Raff Riff: Chris Walton welcomes a reassessment of Wagner disciple Joachim Raff and his friendship with Hans von Bülow

Review of Simon Kannenberg, Joachim Raff und Hans von Bülow (Vol. I: Porträt einer Musikerfreundschaft; Vol. II: Briefedition) (Studio Verlag im Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2020).

November 2021, Volume 15, Number 3, 93–6.

Joachim Raff (1822–82) seems in many ways an in-between fellow. Many musicians in the English-speaking world will have heard of him, but probably only on account of ‘Raff’s Cavatina’ – his op. 85 no. 3 that has long been a mainstay of young violinists (often featuring on the lists of examination boards in the UK). It is the kind of salon piece that sticks in the memory, though without being quite memorable enough to facilitate precise recall of its melodic contours. I also remember reading about Raff during my studies as the man who had supposedly orchestrated Liszt’s early symphonic poems (though in fact this turns out to have been something of a canard). Wagnerians might have come across Raff as the composer of several Wagner paraphrases, as the man who convinced him to publish the Wesendonck Lieder, or as the author of almost the first-ever book on Wagner, Die Wagnerfrage (‘The Wagner Question’), published as ‘Volume 1’ in 1854. Raff was a gifted writer, but his endeavours here to assume an objective stance merely annoyed both the progressives and the conservatives. He found out the hard way that sitting on the fence only gives you splinters in uncomfortable places. No ‘Volume 2’ ever appeared.
     But Raff was not always regarded as an in-betweeny fence-sitter.