Das Echte und Innerliche in der Kunst: Der Komponist, Dirigent und Pädagoge Woldemar Bargiel (1828– 1897): Ein Beitrag zur Musikgeschichte des „unbekannten“ 19. Jahrhunderts (review)

Dean Cáceres’s study of the life and works of Woldemar Bargiel explores the contributions of an important and highly praised, though now nearly forgotten, mid-nineteenth-century musician, offering a unique perspective on nineteenth-century music through Bargiel’s relationships with Clara and Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Joseph Joachim, and Johannes Brahms. As Cáceres notes in the second sentence of the work:

As a so-called “Kleinmeister,” as a typical composer of the “second tier” who enjoyed in his lifetime a considerable degree of fame, he belongs to a modern historical-aesthetic discourse that complements or questions a view of the long familiar idolized figures [“Sockel-gestalten”] of music history.

(p. 3; translation mine)

This criticism of a modern canon-based historiography is one reason why Cáceres’s book will be of interest to scholars working on nineteenth-century music generally and German romanticism more specifically. Scholars seeking to construct a multifaceted portrait of everyday musical life in the midcentury will find many useful discussions here, as will those working on the development of musical style in the years between the early romantic innovations of the 1830s and 1840s and the full bloom of late romanticism in the 1880s through the turn of the century. As Cáceres notes, the turbulent years of the 1850s and 1860s present a music culture in flux, and a generation of composers (including Brahms and Wagner) searching for new solutions to old musical problems. Woldemar Bargiel’s music offers us a window into the spirit of his age.

Woldemar Bargiel was the oldest of four children born to Clara Schumann’s mother Mariane and her second husband Adolf Bargiel. The siblings remained close throughout their lives, and Clara and Robert served as role models for Woldemar in his early years. He visited them in Dresden during summer holidays and studied counterpoint with Robert in 1845 to prepare for his entry to the Leipzig conservatory, where he met many of the musicians who would belong to his personal and professional social circle for the rest of his life. Clara and Robert interceded on his behalf with publishers and performers; Robert critiqued his music and made suggestions for improvement. His relationship with the Schumanns and their circle played a formative role in his development, and his aesthetic and musical ideals coalesced as a response to and adoption of their goals and dreams during the optimistic Vormärz period.

After his studies at the Leipzig Conservatory, Bargiel spent nine years in Berlin as a freelance composer and music teacher, and during this time he published fifteen works, mostly piano pieces, with one piano trio that was frequently performed in the 1860s and that some critics hailed as one of the most important works of the new chamber-music style. In the solo piano works, Bargiel utilized the early romantic genres pioneered by earlier pianist-composers (character pieces, fantasies, suites), and employed similar techniques including the use of mottos and ciphers, quotation and allusion to his own and others’ works, and an eclectic mix of old and new musical styles.

Bargiel took up a position at the Cologne Conservatory in 1859 but did not stay there for long; he leapt at the opportunity to serve as music director for the Rotterdam branch of the Maatschappij tot Bevorder-ing der Toonkunst (the Dutch National Society for the Advancement of Music). In Rotterdam he cultivated a conducting career that allowed him to promote his “Schumannian” musical ideals, leading performances of his own works and those of his favorite predecessors and colleagues. He also spearheaded revival performances of Bach’s St. Matthew and St. John Passions, as...