He fled to Copenhagen to escape Napoleon's conscription, stayed for the rest of his life, and ended up a Danish national composer.
Kuhlau was born in 1786 near Hanover, the son of an oboist in a military band. A fall on the ice as a child cost him the sight of his right eye, and every portrait of him afterwards was made in left profile.
When Napoleon's army occupied Hamburg in 1810 and began conscripting, the twenty-four-year-old took a boat to Copenhagen. He gave a concert there playing his own concerto, and within a year held a court title — a title without a salary. For the next two decades he lived on teaching, operas and a steady output of published piano music, supporting his parents, his sisters and a whole household.
His two claims to fame have nothing to do with each other. One is the Danish opera Elverhøj, full of Danish folk tunes and still a national piece there. The other is the sonatinas he wrote for his students — Opp. 20, 55 and 88 — which have sat in piano lesson books around the world for two hundred years.
In 1831 a fire at his house destroyed all his unpublished manuscripts; he caught a chill escaping it, declined quickly, and died the following year at forty-six.
He also knew Beethoven. The two spent a long day drinking outside Vienna in 1825, after which Beethoven sent him a canon built on B-A-C-H that puns on Kuhlau's name, with a letter joking about how much he had drunk.
Kuhlau's music sounds clean, square and easy to follow. Four-bar phrases answer one another, the left hand is usually a broken chord or a plain bass, and the right hand states the tune — exactly what he wanted for his students: everything audible and in its place.
The second mark is his love of scale runs. Fast passages sweep up and down all through his music, and they always sit well under the hand; his contemporaries called him the Beethoven of the flute, and those fluent runs are why.
The third is brightness. His major-key pieces barely darken, and when they touch the minor they come back quickly; not sad, not deep, but not empty either — the kind of tidiness that lifts the mood.
Set him beside other writers of teaching material and you notice his tunes have more theatre in them: not just exercises, but pieces that can actually be sung.
