Quarante Études ou Caprices pour le Violon / Vierzig Vollständige Übungen für die Geige... Neueste verbesserte Ausgabe. - WITH INTRIGUING PROVENANCE

Bound upright folio. Lithographed. Mainz: B. Schotts Söhne, n.d. [1820s]. 51 pp. Bilingual edition, with title and all instructions in French and German. Signature with date, "Leopold Kauffm[ann] Hamburg 1836," to right head of title. Bowing and articulation in pencil to p. 3. 12.5 x 9.25 inches (31.3 x 23.6 cm). Half leather; upper board lost. Title damp stained to head and somewhat soiled. Fol. 4 (pp. 7-8) torn to gutter and with small ink stains. Some foxing.WorldCat lists only two copies, at the Juilliard School and and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. This is an especially intriguing copy with interesting provenance. 

The German politician Leopold Kaufmann was an amateur musician and included among his friends Felix Mendelssohn and Franz Liszt, and the poet Gottfried Kinkel. They with his future wife Johanna, née Mockel, founded a poetical society called the "Maikäferbund". On the occasion of the first Beethoven festival and of the unveiling of the Beethoven Monument, in the summer of 1845, Kaufmann founded the male choral society of Bonn, the "Concordia".  He was Mayor of Bonn from 1850-1876 and made acquaintance with Clara and Robert Schumann in 1853 on the occasion of Clara's concert performances in Bonn and organized for the memorial grave at the Old Cemetery after the death of Robert Schumann. Clara Schumann greatly appreciated this gesture and the friendliness of Kaufmann, and expressly thanked him in a very personal letter. On behalf of Kaufmann's grandfather, who was a clerk standing in electoral services, built the country house in Endenich near Bonn in 1790, which was later acquired by the physician Franz Richarz and since 1844 established as a mental hospital, where Robert Schumann died in 1856.

The French violinist and composer Rodolphe Kreutzer was one of the most famous and influential virtuosos of his time. From 1795 he was professor at the Paris Conservatory, and from 1801 to 1821 he was concertmaster and director of music of the Paris Opera. At this time, Kreutzer wrote about 40 operas and numerous works for violin. In 1803, he published together with Jacques Pierre Joseph Rode and Pierre Marie François Baillot the "Méthode de violon" ("System for the violin"), which soon after had become the official manual of exercises for the violin at the Paris Conservatory. Kreutzer befriended Ludwig van Beethoven during his visit to Vienna in 1798 and Beethoven later wrote that he was "a good and nice person, it was indeed a pleasure to spend time with him". Seven years later (1805), Beethoven dedicated his Violin Sonata in A Major, op. 47 to Rodolphe Kreutzer, now known as the "Kreutzer-Sonate".


"Kreutzer’s 42 études ou caprices (originally 40) for unaccompanied violin occupy an almost unique position in the literature of violin studies; Kreutzer met the challenge of the modern violin by aiming partly at fluency in contraction and extension of the left hand. As Szigeti (1969) pointed out, extensions and unisons were easier on the old short-necked violin; in the ‘practically unknown nineteen Etudes-Caprices … it is obvious that the great teacher was already conscious of the need for the “opening up” of the hand’." (David Charlton, Grove Online) (21807)

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