Otto-Werner Mueller

Otto-Werner Mueller (23 June 1926 – 25 February 2016) was a German-born conductor. He was a professor of conducting at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, as well as at the Juilliard School in New York City.

Mueller was born in Bensheim, Germany. At the age of 13, he was selected to attend the Musisches Gymnasium Frankfurt am Main, where he was a student throughout the war. Following the war, he became director of the chamber music department at Radio Stuttgart at age 19, and was on the staff of the Heidelberg Theatre.[1]

Mueller founded and conducted an orchestra for families of US military personnel stationed in Germany.[2]

He emigrated to Canada in 1951 and worked as pianist, composer, arranger, and conductor for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and soon began teaching at the Montreal Conservatory.

Among his appointments were those at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, the Yale School of Music in New Haven, Connecticut, the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Victoria School of Music in British Columbia. At Yale, he was director of the Yale Philharmonia from 1973–1987.[3] During his time at Yale, Herr Mueller also spent summers conducting and teaching at the Yale Summer School of Music and Art in Norfolk, Connecticut. Mueller began teaching on the faculty of the Curtis Institute of Music[2] in the fall of 1986, and made his public conducting debut in Philadelphia in April 1987.[4] He served on the Curtis faculty until his retirement in 2013.[2]

Some of Mueller's notable students include conductors Maxim Shostakovich,[5] Rudolf Barshai,[5] Miguel Harth-Bedoya[2] Alan Gilbert,[1] Alasdair Neale,[3] Robert Hart Baker, Gary S. Fagin, Keri-Lynn Wilson, David Hayes,[2] Sarah Ioannides,[3] Paavo Järvi,[1] Jahja Ling,[3] André Raphel, Richard Rosenberg, Ignat Solzhenitsyn and Ransom Wilson. He was also an opera repertory coach for mezzo-soprano Huguette Tourangeau[6] and soprano Colette Boky.[7]

Herr Mueller spoke six languages fluently, and taught himself at least seven other languages, including Japanese. English was his third language, after German and French.

Herr Mueller played the trumpet in his youth, but lost his "lip" while hiding from the Nazi movement during the period of World War II. He had been conscripted into Hitler's SS, but was able to avoid serving. When asked about his thoughts on the Nazi movement, he made it very clear that he was German, and that not all Germans supported Hitler during that era.