In the early 1830s, Jan Ruckgaber and Franz Xavier Mozart set up the Society of Friends of Music (Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde), which soon became a foundation for the Galician Music Society, officially registered on the 14th of August 1838.
Later in the same year Franz Xavier Mozart set for Vienna, and Jan Ruckgaber replaced him in the organisational work. In the years 1838-42, the Society worked under his direction as an art manager. Ruckgaber was also the conductor of the orchestra and choirs and later the manager of a music school.
Soon the Society started organizing weekly musical meetings in which amateur-musicians performed music by Mozart, Beethoven and others.
The period of best prosperity for the Galician Music Society came in the years 1842-48. At that time the society held numerous concerts, charity events and musical meetings. Ruckgaber invited the most eminent musicians in Europe to perform in Lviv. The public was most impressed by violinist Bedřich Smetana (1843), pianist Libra Ottawa (1844), violinist Heinrich Ernst (1845), cellist Marek Bauer (1843) and pianist Leopold Mayer (1843), but it was Ferenz Liszt, who performing for the whole month at the turn of April and May, 1847, broke records of popularity.
The revolutionary events of the year 1848 ceased the activity of the school at the GMS.
In November 1848, due to a shellfire of the town, the center of Lviv was seriously damaged. The university building and its library, with valuable Polish materials and antique books, were burnt down, the same happened with the technical university, the town hall and the theatre. The Galician Music Society suspended its activity.
It was not before June 1852, when the Galician Music Society was renewed as The Society for the Development of Music in Galicia. The Society’s concert activity was soon restarted and under Ruckgaber’s direction the orchestra presented to the audience, among others, the overture to "The Summer Night’s Dream" by F. Mendelssohn, and The Pastoral Symphony by L. van Beethoven.
The music school at the society was reopened on the 1st of May 1854, this time as a Conservatoire. It was one of the oldest in Europe, older than the conservatoires in Petersburg (established in 1862) and in Moscow (1864).
At first it was led by the director Jan Ruckgaber. Art of composition was taught along with theoretical subjects, as harmonics, counterpoint, instrumentation and analysis of music forms. From the first years of the Galician Music Society, Ruckgaber gathered repertoire for a music library, whose collection was enriched when the conservatoire was established.
In 1906, the GMS and the Conservatoire moved to a new building, and in 1910 a new concert hall, with excellent acoustics and new organ was put into use. Presently the Lviv Philharmonic is placed there.
World War I thwarted the work of the GMS and the Conservatoire, but as soon as in 1916/17 the institution started returning to normal life.
After the second disaster of World War II the Conservatoire took up its activity as the Lviv National Music Academy, and it still works, taking the name of M. Łysenko Lviv National Musical Academy from 2008.
In the year 2004, the institution, once established by Jan Ruckgaber, celebrated its 150th anniversary.
The Society existed for 100 years – from 1838 to 1939, between 1919 and 1939 as the Polish Music Society and it was the most important institution for the popularization of music and for organizing musical life in Lviv and Galicia in the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century.
The Conservatoire at Galician Music Society was the first serious educational institution not only in Galicia, but also (except for Prague) – in Eastern Europe. Opening a Music School in 1839, and a Conservatoire in 1854, was the beginning of professional music education in Lviv.
More information in a form of Jan Ruckgaber’s full biography, in English and in Polish, is ready for download here.