Hans Erich Pfitzner was a German composer, conductor and polemicist who was a self-described anti-modernist. His best known work is the post-Romantic opera Palestrina (1917), loosely based on the life of the sixteenth-century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and his Missa Papae Marcelli.

Hans Knappertsbusch was a German conductor, best known for his performances of the music of Wagner, Bruckner and Richard Strauss.