Knorr, Iwan

Iwan Knorr – Passacaglia and Fugue

(b. Mewe (West Prussia), 3. January 1853 – d. Frankfurt, 22. Januar 1910)

Preface
Ivan Knorr was born in Gniew, a town in Pomeranian Voivodeship, northern Poland, which was part of the German Empire from 1871 to 1918. Knorr attended the Leipzig Conservatory, which has one of Europe’s most prominent composing departments. He studied under Ignaz Moscheles (1794–1870), Ernst Friedrich Richter (1808–1879), and Carl Reinecke (1824–1910). After being appointed director of music theory education at the Imperial Kharkiv Conservatory in Ukraine 1878, Knorr moved to Frankfurt in 1883, where he joined the faculty of the famed Hoch Conservatory.

One of the key figures in Iwan Knorr’s life was Johannes Brahms. In 1877, Knorr sent orchestral variations on a Ukrainian folk song to Brahms in Vienna “with the request for a sincere judgment.” Brahms’s answer – “In any case, it offers so much pleasure on all sides that one may expect the very best from its creator” – was Knorr’s strongest driving force for further compositions. Among other things, he wrote a piano quintet, which he also sent to Brahms, who again replied promptly and gave benevolent advice. The work was later reworked into a quartet in Frankfurt, probably on the basis of Brahms’s advice, and performed as Op. 3. At the end of December 1882, Brahms arranged for the orchestral variations to be performed under Friedrich Hegar in Zurich and personally attended all rehearsals. Knorr now had only one wish: to come to Germany. Brahms supported him by recommending the young artist to his friends: Franz Stockhausen in Strasbourg, Franz Wullner in Dresden, and Bernhard Scholz, who was just moving from Breslau to Frankfurt at the time. …

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