The International Reicha Society is a band of avid chamber musicians hellbent on spreading the forgotten music of Anton Reicha across the globe. 

Who was Anton Reicha you might ask? An exact contemporary of Beethoven (they were both born in 1770), and a childhood friend, Reicha went on to an important and influential career as a composition teacher and music theorist, yet his substantial body of work as a composer has all but been forgotten. 

That’s where we come in. Reicha wrote many orchestral works and concerti, 14 operas, at least 29 string quartets, probably 10 string quintets, mixed chamber works for strings and winds, and 25 woodwind quintets, for which he is most famous as a composer. 

So why the at least’s and probably’s? That’s because Reicha was not interested in the publication and proliferation of his own music. What this means is that today, unfortunately, his catalog is filled with works with no opus and we cannot rely on the opus numbers that exist to give us a chronological picture of his body of work. There are lost and incomplete compositions, and many of them still exist in manuscript only. All of these obstacles mean that a true scholarly understanding of this musical scientist and his work has been avoided until recently.

Here at the Reicha Society we do not claim to be musicologists. We are most interested in breathing the life of live performance into these forgotten masterpieces, but in order to do this we must sometimes don the hat of the scholar. In order to present programs of Reicha’s and related music, we often are working from editions we have created ourselves using a combination of manuscripts, handwritten parts, and error riddled first editions. Some even contain the fingerings and bowings of the original performers!