Friedrich Kalkbrenner (1784-1849)
- Grande Sonate Brillante Pour le Piano ...
Dediée à Mr. Sigismond Thalberg, Op: 177 (c.1840)
Performers: Adrian Ruiz (piano)
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German pianist, teacher and composer. He was born while his parents were en route from Kassel to Berlin. His father, Christian Kalkbrenner (1755-1806), of Jewish extraction, was a professional musician of some repute, whose own inflated sense of self-worth led him in 1803 not only to re-arrange Mozart’s Don Giovanni for the Parisian theatre but to interpolate fresh pieces into the opera. Soon after Friedrich’s birth, Christian Kalkbrenner was appointed choirmaster at the Prussian Court (1788) and subsequently (1790-96) for Prince Heinrich, brother of Frederick II 'The Great', at his castle at Rheinsberg. It was in this exotic environment that the young Kalkbrenner grew up. By the age of five-and-a-half he was advanced enough to play a Jospeh Haydn concerto before the Queen of Prussia. At eight, he spoke four languages fluently. Having abandoned Germany in 1796, the Kalkbrenners travelled through Italy for two years, before visiting Vienna where, it is said, young Friedrich was among the violinists in the first performance of Joseph Haydn’s The Creation in March 1799. His father, having procured an engagement as choirmaster at the Paris Opéra, enrolled his son in the Conservatoire. Here he studied from 1799 to 1801 with Louis Adam and František Nicodami (piano) and Charles-Simon Catel (harmony), winning first prizes for piano and composition in a ceremony graced by the presence of Napoleon. Introduced by Joseph Haydn to Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, he studied counterpoint in Vienna from 1803, striking up a warm friendship with Johann Nepomuk Hummel and passing his leisure time in the company of Ludwig van Beethoven and Muzio Clementi. The latter made a deep impression on him and he remained a firm adherent of Clementi’s methods for the rest of his life. Kalkbrenner plunged into a dazzling career as a soloist, but only for a short while.
His father’s death in 1806 affected him profoundly and, for several years, he turned his back on music, buying an estate at Praslin where, in the company of an unidentified lady, he turned his attention to agriculture. The estate speedily doubled in value. Unluckily, his banker became bankrupt and Kalkbrenner sailed for England in 1814 in an attempt to recover his losses. Having opened his musical campaign in Bath, he settled in London where he lived for the next ten years. His success as a pianist and teacher was extraordinary. Pupils flocked to him (at a guinea for forty minutes, his fee was the highest in the capital); and in 1818 he added to his considerable earning power by buying into an invention called the 'Chiroplast'. Dreamt up by a German emigrant musician, Johann Logier, this contraption had two parallel mahogany rails attached to the instrument in front of the keyboard to restrict extreme vertical motion of the wrists and forearm. Kalkbrenner brought out his own simplified version, his 'Guide-Mains'. It was said to be still available in England as late as the 1870s. Among those he put to work on it was his pupil Camille Stamaty, who in turn introduced it to his pupils Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Camille Saint-Saëns. The latter spoke up in favour of its use for 'forming the young pianist in the execution of works written for the clavecin and earliest pianofortes, of which the notes spoke without effort on the player’s part'. With his fortune and ego substantially inflated, Kalkbrenner returned to Paris in 1824 where he became a partner in the firm of Camille Pleyel, 'a man famous for his pianos and his wife’s adventures' as one contemporary wag put it. Here he remained as a fashionable teacher and successful pianist until his death. 'After my death or when I stop playing', he informed Frédéric Chopin, 'there will be no representative of the great pianoforte school'.
