Bernese revolutionary and romantic

"Adolf Reichel is an unknown" is how Jannis Mallouchos' monograph on the Bernese chief conductor, composer, pianist and teacher of German origin begins. 652 pages later, the unknown man has been researched as exhaustively as few of his peers, in a scholarly book that reads as grippingly as a novel. In the literature on early socialism and the Vormärz, Adolf Reichel (1816-1896) has long been an old acquaintance. But years ago, a handful of musicians (Suzanne Reichel, Adrian Aeschbacher, Stefan Blunier) tried in vain to draw attention to Reichel as a composer.

It then took a Greek composer and musicologist, a German professor, a Dutch archive, an Austrian publisher and a coincidence to rediscover the Swiss musician: Mallouchos came across Reichel's great-great-granddaughter on the Internet, who had just tracked down her ancestor's music manuscripts, which had been lost for decades.

Excellent networked personality

Mallouchos meticulously traces Reichel's adventurous path from good Prussian subject to supporter of oppositionists and revolutionaries known to the police (who today would probably have to put up with the label "terrorists") and finally to serene republican and Swiss citizen with Emmental citizenship, the progenitor of a dynasty that today counts six generations of musicians without a break.

Mallouchos traces Reichel's encounters with countless important personalities from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Alexander Herzen (whose collaborator Marija Ern he married), Georg Herwegh, Frédéric Chopin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Karl Marx and Duke Georg II of Saxe-Meiningen, his stations in "revolutionary and romantic" (John Eliot Gardiner) Europe and his long-standing symbiotic friendship with the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin down to the finest ramifications and cross-relationships. He places Reichel's memoirs, his theoretical works, his letters and his compositions - beautiful and thoroughly touching music, written conservatively but very adeptly in the idiom of classical Romanticism between Beethoven and Schumann - astutely and knowledgeably in the intellectual-historical contexts of their epoch.

The book concludes with work analyses, a bibliography and a list of Reichel's 279 works, which we will hopefully soon see published and hear performed again.

Jannis Mallouchos: Adolf Reichel (1816-1896), Political, cultural-historical, music-theoretical and compositional aspects of a musician's life, 652 p., € 80.00, Hollitzer, Vienna 2023, ISBN 978-3-99094-084-6