1830–1894
Hans von Bülow (1830–1894) was a German conductor, pianist, teacher and composer, a pupil of Liszt. He conducted the Munich premieres of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" and "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg", and in Boston he played the solo part in the first performance of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto. Players know him for his editions and transcriptions of other composers' works.
Hans Guido von Bülow was born in Dresden on 8 January 1830 into an old noble family from Mecklenburg; his father, Karl Eduard von Bülow, was a writer. He began piano lessons at nine, first with Friedrich Wieck, then with Cäcilie Schmidel and Max Eberwein, and studied composition with Moritz Hauptmann. His parents, however, saw him as a lawyer and sent him to study in Leipzig.
From 1846 to 1848 Bülow lived in Stuttgart, where he met Joachim Raff. In 1849 he attended a concert conducted by Richard Wagner, and a year later the Weimar premiere of "Lohengrin" under Franz Liszt. These experiences made such an impression that he abandoned a legal career and resolved to devote himself seriously to music.
He consulted Liszt and took private lessons from Wagner. On Wagner's recommendation Bülow conducted Donizetti's "La fille du régiment" in Zürich, but soon left that post. He then became conductor of a small opera house in St. Gallen and made his debut there with Weber's "Der Freischütz". The audience welcomed him warmly, not least because he conducted from memory, without a score.
In 1851 Bülow went to Liszt in Weimar and for a time gave up conducting. He worked hard at his playing, began to compose and wrote articles. Liszt called him one of the greatest musical phenomena he had ever met. Bülow had a sharp temper and a biting tongue, which put many musicians at odds with him.
From 1855 to 1864 Bülow taught in Berlin and appeared as a pianist; his Berlin pupils included Asger Hamerik and Joseph Pache. On 22 January 1857 he gave the first performance of Liszt's Piano Sonata in B minor in Berlin. He married Cosima, Liszt's daughter.
In 1864 Bülow became court Kapellmeister in Munich, and it was there that he achieved his main renown. There he led the first performances of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" (1865) and "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" (1868). Bülow laid the foundations of the modern way of preparing an opera: singers were coached individually, then in ensembles and with piano, then came orchestral rehearsals and finally full stage run-throughs. Before "Tristan" there were eleven of these.
In 1867 Bülow became director of the newly reopened Royal Music School in Munich and taught piano there after Liszt's example. He stayed as its director until 1869.
In 1864 Cosima began an affair with Wagner, and in 1865 their daughter Isolde was born; Bülow acknowledged her as his own. The divorce was completed in July 1870, and Cosima married Wagner in August. In 1869 Bülow left his Munich post: one reason was the break with Cosima, the other trouble over the staging of "Das Rheingold", in which King Ludwig II kept interfering. His friendship with Wagner was ruined, yet he respected him as a musician, went on performing his works and mourned his death in 1883. He never went to the Bayreuth festival, however.
From 1872 Bülow again performed as a pianist: in 1873 he toured 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 world premiere of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto. Bülow was one of the first western European musicians to promote the Russian composer; he also championed the music of Brahms. In 1873 he received the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal.
He also toured widely elsewhere. In the winter of 1877–1878 he conducted the subscription concerts at the recently inaugurated St Andrew's Hall, Glasgow, where he performed the recently revised First Symphony of Brahms.
From 1878 to 1880 Bülow was court Kapellmeister in Hanover, but he left the post after a quarrel with the tenor Anton Schott. From 1880 to 1885 he worked in Meiningen and raised the local orchestra to the level of one of the best in Germany. Among his demands, he insisted that the players know their parts by heart. Bülow was a close friend and admirer of Brahms and directed the first performance of his Fourth Symphony with this orchestra.
Several innovations are credited to Bülow: he added five-string double basses and pedal timpani to the orchestra, and ever since, pedal timpani have been a regular part of the orchestra's percussion. He was also the first musician to play a piano concerto, Brahms's First, while at the same time conducting the orchestra.
In 1882 Bülow married the actress Marie Schanzer, who later wrote his biography and edited his correspondence. During the Meiningen years he met Richard Strauss and later helped him obtain his first regular post as a conductor. From 1887 Bülow was principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic; he gave his last concert with it in April 1892.
In the late 1880s Bülow settled in Hamburg, but he kept touring as a conductor and pianist. He taught in Berlin at Klindworth's piano school and appeared as a guest conductor; in 1888 he visited London.
After 1890 Bülow's health, mental and physical, began to fail. He sought a warm, dry climate and went to Egypt. There he passed away in a Cairo hotel on 12 February 1894, aged 64, ten months on from his last public concert. He is buried at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg.
Bülow was regarded as one of the most outstanding musicians of the nineteenth century. Critics described his playing as intellectual, based on analysis and careful calculation, for which he was often reproached, yet not lacking in expression and passion. He was noted for his interpretation of Beethoven. His energy matched enormous programmes: in 1880 he played Beethoven's five late sonatas together in a single concert several times, and in 1889 in New York he performed 22 sonatas in 11 days.
Bülow edited piano works by Bach, Beethoven, Weber, Kramer and others, and wrote songs as well as pieces for orchestra and for piano. With Sigmund Lebert he produced an edition of Beethoven's sonatas; he was also the first to play the complete cycle of Beethoven's sonatas from memory. His piano transcriptions are recorded as including Gluck's "Iphigenie in Aulis", the overture to "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg" and a paraphrase of the quintet from Act III of that opera.
As a conductor Bülow was tied to the success of several major composers of his time, above all Wagner and Brahms. His accurate, sensitive and deeply musical interpretations made him a model for the virtuoso conductors who flourished later. He was also an astute, witty music journalist. For a student, his name is most often met in editions and transcriptions of other people's works, and it is these that one can come across at the piano.
Three first performances are tied to Bülow's name and are often recalled by pianists and opera lovers: Liszt's B minor Sonata in Berlin in 1857, "Tristan und Isolde" in Munich in 1865 and Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto in Boston in 1875. In addition, in 1868 he conducted the first staging of Wagner's "Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg".
Bülow was an admirer of Chopin: he devised titles for all the Preludes of Opus 28, but today only the name of Prelude No. 15 in D-flat major, the "Raindrop", is widely known. To start getting to know him, the site has the score "buliow - (wagner) die meistersinger vorspiel" for solo piano, at the "Intermediate+" level.