Otto Bach (composer)

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Otto Bach (born February 9, 1833 in Vienna , † July 3, 1893 in Unterwaltersdorf , Lower Austria ) was an Austrian composer, church musician and conductor .

Life

Otto was the youngest son of the lawyer Michael Bach ; his older brothers were the future politicians Alexander and Eduard . He received his education at the Vienna Schottengymnasium .

After the political events of 1848/49, Bach began to study music with Simon Sechter in Vienna. Further studies led him to Adolf Bernhard Marx in Berlin and to Moritz Hauptmann in Leipzig.

Bach was privately married to Therese Bach-Marschner, Heinrich Marschner's widow, from 1864 . He was also in close contact with the family of Franz von Hilleprandt , to whose daughter Marie he dedicated some songs.

At the age of 35, in 1868, Bach was appointed director of the Cathedral Music Association and Mozarteum in Salzburg and head of the local Liedertafel . The period of activity in the city of Mozart was inglorious and full of conflicts. Although he was valued as an orchestra conductor, there was a break with the Liedertafel in the fall of 1872 and, as a result, disputes that were also reported publicly in the newspapers. Indirectly, through his contentious leadership style, he also favored the establishment of the International Mozart Foundation, the direct predecessor of the International Mozarteum Foundation , which was to become an alternative to the Dommusikverein as the supporting organization for the Mozarteum School and a place of Mozart care. A few weeks before the Mozarteum was handed over to the International Mozarteum Foundation , Bach finally went back to Vienna in 1880, where he was Kapellmeister at the Votivkirche (Vienna) and teacher at the Horak Music School for ten years . In addition, from 1880 to 1888 he headed the orchestral association of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. Bach retired into private life around 1890 and then died at the age of 60 in Unterwaltersdorf, Lower Austria.

Dr. Otto Bach is buried in the honorary grave of his brother Alexander, who died in November of the same year, in the Vienna Central Cemetery (group 21, crypt row 1, no. 21).

Works

As a conductor, Bach was considered important, and as a composer he was valued and successful in Austria during his lifetime. But he did not become very well known beyond that. Especially his early songs, which are based on Mendelssohn and Schumann , were able to attract attention. Bach later turned to the New German direction . Critics have repeatedly accused him of a lack of independent compositional inventiveness. This is how Eduard Hanslick writes about a symphony by Otto Bach:

"... a symphony of enormous duration, apparently with a discreet 'program'. To analyze this thaw of swell, noise and reminiscences would be futile work. The driest sobriety celebrates a graceful wedding party here with wild fantasy. A large orchestra with two The harps, ophicleide, bass drum and cymbal are in constant turmoil, but all the noisy instruments of the Turkish Empire are unable to mask this lack of thought. [...] It was to our courage like one who, before going to sleep, did all Wagnerian operas and some Liszt's symphonies would have belonged to it, and now dreams of it in a confused mess. There is hardly any talk of an artistic form; three or four times in each piece one believes the end has come, and - is mistaken. [...] The The instrumentation is terrifyingly brutal, the trumpets, trumpets, ophicleids cannot breathe - an armored frigate on the city park pond. "

Bach composed a Te Deum (1856), a Missa Solemnis in D (1869) and a Requiem (1879) of large church music for soli, choir and orchestra . In his work there are also several operas, including Sardanapal ( Lord Byron , 1862, not performed), Lenore op. 30 (Otto Prechtler, premiered in Gotha in 1874 ), The Argonauten and Medea (both Franz Grillparzer , 1876, not performed). He also set Friedrich Hebbel's tragedy The Nibelungs to music . Bach also composed four symphonies, a symphonic poem Spring-Middle , a violin (1854) and a piano concerto (1870), a string quartet in G minor (1851), a string quintet in A minor (1864), chamber music, piano and choral works as well as numerous songs. He also edited several works by Mozart .

Most of Otto Bach's works are now in the music collection of the Austrian National Library in Vienna.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hedwig Abraham (Red.): Freiherr Alexander von Bach . In: viennatouristguide.at , accessed on August 19, 2015.
  2. ^ Eduard Hanslick: From the Concertsaal, Vienna 1870, p. 285f.
personal data
SURNAME Bach, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian church musician and conductor
DATE OF BIRTH February 9, 1833
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH July 3, 1893
Place of death Unterwaltersdorf