Siegfried Alkan (30 March 1858 – 24 December 1941) was a German composer. Alkan was born in

Dillingen, Saarland Dillingen (; officially Dillingen/Saar; ) is a town in the Saarlouis (district), district of Saarlouis, in Saarland. It has about 20,000 inhabitants and is divided into the three districts Dillingen-city center, Pachten and Diefflen. The city is l ...

(then

Prussia Prussia (; ; Old Prussian: ''Prūsija'') was a Germans, German state centred on the North European Plain that originated from the 1525 secularization of the Prussia (region), Prussian part of the State of the Teutonic Order. For centuries, ...

, now Germany), the son of Johannes Alkan and Johanna Bonn in a family of merchants and musicians. Through his mother he was a distant cousin of the composers

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (3 February 18094 November 1847), widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period. Mendelssohn's compositions include symphonie ...

, Fanny Hensel and

Giacomo Meyerbeer Giacomo Meyerbeer (born Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer; 5 September 1791 – 2 May 1864) was a German opera composer, "the most frequently performed opera composer during the nineteenth century, linking Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mozart and Richard Wa ...

. It is unknown whether he was related to the French composer and pianist

Charles-Valentin Alkan Charles-Valentin Alkan (; 30 November 1813 – 29 March 1888) was a French composer and virtuoso pianist. At the height of his fame in the 1830s and 1840s he was, alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, amon ...

, but like the latter, he was a scion of Jewish families from the Moselle region. In 1938 the octogenarian Siegfried Alkan became a victim of the "

Kristallnacht ( ) or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's (SA) and (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilia ...

". His instruments were destroyed and he himself was beaten by Nazi hordes. In his last years he was forced to wear the yellow star. Many works of Siegfried Alkan seem to be lost. Still known are for example the compositions "Gruß an die Saar" (Op. 32), "O wüsstest du's" (Op. 39), "Neues Saarlied" (Op. 91) and "Ur-Großmütterchen" (Op. 80), which was very popular in the time after World War I.

References

Gregor Brand
Über den saarländischen Komponisten SIEGFRIED ALKAN
(in German) 1858 births 1941 deaths 19th-century German Jews German Romantic composers People from Saarlouis (district) German male classical composers 20th-century German male musicians 19th-century German male musicians {{Germany-composer-stub