Johann Nepomuk Hummel: A Musician’s Life and World (review)

With his publication of Johann Nepomuk Hummel: A Musician’s Life and World, Mark Kroll has filled an important gap in the literature. A student of Mozart and rival to Beethoven, Hummel was considered in his day to be one of Vienna’s greatest pianists and composers, and yet very few monographs on Hummel are currently available in university libraries. The most notable works are Karl Benyovszky’s J. N. Hummel: Der Mensch und Künstler (Bratislava: Eos-Verlag, 1934) and Joel Sachs’s Kapellmeister Hummel in England and France (Detroit: Information Coodinators, 1977). The book by Benyovszky is a somewhat out-of-date treasure trove of information for the Hummel enthusiast and is drawn upon heavily by Kroll. Sachs’s study is a thorough and well-documented work on several of Hummel’s concert tours. Kroll’s biography fills the gap between those two works and has the distinction of being the first English-language biography on Hummel’s life and career from birth to death.

Kroll’s structural approach to this seminal work is not what one might at first suspect. Rather than reporting on events in Hummel’s life in chronological order, Kroll arranges his chapters into a series of topics. His format makes sense for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which he addresses in his introduction: that of the complexity of Hummel’s life (p. xii). It is true that more so than with other composers, Hummel’s broad interests lend themselves toward categorization by subject rather than decade. Kroll divides his selected topics over an introduction and thirteen chapters, which include Hummel’s relationships with Mozart, Joseph Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, and Chopin, in addition to chapters on Hummel’s concert tours, his positions in Stuttgart and Weimar, and his role as an educator.

The first chapter, “The Worlds of Johann Nepomuk Hummel,” is a succinct study of Hummel’s family and includes information on their background in farming and entrepreneurship. Kroll fleshes out his investigation with details about the political and cultural environment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Substantial documentation and commentary in the form of endnotes rounds out the chapter (and each subsequent one). Particularly delightful for this reviewer is the account of Hummel’s childhood experience with the violin, as translated from the handwritten biographical notes of Max Johann Seidel (pp. 5–6). But Kroll perhaps should have addressed the conflict Seidel’s account creates with other noted sources, such as François-Joseph Fétis in his Biographie universelle des musiciens et Bibliographie générale de la musique (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1874), who asserts that failure to progress on the violin (rather than the street fight mentioned by Seidel) caused Hummel to switch from violin to piano. Kroll later qualifies Seidel as a source and admits that he may be prone to exaggeration (p. 9, note 21) which later forces Kroll to choose which elements of Seidel’s account to accept and which to dismiss (chapter 2, p. 17; chapter 3, pp. 34–36). Unfortunately, this makes parts of the book less than convincing.

Kroll’s second chapter, “The Modern Mozart of Germany,” highlights Hummel’s childhood years of study with Mozart. The author correctly points out the impact that Hummel’s association with Mozart had on his career, despite his studies lasting merely two years (ca. 1786–1788). Kroll also elaborates on the relationship between Hummel and Franz Xaver Mozart and the little-known financial dispute between Mozart’s widow and Hummel’s widow after Hummel’s death in 1837. In addition, there is some discussion of Hummel’s role as an arranger of Mozart’s works and of the relationship of Hummel’s pianism to that of Mozart. In correctly pointing out that Hummel’s later fall from favor was related to his reputation as a performer in the “old” school of Mozart, Kroll makes an error...