Henri Marteau – Entdeckung eines Romantikers (Discovery of a romanticist)

Description

The violinist, composer, violin pedagogue and publisher Henri Marteau (1874-1934) is one of the tragic figures in the history of music. He began his career as a prodigy, encouraged by, among others, Brahms, Bruch, Gounod, and Massenet, and then celebrated triumphs throughout Europe and the US on extended concert tours. As the successor of the German “Violin Pope” Joseph Joachim at the Berlin Academy of Music since 1908, he was also the leading violin teacher in German-speaking countries. But the son of a French industrialist and a German mother, who was a French citizen, was arrested at the outbreak of World War I 1914 as an enemy alien, released several times and arrested again and was allowed to return after a humiliating internment in 1917 in his villa in Lichtenberg in Upper Franconia. His position in Berlin was deprived of him in a degrading manner and was not reproduced even after the end of the war. Neither as a soloist nor as a pedagogue, he was able to build on his successes before the war, certainly not with recordings that came too late for him and show him no longer in full possession of his abilities.