Max Bruch (1838 – 1920): Symphony no 2 in F Minor
He composed one of the best-loved works in the classical repertoire. He also briefly worked in Liverpool. But what else do we know about Max Bruch? Notwithstanding the cosy appeal of his most famous music – including the Scottish Fantasy, Kol Nidrei and the ever popular First Violin Concerto – he remains a surprisingly obscure and even misunderstood figure. Yet his compositional output was extensive and surprisingly varied, and deserving of far wider recognition.
As a composer, Max Bruch was the ultimate anti-Wagnerian, believing that music should be about fine craftsmanship, melodic balance and emotional sincerity (“I can only compose what I feel deeply”, he once said). But the dignified character of his music was often at odds with his personality, which could be both quirky and querulous. In later life he would accrue an impressive litany of pet-hates, including pianos, concert administrators, provincial choral societies, Wagnerian opera and any violinist who wanted to play his First Concerto.
Bruch’s reputation would also suffer from his failure to embrace the more expansionist fashions of his day. Having built his early technique on such classical-romantic masters as Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, he saw no reason to emulate the Neudeutsche Schule (New German School) of Franz Liszt, and especially Richard Wagner (“a brilliant man, who strives with great energy and exceptional talent for undoubtedly the wrong goals”). Any conductor programming the music of these two he considered a “podium peacock”.
There’s no doubt that Bruch was a very different kind of artist to Wagner. And at least on the surface, his life appeared to be well-lived, productive and mostly untroubled. Born in Cologne, he had the best possible start when his parents, Wilhelmine (an accomplished singer) and August Carl Friedrich (an attorney) quickly recognized their son’s unusual musical talent and encouraged it to the fullest. His mother taught him piano and later sent him to Bonn to study theory with a distinguished musicologist named Heinrich Carl Breidenstein. Despite his sound schooling, Bruch would later be critical of many of his teachers, with Breidenstein himself singled out as an “ignoramus”, a view Bruch claimed was shared by half of Bonn. But clearly Breidenstein’s lessons did him little harm, and by his early teens Bruch was already turning out compositions in droves, including motets, psalm settings, lots of chamber music and even some orchestral works.
At the age of fourteen his String Quartet in C Minor was awarded the Frankfurt Mozart-Stiftung Prize, effectively allowing him a four-year scholarship at the Frankfurt Mozart Foundation. There he would study piano with the composer Carl Reinecke, and composition with pianist and composer Ferdinand Hiller, then a prominent figure in German music. He also made a devoted fan out of the ageing composer Louis Spohr, one of the judges who had awarded him the prize. Spohr afterward stated that he was keen to know “the name and place of residence of the young artist whom I have recognized most worthy of the grant. I am very interested to learn more about him, as I prophesy a bright future for him.” Bruch was not the first or last precocious young musician in the mid nineteenth century to evoke comparisons with Mozart.
Hiller would keep a close record of the lessons he gave his talented, young pupil, noting at various points in his diary:
15 August 1853: Bruch came to me with an eight-part Mass and a Symphony. 8 September he brought them back improved.
20 October: After lunch M. Bruch came, parts of a Oratorio, long severe lecture on his way of reasoning.
3 December: Bruch came for the first of regular Saturday lessons, and I gave him a harmony and counterpoint exercise.
22 April 1854: After dinner Bruch [came], I took him through studies in musical analysis.
Although Bruch learned much from Hiller, he later claimed that he had found his teacher’s methods too intense. “Hiller directed my artistic development”, Bruch wrote, “with love and understanding, but like almost all my teachers, he expected too much of me, and later, by studying alone, I had to make up for this.” Bruch was also wise enough to absorb his teacher’s somewhat by the book approach only as he saw fit. A fine craftsman but never a slave to the rules, Bruch would take great pains to avoid empty displays of technique for technique’s sake in his own works.
Having finished his education at the Mozart Foundation, Bruch would spend much of the next three decades moving between various compass points in northern Germany, sometimes taking on a conducting role but never staying anywhere for very long. Tellingly, his first port of call was Leipzig, a city whose musical life was still greatly influenced by its former kapellmeister, Felix Mendelssohn, who had died so tragically young a decade earlier. Bruch felt Mendelssohn’s ghost everywhere and wished he could have taken lessons from him (“he died too soon for me”, he lamented). Mendelssohn’s music had already made a huge impression on the young composer, as Bruch strove to incorporate many of the same upright, classical values into his work. Aside from Leipzig, Bruch also spent time in Bonn, Berlin, Mannheim and Munich during his early twenties. At Bonn he even flirted with a university degree in philosophy and art, but in the event lasted just one term, with most of his time there spent practising JS Bach on the university’s pipe organ.
During these same years, Bruch managed to put aside other major compositional projects to work on his opera Die Loreley for several years, with the work proving to be his first hit of any kind. Using a libretto by Emanuel Geibel, first written in the 1840s and originally intended for Mendelssohn, Bruch would manage to synthesise many of the most popular elements of mid-century German Romantic Opera into his new work, from Carl Maria Von Weber through to Heinrich Marshner, Robert Schumann and even early Wagner – though without quite reaching the dizzying heights of some of the latter’s more recent efforts. Premiered at Mannheim in 1863, there were many who quickly recognized Loreley as a refreshing change to the sometimes overbearing manner of Wagner, with one critic for the Niederrheinische Musikzeitung noting:
There are no shrill dissonances, no torture of the ears, no ugliness on the ears or nerves of the listener. There were also no motivic references which trumpet “I am the King”, “I am the good person”, “I am the evil one”, no eccentric couplings of heterogeneous instruments such as piccolo with timpani and similar trivial hocus-pocus. In a word: the law of beauty is never broken. Let this beautiful and pure German work make its own way forward! Our great theatres will not regret taking on this patriotic work of art.
When Clara Schumann (who later became a friend of Bruch) heard the work, she praised its “lovely moments” and its assured mastery (“I can scarcely believe it is by such a young composer”). But she also admitted that she missed a certain “creative power in the music.” Bruch too felt the same way, and rather than the work defining his life mission, as it might well have done, he had all but disowned it just a year or so later. He would complete just one further opera in his lifetime.
It was as if Bruch wanted to look beyond Germanic models to discover the true meaning of music. And shortly after putting Loreley aside, he would appear to find exactly what he was looking for in a collection of Scottish folk songs, as he enthused to a friend:
If you sing and play these melodies through… you once again experience the holy respect for the power, simplicity, and beauty of the genuine folksong. Don’t you agree? A melody like, for example, ‘The Beds of Sweet Roses’ literally strikes dead hundreds of modern melodies, stone dead I say. Where do we all stand? I consider I have revealed my musical Credo quite clearly and loudly through the publication of these wonderful, unknown melodies.
Bruch later claimed to be familiar with more than 400 Scottish folk songs and in 1864 he published his 12 Scottish Folksong settings for solo voice and piano, a collection including such numbers as “Mary’s Dream” (Mary’s Traum), “Auld Rob Morris” (Der alte Rob Morris), and “Highland Lassie” (Hochlandsknabe). Although Bruch’s arrangements were somewhat bound by the ‘proper’ Germanic conventions of the day and do not sound particularly Scottish, the raw, natural beauty of the folksongs still left a deep impression. For him, they seemed to embody the very heart of music. “Melody is the soul of music” he would say, and it was this mantra, moreso than any novel harmonic experimentation or show of technical skill that would come to shape his mature approach to composition.
Searching for musical inspiration in windswept northerly lands may also have inspired Bruch’s next major success, his secular cantata, Scenes from the Frithjof Saga, which was premiered in Aachen in 1864. The work is subdivided into six dramatic musical scenes inspired by Norse mythology, each telling a different story involving the heroic Frithjof the Bold and his lover Ingeborg.
Bruch was by now working full-time in various kapellmeister roles, and in the 1860s and 70s would occupy positions in Mannheim, Koblenz, Sondershausen and Berlin. He had already decided that teaching was not for him and that conducting was – he enjoyed waving a baton around and also felt it gave him a far better grasp of how an orchestra worked than any theory book could. Over time, Bruch would become a highly proficient but also somewhat rigorous figure at the podium, with one contemporary describing him thus:
In personal appearance Bruch is by no means as majestic as one would suppose from his works. He is small of stature, and his dark eyes peer through his spectacles with the sharp glance of a teacher rather than a creator of heroic cantatas. He is quick and nervous in motion and, when directing an orchestra or chorus, his gestures are spontaneous and expressive.
Less promisingly, Bruch would prove to be a somewhat temperamental maestro, often making harsh and unreasonable demands on his performers (a curious echo, perhaps, of how Bruch himself had felt treated by his past teachers). When stationed in Koblenz, he found himself complaining of “a hundred stupidities in the way of making music here.” Sondershausen was even worse: “a very small backwater” which did not even have its own railway station; he later complained that the position he “hated from the start… [it was] a beginner’s post, a wretched orchestra, average chorus, amateurish arrogance, impossible to do anything well there.”
When invited to hop across the North Sea and direct the prestigious Liverpool Philharmonic Society a few years later, Bruch’s lack of interpersonal skills went with him. Having upbraided the British musicians for their “rather lax standards”, he was accused in turn of being “humorless, arrogant, egotistical and unable to warm the hearts of his players”. His time in Liverpool would be increasingly beset with fights with the players and critics before being virtually asked to leave.
One of Bruch’s friends, fully aware of composer’s irascible nature, tried to put it as diplomatically as he could: “if a somewhat blunt manner and an amount of self-centeredness that is not common even amongst musicians prevent [Bruch] making friends very quickly, or being what is called popular in general society, those who know him best know how whole-hearted is his devotion to his art…” Bruch only finally seemed to mellow a little when he took on a post in Breslau (now Wrocław in Poland) in the 1880s. By now married with children, he told a friend that he had “my stronghold, my house, my dear wife, my child, and good friends in all parts of the world; in Germany as well as in England and America. I care less and less about false friends or opponents, and just laugh at their farcical comedy of errors.”
He also continued during these years to progress as a composer, with the work that would make him world-famous appearing before he was even 30 years old – his First Violin Concerto in G Minor. Bruch had already decided that he detested pianos (which he called “dull rattle-traps”) – and not only their sound and the overblown way they were played by the virtuosos of his day, but also their almost suffocating omnipresence. It is telling that while Bruch would write music into his eighties, he wrote no solo works for the piano after the age of 24. In a letter to his publisher Simrock, Bruch spoke of his desire, “to set up a grand auto da fé* of ten to twenty thousand pianos, so that this nineteenth-century epidemic, if not wiped out, might at least be reduced to manageable proportions.”
*Bruch was here referencing a centuries old grand public ritual (“act of faith”) used by the Spanish, Portuguese, and Mexican Inquisitions to pronounce sentences on condemned heretics. Staged as a spectacle in city plazas, the event involved a procession, mass, and sermon, and usually ended with public punishments, imprisonment, or execution by burning at the stake.
By way of contrast, Bruch was hugely fond of violins. When once asked about his preference, he replied that melody was the cornerstone of music and that “the violin can sing a melody better than the piano can”. As a young man Bruch had befriended several of Germany’s leading young violinists, including the renowned Joseph Joachim, who would be closely associated with three of the greatest violin concertos of the 19th century – by Mendelssohn, Bruch and Brahms respectively – premiering the first at the age of 12, and then taking on a consultatory role for the solo violin part in the latter two. Bruch would have a long and sometimes fretful correspondence with Joachim over countless details in his own concerto, with Joachim eagerly offering up all manner of suggestions and advice. Bruch would also subject his new work to several painstaking revisions, only finally claiming to have created its definitive version two years after its first performance.
Whatever Bruch’s later misgivings about his First Violin Concerto, it is a fabulous work, perfectly balanced with three interconnected but contrasting movements, and full of beautiful, impassioned music that not only evokes Mendelssohn but also JS Bach. The second movement in particular, which is built upon one of Bruch’s loveliest and most romantic melodies, remains a huge favourite with violinists and listeners alike.
Eventually premiered (in its final form) in Bremen in early 1868, with Joachim as soloist, the work’s reputation would quickly spread all across Germany and then much further afield. Eventually it would overshadow almost everything else Bruch produced, causing the composer no end of annoyance in the process. And not least that he would write two further Violin Concertos (in 1878 and 1891, both in D Minor) which he thought at least as good. There were also other concertante works he could point to, such as his Romance in A Minor (1874) and Scottish Fantasy (1882), both for violin and orchestra, as well as his Hebrew melody inspired Kol Nidrei, for violin and cello (1881). And while he found the time to add three accomplished symphonies to his canon, many have considered his best compositions of all to be his works for voices and orchestra, such as his ballad, Schön Ellen (1867) and secular oratorio, Odysseus (1872). Sadly all of these fine works would be increasingly sidelined by the all too famous Concerto.
“Nothing compares to the laziness, stupidity and dullness of many German violinists”, Bruch once ranted:
Every fortnight another one comes to me wanting to play the first Concerto; I have now become rude, and have told them: ‘I cannot listen to this Concerto any more – did I perhaps just write this one? Go away and once and for all play the other Concertos, which are just as good, if not better.’
Bruch’s irritation with the Concerto’s enduring popularity was surely exacerbated by the fact that he earned almost no money from it. In fairness, this was largely his own fault – early on, he had sold all rights to his publisher, not seeing how big the work would become. So no matter how many times the concerto was performed over the coming decades, it never earned him a penny. A desperate attempt to sell the work’s manuscript during a period of penury in old age would result in one of the most upsetting episodes of the composer’s life, as he was swindled out of a large sum of money by two unscrupulous pianists, supposedly acting as intermediaries.
At around the time he was completing his final revisions to the G Minor Concerto, Bruch was also working on his first symphony, with the latter work also premiered in 1868 and making a fair impression on both audiences and critics. Bruch was by now somewhere near his peak as a composer, with one critic for the Rheinische Musikzeitung comparing him to both Mozart and Mendelssohn, and rhapsodizing, “may he courageously step forward on the path he has begun, serve art as the noble holy goddess only for its own sake and find his goal only in the attainment of the highest and best! With all our hearts we wish him the best of heaven’s blessings!”
Two years later came a Second Symphony in F Minor, dedicated to Joseph Joachim, and first performed at a concert for soldiers wounded in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. Whether the ongoing conflict with France offered any context for the symphony’s mood is not clear, but it is certainly a darker, denser work than the First. The first movement (allegro passionato ma un poco maestoso) builds its impetus unhurriedly after a slow, ominous introduction (quiet unison Fs on strings, brass and timpani breaking into dramatic chords), alternating powerful orchestral tuttis with restlessly evolving themes and subthemes.
Whereas the first movement contains clear hints of Mendelssohn and Schumann, the lushly scored second (adagio ma non troppo) appears to look ahead, and not least to the orchestral music of Anton Bruckner and Richard Strauss. Although now in the key of C Minor, the music is more melancholy than tragic. It is also strikingly beautiful, with Bruch skillfully sharing his exquisite melodies around the orchestra and creating a sense of perpetual organic growth.
Highly unusually for the time, there are only three (rather than four) movements in the Symphony. Without a break from the slow movement, Bruch launches into a stately F Major finale (allegro molto tranquillo), which moves steadily and majestically like a mighty river (perhaps the Rhine of his native Cologne). There are still moments of genuine drama and tension which recall the first movement, but this time the outbursts are resolved much more quickly and the symphony surges towards its conclusion in a mood of sunny jubilation.
It was the German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus who once suggested that no worthy symphony had been written between Schumann’s Fourth in 1851 and Brahms’ First in 1876 (an assertion often referred to as the “Dahlhaus Gap”). But Bruch’s much underrated Second must surely challenge that. And his triumphant finale, of light triumphing over dark, has a superficially similar manner to the finale of the Brahms – not least, there is the spacious theme Bruch creates, with its passing resemblance to the Ode to Joy melody of Beethoven’s Ninth. Brahms would famously do something similar in his own Symphony, but did Bruch, who was friendly with Brahms and knew his music well, actually beat him to the mark?
Despite his growing crankiness in middle age, Bruch always managed to retain an admirable sobriety and good sense when it came to important life decisions. Although he would put off matrimony until relatively late in life, he would find genuine happiness with a young singer named Clara Tuczek, whom he had first met on tour in Berlin in 1881. Their marriage would last almost forty years and produce four children, with their daughter Margaretha later becoming a noted author and champion of her father’s music.
After finally retiring from full-time conducting in 1890, Bruch spent much of the next two decades working as a professor of composition at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. Despite now being regarded, musically speaking, as a doyen for traditional, Germanic values, Bruch would prove himself valuable to a wide range of international students, including the likes of Ottorino Respighi (the future composer of Fountains of Rome) and the young British composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams. Both would greatly benefit from the time spent with the old master, while eventually turning out music that could have hardly have been more different from their teacher’s.
Even after stepping down from the Academy at the age of 72, Bruch remained busy in the last decade of life, holding masterclasses, and still composing productively. Sadly, just as he should have been enjoying his retirement with his wife and family, his financial well-being was ruined by a series of unforeseen disasters.
Upon the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he suddenly found himself, as a German composer, blacklisted across most of Europe. As royalties from international performances dried up, Germany was also hit was a crippling war inflation, which only worsened the situation.
In desperation, Bruch turned to two former students, the American pianist-sisters Rose and Ottilie Sutro (for whom he had already written a double piano concerto in 1911). They offered to sell the manuscript of the First Violin Concerto in America, where they claimed they could get a hefty price for it. But once returned across the Atlantic, the Sutro sisters became incommunicado with the composer, ignoring his increasingly anxious letters and severing all contact. They would eventually send a risible sum (in worthless German currency) a few years later, while hanging onto the manuscript for decades and finally selling it in 1949 to a New York music dealer.
At the same time as Bruch was dealing with the shock of being cheated so egregiously by two professional musicians, he then lost his beloved wife Clara to a sudden illness at the age of 65. The end of the Great War sadly brought no relief to his ailing nation, nor to his own life, only further economic distress. In one of his last ever letters, Bruch despaired at the situation across Europe and what he already sensed was a rise of fanaticism in his home country: “I only see la bête humaine all around me in its ugliest, basest form; who will undertake to reason with these narrow-minded, fanatical, brutal minds, and who will restore us to normal perceptions?”
Remarkably, he still wrote music, with two substantial string quintets appearing in 1918, and then his swansong, an impassioned String Octet in 1920, whose freshness and vitality suggests a much younger composer. Bruch died at his home in Berlin-Friedenau later that year, nearly penniless, and mostly forgotten by the wider musical world. He was buried next to Clara at the Old St. Matthäus churchyard at Berlin-Schöneberg. Their daughter, Margaretha, had the following words inscribed on their gravestone: “Music is the language of God.”
Max Bruch, a man not always easy to be around, was also a steadfast artist who had stuck to his guns throughout a period of increasingly turbulent cultural and political change. And he had written at least one work that would long outlast him, along with several others which are now being rediscovered by a new generation of listeners entirely unbothered by the fashions of Bruch’s day.
If Bruch had ever desired an epitaph, he might have looked no further than words a certain music critic had written about him in mid-career. Rather than wax on about the composer’s supposed conservatism, as everyone else increasingly did, the critic framed it another way. The music of Max Bruch, he wrote, “maintains a calmness and dignity, totally at variance with the style of many composers in the present day.”