Portrait of Hans Pfitzner

Hans Pfitzner

German composer

Lived
1869–1949
Country
Germany

Updated September 2026

About Hans Pfitzner

Hans Erich Pfitzner was a Russian-born German composer, conductor and polemicist who was a self-described anti-modernist. His best known work is the post-Romantic opera Palestrina (1917), very loosely based on the life of the sixteenth-century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and his Missa Papae Marcelli.

Biography from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Sources: book lists and dates from Wikidata and Open Library, ratings from Open Library readers. Last updated September 2026.