Alphons Diepenbrock

Alphons Diepenbrock was born in Amsterdam in 1862 into a prosperous Catholic family and never had a formal musical training. He studied classics at the University of Amsterdam, took his doctorate in 1888 with a dissertation on Seneca and then worked for some years as a schoolteacher in ‘s-Hertogenbosch. As a composer he was self-taught. After returning to Amsterdam in the mid-1890s he lived as a private tutor in Latin and Greek, wrote essays on literature, philosophy and religion, and composed. Most of his output is vocal, and he chose his texts with a scholar’s care: the Catholic liturgy, Novalis, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Baudelaire and Verlaine among them. His style joins the polyphony of the sixteenth-century Netherlandish masters to Wagner’s chromatic harmony and, later, to the refinement he found in Debussy. His works include the Missa in die festo, two Hymnen an die Nacht after Novalis and Im großen Schweigen. Willem Mengelberg performed his music with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, and Gustav Mahler was among his friends. He died in 1921.