Fritz Kreisler — Immortal, and Soon to be Forgotten!

—“”‘’

I sometimes panic, thinking that some of the great names from the past: musicians, writers, thinkers and scientists, will be gone, to be forgotten with the rest, to quote Rudyard Kipling (a case in point).  In some cases these names are gone because the folk alive and doing today just don’t have need of them.  In other cases, there is great need of their thinking and their work, but for various reasons they weren’t brought to the limelight when this generation was paying attention, and so they have been missed.  Young people today have such a huge host of noisy contenders for their attention that the oversight can be easily excused.

Fritz Kreisler (‘Fritz’ is a diminutive of Friedrich; you can look it up) was at one time the best known violinist in the world; he presided over the musical scene of Europe and America for many, many decades.  We can safely say that Kreisler probably tripled the number of people who enjoyed music in the classical tradition in the early twentieth century.

The music associated with Fritz Kreisler is small-scale music; the pieces he introduced to audiences, usually around the size of a large drawing-room (a Salon, as they were called), were around 3 minutes long, in other words, about the length of a modern-day pop song.  He extracted popular tunes from operas and borrowed from folk songs; then he looked around for small pieces and movements written by other composers, both well-known and less well known.  Finally, he made up his own imitations of the work of other composers after they were safely dead, and introduced spurious works by Handel, Couperin, Tartini and others.  This writer (Blair Sanderson) puts it very well: “Fritz Kreisler was one of the most beloved violinists of the 20th century, universally known for his Liebesfreud and Liebesleid, and a quantity of other popular encore pieces. Yet Kreisler was also an industrious arranger and clever pasticheur, who sometimes composed attractive works in the styles of Baroque and Classical composers and gave them false attributions, though more out of a wish to amuse than to deceive.”  If you continue to read, you get the impression that Kreisler’s fame is mostly alive, and mostly well, but in my opinion it is now limited to a small circle of music aficionados, who are relatively a small proportion of the general population.

Let’s begin with Leibesfreud, Love’s Joy, one of Kreisler’s own compositions, and introduced as such from its origins.  Anyone who likes such music as Pachelbel’s Kanon is sure to like this piece, and I’m also fairly sure, many others of Kreisler’s pieces.



Remember, this is Kreisler himself, and recording technology of around 1930.  If you want to hear a modern recording, played by Itzhak Perlman or Joshua Bell, it is relatively easy to search for them on YouTube.

Next, let’s see whether Liebesleid (Love's Sorrow) is on YouTube ... ah, here is Itzhak Perlman, with a wonderfully simple rendering of this melancholy tune:



If you look, you can find a performance by Anne Akiko Meyers that raises the emotional level of the piece to that of great tragedy.  Well, that’s interpretation; you’re allowed to put a certain amount of spin on a piece.  I think it was originally intended to be a foil for the former piece, to present both the joys and the sorrows of love.

Schön Rosmarin (lovely Rosemarie) is also well known.  This recording is by Zino Francescatti.  (It seems like a good idea, while we’re at it, to introduce you to some of the most famous performers of the past; I’m regarding Kreisler in this post as mainly a composer.)




The bowing technique used heavily in this performance is called spiccato, where the violinist gets a very disconnected sound by almost bouncing the bow off the strings.  It is an advanced technique, in that it takes a lot of control to do it evenly and well.  (If any budding young violinist you know uses this technique appropriately, be sure to praise them well!)

Talking about disconnected, the generic term for it is, of course, staccato.  Spiccato is a technique only available to bowed string players; but you can even do staccato on a piano, or organ, for that matter.

A well-known piece by Antonin Dvořák, called Humoresque started out as a piano piece, but was adapted by Fritz Kreisler as a violin piece for his many concerts.



Here next is a performance by one David Nadien, a name I’m not familiar with.  Notice that the piano part influences the character of the performance a good deal, and here we seem to have a very good pianist.



Mr Nadien has borrowed many little mannerisms from Fritz Kreisler.  Performers of Kreisler’s era were well known for introducing little mannerisms that added to the attractiveness of a solo performance (but of course were completely out of the question for using in an ensemble).  Itzhak Perlman remarks on this phenomenon in the DVD The Art of Violin, and he observes that many experts dismiss these mannerisms as mere tricks, but, he says, so many of us would love to know how to apply them!  So though Kreisler could be accused of making a relentless search for an endearing style of violin playing, he was a great violinist in many ways, establishing a style of playing that held sway for at least half a century.  When the authentic movement sought to return to a style more appropriate for Baroque performance, a good part of what they had to break away from was the style established by Kreisler, especially regarding vibrato.

Caprice Viennois



The performer here is Christian Ferras.  His phrasing is very reminiscent of Kreisler’s own.

If a violinist is reading this, don’t forget that the most highly regarded cadenza for the Brahms Violin Concerto was written by Fritz Kreisler.  This concerto is an amazing piece of music though it is by no means a showpiece for violinists.  Paganini is famously known to have refused to play it, because there were no tunes in it for the violin.  But Kreisler decided to play it, (or was promised a vast sum of money if he would play it, possibly) and decided to write his own cadenza.  It stood as the most tasteful and balanced cadenza for many, many years, and is so to this day.  If you listen to Jascha Heifetz’s cadenza written for his performance of the Brahms, you will see how much it was influenced by that of Kreisler.

Fritz Kreisler wrote scores of pieces, and performed hundreds of them.  He lived just at the time that television and film and music recording tape were coming into common use, so there are lots of recordings, audio, and platter (and even some video I believe, but I could be wrong), of Kreisler’s performances.  Keep a lookout for it.  And if you see a collection of Kreisler pieces performed by a modern violinist, it would be a good bet for light listening, and great to play for the edification of very young people, while they’re engaged in jig-saw puzzles, or what have you.

Archimedes