Josef Ferdinand Nesmüller

Austro-German actor, theater director, playwright, musician, composer, and director (born March 9, 1818 in Mährisch Trübau, Austria-Hungary [now Moravská Třebová in the Czech Republic] – died May 9, 1895 in Hamburg, Germany). Nesmüller had a successful career as a comic actor, then settled in Dresden, where he managed to break the monopoly of the Dresden Court Theater by acquiring the permission to open a second theater, named, in fact, Zweites Theater, in the Gewandhaus in Dresden in 1854. During the summers, he opened up a summer theater with 1,200 seats in the Großer Garten in Dresden. For almost three decades, he became a staple of the Dresden theater scene, staging especially comic plays and operettas, some of them written by himself. Nesmüller's best-known song is "Der Tiroler und sein Kind" (The Tyrolean And His Child, a.k.a. Wenn Ich Mich Nach Der Heimat Sehn') from his 1849 musical "Die Zillertaler" (People From Zillertal).