Eugenie Menter

Eugenie Menter was born on 19 May 1853 in Munich (Germany). She grew up in an exceptionally musical family as one of nine children of the singer and actress Wilhelmine Menter, née Diepold, and the cellist and composer Joseph Menter. Her older sister Sophie Menter later became one of the most celebrated pianists of her generation. Eugenie received her first piano lessons from Sophie and continued her studies with Hans von Bülow between 1867 and 1869.

Eugenie Menter made her public concert debut on 24 April 1873 in Munich at a concert given by the violinist Benno Walter, performing works by Liszt, Chopin and Schubert-Tausig. During the following years she established a substantial career as a concert pianist and appeared in Munich, Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin, Stuttgart, Hanover, Brunswick, Nuremberg, Regensburg and Vienna. Her travels also took her to Italy and Paris in 1881 and to Zurich in 1884. Her repertoire concentrated mainly on nineteenth-century music and included works by Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Liszt and Brahms. In December 1884 she appeared with the Meiningen Court Orchestra under her former teacher Hans von Bülow in Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor.

Menter was highly regarded by contemporary critics. Although comparisons with her internationally famous sister Sophie were almost inevitable, reviews regularly praised Eugenie's musicianship, technique and refined interpretation. She also appeared together with her sister; in November 1886, for example, the two pianists performed Liszt's Concert pathétique for two pianos in Munich.

By late 1886 Eugenie Menter had married the Bavarian artillery captain Otto Schulze (1832–1906) and subsequently used the names Eugenie Menter-Schulze or Schulze-Menter. After her marriage she largely withdrew from the regular career of a travelling virtuoso, although she continued to appear occasionally in public. She also devoted considerable attention to teaching. Her best-known pupil was the later conductor and composer Hugo Reichenberger, whom she taught piano during his youth.

Eugenie Menter spent the remainder of her life in Munich. During her later years her hearing deteriorated considerably. Her unpublished memoirs, entitled Bekenntnisse einer traurigen Seele, survive in two handwritten versions and provide an extensive first-hand account of her musical life and her encounters with musicians such as Franz Liszt and Johannes Brahms. Eugenie Menter died on 27 September 1934 in Munich.

Although Eugenie Menter was a highly accomplished and respected pianist during her lifetime, her reputation was increasingly overshadowed by that of her famous sister Sophie. Her work as a composer has received even less attention. Only a very small number of her compositions and arrangements can currently be traced. A Gavotte for piano was published by Ries & Erler, while Simrock published her arrangement for two pianos of Brahms' Variations on an Original Theme, op. 21 No. 1 in 1908. The surviving composition Just die Eine! op. 35 shows, however, that Menter used opus numbers at least as high as 35, suggesting that her compositional activity was considerably more extensive than the few works known today.

In my possession is a handwritten manuscript of Eugenie Menter's composition "Just die Eine!" op. 35 for male quartet. The manuscript came from the estate of the pianist Ernst Riemann (1882–1953), a grandnephew of Eugenie Menter and her sister Sophie. It is written in a hand different from Riemann's, and no other source for the composition has so far been traced. "Just die Eine!" is a setting of a poem attributed in the manuscript to Franz Freiherr von Godin and is scored for two tenors and two basses. The manuscript is undated.