1840–1916 · Germany · Romantic
Ernst Rudorff (1840–1916) was a German composer and teacher from Berlin. He taught in Berlin for four decades, conducted choirs, edited works by Mozart and Weber, owned a large collection of composers' manuscripts and spoke up for the protection of nature. The site currently has his choral piece Sandmännchen.
Ernst Friedrich Karl Rudorff was born in Berlin on 18 January 1840. His father, Adolf August Friedrich Rudorff (1803–1873), was a professor of law. His mother, Friederike Dorothea Elisabeth, born Pistor (1808–1887), known as Betty, was an active member of the Berlin Singakademie as a young girl. Felix Mendelssohn dedicated to her the song Ist es wahr?, for which he wrote both the words and the music himself.
The boy's first piano lessons came from his godmother, Marie Lichtenstein (1817–1890). She was a daughter of Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein and a friend of Clara Schumann.
From 1852 to 1857 Rudorff was a pupil of Woldemar Bargiel. Thanks to Bargiel's mediation the young man took several piano lessons from Clara Schumann, and the friendship with her lasted all his life.
Rudorff enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory in 1859 and worked there with Ignaz Moscheles, Louis Plaidy and Julius Rietz. Moritz Hauptmann and Carl Reinecke also taught him.
Rudorff began teaching piano at the Cologne Conservatory in 1865, and two years later, in 1867, he set up the Bach-Verein Köln there. In the autumn of 1869 he moved to Berlin and became professor of piano and organ at the Royal Hochschule für Musik in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He held the post until he retired in 1910.
Alongside this he led the choir founded by Julius Stern: from 1880 to 1890 Rudorff directed it after Max Bruch. On 5 May 1882 he conducted the first concert of the newly founded Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, later known as the Berlin Philharmonic.
In November 1871 Rudorff bought a villa in Lichterfelde near Berlin. It had been built by the architect Johannes Otzen and stood at Wilhelmstrasse 26 (today Königsberger Strasse 26). The composer lived there until his death, and the house remained the family's home until it was destroyed in 1943.
In 1876 he married Gertrud Charlotte Marie Rietschel (1853–1937), a daughter of the sculptor Ernst Rietschel. They had three children: Hermann, Elisabeth and Melusine.
Already in 1878 Rudorff wrote about the harm that mass tourism and rapid industrialisation do to the environment. He argued for an organisation that would protect nature, and he opposed building railways, especially ones made only for tourists.
He often withdrew from the city to Lauenstein, to his parents' estate Knabenburg in Niedersachsen. There Rudorff bought the ruin of Lauenstein castle together with the hill where a beer hall was planned, so as to preserve the castle and keep it open to everyone. He saved old oaks beside a footpath, stopped a meadow valley from being turned into paddocks, and created woodland edges, hedges and riverside woods along the stream.
In 1897 Rudorff coined the word Heimatschutz (“protection of the homeland”) in a detailed account of his views. Together with two articles in the Grenzboten, this led to the founding of the Deutscher Bund Heimatschutz on 30 March 1904.
Rudorff's maternal grandfather, Carl Philipp Heinrich Pistor, left him a valuable collection of composers' manuscripts, which Pistor had asked Mendelssohn to arrange. Rudorff kept enlarging it. Among its autographs are manuscripts of Bach, Beethoven, Bruch, Clementi, Dussek, Gluck, Handel, Mendelssohn, Mozart and Salieri.
Rudorff's letters to and from Clara Schumann and with Johannes Brahms went to the Saxon State Library in Dresden (SLUB), and they are now fully digitised.
Hermann Rudorff (born 2 December 1877) studied law and gained a doctorate. For a time he sat on the board of the Bund Heimatschutz and worked as a volunteer for the Prussian state office for the care of natural monuments. At the time of his death he was a government councillor in the Berlin police headquarters.
Elisabeth Rudorff (born 13 May 1879) continued her father's cause after his death: in 1948 she submitted a request for many natural areas in Lauenstein and the Ith hills to be placed under protection. Only 60 years later was the Ith declared a nature reserve. In Lauenstein a street is named after Rudorff, and a walking trail in his name was opened in 2006.
Rudorff retired from the Hochschule in 1910. On 1 February 1916 his son Hermann died, aged 39, after a long illness, and his father was deeply affected. Ernst Rudorff himself died on 31 December 1916. His daughter Elisabeth, who had already worked as his secretary in his lifetime, carried on her father's work, and in 1938 she published his autobiography.
Rudorff's compositions are tied to Romantic music and show traces of Robert Schumann's influence. He is counted among the “Berliner Akademiker” together with Friedrich Kiel, Max Bruch and Heinrich von Herzogenberg.
The catalogue includes three symphonies: Op. 31 in B flat, Op. 40 in G minor and Op. 50 in B minor. For orchestra he also wrote two serenades, Op. 20 in A and Op. 21 in G, a Ballade in three movements (Op. 15) and Variationen (Op. 24); Op. 41 is a Romanze for violin with orchestra, and Op. 5 a string sextet in A. Of his three overtures, one goes with Ludwig Tieck's Märchen vom blonden Ekbert (Op. 8), another with Otto der Schütz (Op. 12), and the third is the Romantische Ouverture (Op. 45). He also set texts by Tieck and Friedrich Rückert for voices and choir, composed Herbstlied (Op. 43) and wrote many songs.
Rudorff also worked as an editor. Rudorff prepared editions of the score of Weber's opera Euryanthe, of Mozart's piano concertos and sonatas, and of Weber's letters to Heinrich Lichtenstein (1900). He orchestrated Schubert's Fantasia in F minor. His correspondence with Brahms and Joseph Joachim has been published.
The site currently has one of his pieces: Sandmännchen for choir, at the intermediate level.