Bruch (Max Bruch, 1838-1920)
Bruch was born in Cologne on 6 January 1838 to a civil servant father and a well-known soprano and music teacher – a typical middle-class family. At the age of nine, Bruch's writings caught the attention of the famous conductor of the time, Ferdinand Hiller, who volunteered to mentor the young genius. At the age of fourteen, Bruch won the Mozart Scholarship in Frankfurt for a string quartet, studied under the famous teachers Reinecke and Breuning, and traveled to various music cities in Germany. At the age of twenty, Bruch returned to his hometown to work as a music teacher, releasing the 01st, the comedy opera Scherz, list and Rache, based on Goethe's early works. After his father's death at the age of twenty-three, Bruch traveled to Deau and spent nearly four years in Mannheim, concentrating on composition. Around this time, he became acquainted with the poet Geibel, who later filled in the words for himself. At the age of twenty-five, Bruch published the opera Lorelei. The following year, frithjof, a chorus based on Norse mythology for sopranos, baritones and male choirs, was published, and the song was so successful that he was invited to Paris and Brussels to conduct the work himself. Soon after, the soprano, baritone, and choir works "Beautiful Ellen", which followed a Scottish girl who heard the bagpipes of reinforcements during the siege of Lucknow and stopped the garrison from surrendering to the ruthless Sepoy.
In 1868, Bruch published his time-honored Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor (Op.26), which (written to Joseph Joachim) triumphed with incredible fluency and warm poetry, and the second movement was one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever made. Bruch later wrote two violin concertos, the second of which (for Sarazati) was occasionally played (reference record: Angel CDC 49071, Perlman and Mehta); the third was almost lost. During this time he served as court musician for Sondershausen and also published two symphonies: "Down in E major, Op.28" and "F major, Op.36", which coincided more than a decade later with E major, Op.51, and his symphony collection consisted of three pieces (see records: Philips 420 932-2, Kurt Masur and the Leipzig Bolshewk orchestra of the Buschan Haus). After leaving the Court Orchestra, Bruch spent several years in Berlin and Bonn, where he worked full-time composing music.
Around 1880, Bruch was hired as the permanent conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra in England, and for three years he wanted to settle in England, but because of his heavy German accent and Teutonic perfectionist personality, he often had friction with the orchestra and had to give up. While in England, he married the soprano Clara Tuczek and wrote two excellent works – Scottish Fantasia, Op. 46 for violin and orchestra after painstakingly collecting Scottish folk songs; and Kol Nidrei (titled: Prayer for the Jewish Ceremony on Yom Kippur Evening), written for the Jewish community in Liverpool and performed by cellos and orchestras. Because of Kol Nidrei's Jewish color, some people think that Bruch is Jewish, but in fact he comes from a Protestant family.
In 1891 Bruch was hired to teach composition at the Berlin Conservatory, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 1893, became Vice-President of the Berlin Conservatory in 1907 after Joachim, retired from the Conservatoire in 1910, and was elected honorary member of the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1913. From this point of view, Bruch's status in the German music industry in his later years was very high, but in fact his works are gradually being forgotten. It was a time of Mahler, Debussy, and Stravinsky, but Bruch still insisted on writing music that was "easy to be understood by the audience" with the music of Mendelssohn's era, and the chorus on which he became famous was fading in Europe, and it was natural to be regarded as a "legacy of the former dynasty".
Bruch was closed-minded, self-centered, and dictatorial, and in his later years was very dismissive of the "terrible" discord in weill and Demidt's works, and even angrily criticized. The outbreak of World War I, the death of his son on the battlefield, dragged him into despair, his wife died in 1919, and Bruch died the following year at the age of eighty-two.
For records of the Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, the British Penguin Record Guide "Samsung Daihua" is preferred for the version of Lin Zhaoliang and Slatkin (CBS MK42315); the AMERICAN CD Review recommends the Bell and Marina version (Decca 421 145-2), and the Japanese record art "New Five Hundred Discs" preferred zheng Jinghe version (Decca 417 707-2). And of course, the famous performance of master Heifetz (RCA 6214-2)