Joseph Raff

Joseph Joachim Raff was a German-Swiss composer, pianist, conductor, writer, musicographer, and influential music educator, born on 27 May 1822 in Lachen, a German-speaking commune in the canton of Schwyz, Switzerland, near Zurich. A Swiss citizen and a Catholic, he was the son of an organist who had moved from Württemberg to Switzerland in 1810. Although Raff received no formal musical training, he developed his abilities largely on his own while studying at a Jesuit school in Schwyz. After completing his education, he worked as a teacher in Schmerikon, Schwyz, and Rapperswil.

Raff's early musical attempts consisted of piano compositions that he sent to Felix Mendelssohn, whose favorable response led to their publication by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1844. These works received positive reviews from Robert Schumann in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and encouraged Raff to move to Zurich for a full-time musical career. In 1845 he met Franz Liszt in Basel, whose support became crucial to his development. Raff later lived in Stuttgart and maintained friendships with musicians including Hans von Bülow.

From 1850 to 1853, Raff served as Liszt's assistant in Weimar, joined the Weimar school of music, and contributed to the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. During this period he published his essay “The Wagner Problem” in 1854. Between 1856 and 1877 he lived in Wiesbaden, continuing to compose and consolidating his reputation. His opera King Alfred, first produced in Weimar in 1848 and revised there in 1851, was not a major success, but performances of his instrumental works soon established him as a respected symphonist in the German tradition. His later operas included Dame Kobold, staged in Weimar in 1870, and Benedetto Marcello.

In 1877 Raff became the first director of the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt am Main. There he founded a special class for women composers and enlisted distinguished musicians, including Clara Schumann, as instructors. As a composition teacher, he mentored several successful students, among them Algernon Ashton, Anton Urspruch, Edward MacDowell, Alexander Ritter, August Wilhelmj, and Ernesto Elorduy. His music was widely performed throughout Europe during his lifetime, and contemporary critics, including N. F. Solovyov in the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, considered him among the leading composers of the modern German school. Raff died in Frankfurt am Main on 24 June 1882 and was buried in the city's Hauptfriedhof.

Raff's extensive output included operas, oratorios, eleven symphonies, concertos, orchestral suites and overtures, including overtures for plays by William Shakespeare, chamber music, piano works, and choral and vocal compositions. Among his symphonies are To the Fatherland (1863), In the Forest (1869), Leonore (1872), In the Alps (1877), Spring Sounds (1878), and In Summer (1880). His concertante works include a piano concerto, the Ode to Spring and a piano suite; two violin concertos and a violin suite; and two cello concertos. His chamber works include four piano trios, eight string quartets, a piano quintet, a string sextet, and a string octet. For piano he wrote two sonatas, suites, and shorter pieces, as well as transcriptions of works by Bach and Handel; his vocal music includes choruses, duets, and songs.