Jan Brandts Buys

Jan Willem Frans Brandts Buys (Zutphen, September 12, 1868 - Salzburg, December 7, 1933) was a Dutch-Austrian composer who came from a long line of Dutch organists and composers of protestant church music.

His father was an organ player in the town of Zutphen in the Netherlands, where Jan was born. He studied at the Raff Conservatory in Frankfurt and in 1893 settled in Vienna where he got to know Johannes Brahms, who, along with Edvard Grieg, praised his early works. His piano concerto won an important international prize and such famous artists as Lilli Lehmann often included his songs on the same program with those of Franz Schubert.

Work

Brandts Buys' oeuvre comprises piano pieces, organ pieces, chamber music, orchestral music , sonds, pieces for choir and cantatas, operas and many arrangements - such as piano arrangements of all the symphonies of Schubert and Beethoven).

However, his reputation today mainly rests on his comic operas and operettas, such as "The Tailors of Schonau" and "The Man in the Moon", which gained considerable international acclaim. Of the ten chamber music works he wrote, only the "Romantische Serenade (Romantic Serenade)", composed in 1905, was performed with any regularity before disappearing shortly after his death.

References

Some of the information on this page appears on the website of Edition Silvertrust but permission has been granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.

External links

* [http://www.editionsilvertrust.com/brandts-buys-romantic-serenade.htm Brandts Buys: Romantische Serenade for String Quartet, Op.25] Soundbites and information.