Fritz Kreisler, a Viennese original

Fritz Kreisler has fascinated me since childhood. I devoured his biography; his diary Four Weeks in the Trenches — The War Story of a Violinist, like his famous essay Music and Life, offers an exceedingly honest view of the heights and depths of a musician’s life. My first CD, which won the MDR special prize at the Dresden violin competition, I called Caprice Viennois, setting side by side the compositions of famous violinists.

“His career brought him the most brilliant successes on every continent and made him, over decades, the declared favourite of audiences throughout the world, the idol of an entire generation of violinists. Everywhere he was regarded as the epitome of the Austrian, the Viennese musician and artist. In every respect his personality bore the stamp of the extraordinary. Historically, Fritz Kreisler is regarded as the last significant representative of the composing virtuosos of Romanticism, and at the same time as one of the pioneers of modern violin playing in the twentieth century. Kreisler was born into the culturally immensely rich Vienna of the late Romantic period, into a family of that enormously educated, art-loving, not always prosperous Jewish middle class that was an essential bearer of Austrian culture around the turn of the century. For two decades Fritz Kreisler remained the most sought-after and highest-paid violin virtuoso in the world. His famous, inimitable small compositions ran to record printings and are loved and played by all violinists to this day. With the wealth that came from these unprecedented successes, a quality particularly characteristic of Kreisler emerged: his delight in helping; a readiness to help others never seen on this scale among artists — for young virtuosos struggling for recognition as much as for impoverished colleagues, for victims of natural disasters and of war, but also quite generally for orphans and the destitute. His help for his homeland Austria and his native city of Vienna after the First and Second World Wars remains unforgotten.”

Prof. Michael Frischenschlager, President of the Fritz Kreisler Society

On a concert tour to Washington I visited the Library of Congress, and the member of staff was kind enough to show me the composer’s estate. In those boxes, alongside Kreisler’s letters, notes and marked parts of the works he played most often, there were also sketches and finished works that never made it into print but were played by the composer himself as encores after his concerts.

Another Fritz Kreisler enthusiast in Vienna is the pianist Andrea Linsbauer, with whom I am working on a project devoted to Kreisler’s unknown works. The CD Fritz Kreislers Erben is the result of a collaboration with the violin virtuosos Benjamin Schmid, Ekaterina Frolova, Leonhard Baumgartner and Christian Altenburger.