A Dictionary of Music and Musicians/Pohlenz, Christian

by George Grove

POHLENZ, Christian August, born July 3, 1790, at Saalgast in Lower Lusatia. In 1829 we find him well established in Leipzig as a singing-master, a conductor of concerts, organist, director of the Singakademie and the Musikverein, etc. At the end of 1834 he resigned the post of Conductor of the Gewandhaus subscription concerts, which he appears to have held for nine years, and in which he was succeeded by Mendelssohn in the following October. After the death of Weinlig, on March 6, 1842, and before the appointment of Hauptmann later in the same year, Pohlenz filled the office of Cantor at the St. Thomas's School. Indeed, in the then state of music at Leipzig, he seems to have been a person of consideration, which is confirmed by the fact of Mendelssohn's having chosen him as teacher of singing in the new Conservatorium there, in the prospectus of which his name appears, in the Allg. Musikalische Zeitung of Jan. 18, 1843. He was not however destined to take part in that good work, for he died of apoplexy at Leipzig on March 9, 1843, just three weeks before the operations were begun. He published Polonaises for the PF., but his best works are part-songs for equal voices, of which one or two good specimens are given in Orpheus. [See vol. ii. p. 613.]

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