Georg Schmitt

Johann Georg Gerhard Schmitt (11 March 1821 – 7 December 1900), in French Jean-Georges Gérard Schmitt, was a Paris-based composer and organist, originally from the Prussian Lower Rhine province. He was only 14 when he took over as organist at Trier Cathedral: the position had fallen vacant three years earlier through the early death of the previous incumbent, his father. Life Johann Georg Gerhard Schmitt was born at , a riverside fishing hamlet on the northern edge of Trier (into which it has subsequently been subsumed). His birth took place in the little hotel run by his parents, Johann Georg Schmitt (1787–1832) and his wife, born Catharina Marx (1809–1868). Two hundred years later, there is still a hotel on the site: it is now named “Gasthaus Mosellied”, after a song which during the nineteenth century became one of Schmitt’s more widely appreciated compositions. The elder Johann Georg Schmitt combined his business as an hotelier with the post of Trier Cathedral organist between 1810 and his death in 1832. During his final illness his son frequently deputised for him, despite being aged only 11 at the time of the father’s death. Over the next two years the boy, whose early music