Max Bruch

Max Bruch was a German composer best known today for a single work, his First Violin Concerto, which became one of the most performed pieces in the violin repertoire. He wrote operas, oratorios, and choral works that were admired in his lifetime, but it is his gift for a singing, memorable melody, heard also in the Scottish Fantasy and Kol Nidrei, that has kept his name alive in concert halls long after most of his output fell out of the repertoire.

Bruch's music favors long, songful melodies over dramatic conflict. His concertos for violin and cello often open quietly, almost like an improvisation, before the soloist enters with a broad theme that the orchestra later takes up and expands. Rhythms tend to be steady rather than driving, and the orchestration is warm and full without being heavy, letting the solo instrument sing above it. Slow movements are lyrical and unhurried, sometimes drawing on folk or liturgical tunes, as in Kol Nidrei's use of a Hebrew prayer melody. Finales usually pick up the pace with dance-like energy, often flavored by folk idioms, Scottish, Swedish, or Russian. Pieces run from short single-movement showpieces of five or six minutes to full concertos of around 25 minutes, always ending decisively rather than trailing off.

Max Bruch was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1838, into a musical household, and showed early talent as a composer, writing his first works as a teenager. He studied in Cologne and went on to build a career across German-speaking Europe as a conductor as well as a composer, holding posts in cities including Koblenz, Sondershausen, and Liverpool, where he led the Philharmonic Society for a few years in the 1880s. He later returned to Germany and taught composition at the Berlin Academy of Arts for two decades, shaping a generation of younger composers.

His compositional output was large and varied, including three operas, oratorios, choral works, and pieces for chorus and orchestra that were well regarded in his own time. Yet from early on it was his instrumental writing for solo strings and orchestra that found the widest audience, above all his First Violin Concerto, completed in 1866 and revised with help from the violinist Joseph Joachim. He wrote two further violin concertos and other concertante works for violin and cello, but none matched the first concerto's popularity, a fact that reportedly frustrated him during his lifetime.

Bruch remained active as a composer and teacher into his final years. He died in Berlin in 1920, at the age of 82, having lived to see musical styles shift dramatically around him while his own most famous work retained its place in the standard repertoire.