Karl Klindworth

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Karl Klindworth

Karl Klindworth (born September 25, 1830 in Hanover , † July 27, 1916 in Stolpe ) was a German composer , conductor , music teacher and piano virtuoso.

Life

Karl Klindworth was the son of the mechanic and entrepreneur Carl August Klindworth and Dorothea Wilhelmine (1800-1853), the daughter of the court printer Johann Thomas Lamminger (1757-1805). As a child, Karl received violin lessons and taught himself to play the piano. At the age of 17, he was already a successful violinist and conductor of a traveling theater company, and in 1850 he took over the management of the Neue Liedertafel in Hanover . In 1852 Klindworth went to Weimar , where he took piano lessons with Franz Liszt and soon became one of his closest pupils and friends. From 1854 he lived as a pianist and piano teacher in London , where he met Richard Wagner in 1855 . He was to become a lifelong devotee and friend to him. In 1868, Klindworth accepted Nikolai Rubinstein's invitation to teach a piano class at the Moscow Conservatory . Here, where Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was also professor of harmony , he completed the piano arrangement of Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen, which he began in 1855, the year he met Wagner, and a critical edition of Frédéric Chopin's works .

After Rubinstein's death, Klindworth settled in Berlin in 1882 and from 1884 to 1886, alternating with Joseph Joachim and Franz Wüllner, led the Berlin Philharmonic and the concerts of the local Wagner society. His piano school, founded in 1883 and expanded to a music school a year later, was merged with the Scharwenka Institute founded by Xaver Scharwenka in 1881 and headed by his brother Phillip since 1892 to form the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory after he had given up its leadership . After completing his teaching activities in 1898, Klindworth remained active as a pianist and conductor, but devoted himself increasingly to the publication of arrangements and textbooks. In 1907 the Klindworth couple adopted the ten-year-old English orphan Winifred Williams (a relative of Klindworth's wife, Henriette Karrop ), who married Siegfried Wagner in 1915 and, after his death in 1930, became director of the Bayreuth Festival .

Meanwhile based in Potsdam , later in the Eden non-profit fruit growing settlement near Oranienburg , Klindworth left the concert podium in 1910.

Karl Klindworth and his wife were buried in Bayreuth in the municipal cemetery, near the graves of Siegfried Wagner and Franz Liszt .

The grave of Karl Klindworth and his wife Henriette (née Karrop) in the Bayreuth city cemetery.

meaning

Klindworth emerged primarily as an editor of the works of Wagner and Liszt. He himself described the encounter and friendship with these two composers as a decisive turning point in his life. While Liszt became a role model in piano pedagogy, Wagner was the creator of the musical drama for which Klindworth produced the close-to-score piano reductions of the Ring of the Nibelung , his most famous works to this day. Wagner himself, however, saw the practical use of the arrangements severely limited by their high level of technical difficulty. In a letter to Klindworth dated February 14, 1874, he stated:

Nobody plays such a piano reduction as you thought. [...] So: better just a hint, while the ordinary pianist can only get away with it if he skips over half of the notes.

In the course of the preparation of excerpts for other stage works by Wagner, Klindworth later published a simplified version of the Ring piano reduction .

With the edition of works by Bach , Beethoven , Chopin and Mendelssohn , Klindworth also made a name for himself as an editor. Nowadays, however, like his arrangements, these are mostly only of historical interest due to the changed understanding of the work. His piano schools also remained in use for a long time. Hans von Bülow and William Mason were among his students .

Works

Piano works

  • Concert polonaise
  • Polonaise fantasy

Arrangements and piano reductions

Editions

  • Frédéric Chopin: Oeuvres complètes. 6 volumes. Moscow 1873–1876.
  • Ludwig van Beethoven: Sonates pour piano. 3 volumes. Berlin 1884.
  • Johann Sebastian Bach: The well-tempered piano. Mainz 1894.
  • Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Songs without words. London 1898.

Piano schools

  • The skill in playing the piano, 24 practice pieces in all major and minor keys. Mainz 1897.
  • Novello's School of Pianoforte Music. London 1902.
  • Elementary piano school. London, Mainz 1903.
  • 24 exercise pieces in all major and minor keys to develop skill in piano playing, last supplement to Bertini's piano school.

Letters and writings

  • Then and now in England. Bayreuth 1898.
  • Memories and thoughts from Karl Klindworth's letters to Wahnfried. Bayreuth 1916.
  • Unpublished letters from Karl Klindworth to Tchaikovsky. Berlin 1965.

Literature (selection)

Web links

Commons : Karl Klindworth  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

References and comments

  1. ^ Anton Würz:  Klindworth, Karl. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 75 f. ( Digitized version ).
  2. ↑ There deviations in the year of birth of Carl August ("17 89 ") as well as in the indication "Part (but) of a mechanical (ical) company"
personal data
SURNAME Klindworth, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer, conductor, music teacher and piano virtuoso
DATE OF BIRTH September 25, 1830
PLACE OF BIRTH Hanover
DATE OF DEATH July 27, 1916
Place of death Stolpe (Hohen Neuendorf)