Joseph Joachim Raff (1822 – 1882) was a German-Swiss composer, teacher and pianist born in Lachen in Switzerland. His father, a teacher, had fled there from Württemberg in 1810 to escape forced recruitment into the military of that southwestern German state that had to fight for Napoleon in Russia. Joachim was largely self-taught in music, studying the subject while working as a schoolmaster in Schmerikon, Schwyz and Rapperswil. He sent some of his piano compositions to Felix Mendelssohn who recommended them to Breitkopf & Härtel for publication. They were published in 1844 and received a favourable review in Robert Schumann's journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which prompted Raff to go to Zürich and take up composition full-time.

In 1845, Raff walked to Basel to hear Franz Liszt play the piano. After a period in Stuttgart where he became friends with the conductor Hans von Bülow, he worked as Liszt's assistant at Weimar from 1850 to 1853. During this time he helped Liszt in the orchestration of several of his works, claiming to have had a major part in orchestrating the symphonic poem Tasso. In 1851, Raff's opera König Alfred was staged in Weimar, and five years later he moved to Wiesbaden where he largely devoted himself to composition. From 1878 he was the first Director of, and a teacher at, the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt. There he employed Clara Schumann and a number of other eminent musicians as teachers, and established a class specifically for female composers. (This was at a time when women composers were not taken very seriously.) His pupils there included Edward MacDowell and Alexander Ritter.

Raff was very prolific, and by the end of his life was one of the best known German composers, though his work is largely forgotten today. (Only one piece, a cavatina for violin and piano, is performed with any regularity today, sometimes as an encore.) He drew influence from a variety of sources - his eleven symphonies, for example, combine the Classical symphonic form, with the Romantic penchant for program music and contrapuntal orchestral writing which harks back to the Baroque. Most of these symphonies carry descriptive titles including In the Forest (No. 3), Lenore (No. 5) and To the Fatherland (No. 1), a very large-scale work lasting around seventy minutes. His last four symphonies make up a quartet of works based on the four seasons. Arturo Toscanini conducted some performances of the Symphony No. 3 In the Forest in 1931.

One of Raff's earliest compositions was the Fantaisie et Variations brillantes op.6 which he wrote in Rapperswil in 1843, whist working as a schoolteacher there. At Mendelssohn's urging, it and several other piano works were published by Breitkopf & Härtel but the company soon lost interest in the young composer. 35 years later, Breitkopf approached the now famous Raff to write some new compositions for them to publish but instead, at his suggestion, he completely rewrote this and a number of other early works. Apart from the key of E flat and the variations format, he retained nothing of the original. The simple, almost childish theme of the new set is enhanced and transformed through a set of 17 imaginative variations in moods ranging from the contemplative to the frenetic, demanding virtuosity of a high order as they become progressively grander and more complex until Raff embarks upon the work's fugal finale. Overall, though, there remains something of the classroom about this ten minute long set, as if Raff was harking back to the days when he composed his original op.6, or maybe reflecting his new teaching role as director of the Hoch Conservatory.

Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joachim_Raff).

Although originally composed for Solo Piano, I created this Interpretation of the Variations in Eb Major (Opus 6) for String Quartet (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).