Josef Gabriel Rheinberger

Josef Gabriel Rheinberger is the great composer that Liechtenstein gave to music — and one of the most influential teachers of the entire nineteenth century. Born in the tiny Alpine principality and settled for life in Munich, he wrote in nearly every genre, but it is his twenty organ sonatas that secured his place: the single largest and most accomplished body of Romantic organ music after Mendelssohn, and the foundation of the modern organist’s repertory. Around him, in the classrooms of the Munich Conservatory, passed a startling roll-call of pupils who would shape the next era on both sides of the Atlantic.

He was a prodigy of the kind that sounds invented. Born in Vaduz on 17 March 1839, he was organist of the Vaduz parish church at the age of seven, and his first composition was performed when he was eight. After early study in nearby Feldkirch, he entered the Munich Conservatorium in 1851, aged twelve, and the city became his home for the next half-century. He rose to become professor of piano and composition there — and, above all, the most sought-after teacher of organ and composition in Europe.

The twenty sonatas

The cornerstone of Rheinberger’s reputation is the cycle of organ sonatas. He set out to write twenty-four — one in every major and minor key — and completed twenty, leaving the project, like Bach’s two books of preludes and fugues before him, as a monument that did not quite need finishing. Each is a fully worked Romantic sonata of several movements, marrying singing melody to fugal rigour, and together with his two organ concertos they made him, for the late nineteenth century, the indispensable composer for the instrument. The verdict of the day was emphatic:

The organ sonatas are undoubtedly the most valuable addition to organ music since the time of Mendelssohn. They are characterised by a happy blending of the modern Romantic spirit with masterly counterpoint and dignified organ style.

— J. Weston Nicholl, in Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1908 edition

The Munich teacher

Rheinberger’s classroom was an institution. His pupils included the German Engelbert Humperdinck (of Hänsel und Gretel), Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, and the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler — and a remarkable number of Americans who carried his disciplined craft home to found a national school of composition: Horatio Parker (later Charles Ives’s teacher at Yale), George Whitefield Chadwick, Henry Holden Huss, and others. Through them, the conservatory training of late-nineteenth-century America runs straight back to a man from Vaduz.

In 1877 he was appointed court conductor in Munich, responsible for the music in the royal chapel, a post he held until ill health forced his resignation in 1894. Ten years earlier, in 1867, he had married Franziska von Hoffnaaß — “Fanny,” a poet and a former pupil — who wrote the texts for much of his vocal music and was his closest companion until her death on the last day of 1892.

Legacy

Rheinberger died in Munich on 25 November 1901. His standing, immense in his lifetime, faded in the twentieth century as Romantic counterpoint fell out of fashion, and his reputation came to rest almost entirely on the organ works and a few choral pieces such as the beloved motet Abendlied. A final, strange epilogue: his Munich grave was destroyed in the Second World War, and in 1950 his remains were brought home and reinterred in Vaduz — the principality reclaiming, half a century on, the one composer who had carried its name into the concert halls of the world. The twenty sonatas remain in every serious organist’s repertory, and the long line of his pupils, German and American alike, remain his living monument.