Ludwig Wenzel Lachnith
3 Sonatas, Op.83 Symphonies, Op.66 Keyboard Concertos, Opp.9-106 String Quartets, Op.76 Symphonies, Op.16 Symphonies, Opp.11-12WikipediaLudwig Wenzel Lachnith (Prague, July 7, 1746 – Paris, October 3, 1820) was a Bohemian horn player and versatile composer influenced by
Joseph Haydn and
Ignaz Pleyel. Today he is chiefly remembered because of his adaptions of operas by
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The French composer and writer
Hector Berlioz immortalized him in a diatribe in his autobiography.
Lachnith was born in Prague. After early studies with his father Franz, an able church musician in Prague, Lachnith from 1768 onwards became a member of the court orchestra in Zweibrücken.
With the onset of the French Revolution he got in trouble with the new authorities and had to resign from his post at the Paris Opera. He fled from the terror of the revolution in 1790, came back and henceforth eked out a meagre existence by giving private lessons and arranging operas and even oratorios for Parisian theatres. In 1801 he became instructor at the Paris Opera, but had to leave the following year, only to be reemployed in 1806. He died in Paris.
He is remembered chiefly as a composer of pasticcios, using the music of several composers in one piece. His arrangement of the music and libretto of Mozart's Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte), appearing under the title Les Mystères d'Isis in 1801, was an instant success but also parodied as Les Misères d'ici. In several of his ventures he had
Christian Kalkbrenner, father of the pianist and composer
Friedrich Kalkbrenner, as his collaborator.
Although very successful with the public, Lachnith's adaption of Mozart’s Magic Flute met with scathing criticism already during his lifetime. Hector Berlioz for one was a fierce (and very funny) critic of such practices. Long before the terms Urtext (original text) and Werktreue (work faithfulness) were coined, Berlioz was demanding just that in a series of articles that were later incorporated into his autobiography:
For Mozart's biographer Otto Jahn Lachnith's travesty was the "maddest chapter in the history of the Magic Flute":
Original compositions by Lachnith include the operas: