Biography (read more)
Sigismund Neukomm was born in Salzburg on 10 July 1778, studied first with the organist Franz Xaver Weissauer and then theory with Michael Haydn and Leopold Mozart, while reading philosophy and mathematics at Salzburg University from 1790. He became honorary organist at the university church in 1792 and chorus-master at the Salzburg court theatre in 1796. At the end of March 1797 he moved to Vienna to study with Joseph Haydn, which lasted seven years, and he venerated his teacher for the rest of his life. He left Vienna on 5 May 1804 for Saint Petersburg, where he conducted German opera until 1809, then went to Paris. He was ennobled as a knight, and died on 3 April 1858.
He made arrangements of The Creation, The Seasons, Il ritorno di Tobia and the cantata Arianna a Naxos for Haydn, transcribed symphonies for harmonium and piano, and by 1804, when Haydn could no longer compose, took over the arrangement of forty-three Scottish folk songs on his behalf; he visited him daily between November 1808 and February 1809, and in 1814 paid for a tombstone over Haydn’s first grave in the Hundsturm cemetery, inscribed with a puzzle canon of his own. In Vienna he taught Anna Milder and Franz Xaver Mozart. In Paris he became friendly with Grétry and Cherubini and succeeded Dussek as pianist to Talleyrand; he travelled to Rio de Janeiro with the Duke of Luxembourg in 1816 and stayed as court music director to John VI of Portugal until the revolution of 1821 sent him back to Lisbon. He divided his last two decades between London and Paris, arriving in London in 1829 at the same time as Mendelssohn and meeting him at Moscheles’s house; the Philharmonic Society played his E flat Symphony on 21 March 1831, and his oratorios were widely taken up.
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