Hard to believe but true: at the beginning of the 1870s Joseph Joachim Raff numbered among those composers whose works were most often performed in German-speaking countries. He satisfied the taste of the times like no other composer and published one work after another. The prizewinning Ensemble Villa Musica again turns to a chapter of music history too quickly and not closely enough read during other times. Not a few Raff contemporaries regarded his musical language as the summit of Central European artistry. In 1869 Hans von B�low effusively declared that Raff's Grand Quintuor op. 107 was "the most important work in the field of chamber music since Beethoven." Raff's parents, who lived in Switzerland, did not have the means to finance the education of their talented son. He developed his compositional capabilities autodidactically and later had to make ends meet with occasional work, as a salesperson in a Cologne music shop, as a music teacher, or as Liszt's private secretary. Renown It was from Wiesbaden, where his wife was an actress, that Raff's works finally found the dissemination that he had hoped for. At the height of his public renown Raff assumed the post of director of the recently founded Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt in 1877. Under his leadership the conservatory became one of the leading institutions of it's kind.