A Dictionary of Music and Musicians/Döhler, Theodor

DÖHLER, Theodor, of a Jewish family, born April 20, 1814, at Naples; died Feb. 21, 1856, at Florence; an accomplished pianist, and composer of 'salon' music—a vendor of the sort of ware for which the epithet 'elegant' seems to have been invented. His Fantasias, i.e. operatic tunes embroidered with arpeggios; his 'Variations de concert,' or 'de salon'—similar tunes not necessarily operatic, but bedizened with the same cheap embroidery; his 'Transcriptions'—nondescript tunes bespangled after the selfsame fashion; his 'Nocturnes'—sentimental eau sucrée, made up of a tearful tune for the right hand propped upon undulating platitudes for the left, in D flat; his 'Etudes,' also 'de salon' or 'de concert'—some small piece of digital gymnastics with little sound and less sense,—are one and all of the same calibre, reprehensible from an artistic point of view, and lacking even that quaintness or eccentricity which might ultimately claim a nook in some collection of musical bric-à-brac. Döhler was an infant phenomenon, and as such the pupil of Benedict, then resident at Naples. In 1829 he was sent to Vienna, and became Carl Czerny's pupil. From Vienna, where he remained till 34, he went to Naples, Paris, and London—then travelled in Holland, Denmark, Poland, and Russia—as a successful fashionable virtuoso. He died of a disease of the spinal marrow which troubled him for the last nine years of his life. His works, if works they can be called, reach as far as opus 75.

[ E. D. ]