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Vincenz Lachner (also spelled Vincenz) (19 July 1811 in Rain am Lech - 22 January 1893 in Karlsruhe)was a significant German composer and conductor.
He was the youngest brother of Franz Lachner, also a composer and conductor and well known as a close friend of Franz Schubert. As a composer Lachner was essentially self-taught. He was first educated by his father Anton Lachner, the municipal organist, and after Anton\\\'s death was schooled in Augsburg, where he subsequently scratched out a living teaching music until his brother Franz arranged for him to become conductor and house musician for Earl Mycielski of Coscevitz in the Grand Duchy of Pozna. In 1831 he moved to Vienna to continue his musical training, becoming assistant conductor at the Court Opera and organist at a Protestant church (though he himself was Catholic). In 1836 he became court conductor at Mannheim in succession to Franz, where he was so highly valued that his contract was renewed and extended whenever he received offers from other musical centres. In all he remained there for 37 years, during which Mannheim had the reputation of performing the largest repertoire of operas of any city in Germany.
Nevertheless, Lachner travelled and conducted widely, as far afield as London. However, instinctively conservative in his tastes, he stood out publicly against the cult of Richard Wagner, but the formation of a Wagner Association in Mannheim at the beginning of the 1870s was the beginning of the end for his career. Wagner himself came to conduct in Mannheim and, having already engineered the removal of Franz Lachner from Munich, campaigned for Vinzenz (who, to his rage, had conducted Der fliegende Hollander in a mutilated version) to be retired, which was brought about in 1873. He settled afterwards in Karlsruhe, where he continued to teach. Like all the Lachner brothers, he was friendly with Johannes Brahms. In 1879, he wrote a letter to Brahms asking why he had used trombones, tuba, and a drumroll - trombones being associated with death - early in the pastoral first movement of his Second Symphony; Brahms famously replied in detail, expressing the \"great and genuine\" pleasure he received from the letter, calling Lachner\'s analyses unusually perceptive and insightful, then \"admitting\" that \"I am a deeply melancholy person, [to whom] black bird-wings constantly rustle above us.\"
Lachner died after a number of strokes at the age of 81.
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