Max Kalbeck was a close friend and partisan of Johannes Brahms. Kalbeck's principal achievement was his eight-volume biography of that composer, published from 1904 to 1914, which has never been translated into English. Kalbeck also edited several volumes of Brahms's correspondence and in 1918, the letters of the poets Gottfried Keller and Paul Heyse, as well as publishing two collections of his own music reviews. Kalbeck wrote new libretti for Mozart's "Bastien und Bastienne" and "La finta giardiniera"; and he revised those of "Don Giovanni" and "The Marriage of Figaro" for Gustav Mahler's productions at the Vienna Hofoper. In addition, he supplied
Zar und Zimmermann Zar und Zimmermann Zar und Zimmermann ("Tsar and Carpenter") is a comic opera in three acts, music by Albert Lortzing, libretto by the composer after Georg Christian Römer's "Der Bürgermeister von Saardam, oder Die zwei Peter", itself based on the French play "Le Bourgmestre de Saardam, ou Les deux Pierre" by Anne-Honoré-Joseph Duveyrier de Mélésville, Jean-Toussaint Merle, and Eugène Centiran de Boirie. Ultimately, it goes back to the historical Grand Embassy of Peter the Great. Gaetano Donizetti had set the same story in his 1827 opera "Il borgomastro di Saardam". The opera was first performed at the Stadttheater in Leipzig,