BY MADELEINE ROYCROFT
It’s time to acknowledge the underappreciated champions of classical music history: composer dads.
In celebration of Father’s Day, we bring you the behind-the-scenes heroes; the dads of some of classical music’s most fruitful composers.
6. Bernhard and son Gustav Mahler
A humble innkeeper and distillery owner, Bernhard Mahler was the definition of supportive composer dad. While he had no musical training, Bernhard wholeheartedly believed in his son’s potential and ignored the terrible academic reports Gustav received early in his education. Instead, he sent his son to various schools, ultimately encouraging him to apply for the Vienna Conservatory and the University of Vienna, so others could realise the musical genius he had always known to be there. Nice one, Bernhard.
5. Manuel Garcia and daughter Pauline Viardot
Daughter of successful tenor, singing teacher and composer Manuel Garcia, Pauline was the youngest of three children in a family of Spanish classical music royalty. A veritable Daddy’s girl, she took piano and singing lessons with her father from a young age. Pauline had dreams of being a concert pianist, but after Manuel’s untimely death when she was just 11 years old, her mother, a soprano, pressured Pauline into a career as a professional singer. She had a long and prosperous career on the stage, yet Pauline continued to compose and arrange on the side. Had Manuel been around to support her longer, Pauline would likely have followed a different path – Chopin, Saint-Saëns, and Liszt all wrote of her sheer brilliance at the piano.
4. Leopold and son Wolfgang Mozart, daughter Nannerl Mozart
Always a controversial figure in accounts of musical history, Leopold Mozart’s main claim to fame is as the teacher/overbearing father of two musical children, Wolfgang and Maria Anna (Nannerl) Mozart. Yet Leopold was a violinist, composer and teacher in his own right; in fact, he authored the influential violin method Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, a text which performers and scholars still consult today for historically informed performance practice of 18th Century music. Evidently, Leopold’s compositions didn’t hold up well next to Wolfgang’s, but then again, he did give up his own career to promote his son’s, which makes him a pretty solid composer dad.
3. Adam and son Franz Liszt
The great piano virtuoso came from prized musician stock: Franz’s grandfather was an organist, and his father Adam Liszt was a court clerk who also happened to play the cello, violin, piano and sing in his spare time. After Franz’s musical talent began to shine from the age of five, Adam began the intensive home lessons that comprised most of Franz’s early education. Adam retired from working life in order to fully commit to managing his son’s career, organising tours, concerts and lessons for the young prodigy. Sadly, Franz was still a teenager when Adam passed away; consequently, he never got to see his son reach the musical maturity that became nothing short of legendary.
2. Giovanni Battista and son Antonio Vivaldi
A barber-turned-professional musician, Giovanni Battista Vivaldi can be credited for introducing his son Antonio to the wonders of the violin. A founding member of Italian musician’s trade union Sovvegno dei musicisti di Santa Cecilia, Giovanni Battista was also a respected copyist. He worked closely with his son well into adulthood (but not in a controlling way, more in an ‘I’m so glad you’re following in my footsteps and we can do this together’ kind of way). He even came with Antonio on tour to Germany later in life. How great are composer dads?
1. The Bach Dynasty
‘I got it from my dad’ could have been the official slogan of the Bach family, considering the amount of talent that sifted down through the generations. Johann Sebastian Bach (the superstar of the family) was the youngest son of court trumpeter and director of town musicians, Johann Ambrosius Bach. All three of Johann Sebastian’s uncles were musicians, and of his eight children, four of them became professional musicians (all trained by their father, of course). With a pedigree like that, it’s no surprise that in Carl Philipp Emanuel’s compositions (that’s J. S. Bach’s fifth child), not only is there influence from his father, but also stylistic invention and creativity across the transition from baroque to classical periods that could only have come from several generations of purebred composer dad.
Happy Father’s Day!
