Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt

Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt was born in Berlin in May 1900 and studied at the universities of Berlin and Münster, taking his doctorate in 1923 with a thesis on Vincenzo Galilei’s monody. He held opera house posts at Wuppertal, Rostock, Darmstadt and the Hamburg State Opera through the inter-war years, then in 1945 was appointed chief conductor of the newly-founded NDR Symphony Orchestra in Hamburg — a position he held for twenty-six years until 1971.

He shaped the NDR Symphony into one of the leading post-war German orchestras and used its broadcasting position to give substantial space to twentieth-century music alongside the standard repertoire. His Decca recordings of the Beethoven symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic (1965–69) — taped at a time when complete cycles were still relatively rare — became one of the central reference cycles of the LP era. He also recorded substantial Mozart, Brahms and Bruckner with the NDR, the Stockholm Philharmonic (which he led from 1955 to 1964), and as guest conductor with the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics.

Schmidt-Isserstedt died in Holm-Holstein, near Hamburg, in May 1973. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his recorded work with European orchestras in the post-war decades.