He was German, but it was Paris that made him Burgmüller. He moved there at twenty-six and never left, wrote salon music and ballet for forty years, and the only part of it still played straight through today is a set of studies for children.
Burgmüller was born in Regensburg in 1806 into a family of musicians: his father was a composer and conductor, his mother a pianist and singer, and his younger brother Norbert composed too. In 1829 he went to Kassel to study with Spohr, and the following January he appeared for the first time as a pianist.
In 1832, aged twenty-six, he moved to Paris. It was Paris at its loudest: Chopin gave his first concert there that same year, Liszt was there, and the salon was where music was sold. Burgmüller stayed — forty-two years, until his death in Paris in 1874. Norbert had planned to join him in 1835, but drowned during an epileptic seizure at a spa in Aachen the year after; the journey never happened.
In Paris he wrote what that market wanted: salon miniatures, variations, fantasies on whatever opera was in fashion, album after album. He wrote for the ballet as well — the peasant pas de deux added to Giselle for its 1841 premiere is his.
The studies for children came later. Op. 100 was published in Paris in 1851, followed by Op. 105 and Op. 109 for more advanced players. He presumably thought of them as ordinary working output. The salon pieces have all gone; these three books stayed, and a hundred and seventy years on they are still among the most-opened scores in piano rooms anywhere.
You can hear at once that Burgmüller's pieces are meant to be practised, yet they do not sound like studies: each is short, each has a picture for a title, and each can be played through in one breath.
His method is consistent. One hand takes a single unchanging job — a run, a broken chord, a repeated chord — the other sings the tune, and somewhere in the middle the two hands swap jobs exactly once. There is always one difficulty, and it is always in plain sight.
Harmonically he takes no risks: orderly modulations, clean endings. The result is music that is pleasant without being sticky — good to leave playing in the background, and good as the first pieces that actually sound like pieces.
