Josephine Karoline Lang-Köstlinaus romantic

Josephine Caroline Lang (* 14 March 1815 in Munich; † 2 December 1880 in Tübingen) was a German lied composer and singer of the Romantic period.

Life

The daughter of Theobald Lang (1783-1839), a Munich violinist and member of the Munich Court Orchestra, and Regina Hitzelberger, a chamber singer, she was considered a child prodigy. At the age of eleven she performed as a piano soloist in a concert of the Munich society “Das Museum”. Before she began composing at the age of five, she had already received piano lessons. She made enormous progress on the piano and gave her first piano lessons at the age of twelve, with which she was able to supplement the meagre family coffers, although her real talent remained composing. She had suffered from poor health since birth, which is why she initially received private lessons. Later she attended an institute where she developed a great interest in modern languages and literature, which later influenced her song compositions.

She often visited her godfather, the Munich court painter Joseph Karl Stieler, from whom her first name “Josephine” comes. His house became her second home, especially after the death of her mother in 1827. Many important musicians of the time stayed here, such as Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who later became godfather to her first son Felix (1842-1868), or the music teacher Ferdinand Hiller. Mendelssohn was particularly impressed by her songs and wrote in October 1831:

“She has now the gift to compose songs, and to sing like I have never heard anything, it is the most perfect musical joy”

and gave her special lessons in counterpoint and basso continuo. At his suggestion, she was to move to Berlin to train with Adolf Bernhard Marx, but her father declined the offer.

The 1830s were to be Josephine’s most productive years. In 1831, encouraged by Felix Mendelssohn, her first collection of songs was published in Munich. Further regular engagements as a court chapel singer in Munich as well as at house and salon concerts followed in the following years. In 1838 she travelled to Salzburg to visit the widow of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, the widowed Staatsrätin Constanze von Nissen, with whom she had a lively exchange of experiences. As early as 1835, she met the pianist and composer Stephen Heller at the annual concerts held in Augsburg during the summer months. Through his mediation, she succeeded in gaining admission to the Royal Court and Church Orchestra of Munich. He also introduced her to the works of Robert Schumann. Schumann, in turn, came to know and appreciate Lang’s songs and published and reviewed some of them in his “Neue Zeitschrift für Musik”. She also had a lasting friendship with Robert’s wife Clara Schumann. She was instrumental in ensuring that Lang’s works not only received repeated entries in Robert’s journal, but also sporadically in the “Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung” or the “Allgemeine Deutsche Musikzeitung”. In 1840 she was finally promoted to court chapel singer and thus also became familiar with the masterpieces of Catholic church music.

The death of her father a year earlier increased her enormous workload. In 1840, on the recommendation of the Emperor’s widow Karoline Auguste of Bavaria, she took a cure in Wildbad Kreuth, where she met the Tübingen jurist and poet-lawyer Christian Reinhold Köstlin, whom she married two years later. Meanwhile living in Tübingen, she had to take care of the household, representational duties and sick family members, so she had to cut back on her artistic activities. During these years she gave birth to six children, of whom her son Theobald was paralysed from birth. In 1850 her husband fell ill with a lung disease, to which he finally succumbed in 1856. After his death and no longer completely healthy herself, Josephine Köstlin was initially left to fend for herself and had to support her family again with piano and singing lessons and new compositions.

Among her best-known pupils of that time were Prince Wilhelm, later King Wilhelm II of Württemberg, and his cousin Duke Eugen von Württemberg (1846-1877). Compositionally, she was out of practice and had not been able to develop artistically, and so her first publications were not a success at first. But with the help of her old friend Ferdinand Hiller and Clara Schumann, she was able to publish several successful works. In the meantime, she had to suffer repeated setbacks, for example when her son Felix, initially a promising artist himself, became mentally ill at the age of about 20 and had to be admitted to the sanatorium and nursing home in Winnenden in 1862, where he died in a fire in 1868. After her paralysed son Theobald died in 1873 and her third son Eugen died in 1880 from typhoid fever, her will to live dried up and Josephine Caroline Köstlin née Lang died only a few months later on 2 December 1880 and was buried in the city cemetery of Tübingen.

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Lang