1830–1894
Hans von Bülow (1830–1894) was a German pianist, conductor, teacher and composer, a pupil of Franz Liszt. He was the first to play Liszt's B minor Sonata in public, and he took the solo part when Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 was first performed. Bülow also prepared editions of piano works by Bach, Beethoven, Weber and other composers.
The future musician was born in Dresden on 8 January 1830, into the old noble House of Bülow, which came from Mecklenburg. His father, Karl Eduard von Bülow, was a novelist. At nine he started learning the piano from Friedrich Wieck, the father of Clara Schumann, and then studied with Cäcilie Schmiedel and Max Eberwein. He learned composition under Moritz Hauptmann.
Law, not music, was what his parents had in mind for him, and they sent him off to Leipzig. In that city he met Franz Liszt and took piano lessons from the teacher Louis Plaidy. Between 1846 and 1848 Bülow lived in Stuttgart, where Joachim Raff and several other prominent musicians became his acquaintances.
In 1849 Bülow attended a concert conducted by Richard Wagner, and a year later he heard the Weimar premiere of Lohengrin under Liszt. These experiences led him to give up the legal career he had begun and take up music seriously, against his parents' wishes.
He consulted Liszt and took private lessons from Wagner. On Wagner's recommendation, Bülow conducted Donizetti's opera The Daughter of the Regiment in Zurich, but he soon left that post. He then became conductor of a small opera house in St Gallen, making his debut there with Weber's Der Freischütz. The audience received him warmly, not least because he conducted from memory, with no score.
In 1851 Bülow became a pupil of Liszt in Weimar and paused his conducting career for a time. He worked hard at his craft, began to compose and started writing articles. Liszt spoke of him as one of the greatest musical phenomena he had ever encountered.
Bülow spent 1855 to 1864 teaching in Berlin and giving recitals. In that city, on 22 January 1857, he was the first to play Liszt's B minor Sonata before the public. He married Liszt's daughter Cosima, and the couple had two daughters, Daniela (1860) and Blandina (1863). In those years he was active at the piano, on the podium and with the pen, and he became known across Germany and in Russia. His Berlin pupils included Asger Hamerik and Joseph Pache.
Munich brought Bülow his post as court Kapellmeister in 1864, and the city made his name. Two Wagner operas had their premieres under his baton: Tristan und Isolde on 10 June 1865 and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg on 21 June 1868. Both productions were enormous successes.
Bülow laid the foundations of the modern way of preparing an opera: singers were heard singly and in ensembles, then with piano, followed by orchestral rehearsals and full run-throughs on stage. Before Tristan there were eleven such run-throughs. In 1867 he became director of the newly reopened Royal Music School in Munich, where he taught piano in Liszt's manner, and he led the conservatory until 1869.
Meanwhile Cosima began an affair with Wagner. Bülow refused for a long time to grant a divorce and gave way only after Cosima and Wagner had a third child. The divorce was finalised in 1870, after which Cosima and Wagner married. In 1869 Bülow left his Munich post; among the reasons were the break with his wife and trouble over staging Das Rheingold, in which King Ludwig II of Bavaria kept interfering.
The friendship with Wagner was destroyed, yet Bülow went on respecting him as a musician: he still conducted his works and grieved when Wagner died in 1883. He never travelled to the Bayreuth festival, though.
From 1872 Bülow performed as a pianist. In 1873 he played in Britain, and in 1875–1876 he gave 139 concerts in the United States. In Boston on 25 October 1875 he was the soloist at the premiere of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, becoming one of the first Western European musicians to promote the Russian composer. In 1873 the Royal Philharmonic Society awarded him its gold medal.
From 1878 to 1880 Bülow was court Kapellmeister in Hanover, but he left after a quarrel with the tenor Anton Schott. In 1880 he moved to Meiningen to take the same kind of post. Over five years he raised the Meiningen orchestra to the level of one of the best in Germany, and he demanded that the players learn every part by heart.
Brahms counted Bülow as a close friend and found in him an admirer; with the Meiningen players Bülow directed the first performance of the Fourth Symphony. He also had reforming ideas: five-string double basses and pedal timpani entered the orchestra, and the pedal timpani are now a regular part of the symphony orchestra. He was the first musician to play a piano concerto (Brahms's First) while also conducting the orchestra.
During his years of service in Meiningen he got to know the young Richard Strauss, and later he used his influence to win Strauss his first regular job as a conductor. In 1882 Bülow married the actress Marie Schanzer, who later wrote his biography and edited his correspondence.
Bülow served as principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic starting in 1887; his last concert with the orchestra ended in April 1892. Towards the end of the 1880s he made his home in Hamburg, though he went on touring as a conductor and pianist. He taught at the Raff Conservatory and at the Klindworth piano school in Berlin, and he also appeared as a guest conductor.
In the early 1890s Bülow's health declined: he suffered from chronic headaches, and a mental disorder set in alongside physical troubles. Hoping to recover in a warmer, drier climate, he went to Egypt and died in a Cairo hotel on 12 February 1894, ten months after his last concert. He is buried at Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg.
Bülow was a pianist, conductor, teacher, composer and writer of articles. He ranked among the most distinguished conductors of the nineteenth century, and his work was decisive for the success of several major composers of his time, above all Wagner and Brahms. Critics described his piano playing as intellectual, built on analysis and careful calculation (for which he was often reproached), yet not without expression and passion. His stamina as a performer was huge: in 1880 he played the five late Beethoven sonatas together in a single concert several times, and in 1889 in New York he performed 22 sonatas in 11 days.
He was the first to play the complete cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas from memory, and together with Sigmund Lebert he produced an edition of those sonatas. He was known for his readings of Beethoven's music, and he was among the first musicians from Europe to give tours in the United States. As a conductor, Bülow played an important part in the success of works by Wagner and Brahms, and he also supported the music of Tchaikovsky.
Bülow's legacy as a composer covers pieces for orchestra and for piano, songs, and editions of keyboard works by Bach, Beethoven, Weber, Cramer and others. He also made piano arrangements: of Gluck's Iphigenie in Aulis, of the Meistersinger overture, and a paraphrase on the Act III quintet of that Wagner opera.
Bülow conducted and played from memory, and in Meiningen he asked the same of his orchestral players. His accurate, sensitive and deeply musical interpretations made him the model for the conductor-virtuosos of later years. He was also a shrewd and witty writer on music.
In The Hague on 15 April 1865 Bülow performed Liszt's Totentanz for piano and orchestra. He was the first to play Liszt's B minor Sonata in public, on 22 January 1857 in Berlin, and he was the soloist at the Boston premiere of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1875. He backed Brahms as well: he directed the first performance of the Fourth Symphony and, in Brahms's First Concerto, was both soloist and conductor.
Bülow was a devotee of Chopin's music: he thought up epithets for all the Op. 28 Preludes, although these have mostly fallen out of use.
Bülow was a teacher as well. His pupils include Agathe Backer Grøndahl, Sophie Menter, José Vianna da Motta, Asger Hamerik, Lothar Kempter, Karl Heinrich Barth and Clara Kathleen Rogers.