Max Fiedler

August Max Fiedler (21 December 1859, Zittau – 1 December 1939, Stockholm) was a German conductor and composer, He was noted as an interpreter of Brahms. He first studied the piano with his father, who conducted the accompanying orchestra when Max made his first public appearance at the age of ten in 1870, playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto in A, K.488. Continuing his musical studies in Zittau with the organist Gustav Albrecht, who had been a pupil of Mendelssohn, Fiedler then entered the Leipzig Conservatory in 1877, where the director, Carl Reinecke, was his piano teacher. He graduated in 1882, with exceptional honours, alongside his friend and colleague Karl Muck. Fiedler also studied composition and was active in the city’s musical life, developing a close relationship with Julius Spengel, a friend of Brahms. Fiedler himself knew Brahms sufficiently well for the composer to ask him to substitute for him in a performance of his Piano Concerto No. 2, an invitation which Fiedler politely declined. He almost certainly heard Brahms conduct the first Leipzig performances of his Symphony No. 2 early in 1878 (though Ethel Smyth later wrote that Brahms “had the knack of rubbing orchestras