Johann Nepomuk Hummel: A Musician's Life and World

Notes, Sept, 2008 by Jarl Hulbert

Johann Nepomuk Hummel: A Musician's Life and World. By Mark Kroll. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007. [xiv, 503p. ISBN-13 9780810859203. $85.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, appendix, index.

With his publication of Johann Nepomuk Hummel: A Musician's Life and World, Mark Kroll has filled an important gap in the literature. A student of Mozart and rival to Beethoven, Hummel was considered in his day to be one of Vienna's greatest pianists and composers, and yet very few monographs on Hummel are currently available in university libraries. The most notable works are Karl Benyovszky's J.N. Hummel: Der Mensch and Kunstler (Bratislava: Eos-Verlag, 1934) and Joel Sachs's Kapellmeister Hummel in England and France (Detroit: Information Coodinators. 1977). The book by Benyovszky is a somewhat out-of-date treasure trove of information for the Hummel enthusiast and is drawn upon heavily by Kroll. Sachs's study is a thorough and well-documented work on several of Hummels concert tours. Kroll's biography fills the gap between those two works and has the distinction of being the first English-language biography on Hummel's life and career from birth to death.

Kroll's structural approach to this seminal work is not what one might at. first suspect. Rather than reporting on events in Hummel's life in chronological order, Kroll arranges his chapters into a series of topics. His format makes sense for a number of reasons, the most obvious of which he addresses in his introduction: that of the complexity of Hummel's life (p. xii). It is true that more so than with other composers, Hummel's broad interests lend themselves toward categorization by subject rather than decade. Kroll divides his selected topics over an introduction and thirteen chapters, which include Hummel's relationships with Mozart., Joseph Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Liszt, and Chopin, in addition to chapters on Hummel's concert tours, his positions in Stuttgart and Weimar, and his role as an educator.

The first chapter, "The Worlds of Johann Nepomuk Hummel," is a succinct study of Hummel's family and includes information on their background in farming and entre-preneurship. Kroll fleshes out his investigation with details about the political and cultural environment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Substantial documentation and commentary in the form of endnotes rounds out the chapter (and each subsequent one). Particularly delightful for this reviewer is the account of Hummel's childhood experience with the violin, as translated from the handwritten biographical notes of Max Johann Seidel (pp.-5-6). But Kroll perhaps should have addressed the conflict Seidel's account creates with other noted sources, such as Francois-Joseph Fetis in his Biographie universelle des musiciens el Bibliographie generale de la musique, (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1874), who asserts that failure to progress on the violin (rather than the street fight mentioned by Seidel) caused Hummel to switch from violin to piano. Kroll later qualifies Seidel as a source and admits that he may be prone to exaggeration (p. 9, note 21) which later forces Kroll to choose which elements of Seidel's account to accept and which to dismiss (chapter 2, p. 17; chapter 3, pp. 34--36). Unfortunately, this makes parts of the book less than convincing.

Kroll's second chapter, "The Modern Mozart of Germany," highlights Hummel's childhood years of study with Mozart. The author correctly points out the impact that Hummel's association with Mozart had on his career, despite his studies lasting merely two years (ca. 1786-1788). Kroll also elaborates on the relationship between Hummel and Franz Xaver Mozart and the little-known financial dispute between Mozart's widow and Hummel's widow after Hummel's death in 1837. In addition, there is some discussion of Hummel's role as an arranger of Mozart's works and of the relationship of Hummel's pianism to that of Mozart. In correctly pointing out that Hummel's later fall from favor was related to his reputation as a performer in the "old" school of Mozart, Kroll makes an error, however, in asserting that Carl Czerny attacked Hummel's "Mozartian" playing as "as monotonous as a barrel-organ" (pp. 19-20). A study of the quotation reveals that Czerny actually wrote:

  Hummel's performance, on the other hand, was a model of all that is
  clean and distinct, of the most charming elegance and delicacy, and
  its difficulties were invariably calculated to produce the greatest,
  most astonishing effect... [but] Beethoven's partisans... declared
  his playing was as monotonous as that of a hurdy-gurdy (pp. 72-73,
  note 9)

Kroll assumes here that Czerny includes himself in the category of "Beethoven partisan," which, considering Czerny's positive comments about Hummel, hardly seems to be the case.

Chapters 3 through 5 ("Beloved Papa": Hummel, Hayden, and Esterhazy; In the Footsteps of Beethoven; and Hummel's Tears: Schubert) deal mostly with Hummel's early career in Vienna and at the Esterhazy court. The least flattering picture of Hummel in the book occurs in chapter 3, where he is portrayed as an irresponsible Konzertmeister for the Esterhazy court who is eventually dismissed for neglecting his duties. Nevertheless, Hummel's excellent relationship with his mentor Haydn is also highlighted, and in chapters 4 and 5, the important and positive role that Hummel played in the lives of Beethoven and Schubert is given a thorough treatment.