Rudolf Louis

Rudolf Louis was an influential German music critic and conductor. He was born in Schwetzingen on 30 January 1870. He studied in Geneva, where he was a pupil of Friedrich Klose, and continued his studies in Vienna and then Karlsruhe under Felix Mottl before becoming conductor of the theatre orchestras in Landshut and Lübeck. In 1897 he moved to Munich, where he lived for the remainder of his life. Among his pupils was Wilhelm Petersen. Here he taught harmony and composition and was the critic for the newspaper Münchner Neueste Nachrichten. An advocate of the latest trends in music as exemplified by his friends Ludwig Thuille and Richard Strauss, he published books on Wagner, Liszt, Berlioz, Bruckner, Pfitzner, Klose and contemporary German music. With Ludwig Thuille he wrote an influential manual on harmony, Harmonielehre (1907), which went through many editions. He died in Munich on 15 November 1914.