Fritz Kreisler

• Born: February 2, 1875
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
• Died: January 29, 1962
• Place of death: New York, New York

Austrian classical composer and violinist

Kreisler was a celebrated violinist, trained in Vienna before World War I. His playing was noted for continually varying tempi, nearly constant vibrato, and an imitation of a vocal slide known as portamento.

The Life

Born to physician Saloman Severin Kreisler and his wife Anna in Vienna, Fritz Kreisler (frihtz KRI-slur) played a violin as soon as he could hold one. His Polish-born father was a gifted amateur violinist, and he was Kreisler’s first teacher. By the age of four Kreisler had drawn the attention of Vienna’s major musicians. At the age of seven Kreisler entered the Vienna Conservatory, where he studied theory with composer Anton Bruckner. At the age of ten he won the conservatory’s gold medal, and he went on to the Paris Conservatory, where he won the premier prix in violin two years later in 1887. The following year he toured the United States with pianist Moritz Rosenthal, but he did not receive the acclaim Europe afforded him.

Back in Vienna, Kreisler abandoned music for a series of experiments in other vocations, studying medicine in Vienna and art in Rome and Paris. In 1895 and 1896, he took officer training in the Austrian army. Returning to the violin after this hiatus, he discovered he had lost none of his virtuosity. Appearing as a soloist first with the Vienna Philharmonic and then the Berlin Philharmonic, Kreisler began a second U.S. tour in 1900, this time to great acclaim.

During his second U.S. tour, he met and courted Harriet Lies; they married in New York in 1902. In 1910 England’s foremost composer, Edward Elgar, wrote a violin concerto for him, which Kreisler premiered. When World War I broke out in 1914, Kreisler rejoined his old regiment, but he was discharged after being wounded in action. He returned to the United States, where he toured again with great success. When the United States entered the war in 1917, Kreisler, who had fought in the army now fighting U.S. forces, stopped giving concerts and turned to composing. With Victor Jacobi, Kreisler created music for the Broadway operetta Apple Blossoms. In 1924 he returned to Europe, living in Berlin until 1938. He moved to France, and to escape the Nazi advance he left a year later. He returned to the United States, and he became a U.S. citizen in 1943. He retired from public concerts in 1947, though he continued playing on the radio until 1950. Complications from a 1941 auto accident left him blind and deaf for the last decade of his life. When he died in 1962, his legacy included one of the largest private collections of eighteenth century violins, and some still bear his name.

The Music

Kreisler composed short works, which he used as encore pieces (though he created a stir by attributing some of his pastiches to famous Baroque composers), and which are now part of the standard repertoire of virtuoso violinists. He was influenced by the music of his Viennese childhood, when it was the peak of popularity for the waltzes and ländler (folk dances) of Johann Strauss and Josef Lanner, echoing the folk-music traditions of Austria at the end of the nineteenth century. Although Kreisler was trained in the Franco-Belgian school, he manifested the Viennese style in his performances and in his compositions.

Three Viennese Melodies. When Kreisler published a trio of violin and piano pieces in 1905 under the title of Three Viennese Melodies, he attributed them to Lanner, Strauss’s rival. They were instant successes, and they became popular concert pieces not only for Kreisler but also for other violin soloists, who assumed that Kreisler’s role in publishing them was as arranger. Five years later Kreisler published the third piece, a waltz entitled “Schön Rosmarin” (“Beautiful Rosmarin”), under his own name, revealing it as his own composition. Audiences and critics quickly figured out that the other two songs, “Liebesleid” (“Love’s Sorrow”) and “Liebesfreud” (“Love’s Joy”), long performed as posthumous compositions by Lanner, were also Kreisler’s. Companion pieces, “Liebesleid” and “Liebesfreud” are nearly program-music clichés of the emotions in their titles. “Liebesleid” creates a mournful sound by using portamentos that project sorrow and adding glissandi. “Liebesfreud” achieves a joyful sound with sprightly rhythms and the liberal use of the double stop, in which two notes are played simultaneously. “Schön Rosmarin” remains a popular showpiece for violinists, with its Strauss-Lanner Viennese waltz style, yet it develops rhythmic complexities by continually grouping pairs of standard 3/4 waltz time measures so that they sound like larger measures of 3/2 time. Taken together, the three pieces evoke the spirit of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. They complement one another, and yet each played alone can be an effective recital or encore piece.

Caprice viennois, Op. 2. An imitation of the Strauss Viennese melodies of Kreisler’s youth, this sprightly piece lives up to its capricious name. Kreisler achieves humor by opening with a lingering, sensuous, slow rhythm before bursting into dynamic activity of breathtaking rapidity.

Tambourin chinois, Op. 3. Composed about the same time as the Viennese pieces (and copyrighted the same year, 1905), this pseudo-Chinese invention is not as authentic as Kreisler’s imitation of his native folk music of Vienna, but it is as good as most of the Orientalist imitations in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century. Like most of those imitations, Tambourin chinois (Chinese tambourine) employs the pentatonic scale, the five pitches per octave that is the basis for Chinese and Japanese folk music (known as the “oriental scale” in the West). A piano begins the piece, with sharply hammered notes that imitate the tambourine of the title, and then the violin picks up the pentatonic melody to conclude the first part. The second section abandons the pentatonic and sounds as Viennese as Kreisler’s other compositions of the period. The third and concluding section is a reprise of the opening melody.

Apple Blossoms. More than a decade before Fred Astaire danced to Irving Berlin’s jazz-inspired syncopations with Ginger Rogers, he was dancing to the Viennese sounds of fellow Austrian American Kreisler. (Astaire was born Frederick Austerlitz; his father emigrated from Austria.) In this otherwise forgettable operetta, Kreisler’s melodies recall the Strauss-Lanner imitations of the previous decade, yet they are now fully Americanized, as is the thin story line. Based on a novel by writer Alexandre Dumas père, the nineteenth century French love story is transposed to New York. Of the twenty-two songs in the score, ten are Kreisler’s compositions and two more are collaborations with the show’s other composer, Jacobi. The most enduring song is “Who Can Tell?” In it, Kreisler’s shifting rhythms and tempi perfectly capture the emotions of the song and the central conflict of the play. The conflict is a familiar one for romantic comedy: two girls love two boys, but the girls’ parents want each to marry the other’s beau. When Kreisler reworked the operetta to become the Columbia Pictures film The King Steps Out (1936), the song was revived for another generation as “Stars in My Eyes.”

Musical Legacy

Kreisler’s violin technique influenced students of the instrument long after he stopped performing, and his compositions remain standard elements for violinists’ training. Kreisler’s constant vibrato may strike some as overly mannered, but violinists trained in Europe and North America in the first half of the twentieth century were heavily influenced by that performance style. Kreisler established an award, which he gave personally to the best violinist at his alma mater, the Wiener Musikakademie (Vienna Music Academy) each year from 1924 to 1938. In 1979 the award was made international, and it is given every four years to an outstanding young violinist. In 2005 the Canadian Broadcasting Company began a series of annual concerts dedicated exclusively to music by Kreisler and Kreisler’s arrangements of the works of other composers.

Kreisler’s compositions may constitute his most lasting legacy. His works play major roles in violinists’ repertoire, and they are used as teaching pieces on which young violinists perfect their technique. Many of the cadenzas (violin solos) he wrote for Brahms and Beethoven violin concerti are still heard in performances of those pieces. His arrangements of Antonín Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances (1878) and Arcangelo Corelli’s La Folia (1700) are still popular if not standard choices.

Bibliography

Bell, A. Craig. Fritz Kreisler Remembered: A Tribute. Braunton, England: Merlin Press, 1992. This brief and readable biography is an ideal starting point for understanding Kreisler and his music.

Biancolli, Amy. Fritz Kreisler: Love’s Sorrow, Love’s Joy. Portland, Oreg.: Amadeus Press, 1998. Detailed and grounded in hard documentary evidence, this biography demonstrates the author’s thorough knowledge and obvious love of Kreisler’s music.

Kreisler, Fritz. Four Weeks in the Trenches. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1915. Kreisler’s contemporary account, written and published before the United States entered the war, of his experience fighting for the Austrian Empire in World War I.

Lochner, Louis P. Fritz Kreisler. New York: Macmillan, 1951. A richly detailed biography (with an extensive discography). It is enhanced, but also limited, by Lochner’s intimate friendship with Kreisler. Important aspects of Kreisler’s life (such as his Jewish childhood) are suppressed.

Sachs, Harvey. Virtuoso: The Life and Art of Niccolo Paganini, Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein, Ignace Jan Paderewski, Fritz Kreisler, Pablo Casals, Wanda Landowska, Vladimir Horowitz, Glenn Gould. London: Thames & Hudson, 1982. The chapter on Kreisler in this collection of biographical-critical sketches is a concise portrait of the virtuoso.

Principal Works

musical theater (music): Apple Blossoms, 1919 (with Victor Jacobi; lyrics by William Le Baron; libretto by Alexandre Dumas); Rhapsody, 1944 (lyrics by John LaTouche; libretto by Leonard Louis Levinson and Arnold Sundgaard).

orchestral work: String Quartet in A Minor, 1921.

Principal Recordings

albums (as violinist): Variations on a Theme of Corelli, 1910; Rondino on a Theme by Beethoven, 1916; Aucassin et Nicolette, 1921; March of the Toy Soldiers, 1921; Caprice viennois, Op. 2, 1924; Liebesfreud, 1926; Liebesleid, 1926; Gypsy Caprice, 1927; Shepherd’s Madrigal, 1927; Tambourin chinois, Op. 3, 1928; La Précieuse in the Style of Couperin, 1929; The Old Refrain, 1929; Polchinelle, 1929; Schön Rosmarin, 1929; La Gitana, 1942; Viennese rapsodic fantasietta, 1946.

writings of interest:Four Weeks in the Trenches, 1915.