1815–1883 · Romantic
Robert Volkmann (1815–1883) was a German composer, conductor and teacher, born in Lommatzsch in Saxony. In 1841 he settled in Pest, wrote symphonies, trios and choruses, and from 1875 taught harmony and counterpoint in Budapest. Our site offers his choral Abendlied.
Volkmann was born on 6 April 1815 in Lommatzsch, not far from Meissen in Saxony. His father was a church cantor and meant the boy to take over the post one day, so the first music lessons happened at home: Robert learned the organ and the piano. By the age of twelve he was playing the cello part in quartets by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.
In 1832 he entered the gymnasium in Freiberg, and from 1833 to 1835 he studied at a teachers' seminary. Alongside, he took violin and cello lessons and worked on composition with August Ferdinand Anacker, the seminary's director of music. Anacker encouraged his pupil to devote himself to music more fully.
In 1836 Volkmann moved to Leipzig. There he took private composition lessons from Carl Ferdinand Becker, cantor of the city's St Nicholas church. In Leipzig he also got to know Robert Schumann, an acquaintance that left a strong mark on the young musician. Schumann backed his studies, and the two met again several times later.
From 1839 to 1841 Volkmann taught singing in Prague. In 1841 he settled in Pest, and until 1844 he earned his living from private piano lessons and from articles for the music paper Allgemeine Wiener Musik-Zeitung. For a while after that he worked as a freelance composer, but in 1848 he again had to look for work and became choirmaster and organist at a reform synagogue.
Relative recognition came to Volkmann in 1852, when Franz Liszt and Hans von Bülow added his piano trio to their repertoire. It was the trio in B-flat minor, and Liszt and Bülow played it repeatedly in various European cities. From 1854 the composer lived in Vienna, and in 1858 he went back to Budapest.
While visiting Vienna in 1864, Volkmann met Johannes Brahms, and the two became close friends.
In 1857 the publisher Gustav Heckenast took on printing all of Volkmann's works and committed himself to paying the composer a steady income, whatever the music sold. Thanks to the arrangement the composer became financially independent and could give himself wholly to composing. The support lasted until the early 1870s, when Heckenast closed his publishing house in Budapest. By the 1860s Volkmann's name was already fairly widely known in Europe.
From the early 1870s Volkmann wrote very little. From 1875 until the end of his life he taught harmony and counterpoint at the Budapest conservatoire, whose director was Liszt. Volkmann died in October 1883 in Budapest.
Lommatzsch, the town where he was born, made him an honorary citizen. Károly Aggházy, Henri Gobbi and Károly Szabados are named among Volkmann's pupils.
Volkmann's first known work was the cycle of piano pieces Phantasiebilder ("Fantastic Pictures"), written in 1839. He also wrote symphonies, serenades, masses, sacred songs and church chants, nocturnes, piano and cello concertos, romances, trios and duets, three marches and male-voice choruses. Among the titles are Sonatina, Musikalisches Liederbuch and Die Tageszeiten.
He wrote the overture Richard III and set several twelfth-century Christmas hymns to music. The work that brought him recognition in 1852 was a piano trio, played by Liszt and Bülow. From the 1870s onward Volkmann composed far less.
The site carries two editions of the choral piece Abendlied. The version from op. 30, no. 2 for choir is at the "Elementary+" level; the Abendlied without an opus number, for SATB mixed choir, is at the "Intermediate" level. For anyone who wants to get to know Volkmann through the scores, it makes sense to begin with the first and then move on to the second.