Marteau, Henri

Henri Marteau

String Quartet no. 3 in C major, op. 17

(b. Reims, 31 March 1874 – d. Lichtenberg, 4 October 1934)

Comodo p.3

Hymne an den Schmerz – molto adagio p. 16

Scherzo: Allegro p.24

Finale – Adagio – Allegro p.37

Henri Marteau is probably best-known today, if at all, as a violin virtuoso and as editor of various classic works for the violin. But from his early years he also revealed an ambition to compose, and his earliest surviving works date from around 1890. His opus 1, published in Geneva, was a setting of six poems with orchestral accompaniment, while his final published work, four Dance Pieces for large orchestra, appeared as op. 45. In between came vocal music such as his Gesänge für Männer-Chor op. 16 (published by Steingräber in 1922) and the Drei geistliche Gesänge op. 29 (1923), three organ pieces op. 23 (1919), secular songs and chamber music, plus a set of bravura violin Caprices issued as his op. 25. Marteau enjoyed success both as performer and composer up until the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, but thereafter his fortunes waned as his music began to seem increasingly dated and outmoded.

Marteau was born into a bourgeois family, and had a privileged upbringing. His French father, Charles, had charge of a cotton mill in Reims, while his German mother, Clara, was from Dresden, and was the daughter of pianist Luise Schwendi, who had been a pupil of Clara Schumann. Charles Marteau was also president of the Philharmonic Society of Reims, and consequently both parents were well placed to support their son’s musical ambitions. Henri began studying the violin from the age of 5 with August Bünzli, who had been a pupil of Bernhard Molique, and between the ages of 7 and 16 he was a pupil of Belgian virtuoso Hubert Léonard, with whom he seems to have enjoyed a warm relationship. Indeed, Léonard thought sufficiently highly of his pupil that he asked him to deputize for him in a performance in April 1884 of his fifth Violin Concerto in Reims, before an audience of some 2,000 people. This marked Marteau’s first significant public success. His first appearance in Berlin – a city that was to play an important part in his later life – was in 1886, and from 1889 he was a travelling virtuoso, a career that brought him tours to London, three tours of the USA (in 1893 and 1898), to Scandinavia (Copenhagen, Bergen, Stockholm, Helsinki, 1894-5) and to Eastern Europe and Russia (in 1898). Scandinavia was to remain special to him, and in 1920 he renounced his French nationality in favour of Swedish citizenship. After Léonard’s death in 1890 Marteau entered the Paris Conservatoire as a student of Théodore Dubois (composition) and Jules Garcin (violin), winning the Conservatoire’s principal violin prize in 1892 after just one year of study with his new teacher. His earliest attempts at composition also date from this time, and include a string quartet in D minor (unpublished, 1892), and three pieces for violin and piano, op. 2, published around 1907 but dating from 1891.

From 1900 until 1908 Marteau taught violin at the Conservatoire in Geneva, and also founded a string quartet in that city. His compositions from this time include a set of variations for viola and orchestra, the Cello Concerto in B flat major, op. 7 (written 1904, published 1907), and his Chamber Symphony for flute, clarinet, horn and strings, op. 11 (1907), written in memory of Richard Mühlfeld, who had been the inspiration for Brahms’ chamber works with clarinet. Marteau had other connections to Brahms too – during the 1890s he gave the first performances in Stockholm, Helsinki, and Paris of Brahms’ violin concerto, and also gave the work its first American performance, in 1893. From around 1905 his own works were being published by the renowned publisher Simrock in Leipzig and Berlin (perhaps helped by Dvořák, who was published by Simrock and whom Marteau had met in America during a concert tour), so it seems likely that he was now being taken seriously as a composer too. In 1908 he was called to Berlin to succeed Joseph Joachim as professor

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