Hans von Bronsart (1830-1913) was born in Berlin on 11 February 1830 and died in
Munich on 3 November 1913. He studied with Franz Kullak in Berlin and was an early
pupil of Liszt at the Altenburg in Weimar from 1853 to 1857 where he met many
musicians including Hector Berlioz and Johannes Brahms.
On 21 July 1855 at a soirée at the Altenburg, fourteen-year old prodigy and Liszt pupil,
Carl Tausig, played some pieces. He and his father Aloys, a respected piano teacher,
were presented to Hans von Bülow and various members of the Weimar school. Bülow
played three of his own works and Liszt concluded by playing his Scherzo and his Sonata.
Afterwards everyone went down to the Erbprinz Hotel for dinner.
Bronsart heard Liszt play his Sonata at the Altenburg in July 1855, presumably this
performance of 21 July 1855, and wrote in the ‘Neue Zeitschrift für Musik’: ‘In regard to
its self-stipulated form and development, this is one of the singular events of modern
times, as if it were a continuation of Beethoven’s late period sonatas, a work to consider
as a new beginning for the Sonata.’
Liszt thought highly of Bronsart and dedicated his second piano concerto to Bronsart who
gave its first performance. Bronsart met his wife Ingeborg Starck (1840-1913), who was
also a composer, in Weimar and they married in 1862. He worked as a conductor in
Leipzig and Berlin and then took the post of general manger of the Royal Theatre
Hanover in 1895. He composed piano, chamber and orchestral music, including two
piano concertos, the second of which Bülow and Sgambati included in their repertoires.
Karl Heinrich Barth, the teacher of Arthur Rubinstein, was his pupil. Bronsart did not
make any discs or rolls.
BULOW
Hans von Bülow (1830-1894) was born in Dresden, Germany, on 8 January 1830 and
died in Cairo on 12 February 1894. He studied at the Leipzig Conservatory with Louis
Plaidy and from 1839 with Friedrich Wieck in Dresden. He matriculated as a law student
at Leipzig University at the age of eighteen but continued to study music. He met
Wagner who taught him conducting, and Liszt from whom he took piano lessons at the
Altenburg, Weimar. He studied with Liszt for two years, commencing in the summer of
- He worked on Czerny’s ‘School of Velocity’ and made a special study of Liszt’s
Transcendental Studies. Liszt regarded Bülow as his most intellectually gifted pupil and
his true heir and successor in the field of piano playing. They remained close friends all
their lives.
Bülow toured Europe for the first time in 1853 and again two years later. In 1855 he
succeeded Theodore Kullak as head of Stern’s Conservatory, Berlin. On 6 December
1855, at an all-Liszt concert conducted by Liszt himself, Bülow was soloist in Liszt’s first
piano concerto. There was a friendly reaction from the audience but the conservative
musical press in Berlin were hostile.