Wikipedia
Xaver Scharwenka
Theophil Franz Xaver Scharwenka (born January 6, 1850 in Samter near Posen; died December 8, 1924 in Berlin) was a German composer, pianist, and music educator of Polish-Czech origin.
He was the brother of composer and music educator Philipp Scharwenka and uncle of composer and organist Walter Scharwenka.
Scharwenka received his first musical instruction in Posen, where he also graduated from high school. In 1865, he came to Berlin to study piano with Theodor Kullak and theory and composition with Richard Wüerst and Heinrich Dorn at the ''Neue Akademie der Tonkunst''. After completing his studies, he worked there as a piano teacher from 1868 to 1874. A triple debut in 1869 at the ''Sing -Akademie'' in Berlin marked the beginning of his career as a pianist, conductor and composer. The publishing house ''Breitkopf & Härtel'' immediately printed Scharwenka's ''Piano Trio op. 1'', his ''Violin Sonata op. 2'', and ''5 Polish Dances op. 3'' for piano. In 1877, with the ''Piano Concerto No.''.
In Berlin, he opened the chamber music-oriented "Subscription Concerts" in 1879 and an orchestral concert series in 1886, in which he distinguished himself as a conductor. Together with his brother Philipp Scharwenka, he founded the Scharwenka Conservatory in 1881, which was merged with Karl Klindworth's piano school in 1893 to form the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory. Between 1880 and 1886, he edited the complete works of Chopin and Schumann, and later also Mendelssohn. In addition to his appointment as court pianist, he also turned increasingly to composition.
Beginning in 1891, Scharwenka moved to New York for seven years, where he founded his second conservatory, the Scharwenka Conservatory of Music. After numerous concert tours of the United States, he returned to Germany in 1898 and was appointed to the Senate of the Royal Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin in 1901. He became friends with Max Bruch, gave concerts with Ferruccio Busoni, and performed his piano concertos under Gustav Mahler and Arthur Nikisch. On March 7, 1905, he recorded 14 piano pieces for the Welte-Mignon reproduction piano, including two of his own compositions.
In 1914, he opened another master school with Walter Petzet with piano teacher seminar. Among his students were José Vianna da Motta, Kurt Schubert and Gustav Ernest. Awarded numerous courtly honors as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Tennessee (1896), he was also active in music politics as chairman of the ''Musikpädagogischer Verband'' and the ''Verband konzertierender Künstler Deutschlands''.
In 1910/12 he had a villa built in Bad Saarow in wood-frame construction as a summer house (his "Musenhütte"), which since 2005 has been listed as the Scharwenka House and was subsequently renovated and restored step by step by the Scharwenka Foundation and the ''Förderverein Kurort Bad Saarow''.[1][2][3]
He found his final resting place in a family grave in Dept. P-004-008/009 at the Old St. Matthew's Cemetery in the Tempelhof-Schöneberg district of Berlin. Since 2014, it is no longer "honorary grave Land Berlin" according to the Senate resolution. It was subsequently restored and cleaned by the ''Förderverein EFEU e.V''. - also with donations from the Scharwenka Foundation.
His many talents made Scharwenka one of the most successful artistic personalities of the late 19th century. Even during his lifetime he was one of the most famous piano virtuosos in the world. Eduard Hanslick described him in ''Concerte, Componisten und Virtuosen der letzten fünfzehn Jahre'', 1870-1885 (Berlin 1886) as a "quite excellent pianist, dazzling without charlatanry." He also gained worldwide reputation for his extraordinary pedagogical abilities. During his teaching career, he trained thousands of pupils from various countries and wrote some important music pedagogical writings. His fame as a composer began with the ''Polish National Dances op. 3''; his ''Symphony in C-minor'' and the opera ''Mataswintha'', on the other hand, it achieved only respectable success. Scharwenka's further compositional output includes piano concertos, piano trios and piano quartets, sonatas and dances, but did not go beyond the conservative Mendelssohn-Schumann succession.
Note: Translated from the German version of Wikipedia into English.
