Wilhelm Petersen was a German composer and conductor.

He was born in Athens

Athens

Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...

 and spent his childhood in Darmstadt

Darmstadt

Darmstadt is a city in the Bundesland of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Rhine Main Area.The sandy soils in the Darmstadt area, ill-suited for agriculture in times before industrial fertilisation, prevented any larger settlement from developing, until the city became the seat...

. From 1908 to 1913 he studied in Munich

Munich

Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

 with Friedrich Klose

Friedrich Klose

Friedrich Klose was a German composer. His opera Ilsebill is inspired by the music of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, and the plot is based on the Brothers Grimm tale of a fisherman who catches a huge fish which grants wishes....

, Felix Mottl

Felix Mottl

Felix Josef von Mottl was an Austrian conductor and composer. He was regarded as one of the most brilliant conductors of his day. He composed three operas, of which Agnes Bernauer was the most successful, as well as a string quartet and numerous songs and other music...

 and Rudolf Louis

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...

. In addition to music he wrote lyric and dramatic poetry and was on the fringes of the circle around Stefan George

Stefan George

Stefan Anton George was a German poet, editor, and translator.-Biography:George was born in Bingen in Germany in 1868. He spent time in Paris, where he was among the writers and artists who attended the Tuesday soireés held by the poet Stéphane Mallarmé. He began to publish poetry in the 1890s,...

.
Petersen was an apprentice conductor in Lübeck

Lübeck

The Hanseatic City of Lübeck is the second-largest city in Schleswig-Holstein, in northern Germany, and one of the major ports of Germany. It was for several centuries the "capital" of the Hanseatic League and, because of its Brick Gothic architectural heritage, is listed by UNESCO as a World...

 under Wilhelm Furtwängler

Wilhelm Furtwängler

Wilhelm Furtwängler was a German conductor and composer. He is widely considered to have been one of the greatest symphonic and operatic conductors of the 20th century. By the 1930s he had built a reputation as one of the leading conductors in Europe, and he was the leading conductor who remained...

 in 1913-14; at the end of the First World War he was active as a writer in the Expressionist

Expressionism

Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...

 movement in Munich but from 1919 devoted himself entirely to music. His early music is described as radically Expressionistic, but in the 1920s he progressively clarified his style, arriving at a monumental tonal style typified by his Grosse Messe, op. 27 of 1928-9, premiered in 1930 in Dartmstadt under Karl Böhm

Karl Böhm

Karl August Leopold Böhm was an Austrian conductor. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest symphonic and operatic conductors of the 20th century.- Education :...

. From 1927 he was a lecturer in the Music Academy at Darmstadt, and in 1934 became professor of music in Mannheim

Mannheim

Mannheim is a city in southwestern Germany. With about 315,000 inhabitants, Mannheim is the second-largest city in the Bundesland of Baden-Württemberg, following the capital city of Stuttgart....

. He died in Darmstadt.

Petersen's works include five symphonies, concertos, works for string orchestra, choral and chamber music, and the opera Der goldene Topf, premiered in Mannheim in 1941.

Source

• Booklet for Wergo WER 6213-2 (recording of Petersen's Grosse Messe')