Eugene D`Albert

Eugen Francis Charles d'Albert (April 10, 1864 – March 3, 1932) was a German pianist and composer. Eugen was taught by his father until he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London. There he studied with Ernst Pauer, Ebenezer Prout, John Stainer, and Arthur Sullivan. In 1880, he arranged the piano reduction for the vocal score of Sullivan's sacred music drama The Martyr of Antioch, to accompany the chorus in rehearsal.[2] While d'Albert later said that he considered his work during this period more or less worthless,[3] he is credited with writing the overture to Gilbert and Sullivan's 1881 opera, Patience. Ainger wrote "That evening (April 21, 1881) Sullivan gave his sketch of the overture to Eugene d'Albert to score. D'Albert was a seventeen-year-old student at the National Training School (where Sullivan was the principal and supervisor of the composition department) and winner of the Mendelssohn Scholarship that year."[4] David Russell Hulme studied the handwriting in the manuscript score of Patience and confirmed that it is that of Eugene, not of his father Charles (as had erroneously been reported by biographer Arthur Jacobs), both of whose script Hulme sampled.[5]. D'Albert became a pupil of the elderly Franz Liszt in Weimar and can be heard in an early recording of that composer's works. Liszt called him "the young Tausig." His output includes a symphony, two string quartets, two piano concertos, a cello concerto, and many lieder and piano works. His greatest compositional successes, however, were his many operas, the best known of which is Tiefland; this has retained a place in the German and Austrian repertoire, with a recent production at Deutsche Oper Berlin, in November 2007. D'Albert was married six times, one of his wives being the Venezuelan pianist, singer and composer Teresa Carreño (m. 1892-95), herself much married. D'Albert and Carreño were the subject of a famous joke: "Come quick! Your children and my children are quarreling again with our children!"[6] The line, however, has also been attributed to others. D'Albert died in Riga, where he had traveled for a divorce from his sixth wife. He was buried in the beautiful cemetery overlooking Lake Lugano in Morcote, Switzerland. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.