1838–1920 · Germany · Romantic
Max Bruch (1838—1920) was a composer and conductor from Cologne, Germany. He composed choral, orchestral and chamber music, and later became a composition teacher at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. His best-known pieces are the First Violin Concerto, the Scottish Fantasy and Kol Nidrei, written for cello; the site has his choral piece Wiegenlied der Hirten.
Max Christian Friedrich Bruch was born in Cologne on 6 January 1838, in the Richmodis house; today a memorial plaque hangs on the rebuilt tower on Richmodstraße, near the Neumarkt. His father, August Carl Friedrich Bruch (1799—1861), studied law, spent some years working as a lawyer in Berlin and then became deputy head of the Cologne city police. His mother, Wilhelmine (born Almenräder, 1799—1867), sang, and she gave her son his first lessons in music and piano. Max was close to his sister Mathilde, known as Till; he had no other brothers or sisters.
As a child Max showed a gift for painting: between the ages of seven and ten, his relatives were calling him a second Raphael. For practice he copied pictures he knew from illustrations in children's books, Bibles and books on world history.
Max wrote his first song when he was nine, as a gift for his mother's birthday. Music became his great passion from then on, and his parents backed his studies. In his teens he turned out many small compositions: motets, settings of psalms, piano pieces, violin sonatas and a string quartet, as well as the orchestral prelude to an opera on Joan of Arc that he planned but never wrote. Very little of this youthful output survives.
In 1849, in Bonn, he had his first music theory lesson, from his father's friend, Professor Heinrich Carl Breidenstein. Max also took private lessons from teachers at Cologne's Friedrich Wilhelm school.
Around then the boy first visited the Igeler Hof, an estate in Bergisch Gladbach in which many of his scores took shape. On the way, on foot and in the stagecoach, his father taught him to speak French and English. The estate belonged to Neissen, a lawyer and notary, who shared the house with his sister Thérèse, who had not married. It was later bought by the Zanders family, owners of a large paper mill, and Maria Zanders became a close friend and patron of the composer.
Hiller had met the young Bruch as early as 1850: his diary entry for 8 April records a visit from Bruch and his son, and a sonata for four hands that Max brought along. Over the next years he heard more of the boy's pieces: in 1851 a trio, a motet and a sonata, and on 30 November 1852 a sonata with violin and a piano quintet.
In March 1852 the Philharmonic Society of Cologne performed his first symphony, in F minor, and on 12 March the Rheinische Musikzeitung ran an article on Max that set him beside Mozart and Mendelssohn. That year Bruch won, with a string quartet, a four-year scholarship from the Frankfurt Mozart Foundation. Hiller had pleaded the young man's case with the foundation, and the foundation asked him to bring the new scholar up as a sound musician and composer. The scholarship let Bruch study composition with Ferdinand Hiller from 1853 to 1857.
Hiller was a composer and a pianist, and the dedicatee of Schumann's A minor piano concerto. He gave Bruch's work more attention than that of his other pupils and helped to get Opus 1 into print, the opera Scherz, List und Rache (Jest, Cunning and Revenge), based on a Goethe text: he gave recommendations and had a subscription list passed around among music lovers and friends in Cologne, and it was filled within a few days. As a result the opera was published in 1857 by Senff of Leipzig.
Carl Reinecke was also among Bruch's teachers. On Hiller's advice he went to Leipzig in 1858 to continue his studies. There he met Ignaz Moscheles, Ferdinand David and Moritz Hauptmann, made his first contacts with the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel, and began to have his works published and performed. They included the Jubilate, Op. 3, for solo soprano, chorus and orchestra.
After returning from Leipzig in 1859, Bruch broke off his musical studies and enrolled at the University of Bonn to study philosophy, art and architecture. Having studied privately, he had no school-leaving certificate, and he was admitted on the strength of letters of recommendation. His time there was short: his file was closed on 6 December 1859. The lectures of the art historian Anton Springer on the art of the Rhineland left a lasting mark on him, and Bruch kept the notebook in which he recorded the visits to Cologne's churches and crypts that Springer and the students made.
His father died in 1861. His mother and sister were supported financially by Alfred Krupp, an industrialist from Essen, to whom the Bruch family was related through Bruch's cousin Bertha Krupp. This allowed Max to carry on his musical education in Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig, Vienna and Munich.
In 1862—1864 Bruch worked in Mannheim, where he wrote the opera Loreley (1863). The second version of the cantata Frithjof (1864) brought him his first success. In 1865—1867 he was music director in Koblenz, and in 1867—1870 he led the court orchestra in Sondershausen. He then worked in Berlin (1870—1872), and in 1873—1878 he worked privately in Bonn.
In 1880—1883 Bruch conducted the orchestra of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society, one of the leading musical ensembles in Britain. On 3 January 1881 he married the singer Clara Tuczek. Her sister, Felicia Tuczek, was also a composer. The couple rented rooms in the Sefton Park district.
Their daughter Margarete (1882—1963) came into the world in Liverpool. She later became a writer and spoke up for her father's life and music. The eldest son, Max Felix, was born in Breslau on 31 May 1884 and showed musical gifts early. Two more sons, Hans and Ewald, followed. Just two of the four children, Max and Ewald, ever married, and neither had children, so the direct line of the Bruch family died out in 1974 with Ewald.
Between 1890 and 1910, when he retired, Bruch was a composition teacher at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik. Among his pupils were Ottorino Respighi, Oscar Straus, Ralph Vaughan Williams, the American pianist Rudolph Reuter, and Clara Mathilda Faisst, a German pianist, composer and author.
In 1892 Bruch received the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art, and in 1918 he was made an honorary doctor of the University of Berlin. His awards also include the Pour le Mérite.
In 1918 Bruch returned to chamber ensembles and wrote two string quintets, one of which served as the basis for an octet for four violins, two violas, a cello and a double bass. The octet was his final work, and it is dedicated to the violinist Willy Hess.
Bruch died at his home in Friedenau, Berlin, on 2 October 1920. He was laid to rest in Schöneberg, in the churchyard of the Old St. Matthäus church, alongside his wife Clara, who had passed away on 26 August 1919.
The octet had its premiere on 16 July 1937, broadcast live by the BBC. Hess handed the rights to perform it over in 1936 to Bruch's oldest son, Max Felix, and his wife Gertrude, who prepared the parts for that first performance. Under the Nazis Bruch was put on a blacklist, since they mistakenly thought the composer of Kol Nidrei was a Jew. His pieces were dropped from programmes and were largely forgotten in post-war Germany. Lately interest in his music has been rising.
Bruch wrote more than two hundred works, including three violin concertos. His complex, well-structured music carries on the German Romantic tradition, closer to the Romantic classicism of Johannes Brahms than to the followers of Liszt and Wagner. In his lifetime he was known chiefly as a choral composer, and his friend Brahms was the more popular of the two. His large-scale choral works Odysseus (1872) and Das Feuerkreuz (1899) enjoyed a measure of popularity.
In time it was mainly his works for a solo string instrument with orchestra that stayed in the repertoire. The Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26, belongs to the standard violin repertoire. While writing it Bruch consulted Joseph Joachim, and Joachim's revisions went into the published version. The concerto borrows several devices from Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto, among them the linking of movements, and it omits the orchestral opening section found in classical concertos. The Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra, Op. 46 (1880), and Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra, Op. 47 (1881), based on Jewish liturgical melodies, are also still widely played.
There are two other, lesser-known violin concertos, both in D minor: No. 2 (1878) and No. 3 (1891). Bruch rated the latter as highly as the celebrated first. His output also includes a double concerto for clarinet and viola, three symphonies, and many shorter works pairing a violin, viola or cello with orchestra. Willy Hess, one of the violinists who guided Bruch's violin writing, was the dedicatee of the Concert Piece for violin and orchestra, Op. 84, and gave its premiere.
Bruch's chamber music is less familiar. The Eight Pieces for Clarinet, Viola and Piano are revived now and then; he wrote them with a particular clarinettist in mind, his son Max. There is also a septet. His first major chamber works, from the start of his career, were two string quartets. In later life he added three orchestral suites. The American pianists Rose and Ottilie Sutro, who played as a duo, asked him for a concerto, and he reworked the third suite, completed in 1909, into a double piano concerto in A flat minor, Op. 88a (1912).
The site has Bruch's choral piece Wiegenlied der Hirten for mixed choir (SATB), at Intermediate level. Choral music held a notable place in his output: Odysseus and Das Feuerkreuz were both choral works. His last pieces for solo piano date from the time of his work in Leipzig: the Six Pieces, Op. 12, dedicated to his cousin Bertha Krupp, and the Two Pieces, Op. 14; the Fantasy for two pianos, Op. 11, was written at the same time.