Close to the Schumanns and admired by Mendelssohn and Wagner, Theodor Kirchner (1823–1903) was an accomplished pianist, organist, and composer in his own right. His...

Close to the Schumanns and admired by Mendelssohn and Wagner, Theodor Kirchner (1823–1903) was an accomplished pianist, organist, and composer in his own right. His lifelong friendship with Brahms began when the two men met at the spa town of Baden-Baden in 1865. Robert Schumann had already mentioned him in the same breath as Brahms in the influential 1853 article which effectively launched Brahms’s career. While Kirchner pursued his own, less celebrated career as a composer, he found a reliable subsidiary source of income in making the kind of arrangements through which many listeners made their first encounters with larger-scale works. He seems to have specialized in doing this for Brahms, who regarded him as an outstanding craftsman in this respect.