“Excellent concertmasters are even harder to do without than excellent conductors, as the history of all the great orchestras shows.”
This remark comes from a Dresden music critic in 1855. Despite their importance (behind the scenes) and heavy responsibilities, concert masters also found time to be string quartet heroes. Those discussed so far in Leipzig, Dresden, and Cologne were all concert masters and the other members of their quartets were also members of the orchestra. It seems that chamber music concerts were not in the job description but rather a labor of love. For instance, Franz Hartmann, concert master at Cologne, had a daily schedule of lessons, rehearsals and performances to get through before he could devote some time to chamber music. Some of these concert masters also kept up their performances as a soloist, such as Johann Lauterbach at Dresden, who performed at the Gewandhaus nine times between 1855 and 1880.1
Concert masters are just one subject in a recently published gold mine of documentation of the Dresden Königliche Kapelle by Eberhard Steindorf.2
Although chamber music concerts aren’t included, information on the quartet players is part of the data on the orchestra members. Steindorf assembled lists of all the concerts, with programs and cross references of composers and pieces. Further, there are excerpts from reviews from Dresden newspapers, which indicate how these concerts were received and what the audience thought of performers and pieces.
There are also sections on interesting topics about concert life, such as the changing stance on concert pitch, rehearsals, and intermissions. There are some detailed descriptions of audience participation through applause, silence and hissing.3 The last topic, the social status of the musician, is qualitatively different and harder to document. We know they were usually part of a family of musicians, who started working at a young age and had little education other than in music. Since they weren’t well paid and had very little free time, there probably isn’t much to find out about most of them. But that reminds me of a fictional work that I found very informative….
Social Status
The everyday lives of orchestra musicians are depicted in a novel from 1877 called The First Violin. Its English author Jessie Fothergill (1851-91) drew upon the year she spent studying in Düsseldorf. The title refers to the concert master of a German orchestra in the Rhineland. This book was in its tenth edition by 1895, and its one time popularity is reflected in (my) Google searches. All of Fothergill’s novels focused on social issues, especially of class and gender, and show the influence of George Eliot. When I first read it a few years ago, I was much struck by the moment of social mortification that takes place in the book’s first part. The English heroine, a vicar’s daughter, had been rescued by a gallant, noble-looking gentleman after getting separated from her companions in the Cologne train station. Some days later she sees him again at the opera and realizes with horror that he is the concert master of the orchestra. Instead of being her “equal and a gentleman,” he is “a professional musician, a man in a band, a German band, playing in the public orchestra of a provincial town.” She “cuts him dead” – refuses to acknowledge him. She explains to the reader that back home in England, musicians “were a class with whom we had and could have nothing in common; so utterly outside our life, that we scarcely ever gave a thought to their existence.”
Eventually she comes to recognize that “the musicians before me were nearly all true artists, and some of them undoubted gentlemen to boot, even if their income averaged something under that of a skilled Lancashire operative.” It only takes some time to get over her “poor, pedantic little scruples,” ingrained by her English assumption that “the only respectable professions were the Church, the Army, Medicine, and the Law.”
The concerts themselves in “Elberthal”/Düsseldorf are described not as significant public events, but rather as community gatherings. “I often recall those homely Saturday evening concerts; the long, shabby saal, with its faded, out-of-date decorations; its rows of small tables, with the well-known groups around them; the mixed and motley audience.” As for the musicians, “every face of them [was] well known to the audience, as those of the audience to them.” “It was not a mere ‘concert,’ which, in England, is another word for so much expense and so much vanity– it was a gathering of friends.” In this context, the concert master does not seem to command much in terms of social standing.
For the first part of this novel a conventional plot is remarkably subverted by “a mix of feminist romance and queer masculinity.”4 But the required happy ending that reaffirms patriarchy cannot be denied. It takes long chapters of melodrama, which seem to be imported from another fictional world, to explain how the concert master was not actually a lowly working musician and instead the noble gentleman she took him for.
A different kind of aristocracy
Otto von Königslöw, concert master of the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne
My last post on chamber music in Cologne left off with the description of the short tenures of three concert masters. After 1858, when Ferdinand Hiller became Kapellmeister and head of a new conservatory, Cologne grew quickly in musical prominence. Hiller called upon his old friend Otto von Königslöw to be his concert master and a teacher at the music school, and for the next 25 years Königslöw was involved with multiple aspects of musical life in Cologne and Bonn, including overseeing the chamber music concerts from 1860-84.
It is not easy to find information about Königslöw. Unlike the prodigious Hiller and the even more prolific Carl Reinecke, who was his close friend, he did not compose, write his memoirs, or have his correspondence published. His Nachlaß appears to be a single box, mostly of newspaper clippings.5
His teacher in Hamburg was the Viennese Carl Hafner, who had studied with Jansa and was an early advocate of the late Beethoven quartets. This background explains his strong preference for chamber music, such as his four concerts of three quartets each in Hamburg in 1848. Königslöw also studied with Ferdinand David in Leipzig and made his debut as a soloist at the Gewandhaus on 6 February 1845 with the Spohr e minor Violin Concerto. He was the first to perform the Beethoven Violin Concerto in Bonn in 1855. His biggest claim to fame today may be as the performer of the first version of the Max Bruch G minor Violin Concerto in 1864. But his interest in chamber music was paramount.
It is not clear if the von Königslöw name indicated noble heritage, but it could be called the musical equivalent due to friends and family. Otto was born into a family of distinguished musicians in Hamburg in 1824.6 In 1861 he married Betty Völkers, a member of Brahms’s Hamburg Frauenchor. Besides connections to Brahms, he was a long time member of the north German network supporting Schumann, starting in 1846 when he and Carl Reinecke paid visits to the Schumanns in Dresden and Düsseldorf. In later years Königslöw was involved in the many festivals and commemorations for Schumann and Brahms.
I also suspect Königslöw was financially well off, with his “Wanderjahre” of travel and playing through Scandinavia, England, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Bohemia, and Austria only coming to an end with the Cologne appointment. Furthermore, how many violinists from this period had their portrait painted when they were 26 years old?
Von Barthélemy Menn, 1850
Notes
- Lauterbach premiered Albert Dietrich’s Violin Concerto in 1874. There is a recent recording of this accessible work on Naxos. ↩︎
- Eberhard Steindorf spent his whole career in the administration of the Dresden Staatskapelle. He earned his doctorate after retirement with this research and was able to see his work published before he died last year. https://www.musik-in-dresden.de/2023/08/11/abschied/
↩︎ - Table of contents to Die Konzerttätigkeit der Königlichen musikalischen Kapelle zu Dresden (1858–1918). ↩︎
- See Linda Hughes, Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany: Cross-Cultural Freedoms and Female Opportunity (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Hughes emphasizes the connections between Eliot’s Daniel Deronda and The First Violin. The queer masculinity she refers to is manifested in one of the most interesting features of the novel: besides the heroine, there is another first-person narrator, who also loves the concertmaster. This is the assistant concert master! He and the concert master live together and act as parents to the concert master’s young child. ↩︎
- Historisches Archiv Köln, https://kalliope-verbund.info/DE-611-BF-26919 ↩︎
- Johann Wilhelm Cornelius von Königslöw (1745-1833) was organist and music director of the city of Lübeck, where he initiated performances of oratorios and organized concerts for amateurs. Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe. Digitale Edition, https://weber-gesamtausgabe.de/A000EDB (Version 4.11.0 vom 1. Juli 2024)
Letzte Änderung dieses Dokuments am 16. Dezember 2017 ↩︎
