1822–1882 · Switzerland
Joseph Joachim Raff (1822–1882) was a German-Swiss composer and teacher, born in Lachen. Largely self-taught, he had his first piano pieces published on Mendelssohn's recommendation, worked as Liszt's assistant and became the first director of the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. For players he left piano suites, a sonatina and short pieces.
Joseph Joachim Raff was born on 27 May 1822 in Lachen, a German-speaking commune in Switzerland not far from Zurich. His father was a musician. In 1810 he had fled Württemberg, where men were being forced into an army that was filling its ranks for Napoleon's campaign in Russia. In Lachen, in the canton of Schwyz, the father married Katharina Schmid, the daughter of an innkeeper.
The modest income of his father, a schoolmaster, did not stretch to further studies for his son. Even so, the boy attended the Latin school in Rottweil and, for the last two years, the Jesuit college in Schwyz, which gave him a broad education. He began playing the violin, piano and organ early. Raff never received a specialised musical education and was largely self-taught.
At eighteen Raff took his first post: the papal nuncio needed an interpreter for an official matter, and the young man accompanied him. In the same year he became a teacher in Rapperswil. Later he also worked as a teacher in Schmerikon and Schwyz, but his thoughts were on music.
Four years later he left school service. He was expelled from the canton of Schwyz as an "undesirable foreigner" because of a youthful prank, and Raff moved to Zurich.
Raff sent his first piano compositions to Felix Mendelssohn. On Mendelssohn's recommendation the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel printed them in 1844, and Robert Schumann reviewed them favourably in the journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. This success prompted Raff to move to Zurich and devote himself entirely to composing.
He wrote a great deal and quickly, wanting to become financially independent and known as soon as possible. In one letter he declared that he meant to force a composer's career. Yet nobody wanted to offer him the permanent contract that an independent composer needed.
Franz Liszt gave Raff valuable backing; they met in Basel in 1845. The composer's daughter Helene vividly described how Raff walked to Basel to hear Liszt play: he had no money for the journey, it was pouring with rain, every ticket was sold, yet Liszt let his admirer in and gave him a seat on the stage. This account is probably a family tale that has been embroidered. What is firmly established is that, through Liszt's intervention, Raff worked from the autumn of 1845 in a music shop in Cologne.
For a time Raff lived in Stuttgart, scraping by on occasional music lessons. There he met the pianist Hans von Bülow, who became his patron and long-time friend. Later he held a post at a publishing house in Hamburg.
In Weimar Raff served as Liszt's assistant. Most of his time went on scoring Liszt's orchestral pieces, which won him no fame but gave him a lot of experience. He himself said that his contribution to the orchestration of the symphonic poem Tasso was a substantial one. During this time he joined the Weimar school, wrote for the journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and in 1854 published a study called The Wagner Question.
His opera König Alfred was also staged in Weimar. There he met Doris Genast, the daughter of the director of the Weimar court theatre; they married in 1859. Raff also became friends with the violinist Joseph Joachim.
Raff then lived in Wiesbaden until 1877. These years are regarded as the most productive period of his composing. He taught piano and harmony, and from the early 1870s the growing success of his works let him work as a freelance composer. He also spent some time with Richard Wagner.
The First Symphony, "To the Fatherland", quotes the song "Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?". In 1861 it won first prize at the competition of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, and the premiere took place on 22 February 1863 in the Vienna Musikverein. The Third Symphony, "In the Forest", spread the composer's fame quickly, as did the Fifth, "Lenore".
In 1870 his comic opera Dame Kobold had its premiere in Weimar. Raff did not write only symphonies: his output includes concertos, chamber music, overtures and suites. His reputation as a symphonist grew after performances of his orchestral works in Weimar.
Raff became the first director of the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main. It soon gained an international reputation, partly thanks to him, and he finally had the secure position he had wished for. He was held in high esteem as a teacher and organiser.
He founded a special class for women composers and invited Clara Schumann and other distinguished musicians to teach. Julius Stockhausen was among his companions of those years; he hired representatives of both the New German School and the conservatives, since he wanted both camps fairly represented.
Raff himself taught composition and trained a number of composers and musicians, among them Edward MacDowell and Alexander Ritter, as well as Olga Radecki and Johan Messchaert.
Raff died in June 1882 in his Frankfurt flat of a heart attack. A great many townspeople attended the funeral on 27 June at the central cemetery; the city council declared the grave a place of honour. Condolences arrived from all over the world.
During his lifetime his works were often performed, and he was counted among the most sought-after composers of the German-speaking world. After his death he was gradually forgotten, and in the twentieth century his music was judged unfavourably. The main reason was probably that Raff joined neither the New German School nor the traditionalists but tried to bring the two together.
From about 1970, and especially from the 1980s, many of his works, chiefly instrumental ones, began to appear on recordings. A monument was unveiled in his birthplace, Lachen, in 1972. In 2022, the bicentenary of his birth, more concerts of Raff's music were given than usual. By the end of 2018 almost 70 CDs of his works were available.
Raff composed an enormous amount, and late in life he ranked among Germany's best-known composers; today his music has largely dropped out of the repertoire. His eleven symphonies mostly carry descriptive names: "To the Fatherland" (No. 1), "In the Forest" (No. 3), "Lenore" (No. 5), "In the Alps" (No. 7). The final four make up a cycle on the seasons. The First is a vast score of about seventy minutes. Audiences of the day greeted the Third warmly; it reached England and America quickly and at the end of the nineteenth century ranked among the orchestral works performed most often anywhere in the world. In 1931 Arturo Toscanini conducted several performances of it. In the early 2000s all the symphonies were recorded by the Bamberg Symphony under Hans Stadlmair.
He also worked in other genres: operas, concertos, overtures (some for Shakespeare's plays) and suites. In chamber music he left four piano trios, two piano quartets and a piano quintet, eight string quartets, a string sextet, five violin sonatas and a cello sonata. The "Ode au printemps" and a concerto in C minor are for piano and orchestra.
Raff's music has been compared with that of other composers: it was said that he influenced the early works of Richard Strauss and foreshadowed the early works of Jean Sibelius. His symphonies join classical form to Romantic programme music and to contrapuntal handling of the orchestra that looks back to the Baroque. Bernard Herrmann, who recorded "Lenore", ranked it among the best examples of Romantic programmatic writing.
For solo piano Raff left two sonatas, suites, pieces and transcriptions of works by Bach and Handel. The site holds seven editions, all at the "Средний+" (upper intermediate) level. Among them is the Suite, Op. 91, whose parts are listed as "suite part 1", "Suite Giga con Variazoni" (Op. 91, No. 2) and "suite part 3". The Suite in D minor, Op. 91, for solo piano was released on a record.
Other editions include the "Sonatina" (Op. 99, No. 1), "N0 3 - Rigaudon" (Op. 204) and "4 Galopp-Caprices" (Op. 5). The Rigaudon, Op. 204, No. 3, was recorded by the pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch on a Welte-Mignon reproducing piano. There is also the "Paraphrase on the Liszt song Du bist wie eine Blume", a paraphrase on a Liszt song.