Friedrich Gernsheim

[1] He made his first public appearance as a concert pianist in 1850 and toured for two seasons, then settled with his family in Leipzig, where he studied piano with Ignaz Moscheles from 1852.

His travels afterwards took him to Saarbrücken, where in 1861 he took the conductor post vacated by Hermann Levi; to Cologne, where in 1865 Ferdinand Hiller appointed him to the staff of the Conservatory (his pupils there included Engelbert Humperdinck and Carl Lachmund); he then served as musical director of the Philharmonic Society of Rotterdam from 1874 until 1890.

Due to his Jewish background, his work was banned in Nazi Germany, and his papers and a biography written about him by Karl Holl were removed from music libraries.

Christopher Fifield suggests that Gernsheim owes his “instrumentation, thematic shapes, accompaniments, and orchestral textures” to both Brahms and Max Bruch.

Moscheles also admitted, after playing Gernsheim’s first piano quartet, that he composed “with great agility in the manner of Schumann” and the Romantic style of the time, but thought his clear motives were often sacrificed to “artificial counterpoint.” Many theorists and music critics today agree with this evaluation of the composer, saying his symphonies and other works tend to be discursive, but all admire his talent in orchestration and achievements in chamber music.

His late orchestral works, such as his fourth symphony and the tone poem Zu einem Drama, demonstrate the maturity reached in his chamber music but on a larger scale.

Alexander Ringer calls this virtue “Gediegenheit,” or “decency and solidarity,” a principle that served as a constant guide in Gernsheim’s musical and personal life.