Paul Rottenburg

Paul Rottenburg was one of around 1000 Germans living in Glasgow in the 1880s. He was born in Danzig, but moved to Glasgow to pursue his work as a chemical merchant, became a naturalised British citizen. An avid music fan, he founded the Glasgow Society of Musicians in 1884, and was a founding benefactor of the Glasgow Grand Opera Society.

As a conductor, he worked with the Glasgow Choral Union – no mean feat for a non-‘professional’ musician.

Alongside William Mackie Miller (an expert and early pioneer of solfaege), Sir Frederic Cowan (later the conductor of the Scottish Orchestra and a renowned exponent of Beethoven’s music), and Sir Charles Groves (editor of, alongside Germany’s Musik in Geshickte und Gegenwart, the world’s largest encyclopaedic dictionary of music; The Grove Dictionary), he founded the St Cecilia Musical Society.