Joseph Joachim Raff was born on 27 May 1822 at Lachen in Switzerland, where his father, a teacher, had fled from Württemberg in 1810 to escape conscription into the forces Napoleon took to Russia. He was largely self-taught, studying while working as a schoolmaster at Schmerikon, Schwyz and Rapperswil, and sent some piano pieces to Mendelssohn, who recommended them to Breitkopf & Härtel; they appeared in 1844 and were reviewed favourably in Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which decided him to move to Zürich and compose full time. In 1845 he walked to Basel to hear Liszt play, and after a period in Stuttgart, where he became a friend of Hans von Bülow, worked as Liszt’s assistant at Weimar from 1850 to 1853, helping to orchestrate several of his works and claiming a large hand in the symphonic poem Tasso. He moved to Wiesbaden in 1856 and died in Frankfurt on the night of 24–25 June 1882.

From 1878 he was the first director of the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, where he hired Clara Schumann and other leading musicians and set up a composition class specifically for women at a time when women composers were not taken seriously; Edward MacDowell, Olga Radecki and Alexander Ritter studied with him there. He was prolific and, by the end of his life, among the best-known composers in Germany. His eleven symphonies join classical form to programmatic titles and a contrapuntal orchestral manner reaching back to the Baroque — In the Forest, Lenore, the seventy-minute To the Fatherland, and a closing quartet of works on the four seasons. The Third Symphony travelled quickly to England and America and was among the most played orchestral works in the world at the end of the nineteenth century; Toscanini conducted him, and Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique shows his mark. Today only a cavatina for violin and piano is heard with any regularity, though the Bamberg Symphony under Hans Stadlmair recorded the complete symphonies in the early 2000s.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Raff
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q547301