William Becker ???

[Mark Thomas]

Thanks Eric. I followed that up, but it isn't available online as far as I can see and I'm not really interested enough to go to any bother.... 

[Gareth Vaughan]

...there's a copy of the score in the Fleischer Collection

True, Mark, but it's only a 2-piano score. Where is the full score? That's what I want to know.

[Mark Thomas]

Thanks for that, Gareth. The full score has probably followed poor Becker into the musical limbo where he seems to remain.

[eschiss1]

Very minor detail to add - a waltz, Wenn die Rose welkt, opus 101 (Valse élégiaque pour piano), was published by Arpa-Verlag of Berlin in 1910 according to Hofmeisters Monatsberichte (December 1910, page 316). (Assuming it's the same fellow.)  Haven't seemed to run into his name much elsewhere I think..

[Mark Thomas]

Opus 101? Good heavens, that's an awfully big bushel!

[eschiss1]

I haven't yet exactly scoured the ONB scans of Hofmeister issues 1901-1947 for his name- alas the searchable transcripts of Hofmeister only go from 1829 to 1900 or so, the rest of the scans have not (yet?) been transcribed by the fine people at the Hofmeister-site at rhul.ac.uk and have to be read at onb.ac.at (Austrian Nat. Library) manually. (And one still has to learn the ins and outs of the search site more over time, too- anyway. Nothing by him seems to be in the 1829-1900 part, but he may have had nothing published yet in 1900, or nothing that the people at Hofmeister had caught in their net, anyway!)
-Eric proud dork with too much time on his hands today (and ignoring some things he has to do - well, erm... right. And alas if there was a pun in your reply, Mark, I quite missed it!)

[Mark Thomas]

Hiding one's light under a bushel, Eric. No pun. 

[giles.enders]

William Becker 1873-1951 was born in Cleveland, Ohio.  He visited London in 1904 and performed a solo recital at Beckstein Hall (now Wigmore) on 19th January 1904. I have recently had correspondence with a former pupil of a pupil of Beckers.  He is planning a live performance in Cleveland later in the year.

[Mark Thomas]

Thanks Giles.

[giles.enders]

A little more about William Becker.  He was married twice, there were no children by either.  His estate went to his second wife's sister who had no interest in Becker or his music.  There was something in his will that required a public performance of his works and reluctantly she acceded to this and which resulted in the recording referred to.  There is also a recording of the rehearsal of Kelly and his pupil playing the two piano score. 

The problem my contact has is that he cannot find out who now owns the copyright.

 

[Mark Thomas]

How interesting.

Isn't it odd the alleyways down which we sometimes find ourselves wandering? I spent several fruitless days on genealogy sites contacting people who had Raff's brother Joseph Kaspar in their family tree to see if any of them had a photo. None replied and I got no reply either from my email to Binghamton NY library. It was only mild curiosity, but it kept me happy for days...

[giles.enders]

Jumping from Becker to Raff's brother is a big leap.  I have a hunch that if a photo is anywhere, it will be in Wiesbaden.  What are his dates and what was his profession?

[Mark Thomas]

Oh, I was just getting diverted into musing on how I get diverted. There is no link with Becker.

Raff's brother Kaspar (1831-1893) emigrated to the US in 1855 and from 1858 lived in Owego NY. He set himself up as "Professor Joseph C Raff", a music teacher and leader of local cornet bands. He wrote an amount of  light piano music (confusingly for posterity published as being by J. Raff or Joseph Raff) and retired in 1888, moving to nearby Binghamton where he died. As far as I can tell, he made one trip back to Germany in 1890, by which time big brother Joseph Joachim had been in his grave for eight years. If you want to hear a couple of his piano pieces go here. Of course, there is a chance that the family back in Germany had a photo of him, but the Raff wasn't close to his own family and in any event it would be amongst the Raff papers which are all in Munich. I thought it worth an email or two to the US, but really I was only idly interested to see what Joachim's brother looked like.

[eschiss1]

that actually brings up something.
I want to create a category on IMSLP for Joachim's brother (composers, editors, etc. have categories rather than pages there, for those yet unfamiliar with the site...) to preserve copies of the LOC scans of Kaspar's music, with attribution- standard practice of mine and something I believe the site is for - but the evidence and reasoning that in my opinion strongly establishes that "Joseph Raff", LOC-style, is not Joachim Raff but rather his brother (except for a work or so that's definitely by Joachim- one needs a language in which to talk about this in which this makes sense...)

the evidence, the reasoning is not mine, but that of a few people on this forum in varying proportions, and I should probably resurrect the earlier thread to do this but do feel a need to ask a certain intellectual-property-permission before going forward.  And so I do.

[Mark Thomas]

My apologies to Alan for this thread going off piste, the responsibility is entirely mine.

Eric, you have my permission, blessing, enthusiastic encouragement and anything else you need, to use whatever I have come up with to establish at IMSLP Joseph C(aspar) Raff as the composer of the LOC works which we have identified. All I know is on this site and is summarised on the Raff web site here. If I can find out any more then I'll be sure to let you now.