Brodsky and His Circle : European Cross-Currents in Manchester Chamber Concerts, 1895-1929
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BRODSKY AND HIS CIRCLE : EUROPEAN CROSS-CURRENTS IN MANCHESTER CHAMBER CONCERTS, 1895-1929 GEOFFREY EDWARD THOMASON A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Manchester Metropolitan University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Awarded for a Collaborative Programme of Research at the Royal Northern College of Music by the Manchester Metropolitan University January 2016 In memoriam Anthony Thomas Hodges (1934-2002) He opened Pandora’s box CONTENTS Acknowledgments 1 Abstract 3 Introduction 6 Chapter 1. Chamber music in Manchester before Brodsky – The Hallé tradition 26 Chapter 2. Brodsky in Europe – Building a repertoire, building the circle 55 Chapter 3. American interlude 88 Chapter 4. Brodsky in Manchester – Renewing links 106 Chapter 5. The Brodsky Quartet Concerts to 1914 133 Chapter 6. Brodsky, Beethoven and the Brotherhood 174 Chapter 7. A tale of two citizens 204 Chapter 8. After the war – The final Brodsky Quartet Concerts 240 Chapter 9. The Brodsky Quartet at the Tuesday Mid-day Concerts 271 Conclusion 302 Bibliography 310 Appendix 1 – Adolph Brodsky timeline 341 Appendix 2 – Concerts given by the Brodsky Quartet 347 Appendix 3 – Resumé of the principal chamber concerts to which 377 Adolph Brodsky contributed Illustrations Fig.1 – Teutonic satire 190 Fig.2 – The Excursionist 194 Fig.3 – The triumph of culture 195 Fig.4 – The fight for right 196 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Of those to whom thanks and acknowledgement are due, pride of place must go to the Royal Northern College of Music for providing support on so many levels. Not the least of these is its generosity in funding my research and the numerous conference presentations it has given rise to. To Anna Wright and my library colleagues and to Heather Roberts our archivist, very many thanks for your patience and encouragement. Especial thanks to Barbara Kelly for her excellent supervision (and all those lunches) and to Fabrice Fitch and Martin Blain for their perceptive comments. Beyond the RNCM there are many in the wider community of music librarians who have facilitated my access to sources. Barbara Wiermann at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig; Siren Steen at the Offentlige Bibliotek Bergen; Jörg Prufert at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preussischer Kulturbesitz; Otto Biba at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Vienna; Ines Pampel at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden; Bob Kosovsky at New York Public Library; Ros Edwards at Manchester Central Library; Eleanor Roberts at the Hallé Concerts Society; Peter Horton and Katy Hamilton, formerly of the Royal College of Music; Kathy Adamson at the Royal Academy of Music; Rupert Ridgewell and Chris Scobie at the British Library; the staff of the BBC Written Archives. I am grateful to Thomas Schmidt at the University of Manchester for his assistance in deciphering German Gothic handwriting and to Maria Briggs, former RNCM student, 2 for her translations of Russian letters.1 Thanks as well to Frank Rutherford and John Stowell for sharing information on Christopher Rawdon Briggs, and to the late Delia and Tessa Fuchs for their childhood memories of Carl Fuchs. There are those too who are probably unaware of how much encouragement can be found in a chance conversation or a single comment. Styra Avins for her suggestion that I might want to “write something about Brodsky”. George Kennaway for several interesting chats about Brodsky’s performing material. Christina Bashford for useful suggestions concerning background reading. Jim Gourlay who, at the outset, said “you can do this”. There are also some who will never know of their contribution, since they can only be acknowledged posthumously. Two of them were pupils of Adolph Brodsky. Ben Horsfall, from whom as an undergraduate I first heard the name Brodsky and the plentiful and often affectionate anecdotes that went with it. Clifford Knowles, former leader of the RLPO and sometime tutor at the RNCM, whose own reminiscences of his teacher are set down in print. Last, but certainly not least, the late Tony Hodges, first librarian of the RNCM who one day presented me with a black metal box full of autograph letters and thereby introduced me to the Brodsky Archive. It is to his memory that this dissertation is dedicated. 1 All other translations (German, French and Italian) are the author’s. 3 ABSTRACT Adolph Brodsky (1851-1929) is today remembered principally as a Russian violinist, notably as the soloist in the first performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. Like many performers he has otherwise received little scholarly attention in a historiography hitherto weighted towards discussion of music as a compositional act and thereby undervaluing the roles of performers as intermediaries between composers and their audiences. This study, the first to examine Brodsky’s career as a chamber musician, focusses on the interrelationship between the contacts and formative influences developed in his earlier years in Europe and the USA, and his period as Principal of the Royal Manchester College of Music, 1895-1929. It argues that these influences placed him in an advantageous position to stamp his own imprimatur on the repertoire he chose to present in his adopted city and thereby influence the tastes of his audiences there. Brodsky was able to take advantage of the substantial German community in Manchester to offer a repertoire centered largely on the Austro-German canon, at the same time introducing to Manchester audiences less familiar repertoire by those composers with whom he had forged friendships in Europe. These included Grieg, Busoni and Nováček as well as Tchaikovsky and Brahms, all of whom formed part of his circle during his professorship at the Leipzig Conservatoire, 1883-1891. Building on a tradition developed by Charles Hallé, Brodsky established Manchester as a thriving centre for chamber music which not only complemented its reputation for orchestral music, created by Hallé and continued by Hans Richter, but also rivalled the contemporary chamber music culture in London. Whereas late nineteenth- and 4 early twentieth-century concert life in the capital is beginning to emerge as a fruitful area of study, parallel developments in Manchester have to date received next to no attention. What little body of writing exists has concentrated on orchestral music, ignoring both chamber music and the interrelationships between performers, audiences and repertoire. This thesis charts Brodsky’s increasingly predominant role in shaping the discourse of chamber music in Manchester over the best part of the two decades prior to the First World War, bringing to the city a distinctive “brand” in its chamber concerts which at that stage no other British city could offer. Central to its argument is the positioning of the war and its aftermath as a cultural watershed in Manchester, accelerating an incipient decline in the popularity of chamber concerts and necessitating the emergence of new models in order for the tradition to continue. The dissipation and increasing ostracism of the city’s German community, many of whom supported Brodsky’s chamber concerts, weakened the link between Brodsky and his audiences. Brodsky’s absence from Manchester as a wartime internee, a questioning of the pre-eminence of the Austro-German repertoire he had championed, the rise of a younger generation of performers bringing newer repertoire, and the emergence of new audiences are all viewed as contributing to a decline in Brodsky’s role within the city’s post-war pattern of chamber concerts. In his final years Brodsky thus found it increasingly difficult to maintain his status within a musical landscape offering challenges to pre-war patterns of repertoire and a shifting demography of performers and audiences. 5 This study draws on sources including letters, concert programmes and press reports to examine Brodsky’s contribution to a period in Manchester’s cultural history, and to a specific musical genre, both as yet overlooked within the emerging discourse of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British music studies. It thereby accords the city its due importance as one whose musical life prior to the First World War was particularly susceptible to the absorption of European influences to carve out its own distinctive role in British chamber music, the legacy of which, though moderated by the war, was strong enough to survive and continues today. 6 6 Introduction The inherited assumption, largely unchallenged until recent years, that the history of Western music was predominantly one of composers and their creative output, has given rise to what Nicholas Cook has aptly termed a “hierarchy of value”. It is in the nature of things that the activities of composing, performing and appraising represent a chronological sequence… And what begins as a chronological priority somehow turns into a hierarchy of value… that is reinforced by the way it maps on to different individuals or social groups: composers, performers, and the “appraisers” who range from professional music critics and educators to music-lovers and “ordinary” listeners.1 This is a hierarchy in which performers, let alone their audiences, have been marginalised as supporting players, the passive executants or receivers of another’s creativity and in consequence deemed to have little or no bearing on the historical discourse to which such creativity contributed. In this context it is therefore understandable that the name of Adolph Brodsky, a violinist, has surfaced more often than not simply as a footnote to the career of Tchaikovsky. That it was Brodsky who, unbeknown to the composer, persuaded Hans Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic to give the first performance of his Violin Concerto after it had been rejected by its original dedicatee Leopold Auer, is the one detail of his career which can be said to have passed into the realm of common musical knowledge. Those seeking further biographical information about Brodsky in a standard reference work like the New 1 Nicholas Cook.