Klarinet Archive - Posting 000498.txt from 2000/04

From: Bilwright@-----.net (William Wright)
Subj: Re: [kl] Sutermeister
Date: Tue, 11 Apr 2000 22:27:44 -0400

You also asked about Max Bruch (paraphrased from CD liner, Symphony
No.3 on Chandos):

Born 1838 in Cologne, died 1920 in Berlin, a comparatively long life for
those days. He was the son of a police official.

His life spanned a period of innovation that included Wagner,
Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartok, Bruckner, Mahler, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky,
Grieg, Debussy, Chabrier, Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin, Mussorgsky, Liszt,
and Massenet. (That's quite a list of contemporaries, actually.) These
years saw a "breakdown of tonality and harmony", but Bruch opposed this
breakdown and did not include it in his 60 years of composing. He was a
"ally" of Brahms, and dedicated his first symphony to Brahms (who
response was "vivid joy and heartfelt thanks"), but they quarrelled a
lot -- see below -- because of their strong personalities.

Bruch won the "coveted Mozart Foundation prize" at age 14. His major
fame is from choral music (it says here, but I like his symphonies and
concertos best). He spent a few years (1880-1883) in England, then did
some conducting in America for a year, and returned to Germany ("pined
for his native Germany"), and retired in 1911.

He loved the violin, hated the piano (he wrote that the violin "can sing
a melody, and melody is the soul of music." He sold the rights to his
first violin concerto for next to nothing, he wrote his second violin
concerto for Sarasate (and Brahms sneered at its slow first movement
because it was "intolerable for normal people.")

FWIW,
Bill

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