Walter Niemann

Walter Niemann (Hamburg, 1876 – Leipzig, 1953) was a composer, pianist and one of the most controversial music writers in Germany of his time. He came from a musical family: his father, Rudolph Niemann, was a virtuoso pianist and a late-Romantic composer who had studied with Moscheles and David in Leipzig and with Marmontel and Halévy in Paris, and his uncle Gustav Adolph Niemann, a violinist, achieved notoriety in the musical life of Helsinki.

Walter began his training with his father and then with Humperdinck. From 1898 he studied at the Leipzig Conservatory with Reinecke and at the university of the same city with Riemann, where he earned his doctorate with a dissertation on ligatures in mensural music. After teaching in Hamburg, he settled in Leipzig, where he combined teaching, performance and writing. He was briefly an editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and worked as a critic for the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten between 1907 and 1917. As a composer he was very prolific, above all in music for piano, with numbered works reaching as far as Op. 189. His early models were Schumann and Brahms, but over time he incorporated folk elements and influences from Impressionism and exoticism.

Niemann was a scathing critic, and his weight in the debate is reflected in the threat of a libel suit that Max Reger directed at him in 1910. Linked to the Heimatkunst movement and a contributor to völkisch publications, he championed nationalist composers such as Pfitzner, Sibelius and MacDowell, while censuring the music of Richard Strauss, Mahler and Schoenberg. His biography of Brahms sought to detach the composer from his liberal surroundings and place him within the framework of northern German regionalism. Today he is remembered above all for his writings on the history of the piano and Nordic music, although his reputation is disputed because of his ideological positions.