Gustav Hinrichs

Gustav Ludwig Wilhelm Hinrichs (later Anglicized to Hinricks) (10 December 1850 - 26 March 1942) was a German-born American conductor and composer. He immigrated to the United States at the age of twenty, conducting opera in San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia where he founded his own opera company. His compositions include an opera and an accompanying score to the 1925 silent film The Phantom of the Opera.

Gustav Hinrichs was born in Grabow near Ludwigslust, Germany to August Hinrichs and Sophie neé Havekoss. He studied music, first with his father, and later with Marxsen in Hamburg. At the age of fifteen he started studying conducting. By the age of twenty he was sufficiently accomplished to obtain a position as a conductor in the United States. Leaving from Hamburg via Le Havre, he arrived in the United States on the Silesia on 4 April 1870. In San Francisco he taught music and conducted the Fabbri Opera and served as the music director of the Tivoli Opera House. One of the operas he directed there was The Prince of Pilsen by Henry W. Savage. In 1881 he founded the San Francisco Philharmonic Society, precursor of the San Francisco Symphony. His conducting of the newly established orchestra played to mixed reviews. While in San Francisco he conducted the Grand Military Band at the Authors' Carnival given for the Associated Charities of San Francisco, October 18 to October 28, 1880.

In 1885, he moved to New York where he became assistant conductor of the American Opera Company under director Theodore Thomas.

In 1888, he founded the Gustav Hinrichs Opera Company in Philadelphia which survived for ten seasons. On 28 July 1890, he produced and conducted the première of his own opera, Onti-Ora. He also conducted the American premières of Cavalleria rusticana (9 Sept. 1891), L'amico Fritz (8 June 1892), Les Pêcheurs de perles (1893) and Manon Lescaut (29 Aug. 1894). He conducted the première American performance of I Pagliacci in New York on 15 June 1893. He also conducted Hänsel und Gretel in Philadelphia

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