Composer Spotlight
Max Bruch (1838–1920)
Max Bruch is immediately and inextricably associated with two words, violin concerto, and for a very good reason. His Violin Concerto No. 1 in G Minor — a beautiful, virtuosic, and sweetly satisfying composition — is one of the greatest works of the Romantic era and one of the most enduringly popular pieces in the classical music repertoire.
But there’s more to Max Bruch than just one infectious work. During his lifetime, Bruch was known primarily as a choral composer, and, in addition to two other violin concertos, he wrote three symphonies, three operas, various orchestral suites, chamber music pieces, and so on. The popularity of his first violin concerto, however, eclipsed his overall output, and his talents were overshadowed by those of another German composer, Johannes Brahms (1833–1897). In 1907 Bruch told American music critic Arthur Abell: “As time goes on, [Brahms] will be more appreciated, while most of my works will be more and more neglected. Fifty years hence he will loom up as one of the supremely great composers of all time, while I will be remembered chiefly for having written my G-Minor Violin Concerto.”
For better or worse, Bruch’s historical assessment was correct. Despite his vast catalog, today concertgoers are typically treated to just three of his works with some frequency: the previously mentioned Violin Concerto No. 1, as well as his Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra and his Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra.
Early Years
Bruch was born in Cologne, Germany, on January 6, 1838. His father was a lawyer, and his mother was a singer. Both of his parents encouraged his prodigious talents. (It’s said that the first piece Bruch wrote, at the age of nine, was a song in honor of his mother’s birthday.) Bruch had one sibling, a sister named Mathilde.
At the age of 14, Bruch was awarded the prestigious Frankfurt Mozart Foundation Prize due, in part, to a recommendation from the acclaimed composer and conductor Ferdinand Hiller (1811–1885), who founded the Cologne Conservatory in 1850. (Hiller had heard a number of Bruch’s works while visiting the Bruch’s home on occasion.) The prize allowed Bruch to study composition with Hiller as well as piano with Carl Reinecke (1824–1910), one of the conservatory’s professors.
In 1858, six years after Bruch won the Mozart prize, he premiered his first published work: a one-act opera called Scherz, List, und Rache (Jest, Cunning, and Revenge), based on text by Goethe. Other works followed, and his reputation as a serious composer was cemented with his opera Die Loreley (1862) and his cantata Frithjof (1864).
Career and Compositional Style
During his long career, Bruch was a well-regarded conductor and teacher as well as a composer. He served as music director for a number of organizations, including the Stern Choral Society in Berlin, the Philharmonic Society in Liverpool, and the Orchesterverein in Breslau. From 1890 to 1910 he taught at the Berlin Academy, where his students included Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958). In 1893 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in music from Cambridge University.
Bruch’s music was firmly rooted in Romantic classicism, which put him at odds with innovative, avant-garde contemporaries like Franz Liszt (1811–1886) and Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Scholars have noted that Bruch’s style remained virtually unchanged throughout his career, and they’ve pointed to a perceived conservatism and sentimentality in his work as having limited the scope of his legacy — especially since, in his later years, Bruch was composing at the same time as revolutionaries like Gustav Mahler (1860–1911) and Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971).
Bruch at the Festival
On Thursday, August 3 at Noon, for the first time in its 45-year history, the Festival presents one of Bruch’s underperformed chamber music works: his String Octet in B-flat Major, featuring the Orion String Quartet and violinists Martin Beaver and Owen Dalby (in his Festival debut), violist Ida Kavafian, and bassist Mark Tatum.
Bruch composed his Octet in January and February 1920, completing it eight months before his death on October 20 of that year. The work is a rich, warm, and bittersweet revelation, and while it does indeed hark back to a long-ago era — one seemingly incongruous with a rapidly modernizing early-20th-century society — it nevertheless brims with Bruch’s trademark talent for creating intoxicating melodies and finely crafted compositions.
