(b Dresden, 8 Jan 1830; d Cairo, 12 Feb 1894). German conductor, pianist and composer. His musical studies began at the age of nine with piano lessons from Friedrich Wieck. Further studies took him to Dresden (with Max Eberwein) and Leipzig (with Plaidy and Hauptmann); he also met Raff and other musicians at Stuttgart in 1846–8. After hearing Wagner conduct in Dresden in 1849 and the première of Lohengrin under Liszt at Weimar in 1850, he abandoned the law career chosen for him by his mother. He sought advice from Liszt and practical help from Wagner, by then in Zürich, who arranged for him to conduct Donizetti’s La fille du régiment. Bülow’s lack of tact soon led to his dismissal from Zürich, however, and he moved as musical director to the small opera house in St Gallen, where he began with Der Freischütz. It was well received, not least because he conducted it without the score, a feature of his working method that was to become renowned.
His conducting work was then interrupted by Liszt, who accepted him as a piano pupil in Weimar in 1851. He completely rethought his piano technique, embarking on a strict regimen of hard work; he also began to compose and wrote some reviews that both impressed and offended. Liszt regarded Bülow as one of the greatest musical phenomena he had encountered, assuring his parents that ‘his talent will place him in the first rank of the greatest pianists’. After teaching in Berlin (1855–64) and undertaking concert tours as a pianist, Bülow began an important phase in his career when he was appointed Hofkapellmeister in Munich. There he gave the premières of Tristan und Isolde (1865) and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868). In his meticulous preparation and rehearsal from memory of both operas (for five years he had been preparing a piano score of Tristan), Bülow virtually developed the procedure by which operas have since come to be staged in Germany and elsewhere. He began with individual coaching of his répétiteurs so that they in turn could prepare the singers to his satisfaction. He would then rehearse the singers both singly and in ensembles before they began production rehearsals with piano. This schedule of preparation was also used for the orchestra, with sectional and then full orchestral rehearsals before combining players and singers in Sitzproben and stage rehearsals (there were 11 pre-dress rehearsals for Tristan before the final dress rehearsal).
In 1869 Bülow resigned from Munich, unable to cope when his wife, Liszt’s daughter Cosima, whom he had married in 1857, left him for Wagner and when he foresaw the problems of staging the première of Das Rheingold according to demands made by King Ludwig against the composer’s wishes. Despite the humiliation of having been publicly cuckolded for so long by Wagner, Bülow remained remarkably loyal to him as a musician, though he never set foot in Bayreuth. When Wagner died in 1883 Bülow telegraphed his distraught widow, ‘Soeur, il faut vivre’. He began to undertake concert tours from 1872, visiting England in 1873 and the USA in 1875–6, where he gave 139 concerts, including the première of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto in Boston (a turbulent affair, according to James Huneker, in which conductor, orchestra and audience alike were subjected to advice and insults). Bülow was a fervent champion of Tchaikovsky, and was one of the first west European musicians to recognize the composer’s talent; the concerto was dedicated to him.
Bülow spent the years 1878–80 as Hofkapellmeister in Hanover, but resigned after a quarrel with the tenor Anton Schott (whom he had described during Lohengrin as a Knight of the Swine rather than of the Swan). Bülow moved on to Meiningen as Hofmusikdirektor, where from 1880 to 1885 he moulded the orchestra into one of Germany’s finest, insisting that they play standing up and from memory. On one occasion he included two performances in one evening of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He was an admirer and friend of Brahms, and with his 48-piece Meiningen orchestra gave the première of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony in October 1885. He caused astonishment by conducting Brahms’s First Piano Concerto from the keyboard, and by his performance with full strings of Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge – innovations that bear witness to the orchestral discipline he had instilled. He also introduced five-string basses, the Ritter alto viola and pedal timpani into the orchestra. In 1882 he married the actress Marie Schanzer, who became his biographer and the editor of his letters. His last years were spent touring (including appearances in Glasgow in 1878 and London in 1888), teaching at Raff’s Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt and the Klavier-Schule Klindworth in Berlin, or guest conducting at the Berlin and Hamburg opera houses. His precarious mental state began to decline in the 1890s and he entered a private institution in 1893. Ill-health persuaded him the following year to seek the warmth and dry air of Egypt, but he died in a Cairo hotel.
Eduard Dannreuther described Bülow’s pianism as possessing a ‘passionate intellectuality’ (his detractors preferred to omit the word ‘passionate’) with ‘all effects analysed and calculated with the utmost subtlety, and yet the whole left an impression of warm spontaneity’. His physical and intellectual stamina is illustrated by his habit in the 1880s of performing Beethoven’s last five sonatas in a single recital. In New York in 1889 he played 22 sonatas in 11 days. The critic Henry Krehbiel observed that ‘those who wish to add intellectual enjoyment to the pleasures of the imagination derive a happiness from Bülow’s playing which no other pianist can give to the same degree’. Yet Clara Schumann found him a ‘wearisome player’ (the dislike was mutual). Bruno Walter noted ‘a certain didactic element which may have deprived it of some of the spontaneity manifested in his orchestral work’. Amy Fay called him a ‘colossal artist’, saying that ‘he impresses you as using the instrument only to express ideas. With him you forget all about the piano, and are absorbed only in the thought or the passion of the piece’. She also remarked on his disdainful manner to his audiences, reporting that he liked to have two pianos on the stage at a recital so that he could present either his face or his back to the public. According to Richard Strauss, a Bülow protégé, he had small hands and could barely stretch an octave. Nevertheless, Bülow’s technique was highly accomplished, even for an age of great pianists, although it declined in his later years.
As a composer Bülow naturally attached himself to the New German School. He never wrote an opera, despite considering the subjects of Tristram and Merlin. His piano works are technically demanding, and reflect the manner of Liszt in their bravura and some of the thematic handling. He composed music for Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar op.10, the orchestral ballad Des Sängers Fluch op.16, the symphonic poem Nirwana op.20, and Vier Charakterstücke for orchestra op.23. He also prepared editions of keyboard works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Cramer, Domenico Scarlatti, Weber and others.
Bülow was a musician of formidable ability, with absolute self-command and an acute intellectual power of interpretation, notably of new German works. But he also possessed an irascible nature; he was quarrelsome, nervous, passionate and given to extremes of mood. As a conductor, Weingartner thought he lacked the necessary instinct for working in opera and that by devoting his entire attention to the orchestra he ignored his singers; Bülow’s 1887 performance of Carmen in Hamburg horrified Weingartner with its musical aberrations and excessive rubato. Yet Richard Strauss had the highest regard for his intellect, analysis of phrasing and grasp of the psychological content of the music of Beethoven and Wagner.
MGG1 (W. Kahl) [incl. list of works]
A. Fay: Music-Study in Germany (New York, 1881/R)
M. von Bülow, ed.: Hans von Bülow: Briefe und Schriften (Leipzig, 1895–1908) [i–ii, 2/1899; iii, 2/1911]
C. Bache, ed. and trans.: The Early Correspondence of Hans von Bülow (London, 1896/R)
La Mara [M. Lipsius], ed.: Briefwechsel zwischen Franz Liszt und Hans von Bülow (Leipzig, 1898)
E. Förster-Nietzsche and P. Gast, eds.: Friedrich Nietzsches Briefwechsel mit Hans von Bülow, Hugo von Senger, Mawilda von Meysenburg, Gesammelte Briefe, iii/2 (Berlin, 1905), 331–68
D. Thode, ed.: Richard Wagners Briefe an Hans von Bülow (Jena, 1916)
M. von Bülow: Hans von Bülow (Stuttgart, 1925)
R. du Moulin-Eckart, ed.: Neue Briefe von Hans von Bülow (Munich, 1927; Eng. trans., 1931)
E. Newman: The Life of Richard Wagner (London, 1933–47/R)
L. Schemann: Hans von Bülow im Lichte der Wahrheit (Regensburg, 1935)
M. Millenkovich-Morold: Dreigestirn: Wagner, Liszt, Bülow (Leipzig, 1940)
K. Huschke: Hans von Bülow als Klavierpädagoge (Horb, 1948)
P. Tinel: ‘L’enseignement pianistique de Hans von Bülow’, Bulletin de la classe des Beaux-Arts de l’Académie royale de Belgique, xli (1959), 53–68
M. Gregor-Dellin, ed.: R. Wagner: Mein Leben (Munich, 1963, 2/1976; Eng. trans., 1983)
S.B. Partick: Hans von Bülow as Music Critic (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1973)
W. Bollert: ‘Hans von Bülow als Dirigent: Marginalien zur künstlerischen Laufbahn zum Wesen’, Melos/NZM, i (1975), 88–95
J. Deaville: ‘Cornelius über ein Konzert Hans von Bülows in Partenkirchen: ein bisher unveröffentlichter Artikel’, Musik in Bayern, no.42 (1991), 121–40
R.A. Lott: ‘“A Continuous Trance”: Hans von Bülow’s Tour of America’, JM, xii (1994), 529–49
P. Crombie: Hans von Bülow: a Biography (forthcoming)
CHRISTOPHER FIFIELD