Ignaz Brüll wrote well over 100 piano works, many orchestral and chamber pieces as well as numerous operas. Sadly, nearly all of his works have been ignored by the music establishment for over a hundred years, and the public have been denied access to Brüll’s qualities as a composer, which were so evident to his friend Johannes Brahms.

Brüll deserves to be repositioned alongside friends Brahms, Mahler and Schumann. Even his close friendship with Brahms could not save him from the anti-Semitism fuelled by Wagner and Liszt during the 19th century. Hitler idolised Wagner, and he ordered that music scores of Jewish composers be found and burnt. Fortunately for us, many of them were well hidden.

To have been a composer in the late nineteenth century Germany must have been a mixed blessing. The pantheon of greats featured the refined Brahms, the revolutionary Wagner and romantic Reinecke. This left little room, therefore, for composers of less renown, especially those whom the musical and political establishment would have chosen to keep out of the limelight. Salomon Jadassohn found little support for his work and a composer.

Overshadowed by his colleague and superior at the Leipzig Conservatory, Carl Reinecke, opportunities for presentations of his more than 140 compositions were rare. In addition, due to his Jewish faith, Jadassohn was unable to secure prominent posts in Leipzig as a conductor or teacher. Nevertheless, his reputation as a teacher at the Conservatory drew students to him, including Busoni, Grieg and Sigfrid Karg-Elert.