The Spitzeders, A Musical Family
Thursday, February 23, 2017
If you search for “Spitzeder” online, you’ll first stumble upon a lot of websites related to the actress Adele Spitzeder (1832-1895; image left). She has a musical tie-in (later in life she performed popular songs as the singer Adele Vio), but today she is more infamous than famous for founding the Spitzeder Private Bank. As a money lender, she used a pyramid scheme to defraud 31,000 customers of 8 million guldens and was sentenced to three years in jail.
Adele Spitzeder came from a long line of musicians, however. Six of her relatives have sources in the RISM database:
Tenor Franz Anton Spitzeder (1735-1796) was active in Salzburg as a singer as well as a piano and voice teacher. His name appears as a performer on a libretto of Mozart’s Die Schuldigkeit des Ersten Gebots (RISM ID no. 653005629).
His brother Oswald Spitzeder (1738-1783) is so far only known in RISM as the owner of a Litaniae Lauretanae by Anton Cajetan Adlgasser (RISM ID no. 659000020).
Franz Anton’s son Johann Baptist Spitzeder (1764-1842) can be found on four sources from Weimar, including as a performer in Carl Friedrich Zelter’s setting of Friedrich Schiller’s Dithyrambe (RISM ID no. 250002099). The well-traveled bass and actor also performed in numerous opera houses, including in Bonn, Munich, and Vienna.
Another one of Franz Anton’s sons is Joseph Spitzeder (1767-1842), who was active in Nuremberg and Vienna and should not be confused with his nephew Josef Spitzeder (1796-1832; the father of Adele). Adalbert Gyrowetz composed an aria for Joseph in the opera Der lustige Schuster (RISM ID no. 464111140).
Adelheid Fries (1793-1873) was the daughter of Johann Baptist Spitzeder and performed in the opera Garibaldi der Agilofinger in 1824 (RISM ID no. 455020427).
Henriette Spitzeder-Schüler (1800-1828) was the daughter of the singer Carl Schüler (1775-1809) and married Josef Spitzeder in 1816. During her short life, she could be heard in numerous opera houses, including the ones in Karlsruhe, Nuremberg, and Vienna. A guest performance took her to Hamburg in 1826, where she sang in Etienne-Nicolas Méhul’s opera La Journée aux Aventures (RISM ID no. 452502383). She died in 1828 giving birth to her tenth child.
Image: Adele Spitzeder, from the popular weekly magazine Die Gartenlaube, vol. 15 (1873), p. 251. Spitzeder had made headlines when she was arrested the previous November. Via Wikimedia Commons.
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