In 1841, Robert Volkmann settled in Pest after a period teaching singing in Prague. Born in 1815 in Lommatzsch, Meissen, Saxony, he had trained within the German instrumental tradition. He would spend most of his working life in Hungary, where he wrote music on Hungarian subjects and became the first composition professor at the new Academy of Music.
His career joined two musical centres. Saxony and Leipzig supplied his early teachers and his contact with Robert Schumann. Pest-Buda supplied pupils, performers, a publisher and an institution through which his teaching reached the next generation.
Training in Saxony and Leipzig
Robert Volkmann first learned music from his father, Friedrich August Gotthelf Volkmann, a cantor and schoolteacher. A local town musician known as Friebel taught him violin and cello. Friebel’s full name and the dates of these lessons have not been established.
By the age of twelve, Robert Volkmann could substitute as an organist and play in a string quartet. Organ playing required him to handle several independent musical lines at once, while quartet playing taught him how four string parts interact without a conductor.
Both practices preceded his later work in counterpoint—the method of combining independent melodic lines—and chamber music.
August Anacker
August Anacker taught Robert Volkmann at the teacher-training seminary in Freiberg from 1833 to 1835. August Anacker worked in the city as a cantor, conductor and music teacher. He taught composition and encouraged Robert Volkmann to make music his profession.
The surviving accounts do not include lesson books or a detailed syllabus. They establish formal study and professional encouragement, but they do not connect a particular technique in Robert Volkmann’s mature works to a particular lesson from August Anacker.
Karl Becker
Robert Volkmann moved to Leipzig in 1836 and studied privately with Karl Becker. One account describes composition lessons; another identifies organ playing and theory. The exact division of subjects and the duration of the lessons remain uncertain.
Karl Becker had worked as a Gewandhaus violinist and was active as an organist. He contributed to Robert Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and wrote historical and bibliographical studies. He also supported Schumann’s Études symphoniques. His work placed historical study, counterpoint and contemporary Romantic composition within the same professional setting.
Robert Schumann
Robert Schumann’s diaries record two meetings with Robert Volkmann in 1838. The contact mattered stylistically, but there is no evidence that Schumann formally taught him.
Robert Volkmann published his first work, the piano collection Phantasiebilder, in 1839. An early biography regarded the title as Schumannesque but described the music itself as independent. The documented relationship is therefore one of acquaintance and influence, not teacher and student.
Building a career in Pest
After arriving in Pest, Robert Volkmann worked as a private piano teacher and musical correspondent. In 1848 he became choirmaster and organist at a Reform synagogue. Except for a period in Vienna from 1854 to 1858, Hungary remained the centre of his professional life.
His position became more secure in 1857, when the publisher Gustav Heckenast agreed to issue his music in return for a regular income independent of sales. The arrangement meant that Robert Volkmann did not have to rely on the immediate commercial success of each score.
It continued until Heckenast’s publishing business closed in the early 1870s and covered years in which Robert Volkmann wrote much of his orchestral and chamber repertory.
Performers and colleagues
The work that first brought Robert Volkmann broad attention was the Piano Trio No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 5, composed in 1850 and dedicated to Franz Liszt. Liszt championed it, and Hans von Bülow performed and admired it. Richard Wagner also expressed admiration for the score.
Liszt did not formally teach Robert Volkmann, and Robert Volkmann did not formally join Liszt’s circle. Their relationship rested on Liszt’s advocacy and later on their work at the same institution.
Robert Volkmann met Johannes Brahms in Vienna in 1864, and the two became friends. Later writers have placed Robert Volkmann between Schumann and Brahms on stylistic grounds.
Some scholarship argues that the Second Piano Trio anticipates features of Brahms’s chamber music, but the evidence does not establish direct borrowing in either direction. Neither man taught the other, and no joint composition is known.
The Academy of Music
In 1875, Robert Volkmann joined the founding faculty of Hungary’s Academy of Music. Ferenc Erkel served as director and Franz Liszt as president. The Academy opened on 14 November with five professors and 38 students.
Its curriculum covered harmony, counterpoint, composition, orchestration, music history, aesthetics, piano and Hungarian musical characteristics. Orchestration meant learning how to assign and combine musical material across the instruments of an orchestra.
Robert Volkmann served as the Academy’s first composition professor and taught there from 1875 until 1883. Hans Koessler took over his composition duties after his death.
Istvan Thoman
Robert Volkmann taught Istvan Thoman, who entered the Academy in 1881. Istvan Thoman also studied with Ferenc Erkel and Sándor Nikolits before entering Liszt’s class in January 1883. The documented period in which Robert Volkmann could have taught him is therefore 1881–1883, though no consulted lesson register states the subjects semester by semester.
Istvan Thoman joined the Academy faculty in 1888 and later taught Béla Bartók and Ernő Dohnányi. This provides a documented institutional line from Robert Volkmann to Istvan Thoman and then to musicians active in twentieth-century Hungary.
The surviving research does not identify a specific exercise, compositional rule or teaching method that Istvan Thoman carried from Robert Volkmann to those later pupils. Academy accounts instead identify Istvan Thoman chiefly with the transmission of Liszt’s approach to piano playing and teaching.
Károly Szabados and other pupils
Károly Szabados studied with Robert Volkmann, Erkel, Liszt and Kornél Ábrányi Sr. A contemporary recollection described Robert Volkmann as:
“exceptionally strict and conscientious”
Robert Volkmann also joined Erkel and Ábrányi in appealing to Liszt after a dispute between Liszt and Károly Szabados. This episode shows him working as an advocate for a student as well as an instructor. Károly Szabados spent three years at the Academy, but the consulted account does not supply exact entry and departure dates.
Doctoral research also names Béla Szabados, Géza Zichy and Károly Aggházy as pupils whose memoirs contain information about Robert Volkmann’s teaching. Their exact years and lesson schedules have not been established from the available summary. Béla Szabados and Károly Szabados were different people and cannot be treated as one pupil.
German forms and Hungarian subjects
Robert Volkmann’s catalogue includes two symphonies, six string quartets, two piano trios, a Cello Concerto in A minor, three serenades, the Richard III Overture and works for piano, voices and chorus.
Representative scores include the Cello Concerto, Op. 33; Symphony No. 1 in D minor, Op. 44; Symphony No. 2 in B-flat major, Op. 53; the Serenades, Opp. 62, 63 and 69; and the Richard III Overture, Op. 68.
His Hungarian surroundings also entered his music. The relevant works include Souvenir de Maróth, Op. 6; Ungarische Lieder, Op. 20; Visegrád, Op. 21; Ungarische Skizzen, Op. 24; and Au tombeau du comte Széchenyi, Op. 41, also listed under the Hungarian title Széchenyi sírjánál.
Research on these piano works finds that their formal designs generally follow German Romantic practice. Their subjects and musical surfaces, however, refer to Hungarian history and national culture and sometimes use verbunkos, a Hungarian recruiting-dance style marked by characteristic rhythms and melodic gestures.
Ungarische Lieder and the Széchenyi memorial fantasy provide particularly clear examples. Robert Volkmann retained the formal training he had received in Saxony and Leipzig while drawing topics and phrases from the musical culture in which he worked.
Robert Volkmann died in Budapest in 1883, but the exact day remains disputed. The consulted records give 28, 29 and 30 October, and no complete register of his private pupils or Academy classes from 1875 to 1883 has yet settled the other gaps in his teaching record.
