Help with identifying a piano piece

[Mark Thomas]

Can I throw out a plea for help, please, from the UC community? Here's a four-minute piano piece in G minor entitled Octaven-Edude (Octaves Etude), supposedly by Raff. It's clearly an extract from a larger publication (the "15" at the start presumably indicates that it's the fifteenth work in whatever collection the score is extracted from).

If it is indeed by Raff, then it's not a piece which we've known about before, but I do have serious doubts about the attribution.  Although it's obviously a piano exercise, unlike Raff's published piano exercises (the 30 Progressive Etudes WoO.36) it's rather an unimaginative, remorseless and unsubtle one. That in itself doesn't debar it from being by him, of course, but there is no hint that I have ever come across that Raff wrote such a work and neither do I know of a collection which might feature one. I did suspect that it was the fifteenth number of a supplement published in 1876 by Schlesinger to Theodor Kullak's well-known Die Schule des Oktavenspiels (Raff's name is the fifteenth composer listed in the title), but the Raff pieces in that turn out to be excerpts from the finale of his D minor Piano Suite Op.91 and the Cachoucha-Caprice Op.79. 

The Etude was published in facsimile (as a copy of the PDF) by Musica Obscura, who don't seem to be trading any more.  It's entirely possible that, having an unattributed piece of music lying around, someone (and I'm not pointing a finger at Musica Obscura, of course) cut and pasted the "Joachim Raff" at the top, thereby giving it an author.

I am very loathe to claim it as being Raff just on the strength of one PDF, without any publication history or any other context. Any help which anyone can give in identifying this Octaven-Etude, whether it's by Raff or not, will be greatly appreciated. 

[Martin Eastick]

This Raff work is from Sigismund Lebert & Louis Stark's "Grand Theoretical and Practical Piano-School....." It would seem to be one of "eleven etudes especially composed"  for this work which also includes contributions from such composers as Bargiel, Benedict, Brahms, Heller, Henselt, Hiller, Kirchner, Moscheles, Rubinstein, as well as 4 items by Liszt. Apart from the Liszt items, there are a total of 17 others, so not all of these were "especially composed", but perhaps Raff's contribution was? Furthermore, I don't know where the "No15" comes from, as noted from the Musica Obscura reprint, as there is no mention of this in my copy, and Raff's work is actually the 13th in the running order! Perhaps Musica Obscura's reprint is from another edition of this publication? (My edition is J G Cotta, Stuttgart 1879).

[Mark Thomas]

Thank you so much, Martin!

I had already come to the reluctant conclusion that it was by Raff (reluctant, as it seems to me to be a very workaday piece) because yesterday I came across an extract from it in Eduard Mertke's Oktaventechnik, published by Steingräber in 1892. The extract is endorsed "Octaven-Etude: Joachim Raff" and was one of a number of other such extracts, all of them from well-known works by Raff. I imagine that Raff will have written it especially for the Lebert & Stark book. In the 1870s he wrote three sets of Etudes for a pair of such handbooks by Theodor Steingräber (using the psueudonym of Gustav Damm), which were posthumously published by Steingräber as Raff's 30 Progressive Etudes. The earliest edition of the Grand Theoretical and Practical Piano-School I have found is 1868, which fits in very nicely with the composition dates of those three sets (1868-1870), so I can go ahead now and allocate the work a WoO number with confidence, because that's done chronologically, of course.

Once again, very many thanks to you, Martin, and also to Thal and Eric for your help in this little quest.