Suppé, Franz von (1819–1895)

Austrian composer and conductor of Belgian descent. His Das Pensionat (1860) was the first successful Viennese operetta in response to the French model. His later works are largely known today outside German-speaking countries through their tuneful overtures.

He showed a talent for composition early, producing a Mass and a comic opera Der Apfel at Zara in 1834; but he was sent to Padua University by his father to study medicine. On his father's death, however, he settled in Vienna with his mother. He studied there with Ignaz Xaver von Seyfried and conducted at various Viennese and provincial theatres, including the Josephstadt, Wieden, and Leopoldstadt theatres in Vienna from 1841 until his death.

Works Opera and stage operettas Das Mädchen vom Lande (1847), Das Pensionat (1860), Paragraph 3, Zehn Mädchen und kein Mann (1862), Pique Dame/Die Kartenschlägerin (1862), Flotte Bursche (with an overture on students' songs, 1863), Die schöne Galatee (1865), Leichte Kavallerie/Light Cavalry (1866), Fatinitza, Boccaccio (1879), Donna Juanita (1880), Die Afrikareise, and several others; farces; ballets; incidental music to Elmar's Dichter und Bauer/Poet and Peasant (1846), Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Schiller's Wallensteins Lager, and others (more than 200 stage works).

Sacred music Mass, Requiem (L'estremo giudizia, 1855; first British performance, 1984).