Adolf Reichel

Adolf Reichel (30 August 1816 – 5 March 1896) was a German-Swiss orchestral conductor and composer. Life Adolf Reichel was a son of an East Elbian German landowning family in Tursnitz, West Prussia (now Turznice in Poland). He studied composition with Siegfried Dehn in Berlin, piano with Ludwig Berger and instrumentation with Carl Gottlieb Reissiger in Dresden. He found his first job as music teacher to the young hereditary prince Georg von Sachsen-Meiningen. He travelled to Vienna, Bern and Brussels and made a living as a piano teacher in Paris from 1844, where he associated with George Sand and Frédéric Chopin. In 1842, he met the professional revolutionary and anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in Dresden, with whom he had a lifelong friendship. In his circle in Paris he met opposition figures such as Georg Herwegh, Gottfried Kinkel, Karl Marx, Georg Weber, Vasily Petrovich Botkin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Richard Wagner, without himself taking an active part in the 1848 Revolution. In 1850, he and Mariya Kasparovna Ern (1823–1916), whom he had met as an associate of Alexander Herzen, married. They had four sons, one of whom was the later Swiss judge and politician Alexander Reichel. I