Adolph Behrens

Adolph Behrens (born June 24, 1833 in Manchester , † March 16, 1896 in Richmond (London) ) was a German-English privateer, amateur musician and patron .

Life

Adolph Behrens was the ninth of twelve children of the entrepreneur Salomon Levy Behrens from Bad Pyrmont and his wife Anna, born in England, from England. Lucas. He was related to the Hamburg banker and patron Theodor Behrens . His Hamburg cousin Wilhelmine Behrens was married to the Hamburg lawyer Henry B. Sloman (1812–1867), with whom he had a lifelong friendship.

Behrens studied German and French language and literature at Owens College in Manchester. Around 1860, at the suggestion of the merchant Gottlieb Kyllmann , Behrens went to Cologne to study music under Ferdinand Hiller at the local conservatory . He received composition lessons from Woldemar Bargiel , a half-brother of Clara Schumann . A close friendship developed between the teacher and his pupil Behrens. Bargiel later (1871) wrote about this to his half-sister Clara: "... he was more friends with me than hardly anyone else". However, Behrens soon went to Pau to see Sloman and wrote twelve pieces for piano there . In 1863 the first musical works by Behrens were printed in Paris . In 1871 relations with Bargiel and his family ended.

As early as 1866, Behrens came into closer contact with the violinist Joseph Joachim in Pau . With the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War , Behrens left Pau and returned to England, where he took up residence in Richmond. In 1871, Behrens made the English premiere of Brahms ' German Requiem possible in London . Here, too, Joachim often visited him. He had Behrens financially support the quarterly journal for musicology projected by Friedrich Chrysander and Philipp Spitta in 1885 . With a contribution of 1,000 Mark Behrens was also one of the largest foreign donor in founding the Association Beethoven House in Bonn.

Since the mid-1870s, Behrens rarely left his house for health reasons and became increasingly lonely. In 1893 he commissioned a painting from Roger Fry . In his will, he gave his friends Bargiel, Joachim and Brahms a sum of 10,000 guilders each. Brahms donated a large part of his Behrens inheritance to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna .

The letters from Adolph Behrens to Woldemar Bargiel are in the music department of the State Library in Berlin , the letters to Joseph Joachim in the State Institute for Music Research in Berlin .

literature

• Peter Clive: Brahms and His World: A Biographical Dictionary , Scarecrow Press, 2006, p. 34-36
• Enzo Maaß: "Adolph Behrens, Unicum. Brahms' benefactor, Joachim's friend, Bargiel's student" In: Brahms Studies , Volume 18, Georg Olms Verlag, Hildesheim 2017, p. 265-306 ISBN 978-3-487-15648-4
• Enzo Maaß: "Adolph Behrens: a life in Manchester and music. A quest for perspectives" In: Shemot. Journal of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain , Vol. 26, No. 2 (2018), p. 11-13