Ferdinand Löwe

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Ferdinand Löwe (1865–1925) was an Austrian conductor from Vienna. His career was mainly in Vienna and Munich. From 1896 he led the Kaim Orchestra, now the Munich Philharmonic, and he returned there from 1908 to 1914. In 1900 he founded and conducted the Wiener Concertvereinsorchester, now the Vienna Symphony. He taught at the Vienna Conservatoire from 1884 and was its director from 1919 to 1922. A pupil of Anton Bruckner, Löwe helped popularize Bruckner’s symphonies and sometimes urged the composer to rearrange music for audiences. For Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9, Löwe made major changes to harmony, orchestration, phrasing and dynamics before its posthumous premiere. The original version wasn’t heard until 1932, when Siegmund von Hausegger, Löwe’s successor in Munich, revived it. Today the symphony is performed as Bruckner wrote it, without Löwe’s changes.