German composer and conductor Max Bruch was born on January 6, 1838 in Cologne. His father was a royal commissioner of police and deputy chief constable, his mother was a soprano. Max showed early on that he had a great talent for painting, but this soon faded into the background in favor of music. At the age of 9, Bruch wrote his first composition, a song for his mother's birthday. His parents encouraged his enthusiasm for music as best they could. However, little of his numerous early works has survived. Bruch received his first music theory lessons in Bonn in 1849 from Professor Heinrich Carl Breidenstein, a friend of his father. At the age of eleven he first appeared in public with major compositions. In March 1852 his first symphony in F minor was performed by the Philharmonic Society in Cologne. As early as March 12, 1852, an article about Max appeared in the Rheinische Musikzeitung, comparing him to Mozart and Mendelssohn. In the same year, Bruch won a four-year scholarship from the Frankfurt Mozart Foundation with a string quartet, which enabled him to study composition with Ferdinand Hiller and piano studies with Carl Reinecke and Ferdinand Breunung in Cologne from 1853 to 1857. In 1865 Bruch became music director in Koblenz. There he wrote what is probably his most famous work, the 1st Violin Concerto in G minor. Just two years later he moved to Sondershausen as court music director. From 1870 he lived as a music teacher in Berlin and from 1873 as a freelance composer in Bonn. In 1878 Bruch took over the management of the Stern'sche Choral Society in Berlin and from 1880 to 1883 he led the Philharmonic Society in Liverpool. After a trip to the USA in the spring of 1883, he took over the management of the Breslau Orchestra Association in the same year. In 1891, Bruch received a professorship for composition at the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin. His students included Oscar Strauß, Eduard Künneke and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Max Bruch died on October 2, 1920 in Berlin.