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Karl Franz Friedrich Chrysander

From the Musical Times of October 1901 (reprinted in the Autumn 2001 issue)

With much regret we place on record the death – which took place on the 3rd ult., at Bergedorf, near Hamburg, where he had lived since 1866 – of Friedrich Chrysander, Doctor of Philosophy, musician, musical historian, critic, and editor. The biographical information concerning this great Handelian scholar is so exceedingly meagre and in some respects inaccurate, that we are glad to furnish our readers with the subjoined authentic account of his life, kindly contributed by his son-in-law, Mr. Charles Volkert, whose account includes some autobiographical matter written by Dr. Chrysander and now published for the first time.

Karl Franz Friedrich Chrysander, the son of a miller, was born at Lübtheen, in Mecklenburg, on July 8, 1826. He adopted at first an educational career, holding posts of tutor in several gentlemen’s families. He was also assistant master to his future father-in-law, the organist and schoolmaster Borgmann, of Vellahn, in Mecklenburg.

After attending lectures at Göttingen, Leipzig and Rostock, the last-named University bestowed upon him the degree of Doc. Phil., the independent work for his promotion being ‘Ueber die Molltonart in den Volksgesangen’, (On the minor mode in Folk-songs), Schwerin, 1853, which he soon followed up by another booklet ‘Ueber das Oratorium’ (On the Oratorio).

Subsequently Chrysander took to music as a profession. From the beginning he assumed the role of an historian in rigorously defending the right and claims of musical masterpieces of a distant past to a legitimate and faithful reproduction, i.e., without modernising, and without instrumental or vocal additions. This soon brought him into conflict with leading musicians, who considered his action too far-reaching and one-sided.

Friedrich Chrysander’s work centred indeed in the oratorio, as his early pamphlets prove, though not by any means confined to it. While working at Wolfenbüttel, Brunswick, Weissenfels, Lauenburg, and other once famous German cities, he prepared for actual performance and published in 1856 (Wolfenbüttel) four volumes of Bach’s Clavier compositions, an edition which has lost none of its value or importance; moreover, it has the merit of being the first critically revised classical edition on record. Even before this he had had the good fortune to discover Bach’s long-lost autograph of the immortal B minor Mass; and it at once illustrates the ideal side of his character, that he handed over this priceless score, from which much of the Bach cult of recent years has arisen, to the Royal Library at Berlin for the same sum (either £40 or 40 thalers) that he gave for it. He had to put up with many personal attacks of partisans of the great Leipzig Cantor, but it has not been yet shown that anyone of them has done as much for Bach as the subject of this notice.

At that time Chrysander put into score several volumes of Heinrich Schütz’s compositions, which years afterwards he handed over to his friend, the late Philipp Spitta, to see through the press. It bears testimony to the dead musician’s character that his work for Schütz, as well as his editions of the Motets of Palestrina, the clavier music of Couperin, the violin works of Corelli, bore for thirty years the names of Bellermann, Brahms, and Joachim, respectively, but not his own. His object was solely to secure for these fine works the utmost interest and utility.

He found his real sphere of action, however, when he started in 1856, in conjunction with Gervinus, Dehn, Hauptmann, and others, the so-called German Handel Society for the publication of the great Anglo-Saxon’s complete compositions. These works he prepared from sources almost exclusively preserved in England. He was fortunate in being able to embody in that edition innumerable second thoughts and improvements noted down in Handel’s own hand, as indicated in the conducting scores which came to light about that time.

Chrysander received some blame on this side of the Channel for carrying off those valuable Handel documents, and it is as well that the facts should be recorded in this place. In the early fifties, Kerslake, a second-hand bookseller of Bristol, secured the library of Lord Rivers’s family, and offered about 126 volumes of MSS. – reputedly copies of Handel’s scores – in his catalogue for the sum of £38. The late Victor Schoelcher, himself an able and enthusiastic Handel lover, secured the lot – it narrowly escaped being caught up by the Sacred Harmonic Society – which proved to be in the handwriting of the two Smiths. Schoelcher immediately placed the volumes at Chrysander’s disposal. Seeing at a glance their immense importance to the Handel Edition, he offered to buy the scores – which, by the way, also contained the autographs of Christopher Smith’s own oratorios – and Schoelcher accepted £800 for them. Though Chrysander could not scrape together more than £100, and had to leave the volumes in Schoelcher’s hands for some years, he (Schoelcher) stuck to the bargain, in spite of the increased offers he meanwhile had received. In return for this kindness, the Doctor declined more than one offer to translate his ‘Life’ of Handel, because Schoelcher had published one in the English language. Several Hamburg gentlemen subsequently subscribed the funds necessary to complete the purchase, and thus the Smith conducting scores found their permanent home in the Hamburg Library.

This brings us to the second most important work connected with Chrysander’s name, his ‘G. F. Handel,’ of which two volumes and the first half of the third were published between the years 1858 and 1867, and which ranks with the best in this form of literature that has appeared in the German language, for sound, unbiassed and independent research, and the author’s enthusiasm for his work and subject. True, the period (1740–1759) dealing with Handel’s great oratorios, he was not able to see through the press. But he left most of the material for its completion in admirable order, and it is to be hoped that Dr. Max Seiffert, his valued friend and pupil will not only soon issue the earlier volumes (long since out of print, though re-cast and partly re-written by Dr. Chrysander), but that he will complete the work according to the intentions of the author.

To revert to the Handel Edition. The struggles to carry on this vast work of editing and engraving between 16,000 and 17,000 plates of Handel’s works alone, unaided by publisher’s advice or finance, were indeed heavy, particularly seeing that from the outset his colleagues were not merely apathetic but in actual opposition to him, as a letter of Hauptmann to Hauser and various printed attacks sufficiently prove. These collaborators all fell off after 1860, except Professor Gervinus, whose still valuable German translations were given to the edition. He died in 1871. To produce the works at first cost, Chrysander set up an office in his own garden, where all the volumes since 1862 were engraved and printed under his personal and unremitting care, thus following the example set by the Bach family.

Chrysander was able to issue about ninety-seven volumes of Handel’s works, and the outstanding two volumes were also lately completed by him, and engraved ready for publication. In the preface to the last volume, ‘The Messiah,’ he has acknowledged gratefully some of the factors that have rendered this edition possible, and, with his usual custom, he subordinates therein all personal questions and merit to the cause so dear to his heart.

No doubt his Handel studies might be considered sufficient for one man’s life-work – one that places Chrysander in the front rank of musical scientists and editors; but he always wished to rank as, and was eminently a musician of broad culture and convictions; not a mere Handelian in the generally understood sense of the term, but a practical musician. To study Handel aright, he issued at his cost, under the heading of ‘Sources to Handel’s works,’ some very important compositions, such as Urio’s Te Deum, Clari’s Duets, Erba’s Magnificat, Stradella’s Serenata, Muffat’s Componimenti, R. Keiser’s operas, which Handel absorbed in his great work. These borrowings have only recently been ably treated by Mr. J. S. Shedlock, but the reasons for such conduct are still to be accounted for. Apart from the practice of the day, Handel transformed the ideas of others in a legitimate way, and Chrysander not only produced the means whereby to estimate the apparent theft, but collected evidence to explain Handel’s action. Thus there is a copy of Handel’s Clavier Suites annotated by Muffat, in which this sound musician censured, corrected, and cut up the greater master’s work. Handel’s revenge in borrowing from Muffat may have been taken to show how much could be done with his (Muffat’s) own ideas. This sort of raillery has existed as long as there have been musicians, and so far the art has not been a loser by it. No one has effectually belittled Shakespeare for having picked up valuable material wherever he could, or Bach for interspersing his great works with themes and chorales that existed before him. It is curious that Handel alone was attacked after his death on that account more than were the other great men.

During the forty-five years which Chrysander mainly devoted to the cause of Handel, partly to support it and himself, he edited Jahrbücher für Musikalische Wissenschaft (1863 to 67). They contain complete and important investigations on our ‘God save the King,’ the ‘Lochheimer Liederbuch,’ and many important subjects, as interesting now as then. Moreover, for thirteen years he was the indefatigable editor of the Leipziger Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung, and many are the signed and unsigned contributions that he sent forth week after week. Together with Spitta and Adler he edited the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, in which appeared his articles on music printing, on Zacconi, the great Italian singing master, upon whom most of Handel’s work for solo voices is based, and who practically taught us how such music should be sung. There is also an edition of all Carissimi’s oratorios, some of which would not have come to light but for his tenacity of purpose. Dr. Max Seiffert will be able to tell us something of this great forerunner of Handel. Chrysander edited and published at his expense, Beethoven’s symphonies in score quite forty years ago – an exceedingly careful and correct edition. Many are his concise and impartial biographies of musicians in Brockhaus’ famous lexicon, to which he contributed for several years. Vast as was his literary and musical work, he became in recent years best known by the masterly conducting versions which he prepared of twelve or fourteen of Handel’s masterpieces. These are not only the outcome of the last seven or eight years, during which Germany has accorded his true place to the famous Saxon; Chrysander actually prepared much of the work as far back as forty years, when the late King of Hanover intended to place concert music on as solid a basis as is the opera in Germany, by the creation of a Cäcilien-Haus, as the King intended to name it. This noble monarch was unable to fulfil all he promised; and except for the thousand thalers granted to him for carrying on the edition, a grant which was continued by Prussia for each year’s issue until the so-called ‘Guelph Fund’ was restored to the royal House of Hanover, it is more than probable that Chrysander’s edition would have remained incomplete like more than one similar enterprise. Nor would the conducting scores, to which the prefaces of volumes prepared between 1860 and 1865 allude, have been completed and successfully performed in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Successful they were and of the utmost influence upon musical life itself, because they not only enter thoroughly into Handel’s spirit and practice, but emanated from an eminently practical musician capable of transmuting them into German, and casting them in a way which Handel indicated, and which a present-day audience can enjoy. He was averse to publishing these conducting versions, though he had, again at his expense, engraved orchestral and chorus parts for several of the works since used by choral societies. The time may come to issue the result of all this independent labour; in fact, Chrysander had all but completed arrangements for this purpose when he broke down in health; but what he has done for Handel can never be lost.

He was one of the most simple and retiring of men. Kind to everyone with whom he came into contact, and, highly cultured, he was able to get on with the high and low; only those who did not know him, or had reasons not to know him, misjudged him, because he failed in the modern faculty for self-advertisement, cared little for what was written about him, and hardly ever worked for the sake of gain. He had frequent offers for positions under Government, of which the first was that of organist and choirmaster at the Cathedral of Schwerin. The King of Hanover entrusted him with the reconstruction of the Liturgy at his Court Chapels, and offered him the chief Musician’s place in his dominion, but Chrysander declined all such appointments, even the Directorate of the Berlin Hochschule, feeling certain that it would mean to him the giving up of his life work and his freedom. This did not prevent him from accepting the King of Hanover’s generous offer referred to above – on the contrary, he challenged it by requesting the King not to decorate him, but to help forward the Handel work. When, later on, Prince Bismarck invited him to Friedrichsruh, where he was an honoured guest for several years, and in due course offered to distinguish him, he begged the Prince not to do so by means of Orders, as he had declined similar honours from Hanover. The Prince found other means of showing his appreciation of the Handelian’s worth, by proposing him for a pension from the Emperor William’s privy purse, in commemoration of Handel’s bi-centenary, in 1885. Prince Bismarck’s letter on that occasion, and another when Chrysander lost his eldest son at the age of twenty-four; are treasured by the family, as are the kindly words which he (Bismarck) wrote to Princess Bismarck, on June 12th, 1886, and which were recently published by their son, Prince Herbert.

Friedrich Chrysander was married in 1856 to Elizabeth Borgmann, of Vellahn. They lost their first son in 1859, and afterwards moved to Lauenburg, in Holstein, when two more sons and a daughter were born to them. Their elder son, George, died in 1884, while in the army; the youngest, Rudolph, studied medicine, and became Prince Bismarck’s trusted secretary and physician from the Prince’s retirement to his death. He nursed and relieved his father during the weary months of feebleness and pain. Their daughter became, in 1886, the wife of Mr. Charles Volkert, the managing partner of the publishing firm of Schott & Co., London.

It may be interesting to add that, since 1856, Chrysander visited London annually, and through the kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Russell Martineau, found under their hospitable roof a second home until his children claimed him during his sojourns in the Metropolis. He often used to say that his visits to England were his only holidays, and yet what a vast amount of work he got through while he was here!

Dr. Chrysander’s private life was above reproach, and though he never quite recovered from the loss of his wife in 1887, he knew there was work for him to do, and he did it until called away. He was immensely fond of his gardens and hot-houses, and their produce found many admirers.

The funeral took place at the family vault in Vellahn, on the 6th ult., and was as peaceful as was his end.