Jacques Bekker

Jacques Bekker was born on 27 December 1865 in Den Helder (Netherlands). He grew up in a musical family: his father was a professional violinist, and his brother Christof and sister Anni also later became involved in music. From the age of five he attended the singing lessons given by his father, who from 1868 served as municipal music director in Kampen. At the age of eight he began violin studies with his father and showed such progress that, at the age of twelve, he was admitted to the first violin class of the Royal Music School in The Hague. There he studied violin with Jan George Mulder until 1884 and received piano instruction from Georg Friedrich Wagener.
After graduating with distinction from the Royal Music School in 1884, he joined the orchestra of Cornelis Coenen in Utrecht as first violinist. From 1885 to 1887 he worked as a violinist at the Theatre de la Monnaie in Brussels. He subsequently became a member of the orchestra in Aix-les-Bains in Savoy under the direction of Edouard Colonne. During the following winter Jacques Bekker accepted an appointment as solo violinist in Arnhem, where he appeared successfully in concerts both in the city itself and in other German cities. In the following years he also performed with the orchestra of Willem Kes, worked at the Fransche Opera in The Hague, and later joined an orchestra in Dresden. In 1903 he temporarily succeeded his father as conductor of the mixed choir in Kampen and, six months later, also became director of the singing society “Euterpe” in that city. In the same year he held a short appointment with an orchestra in Dresden, but returned to the Netherlands shortly afterwards and lived for several years in Groningen and Rotterdam, where he worked as a violin teacher. In 1916 Jacques Bekker was appointed concertmaster in Teplitz-Schönau, and in 1917 he moved to Breslau, where he continued to work as concertmaster of the local orchestra and remained for the rest of his life.
Jacques Bekker died on 25 February 1943 in Breslau (then part of the German Reich, today known as Wroclaw in Poland).

In my possession is the autograph manuscript of the work "Andante for cello (or violin) and piano" by Jacques Bekker. The work was composed in 1924 when Jacques Bekker was concertmaster in Wroclaw.