1833–1874 · Austria
Franz Bendel was a pianist, composer and teacher, a pupil of Franz Liszt. He taught in Berlin, toured widely and died in 1874. Players know him for his salon piano pieces and small cycles of musical pictures, such as Swiss Pictures and On Lake Geneva.
Franz Bendel was born in Schönlinde in Bohemia; his father was an elementary school teacher. His father gave him his first music lessons. Later he became a pupil of Josef Proksch and studied with him in Prague.
Proksch encouraged his pupil a great deal. It was through this teacher that Bendel later came to Franz Liszt in Weimar. There he met Wendelin Weissheimer.
In 1848 Count Otto von Westphal employed Bendel as a home tutor of music in his aristocratic family. He kept this post for 14 years.
He had also made a name as a composer: his teacher Proksch performed a mass by Bendel in Prague.
In Weimar Bendel studied with Franz Liszt. He remained Liszt's pupil for five years.
In Bendel's tone poems, Liszt's liking for symphonic treatment comes to the fore. The powerful manner of playing of a piano virtuoso also became his own. At the same time, his lessons with Proksch left a leaning towards seriousness and solidity in his composing.
From 1862 Bendel lived and worked in Berlin. From 1863 he taught at Theodor Kullak's New Academy of Music. He lived and worked in Berlin until his death.
Only a few short concert trips broke up his life in Berlin. The trip to Prague in 1863, for example, was praised in the press. In 1866 he spent some time at Carl Tausig's school of advanced piano playing as well.
Bendel gave concerts in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Sweden. His many journeys were accompanied by success. Both as a performer and as a composer he followed a serious and solid direction.
His last journey took Bendel to America, to the music festival in Boston. In 1872 he took part as a concert pianist in Patrick Gilmore's National Peace Jubilee in Boston.
Bendel died of typhoid fever in July 1874. He is buried in the French Cemetery in Berlin.
After his death, Bendel's music lost much of its recognition: it appeared just as Wagner was transforming music. The London publisher Augener & Co. and its journal The Monthly Musical Record kept publishing reviews of Bendel's works after he died.
Silas Pratt, Edward Morris Bowman and Max Schwarz are named among Bendel's notable students.
Bendel worked above all as a composer. He wrote more than four hundred works, many of them for piano. They include four masses, symphonies and a piano trio as well as a piano concerto, and there are many songs. His salon piano pieces and songs spread widely.
He wrote well over a hundred piano pieces: light and descriptive pieces, fantasias, idylls. Fantasias on themes from Faust by Gounod and L'Africaine by Meyerbeer, and on Bohemian folk songs, were the most admired. His selected works include Polkas de Salon (Op. 58), Souvenir d'Innsbruck (Op. 90) and Hommage a Chopin, the third of three pieces in Op. 111.
The small cycles of piano pieces, such as Schweizer Bilder (Op. 137) and Am Genfer See (Op. 139), were the most successful. Like John Field's nocturnes, Bendel wrote many Stimmungsbilder, or mood pictures. His liking for mountain trips found expression in a series of such pieces, including Schweizer Bilder and Am Genfer See. Some of them came with a brief explanation of their content.
The site has Bendel's piece By Moonlight for solo piano, at the level Intermediate+. You can begin getting to know his pieces with it.