Max Bruch

Max Bruch, born in Cologne in 1838, was a thoroughly Romantic German composer whose long life ran from the age of Mendelssohn well into the twentieth century, yet whose musical convictions never budged from the mid-Romantic ideals of his youth. A precocious talent who was composing by the age of nine, he made his living chiefly as a conductor, holding posts in Mannheim, Koblenz, Sondershausen, Liverpool (with the Liverpool Philharmonic) and Breslau, before settling into a long and influential professorship of composition at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik from 1890 to 1910. Bruch prized melody above all, and his sympathies lay with the conservative tradition rather than the ‘music of the future’ of Wagner and Liszt. He was a prolific composer of choral works and operas that he regarded as his most important achievements, but posterity has been ruthlessly selective: today he is remembered almost entirely for three instrumental pieces: the First Violin Concerto, the Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra, and Kol Nidrei for cello, the last built on a Jewish liturgical melody that led to a persistent and false assumption that Bruch was himself Jewish (he was, in fact, raised a Protestant). He lived just long enough to see the Romantic world he embodied swept away by the First World War, dying in Berlin-Friedenau in 1920.