Friedrich Kuhlau in the Mirror of His Flute Works (review)

Friedrich Kuhlau in the Mirror of His Flute Works. By Arndt Mehring. Translated by Laszlo and Doris Tikos. Edited by Jane Rausch. (Detroit Monographs in Musicology; Studies in Music, 27.) Warren, Mich.: Harmonie Park Press, 2000. [xviii, 103 p. ISBN 0-89990-091-7. $27.50.]

To most flutists, Friedrich Kuhlau is known as a composer of solos, duets, and chamber pieces for flute. To many pianists, he is known as a composer of those "little salon pieces" for piano, and indeed, more than half his compositions are for that instrument. As editor Jane Rausch notes in her introduction, Kuhlau, when compared to his contemporaries--Ludwig van Beethoven, Carl Maria von Weber, Franz Schubert --generally falls into that second tier of composers whose music has not been taken seriously by today's musicologists.

Musical tastes vary from one century to another, even from one generation to another. This book takes the reader back to the early nineteenth century, a time when Kuhlau, though today considered less than masterful, was actually quite popular. Although he had his share of financial difficulties, he was dubbed the "Beethoven of the flute" during his lifetime.

Kuhlau was born in Germany near Hamburg in 1786 and spent his first twenty-four years in that area. Unable to make a decent living there, however, he moved to Copenhagen in 1810 and remained a resident of Denmark until his death in 1832. He wrote several operas with varying degrees of success, but his opera Elverhøf, with more than one thousand performances, remains one of the most successful productions of the Royal Danish Theater. Thus, in addition to his reputation as a composer of flute pieces and despite his German heritage, Kuhlau became known as one of Denmark's national composers.

Apart from the article on Kuhlau in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan; New York: Grove's Dictionaries, 2001), there is little about him written in English. A biography by Carl Thrane (Friedrich Kuhlau [Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1886; reprint, Buren, Netherlands: Frits Knuf, 1979]) was the springboard for further studies done by Karl Graupner (Friedrich Kuhlau [Remscheid: H. Krumm, 1930]) and Gorm Busk (Friedrich Kuhlau: Een biografi og en kritisk analyse af hans musikdramatiske produktion [Copenhagen: Engstrøm & Sødring, 1986). These works, written in German and Danish respectively, provide biographical information and worklists, and Busk continued his research with Kuhlau breve (Copenhagen: Engstrøm & Sødring, 1990), the letters of Kuhlau to his family and his publishers, written in German--Kuhlau never learned to speak or write Danish very well --with Busk's commentary in Danish.

Mehring's work focuses on the works for one or more flutes and incorporates the research of Thrane, Graupner, and Busk, as well as other pertinent scholarship. The editor's preface states quite correctly that Mehring's book is a "boon to flutists interested in early Romantic music" (p. xiii). Her claim that Mehring offers an analysis of all of Kuhlau's flute pieces as well as advice on how to play them in the manner Kuhlau envisioned, however, is a bit inflated. Music examples with brief annotations are found throughout the book, but only about a third of the flute compositions are discussed in the body of the text. Though the annotations are useful, the reader should be warned that the promised analyses and discussions are brief.

As is true with the study of any music, understanding a composer's life and its social and historical context lends a deeper understanding of the music itself. Kuhlau's hardships, his financial problems with publishers and patrons, his illnesses, the responsibilities of caring for parents and siblings, to say nothing of the great meeting with Beethoven--all not only make for interesting reading, but bring this early-nineteenth-century composer to life. The updated list of flute works is especially valuable. There are some awkward sentence structures arising from the translation, and the music example...