Ludwig Berger (composer)

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Ludwig Berger
Ludwig Berger, 1802 by Ph.O. Runge

Carl Ludwig Heinrich Berger (born April 18, 1777 in Berlin ; † February 16, 1839 there ) was a German composer , pianist and piano teacher.

Life

Berger spent his childhood first in Templin ( Uckermark ), later in Frankfurt (Oder) , where he attended high school and from 1795 the university . From 1799 he received musical training from the double bass player and later royal conductor Joseph Augustin Gürrlich (1761–1817), who was also valued as a composition teacher (see also MGG 2nd edition, personal part, vol. 8, sp. 300–302) in Berlin. In 1801 Berger traveled to Dresden to continue his musical studies with the then famous Johann Gottlieb Naumann , who had died shortly before his arrival. In Dresden, Berger had a close friendship with the painter Philipp Otto Runge . In 1803 Berger returned to Berlin, where he settled down as a piano teacher.

In 1804 Muzio Clementi arrived in Berlin with his student August Alexander Klengel . Clementi, who has not performed publicly since 1786, was often accompanied on his travels by young pianists who publicly performed his piano works in his favor. Clementi continued to travel to Italy in 1804 , while Berger and Klengel were preparing for a concert tour with Clementi in Berlin, which began in September 1805 and led to Saint Petersburg . Until 1812 Berger worked there successfully as a pianist and piano teacher. In 1808, in an economically secure position, he was finally able to think of marrying his long-time Berlin fiancée Wilhelmina Karges. He traveled to meet her from Petersburg to Courland, where the wedding took place. Just ten months later he lost his young wife in childbed . This stroke of fate is occasionally seen as the cause of his later melancholy and hypochondria . He did not remarry, but made another attempt to start a family much later in Berlin: in 1817 he had a friend Luise Hensel propose to him, but was turned down like other applicants. The highly educated and attractive Luise Hensel never married, but devoted her further life to religious ideals within the framework of educational and above all charitable tasks in the lap of the Catholic Church.

In 1812 Berger joined the great escape movement from the advancing Napoleon's troops. Via Stockholm , where he performed successfully, he came to London , where Clementi had now settled and took care of him. After two successful years as a pianist and piano teacher in London, he returned to Berlin in 1814 (not 1815, as is often wrongly stated), where he made his last public appearance on November 20, 1814. Berger was his own organizer, probably to make himself known in Berlin. At that time he was still living in the Hotel de Brandenbourg (where you could buy concert tickets for 1 thousand from him at No. 10). The concert is announced in the Berlinische Nachrichten, the Spenersche Zeitung, on November 19, 1814: “Vocal and instrumental concert in the Saale des Königl. Playhouse given by Mr. Ludwig Berger ”. He played an overture on a "grand piano fortepiano" he had brought with him from London, his piano variations "Ah vous dirai-je", composed 10 years earlier and only published as op. 32 in 1841, as well as his "Concerto for fortepiano" (also posthumously as op. 34 printed). Works by Paer, Simon Mayr and Mattäi, for which he had hired vocal and instrumental soloists from the city, also played. The criticism in the AmZ ("Leipziger Allgemeine Musical Zeitung"), Vol. 16, Sp. 881 praises his "finished, safe game Clementischer Schule ... wonderful, easy manner of touching the keys, excellent application ... great skill of the left hand".

Berlin's intellectual life flourished during this time, especially in the city's bourgeois salons , to which Berger quickly found access as a musical authority. So he played on New Year's Eve 1814/1815 in the salon of Kriminalrat Julius Eduard Hitzig , where ETA Hoffmann heard him (description by Hoffmann in: Die Abenteuer der Sylvester-Nacht , 1. Die Geliebte, from: Fantasiestücke in Callot's manner; here is he still "a strange virtuoso, named Berger"). In one of these salons, at the State Councilor Friedrich August von Staegemann's , Berger met the young poet Wilhelm Müller . Staegemann's wife Elisabeth, later her daughter Hedwig, ran the salon in the rooms of the 'Prussian Sea Trade' in Jägerstr. 21. In addition to Berger and Müller, u. a. Luise Hensel and her brother, the painter Wilhelm Hensel (later brother-in-law of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy ), Clemens Brentano and Count Neithardt von Gneisenau guests of this salon. As part of one of the literary games customary in these salons, the first poems of the later cycle "Die Schöne Müllerin" by Wilhelm Müller, to which Berger contributed the music, were created with the motto "Rose, die Müllerin" in 1816, long before Müller's collection of poems took their final form which was then set to music by Franz Schubert in 1823 . Berger's cycle, published in 1819 as op. 11 by the Berlin publisher EHGChristiani (in whose house Unter den Linden 21 Berger lived at the time) under the title Gesänge from a social song game ´Die Schöne Müllerin´ , consists of ten songs, five of which are based on texts by Müller based in the role of the miller's boy. The others come from other guests of the salon in the following roles: Rose, the miller's wife (Hedwig von Staegemann), hunter (Wilhelm Hensel), gardener's boy (Luise Hensel), junker (Friedrich Förster). There were also other poems by admirers of the miller's wife, including a fisherman, which Berger ignored. Wilhelm Müller had already broken the link between his poems and those of the other members of the circle before he left for Italy in August 1817 and gave a first version of the cycle with 15 poems for publication. The final form with 25 songs, which also served as a model for Schubert, who selected 20 poems for his Müllerin cycle, appeared as part 1 of the collection “77 poems from the papers left behind by a traveling French horn player” in 1821.

Berger became the most sought-after piano teacher of his time in Berlin. His reputation spread far beyond the borders of the city of Berlin. His most prominent piano student was the young Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who as a composer was a student of Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832), Goethe's source of information on music. Zelter had founded a so-called " Liedertafel " in Berlin in 1808 , a male choir that had given itself such elitist admission rules that Berger tried in vain to get admission. In response to this, Berger founded the “Younger Liedertafel zu Berlin” together with Bernhard Klein , Ludwig Rellstab and Gustav Reichardt in 1819, which opened up to the outside world and thus gave important impulses for the great male choir movement of the 19th century. In 1822 Berger joined Zelter's Sing-Akademie in Berlin , which is a sign that there were no conflicts between him and Zelter because of the song table problem. Rather, Zelter was accepted as an honorary member of the Younger Liedertafel in the fall of 1819 . In a letter to Goethe of March 1830 it says: “There are now at least four Liedertafel here in Berlin, of which mine is not the best ... On the other hand, the second Liedertafel is in fact the best; It consists of young people with good voices: they make songs for themselves and there is no shortage of old good songs. I honestly confess that I would rather be here than with us. "

Berger last lived in the Alte Jakobstr. 9, where he had moved from Franzische Strasse 5. He used to be ailing, but according to Rellstab, his health has recently improved. His sudden death was all the more surprising. He died teaching a blind student. With great sympathy from schoolchildren and friends, he was buried on February 20, 1839 in the "Hallisches Kirchhof", Cemetery III of the Jerusalem and New Churches in front of the Hallesches Tor . The grave has not been preserved.

Famous students

Fanny Hensel and her brother Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy as well as Otto Nicolai , Moritz Ernemann and Wilhelm Taubert were students of Ludwig Berger.

Works

Berger's compositional work was essentially concentrated on three genres: song, male choir and piano music. His contemporaries particularly valued him as a song composer. Here he broke up the strict strophic form of the so-called 2nd Berlin Liederschule of the 18th century in favor of increased expressivity by integrating the piano accompaniment into the melodic flow and intensifying the interpretation of the text with the help of harmony as a mood carrier. In piano music the small forms dominate, which he only left convincingly once, namely with his Beethoven-inspired Sonate pathétique op. 1 in C minor (1804). In addition to works of variations, his two etude collections, Op. 12 (1816) and Op. 22 (1836), were particularly popular. The Etudes op. 12 were published again and again well into the 20th century. Due to their poetic character, they are lyrical piano pieces and, as Robert Schumann already emphasized, actually “songs without words”, which pointed the way to Mendelssohn Bartholdy for his compositions of the same name. Berger also tried his hand at large forms (e.g. piano concerto), but with little luck. He was a master of small forms and an outstanding representative of Berlin Biedermeier on the threshold of northern German romanticism . Berger dedicated the article Explanations of a Mozart's judgment on M. Clementi to his mentor Clementi , which was printed in 3 publications in 1829: Caecilia vol. X, pp. 238-240; AmZ vol. 31, col. 467-469; and Berliner Allgemeine Musikische Zeitung , vol. 6, pp. 201-202.

After Berger's death, a (not entirely complete) complete edition of his works was published in two series by the Leipzig publisher Hofmeister, namely the “Oeuvres complèts (sic!) Pour le Piano”, Cahier 1-11, 1840-1848 and “Sämmlichen (sic!) ) Lieder, Gesänge und Balladen “, delivery 1 - 7, 1840 - 1844, both series edited by Ludwig Rellstab and Wilhelm Taubert.

Assignment

Ludwig Berger had a contemporary of the same name who also published as Ludwig K. Berger or Ludwig Berger (singer) (1774 (?) - 1828). He last lived in Karlsruhe as the director of a so-called choir teaching institute , which was apparently attached to the court theater there. He began his career as a singer, as he was first mentioned in 1804 when the Würzburg National Theater opened. He mainly wrote songs with guitar accompaniment, which were printed exclusively in southern Germany, especially by André in Offenbach. In almost all previous publications up to the first edition of MGG, the works of both are assigned incorrectly. (cf. Dieter Siebenkäs: Zweimal Ludwig Berger, in: Die Musikforschung, 18th year 1965, Bärenreiter-Verlag Kassel and Basel, pp. 185–187)

literature

  • Johann Philipp Schmidt: Nekrolog. In: General musical newspaper. Vol. 41, March 1839, col. 187.
  • Robert Schumann: L. Berger's collected works. In: Collected Writings on Music and Musicians. Volume IV. Wigand, Leipzig 1854, pp. 109-114 ( commons ).
  • Ludwig Rellstab : Ludwig Berger, a monument. Trautwein, Berlin 1846 ( digitized version ).
  • Carl Freiherr von Ledebur: Tonkünstler-Lexicon Berlin's from the oldest times to the present. Berlin 1861, pp. 48-51.
  • Arrey von Dommer :  Berger, Ludwig . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1875, p. 380 f.
  • Willi Kahl:  Berger, Carl Ludwig Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 2, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1955, ISBN 3-428-00183-4 , p. 83 ( digitized version ).
  • Dieter Siebenkäs: Ludwig Berger, his life and his works. Berlin 1963 (with catalog raisonné of the printed and unprinted works and letters from the estate of the Berlin State Library ).
  • Dieter Siebenkäs: Berger, (Carl) Ludwig (Heinrich). In: Music in the past and present. 2nd Edition. Volume 2: Person Part. 1999, col. 1258–1261 (with another portrait).
  • Ute Wollny: The beautiful miller's wife on Jägerstrasse in Berlin. In: Scientific journal of the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. 41, 1992, pp. 48-52.
  • Klaus Martin Kopitz , Eva Katharina Klein, Thomas Synofzik (eds.): Robert and Clara Schumann's correspondence with correspondents in Berlin from 1832 to 1883 (= Schumann letter edition. Series II, Volume 17). Dohr, Cologne 2015, ISBN 978-3-86846-028-5 , pp. 87-97.
  • Maria-Verena Leistner (Ed.): Wilhelm Müller, works, diaries, letters. 6 volumes. Gatza, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-928262-21-1 , Volume 1: pp. 286, 288 ff., Volume 5: pp. 69, 224, 238, 476.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ^ Dieter Siebenkäs: Ludwig Berger - his life and his works . Berlin 1963
  2. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 240.
  3. ↑ Robert Schumann: Collected writings on 'Music and Musicians Bd. I, p. 122. Ed. By Dr. Heinrich Simon, Reclam Leipzig undated, (preface from HS 1888).
  4. ↑ Collected writings on music and musicians , Volume 1, p. 168 ; see also Volume 2, pp. 28-29
personal data
SURNAME Berger, Ludwig
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Berger, Carl Ludwig Heinrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer, pianist and piano teacher
DATE OF BIRTH April 18, 1777
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 16, 1839
Place of death Berlin