Josef Reicha
Czech composer and violoncellist
Josef Reicha (12 February 1752 – 5 March 1795), also spelt Rejcha, was a Czech cellist, composer and conductor. He was the uncle of composer and music theorist Anton Reicha.
Josef Reicha was born in Chudenice. In 1761 he moved to Prague, where he was taught cello by Franz Joseph Werner. In 1771, Reicha became first cellist in the orchestra of Prince (Fürst) Kraft Ernst von Oettingen-Wallerstein. Together with the famous violinist Anton Janitsch, who also played in the orchestra, Reicha toured several European cities during the late 1770s and visited Leopold Mozart in Salzburg in 1778. In his letters to Wolfgang Amadeus, Leopold praised Reicha's cello playing and compared the style of one of his cello concerts to those by Wolfgang Amadeus.
Reicha adopted his nephew Anton in 1780 (Josef married in 1779, but the marriage produced no children) and subsequently taught him the violin and the piano. In 1785 Josef was made director of the orchestra in Bonn by Maximilian Francis of Austria, Elector of Cologne; the whole family moved to Bonn. Anton became a member of the court orchestra through his uncle.
“Josef Reicha” enters the record as czech composer and violoncellist. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Josef, Reicha and Czech can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q569450. VIAF identifies the subject as 22328501. The Library of Congress control number is n81120383. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1752, 1795, 1761 and 1771.
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This entry incorporates text from “Josef Reicha” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.