Julius Klauser, born in 1854, spent his early years in New York City, where his
father, German émigré Karl Klauser, was musical director at Miss Porter’s Young
Ladies School, Farmington, Connecticut. Julius Klauser relocated to Milwaukee in the
early 1870’s to commence his own career as a musician, music teacher, and music
theorist. Klauser became musical director of the subscription musical performance
series Euphonia shortly after it was formed circa 1875 and was involved with the
organization into the early 1880’s. Lizzie Eldred, one of the organizers of Euphonia
and daughter of prominent Wisconsin lumber miller Anson Eldred, became Klauser’s
wife during this period.
By 1882, Klauser had begun a music instruction practice in Milwaukee that would
continue intermittently for the next twenty-five years. Regular public recitals by
his pupils began in 1882 and would remain a significant feature of his pedagogy for
the remainder of his career. Klauser became a prominent musical theorist in this
period as well, with the publication in 1890 of his book The
Septonate and the Centralization of the Tonal System. Two years later,
in 1892, Klauser expanded his music instruction practice by establishing the Klauser
Music Institute in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which featured a full faculty of music
instructors as well as public recitals by students until its dissolution in
1896.
After a two-year sojourn touring Europe with his family, Klauser resumed his
individual music instruction practice in 1898. Klauser’s life and career was cut
short by his unexpected death in April of 1907. A second book on music theory
written by Klauser, The Nature of Music: Original Harmony in
One Voice (edited by Lizzie Eldred Klauser), was published posthumously
in 1909.
Adeline T. Ricker began her association with Julius Klauser as his student in the
early1880’s. She performed in recitals for Euphonia in 1880 and as Klauser’s pupil
throughout the 1880’s and early 1890’s. Ricker became a faculty member at the
Klauser Music Institute and taught as a colleague of Klauser’s between 1892 and
1896. She was instrumental in organizing a memorial concert in Klauser’s honor in
1908 and was active in the MacDowell Club, another Milwaukee music performance
organization, in the 1910s and early1920s. By the mid-1910s, Ricker had established
her own individual music instruction practice, with her own students holding
occasional public recitals between 1916 and 1928.
