Misunderstood acquaintance
A comprehensive biography of Joachim Raff (1822-1882) now makes a significant contribution to the late renaissance of the artist.
His symphonies once impressed Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Richard Strauss, yet his memory is only kept alive by a miniature, the Cavatina op. 85 No. 3 for violin and piano. It carried the composer's name all over the world and had to put up with countless adaptations. As his most successful piece, it obscured the view of his multifaceted oeuvre with 216 opus numbers for almost a century, even though Raff was one of the most frequently performed composers of German-Swiss origin during his lifetime.
Since 1972, the Joachim Raff Society in Lachen SZ, where the musician was born to a German father and Swiss mother, has been championing the composer, pianist, arranger and music teacher, who was particularly supported by Liszt and Hans von Bülow. Its president, Res Marty, is now presenting the results of several years of research in archives, libraries and museums. The book, modestly described as a biography and weighing almost three kilos, is much more than just that. It resembles a weighty cultural history of German Romanticism. The author combines unpublished documents from Goethe, Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Liszt and Wagner to Hans von Bülow, Richard Strauss and Ibsen with a considerable number of new insights.
In terms of format, wealth of images and density of information, this 440-page book is comparable only to Ernst Burger's "Lebenschroniken in Bildern und Dokumenten", dedicated to Chopin, Liszt and Schumann, and to the four-volume work on Ernest Bloch by Joseph Lewinski and Emmanuelle Dijon, making it the most comprehensive publication among biographies of Swiss composers. The career counselor and singer Res Marty has created a standard work on Raff as a music-researching career changer.
It is to be hoped that the letters of recommendation and reviews by Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Schumann, among others, which are reproduced and intelligently annotated in it, will contribute to overcoming the prejudices of renowned conductors and concert organizers, which are long overdue. With program-inspired major works such as the 3rd Symphony In the forestthe 5th Symphony Lenore, the Piano Concerto in C minor op. 185, which foreshadowed Rachmaninov, or the four orchestral suites, Liszt's sophisticatedly orchestrated collaborator on his symphonic poems finally deserves to be performed regularly again.
Most of the unpublished documents come from the Bavarian State Library in Munich. As a passionate researcher and collector, Res Marty contributed many biographically revealing letters and other trouvailles.
Res Marty, Joachim Raff. Leben und Werk, with a contribution by Bernhard Billeter, 440 p., Fr. 69.00, MP Bildung, Beratung und Verlag AG, Altendorf SZ 2014
Picture on the book cover:
Portrait of the first director of the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt: Joseph Joachim Raff, Heinrich Georg Michaelis, 1882, oil on canvas, unframed. The portrait was rediscovered and identified during research for this publication in the archives of the Historisches Museum Frankfurt and is published here for the first time. (historisches museum frankfurt / Photo: Horst Ziegenfusz)
