Philipp Fahrbach the Younger

Philipp Fahrbach the Younger, born in Vienna in 1843, came from a noted Viennese family of dance musicians and bandmasters active in the orbit of the Strauss dynasty. He trained with his father, Philipp Fahrbach the Elder, a well-known conductor and composer in the orbit of the Strausses, and followed him into the profession, composing more than five hundred dances and marches in the popular Viennese idiom. From 1860 he served as a military bandmaster, later guest-conducting across Europe, and he was a familiar figure in Vienna’s flourishing dance-music scene of the later nineteenth century, supplying the ballrooms and pleasure gardens with a steady stream of fashionable entertainment. Though overshadowed by his more famous contemporaries, Fahrbach was a skilled craftsman whose lively pieces held their own place in the repertoire. He died in Vienna in 1894. His music is rarely heard today, which makes its appearance at the New Year’s Concert, a first for this composer, a genuine act of rediscovery.