Hans von Bülow

Hans Guido von Bülow, a German conductor, pianist, and composer of the Romantic period, was born in Dresden on 8 January 1830 into the noble House of Bülow. His father was the novelist Karl Eduard von Bülow, and his mother was Franziska Elisabeth Stoll von Berneck. At age nine, he began studying with Professor Friedrich Wieck, but his parents pushed him toward law, sending him to Leipzig. There he met Franz Liszt, and after hearing the premiere of Richard Wagner’s *Lohengrin* in 1850, he abandoned his legal studies for music. He studied piano in Leipzig under Louis Plaidy and, on Wagner’s recommendation, landed his first conducting job in Zürich in 1850.

Bülow’s sharp tongue and acerbic personality often alienated colleagues, leading to his dismissal from Zürich. Yet he gained fame for conducting complex new works from memory. In 1851, he became a student of Liszt and married Liszt’s daughter Cosima in 1857; they had two daughters, Daniela (born 1860) and Blandina (born 1863). During the 1850s and early 1860s, he worked as a pianist, conductor, and writer across Germany and Russia. In 1857, he gave the first public performance of Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor in Berlin.

He achieved his greatest renown as Hofkapellmeister in Munich from 1864, conducting the successful premieres of Wagner’s *Tristan und Isolde* (1865) and *Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg* (1868). Meanwhile, Cosima had an affair with Wagner, bearing his daughter Isolde in 1865 and Eva in 1867. Though the affair was public, Bülow refused a divorce until Cosima gave birth to a third child, Siegfried. The divorce was finalized in 1870, and Cosima married Wagner. Bülow never spoke to Wagner again and did not see Cosima for 11 years, but he continued to conduct Wagner’s works and mourned his death in 1883. In July 1882, he married actress Marie Schanzer.

In 1867, Bülow became director of the reopened Königliche Musikschule in Munich, teaching piano in Liszt’s style until 1869. His students included Asger Hamerik and Joseph Pache. Besides Wagner, he championed Brahms and Tchaikovsky, serving as soloist in the world premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor in Boston in 1875. He was devoted to Chopin’s music, assigning epithets to all of the Opus 28 Preludes—though only the “Raindrop” title for Prelude No. 15 remains common. He was the first to perform the complete cycle of Beethoven’s piano sonatas from memory and co-produced an edition of them with Sigmund Lebert.

For the 1877–1878 winter season, he conducted orchestral subscription concerts at Glasgow’s St Andrew’s Hall for the Glasgow Choral Union, touring Scottish cities with the orchestra. Among the works he led was the revised version of Brahms’s Symphony No. 1. From 1878 to 1880, he was Hofkapellmeister in Hanover, but left after calling a tenor in *Lohengrin* the “Knight of the Swine” instead of the “Knight of the Swan.” In 1880, he took a similar post in Meiningen, building the Meiningen Court Orchestra into one of Germany’s finest, insisting musicians learn their parts from memory.

During his five years in Meiningen, he met Richard Strauss in Berlin. Initially unimpressed, Bülow changed his mind after hearing Strauss’s “Serenade” and later secured him his first regular conducting job. Bülow was attracted to the ideas of Max Stirner, whom he reputedly knew personally. In April 1892, he closed his final performance as Principal Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic (a post he held since 1887) with a speech exalting Stirner’s ideas, and he helped place a memorial plaque at Stirner’s last residence with biographer John Henry Mackay. His orchestral innovations included the five-string double bass and pedal timpani, the latter becoming standard. He died on 12 February 1894.