In the life of Hummel (1778-1837), the favourite pupil of Mozart, posts as kapellmeister with Esterhazy, in Stuttgart and in Weimar, with a longer, unattached residence at Vienna, regulated the varying domiciles at which he lived. Weimar, as a great resting place, enjoyed through him its first musical renown, which reached half through the period of Goethe. In the intervals he took his concert-tours to Dresden, Paris, Holland, Berlin, Belgium, England, Scotland, and St Petersburg. These, as far as the furloughs of a kapellmeister permitted, recurred with a certain regularity, till they gradually ceased entirely.
Marcelline Czartoryska, née Princess Radziwill, pupil of Czerny.
Engraved by Marchi.
Cramer (1771-1858) had two long stays in London, in the midst of which a sojourn at Paris occupied the years from 1832 to 1845. He found a secondary occupation in a London musical house, in which he was a partner from 1828 to 1842. Kalkbrenner (1784-1849), on the contrary, lived in Paris, but his residence there was interrupted by a nine years’ stay in London (1814-1823). He too had secondary interests. He was concerned with Logier in a company for the exploitation of the “Chiroplast,” and he had also a share in a piano-factory. Moscheles (1794-1870) had no business. His external life was made up of his youthful time in Vienna with Beethoven and Meyerbeer, his sensational Parisian recitals of 1820, his glorious stay in London from 1821 to 1846, and his professoriate at the Leipzig Conservatorium. At intervals, of course, he made Continental concert-tours.
Among all the great virtuosos and teachers only Czerny had a really fixed abode (1791-1857). As a boy of fifteen he was already a teacher in Vienna, and as such he died there; his tours also being few and far between.
Prince Louis Ferdinand.
Engraved by Geiger after Grassy.
But Czerny is in this respect an exception. Otherwise the international play of virtuosity led to an exchange and co-operation, to the mutual curiosity and desire to learn, which mark the concert-life of that age. Duet-playing by great executants, in private or in the concert-hall, is nothing unusual throughout this time. But the genuine interpreter does not as yet exist. The player has mostly a personal interest in the piece performed, and the friends assist at the christening. It is the time of the Hexameron. Exchange is often even too self-abnegatory. Moscheles composed for Cramer (with whom, as also with Ries and Kalkbrenner, he often played duets) a last movement for Cramer’s own sonata for two pianofortes. Later on he took the piece back again and tacked it on to his well-known piece, “Hommage à Haendel!” We need not then be surprised at such gruesome pasticcios as the programme of a London Philharmonic concert under Weber,[121] when were played the C sharp minor concerto of Ries, the E flat major of Beethoven, and the Hungarian Rondo of Pixis.