Fritz Kreisler
Fritz Kreisler, one of the greatest violin virtuosos of his generation, was born in Vienna, Austria, on February 2, 1875. He was a child prodigy at the violin. From 1882 to 1885 he attended the Vienna Conservatory, a pupil of Leopold Auer, winning the gold medal for violin playing. In 1887, as a pupil of Massart at the Paris Conservatory, he was recipient of the Grand Prix. In 1888, he toured the United States in joint concerts with the pianist, Moriz Rosenthal, making his American debut in Boston on November 9. Upon returning to Vienna, he suddenly decided to abandon music. For a while he studied medicine at the Vienna Academy. After that he entered military service as an officer in a Uhlan Regiment. The decision to return to the violin led to a new period of intensive training from which he emerged in March 1899 with a recital in Berlin. From 1901 on until his retirement during World War II he occupied a magistral place among the concert artists of his time.
As a composer, Kreisler produced a violin concerto and a string quartet. But his fame rests securely on an entire library of pieces for the violin now basic to that repertory and which are equally well loved in transcriptions for orchestra. The curious thing about many of these compositions is that for many years Kreisler presented them as the genuine works of the old masters, works which he said he had discovered in European libraries and monasteries, and which he had merely adapted for the violin. He had recourse to this deception early in 1900 as the expedient by which a still young and unknown violinist could get his own music played more frequently, besides extending for his own concerts the more or less limited territory of the existing violin repertory. His deception proved much more successful than he had dared to hope. Violinists everywhere asked him for copies of these pieces for their own concerts. Publishers in Germany and New York sold these “transcriptions” by the thousands. As the years passed it became increasingly difficult for Kreisler to confess to the world that he had all the while been palming off a colossal fraud. Then, in 1935, Olin Downes, the music critic of the New York Times, tried to trace the source of one of these compositions—Pugnani’s Praeludium and Allegro—now a worldwide favorite with violinists. Downes first communicated with Kreisler’s New York publishers who were suspiciously evasive. After that Downes cabled Kreisler, then in Europe. It was only then that the violinist revealed that this piece was entirely his, and so were many others which he had been presenting so long as the music of Vivaldi, Martini, Couperin, and Francoeur among others.
It was to be expected that musicians and critics should meet such a confession with anger and denunciation. “We wish to apply the term discreditable to the whole transaction from start to finish,” one American music journal said editorially. In England, Ernest Newman was also devastating in his attack. “It is as though Mr. Yeats published poems under the name of Herrick or Spenser,” he said.
Yet, in retrospect, it is possible to suggest that musicians and critics should not have been taken altogether by surprise. For one thing, as Kreisler pointed out, numerous progressions and passages in all of these compositions were in a style of a period much later than that of the accredited composers, a fact that should have inspired at least a certain amount of suspicion. Also, when Kreisler presented his own Liebesfreud, Liebesleid, and Schoen Rosmarin as transcriptions of posthumous pieces by Joseph Lanner in a Berlin recital, and was vigorously assailed by a Berlin critic for daring to include such gems with “tripe” like Kreisler’s own Caprice Viennois, Kreisler replied with a widely published statement that those pieces of Lanner were of his own composition. The reasonable question should then have arisen that if the three supposedly Lanner items were by Kreisler, how authentic were the other pieces of old masters played by the virtuoso?
Besides all this, Kreisler himself provided a strong clue to the correct authorship in the frontispiece of his published transcriptions. It read: “The original manuscripts used for these transcriptions are the private property of Mr. Fritz Kreisler and are now published for the first time; they are, moreover, so freely treated that they constitute, in fact, original works.”
The furor and commotion caused by the uncovering of this fraud has long since died down. It has had no visible effect on Kreisler’s immense popularity either as a violinist or composer. Since then, all this music has been published and performed as Kreisler’s without losing any of its worldwide appeal.
Among the compositions by Kreisler which he originally ascribed to other masters in imitation of their styles were: Andantino (Martini); Aubade provençale (Couperin); Chanson Louis XIII et Pavane (Couperin); Minuet (Porpora); Praeludium and Allegro (Pugnani); La Précieuse (Couperin); Scherzo (Dittersdorf), Sicilienne et Rigaudon (Francoeur); Tempo di minuetto (Pugnani).
Perhaps the best loved pieces by Kreisler are those in the style of Viennese folk songs and dances in which are caught all the grace and Gemuetlichkeit of Viennese life and backgrounds. Some he originally tried to pass off as the works of other composers, as was the case with the already-mentioned Liebesfreud, Liebesleid, and Schoen Rosmarin, attributed to Lanner. Some were outright transcriptions. The Old Refrain is an adaptation of a song “Du alter Stefanturm” by Joseph Brandl taken from his operetta, Der liebe Augustin, produced in Vienna in 1887. Still others were always offered as Kreisler’s own compositions and are completely original with him: Caprice Viennois, for example, and the Marche miniature viennoise.
Among other original Kreisler compositions which he always presented as his own are the following: La Gitana, which simulates an Arabian-Spanish song; Polichinelle, a serenade; Rondino, based on a theme of Beethoven; Shepherd’s Madrigal; Slavonic Fantasia, based on melodies of Dvořák; Tambourin Chinois; and Toy Soldiers’ March.