A Dictionary of Music and Musicians/Sina, Louis

SINA, Louis, born in 1778, played 2nd violin to Schuppanzigh in Prince Lichnowsky's youthful quartet [see vol. i. p. 132] and later in the Rasoumowsky quartet, when the Count himself did not play.

Notwithstanding the high esteem in which he was held as a player, very few details of his life are given. He was a pupil of E. A. Förster, the same whom Beethoven called his 'old master.' In 1819 he was in Breslau with Lincke, and is noticed in an account of the musical season in that city, in the A. M. Zeitung, for Nov. 17th of that year. Sina afterwards emigrated to Paris, where he was known as an odd old bachelor, whose unfailing humour made him a welcome guest among the artists and amateurs in the Paris salons. He died, quite suddenly, at Boulogne, Oct. 2, 1857, and was so little known there that his body would probably have remained unburied but for the offer of a Protestant clergyman, by whom he was interred in the graveyard on the S. Omer road.

[ A. W. T. ]