Friedrich Ludwig Æmilius Kunzen

Friedrich Ludwig Æmilius Kunzen (24 September 1761 – 28 January 1817) was a German composer and conductor who lived and worked for much of his life in Denmark. Life He was born in Lübeck, where his father, Adolph Carl Kunzen, was an organist and his grandfather, Johann Paul Kunzen (1696-1757), had composed for the Hamburg Opera in the 1720s. In 1781 he began studying law in Kiel, but his true love was music, and in 1784, encouraged by composer Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, he moved to Copenhagen to pursue a musical career. He performed as a pianist at court and in clubs, and in the next few years had successes with a memorial cantata for Count Otto Thott and music for the marriage of Crown Princess Louise Auguste to Frederik Christian II, Duke of Augustenborg, as well as theatre music. In 1788 he met the young author Jens Baggesen, and the two collaborated on the opera Holger Danske, which premiered the following year, causing the “Holger Feud,” as a result of which Kunzen temporarily left the country. For the next two years he lived in Berlin. From 1792 until 1794 he worked as musical director of the new Frankfurter National-Theater, where he put on Mozart’s Don Giovanni and The Ma