Kraft Family

[Semi.Serio]

Hi! In the DOWNLOADS Folder, I have uploaded the recording of a "Concerto for Two Cellos by Antonin Kraft" (as announced). I found it on YouTube and recorded it an audio file. Antonin Kraft? The work is certainly not by the Esterházy cellist (the style points at 1840-1860) and it is not a Concerto either, but rather a one-movement Concertino. I do not find any similar piece in the list of works by Anton's son Nikolaus (1778-1853). Could it have been written by the latter's son, Friedrich Anton (1807-1874)?
Best
SemiSerio

[Richard Moss]

Semiserio

Much appreciate this upload - I have liked the other 'Kraft' works I've heard (mostly Nikolaus, some Antonin).

Do you have any further information on which composer this is or any background to the work and and movement/tempi indications?

thank you

Richard

[Richard Moss]

Semiserio,

Don't know why/how - I hadn't seen your post on the site when I created my own post.  I have now looked on Youtube and found two recording of (the same?) work.

One is the one you've kindly uploaded and Youtube says it is in G major and by Antonin Kraft.  The other, with the 'Singolo' orchestra, says it is  by M Kraft(??) with no other information.

Any clarification (from anyone!) appreciated.

Cheers

Richard

[Alan Howe]

Are we sure this isn't by Antonin Kraft? Sounds very late-18thC to me. Could it be some sort of arrangement? Anyway, to be honest, the performance isn't very inspiring, is it? It's all very lethargic. (BTW the YouTube details say it's in C, not G - although the letter isn't very clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsEe5cfMrLU). So, all a bit of a mystery...

[Gareth Vaughan]

Sounds to me as if this could easily have been written before 1820.

[Semi.Serio]

I have no other Information about the work and I did not know there was another performance online. Many thanks for telling us this. Does it perhaps mean that the work was published? As to the date, I do still not think it can be by Antonin sen. but possibly by Nikolaus - this of course if the work is played in its original form and not in a romanticizing arrangement. How like is it that a composer born in 1749 would write a compact Concertino of this kind? The first ones seem to have surfaced at around 1810-1815 but written by composers who were much younger that Kraft like Weber and Bärmann.
Best

[Gareth Vaughan]

On second thoughts, you could well be right. Nikolaus is sometimes written Mikuláš. Hence "M. Kraft", possibly.

[Alan Howe]

Here's the link to the other (much better) YouTube performance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPiXjimRc98
The details given are: "M. Kraft - Concertino for 2 cellos and orchestra", so, I'm guessing that the piece is actually by Antonin's son Mikuláš (Nikolaus) Kraft (1778–1853), which would explain the late 18thC/early 19thC feel of the piece.

[sdtom]

Alan is such a researcher

[Semi.Serio]

In the Grove, it is said that Nikolaus gave some concerts with his son Friedrich Anton, at least in 1820-1821. So one can think about Nikolaus composing a highly virtuosistic piece for himself and Little Fritz...

[Alan Howe]

Might this be the clincher?

In 1818 he undertook an especially noteworthy tour of the Rhein region with Austrian composer and pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837), who had before that been active as Haydn's successor in the function of Kapellmeister of the Esterházy orchestra in Eisenstadt (1804-1811). Then from 1816 to 1819 Hummel held the position of court Kapellmeister in Stuttgart, where he came to know Nikolaus Kraft personally. It may also be of interest that Johann Nepomuk Hummel was exactly one month younger than Nikolaus Kraft (Johann Nepomuk Hummel was born on 14 November 1778). They ended their joint concert trip in Hamburg, where Nikolaus Kraft met cellist Bernhard Romberg (1767-1841). Romberg esteemed Nikolaus Kraft very highly and gave a concerto for two cellos with him in Stuttgart two years after that (1820). As an expression of his admiration, Nikolaus Kraft dedicated to Bernard Romberg his first and second cello concertos. The third concerto was then dedicated to Johann Nepomuk Hummel...

As with his father Anton, Nikolaus Kraft's compositions too were with few exceptions written for the cello. His oeuvre consists of virtuoso concertos, compositions for cello and orchestra, and duets for two cellos (concertos for cello and orchestra, divertimentos, boleros, fantasies, polonaises, potpourris, rondos, and variations); they amount to seventeen opuses. From his works that have survived, it has been possible to put together a list of his accessible works, most of which were published by the Peters publishing house. Works printed in Kraft's time are today housed in the archives of Czech Museum of Music (part of the National Museum in Prague), in the Säschische Landesbibliothek in Dresden, in the Fürstlich Fürstenbergische Hofbibliothek in Donaueschingen, in the Bibliothek der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, in the Archives of Czech Radio in Prague, and in the score archives of the Prague Conservatory.

For Nikolaus Kraft, composing was more like a complementary activity. He wrote mostly for "his" instrument. The most substantial part of his oeuvre is formed by his four concertos for cello and orchestra and a number of works of chamber character including what were in his time termed "salon pieces," which traditionally highlighted the performer's virtuosity and favoured melodious, somewhat sentimental expression: typical of salon style was the so-called Biedermeier. In this regard Nikolaus Kraft is a typical composer of his time – the time of a stylistic shift, in which the key expressive means of the old (in this case in particular some classicist melodic and structural mannerisms) were abandoned in favour of new means associated with early Romanticism.

Nikolaus Kraft entered a period of change when signs of a new style were forming, this coming on one hand from the activitis of the representatives of the rising "national schools," and on the other hand with the intermingling of characteristic (or merely "attractive") elements running counter to those schools. This is very typical if for example we compare the concerto works of period virtuoso-composers such as the violinists Paganini, Kreutzer and Spohr: on the one hand they were representatives of their "national schools" but on the other they were internatinally famous as virtuosos. With Nikolaus Kraft we are dealing with a marked type of early Romantic melodics which has its roots in the tunefullness of the Lieder genre (the Lied in that period had gained enormous social prestige);it is characterized by hightened expressivity both in its tendencies to both the dramatic and the sentimental (created mostly with the help of rather complicated harmonic means), by the use of the characeristic elements of the new kinds of dance (simple accompanying figures as one of the legitimat features not only of dance music but also of operatic and even concert music of early Romanticism). As with the works of his father, Nikolaus Kraft unequivocally places the emphasis on the virtuosity of solo performance, to which all else is subordinated although with a very solid overall artistic result. If we compare the musical impression made by the father Anton Kraft and the son Nikolaus Kraft, there is a striking resemblance, just as when one compares the composing styles of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart with that of his son, Franz Xaver Mozart, a case with an almost identical difference in age. 
http://www.rozhlas.cz/klasika/composers/_zprava/mikulas-nikolaus-kraft--1325096

Here's a works list:

op 1 Fantaisie pour violoncelle et orchestre (1808)
op 2 Polonaise pour violoncelle et orchestre (1809)
op 3 Concerto pour violoncelle et orchestre n° 1 (1810)
op 4 Concerto pour violoncelle et orchestre n° 2 (1813)
op 5 Concerto pour violoncelle et orchestre n° 3 (1819)
op 6 Boléro pour violoncelle et orchestre (1819 ?)
op 7 Concerto pour violoncelle et orchestre n° 4 (1820)
op 8 Pot-Pourri pour piano et orchestre (1820)
op 9 Scène pastorale pour violoncelle et orchestre (1820 ?)
op 10 Andante und Polonaise pour violoncelle et piano (1821)
op 11 Rondo "A la Chasse" pour violoncelle et orchestre (1822 ?)
op 12 Pot-Pourri sur des thèmes du Freischütz pour violoncelle et orchestre (1822 ?)
op 13 Variations pour violoncelle et orchestre (1823 ?)
op 14 8 Divertissements d'une difficulté progressive pour 2 violoncelles (1823 ?)
op 15 6 Duos pour 2 violoncelles (1825 ?)
op 17 6 Duos pour 2 violoncelles (1825 ?)
http://musiqueclassique.forumpro.fr/t5180-nikolaus-kraft-1778-1853
No Concertino for two cellos mentioned, however. Hmmmmm.....

[JimL]

The highlighted statement makes it singularly unclear, however, whether or not the concerto for 2 cellos was composed by Kraft or Romberg (or, for that matter, by a third party).

[eschiss1]

unfortunately, "M." is remarkably ambiguous, since on published scores, especially French ones, it could just mean "Mr.", so depending on the (long-)provenance-chain of the person's information...

[Alan Howe]

The highlighted statement makes it singularly unclear, however, whether or not the concerto for 2 cellos was composed by Kraft or Romberg (or, for that matter, by a third party).

True - but, although Romberg did write a Concerto for two cellos, it dates from the 1840s, so we can rule that one out.

unfortunately, "M." is remarkably ambiguous, since on published scores, especially French ones, it could just mean "Mr."

Again, true. But there is no evidence that Mikuláš/Nikolaus' music was published in the French-speaking world. On the contrary, it was (mostly?) published by Peters of Leipzig. Note also that 'Mikuláš' was Germanicised as 'Nikolaus'. In French this would be 'Nicholas'. So on the balance of the evidence... 

[Richard Moss]

Guys,

Many thanks for all the comments.  UC never fails to amaze me at what its collective know how is!

Is there any way to contact the performers to research the origins of  their scores?

Cheers

Roichard