Van Baerlestraat 98

Frieder Weissmann (Langen (Hesse), January 23, 1893 - Amsterdam, January 4, 1984[2]) was one of the best-known young German conductors during the Weimar Republic. He recorded more than 2000 gramophone records during his career.

Samuel (his birth name), also called Semy, was born in Langen (Hesse) to Russian immigrants. He grew up in Frankfurt, where his father was a cantor in the synagogue. From 1916 he used the first name Frieder.

Although he was attracted to music, his father wanted him to study law, but the organist Philipp Wolfrum and later the composer Walter Braunfels steered him in the direction of classical music. In particular, the developing gramophone record industry made him a significant musician.

In 1920 he obtained his doctorate from the University of Munich with a dissertation on the composer Georg Abraham Schneider. Between 1921 and 1933, as principal conductor of the record labels Parlophone and Odeon, he was responsible for the majority of classical gramophone recordings in Germany and he was the first conductor to record all Beethoven symphonies. He worked with many great opera singers of the time, Richard Tauber, Joseph Schmidt, Lotte Lehmann, Lauritz Melchior, Emanuel Feuermann, Josef Wolfsthal and Moriz Rosenthal. Weissmann had a relationship with the soprano Meta Seinemeyer during this period. He married her just before she died of leukemia in 1929.

In 1933 Hitler seized power and when the Nazis started burning so-called "un-German" books, he fled to the Netherlands and continued his career with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and with radio broadcasts from the AVRO. He performed in Argentina from 1934 (which he later said was one of the best memories of his career). He worked in the Netherlands and Argentina because the theater seasons alternated. He received Argentine citizenship in 1935 and married his second wife Rosita Chevallier-Boutell in 1937. From 1937 he performed in the United States. After his father died a few months after the Kristallnacht, he took his mother to Amsterdam with the help of the soprano Ankie van Wickevoort Crommelin, who had ties with the minister. When the Second World War broke out, however, he was in America and he could not return to the Netherlands, where his mother was arrested and murdered.

After the war he continued to conduct in America, but in 1948 he was back in the Netherlands for the first time to play for the 25th anniversary of the AVRO. From 1950 to 1953 he conducted in Cuba until the political situation prevented that. After that he only appeared as a guest conductor on many stages. He conducted in Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands, but after fifty years also again in Germany, otherwise moderately appreciated.

In 1958, Weissmann befriended Sylvia Quiel, a relationship that lasted until 1976 with peaks and troughs. After the death of Weissmann's wife in 1980, he became lonely. He was hospitalized twice. Two years after his wife's death, Carel and Sylvia Willink brought him from the United States to the Netherlands.

Weissmann died on January 4, 1984 at the age of 90 and was buried on Zorgvlied in the grave of the painter Carel Willink.

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