Carl Michael Ziehrer

Karl Michael Ziehrer (also spelled as Carl Michael Ziehrer) (2 May 1843 – 14 November 1922) was an Austrian composer. In his lifetime, he was one of the fiercest rivals of the Strauss family; most notably Johann Strauss II and Eduard Strauss.

Born in Vienna, Ziehrer was taught music by Simon Sechter, a famous Viennese music theorist and pedagogue and Johann Emanuel Hasel. He was soon discovered by music publisher Carl Haslinger, one of Johann Strauss II's publishers, who had fallen out with Strauss regarding the receipts from the latter's lucrative Russian venture.

Haslinger sought to promote his promising young ward, and on 21 November 1863 the young conductor appeared as the head of a newly formed orchestra aimed at toppling the Strauss dynasty at the Dianabad-Saal in Vienna. Not long after that, he secured a place at one of Viennese military bands. As was the current trend, he took over as Kapellmeister of a large civilian orchestra in 1873. He also published the journal "Deutsche Musikzeitung" around the same time, and was credited as being one of the important sources of music study in the late 1870s.

Not long after founding the music journal, he changed his publisher to Döblinger, and toured Eastern Europe and Germany for many years, earning a good reputation as a strict yet efficient conductor. It was in 1881 that he met his future wife, Marianne Edelmann, a famous operetta singer, in Berlin.

Throughout the period between 1885 and 1893, Ziehrer toured extensively and was a military bandmaster, having achieved the distinction of "Übernahme der Militärmusik der Hoch", as well as the "Deutschmeister" decoration. His fame was such that he was invited to perform at the World Exhibition in Chicago in 1893. After that, in a flurry of events, he toured 41 German cities and finally returned to Vienna, where he formed an even larger and successful orchestra that specialized in playing dance music. At this point, his works began to gain a wider circulation among the music-loving Viennese, and works such as Weaner Mad'ln op. 388, as well as the more famous Wiener Bürger op. 419, were received with greater appreciation, the latter even temporarily triumphing over Strauss compositions when first published in 1890.

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