Ferdinand Hiller’s Twelve Trips to Meet Old Friends in Heaven: A Little-Known Essay in Cultural Commentary from 1881

Abstract

The present article is the first published translation ever of a remarkably insightful essay, in the form of a tale, that the important mid-nineteenth-century pianist-composer-conductor Ferdinand Hiller wrote in 1881. In it he invokes thirty-eight famous individuals he knew during his lifetime: mostly musicians, but also some writers, visual artists, one great Shakespearean actor, and one legitimist (that is: monarchist, highly conservative) lawyer and politician. He knew some of the group—such as Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Berlioz, and the violinist Ferdinand David—quite well. We have annotated the essay extensively in order to bring out its richness, much of which is carried out through literary or historical allusions and careful word choice or, indeed, wordplay. Ferdinand Hiller (1811–1885) was one of the leading figures in what was often called the Leipzig School of musical composition, a loose group of largely German and Austrian musicians who looked to Mendelssohn and Schumann as their models for how to continue and extend the great achievements of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.