Henry Charles Litolff was a virtuoso pianist, composer of Romantic music, and music publisher. A prolific composer, he is today known mainly for a single brief work – the scherzo from his Concerto Symphonique No. 4 in D minor – and remembered as the founder of the Collection Litolff, a highly regarded publishing imprint of classical music scores.
Biography
Litolff was born in London in 1818 to a Scottish mother, Sophie, and a father, Martin Louis Litolff, from the French province of Alsace. The father, a violinist, had been previously taken prisoner of war while serving as a band musician in the Napoleonic army during the Peninsular War. His father taught the boy Henry the rudiments of music, and in 1830, when he was twelve, he played for the renowned virtuoso pianist Ignaz Moscheles, who was so impressed that he gave him free lessons starting that same year. Litolff began to concertize when he was fourteen. His lessons with Moscheles continued until in 1835, at the age of 17, Litolff abruptly married 16-year-old Elisabeth Etherington. The couple moved to Melun, and then to Paris. He separated from Elisabeth in 1839 and moved to Brussels. Around 1841, Litolff moved to Warsaw, where he is believed to have conducted the Teatr Narodowy orchestra. In 1844 he travelled to Germany, gave concerts, and taught the future pianist-conductor Hans von Bülow. The following year, Litolff returned to England with the idea of finally divorcing Elisabeth; but the plan backfired and he ended up not only heavily fined but imprisoned. He managed to escape and flee to the Netherlands — the escape said to have been accomplished with the assistance of the jailer's daughter. Litolff became friends with the music publisher Gottfried Meyer of Braunschweig, Germany; and, after Meyer's death, he married the widow Julie in 1851. Whilst married to Julie, the publishing firm G. M. Meyer grew substantially. This second marriage lasted until 1858, when he divorced her and once again moved to Paris. After the divorce, the publishing firm was run by Litolff's adoptive son, . In Paris he found a third wife, Louise de La Rochefoucauld; and, upon her death in 1873, a fourth. Litolff died at Bois-Colombes, near Paris, in 1891, just shy of his seventy-third birthday.
Works
His most notable works were the five concertos symphoniques, essentially symphonies with piano obbligato. The first one, in D minor, is lost; the others are:
The only one of Litolff's compositions still performed at all regularly is the somewhat Mendelssohnian scherzo from the Fourth Concerto Symphonique, although his music was admired by Franz Liszt and he was the dedicatee of Liszt's own First Piano Concerto. Litolff's Drame symphonique No. 1 Maximilien Robespierre, Op. 55, was one of the works conducted on Christmas Eve 1925 by Yuri Fayer at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow to accompany the world's first showing of Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin.
