Johann Nepomuk Hummel: A Musician’s
Life and World,
by Mark Kroll
(Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007).
503 pp.

R. J. STOVE is a contributing editor at the American Conservative, and author of A Student’s Guide to Music History (ISI Books, 2008).

Had opinion polls existed in 1820, they
would have ranked Johann Nepomuk
Hummel alongside Beethoven, Weber, and
Rossini as among the greatest of all living
composers. In 1820 Chopin, Mendelssohn,
Schumann, Liszt, Verdi, and Wagner remained
mere children, Berlioz an obscure
adolescent; Schubert’s fame had not yet spread
beyond Viennese connoisseurs. Hummel died
in 1837, his glory intact. But within a generation
it was as if he had never breathed, so
wholly did captious Time obliterate his renown.
Posterity seldom even troubled to
censure or calumniate him; it simply forgot
him; and forgotten he has largely stayed, despite
modest revivals in recent years. This is the
first biography of him in English. The last as
well, one suspects, given its breathtaking comprehensiveness,
solicitude for the smallest details,
and attractively fluent idiom, all of which
militate against the very idea of a subsequent
author adequately essaying the topic.

If Hummel had managed nothing else, he
would continue to warrant attention for his
almost Mozartean precocity. Born in 1778,
he had already become an exceptional pianist
when just six years old, and a skilled violinist
too (this secondary interest ended when he
smashed his violin in ire during an inconclusive
aesthetic discussion with a fellow juvenile).
At the age of eight he not only began
studying piano with Mozart in Vienna, but
went to live with him, rent-free. No doubt
today this residential arrangement would inspire
charges of pedophilia, but such residences
occurred quite often at the time—
Mozart’s father had his own live-in pupils—
with no hint of sexual relations. Hummel
proceeded to arrange for chamber forces
several of Mozart’s operas and orchestral works,
as well as to reveal in his own pianism three
Mozartean traits: a constant concern for the
long, singing line (Mozart demanded that his
keyboard music “flow like oil”), persistent
textural clarity, and aversion to any but the
most prudent use of the sustaining pedal. In
short, everything epitomized in the term
“classicist”: everything, also, antipathetic to
the young Beethoven’s keyboard style, with
its string-wrecking ebullience and pedal-heavy
grandeur. Only in the field of improvisation
did Hummel and Beethoven meet occasionally
on shared ground, several competent
judges regarding Hummel as the more gifted
improviser of the two. Between both men
there arose—and there survived until
Beethoven’s death-bed—an improbable
friendship, punctuated by occasional quarreling.
Hummel seems to have been devoid of
envy, while Beethoven (for all his tantrums)
possessed sufficient natural generosity to accord
his major rivals due respect.

As if Hummel’s boyhood were not already
star-spangled enough, he came to know
Haydn—”Most beloved papa!”—during an
English visit. He eventually succeeded Haydn
as music-master at the Esterházy clan’s Hungarian
palace, although he treated his post in
a much more cavalier spirit than Haydn had
shown, fulfilling numerous extramural commissions,
shamelessly twitting his subordinates
(one of whom complained to Prince Nicholas
Esterházy that “I have had it up to here with his
teasing”), and openly disputing his employer’s
artistic knowledge. After only eight years—
the blinking of an eye, by Haydn’s standards of
tenure—Hummel lost his job for good.

Not that he minded overmuch: he experienced
far greater satisfaction as, in Professor
Kroll’s phrase, “the first touring artist.” He
traveled as compulsively as Liszt would do,
and won popular as well as critical acclaim
without non-musical aids like Liszt’s urbane
good looks. (Hummel’s youthful appearance,
with his unkempt tresses and thick slug-like
lips, nightmarishly adumbrated Mick Jagger;
afterwards his facial features thinned out to a
certain aquiline decisiveness, but his body
grew to elephantine bulk.) From Berlin to
Bonn to Cambridge to Copenhagen to
Dresden to Edinburgh to Frankfurt to Hamburg
to Hanover to Kassel to Kiel to
Magdeburg to Moscow to Paris to Prague to
Schleswig to Stuttgart to The Hague to Warsaw:
scarcely a city in northern, central, or
eastern Europe failed to host at least one
Hummel performance. Professor Kroll cites
journalistic reports to indicate that Hummel’s
technique declined in his last years, but even
the ravages of illness could not undo his
executant panache entirely.

Reading Hummel’s life induces a strange
double-vision, in that the attitudes it reveals—
the robust practicality, the effortless
cosmopolitanism, the fundamental lack of
Angst—suggest an early-eighteenth-century
rather than an early-nineteenth-century figure.
In half a dozen ways he had more in
common with Telemann than with his own
contemporaries. He shared Telemann’s gift
for readable didactic prose (his 1828 guide,
Comprehensive Theoretical and Practical Instruction
in Piano Playing, reached bestseller status)
and something of Telemann’s sheer musical
graphomania. Although he lived only two
years longer than Beethoven, he composed
twice as much as Beethoven did, his opusnumbered
pieces forming only about half of
his output. He produced music (to quote the
phrase of his spiritual descendant Saint-Saëns)
“as an apple-tree produces apples.” Of
Beethoven-type agonies at the writing desk,
the hammering-out of recalcitrant sketches,
the frenzied revisions, Hummel experienced
nothing. He enjoyed gracious court life too
much, such life involving in his case protracted
residence at Weimar, where his friend
Goethe compared his prowess at the piano to
Napoleon’s on the battlefield. A dutiful Freemason,
Hummel—like his fellow Austrian
Catholics Haydn and Mozart—alternated between
the Mass and the Lodge meeting without
discomfort to his conscience. (Apropos
such flexibility, it should be noted that among
Germanic peoples the true revolutionary spirit
struck not in 1789 or even 1793, but 1848.
Hummel’s doings make clear how much
power and influence Germany’s miniature
kingdoms, dukedoms, and principalities retained
in his day: how completely these petty
states kept up ancien-régime habits of selfconfident
absolutist patronage, as if France’s
Jacobins and sans-culottes had never been.)

When not writing or playing or socializing,
Hummel could usually be found teaching.
The young Mendelssohn took lessons
from him; the young Schumann had every
intention of doing so, though he turned
against Hummel later; the young Liszt would
have liked to do so, but baulked at paying the
exorbitant fees involved. Hummel’s shrewd
business sense armed him for a laudable, and
in his case successful, struggle against piratical
publishers: this decades before modern copyright
consciousness emerged. His win did
lack permanence—a hundred years on, Richard
Strauss needed to carry out similar
wearying labors afresh, faced with renewed
German governmental reluctance to accept
composers’ intellectual property rights—yet
colleagues recognized it, and Professor Kroll
traces to Hummel’s efforts the origins of
America’s current copyright law. Unlike
Mozart, Hummel left a fortune at his death:
thus harming his posthumous repute, so enslaved
have we become to bohemian drivel
about the virtues of self-destruction. Equally
unglamorous was Hummel’s contented,
quarter- century-long marriage (which produced
two sons): no febrile Byronic spasmody
on the domestic front.

What appeal, what importance, does
Hummel have in our time, when we must use
our imaginations to evoke what Tennyson
called “the touch of a vanished hand”? In
1963 New York Times critic Harold Schonberg
passed upon Hummel’s compositions the brisk
verdict “overrated then, underrated now.”
That seems about right, to judge by the
admittedly small proportion of his output
available on CD, and the even smaller extracts
from it that Professor Kroll reprints. Hummel’s
Trumpet Concerto, far better known at present
than anything else he wrote, is certainly a
curious blend: its outer movements rattle
along as cheerfully as those of Haydn’s piece
for the same instrument (intended for the
same soloist), but its middle movement is shot
through with Beethovenian pathos wholly
unlike anything in the Haydn. Such pathos
quite frequently marks Hummel’s slower
music, and is about the one sign that he took
notice of the emerging Romantic spirit. It is
typical of him that this spirit is almost always
kept within bounds, that he seldom permits it
to dominate an entire piece (as it routinely
dominates in Weber or the lesser-known
composer Louis Spohr, to name two examples
among Hummel’s contemporaries),
and that more often than not it is counteracted
by Hummel’s love of conspicuous virtuoso
filigree.

Regularly he appears to have shown undue
enthusiasm for relying on ingenious pattern-
work after the opening flush of inspiration
has spent itself. This might account for
the frequent critical assertion that his best
writing lies in variation forms, where a shortage
of long-term logic need be no handicap.
He undeniably avoided the genre of the
symphony, though the hypothesis that he did
so through fear of competing with Beethoven
has little to commend it. During Hummel’s
lifetime, Beethoven’s symphonies had not
acquired anything like the canonical prestige
they gained afterwards; and if they had,
Hummel with his legitimate self-worth was
hardly the man to be awed into artistic sterility
by them, or by anything else. He happily
enough vied with Beethoven in various other
media where the latter excelled, including
the piano sonata and the string quartet, despite
the obvious gulf between Hummel’s
loquaciously companionable muse and
Beethoven’s depth. Hummel’s piano concertos
indubitably inspired Chopin’s, and are
free from the Pole’s sometimes jejune notions
of orchestral scoring. Another field justifying
serious examination is Hummel’s sacred music:
the early nineteenth century constitutes a thin
period for liturgical works—in contrast to
such para-liturgical pièces d’occasion as
Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis or Berlioz’s Requiem—
and Hummel’s have the merits, by no
means negligible or widespread, of singability
and solidity. Everything that could be achieved
in Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic musical
life without sheer imaginative genius,
Hummel achieved. Besides, in what moral
code is it written that music must sear the soul
and flay the nerves with its profound originality
before it can be considered valid? “Enjoy
the world by giving joy to the world,” ran
Hummel’s credo; if it ensured that he never
stormed the heavens, it also guaranteed much
high craftsmanship and gemütlich charm.