Hans von Bülow: A Life for Music by Kenneth Birkin (review)

‘Hans von Bülow is known to posterity as the man whose wife left him for Richard Wagner; and as the first conductor of Tristan and Die Meistersinger. But to reduce him to a footnote of Wagnerian biography does scant justice to the memory of one whose influence on nineteenth-and twentieth-century musical performance and practice was seminal’ (p. ix). Hans von Bülow (1830–94) came from an ancient Prussian family that could be traced back as far as the thirteenth century. He was initially destined for a legal career, but his evident musical talent eventually persuaded his reluctant father to allow him to join Liszt at Weimar, where he became a passionate advocate of the ideas of the New German School rapidly gaining currency around Liszt and Wagner. It was at Weimar that he first came to the attention of Richard Wagner, who recognized in the young Hans a musician of remarkable gifts who might be useful to the Wagnerian cause. The story of how Bülow was ultimately drawn within Wagner’s orbit, first as arranger of the vocal score and then conductor of Tristan (1865) and of Die Meistersinger (1868), while Wagner was conducting an affair with Bülow’s wife Cosima, is the stuff of musical legend and has often been told. The later but equally significant part of Bülow’s career is less well known: after the break with Wagner in 1869 he began a new career as a touring piano virtuoso and ultimately became the model of the first ‘star’ conductor in the modern sense of the term who set new standards of orchestral performance and was a major figure in the development of European concert life and the emergence of the Western canon.

In Hans von Bülow: A Life for Music, Kenneth Birkin has produced a work of formidable scholarship that draws on a wide range of documentary evidence to assess Bülow’s career at the centre of nineteenth-century musical life. Bülow could have become a significant composer: his early orchestral fantasy Nirvana (1854) was warmly praised by both Liszt and Wagner: ‘I have to say, it’s masterly; in my opinion, after this, you could do anything at all. . . . When I was your age I simply couldn’t have begun to write anything like it’ (p. 79). There are also striking similarities between the music of Nirvana and the chromatic material of Tristan. Bülow’s devotion to Wagner, however, acted as a bar to the development of his own powers as a composer (p. 119), and it is as a re-creative rather than as a creative artist that he strides across the later nineteenth-century musical stage like a colossus.

Birkin gives a detailed account of Bülow’s rigorous pianistic training under Liszt’s tutelage as a member of the Weimar school and of his early activities as a piano pedagogue. The breadth and depth of his direct experience of Liszt as conductor and rehearser was crucial in the formation of his later powers as an orchestral trainer. Bülow’s experience of the premiere of Lohengrin on 28 August 1850 under Liszt’s direction was seminal in his growing admiration of Wagner. Birkin is also right to remind the reader of the importance of Berlioz in Weimar. Although Weimar was the powerhouse of the New German School it was by no means restricted to German music. The Berlioz festival in November 1852 was a landmark in the French composer’s career and in the young Hans von Bülow he had gained ‘a valuable artistic ally’ (p. 62). Accounts of Bülow’s early career as a virtuoso concert artist show just how wide a repertory he had built up by an early age, although critical acclaim was by no means consistent: the critic attending his first recital in Vienna described the Beethoven Sonata (Op. 101) as ‘lacking in tonal...