Johann Nepomuk Hummel

• 1. Introduction

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  Johann Nepomuk Hummel was taught piano by Mozart at the age of eight, housed and tutored free of charge for two years by the most celebrated composer in Europe. That single fact tells you something about what Hummel's contemporaries thought of him. He went on to shape the fingers of Carl Czerny, who shaped the fingers of Franz Liszt. He published a piano method that sold thousands of copies within days. Franz Schubert dedicated his last three piano sonatas to him. And yet, within a generation of his death in 1837, Hummel had been almost entirely forgotten. What happened to him? And what did the world lose when his name dropped out of the repertoire?

• 2. A Prodigy's Apprenticeships

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  Pressburg, in the Kingdom of Hungary, was where Hummel was born on the 14th of November 1778. The city is now Bratislava, Slovakia. His father Johannes was a violinist and music director who moved the family to Vienna in late 1786 or early 1787, where he took charge of the Theater auf der Wieden. It was in Vienna that young Hummel's talent caught Mozart's eye. At eight, Hummel began lessons with Mozart and lived in his household at no cost. By nine, he was performing at one of Mozart's own concerts.

  His father then took him on a European tour that reached London in 1790. There Hummel studied with Muzio Clementi and performed at the Hanover Square Rooms, playing a Mozart piano concerto alongside a sonata of his own composition. The following year, at the same venue, the thirteen-year-old Hummel premiered a piano trio by Haydn.

  Back in Vienna by 1793, Hummel came under the instruction of Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, Joseph Haydn, and Antonio Salieri. Around the same time, a young Ludwig van Beethoven arrived in the city and studied with the same teachers. The two became friends. Hummel later took part in several performances of Beethoven's orchestral work Wellingtons Sieg, and when Beethoven died, Hummel performed at his memorial concert.

• 3. The Esterházy Years

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  In 1804, Haydn personally appointed Hummel as his successor as Konzertmeister at the Eisenstadt estate of Nikolaus II, Prince Esterházy. Hummel took on many of the duties that Haydn's declining health prevented him from performing, yet out of respect to the older composer, he kept the lesser title. Only after Haydn died in May 1809 did Hummel receive the full designation of Kapellmeister.

  The arrangement lasted seven years altogether. It ended abruptly in May 1811, when the Prince dismissed Hummel for neglecting his duties. From Eisenstadt, Hummel moved to Stuttgart, where he served as Kapellmeister from 1816 to 1818, and then to Weimar, where he held the same position from 1819 until his death.

  In Weimar, Hummel formed a close friendship with Goethe. He also turned his attention to questions beyond music. He became a key figure in establishing principles of intellectual property and copyright law, fighting against music publishers he considered unethical. He also brought one of the first musicians' pension schemes into existence, giving benefit concert tours to help raise the necessary funds. When Goethe died in March 1832, Hummel's engagement with local theatrical life contracted sharply, and he entered a kind of partial retirement that lasted until 1837.

• 4. A Composer's Range

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  Hummel's output as a composer was enormous and conspicuously skewed toward the piano, on which he was counted among the great virtuosi of his day. He wrote eight piano concertos, ten piano sonatas, eight piano trios, two piano septets, a piano quartet, a piano quintet, and music for piano four hands. His Piano Concerto No. 5 in A-flat, Op. 113, is the most frequently performed of the set.

  His Trumpet Concerto was written for the keyed trumpet in E major, though it is now usually heard in E-flat major to better suit modern instruments. He also composed a mandolin concerto, a mandolin sonata, a Grand Bassoon Concerto in F, a wind octet, a cello sonata, a quartet for clarinet, violin, viola, and cello, and twenty-two operas and Singspiels. Hummel contributed a variation on a theme supplied by Anton Diabelli for part two of Vaterländischer Kunstlerverein.

  He was also genuinely interested in the guitar, playing it himself and writing prolifically for it from Op. 7 through Op. 93. One notable absence from his catalogue is a symphony. His oeuvre, for all its scale, never extended to that form.

• 5. Shaping Chopin, Liszt, Schumann

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  In 1828, Hummel published A Complete Theoretical and Practical Course of Instruction on the Art of Playing the Piano Forte in Germany. The book sold thousands of copies within days of appearing. It introduced a new approach to fingering and to the performance of ornaments that spread widely through European piano teaching.

  His reach was partly institutional. Carl Czerny transferred to Hummel after three years of study with Beethoven. Czerny later taught Liszt. Liszt's father Adam had refused to pay Hummel's high tuition fees, which is why Liszt ended up with Czerny rather than with Hummel directly. Liszt nonetheless admired Hummel and performed his works regularly; his particular favourite was the Septet Op. 74.

  Robert Schumann studied Hummel's piano method and at one point considered becoming his pupil. Hummel gave some lessons to Felix Mendelssohn. In The Great Pianists, Harold C. Schonberg writes that "the openings of the Hummel A minor and the Chopin E minor concertos are too close to be coincidental." Schonberg also observed that Chopin's Preludes, Op. 28 are difficult to separate from Hummel's Op. 67, a set of twenty-four preludes in all major and minor keys composed in 1815, starting with C major. Chopin kept Hummel's piano concertos in his own active performing repertoire and almost certainly heard him play during Hummel's concert tours to Poland and Russia.

  Schubert's Trout Quintet, according to Schubert's friend Albert Stadler, was modelled on the quintet version of Hummel's Septet in D minor, Op. 74. Schubert's last three piano sonatas were originally dedicated to Hummel. Both men died before the sonatas were published, and the publishers reassigned the dedication to Robert Schumann.

• 6. Forgotten Then Rediscovered

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  Hummel died peacefully in Weimar on the 17th of October 1837. His grave is in the Historical Cemetery there. He was a freemason, as were Haydn and Mozart, and he bequeathed a considerable portion of his garden behind his Weimar residence to his masonic lodge.

  For all the esteem in which he was held at his death, his reputation collapsed quickly. His disciplined, clear technique in the Clementi tradition and his allegiance to classical balance placed him on the wrong side of the divide when Romantic bravura took over. The revival of interest in early nineteenth-century music during the twentieth century largely passed him over, in much the same way that Haydn's revival had to wait until the second half of that century. Hummel was further obscured by the immense shadows of Mozart and Beethoven.

  His Piano Sonata in F-sharp minor, Op. 81, was cherished by Robert Schumann, and his Fantasy, Op. 18, shaped Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy. These pieces show Hummel stretching classical harmonic structures and pressing against the edges of sonata form. In Paris in 1825, the publishing firm of Aristide Farrenc announced it had acquired French rights to all of Hummel's future works. Five years later, Hummel gave three concerts in the city, and at one of them a rondo of his was performed by Aristide Farrenc's wife, the composer Louise Farrenc, who also sought Hummel's comments on her keyboard technique. That exchange points to the network he inhabited and the role he played in it. An increasing number of recordings and live performances has since returned his music to the classical repertoire.