Jensen Piano Project announced

I am thrilled to announce a new publishing project, which will be launching this month — the complete solo piano music of Adolf Jensen. Over the next two years, I will be releasing a completely new critical Urtext edition of all the known solo piano works, based on first published versions and manuscript sources (where they exist). Individual works will be released as well as a three-volume collection in paperback and clothbound hardback formats.

I first came across Jensen’s music in an old collection of student pieces that I picked up in a second-hand bookstore in York, England. That piece is probably the one you’re most likely to have encountered, ‘The Mill’ from Wanderbilder, op. 17. Straight away, I was charmed and intrigued, and made it my mission to find more of Jensen’s music and to learn more about him.

It seems to me that Jensen is one of those figures against whom the various Fates of music history conspired, ensuring that plans never quite came to fruition and dreams never quite came true. One of the first things about his music that struck me was the affinity with Robert Schumann (one of my absolute favourite composers), evident in, for instance, the contrasting intermezzi in the Präludium und Romanze, op. 19, which reminds me of Schumann’s op. 28 no. 3, or the Ländler aus Berchtesgaden, op. 46, whose use of shared connective tissue and cyclical techniques within the sequence of movements puts one in mind of the Davidsbündlertänze, op. 6, or Carnaval, op. 9. It came as little surprise when I learned that Jensen intended to take lessons with Schumann, and at the age of 19 took a teaching post in Russia with the hope of earning enough money to do so. He started the job in 1856, so never got to study with Schumann. I think this would have been an interesting possibility for the Schumanns, too. Despite nurturing many young talents, and promoting the cause of ‘new music’ as a critic and writer, Schumann the composer never really had a disciple; even if he had a protégé in Brahms, Brahms’s music shows no discernible trace of Schumann’s compositional influence. Admittedly, while not getting to meet the young acolyte from Königsberg is hardly the most tragic event of Schumann’s final years, it is a poignant footnote to them. Destiny had an even crueller blow in store for Jensen, allowing him little more than a decade following his return to Königsberg, via three years in Copenhagen, before he became seriously ill, dying from tuberculosis not a fortnight after his forty-second birthday.

This is one of the leitmotifs, as it were, of delving around in the dustier corners of music history. While a lot of the history books, particularly those venerable tomes written in the early twentieth century under the heady intellectual influence of Darwinism, present a steady stream of Great Men running a pan-European relay race beginning with Monteverdi and ending with Mahler, the reality is that the flow of music history, indeed any history, is far less monodirectional, far messier, than this. This narrative leads us often to misunderstand the composers that ran with that baton for a leg, and to miss entirely all those figures who for one reason or another weren’t in the squad that day. It’s a mistake to believe that we know only the music that merits knowing, and that the rest is deservedly forgotten.

It isn’t a surprise to me that ‘The Mill’ is the one piece of Jensen’s that is encountered most often in pedagogical anthologies, for the simple reason that it’s the easiest. While his compositional ideas owe much to Schumann, his approach to writing for the piano is distinctly Brahmsian. Shortly before his death, he worked as a teacher at the school of advanced piano run in Berlin by Tausig, who was himself regarded as the most accomplished of Liszt’s students, and was therefore probably able to select his staff from the absolute cream of his generation’s more-than-abundant crop of keyboard virtuosi. While Jensen’s lighter works are manageable for advanced hobbyists and students, there is plenty of much heartier fare on offer too, providing ample evidence of his own prowess at the keyboard. He made no contribution at all to the enormous body of beginner-level pedagogical music that was the bread and butter of many composers’ creative endeavor — and most publishing houses’ business — during this period.

So, back to the edition. Each piece will be available separately for sale in the site shop as it is released, and shorter works are also available bundled together. I’m also planning a companion book, Adolf Jensen: Music for Solo Piano, which I hope to release in 2025.