# Albert Dietrich



## vtpoet (Jan 17, 2019)

Just listening to him. Quite a good composer. I'm surprised more of his music hasn't been recorded. 

It's uncanny how Brahmsian he sounds without being Brahms. He's so "Brahmsian" that scholars argue over whether the Piano Trio in A major, Op. Post was written by him or by Brahms.

So many composers seem to have their twin, even the great ones where, just for a moment or a few, the lesser composer can fool you.


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## RICK RIEKERT (Oct 9, 2017)

The congenial Dietrich was a close friend of Brahms and dedicated his Symphony in D Minor, Op 20 to the great composer. Brahms told Dietrich that he was delighted with his "beautiful present which would be even more beautiful if an orchestra would soon bring it to life". In an earlier letter to Clara Schumann he had expressed his true feelings about the piece: "A symphony by Dietrich will be played for you in Oldenburg. It would be better if you used a little more gentleness than frankness there!"


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## vtpoet (Jan 17, 2019)

That's kind of endearing. Brahms looking after his friend.


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Dietrich wrote one movement of the collaborative f-a-e-Sonata for J. Joachim; Brahms wrote the scherzo, Schumann the two other movements he eventually completed to his last violin sonata. There is a disc or twofer on cpo with the symphony and a few other works. It is pretty good, as far as I remember (and I am not a big collector of "second tier" romantics).

I didn't know that Dietrich was a candidate for the composer of the A major Trio. It's really a puzzle to me that a piece from the 1850s or 60s could remain anonymous. These people were writing hundreds of letters. How could we not have strong hints if it was really by Brahms (or Dietrich or...).


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## vtpoet (Jan 17, 2019)

Brahms made a concerted effort to destroy his earlier-est compositions. If he didn't brag about it in one of his letters to Clara, then the letter was apt to disappear along with the composition. That's my best guess. Maybe Dietrich's correspondence wasn't considered important enough for anyone to hoard?


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Partly because Brahms made this effort and even destroyed (movements of?) a mature trio that would have been a sister piece to the C major op.87 and of which Clara and Joachim had seen parts and approved of and because we do not have any surviving piece or version that Brahms wanted destroyed, I am pretty sure the A major is not by Brahms. Admittedly, I don't know about the evidence for Dietrich's authorship.


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## Roger Knox (Jul 19, 2017)

RICK RIEKERT said:


> The congenial Dietrich was a close friend of Brahms and dedicated his Symphony in D Minor, Op 20 to the great composer. Brahms told Dietrich that he was delighted with his "beautiful present which would be even more beautiful if an orchestra would soon bring it to life". In an earlier letter to Clara Schumann he had expressed his true feelings about the piece: "A symphony by Dietrich will be played for you in Oldenburg. It would be better if you used a little more gentleness than frankness there!"


That's a good story and I've read that Brahms made remarks of a similar kind about Herzogenberg, another of the many composer "friends of Brahms." You wouldn't expect Brahms to be complimentary about composers who aligned with him but didn't have his abilities. As a matter of fact I enjoy Dietrich's D minor symphony (1869) for its appealing sense of melody and dance-like rhythms. But I've learned on TalkClassical that I'm more open to "unheralded" composers than many other listeners are ...

My opinion is that a great composer like Brahms who is so determined to "get it right" in his own music will soon find in another composer's work places where he would compose differently, and become dismissive. Brahms was more respectful of Dvorak, who soon took a different road and became a composer of genius.


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## vtpoet (Jan 17, 2019)

Brahms and Tchaikovsky trashed talked each other. Fiercely. Then they met and sort of liked each other.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Dietrich
"Dietrich was born at Golk, near Meissen. From 1851 he studied composition with Robert Schumann in Düsseldorf, where in October 1853 he first met Brahms and collaborated with Schumann and Brahms on the 'F-A-E' Sonata for Joseph Joachim (Dietrich composed the substantial first movement). From 1861 until 1890 he was the musical director at the court of Oldenburg, where Brahms often visited him and where he introduced many of Brahms's works. It was in Dietrich's library that Brahms discovered the volume of poetry by Hölderlin that furnished him with the text for his Schicksalslied, which he began composing while visiting Wilhelmshaven dockyard in Dietrich's company. Dietrich was also instrumental in arranging for the premiere of Brahms's Ein deutsches Requiem at Bremen in 1868. Dietrich's own works include an opera Robin Hood, a Symphony in D minor (1869, dedicated to Brahms), a Violin Concerto in the same key (composed for Joseph Joachim but premiered in 1874 by Johann Lauterbach), a Cello Concerto, Horn Concerto, choral works and several chamber compositions including two piano trios.
Dietrich's Recollections of Brahms, published in Leipzig in 1898, was translated into English the following year and remains an important biographical source. The Brahms scholar David Brodbeck has theorized (The Cambridge Companion to Brahms, 1999) that Dietrich is the most likely author of the anonymous Piano Trio in A major, discovered in 1924, which some scholars have attributed to Brahms; but Malcolm MacDonald (Brahms, 2nd ed, 2001) has maintained that, if any specific composer is to be sought for this work, Brahms remains the more likely candidate on balance of stylistic probabilities."


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