(This volume contains two chamber works by the German-Amer...)
This volume contains two chamber works by the German-American composer Otto Dresel (1826-90): his Piano Trio in A Minor and Piano Quartet in F Major. Both works were composed during his studies with Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. In contrast to Dresel's lieder, which follow in the steps of Schumann and Robert Franz, these compositions, especially the heroic trio, are worthy successors to Mendelssohn's own chamber music. The quartet, a more intimate essay than the trio, features a charming Intermezzo that became one of Dresel's most popular compositions during his lifetime. Franz Liszt reviewed both pieces and called them "remarkably distinguished works." They are indeed eminently performable, engaging, and tuneful works that enlarge not only the repertory of chamber music from this period, but also the record of the high standard of innovative music making in the United States prior to the Civil War. Both works are published here for the first time.
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(This volume presents ninety lieder and other vocal compos...)
This volume presents ninety lieder and other vocal compositions by a neglected figure, Otto Dresel (1826-90), reflecting the life of a composer with German origins and an American émigré experience. A student of Liszt, Schumann, and Mendelssohn, Dresel came to America in 1848. For a quarter century, Dresel-once known as the "musical conscience of Boston"-held critical and intellectual sway in that city's musical matters along with his close friend John Sullivan Dwight. He functioned as composer laureate to the literary community of mid-nineteenth century Boston: Longfellow, Holmes, Child, Howe, and Kemble were among the poets who turned to him to set their words to music. As Dresel released few compositions to publishers during his lifetime, most of the music presented here appears for the first time. The edition includes notes on the (often elusive) sources of his texts and reviews from nineteenth-century journals, which trace the reception of his music. An additional feature is the presentation of the original and revised versions of lieder that Dresel published at different times.
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https://www.amazon.com/Keyboard-Music-Overture-Researches-American/dp/0895798204?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0895798204
Otto Dresel was born in 1826 in Geisenheim-on-the-Rhine, Germany. He was the son of Johann Dietrich Dresel and Luise Ephardt. He grew up in a progressive, intellectual home, his father being a sympathizer with the German liberal movement of 1848.
Dresel had studied piano and composition with Hiller in Cologne and Mendelssohn in Leipzig.
Dresel came to the United States in 1848. He settled in New York, as a concert pianist and teacher in that middle period when "French, Italian, and English opera companies boarded the swifter and safer steamers for experiments in the American marketplace, and singers and instrumentalists from Germany in particular surged in to exploit the concert and teaching field".
Dresel, when he returned to America in 1852 after a visit to Germany, made Boston his permanent home, perhaps because in New York, as in New Orleans, the opera with its social corollaries was more esteemed than concert music, and he felt his talent would more quickly win recognition in a more conservative city. Nor was he mistaken in his choice; his merit was soon recognized, and for more than fifteen years he held his place as Boston's foremost resident pianist, whose interpretation of the masterpieces of the classic piano repertoire gave evidence of his taste and technique.
His influence was all the more valuable because, as a concert pianist, he avoided the facile brilliancies of such Europeans as Henri Herz, who had toured the United States and Mexico immediately before Dresel established himself in Boston; and Sigismund Thalberg, who played in Boston during his tour of the country in 1856. These virtuosos, like their American contemporary, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, inculcated a worship of mere bravura which Dresel consistently opposed by a conscientious cult of what was qualitatively highest in the literature of his instrument.
Dresel's exceptional culture, incidentally, prevented his confining his influence to the piano recital. He had collaborated with Robert Franz in supplying accompaniments for the vocal scores of Bach and Handel, and he took special pains to make the Franz songs known.
Otto Dresel is best remembered mainly for his chamber music and songs, as well as larger-scale settings of poems by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Oliver Wendell Holmes for soloists with orchestra. He was also instrumental in introducing to the American public the most classic German music, including Bach and Handel.
(This volume presents ninety lieder and other vocal compos...)
(This volume contains two chamber works by the German-Amer...)
Dresel married Anna Loring, daughter of Ellis Gray Loring, an abolitionist and a founder of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, on October 29, 1863.
