著者

角倉 一朗

出版者

東京芸術大学

雑誌

東京藝術大学音楽学部紀要 (ISSN:09148787)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.23, pp.37-47, 1997

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This is a summary of the lecture given on the 7th October 1997 for the 10th anniversary of the reconstructed Sogakudo (former concert hall of the Tokyo School of Music). Dr. Raphael von Koeber (1848-1923), philosopher and musician, lived from 1893 to 1923 in Japan and exerted a far-reaching influence on the cultural development of this country. Born as a Russian of German ancestry, he studied piano and composition under Nikolai Rubinstein and Pyotr Tchaikowsky at the Moscow Conservatory of Music. Aware of his inaptitude for public music-making, however, he went over to Germany to study philosophy in Jena and Heidelberg with Kuno Fischer and Eduard Hartmann among others. After completing his doctoral dissertation on the philosophical thought of Schopenhauer, he devoted himself to thinking and writing for nine years in Munich. In 1893 he was invited to Tokyo University to teach Western philosophy, aesthetics, and cultural history for 21 years. He attracted many students with his erudition and, above all, with his personality. Among his students were those who were to become most influential philosophers of Japan: Kitaro Nishida, Jiro Abe, Teturo Watuji, to name only a few. His eurocentric tendency notwithstanding, he was admired and welcomed for his teaching of Greek and German idealistic philosophy at the time when Western culture was being assimilated in Japan. Beside his activity as a teacher and writer of philosophy, Dr. Koeber was highly admired as a pianist. From 1894 to 1909 he gave over 60 public performances and taught piano playing and music history at the Tokyo School of Music (founded in 1887, later to become the Music Department of the Tokyo National University of Fine Art and Music) for eleven years from 1898 to 1909. Among his music students are found composers Rentaro Taki, Kosaku Yamada, a singer Tamaki Shibata (later Miura), among others. Koeber's repertory consisted mainly of German Classic-Romantic composers, centering on Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, and Brahms. Though the name of J.S. Bach rarely appears in his repertory, he could have loved and admired the music of Bach most of all as the root of modern Western music. For, in 1923, shortly before his death, he gave a piece of paper with a musical riddle written down in his own hand to his beloved student Itoe Tachibana, which consists of two crossing staves with four different clefs and a note in their center so that the note, read in four different ways, turns out to be the name BACH. As a music teacher, he consistently emphasized the importance of humanistic culture and intelligence. Dr. Koeber, so records the great writer Soseki Natume, once remarked: "Japanese musicians will come to nothing as long as they play only with fingers without the brain." Dr. Koeber retired from public activity in 1909 to his secluded life for the last 22 years. Meanwhile the Japanese modernization was almost completed and the musical scene of the world saw drastic changes to leave Koeber the musician far behind. But the humanistic culture, as he so enthusiastically required of all the musicians, remains as actual as ever.