Hans von Bülow: A Life for Music (review)

It is probably safe to say that no musician of the nineteenth century had a more decisive impact on the direction of German music than Hans von Bülow. As a teenager and law student, he crossed paths with Robert and Clara Schumann, came to know and quickly idolize Richard Wagner during the turbulent late 1840s, became Franz Liszt’s star pupil and outspoken defender of “Zukunftsmusik,” promoted the orchestral works of Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, and furthered Gustav Mahler’s conducting and—by extension—composing careers at a decisive moment in the young musician’s artistic development. In doing so, he revolutionized the concert-going experience as conductor and pianist. Yet, scholarship on Bülow has been overwhelmingly underwhelming. Indeed, only in the last decade have his life and works been examined with the necessary critical care: first by Frithjof Haas, Hans von Bülow: Leben und Wirken (Wilhelmshaven: F. Noetzel, 2002); and more recently by Alan Walker in Hans von Bülow: A Life and Times (Oxford: Ox -ford University Press, 2010; reviewed by James L. Zychowicz in Notes 67, no. 2 [December 2010]: 333–35). These two authors sought to present Bülow as a creative musician who composed, arranged, performed, taught, and criticized—in other words, as someone no different than, say, Liszt or Camille Saint-Saëns.

While acknowledging the various aspects of Bülow’s artistry, Kenneth Birkin argues in his Hans von Bülow: A Life for Music that “it is as a self-styled ‘reproductive’ artist that he made his greatest impact” (p. ix). This position significantly colors Birkin’s presentation. The first two chapters, which cover Bülow’s upbringing and first years in law school, lead inexorably to chapter 3, “Decision Time: Weimar, Zurich (1850– 1851)” and chapter 4, “Weimar Apprentice-ship (1851–1853),” in which the twenty-year-old takes oaths of servitude to Wagner and Liszt. On the latter, Birkin wryly notes that “the emotional bond formed in those months in Switzerland was, in the fullness of time, to prove hostage to fortune” (p. 45). Indeed, in the following five chapters, which cover the next decade of Bülow’s career in Austria-Hungary, Chocieszewice, and Berlin, Bülow repeatedly manages to change his fortunes for the better, only to undermine them at the next turn. To be sure, Bülow’s commitment to (good) music above all is commendable, but one cannot help but wonder whether he could have achieved his artistic aims earlier in his career had he but been a better “team player.”

Coming in the middle of Birkin’s narrative, chapter 10 chronicles Bülow’s tenure in Munich from 1864 to 1869, a period made famous by his conducting the premieres of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meister-singer von Nürnberg, and made infamous thanks to his wife—Liszt’s daughter—Cosima. Birkin devotes most of the chapter to Bülow’s extraordinarily productive concert activities: more than 230 appearances that include music by the usual suspects (J. S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner), but also by Charles-Valentin Alkan, Josef Rheinberger, and Anton Rubinstein, to name but a few. While Birkin dutifully covers Cosima’s affair, he spends little time rationalizing it. But Bülow’s chief reason for denying the liaison may rest in his success at Munich. As he informed Karl Bechstein, “I am musical over-lord of a city which will soon, artistically, eclipse Berlin, Vienna and Leipzig! Yes, indeed—that’s exactly the goal I’m aiming at” (p. 171). This and similar statements amply justify Birkin’s subtitle.

The remaining chapters follow the Munich model: promise followed by failure. Birkin notes a “recklessness which became more pronounced as Bülow rose, during the 1880s and 1890s, to veritable guru status on the German musical scene” (p. 222), and, indeed, Bülow’s actions in Hanover (chap. 16), Meiningen (chap. 17), and Hamburg...