Background
He was the son of Hofmarschall Nathanael Truhn and the grandfather of Selma Erdmann-Jesnitzer, born Bethge-Truhn, father of Clara and Anna Marie Elizabeth Truhn.
He was the son of Hofmarschall Nathanael Truhn and the grandfather of Selma Erdmann-Jesnitzer, born Bethge-Truhn, father of Clara and Anna Marie Elizabeth Truhn.
He briefly studied orchestration with Mendelssohn to be properly trained as musician.
He was a very special person and a talented composer of numerous songs, several stage works, and also a key organizer in the field of men"s choirs. Only in 1831 they allowed him to go to Berlin as a student of theorist Siegfried Wilhelm Dehn, of Carl Friedrich Zelter and Bernhard Klein. He worked at the city theater in Gdansk as conductor and music teacher in the years 1835-1837 and back in Berlin, he became one of the chief contributors to Schumann"s paper, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Hamburger Correspondenten and the feature pages of the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung.
In 1840 Friedrich lived in Königsberg, Prussia, and there held great performances of his own and others musicians" compositions.
In 1843 he accompanied the pianist Theodor Döhler on an art trip to Sweden, where he acted as composer and conductor. In 1848 he returned to his birthplace, founded a choral society and organized many public performances.
There he worked until 1852 as a music teacher and conductor. In the meantime he again worked as a freelancer in Berlin, founded the Berliner Liedertafel, a choral society on the conceptual model of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
After that he settled permanently in Berlin.
His printed compositions, summoning up to well over 100 opus, were almost consistently received in critical acclaim, but in no way they became universally popular pieces. They were played, sung and then set aside. Truhn was welcome in all social circles, both as a guest and also as a music teacher.
His death put an end not only to his life, but also to the viability of his compositions as the newspapers of the time published obituaries often appreciative of his person and talent as a classical composer.