1810–1836 · Germany
Norbert Burgmüller (1810–1836) was a German composer and pianist from Düsseldorf and the younger brother of Friedrich Burgmüller, known for his studies for young pianists. He lived only 26 years, yet he wrote a piano concerto, two symphonies and string quartets. Schumann called his death the heaviest loss for music since Schubert.
August Joseph Norbert Burgmüller was born in Düsseldorf on 8 February 1810, the youngest son in a very musical household. His father, Friedrich August Burgmüller, worked as a composer and conductor and gave the boy his first music lessons himself. His mother, Therese von Zandt, was a sought-after music teacher. Norbert's older brother Friedrich also became a musician and composer. His mother's full name was Anna Therese Friederike von Zandt zu Reichartshausen.
From an early age Norbert learned to play the violin and the piano, and he began to compose. His father died in 1824, and the family fell into serious need. Count Franz von Nesselrode-Ehreshoven came to their aid: he took Norbert under his protection, supported him with money and took particular care over his musical education.
Thanks to the count's help, Norbert received a good musical education. In Kassel he studied violin playing with Louis Spohr and music theory with Moritz Hauptmann, who had himself been a pupil of Spohr. Until 1830 he lived mostly in Kassel and worked there as a pianist, a conductor and a rehearsal accompanist.
By the end of the 1820s Burgmüller was often performing as a pianist. In January 1830 he made his debut as a composer too: on 14 January in Kassel he himself played the solo part of his Piano Concerto with orchestra. The work was given the opus number 1. While Burgmüller was in Kassel, the young composer and pianist Stephen Heller visited him, and Burgmüller played him this concerto.
In 1829 the composer became engaged to the opera singer Sophia Roland. A year later she broke off the engagement, and on 17 October 1830 she died in Aachen. It was a heavy blow for Burgmüller. For a while he drank too much, he lost Spohr's support, and from then on he suffered epileptic seizures.
He went back to Düsseldorf and lived there with his mother. Public posts, such as that of the city's music director, did not come his way. He lived in seclusion and met only a few people close to him; one of them was Christian Dietrich Grabbe.
In Düsseldorf Burgmüller made friends with Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn spoke approvingly of his music and played it in his own concerts. On 3 May 1834 he performed Burgmüller's Piano Concerto at a subscription concert, and on 13 November of the same year Symphony No. 1 had its premiere, another success for the young composer. The post of music director, which Burgmüller did not get, went to Mendelssohn himself.
In 1835 Burgmüller became engaged for a second time, to Josephine Collin, governess to the children of Count Nesselrode, but this relationship ended too. Grabbe wrote for him the libretto of a parody opera, «Der Cid». Burgmüller's financial and social position remained unstable, and he decided to try his luck in Paris, where his brother was already working. He did not live to carry out this intention.
Besides his larger works, Burgmüller made an orchestration of Karl Blum's quodlibet «Die Wiener in Berlin» (1827), wrote the music for the play «Albrecht Dürer's Dream» (1833) and a festive chorus for the monarch's birthday (1834).
In 1836 Burgmüller went to a spa in Aachen. There he drowned in a spa bath. He died on 7 May 1836, aged 26.
In Düsseldorf the composer's death was received with deep dismay. Grabbe wrote an obituary, and Mendelssohn composed a funeral march, Op. 103, for the burial. The same year Burgmüller's pupil Wilhelm Steifensand fetched the body from Aachen so that the funeral could take place in Düsseldorf. The composer was buried in the Golzheim cemetery, and the grave was later moved to the North Cemetery. In April 1837 Steifensand played the Piano Concerto, Op. 1, and songs from his legacy in his honour.
Robert Schumann wrote an obituary in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. He observed that since the death of Schubert music had suffered no heavier loss. At Schumann's request, the writer Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter put together extensive recollections of the composer, which appeared in print in 1840. In 1839 Schumann wrote a separate essay about Burgmüller.
On 18 January 1838 Burgmüller's Symphony No. 1 was performed at the Leipzig Gewandhaus under Mendelssohn's direction. Schumann spoke of the work in very high terms.
Soon after the composer's death his works were almost forgotten. Most of them were first published only in the second half of the 19th century. The revival of Burgmüller's music began in the 1980s: 1986 marked 150 years since his death. From 2002 to 2010 all his works came out in new or first editions; an association named after him, founded in 2007 in Düsseldorf, did a great deal to bring this about. Today almost all of his works have been recorded on CD.
Editions of Burgmüller's works after his death were published in Leipzig by Kistner. In 1864 the Piano Concerto with orchestra, Symphony No. 1 and the Overture in F minor were printed there. In 1865 came Symphony No. 2, the Duo for piano with clarinet or violin and five songs for voice with piano, and in 1867 the Polonaise for piano and four entr'actes for orchestra.
In 1986 a memorial plaque was put up in Düsseldorf on the house where he was born; another appeared in 2018 on the house where he lived later. In 2003 a bust of the composer was placed in front of the entrance to the Tonhalle, a gift from the Düsseldorf local-history society Düsseldorfer Jonges.
Burgmüller lived too briefly to show all that he was capable of. Even so, his music shows how an individual style of his own was forming. The earliest works, the string quartets Op. 4 and Op. 7, are Romantic in spirit and bear traces of Spohr's influence, while the songs written later have a clarity closer to the Classical manner. In the early pieces the influence of Beethoven can be heard, and later, in places, that of Mendelssohn, but it was never plain imitation. The classical forms served Burgmüller as a foundation, which he varied and developed. Many of his works are dominated by a lyrical mood, against which harmonic experiments, strong expressiveness and moments of stormy drama develop. His melodies are easy to remember and flow freely.
Because of his early death, Burgmüller's legacy is essentially the early period of a composer. Yet even the surviving works reveal a great talent with distinctive features. Seriousness of purpose marks his music: it has almost no showy virtuosity without meaning and no repetition of other people's models. His mature works stand on a level with those of his contemporaries Schumann and Mendelssohn, who held his music in high regard.
The Piano Concerto, Op. 1, is written in F-sharp minor, a very rare key for a solo concerto at that time. It stands out for the breadth of its form and its unusual orchestration: in the slow movement a large solo part is entrusted to the orchestra's cello, which almost becomes a second soloist. The work was composed at the end of the 1820s.
Looking at the years, Burgmüller's string quartets are spread far apart: Op. 4 was written in 1825, Op. 7 in 1825–1826, Op. 9 in 1826 and Op. 14 in 1835. He created the First Symphony in 1831–1833 and the Second in 1834–1835. The Duo for clarinet and piano, Op. 15, dates from 1834, and he worked on the opera «Dionys» in 1832–1834; its subject came from Schiller's ballad «Die Bürgschaft». Among his other works are a Ständchen (1825) for clarinet or cello, viola and guitar, the song «In des Irrtisch weisse Fluten» (1831) and a fragment, «Morgenlied» in E flat major (1834).
Burgmüller left two symphonies. Only Symphony No. 1, in C minor, Op. 2, was completed; in the Second, in D major, Op. 11, the finale was left unfinished. He also wrote four string quartets (Op. 4, 7, 9 and 14), a Duo for clarinet and piano, Op. 15, and a fragment of an unfinished opera, «Dionys».
Burgmüller's opus numbers do not match the order in which the works were written. He was a pianist himself, and for those who play the piano our catalogue currently offers the Sonata, Op. 8, at an upper-intermediate level.