Gustav Adolf Huber - A Forgotten German Composer

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Gustav Adolf Huber was a German musician, composer and music educationist. He was born in 1872 in Magdeburg, Germany. I learnt his beautiful Concertino in G Major recently and tried to find out more about his life.

Information about Huber is hard to come by. Popular encyclopedias of classical music do not mention him at all. There is very little on the internet - except for a tiny bilingual website dedicated to him. The English version seems to have been Google-translated from the German version, with odd results. The site does have a few photographs of his family and descendants, and an incomplete list of his compositions. I found this video to be an expressive rendition of the Concertino in G Major.

In contrast to the sparseness of information about Huber himself, the number of videos on YouTube of students playing his compositions is far higher. His compositions are widely used - as his eponymous website correctly claims - in music teaching.

The name of his hometown is perhaps better known to us for the Magdeburg Hemispheres - the equipment used by the German scientist Otto von Guericke to demonstrate atmospheric pressure. Many of us grew up reading about this in our school science textbooks, complete with the image of two hemispheres being pulled on opposite sides by horses.

Spotify has a couple of albums of his educational compositions.





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