Rudi Stephan

Rudi Stephan (July 29 1887 Worms, Germany – September 29 1915), was a German composer of great promise who shortly before World War I was considered one of the leading talents among his generation.

Stephan was a pupil of Bernhard Sekles in Frankfurt and of Heinrich Schwartz and Rudolf Louis in Munich, where he settled after completing his studies in 1908. He left only a few works: his liking for pointedly neutral titles along the lines of 'Music for ...' has caused him to be seen as a forerunner of the 'New Objectivity' of the post-war era, but his music is in fact in a hyper-expressive late-Romantic idiom which has more plausibly been seen by some as a kind of proto-Expressionism. His father, a Privy Councillor, was able to finance the performance of his early works, which at first met with incomprehension, but the premiere of his 1912 "Music for Orchestra" in Worms was a major critical breakthrough. He completed his only opera, "Die erste Menschen", shortly after the outbreak of the war, and it was eventually premiered in Frankfurt five years after his death from a bullet in the brain fired by a Russian sharpshooter, at Ghodazkow-Wielki near Tarnopol on the Galician Front.

List of Works

*"Opus 1" for Orchestra
*"Liebeszauber" for baritone and orchestra, after Hebbel (1907, rev. 1911)
*"Music for Orchestra" [No.1] (1910)
*"Grotesque" for violin and piano
*"Music for Violin and Orchestra" (1910, rev. 1913)
*"Music for Seven String Instruments" (string sextet and harp) (1907-11; unfinished revision for piano quintet, 1914)
*"Music for Orchestra" [No.2] (1912, rev. 1913) [NB this work is often said to be a revision of the 1910 Music for Orchestra, but they are in fact unrelated]
*"Die ersten Menschen" (1909-14), opera after the erotic mystery-play by Otto Borngräber