Julius Reubke (1834 – 1858): Organ Sonata on the 94th Psalm
Whenever we talk about the tragedy of an artist being cut off in their prime, we might spare a particular thought for poor Julius Reubke. He was cut off almost before he had got started. So brief was his time on earth that he made the likes of Schubert, Mozart and Chopin look like venerable old men by comparison. And yet in his early twenties, at a time when he probably already knew he was dying (of tuberculosis), he composed a highly original piano sonata, as well as one of the great organ works of the nineteenth century. As cruelly short as his life was, he made the very best use of it.
Julius Reubke was born in Hausneindorf, a small German village in the Harz Mountains, into a musical family. His father Adolf was a distinguished organ builder, and two of Julius’ brothers would follow Adolf into the family trade. Julius however showed such musical promise that at the age of 17 he was admitted to the Berlin Conservatory, studying piano with Theodor Kullak and composition with Adolf Bernhard Marx.*
*Marx was at that same time teaching another promising young composer: her name was Emilie Mayer.
It was while in Berlin that Reubke become friendly with conductor Hans von Bülow and organist Alexander Winterberger, both closely associated with Franz List and the group of musicians later styling themselves the Neudeutsche Schule (New German School). Bülow eventually brought Reubke to Liszt’s attention, telling him that the young man was “the best student of the conservatory.” Having met Reubke, Liszt was just as impressed, inviting him to study with him in Weimar.
It was here that Reubke the composer really blossomed, as he wrote the two monumental works on which his reputation now lies. The Piano Sonata in B Flat Minor, completed in early 1857 came first. Although clearly influenced by Liszt’s own Sonata of 1853, Reubke’s effort still holds its own as a great work. Set in a single movement structure lasting some thirty minutes, the Sonata is built almost solely around two recurring ideas – a dramatic, somewhat demonic motif, and a much more expressive, romantic theme. Both ideas are subject to the most imaginative and organic transformations throughout the work, as the music journeys through a vast range of emotional states.
In certain ways, Reubke’s sonata is even more complex and chromatic than Liszt’s and pushes the very limits of piano writing of its time. What it perhaps still lacks is an overall architectural breadth – there are fewer of those majestic summits we find in the Liszt. But Reubke would surely have developed these sides to his creative gift over time.
Shortly after completing the work, Reubke (who was also a very fine pianist), premiered the Sonata to a private gathering. Even by then his health was in visible decline, as a friend later recalled:
Playing us his sonata, seated in his characteristically bowed form at the piano, sunk in his creation, Reubke forgot everything about him; and we then looked at his pale appearance, at the unnatural shine of his gleaming eyes, heard his heavy breath, and were aware of how wordless fatigue overwhelmed him after such hours of excitement. We suspected then that he would not be with us long.
The young composer probably suspected it too, and only a month or so later completed his second (and final) masterpiece, his Organ Sonata on the 94th Psalm. Reubke again gave the first performance of the work, this time on the newly built organ of Merseburg Cathedral (near Leipzig) in June 1857. Reubke already knew something about organs – like many German and French organ-builders of the time, his father’s firm had made use of the latest technological advances to expand the power and range of their instruments. Julius had sometimes accompanied Adolf to the organ loft and listened to his father talking about his work, all of which had left a deep impression.
But Reubke’s Organ Sonata also takes its starting point from Liszt, and his own recently composed and innovative Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam”. As musicologist Hans van Nieuwkoop puts it, both Liszt and Reubke wanted to write a new, virtuosic kind of music for the instrument, “to emancipate the organ, to raise it to the level of the piano.” One could argue that they were pretty successful in doing so.
In many ways, Reubke’s Organ Sonata is even more mature and impressive than the Sonata for piano. Highly avant-garde for its day, it is not traditional organ music by any stretch of the imagination. Characterized by much of the same hyper-chromatic writing of its pianistic predecessor, there is no stable tonal centre, phrase structures are irregular and the melodic material (such as it is) seems in a constant state of flux. The only feature that gives the piece any sense of unity is the slow, chromatic theme heard gently in the bass at the outset, which then underpins almost everything that follows.
As its title suggests, the work is a meditation (or even tone-poem) on Psalm 94, whose stormy, tumultuous verses fit the ambience of the music very well. The first movement, constructed into a loose sonata form, begins slowly and mysteriously, before working itself up into several highly dramatic passages (including some very rapid pedal-work for the organist). It evokes words of both anger and anguish in the psalm:
O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth, shew thyself.
Arise, thou Judge of the world: and reward the proud after their deserving.
Lord, how long shall the ungodly triumph?
They murder the widow, and the stranger: and put the fatherless to death.
And yet they say the Lord shall not see: neither shall the God of Jacob regard it.
The slow second movement – again taking its material from the work’s opening motif – rises into remote and mysterious plains, as if searching for answers. Here the mood is now one of sorrow and of consolation:
If the Lord had not helped me: it had not failed but my soul had been put to silence.
In the multitude of sorrows that I had in my heart: thy comforts have refreshed my soul.
The grand fugue that makes up the third and final movement is one of the most extraordinary ever written for the organ. The subject itself is based once more on the opening motif, now a little extended, while its ferocious counter-subject, filled with very fast semi-quavers, quickly creates a huge architectonic wave of sound, showing off the organ in its full fire-and-ice splendour.
For this section of the work, the words of the psalm appear triumphant:
But the Lord is my refuge: and my God is the strength of confidence.
He shall recompense them their wickedness, and destroy them in their own malice.
Many other composers would have used such words to resolve the tension of the first two movements and create a triumphant conclusion. But Reubke’s relentless minor key tonalities, striking dissonances and general Gothic colouring suggest a much more vengeful Old Testament God smiting His enemies with thunderbolts. There is also no happy ending in the music: the hectic pace of the fugue only intensifies as it moves into compound time, bringing the piece to an enthralling close in a blaze of C Minor chords.
For any other 23-year-old composer, such a stunning piece of music would have been the start of something big. But for Reubke it was already the ending. For much of the last year of his life he was ill and could no longer work. He relocated to Dresden at the end of 1857 and then in May 1858 to a health resort in nearby Pillnizt, where he died a few days later.
Of the little musical circle he had left behind in Weimar, his teacher Liszt was particularly grief-stricken to see such a talent so prematurely extinguished. “Truly no one could feel more deeply the loss which Art has suffered in your Julius”, Liszt wrote to Julius’ father, “than the one who has followed with admiring sympathy his noble, constant, and successful strivings in these latter years, and who will ever bear his friendship faithfully in mind.”
While Reubke’s Piano Sonata remained unpublished, and fell into a state of undeserved neglect, the Organ Sonata was at least issued into print in 1871, thanks to the efforts of Julius’ younger brother Otto, also a pianist and composer, and later professor at the University of Halle.
While we can only wonder what else this super-gifted young man might have achieved had he lived a little longer, we should nonetheless be grateful for those two wonderful and eternally fresh-seeming works he left behind.