Update on Louis Spohr’s ubiquity

Researching Joachim’s concerts at the Leipzig Gewandhaus led me to the astonishing profusion of works by Louis Spohr on the concerts throughout the nineteenth century. A review from Hanslick on the occasion of a Joachim visit to Vienna in 1875 included an appreciation of the composer’s music. Hanslick had a nostalgic view of Spohr’s music that was important to him as a youth. He described his popularity as almost a fad that had just as quickly subsided. While I was going through some music journals from 1877, however, I could not help noticing Spohr’s name on concert programs, again and again.

The list of 40 performances of Spohr’s works in 1877 below should be sufficient to indicate that Spohr was being played more than even Hanslick suspected in 1875. Most of these took place in northern Germany. Works for violin and orchestra prevail on this list, with Joachim and his former students providing most of the performances. Joachim performed the Ninth Violin Concerto on a Crystal Palace concert in London in February. His student Henri Petri played the Eighth Violin Concerto there a week later. Petri then settled that summer into his first position as concert master in the town of Sondershausen.

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Short Excursion to Sondershausen

Sondershausen, a town in Thuringia with the population of 6,000 in 1877, appears five times on my list. (Meiningen, a more famous little town in Thuringia, had a population of 9,000 at that time.) That year the Monthly Musical Record published a feature on this town. The author, “Peregrinus,” marveled that such a small place could have a summer music festival with so many excellent concerts. He explained that the town’s music, including the court orchestra (of 54 members) was partly funded by the Prince of the principality. The outdoor concert venue was a place in the woods known as the “Loh,” “a large oblong square which was originally the shooting place for the Court.” The weekly Sunday concert was at 3:30, with an additional 8 pm popular concert, “which attracts a still larger audience, filling the whole of the large illuminated square; some of them sitting on the benches in front of the orchestra, others walking about and conversing. In the wings of the structure where the orchestra plays, there are refreshment rooms, where wine, beer, coffee, chocolate, cake etc. can be had.”¹F.M.N. Peregrinus, Monthly Musical Record (October 1877): 157. The article also related that the concerts were the result of 3-4 hour rehearsals, 4 or 5 times a week. They were conducted by Max Erdmannsdörfer, a pianist and conductor associated with the New German School. Erdmannsdörfer’s wife, Pauline Fichtner-Erdmannsdörfer, had studied with Liszt. The previous conductor had been Max Bruch. Besides Petri, Joachim’s student Heinrich Schuster was in the orchestra. The cellist Hans Wihan (1855-1920), who later founded the Bohemian Quartet and was the dedicatee of the Dvorák Cello Concerto, was also an orchestra member and one of the main soloists for the concerts in 1877.

The Loh concert programs for that summer were ambitious. They usually included a soloist, but besides the usual piano and violin concertos there were also concertos for flute, clarinet, cello, and even double bass. The concerts ended with a symphony, among which were Raff’s Symphonies No. 5 and No. 7, Rubinstein’s “Ocean” Symphony, and Goldmark’s “Ländliche Hochzeit.” The program of 19 August for the 13th Loh concert was strictly neudeutsche Schule:

• Berlioz, Overture to King Lear
• Wagner, Siegfried’s Funeral march from Götterdämmerung
• Liszt, 2 episodes from Lenau’s Faust
• Wagner, Prelude to Tristan und Isolde
• Berlioz, Sinfonie Fantastique

How Spohr fits into this is hard to say. Erdmannsdörfer did get his training at the Leipzig Conservatory, and his programming also included more conservative composers such as Hiller, Schumann, Volkmann. Erdmannsdörfer went on to bigger things in 1882 when he became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, conducted the concerts of the Russian Musical Society, and premiered several orchestral works by Tchaikovsky.²See the page on Erdmannsdörfer at the Tchaikovsky Research website. https://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Max_Erdmannsd%C3%B6rfer

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Back to Spohr. A festival in Cassel in June 1877 accounts for some of the performances on my list. Spohr had been the general music director in Cassel in the 1830s and ’40s. The impetus was to raise funds for a statue for Spohr in front of the Cassel Opera in time for his centenary (1884). This fund raiser lasted three days, with the major work being the oratorio Die Letzten Dinge. Joachim had been scheduled to perform, but canceled on account of Amalie Joachim’s serious illness after the birth of their fifth child in May. Brahms’s Triumphlied was one of the non-Spohr works performed, and lieder by Brahms were included on the programs of the singers Louise Dustmann, Auguste Hohenschild, and Dr. Franz Krückl.

As for the other pieces by Spohr that were performed in 1877, some are from the category of miscellaneous chamber music, where Spohr’s output was prolific and varied. These include the “double quartet,” the lieder for soprano, clarinet and piano, and the Elegy for harp and cello. However, a symphony, opera and concert overtures, three different string quartets, and a piano trio were also performed. Furthermore, his opera Jessonda was part of the 1876-77 seasons in Berlin and Hamburg.

Date	City	Selection	info
1/2/ 1877	Breslau	Aria from Faust	Lilli Lehmann
1/9/ 1877	Frankfurt	Aria	Lilli Lehmann
1/9/ 1877	Erfurt	Lieder: Die Rose, Romanze
1/12/1877	Oldenburg	Violin Concerto No. 8	Felix Meyer
1/1/ 1877	Dresden	Violin Concerto No. 8	Conservatory
1/12/ 1877	Halle	Aria from Jessonda
1/15/ 1877	Strassburg	Andante in E for Violin	Joachim
1/17/ 1877	Torgau	Adagio for Bassoon	Piano acc.
1/21/ 1877	Cassel	Oratorio Die Letzten Dinge	Excerpt
1/22/ 1877	Copenhagen	Adagio for Violin	Fritz Struss
1/25/ 1877	Leipzig	Violin Concerto No. 8	Heinrich de Ahna
2/20/ 1877	Munich	Violin Concerto No. 2, first mvt.	School
2/22/ 1877	Leipzig	Baracole	Emile Sauret
2/24/ 1877	London	Violin Concerto No. 9	Joachim
3/1/ 1877	London	Violin Concerto No. 8	Henri Petri
2/19/1877	London	Overture to the Alchemist	Philharmonic Society
3/9/ 1877	Hirschberg	Elegie for harp and Cello
3/27/ 1877	Bremen	Quartet Op. 82
3/27/ 1877	Eisenach	Piano Trio in e minor op. 119	Kömpel
4/12/1877	Memel	Adagio for Violin	Heinrich de Ahna
4/26/ 1877	Berlin	Violin Concerto No. 6	Waldemar Meyer
4/28/ 1877	Cassel	Quartet in G Op. 81
5/18/ 1877	Cassel	Rec. & Aria from Faust	Soltans
5/22/ 1877	Cöln	Aria from Faust	Lilli Lehmann
5/27/ 1877	Sondershausen	Overture to Faust
6/3/ 1877	Sondershausen	Violin Concerto No. 8	Henri Petri
6/22/ 1877	Cassel	Oratorio Die Letzten Dinge	Denkmal fundraiser
6/23/ 1877	Cassel	Symphony No. 3 in C minor	Denkmal fundraiser
6/23/ 1877	Cassel	Concertante for 2 violins in b minor op. 88	Denkmal fundraiser
6/24/ 1877	Cassel	Doppel-Quartett Op. 87	Denkmal fundraiser
6/28/ 1877	Sondershausen	Violin Concerto No. 9, Adagio	Henri Petri
7/1/ 1877	Sondershausen	Symphony No. 3	Erdmannsdörfer
9/2/ 1877	Sondershausen	Violin Concerto for 2 Violins in b minor op. 88	Petri and Schuster
9/9/ 1877	Cassel	Lieder for Soprano, clarinet, piano
9/29/ 1877	Gotha	Baracole & Scherzo	Joachim
10/1/ 1877	Berlin	Violin Concerto No. 11, 2nd and 3rd mvts.	Gustav Holländer
11/18/ 1877	Leipzig	Violin Concerto No. 8	Bertha Haft
11/29/ 1877	Leipzig	Baracole & Scherzo	Joachim
12/14/ 1877	Cassel	Quartet in E-flat, op. 58
12/17/ 1877	Frankfurt	Doppel-Quartett Op. 87	Museumsgesellschaft

Conclusion: the 1870s in music were a transitional time in which composers from earlier in the century lingered on concert programs. While none of Spohr’s works became famous enough to survive into the twentieth century, his large output of pieces in almost every genre was drawn upon by performers for longer than is credited.