Gustav Jenner

Gustav Jenner (3 December 1865 – 29 August 1920), born Cornelius Uwe Gustav Jenner was a German composer, conductor and musical scholar. He was the only formal composition pupil of Johannes Brahms. Biography Jenner was born in Keitum on the island of Sylt, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. His father, a doctor, came from a Scottish family: he claimed descent from Edward Jenner, the discoverer of smallpox vaccine, and was related to the family who built the eponymous Art-Nouveau style department store which is one of the landmarks of Edinburgh’s Princes Street. While at school in Kiel, Jenner started to teach himself to write music but, after his father committed suicide in 1884 (he had been accused of abusing female patients), he was befriended and assisted by the poet Klaus Groth, who arranged for him to study with Brahms’s old teacher Eduard Marxsen in Hamburg. Marxsen in his turn handed Jenner over to Brahms, with whom he studied in Vienna from February 1888 to 1895, also receiving instruction from Eusebius Mandyczewski. Though Brahms was a merciless critic of Jenner’s compositional attempts, he took great care over his welfare. He had him appointed Secretary of the Vienna To