Eduard Hummel

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Eduard Hummel, portrait (watercolor) by Henry Hawkins, London 1838

Eduard Joseph Hummel (also Edward or Edouard , born May 8, 1814 in Vienna , † March 1892 in Troy , New York ) was a German composer and conductor .

Life

Eduard Hummel was the oldest of the two sons of Johann Nepomuk Hummel from his marriage to Elisabeth Röckel . He was born on May 8, 1814 in Vienna and baptized Eduard Joseph on May 9 in St. Stephen's Cathedral . He and his family moved from Vienna to Stuttgart in 1816 and to Weimar in 1819 .

There he received his first lessons from his father, who in 1832 sent him to Vienna for further training with Carl Czerny and Ignaz von Seyfried , where he also completed an apprenticeship with the music publisher Tobias Haslinger . On November 17, 1834, Hummel ordered his son to return in a letter to Haslinger, who gave him a negative report the next day.

Back in Weimar, Eduard made his debut as a pianist in a concert by his father on March 10, 1837 with his E major piano concerto op. 110. After his father died on October 17 of the same year, he went to London for two years . When he returned to Weimar in September 1839, the magazine Der Wanderer reported : “The eldest son of Capellmeister Hummel, Eduard, has returned from London to also perform an opera, the subject matter of which is borrowed from the Middle Ages, and then himself to go back to London with a lovable young wife. "

The mentioned "wife" was probably his fiancée Auguste Coudray (born September 8, 1816 in Weimar, † April 22, 1844 ibid), a daughter of the Weimar architect Clemens Wenzeslaus Coudray , who was appointed senior building director of the Grand Duchy of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach in 1845 . Eduard Hummel married her on February 15, 1841 in the city ​​church in Weimar . The opera Alor, or the Huns before Merseburg in 932 , which had already begun in London , was not premiered in Weimar until September 9, 1843. The Weimar correspondent for the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung assessed the work as follows:

“Alor, a great heroic opera by a local poet, composed by Eduard Hummel, the eldest sun of the late JN Hummel, received only individual movements. There are many beautiful verses in the poetry, but there is no plot or interest in it. The music has some pretty movements, but it is exhausted in terms of the breadth of the repetitions and the very substance of the music itself. The difference between several pieces is striking. While that offers quite pleasant melodies and not uninteresting harmonies, strives for character not without success, and becomes dramatic, others are cold and monotonous. This fact is explained if it is true that Mr. Hummel worked on the opera for several years. "

The signals for the musical world reported that the opera “had already been given twice in Weimar. One hopes that the opera will enjoy it later, when it is older. ”In the late summer of 1844, Hummel accepted a call as Kapellmeister at the theater in Augsburg , but moved to Ansbach in November . Further stations in his career as Kapellmeister were in Brno and Opava . From 1874 he worked as a conductor at the Komische Oper in Vienna, where Felix Mottl also held the post of Kapellmeister from 1878 to 1880 . The building was completely destroyed in the so-called ring theater fire on December 8, 1881, one of the worst fire disasters of the 19th century.

At that time, Hummel, who had married a second time after the early death of his wife (1844), probably no longer lived in Vienna, but already lived with his son Alphons in the USA . The family last lived in Troy , a very affluent small town 250 km north of New York City with a population of around 50,000 at the time. There “Edouard Hummel, professor of music” died in March 1892 “in the residence of his son” on Sheridan Avenue.

Eduard Hummel was considered a highly talented, but ultimately “failed son” who did not understand how to purposefully develop his systems. A small part of his estate has been in the Goethe Museum in Düsseldorf since 1975.

family

Eduard Hummel had two daughters from his marriage to Auguste Coudray:

  • Johanna Hummel (born February 28, 1842 in Weimar; † October 13, 1927 there),
  • Auguste Hummel (born April 22, 1844 in Weimar; † August 5, 1918 there).

Both remained unmarried. The Irish pianist Bettina Walker , who came to Weimar in the summer of 1883 to study with Franz Liszt , lived temporarily with them in the former house of her grandmother Elisabeth Hummel at Marienstraße 8. As Walker reports, there was a real cult around Beethoven there , who had belonged to Elisabeth's admirers in Vienna around 1809/10 before she married Johann Nepomuk Hummel in 1813.

The name of Eduard Hummel's second wife is unknown. The only child in this marriage was Alphon's son.

Works

  • Op. 2: Variations brillantes sur un Thème favori de l'Opéra " I Montechi e Capuletti " de Bellini in F major for piano, Mainz: Schott, June 1837
  • op. 4: Fantasina [!] sur un Air de l'Opéra "The Gipsy's Warning" de Julius Benedict in B flat major for piano, Mainz: Schott, November 1838
  • Le Sejour à Londres. Subject et variations pour le Pianoforte (copy in London, British Library)
  • op.12 : Messa solenne ma breve (evidence from List & Francke, catalog 164 , Leipzig 1884, no.904)
  • Rifle march of the Stahl- & Armbrust-Schützengesellschaft in Weimar on August 4, 1840 (copy in Düsseldorf, Goethe Museum, KM 498)
  • Alor, or the Huns before Merseburg in the year 932 , opera, 1839–1843 (autograph in Düsseldorf, Goethe Museum, KM 494–497)
  • The love test. Magic fairy tale , opera based on a libretto by Carl Schultes , first performed in 1847 at the Munich Court Theater (score in the Bavarian State Library; further evidence from List & Franke, catalog 164 , Leipzig 1884, no. 1396)

literature

  • Goethe-Museum Düsseldorf, Anton-und-Katharina-Kippenberg-Foundation, catalog of the music , ed. by Inge Kähmer and Jörn Göres , Bonn 1987
  • Mark Kroll, Johann Nepomuk Hummel: A Musician's Life and World , Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press 2007, ISBN 978-0-8108-5920-3

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Illustration of the baptism entry with Klaus Martin Kopitz , Beethoven, Elisabeth Röckel and the album sheet " Für Elise " , Cologne 2010, p. 30
  2. ↑ Düsseldorf, Goethe Museum, 2244
  3. ↑ Ibid., N 47
  4. ↑ Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung , vol. 39, no. 43 of October 25, 1837, col. 704
  5. ↑ Der Wanderer , Vol. 26, No. 225 of September 20, 1839, p. 900 ( digitized version )
  6. ↑ Allgemeine Musikische Zeitung , vol. 45, no. 52 of December 27, 1843, col. 943 ( digitized version )
  7. ↑ Signals for the musical world , vol. 1, no. 39 of September 1843, p. 301 ( digitized version )
  8. ↑ Allgemeine Musikische Zeitung , vol. 46, no. 37 of September 11, 1844, col. 620
  9. ↑ Allgemeine Musikische Zeitung , No. 49 of December 4, 1844, Col. 830
  10. ↑ Bettina Walker, My Musical Experiences , New Edition, London and New York 1892, pp. 85–114 ( digitized version )
personal data
SURNAME Hummel, Eduard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hummel, Eduard Joseph (full name); Hummel, Edward; Hummel, Edouard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer and Kapellmeister
DATE OF BIRTH May 8, 1814
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 1892
Place of death Troy , New York