Background
Karl Goldmark was born in Hungary. His father, Ruben, was cantor at the Kcszthely (Hungary) synagogue; Karl was one of twelve children.
Karl Goldmark was born in Hungary. His father, Ruben, was cantor at the Kcszthely (Hungary) synagogue; Karl was one of twelve children.
He had scant general education and no musical training until age eleven. When he was twelve, means were found to send him to study the violin twice a week with a teacher in Sopron.
In 1844 he went to Vienna to study music. Three years later, he qualified for entrance to the polytechnic for regular studies and to the conservatory. With the outbreak of the revolution of 1848, the polytechnic and the conservatory closed for the duration.
Goldmark’s brother Joseph joined the rebels and had to flee for his life to America. Goldmark himself was briefly caught up in the fighting and found himself stranded during a lull in the war at Gyoer, a hotbed of the revolution. When the theater of the nearby town of Sopron visited, he found a job as a violinist in the orchestra. Once again unlucky, he was caught by the victorious Austrians and sentenced to death as a revolutionary. His desperate protests that he was just an innocent fiddler in the local theater were not accepted. However, this time he was lucky; the two men assigned to execute him were actors in civilian life and instead of shooting him, smuggled him out of town.
After the debacle of 1849, he returned to Vienna but was too poor to continue his studies. Instead, he gave music lessons, studied the scores of classic composers, and began composing himself. In 1858, he returned to Budapest and for a year and a half taught himself counterpoint, canons, and fugues. From 1860, he again lived in Vienna, taught the piano, and started to compose in earnest. When J. Hellmesberger the elder, founder of Vienna’s most famous chamber group, rejected his Quartet in B-Flat, Goldmark hired the group to play it at an all-Goldmark concert.
Goldmark first used Oriental and Jewish melodies in his successful "Overture Sakuntala" (1865). His first grand opera, "The Queen of Sheba" (op. 27) premiered at the Vienna Court Opera in 1875, with Hermann von Mosenthal’s text. It was immediately acclaimed and Goldmark had forty curtain calls.
The next year he wrote the symphony "Rustic Wedding", followed by the Violin concerto in A Minor and the operas "Merlin" (based on the Arthurian legend), "The Cricket on the Hearth" (from a story by Dickens), "A Winter’s Tale" (based on Shakespeare), and "The Prisoner of War". Between the operas, he produced distinguished orchestral and chamber works.
At the age of eighty-one, Goldmark wrote a short autobiography in German, which appeared in his niece’s English translation in 1927, entitled "Notes from the Life of a Viennese Composer".
Of unprepossessing appearance, Goldmark was a very likeable person. In the great controversy between Brahms and Wagner, which resulted in bitterly opposing factions among their followers, Goldmark alone managed to retain the friendship of both; Brahms remained his friend even after Goldmark had published a piece in praise of Wagner.