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Julius Röntgen (1855 – 1932) was a German-Dutch composer of classical music. Julius Röntgen's works include 25 symphonies, concertos (7 piano concertos, 3 violin concertos, 3 cello concertos, other concertos), as well as numerous chamber, piano and vocal works. He also completed Grieg's unfinished String Quartet No. 2.
Röntgen also harmonized and arranged traditional Dutch melodies used as hymn tunes. One such hymn tune is entitled "In Babilone". It can be found as hymn number 325 "The United Methodist Hymnal" (C) 1989 The United Methodist Publishing House, Nashville, TN. In the Methodist hymnal his name is spelled Roentgen but the tune is the same and dates correlate with the time of his work.
Music became Julius's passion and preoccupation. By his early twenties Röntgen's musical and cultural allegiances were entrenched, his works reflecting a definite Leipzig parentage, his outlook essentially German. Röntgen made annual trips to Vienna and regular social visits to Brahms, and latterly the great Catalan cellist Pablo Casals who became a close family friend and taught two of Röntgen's sons. Röntgen's musical partners also included the influential violinist Carl Flesch and the baritone Johannes Messchaert, with whom he toured for thirty-five years. Röntgen made annual trips to Vienna and regular social visits to Brahms, and latterly the great Catalan cellist Pablo Casals who became a close family friend and taught two of Röntgen's sons. Röntgen's productivity burgeoned, and of his total output of over 650 works, one hundred, many of them substantial, were composed in the final seven years of his life. Röntgen claimed that his compositions sprang naturally from within him, inspired, unharnessed to any system, and, to quote the composer, "honest" and unapologetically "unmodern". To many of his peers he was no more than an anachronism unable to abandon obsolete musical conventions, and as a result his works have had to wait to be judged on their own terms, now that their intrinsic content and quality have finally become more relevant than the context of their creation and competing musical dogmas.
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