CD Robert Fuchs

Robert Fuchs was born on 15 Feb­ru­ary 1847 in Frauen­thal an der Lass­nitz, the youngest of 12 chil­dren. His father, Patriz Fuchs, was an extremely active music teacher; musi­cal tal­ent was read­ily avail­able in the fam­ily. Fuchs’ brother Johann Nepo­muk was a con­duc­tor at the Impe­r­ial and Royal court opera and direc­tor of the Vienna Con­ser­va­tory, while his brother Patriz, who died young, was reputed to be an excep­tional pianis­tic tal­ent. Fuchs’ sis­ters Maria, Elisa and Ludowika were sought-after singers in church choirs, and Maria, with her light soprano voice, later gained rep­u­ta­tion as the “Sulm­taler Night­en­gale”. The only thing known about Robert’s early child­hood is that he enjoyed sit­ting on the bank of rustling brooks and lis­ten­ing for hours as soon as he learned to walk.

In 1854, Robert’s older sis­ter Maria takes charge of rais­ing seven-year-old Robert and his older brother Johann Nepo­muk in the nearby region of Wies, while her hus­band, Mar­tin Bischof, school­mas­ter in Wies, assumes respon­si­bil­ity for the con­tin­ued musi­cal edu­ca­tion of the two boys. There are piano, vio­lin, flute, organ and fig­ured bass classes, all in accor­dance with the strict motto “a clean stroke of the vio­lin bow and a strong switch”. How­ever, Fuchs is thank­ful to his brother-in-law, as he him­self said, for the absolutely solid base of his musi­cal edu­ca­tion. Fuchs writes to his mother on 25 Novem­ber 1870, say­ing, “Send my greet­ings and kisses to dar­ling Mar­tin Bischof in Wies and tell him that even if I don’t write him myself, his mem­ory and the feel­ing of infi­nite thank­ful­ness that con­nects us is alive in my breast and will never be extin­guished.” From 1860 to 1865 Fuchs attends the ele­men­tary school and ped­a­gogy course so that he too can become a teacher.

Soon, how­ever, Fuchs is no longer able to with­stand the tempt­ing reports from his friend, Wil­hem Ger­icke, regard­ing musi­cal life in Vienna and arrives in Vienna on 6 Octo­ber 1865 after an eight-hour jour­ney, with just six­teen gulden to his name. He enrolls at the Con­ser­va­tory as Otto Dessoff’s, the for­mer con­duc­tor of the Vienna Phil­har­monic Orchestra’s com­po­si­tion stu­dent and keeps his head above water by giv­ing lessons and coach­ing. The first con­cert he hears under Dessoff’s tute­lage is Beethoven’s Fourth Sym­phony. “When I heard this piece, I truly believed that I had been trans­ported to a spirit world and when the first move­ment ended I could no longer make out the peo­ple around me for my eyes swam in tears. And then the finale! It pulled me com­pletely out of my sad­dle. Like a man pos­sessed I screamed ‘bravo, bravo!’ until I finally real­ized that the hall was already empty.”

Before his 23^rd birth­day Fuchs mar­ries Amalie Kopp, the daugh­ter of a fac­tory direc­tor in Hirten­berg. In the mean­time, he has writ­ten two sym­phonies, the sec­ond of which is per­formed in 1872 by the Phil­har­monic led by Dessoff. How­ever, he feels that he has not yet learnt enough and begins Opus 1 again at the age of 25. Three years later he becomes a the­ory and com­po­si­tion teacher at the Con­ser­va­tory, a post that he will retain for the next 36 years until 1912. Dur­ing these many years of teach­ing, Fuchs taught almost the entirety of the musi­cal Vienna of the sub­se­quent decades. He taught the major­ity of all com­posers, con­duc­tors and music pub­lish­ers who obtained fame in Vienna, always with mild­ness and friend­li­ness. Alexan­der Zem­linksy, Franz Schreker, Ernst Dec­sey, Karl Lafite, Egon Kor­nauth, Otto Siegl, Hugo Wolf, Gus­tav Mahler, Franz Schmidt, Jean Sibelius, Arnold Rose, Arthur Nikisch and many oth­ers num­ber amongst his pupils. In 1912 Fuchs is more or less forced into retire­ment (along with Her­mann Grädener).

Fuchs begins study­ing Eng­lish when he is 50 and Ital­ian when he is 60 and evi­dently could read cel­e­brated lit­er­ary works in their orig­i­nal lan­guages, such as Dante, Man­zoni, Byron and Shake­speare. Fuchs lived the last 40 years of his life in Wieden, at May­er­hof­gasse 9 (which was destroyed in the war) where Her­mine Böck, the niece of his late wife, man­aged his house­hold. Four days after his 80^th birth­day at approx­i­mately 11:00, Fuchs was walk­ing “with his stu­dent on the left side of the Wied­ner Haupt­strasse towards the city. There, at the place after the Frei­haus where the planks cov­ered with posters begin, he fell quite sud­denly with­out hav­ing com­plained pre­vi­ously about feel­ing poorly and sunk into his sur­prised friend’s arms. He was uncon­scious and wheezed softly. Mr. Leder car­ried him with the help of two passersby into the build­ing across the street, to Wied­ner Haupt­strasse 1, which houses a Unions­bank branch. Shortly after enter­ing the doors of the build­ing, Pro­fes­sor Fuchs passed away.” (Neue Freie Presse, 19 Feb. 1927)

With­out a doubt, the largest influ­ence any­one had on his artis­tic career came from Johannes Brahms, who was four­teen years his senior. In terms of the more con­tem­po­rary musi­cians, Brahms par­tic­u­larly loved Bizet, Dvo­rak, Smetana, Verdi and Johann Strauß; still, he always had a spe­cial pref­er­ence for the refined, intel­li­gent Robert Fuchs. The two had met in a con­cert where Brahms was seated by chance between Fuchs and his friend, Kapellmeis­ter Ger­icke. He was intro­duced as that gen­tle­man “who had recently explained that if he didn’t like one of Brahms’ com­po­si­tions, he would blame him­self and not the com­po­si­tion.” At first, Brahms was quite aloof. It was in the Salon Bill­roth where Brahms and Fuchs’ rela­tion­ship grad­u­ally began to deepen. In par­tic­u­lar, Bill­roth raved about Fuchs’ first piano sonata, which had been pub­lished in 1877. Fuchs was prompted to play it in Brahms’ pres­ence. Brahms lis­tened atten­tively and admired it so much that he later played it for Clara Schumann.

Fuchs ded­i­cated his first piano trio to Brahms in 1879. “This is a beau­ti­ful begin­ning,” exclaimed Brahms, and in 1888 he said with regards to Fuchs opera plans, “I expect from him a beau­ti­ful, vir­tu­ous opera,… refined, ele­gant, not excit­ing. Fuchs is never deep; in the sym­phonies he touches upon some­thing deeper now and again. But he is so charm­ing within his lim­i­ta­tions, which he only seri­ously crossed in the trio that he ded­i­cated to me.” When Brahms learnt of Fuchs’ plans for a sym­phony he only grum­bled, “well, it seems to me he doesn’t have what it takes”. How­ever, as soon as he had looked through the fin­ished man­u­script he wrote to Sim­rock by express post on 30 Octo­ber 1884: “Actu­ally, you should pay atten­tion to the sym­phony writ­ten by Robert Fuchs that will be pre­miered here this win­ter. I only had a glance at it, but was very happy to see how fresh and lively, how finely musi­cal it is. If it is even remotely pos­si­ble to make money on sym­phonies, then this is the per­fect one for it. Pub­lish­ers, how­ever, are like innkeep­ers: no mat­ter what it is that they offer, they com­plain that they can­not make a penny on it right now.”

On 8 Novem­ber, three weeks before the pre­mier, Brahms expressed his grat­i­tude for Simrock’s alacrity, say­ing, “because you have so imme­di­ately and gladly expressed an inter­est, I would like to say a few more things. The sym­phony is deci­sively his best larger work and much bet­ter, much live­lier and more com­plete than I could have ever imag­ined. I can praise it all the more because I once killed a sim­i­lar fruit of his in the womb.” He con­tin­ues by bring­ing Her­mmann Goetz’s sym­phony into the dis­cus­sion:“But one should not make com­par­isons; thus, I will only say that Fuchs, as an Aus­trian – which quite suits him – has an innate, beau­ti­ful, fresh tal­ent. He can let him­self go in such a com­fort­able and wit­tily inti­mate fash­ion.” After the pre­miere at the phil­har­monic con­cert at the end of Novem­ber 1834, Brahms sent him a bas­ket of cham­pagne “to prop­erly shower the child”. Max Kalbeck vis­ited Brahms the day after the con­cert to invite him out to eat. The con­ver­sa­tion turned to the pre­vi­ous day’s pre­miere and Brahms indulged him­self in prais­ing the piece and its author with even more flat­ter­ing expres­sions than he had used with Sim­rock. This pro­voked Kalbeck to con­tra­dict him, say­ing that the spirit and work of the com­po­si­tion were cer­tainly admirable, but he did not feel that the ideas were robust enough for a sym­phony. This upset Brahms, who replied, “So? You don’t always need some­one to so mas­sively and bow­leggedly set­tle in with his Ratatataa,” – he intoned the begin­ning of Beethoven’s Fifth Sym­phony – “other, more del­i­cately con­structed peo­ple also want to live. Maybe you have some­thing to say against Schumann’s d-minor sym­phony? There are many rooms in our Father’s house.”

Brahms remained ami­ca­bly con­nected with Fuchs, even in dis­sua­sion. Fuchs’ piano con­certo was sup­posed to be played by the Phil­har­monic, but due to an advanced sea­son no longer came into ques­tion. Nev­er­the­less, Fuchs wanted to give it to the pub­lish­ing house imme­di­ately. “Some­thing like this has to be heard first”, warned Brahms. When­ever Fuchs had a piano com­po­si­tion arranged for four hands ready, Brahms was gen­er­ally the first with whom he played it through, as was the case with the Op. 25 waltz, which Brahms liked very much, and the op. 48 “Traum­bilder” which he rec­om­mended with light­ning speed to the Peters pub­lish­ing house. The fol­low­ing let­ter from Clara Schu­mann to Robert Fuchs proves how much Brahms advo­cated for the com­po­si­tions of his younger colleague:

Dear Sir!

If I might allow myself to write these lines to you, then you have Mr. Brahms to thank for recently encour­ag­ing me to do so as he told me it might bring you plea­sure when we played your sym­phony “In der Daem­mer­stunde” together on the forth day of the month.
I find your com­po­si­tions so nat­u­rally flow­ing, refined, often dream­ily noble, and always res­o­nant through­out, that I truly find plea­sure in them. It would be a joy to me to hear the sym­phony in its orig­i­nal form, and per­haps I will have the oppor­tu­nity to share my high esti­ma­tion per­son­ally with you.

Most Sin­cerely,

Clara Schu­mann

Brahms said of Fuchs’ opera “The Devil’s Clock”, “Fuchs is really a famous musi­cian; every­thing is so refined, so adroit, so fas­ci­nat­ingly invented! It is always a plea­sure!” Once, when Brahms met Dr. Fellinger (the CEO of Siemens, one of his clos­est friends) on the Elis­a­beth Bridge, he asked Fellinger if he knew who Fuchs was. Fellinger did not, to which Brahms replied, “What? You don’t know him? He is Robert Fuchs, one of our best musi­cians, one should know of him!“

Fuchs also belonged to the same cir­cle of friends (such as Anton Door, Julius Epstein, Euse­bius Mandy­czewski, Ignz Brull) who accom­pa­nied Brahms on his lengthy hikes. Fuchs remem­bers, “We would often go walk­ing together, and one of his friends called me ‘Mas­ter Fuchs’- then you should have seen Brahms’ explode. ‘What do you mean ‘Mas­ter’?! Always this ‘Mas­ter’! There have been no Mas­ters since Bach and Beethoven!’ Then they would have to cajole Brahms at length, until the upheaval of his agi­tated mood had calmed.” Fuchs also recalled Brahms’ direct character:

“…once I showed him a com­po­si­tion from my youth. One of the themes seemed to him to be sim­i­lar to one from a Beethoven Andante and he would not let the topic rest. ‘That there’, he said, ‘I would want to change a bit, not because it is bad, but just so not every idiot would rec­og­nize it immediately!’”

For many musi­cians of the 19^th Cen­tury who lived long lives well into the 20^th, Brahms’ death marked the end of an era of which they were con­sid­ered liv­ing relicts by the younger gen­er­a­tion. Even Robert Fuchs, who him­self out­lived Brahms by thirty years, was not spared this dif­fi­cult expe­ri­ence. Still deeply shaken by this death, Fuchs lost his wife of 28 years, Amalie shortly there­after in the same year, 1897; in 1899 his brother Johann Nepo­muk, then Dvo­rak, Bruck­ner, Strauß; in 1918 his best friend Theodor v. Brücke as well as his last sis­ter; and finally his son after an oper­a­tion in 1919. “My Hans! My dar­ling Hans died on Sep­tem­ber 24^th at 14:00.”

Inter­est in his music also ebbed and per­for­mances in Vienna were sel­dom. His 2^nd Sym­phony only received a sin­gle per­for­mance in 1887 despite Brahms’ warm sup­port and an enthu­si­as­tic pub­lic recep­tion. “A work com­posed with great effort over dif­fi­cult weeks is con­demned to the death of eter­nal silence in three counts”, wrote the cheer­less com­poser. The pay­ments for his three sym­phonies speak for them­selves: Fuchs received 2000 gulden for the first, 1500 for the sec­ond, and only 500 for the third sym­phony with the promise of a bonus should the sym­phony become “com­mer­cial”. This made Fuchs all the hap­pier about the rare per­for­mances of his works, such as the pre­miere of his Sonata for Viola Op. 86 in Berlin on 24 Octo­ber 1912 by Max Reger, who played it along with his own Op. 107. On 15 Novem­ber 1916, respond­ing to a request for an arti­cle for his 70^th birth­day, the Aus­trian “Illus­tri­erten Zeitung” replied as follows:

Hon­or­able Sirs,

We deeply regret our inabil­ity to assist in your request dated on the 14^th of the month, as we have not had the honor of mak­ing the acquain­tance of the Mr. Robert Fuchs whose 70^th birth­day should be cel­e­brated in word and pic­ture in the ‘Aus­trian Illus­tri­erten Zeitung’. We would also like to point out that accord­ing to Lehmann there are many Robert Fuchs in Vienna, one of which is a known aca­d­e­mic painter, another is an organ­ist in the court music chapel, and a third is a high rank­ing civil ser­vant at the min­istry of trade.

With best regards…

If a few years ago Robert Fuchs, this old Aus­trian mas­ter, was only men­tioned with the key­word “Fuchs Ser­e­nades”, then an increased inter­est in his cham­ber music can now be observed. Thus, the name ‘Fuchs’ has once again returned to the con­scious­ness of the music world. Now, his cham­ber music appears more and more on records, but his exten­sive Lied and choral works and his piano music still wait to be discovered.

The First Cello Sonata in d minor, Op. 29, appeared in 1881 and is ded­i­cated to David Pop­per. On 10 May 1881, Brahms wrote to his pub­lisher, Sim­rock, “Now a quick word, to which I request a sim­i­larly quick response. I do not know if you have taken note of our very own Robert Fuchs? Prob­a­bly the most beau­ti­ful tal­ent in town; a charm­ing man who is also mar­ried (so talk­ing about money is a neces­sity). Up to now, Kist­ner (his pub­lisher in Leipzig) has always hap­pily accepted his work and paid well for them. Recently, how­ever, the pub­lisher began nego­ti­at­ing, which embar­rasses the very mod­est and fear­fully cour­te­ous Fuchs. I did not want to go to you regard­ing the waltzes, since Kist­ner (who would be happy to wring my neck even with­out all of this) would have known instantly that I am involved. But now I do indeed have to ask you to let me know in pass­ing if you could inci­den­tally pay 600 gulden for the cello sonata. I think it is his best and most lively work, and if you have never heard of him at all you really should have a look at his Vari­a­tions (Här­tel) and piano sonatas (Kist­ner)… Fuchs doesn’t know any­thing about this.” Sim­rock, how­ever, had a deep mis­trust of cello sonatas; they did not entice him, even if they would have been cheaper. The sonata was released that same year with Kist­ner as publisher.

Fuchs did not par­tic­u­larly care for the higher reg­is­ter of the cello, and so he also begins this sonata with an ele­giac melody in the tenor range of the instru­ment. The sec­ondary theme is pow­er­ful and later serves as the basis for the devel­op­ment. The scherzo, which also begins calmly, is strongly con­trasted by the trio. The ada­gio move­ment begins with a slow, heav­ily pon­der­ous move­ment that is quickly re-framed as an intro­duc­tion to the final move­ment. This dance-like, quick move­ment in D Major brings the sonata to a tri­umphal close with a dra­matic Coda.

The seven „Phan­tasi­estücke“ Op.78 appeared in the Sep­tem­ber of 1905 on the heels of his 4^th vio­lin sonata thanks to the requests and demands of his friend Anton Mayr, an ama­teur cel­list. Fuchs wrote to Mayr in Admond on 4 Sep­tem­ber, “cello pieces are not my pas­sion, but to make you happy I will per­haps try to write some, but only because it is you who is ask­ing”. There­after, the pieces appeared in rapid suc­ces­sion. The first was fin­ished on 18 Sep­tem­ber,  three more on the 23^rd and by 15 Octo­ber all seven cello pieces were pre­pared in fair copy.

At the first play-through on 20 Octo­ber with Mayr at the cello, sev­eral cor­rec­tions were made, which are described in detail by Mayr in his “Mem­o­ries of Robert Fuchs”. In the sec­ond piece Fuchs said he had imag­ined that the har­mony with the empty D-string would sound more beau­ti­ful; the strings should be very evenly and ten­derly played together. In the third piece he found the reca­pit­u­la­tion super­flu­ous and the pizzi­cato of the cello too weak against the piano. He was very con­tent with piece num­ber four, and par­tic­u­larly liked the fla­geo­let on the G-string.  He did not want the 8^th mea­sure of the fifth piece to be played too weakly so that the fol­low­ing dolce came across even more ten­derly. In piece num­ber six he added quite a num­ber of dynamic mark­ings. He also wanted the first of the eighth-note fig­ures in the first two mea­sures to be a bit accen­tu­ated with­out chang­ing the length of the eighth note. He wanted the cello to sound robust and full in the sec­tions where the cello played the bass line and the piano was in a higher reg­is­ter. This piece was Fuchs’ favorite. In the last piece the arpeg­gios in the begin­ning of the sec­ond part proved to be too dif­fi­cult and he made minor adjust­ments and sim­pli­fi­ca­tions to the cello part.

With the excep­tion of a few triv­i­al­i­ties, Fuchs seems to have been sat­is­fied with the pieces. They were pub­lished the fol­low­ing year with Robitschek and ded­i­cated to Fuchs’ friend, Richard von Perger.

The sec­ond cello sonata in e-flat minor, Op. 83 came into being dur­ing the autumn of 1908 and was fin­ished on 3 Decem­ber. It was unded­i­cated. Robert Haus­mann, the cel­list of the Joachim Quar­tet should have pre­miered the piece in Vienna on 19 Jan­u­ary 1909, and a sort of pre-premiere was also planned. How­ever, shortly before the pre­miere, a mes­sage arrived that Haus­mann was seri­ously ill. Fuchs went to Hausmann’s hotel with the pianist, Maria Bau­mayer, where they learned that Haus­mann had suf­fered a stroke. “It would have been so beau­ti­ful”, he wrote to his friend Anton Mayr in Admont, “but it was not meant to be”. Four months later the then 30-year-old Paul Grüm­mer played the sonata in Munich with the com­poser present.

The three-movement sonata is – though sim­i­lar to the first in expres­sion – much more com­plexly con­structed. Fuchs was in the bloom of his per­sonal style in this work, and it is full of his sur­pris­ingly chro­matic twists and enhar­monic rein­ter­pre­ta­tions. The first move­ment exudes a great calm through its two lyric themes. The sec­ond, even calmer move­ment is inter­rupted by a dra­matic mid­dle sec­tion. Finally, the third move­ment rounds out the sonata with boisterous-yet-untroubled exhil­a­ra­tion in E-flat Major.

Translation by Chanda VanderHart, M.A. and Dune Johnson