Rudi Stephan

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Rudi Stephan, born Worms, 29 July 1887, killed in action at Ghodazkow-Wielki near Tarnopol on the Galician Front, 29 September 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 on the Eastern Front.

[edit] 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