Fritz Rikko was a musicologist and conductor who was an authority on music of the Baroque era. Born in Werden, Germany, he immigrated to the United States in 1941 and founded the Collegium Musicum of New York in 1951. The early music ensemble played many engagements and made recordings, but perhaps is best remembered for the free summer concerts it gave in Washington Square Park from 1956 through 1974 with Rikko as conductor. Rikko had been a violist with the Busch Chamber Players and taught at the Juilliard School of Music, Greenwich House Music School, State University of New York at Purchase, and Rutgers University.
As an editor, Rikko published scores for individual pieces by numerous Baroque composers, including Dietrich Buxtehude, Orlando Gibbons, Heinrich Schütz, and Georg Philipp Telemann; however, the figure with whom he was most closely associated was Salamone Rossi. Rossi was a Jewish composer and instrumentalist who was active in Mantua in the early seventeenth century, serving under the patronage of the Gonzaga family; his music often has been characterized as being 'proto-Baroque' in style. Among other projects, Rikko produced a scholarly edition of Rossi's Hashirim asher li-Shelomoh (Song of Solomon), a setting of Hebrew sacred songs and texts, and he also completed the thematic index to the composer's works, in collaboration with Joel Newman.
