An unreconstructed Romantic
The composer Max Bruch An unreconstructed Romantic The composer Max Bruch

His First Violin Concerto is a staple of the repertoire, yet much of Max Bruch’s music remains unfamiliar. Few composers have been so eclipsed by the success of a single work – or so exasperated by it. How did it come to dominate his reputation?

It was a tempting offer. After decades of financial uncertainty, a position teaching composition in Berlin promised Bruch financial independence. By 1893, he was also becoming conscious of his artistic isolation: he remained committed to Romantic ideals and resolutely opposed to the musical innovations of Liszt, Wagner and their successors.

The prospect of leading a composition masterclass in the imperial capital was particularly attractive. But there was a condition: he would be expected to honour Kaiser Wilhelm II with a cantata for his birthday. For Bruch, an ardent admirer of Bismarck, whom the Kaiser had dismissed as Chancellor three years earlier, this was a bitter pill.

His loyalty to Bismarck had already brought him into conflict with his employers in Breslau, now Wrocław. This time, however, he complied. When he later published the score of his “Kaiser Cantata”, he gave it the unassuming title Hymn on Words from Holy Scripture for Chorus, Orchestra and Organ. Only the small print revealed the occasion for which it had been written.

Bruch spent the last 30 years of his life in Berlin, watching it grow into a modern metropolis. He died on 2 October 1920, the day after the creation of Greater Berlin, which brought the city and surrounding communities together to form what was then the world’s third-largest city. Bruch himself had chosen to live in the quiet neighbourhood of Friedenau. A plaque at 3 Albestraße now commemorates his home there.

Yearning for a rural idyll

Friedenau offered shelter from the bustle of the growing capital, but Bruch still longed for his native Rhineland. Born in Cologne in 1838, the son of a senior police official, he had discovered the countryside around Bergisch Gladbach on a childhood summer holiday.

Over the following decades, he returned whenever he could, enjoying the views across the Rhine Valley towards the distant spires of Cologne Cathedral. He spent hours walking alone, planning new compositions.

Bergisch Gladbach was also where he befriended Maria Zanders, who became his patron. She had married a local paper manufacturer in 1853 and took over the business after his early death. Active in the community, she founded a women’s choral society to give her factory workers opportunities to make music. She offered Bruch both financial support and encouragement. A room was always reserved for him at Villa Zanders, where he stayed several times a year to compose in seclusion.

“Musical social democracy”

Bruch’s career initially looked promising. He became music director in Koblenz in 1865 and moved to Sondershausen as court Kapellmeister in 1867. During these years he composed and revised his First Violin Concerto, which achieved international success following the premiere of its final version in 1868.

Yet his growing reputation as a staunch defender of tradition increasingly set him apart from musical developments around him. At 26, he wrote to his friend Brahms rejecting the idea of “surrendering to the fashionable fallacies”. Later, he dismissed avant-garde music as “musical social democracy”.

His admiration for Mendelssohn, who had died in 1847, was unqualified; Schumann and Brahms were his other musical touchstones. To the progressives, Bruch was an unreconstructed Romantic.

His greatest gift was for melody. His dramatic instincts were less assured, and none of his three operas secured a lasting place in the repertoire. He could convey emotional intensity in music, but the drama often depended on external events rather than developing from the characters’ inner lives.

Secular oratorios for the German Empire

Bruch found greater success with large-scale choral works. The founding of the German Empire in 1871 gave fresh impetus to the secular oratorio as an expression of national identity, while the many amateur choral societies created a ready demand for new repertoire.

In Odysseus, Bruch turned to ancient Greece, deliberately choosing an alternative to Wagner’s world of myth. Arminiustook as its subject the defeat of the Romans at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9. For many of his contemporaries, this ancient conflict offered a parallel to the Prussian-led Protestant state’s struggle against the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

His earlier cantata Frithjof had also proved enormously popular. Its story of lovers divided by social rank resonated with a rising middle class seeking to define its position in a society still dominated by the aristocracy.

Bruch married relatively late in life. In 1881, at 43, he married the Berlin-born alto Clara Tuczek, who was 16 years his junior. Their marriage was happy, and Clara lived to see him receive an honorary doctorate from Berlin University in 1918. She died the following year; Bruch survived her by little more than a year.

By then, much of his music had fallen from favour. Today, alongside the First Violin Concerto, his best-known works are the Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra and Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra. Written around the end of his tenure with Berlin’s Stern Choral Society, which he conducted from 1878 to 1880, they reflect his interest in traditional melodies. The Jewish cantor Abraham Jacob Lichtenstein had introduced him to melodies that he later used in Kol Nidrei. The association with Kol Nidrei led to persistent, mistaken assumptions that Bruch himself was Jewish – an association unlikely to endear his music to the Nazi authorities.