Fabulous rendition: Mozart Concerto D Minor K466 Freiburger Mozart-Orchester, Michael Erren,Valentina Lisitsa

Mozart Concerto D Minor K466 Freiburger Mozart-Orchester, Michael Erren,Valentina Lisitsa

ValentinaLisitsa

Published on Aug 15, 2012

Filmed live May 20, 2012, Freiburg im Breisgau ,Germany
Cadenzas by Mozart’s favorite student – and billiards pal, Jan Nepomuk Hummel 🙂
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Piano Concerto No. 20 (Mozart)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 Neuer Markt in Vienna with Capuchin Church and Haus zur Mehlgrube on the right, painting by Bernardo Bellotto, 1760

The Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, was written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1785. The first performance took place at the Mehlgrube Casino in Vienna on February 11, 1785, with the composer as the soloist.^[1]

Background

A few days after the first performance, the composer’s father, Leopold, visiting in Vienna, wrote to his daughter Nannerl about her brother’s recent success: “[I heard] an excellent new piano concerto by Wolfgang, on which the copyist was still at work when we got there, and your brother didn’t even have time to play through the rondo because he had to oversee the copying operation.”^[1]

It is written in the key of D minor. Other works by the composer in that key include the Fantasia K. 397 for piano, Requiem, a Kyrie, the aria “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” from the opera The Magic Flute and parts of the opera Don Giovanni. It is the first of two piano concertos written in a minor key (No. 24 in C minor being the other).

The young Ludwig van Beethoven admired this concerto and kept it in his repertoire.^[1] A bass run from the first movement appears for comic effect in Variation 22 of the Diabelli Variations. Daniel Barenboim contends that this concerto was Joseph Stalin‘s favorite piece of music.^[2] Composers who wrote cadenzas for it include Beethoven (WoO 58), Charles-Valentin Alkan, Johannes Brahms (WoO 16), Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ferruccio Busoni, and Clara Schumann.

Movements

The concerto is scored for solo piano, flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. As is typical with concertos, it is in three movements:

1. Allegro (in D minor)
2. Romanze (in B-flat major)
3. Allegro assai (in D minor, ending in D major)

The first movement starts off the concerto in the dark tonic key of D minor with the strings restlessly but quietly building up to a full forte. The theme is quickly taken up by the piano soloist and developed throughout the long movement. A slightly brighter mood exists in the second theme, but it never becomes jubilant. The timpani further heighten the tension in the coda before the cadenza. The movement ends on a quiet note.

The ‘Romanze’ second movement is a five-part rondo (ABACA)^[3] with a coda. The beginning features a solo piano playing the flamboyant and charming main B-flat major melody without accompaniment. This lyrical, passionate, tender and romantic melody, played at a relatively dainty tempo, paints a picture of peace and a sense of harmony between the piano and the orchestra, and has also inspired its title ‘Romanze’. Halfway through, the piece moves on to the second episode (part C), where the beautiful melody is replaced with a turbulent, agitated and ominous theme in the relative minor key of G minor, which greatly contrasts the peaceful mood at the starting of the movement. Finally, we are greeted once again with the aforeheard melody which returns as the movement is nearing the end. The piece ends with an ascending arpeggio that is light and delicate, gradually until it becomes a faint whisper.

The final movement, a rondo, begins with the solo piano rippling upward in the home key before the full orchestra replies with a furious section. (This piano “rippling” is known as the Mannheim Rocket and is a string of eighth notes (d-f-a-d-f) followed by a quarter note (a). A second melody is touched upon by the piano where the mood is still dark but strangely restless. A contrasting cheerful melody in F major ushers in not soon after, introduced by the orchestra before the solo piano rounds off the lively theme. A series of sharp piano chords snaps the bright melody and then begin passages in D minor on solo piano again, taken up by full orchestra. Several modulations of the second theme (in A minor and G minor) follow. Thereafter follows the same format as above, with a momentary pause for introducing the customary cadenza. After the cadenza, the mood clears considerably and the bright happy melody is taken up this time by the winds. The solo piano repeats the theme before a full orchestral passage develops the passage, thereby rounding up the concerto with a jubilant D major finish.

In other media

The second movement (minus the more tumultuous C part of the rondo) plays in the final scene and during the end credits of the 1984 movie Amadeus. The melody begins right before Antonio Salieri tells the priest sent to hear his confession that he is the patron saint of mediocrities. In the final shot of the film, Salieri announces, “Mediocrities everywhere, I absolve you.” Right before the screen fades to black, Mozart’s laugh is heard. At this point, the piano concerto picks up in volume, continuing through the end of the credits.

The first movement was also played in the ballet scene in Series 1 Episode 8 of the television series Mr. Robot.

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great compositions/performances: Mozart – Horn Concerto No. 2 in E flat, K. 417 [complete]

Mozart – Horn Concerto No. 2 in E flat, K. 417 [complete]

Am4d3usM0z4rt

Uploaded on Oct 29, 2011

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 2 in E-flat major, K. 417 was completed in 1783.

The work is in three movements:
I. Allegro maestoso
II. Andante
III. Rondo Più allegro 6/8

Mozart’s good-natured ribbing of his friend is evident in the manuscript inscription “W. A. Mozart took pity on Leitgeb, ass, ox and fool in Vienna on 27 May 1783.” This is one of two horn concerti of Mozart to omit bassoons. It is also one of Mozart’s two horn concerti to have ripieno horns (horns included in the orchestra besides the soloist), though in contrast to K. 495, the solo horn in this one does not duplicate the first ripieno horn’s part in the tutti passages.
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FREE .mp3 and .wav files of all Mozart’s music at: http://www.mozart-archiv.de/
FREE sheet music scores of any Mozart piece at: http://dme.mozarteum.at/DME/nma/start…
ALSO check out these cool sites: http://musopen.org/
and http://imslp.org/wiki/

 

historic Musical Bits: Wilhelm Kempff plays Chopin Impromptu No. 3 in G flat Op. 51 (rec.1958)

Wilhelm Kempff plays Chopin Impromptu No. 3 in G flat Op. 51 (rec.1958)

gullivior

Uploaded on Jul 28, 2011

rec. 1958

historic musical bits: Koeckert-Quartett · Antonín Dvořák · String Quartet F major op. 96 “American” (rec ~1953)

Koeckert-Quartett · Antonín Dvořák · String Quartet F major op. 96 “American”

childrenscorner

Published on May 16, 2015

Rudolf Koeckert (1. Violine)
Willi Buchner (2. Violine)
Oskar Riedl (Viola)
Josef Merz (Violoncello)

rec. date unknown, appr. 1953. The label and cover date from the earliest after-war DG releases (No. 16001 LP).

I don’t stop to hope, that DG will awake from anaesthesia and re-release the Koeckerts’ unique symphonic-folkloric interpretations, on contemporary media. In my transfer I tried to keep the typical superior golden-red monaural High Fidelity of that remarkable period.
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String Quartet No. 12 (Dvořák)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

The last page of the autograph score with Dvořák’s inscription: “Finished on 10 June 1893 in Spillville. Thanks God. I’m satisfied. It went quickly”

The String Quartet in F major Op. 96, nicknamed American Quartet, is the 12th string quartet composed by Antonín Dvořák. It was written in 1893, during Dvořák’s time in the United States. The quartet is one of the most popular in the chamber music repertoire.

Composition

	Performance of the quartet by the Seraphina quartet (Caeli Smith and Sabrina Tabby, violins; Madeline Smith, viola; Genevieve Tabby, cello) I. Allegro ma non troppo   Menu       0:00     II. Lento   Menu       0:00     III. Molto vivace   Menu       0:00     IV. Finale: vivace ma non troppo   Menu       0:00
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Dvořák composed the Quartet in 1893 during a summer vacation from his position as Director (1892-1895) of the National Conservatory in New York. He spent his vacation in the town of Spillville, Iowa, which was home to a Czech immigrant community. Dvořák had come to Spillville through Josef Jan Kovařík who had finished violin studies at the Prague Conservatory and was about to return to Spillville, his home in the United States, when Dvořák offered him a position as secretary, which Josef Jan accepted, so he came to live with the Dvořák family in New York.^[1] He told Dvořák about Spillville, where his father Jan Josef was a schoolmaster, which led to Dvořák deciding to spend the summer of 1893 there.^[2]

In that environment, and surrounded by beautiful nature, Dvořák felt very much at ease.^[3] Writing to a friend he described his state of mind, away from hectic New York: “I have been on vacation since 3 June here in the Czech village of Spillville and I won’t be returning to New York until the latter half of September. The children arrived safely from Europe and we’re all happy together. We like it very much here and, thank God, I am working hard and I’m healthy and in good spirits.”^[4] He composed the quartet shortly after the New World Symphony, before that work had been performed.^[5]

Dvořák sketched the quartet in three days and completed it in thirteen more days, finishing the score with the comment “Thank God! I am content. It was fast.”^[3] It was his second attempt to write a quartet in F major: his first effort, 12 years earlier, produced only one movement.^[6] The American Quartet proved a turning point in Dvořák’s chamber music output: for decades he had toiled unsuccessfully to find a balance between his overflowing melodic invention and a clear structure. In the American Quartet it finally came together.^[3] Dvořák defended the apparent simplicity of the piece: “When I wrote this quartet in the Czech community of Spillville in 1893, I wanted to write something for once that was very melodious and straightforward, and dear Papa Haydn kept appearing before my eyes, and that is why it all turned out so simply. And it’s good that it did.”^[7]

For his symphony Dvořák gave the subtitle himself: “From the New World“. To the Quartet he gave no subtitle himself, but there is the comment “The second composition written in America.”^[8]

Negro, American or other influences?

For the London premiere of his New World symphony, Dvořák wrote: “As to my opinion I think that the influence of this country (it means the folk songs as are Negro, Indian, Irish etc.) is to be seen, and that this and all other works (written in America) differ very much from my other works as well as in couleur as in character,…”^[9][10]

Dvořák’s appreciation of African-American music is documented: Harry T. Burleigh, a baritone and later a composer, who knew Dvořák while a student at the National Conservatory, said, “I sang our Negro songs for him very often, and before he wrote his own themes, he filled himself with the spirit of the old Spirituals.”^[11] Dvořák said: “In the Negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.”^[12] For its presumed association with African-American music, the quartet was referred to with nicknames such as Negro and Nigger, before being called the American Quartet.^[13][14] Such older nicknames, without negative connotations at the time, were used until the 1950s.^[15][16]

Dvořák wrote (in a letter he sent from America shortly after composing the quartet): “As for my new Symphony, the F major String Quartet and the Quintet (composed here in Spillville) – I should never have written these works ‘just so’ if I hadn’t seen America.”^[17] Listeners have tried to identify specific American motifs in the quartet. Some have claimed that the theme of the second movement is based on a Negro spiritual, or perhaps on a Kickapoo Indian tune, which Dvořák heard during his sojourn at Spillville.^[18]

	Pentatonic scale (info)
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A characteristic, unifying element throughout the quartet is the use of the pentatonic scale. This scale gives the whole quartet its open, simple character, a character that is frequently identified with American folk music. However, the pentatonic scale is common in many ethnic musics worldwide, and Dvořák had composed pentatonic music, being familiar with such Slavonic folk music examples, before coming to America.^[19]

On the whole, specific American influences are doubted: “In fact the only American thing about the work is that it was written there,” writes Paul Griffiths.^[20] “The specific American qualities of the so-called “American” Quartet are not easily identifiable, writes Lucy Miller, “…Better to look upon the subtitle as simply one assigned because of its composition during Dvořák’s American tour.”^[21]

 Dvořák’s transcription of the song of the scarlet tanager (top) and the appearance of the song in the third movement of the quartet.

Some have heard suggestions of a locomotive in the last movement, recalling Dvořák’s love of railroads.^[22]

The one confirmed musical reference in the quartet is to the song of the scarlet tanager, an American songbird. Dvořák was annoyed by this bird’s insistent chattering, and transcribed its song in his notebook. The song appears as a high, interrupting strain in the first violin part in the third movement.^[23]

Structure

The Quartet is scored for the usual complement of two violins, viola, and cello, and comprises four movements:^[24] A typical performance lasts around 30 minutes.

I. Allegro ma non troppo

 

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First theme of the first movement, played by the Seraphina Quartet.

The opening theme of the quartet is purely pentatonic, played by the viola, with a rippling F major chord in the accompanying instruments. This same F major chord continues without harmonic change throughout the first 12 measures of the piece. The movement then goes into a bridge, developing harmonically, but still with the open, triadic sense of openness and simplicity.

 

 

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Second theme of the first movement.

The second theme, in A major, is also primarily pentatonic, but ornamented with melismatic elements reminiscent of Gypsy or Czech music. The movement moves to a development section that is much denser harmonically and much more dramatic in tempo and color.

 

 

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Fugato at end of development

The development ends with a fugato section that leads into the recapitulation.

 

 

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Cello bridge in recapitulation

After the first theme is restated in the recapitulation, there is a cello solo that bridges to the second theme.

II. Lento

 

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Theme of the second movement

The theme of the second movement is the one that interpreters have most tried to associate with a Negro spiritual or with an American Indian tune. The simple melody, with the pulsing accompaniment in second violin and viola, does indeed recall spirituals or Indian ritual music. It is written using the same pentatonic scale as the first movement, but in the minor (D minor) rather than the major. The theme is introduced in the first violin, and repeated in the cello. Dvořák develops this thematic material in an extended middle section, then repeats the theme in the cello with an even thinner accompaniment that is alternately bowed and pizzicato.

III. Molto vivace

 

 

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First section of the Scherzo movement. Listen for the song of the scarlet tanager high in the first violin

The third movement is a variant of the traditional scherzo. It has the form ABABA: the A section is a sprightly, somewhat quirky tune, full of off-beats and cross-rhythms. The song of the scarlet tanager appears high in the first violin.

 

 

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Second section of the scherzo

The B section is actually a variation of the main scherzo theme, played in minor, at half tempo, and more lyrical. In its first appearance it is a legato line, while in the second appearance the lyrical theme is played in triplets, giving it a more pulsing character.

IV. Finale: vivace ma non troppo

 

 

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Main theme of the last movement

The final movement is in a traditional rondo form, ABACABA. Again, the main melody is pentatonic.

 

 

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“B” section of the rondo

The B section is more lyrical, but continues in the spirit of the first theme.

 

 

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“C” section of the rondo

The C section is a chorale theme.

Performance and influence

In a first “private” performance of the quartet, in Spillville, June 1893, Dvořák himself played first violin, Jan Josef Kovařík second violin, daughter Cecilie Kovaříková viola, and son Josef Jan Kovařík the cello.^[8]

The first public performance of the quartet was by the Kneisel quartet in Boston in January 1894.^[25] Burghauser mentions press notices in New York as well as Boston, the first New York Herald, 18 December 1893.^[8]

While the influence of American folk song is not explicit in the quartet, the impact of Dvořák’s quartet on later American compositions is clear. Following Dvořák, a number of American composers turned their hands to the string quartet genre, including John Knowles Paine, Horatio Parker, George Whitefield Chadwick, and Arthur Foote. “The extensive use of folk-songs in 20th century American music and the ‘wide-open-spaces’ atmosphere of ‘Western’ film scores may have at least some of their origins” in Dvořák’s new American style, writes Butterworth.^[26]

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Koeckert Quartet

The Koeckert Quartet was a well-known German string quartet. ^[1]

Table of Contents

• 1 formation and work
• 2 ^{Cast [3]}
• 3 Discography (selection, published by Deutsche Grammophon GmbH)
• 4 Literature
• 5 References
• 6 Web Links

Formation and interaction

It was first established in 1939 under the name Sudetendeutsches Quartet, later renamed the Prague String Quartet. It consisted of members of the German Philharmonic in Prague (1939-1945), who on the orders of Joseph Goebbels was founded. 1947 took the name Koeckert Quartet, after its first violinist Rudolf Koeckert (1913-2005). Since 1949 the quartet resided in Munich, and the members were soloists of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. It coined in the 1950s and 1960s, among other ensembles, the musical life of the city of Munich, from where it concert tours to North America, South Africa ^[2] undertook and all major European cities. It was thus one of Germany’s leading string quartets of international standing. The quartet was under the name Koeckert quartet until 1982. successors the Joachim-Koeckert Quartet was; whose first violinist, Rudolf Joachim Koeckert, is the son of Rudolf Koeckert; the place of the 2nd violin was occupied by Antonio Spiller. Since 1982, this ensemble brought the most important chamber music works of Karl Höller premiered, also works by Günter Bialas, Alberto Ginastera, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek and Winfried Zillig. The Joachim-Koeckert quartet existed until 1992nd

Cast 

• Rudolf Koeckert (1st violin) (until 1982)
• Willi Buchner (* October 14, 1910 Schwarzau / Lower Austria), after his death (1965) Rudolf Joachim Koeckert (* April 10, 1941 Prague) (2nd violin)
• Oskar Riedl (* July 4, 1912 Graslitz / Bohemia) (until 1975), Franz Schessl (Viola)
• Josef Merz (* August 20, 1911 Gumplitz / Bohemia) (until 1976), Helmar Stiehler (Cello)

Discography (selection, published by Deutsche Grammophon GmbH)

• Anton Bruckner, String Quintet in F major (with Georg Schmid, Viola), mono (DGG 18,042)
• Robert Schumann, String Quartet op. 41 Nr. 2 and Bedrich Smetama, String Quartet no. 1 (1959)
• Felix Mendelssohn, String Quartet, Op. 12 (1960)
• Franz Schubert, Trout Quintet D 667, with Christoph Eschenbach, piano (1964)
• . Joseph Haydn, String Quartet Hob III: 72 (1969)
• Carl Orff, Carmina Catulli, with choir and orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, conducted by Eugen Jochum (1970)
• Robert Schumann, String Quartets op. 41 Nr. 1 and 3 (1985)
• Edvard Grieg, String Quartet (1990 and 1992)

• Alain Paris in the 20th Century Classical DTV, Munich 1997. ISBN 3-423-32501-1.
• Violinist and quartet founder Rudolf Koeckert died. In: New music newspaper. 7. September 2005 (http://www.nmz.de/kiz/nachrichten/violinist-und-quartettgruender-rudolf-koeckert-gestorben, accessed 29 April 2010).
• A. Schmitt: 25 years Koeckert Quartet In:.. Musica 18, 1964, p.86.
• J. Creighton: Discopaedia of the Violin, 1889-1971 Toronto 1974. ISBN 0-8020-1810-6.

References

 

• The music in history and present. (MGG), vol 10, Bärenreiter Verlag, Kassel / Basel 2003 ISBN 3-7618-1120-9.
• Drie acclaimed tours of South Africa in 1961, 1969, 1976

 

3. Honegger / Massenkeil: The Great Encyclopedia of Music Volume 4, Herder Verlag, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna 1981. ISBN 3-451-18054-5.

links

• Sound recordings of Koeckert Quartet in the catalog of the German National Library
• Koeckert Quartet at Discogs (English)

Standard data (corporation): GND: 3021204-2

 

best classical music: Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade / Gergiev · Vienna Philharmonic · Salzburg Festival 2005

Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade / Gergiev · Vienna Philharmonic · Salzburg Festival 2005

Canal de Josep489

Published on Mar 3, 2012

Gran presentación de la Orquesta Filarmónica de Viena dirigida por Valery Gergiev, interpretando la famosa obra “Scheherazada” del compositor ruso Nikolai Rimsky-Korsavov, en el Festival de Salzburgo 2005.

Great presentation of Vienna Phiharmonic conducted by russian Maestro Valery Gergiev, playing the russian work “Scheherazade” of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, at Salzburg Festival 2005.

great compositions/performances: Beethoven String Quartet No 4 Op 18 in C minor Alban Berg Quartet

Beethoven String Quartet No 4 Op 18 in C minor Alban Berg Quartet

Arionia Tellus

Published on Jan 22, 2015

Ludwig van Beethoven String Quartet No 4 Op 18 No 4 in C minor
Alban Berg Quartet:
– Günter Pichler 1 violin,
– Gerhard Schulz 2 violin,
– Thomas Kakuska viola,
– Valentin Erben cello

Movements:

1. Allegro ma non tanto 0:00
2. Andante scherzoso quasi allegretto 8:58
3. Menuetto: Allegretto 14:54
4. Allegro – Prestissimo 18:16
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String Quartet No. 4 (Beethoven)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 The opening measures of the first movement from a 19th-century publication

Ludwig van Beethoven‘s String Quartet No. 4, Op. 18, No. 4 in C minor (1798–1800) was published in 1801. It consists of four movements:

1. Allegro ma non tanto

2. Andante scherzoso quasi allegretto

3. Menuetto: Allegretto

4. Allegro – Prestissimo

It is thought that this quartet may be in part based upon earlier material.^[1]

Fabulous Renditions: Beethoven “Für Elise” Valentina Lisitsa Seoul Philharmonic

Beethoven “Für Elise” Valentina Lisitsa Seoul Philharmonic

ValentinaLisitsa

Uploaded on Dec 7, 2008

Live in Seoul. Encore #4 Please come to London on June 19th of 2012 if you want to hear this piece live ! I am making my debut at Royal Albert Hall 🙂
Валентина Лисица

Valentina Lisitsa Live at the Royal Albert Hall
US iTunes – http://bit.ly/iTunesUSVal
US Amazon – http://bit.ly/ValRAH
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Für Elise

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

“Für Elise”, opening

 

First edition, 1867

Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor (WoO 59 and Bia 515) for solo piano, commonly known as “Für Elise” or “Fuer Elise” (German: [fyːʁ eːˈliːzə] ( listen), English: “For Elise”, sometimes written without the German umlaut mark as “Fur Elise”), is one of Ludwig van Beethoven‘s most popular compositions.^[1][2][3] It is usually classified as a bagatelle, but it is also sometimes referred to as an Albumblatt.

History

The score was not published until 1867, 40 years after the composer’s death in 1827. The discoverer of the piece, Ludwig Nohl, affirmed that the original autographed manuscript, now lost, was dated 27 April 1810.^[4]

The version of “Für Elise” heard today is an earlier version that was transcribed by Ludwig Nohl. There is a later version, with drastic changes to the accompaniment which was transcribed from a later manuscript by Barry Cooper. The most notable difference is in the first theme, the left-hand arpeggios are delayed by a 16th note beat. There are a few extra bars in the transitional section into the B section; and finally, the rising A minor arpeggio figure is moved later into the piece. The tempo marking Poco moto is believed to have been on the manuscript that Ludwig Nohl transcribed (now lost). The later version includes the marking Molto grazioso. It is believed that Beethoven intended to add the piece to a cycle of bagatelles.^{[citation needed]}

Therese Malfatti, widely believed to be the dedicatee of “Für Elise”

The pianist and musicologist Luca Chiantore (es) argued in his thesis and his 2010 book Beethoven al piano that Beethoven might not have been the person who gave the piece the form that we know today. Chiantore suggested that the original signed manuscript, upon which Ludwig Nohl claimed to base his transcription, may never have existed.^[5] On the other hand, the musicologist Barry Cooper stated, in a 1984 essay in The Musical Times, that one of two surviving sketches closely resembles the published version.^[6]

Identity of “Elise”

It is not certain who “Elise” was. Max Unger suggested that Ludwig Nohl may have transcribed the title incorrectly and the original work may have been named “Für Therese”,^[7] a reference to Therese Malfatti von Rohrenbach zu Dezza (1792–1851). She was a friend and student of Beethoven’s to whom he supposedly proposed in 1810, though she turned him down to marry the Austrian nobleman and state official Wilhelm von Droßdik in 1816.^[8] Note that the piano sonata no.24, dedicated to Countess Thérèse von Brunswick, is also referred to sometimes as “für Therese”.

According to a 2010 study by Klaus Martin Kopitz (de), there is evidence that the piece was written for the German soprano singer Elisabeth Röckel (1793–1883), later the wife of Johann Nepomuk Hummel. “Elise”, as she was called by a parish priest (she called herself “Betty” too), had been a friend of Beethoven’s since 1808.^[9] In the meantime, the Austrian musicologist Michael Lorenz^[10] has shown that Rudolf Schachner, who in 1851 inherited Therese von Droßdik’s musical scores, was the son of Babette Bredl, born out of wedlock. Babette in 1865 let Nohl copy the autograph in her possession. Thus the autograph must have come to Babette Bredl from Therese von Droßdik’s estate and Kopitz’s hypothesis is refuted.

In 2012, the Canadian musicologist Rita Steblin suggested that Juliane Katharine Elisabet Barensfeld (de), who used “Elise” as a variant first name, might be the dedicatee. Born in Regensburg and treated for a while as child prodigy, she first travelled on concert tours with Beethoven’s friend Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, also from Regensburg, and then lived with him for some time in Vienna, where she received singing lessons from Antonio Salieri. Steblin argues that Beethoven dedicated this work to the 13-year-old Elise Barensfeld as a favour to Therese Malfatti who lived opposite Mälzel’s and Barensfeld’s residence and who might have given her piano lessons.^[11] Steblin admits that question marks remain for her hypothesis.^[12]

Music

	Bagatelle in A minor (“Für Elise”)   Menu       0:00
Problems playing this file? See media help.

The piece is in A minor and is set in 3/8 time. It begins with an A minor theme marked Poco moto (little movement), with the left hand playing arpeggios alternating between A minor and E major. It then moves into a brief section based around C major and G major, before returning to the original theme. It then enters a lighter section in the subdominant key of the relative major of A minor (C major), F major. It consists of a similar texture to the A section, where the right hand plays a melody over left hand arpeggios. It then enters a 32nd note C major figure before returning to the A section. The piece then moves to an agitated theme in D minor^{[citation needed]} with an A pedal point, as the right hand plays diminished chords. This section then concludes with an ascending A minor arpeggio before beginning a chromatic descent over two octaves, and then returning to the A section. The piece ends in its starting key of A minor with an authentic cadence. Despite being called a bagatelle, the piece is in rondo form. The structure is A–B–A–C–A. The first theme is not technically difficult and is often taught alone as it provides a good basic exercise for piano pedalling technique. However, much greater technique is required for the B section as well as the rapid rising A minor figure in the C section.

Kopitz presents the finding by the German organ scholar Johannes Quack that the letters that spell Elise can be decoded as the first three notes of the piece. Because an E♭ is called an Es in German and is pronounced as “S”, that makes E–(L)–(I)–S–E: E–(L)–(I)–E♭–E, which by enharmonic equivalents sounds the same as the written notes E–(L)–(I)–D♯–E.^[10][13]

Fabulous renditions: Valentina Lisitsa – Paganini-Liszt La Campanella (two Separate musical events)

Paganini-Liszt La Campanella 

ValentinaLisitsa

Uploaded on Dec 7, 2008

Live from Seoul. Encore #1. Liszt “La Campanella”
Buy La Campanella video http://www.amazon.co.uk/Live-Royal-Al…
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La campanella

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

	“La campanella”   Menu       0:00   Performed by Romuald Greiss on an 1850 Budynowicz piano
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“La campanella” (Italian for “The little bell”) is the nickname given to the third of Franz Liszt‘s six Grandes études de Paganini (“Grand Paganini Études”), S. 141 (1851). It is in the key of G-sharp minor. This piece is a revision of an earlier version from 1838, the Études d’exécution transcendente d’après Paganini, S. 140. Its melody comes from the final movement of Niccolò Paganini‘s Violin Concerto No. 2 in B minor, where the tune was reinforced by a little handbell.^[1][2][3]

The étude is played at a brisk allegretto tempo and studies right hand jumping between intervals larger than one octave, sometimes even stretching for two whole octaves within the time of a sixteenth note. As a whole, the étude can be practiced to increase dexterity and accuracy at large jumps on the piano, along with agility of the weaker fingers of the hand. The largest intervals reached by the right hand are fifteenths (two octaves) and sixteenths (two octaves and a second). Sixteenth notes are played between the two notes, and the same note is played two octaves or two octaves and a second higher with no rest. Little time is provided for the pianist to move the hand, thus forcing the pianist to avoid tension within the muscles. Fifteenth intervals are quite common in the beginning of the étude, while the sixteenth intervals appear twice, at the thirtieth and thirty-second measures.

 

The two red notes are 35 half-steps apart, which is about 46cm apart on a piano.

However, the left hand studies about four extremely large intervals, larger than those in the right hand. For example, in bar 101, the left hand makes a sixteenth-note jump of just a half-step below three octaves. The étude also involves other technical difficulties, e.g. trills with the fourth and fifth fingers.

The work has been arranged by other composers and pianists, most notably Ferruccio Busoni and Marc-André Hamelin.
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Published on Jan 27, 2014

Valentina Lisitsa performed Liszt La Campanella from Paganini Etude No 3 at Concert hall, Seoul Art Center, 25th November, 2013 under Masters Series which Composer Jeajoon Ryu present.(Encore after 3 hours recital.)

Valentina Lisitsa – Liszt La Campanella – from Paganini Etude No. 3

OPUSChannel

 

fabulous Renditions: Valentina Lisitsa – Edvard Grieg – The Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16(two videos)

 Edvard Grieg – The Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16(two videos)- Valentina Lisitsa

ValentinaLisitsa

Uploaded on Dec 7, 2008

Live from Seoul. Seoul Philharmonic/James Judd

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The concerto is in three movements:^[2]

1. Allegro molto moderato (A minor)

2. Adagio (D-flat major)

3. Allegro moderato molto e marcato – Quasi presto – Andante maestoso (A minor → F major → A minor → A major)
   

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Piano Concerto (Grieg)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“Piano Concerto in A minor” redirects here. For the concerto by Schumann, see Piano Concerto (Schumann).

 

The famous flourishing introduction to the concerto.

The Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16, composed by Edvard Grieg in 1868, was the only concerto Grieg completed. It is one of his most popular works^[1] and among the most popular of all piano concerti.

Structure

 

The main theme of the allegro molto moderato.

The concerto is in three movements:^[2]

1. Allegro molto moderato (A minor)

2. Adagio (D-flat major)

3. Allegro moderato molto e marcato – Quasi presto – Andante maestoso (A minor → F major → A minor → A major)

The first movement is noted for the timpani roll in the first bar that leads to a dramatic piano flourish. The movement is in the Sonata form. The movement finishes with a virtuosic cadenza and a similar flourish as in the beginning.

The second movement is a lyrical movement in D-flat major, which leads directly into the third movement.

The third movement opens in A minor 4/4 time with an energetic theme (Theme 1), which is followed by a lyrical theme in F major (Theme 2). The movement returns to Theme 1. Following this recapitulation is the 3/4 A major Quasi presto section, which consists of a variation of Theme 1. The movement concludes with the Andante maestoso in A major, which consists of a dramatic rendition of Theme 2 (as opposed to the lyrical fashion with which Theme 2 is introduced).

Performance time of the whole concerto is usually just under 30 minutes.^[3]

Instrumentation

The concerto was originally scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in A and B flat, 2 bassoons, 2 horns in E and E flat, 2 trumpets in C and B flat, 2 trombones, tuba, timpani and strings (violins, violas, cellos and double basses). He later added 2 horns and changed the tuba to a third trombone.^[4]

History and influences

The work is among Grieg’s earliest important works, written by the 24-year-old composer in 1868 in Søllerød, Denmark, during one of his visits there to benefit from the climate.

Grieg’s concerto is often compared to the Piano Concerto of Robert Schumann — it is in the same key, the opening descending flourish on the piano is similar, and the overall style is considered to be closer to Schumann than any other single composer. Incidentally, both wrote only one concerto for piano. Grieg had heard Schumann’s concerto played by Clara Schumann in Leipzig in 1858 (1859 is given by alternative sources), and was greatly influenced by Schumann’s style generally, having been taught the piano by Schumann’s friend, Ernst Ferdinand Wenzel.

Additionally, Grieg’s work provides evidence of his interest in Norwegian folk music; the opening flourish is based on the motif of a falling minor second (see interval) followed by a falling major third, which is typical of the folk music of Grieg’s native country. This specific motif occurs in other works by Grieg, including the String Quartet No. 1. In the last movement of the concerto, similarities to the halling^[5] (a Norwegian folk dance) and imitations of the Hardanger fiddle (the Norwegian folk fiddle) have been detected.

 

The theme of the third movement of the concerto, which is influenced by the Norwegian Halling dance.

The work was premiered by Edmund Neupert on April 3, 1869 in Copenhagen, with Holger Simon Paulli conducting. Some sources say that Grieg himself, an excellent pianist, was the intended soloist, but he was unable to attend the premiere owing to commitments with an orchestra in Christiania (now Oslo). Among those who did attend the premiere were the Danish composer Niels Gade and the Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein, who provided his own piano for the occasion.^[6] Neupert was also the dedicatee of the second edition of the concerto (Rikard Nordraak was the original dedicatee), and James Huneker said that he himself composed the first movement cadenza.^[7]

The Norwegian premiere in Christiania followed on August 7, 1869, and the piece was later heard in Germany in 1872 and England in 1874. At Grieg’s visit to Franz Liszt in Rome in 1870, Liszt played the notes a prima vista before an audience of musicians and gave very good comments on Grieg’s work, which influenced him later. The work was first published in Leipzig in 1872, but only after Johan Svendsen intervened on Grieg’s behalf.^[8]

The concerto is the first piano concerto ever recorded — by pianist Wilhelm Backhaus in 1909.^[9] Due to the technology of the time, it was heavily abridged at only six minutes.^[9]

Grieg revised the work at least seven times, usually in subtle ways, but amounting to over 300 differences from the original orchestration. In one of these revisions, he undid Franz Liszt‘s suggestion to give the second theme of the first movement (as well as the first theme of the second) to the trumpet rather than to the cello. The final version of the concerto was completed only a few weeks before Grieg’s death, and it is this version that has achieved worldwide popularity. The original 1868 version has been recorded, by Love Derwinger, with the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra under Jun’ichi Hirokami.^[10]

Grieg worked on a transcription of the concerto for two solo pianos, which was completed by Károly Thern.^[11] The premiere recording of this version was by the British two-piano team of Anthony Goldstone and Caroline Clemmow.^[12]

On April 2, 1951, Russian-born American pianist Simon Barere collapsed while playing the first few bars of the concerto, in a performance with conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall in New York. He died backstage shortly afterwards.^[13] It was to have been Barere’s first performance of the work.^[14]

In 1882–83 Grieg worked on a second piano concerto in B minor, but it was never completed. The sketches for the concerto have been recorded by pianist Einar Steen-Nøkleberg. In 1997, the Belgian composer Laurent Beeckmans elaborated a full piano concerto from these sketches, which was first performed in London on 3 May 2003.^[15]

In popular culture

The enduring popularity of Grieg’s Piano Concerto has ensured its use in a wide variety of contexts.

• The first movement’s coda features in the film Intermezzo (1939) starring Leslie Howard and Ingrid Bergman.

• The Concerto was featured in the film The Seventh Veil (1945) as the piece played by the young concert pianist (Ann Todd; the uncredited pianist was Eileen Joyce).

• It was famously parodied in Franz Reizenstein‘s Concerto Popolare of 1959 (written for Gerard Hoffnung‘s music festival).

• The opening theme of the first movement was used in the song “Asia Minor“, a top-ten pop hit from 1961. The title of the song was also based on the key of the concerto, A minor.^[16]

• Excerpts from the first movement are incorporated into the number “Rosemary”, in the Broadway musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961).

• The concerto was used in a sketch by the British comedians Morecambe and Wise in their 1971 Christmas show. Conducted by André Previn, with Eric Morecambe as soloist, Morecambe claims he is playing “all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order”. In fact, he was playing a simplified version of the correct music, but in a completely inappropriate style.

• The comedian Bill Bailey is a skilled musician, and has used Grieg’s piano concerto for comic effect; in the TV Series Black Books it is played by his character Manny Bianco, and it is cited as an example in his solo mock-scholarly sketch on cockney music.

• The introductory motif opens “Make the Most of Your Music”, in the 1987 revised version of Follies.

Recordings

The following performance is by the University of Washington Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Peter Eros. The piano soloist is Neal O’Doan.

• 1. Allegro molto moderato

   

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  2. Adagio

  

   

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  3. Allegro moderato molto e marcato – Andante quasi – Presto

  

   

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• Problems listening to the files? See media help.

The following performance is by the Skidmore College Orchestra. It is courtesy of Musopen.

• 1. Allegro molto moderato

  

   

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  2. Adagio

  

   

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  3. Allegro moderato molto e marcato

  

   

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• Problems listening to the files? See media help.

 

historic music bits: BEETHOVEN Piano Trio No.7 ‘Archduke’ | E.Gilels, L.Kogan, M.Rostropovich | 1956

BEETHOVEN Piano Trio No.7 ‘Archduke’ | E.Gilels, L.Kogan, M.Rostropovich | 1956

Emilio Pessina

Uploaded on Feb 11, 2012

Ludwig van BEETHOVEN: Piano Trio No.7 in B-flat major, Op.97 “Archduke” (1811)
0:10 / I. Allegro moderato [12’36”]
12:46 / II. Scherzo. Allegro [11’35”]
24:22 / III. Andante cantabile ma però con moto [12’06”]
36:28 / IV. Allegro moderato [6’56”]
Emil Gilels, piano
Leonid Kogan, violin
Mstislav Rostropovich, cello
(rec: Moscow, 1956)
5CDs: Doremi DHR-7921-5 – ℗2007
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5CDs set: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=…
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5CDs: Doremi DHR-7921-5 – ℗2007
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5CDs set: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=…
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great compositions/performances: Franz Schubert: String Quartet No. 13 in A minor (the Rosamunde Quartet), D. 804, Op. 29

Franz Schubert: String Quartet No. 13 in A minor (the Rosamunde Quartet), D. 804, Op. 29

Michel Camille

Published on Sep 22, 2013

Sini Simonen, Benjamin Bowman, Steven Dann, Richard Lester at the 15th Esbjerg International Chamber Music Festival 2013. 25th August at South Denmark’s Music Academy, SMKS, Esbjerg http://www.eicmf.dk EICMF is unique in Denmark as it invites artists to collaborate in new constellations, form new relationships, establish a foundation for exchange and annually act as a host for an international community of artists.
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String Quartet No. 13 (Schubert)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

“Rosamunde Quartet” redirects here. For the German musical quartet, see Rosamunde Quartett.

The String Quartet No. 13 in A minor (the Rosamunde Quartet), D 804, Op. 29, was written by Franz Schubert between February and March 1824. It dates roughly to the same time as his monumental Death and the Maiden Quartet, emerging around three years after his previous attempt to write for the string quartet genre, the Quartettsatz, D 703, that he never finished.

History

Starting in 1824, Schubert largely turned away from the composition of songs to concentrate on instrumental chamber music. In addition to the A-minor String Quartet, the Quartet in D minor, the Octet, the Grand Duo and Divertissement a la Hongroise (both for piano duet), and the Sonata for Arpeggione and Piano all date from that year. With the exception of the Grand Duo, all of these works display cyclic elements—that is, two or more movements in each work are deliberately related in some way to enhance the sense of unity. In the case of the A-minor Quartet, a motive from the third-movement Minuet becomes the most important melodic figure for the following finale (Chusid 1964, 37).

Schubert dedicated the work to Schuppanzigh, who served as the first violinist of the string quartet appointed by Beethoven. Schuppanzigh himself played in the premiere performance which took place on 14 March 1824.

Structure

Movements

The quartet consists of four movements which last around 30 minutes in total.

1. Allegro ma non troppo
2. Andante
3. Menuetto: Allegretto – Trio
4. Allegro moderato

Analysis

The first movement opens with a texture reminiscent of the melancholic theme from one of Schubert’s earliest songs, Gretchen am Spinnrade and also quotes “Schöne Welt, wo bist du?” The reference to Gretchen am Spinnrade is not a direct quotation, but rather is a similarity in the second violin’s restless accompanimental figuration, hovering around the mediant and underpinned by a repeated figure in cello and viola, which precedes the first thematic entrance. This also recalls the accompaniment to the first subject of the “Unfinished” Symphony (Westrup 1969, 31; Taylor 2014, 49). It is the second movement, however, which has lent the Quartet its nickname, being based on a theme from the incidental music for Rosamunde (a similar theme appears in the Impromptu in B-flat written three years later). The dactyl–spondee rhythm pervading this movement unmistakably shows the influence of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (Temperley 1981, 149). The form of this slow movement uses the same modified exposition-recapitulation form found in the slow movement of Schubert’s “Great” C-major Symphony, where an ambiguity of formal deŽfinition is created by the introduction of a developmental passage shortly after the return of the primary theme in the recapitulation (Shamgar 2001, 154). The minuet quotes the melody of another song by Schubert, Die Götter Griechenlands, D. 677, from November 1819, a connection only first noticed more than a century after the work’s composition by Willi Kahl (1930, 2:358). The opening of this melody recurs in inversion at the beginning of the trio, and is later echoed in the opening of the finale (Wollenberg 2011, 201–202, n11).

fabulous musical renditions: Freiburger Mozart-Orchester, Michael Erren,Valentina Lisitsa

Freiburger Mozart-Orchester, Michael Erren,Valentina Lisitsa

ValentinaLisitsa

Published on Aug 15, 2012

Filmed live May 20, 2012, Freiburg im Breisgau ,Germany
Cadenzas by Mozart’s favorite student – and billiards pal, Jan Nepomuk Hummel
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Piano Concerto No. 20 (Mozart)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 Neuer Markt in Vienna with Capuchin Church and Haus zur Mehlgrube on the right, painting by Bernardo Bellotto, 1760

The Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466, was written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1785. The first performance took place at the Mehlgrube Casino in Vienna on February 11, 1785, with the composer as the soloist.^[1]

Background

A few days after the first performance, the composer’s father, Leopold, visiting in Vienna, wrote to his daughter Nannerl about her brother’s recent success: “[I heard] an excellent new piano concerto by Wolfgang, on which the copyist was still at work when we got there, and your brother didn’t even have time to play through the rondo because he had to oversee the copying operation.”^[1]

It is written in the key of D minor. Other works by the composer in that key include the Fantasia K. 397 for piano, Requiem, a Kyrie, the aria “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen” from the opera The Magic Flute and parts of the opera Don Giovanni. It is the first of two piano concertos written in a minor key (No. 24 in C minor being the other).

The young Ludwig van Beethoven admired this concerto and kept it in his repertoire.^[1] A bass run from the first movement appears for comic effect in Variation 22 of the Diabelli Variations. Daniel Barenboim contends that this concerto was Joseph Stalin‘s favorite piece of music.^[2] Composers who wrote cadenzas for it include Beethoven (WoO 58), Charles-Valentin Alkan, Johannes Brahms (WoO 16), Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Ferruccio Busoni, and Clara Schumann.

Movements

The concerto is scored for solo piano, flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani and strings. As is typical with concertos, it is in three movements:

1. Allegro (in D minor)

2. Romanze (in B-flat major)

3. Allegro assai (in D minor, ending in D major)

The first movement starts off the concerto in the dark tonic key of D minor with the strings restlessly but quietly building up to a full forte. The theme is quickly taken up by the piano soloist and developed throughout the long movement. A slightly brighter mood exists in the second theme, but it never becomes jubilant. The timpani further heighten the tension in the coda before the cadenza. The movement ends on a quiet note.

The ‘Romanze’ second movement is a five-part rondo (ABACA)^[3] with a coda. The beginning features a solo piano playing the flamboyant and charming main B-flat major melody without accompaniment. This lyrical, passionate, tender and romantic melody, played at a relatively dainty tempo, paints a picture of peace and a sense of harmony between the piano and the orchestra, and has also inspired its title ‘Romanze’. Halfway through, the piece moves on to the second episode (part C), where the beautiful melody is replaced with a turbulent, agitated and ominous theme in the relative minor key of G minor, which greatly contrasts the peaceful mood at the starting of the movement. Finally, we are greeted once again with the aforeheard melody which returns as the movement is nearing the end. The piece ends with an ascending arpeggio that is light and delicate, gradually until it becomes a faint whisper.

The final movement, a rondo, begins with the solo piano rippling upward in the home key before the full orchestra replies with a furious section. (This piano “rippling” is known as the Mannheim Rocket and is a string of eighth notes (d-f-a-d-f) followed by a quarter note (a). A second melody is touched upon by the piano where the mood is still dark but strangely restless. A contrasting cheerful melody in F major ushers in not soon after, introduced by the orchestra before the solo piano rounds off the lively theme. A series of sharp piano chords snaps the bright melody and then begin passages in D minor on solo piano again, taken up by full orchestra. Several modulations of the second theme (in A minor and G minor) follow. Thereafter follows the same format as above, with a momentary pause for introducing the customary cadenza. After the cadenza, the mood clears considerably and the bright happy melody is taken up this time by the winds. The solo piano repeats the theme before a full orchestral passage develops the passage, thereby rounding up the concerto with a jubilant D major finish.

In other media

The second movement (minus the more tumultuous C part of the rondo) plays in the final scene and during the end credits of the 1984 movie Amadeus. The melody begins right before Antonio Salieri tells the priest sent to hear his confession that he is the patron saint of mediocrities. In the final shot of the film, Salieri announces, “Mediocrities everywhere, I absolve you.” Right before the screen fades to black, Mozart’s laugh is heard. At this point, the piano concerto picks up in volume, continuing through the end of the credits.

The first movement was also played in the ballet scene in Series 1 Episode 8 of the television series Mr. Robot.
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FABULOUS MUSICAL RENDITIONS: Exploding Beethoven: Tempest Sonata Live from Paris Valentina Lisitsa

Exploding Beethoven: Tempest Sonata Live from Paris Valentina Lisitsa

ValentinaLisitsa

Published on Jun 1, 2014

Watch at your own risk – I warned you  🙂
Live from Paris, Salle Gaveau , May 21, 2014.
Sonata No. 17, Op 31 No.2 D Minor
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The Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2, was composed in 1801/02 by Ludwig van Beethoven. It is usually referred to as “The Tempest” (or Der Sturm in his native German), but the sonata was not given this title by Beethoven, or indeed referred to as such during his lifetime. The name comes from a claim by his associate Anton Schindler that the sonata was inspired by the Shakespeare play. However, much of Schindler’s information is distrusted by classical music scholars. The British music scholar Donald Francis Tovey says in A Companion to Beethoven’s Pianoforte Sonatas:

With all the tragic power of its first movement the D minor Sonata is, like Prospero, almost as far beyond tragedy as it is beyond mere foul weather. It will do you no harm to think of Miranda at bars 31–38 of the slow movement… but people who want to identify Ariel and Caliban and the castaways, good and villainous, may as well confine their attention to the exploits of Scarlet Pimpernel when the Eroica or the C minor Symphony is being played (pg. 121).

Structure

The piece consists of three movements and takes approximately twenty-five minutes to perform:

1. Largo – Allegro
2. Adagio
3. Allegretto

Each of the movements is in sonata form, though the second lacks a substantial development section.

First movement

The first movement alternates brief moments of seeming peacefulness with extensive passages of turmoil, after some time expanding into a haunting “storm” in which the peacefulness is lost. This musical form is unusual among Beethoven sonatas to that date. Concerning the time period and style, it was thought of as an odd thing to write; a pianist’s skills were demonstrated in many ways, and showing changes in tone, technique and speed efficiently many times in one movement was one of them. The development begins with rolled, long chords, quickly ending to the tremolo theme of the exposition. There is a long recitative section at the beginning of this movement’s recapitulation, again ending with fast and suspenseful passages.

Second movement

The second movement in B-flat major is slower and more dignified. The rising melodic ideas in the opening six measures are reminiscent of the first movement’s recitative. Other ideas in this movement mirror the first, for instance, a figure in the eighth measure and parallel passages of the second movement are similar to a figure in the sixth measure of the first.

Third movement

The third movement is a sonata-rondo hybrid in the key of D minor. It is at first flowing with emotion and then reaching a climax, before moving into an extended development section which mainly focuses on the opening figure of the movement, reaching a climax at measures 169–173. The recapitulation, which is preceded by an extensive cadenza-like passage of sixteenth notes for the right hand, is followed by another transition and then another statement of the primary theme. The refrain undergoes phrase expansion to build tension for the climax of the movement at measure 381, a fortissimo falling chromatic scale.

 

Best musical Interpretations: Beethoven Sonata Op 57 “Appassionata” Mov1, ,3, Valentina Lisitsa, piano

Beethoven Sonata Op 57 “Appassionata” Mov1

ValentinaLisitsa

Uploaded on Jan 10, 2009

Rehearsal run before recital in Musikverein, Vienna

Best musical collections: Mozart – Symphonies No. 25, 29, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41 Wiener Philharmoniker Leonard Bernstein

Mozart – Symphonies No. 25, 29, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41 (Bernstein)

Musical Art Channel

Published on Oct 14, 2014

Symphony No.25 in G minor, K.183:
I. Allegro con brio – 00:00
II. Andante – 08:10
III. Menuetto – Trio – 12:22
IV. Allegro – 16:12
Symphony No.29 in A major, K.201:
I. Allegro moderato – 22:14
II. Andante – 30:23
III. Menuetto – Trio – 37:16
IV. Allegro con spirito – 40:42
Symphony No.35 in D major, K.385 “Haffner”:
I. Allegro con spirito – 45:56
II. Andante – 51:44
III. Menuetto – Trio – 58:53
IV. Presto – 01:02:10
Symphony No.36 in C major, K.425 “Linz”:
I. Adagio – Allegro spirito – 01:05:53
II. Andante – 01:17:03
III. Menuetto – Trio – 01:25:01
IV. Presto – 01:28:47
Symphony No.38 in D major, K.504 “Prague”:
I. Adagio – Allegro – 01:36:16
II. Andante – 01:49:47
III. Presto – 01:58:58
Symphony No.39 in E flat major, K.543:
I. Adagio – Allegro – 02:07:39
II. Andante con moto – 02:19:02
III. Menuetto. Allegretto – Trio – 02:28:23
IV. Finale. Allegro – 02:32:29
Symphony No.40 in G minor, K.550:
I. Molto allegro – 02:40:35
II. Andante – 02:49:08
III. Menuetto. Allegretto – Trio – 02:57:26
IV. Allegro assai – 03:02:19
Symphony No.41 in C major, K.551 “Jupiter”:
I. Allegro vivace – 03:11:35
II. Andante cantabile – 03:23:34
III. Menuetto. Allegretto – 03:32:47
IV. Molto allegro – 03:38:03

Performers:
Wiener Philharmoniker
Leonard Bernstein

historic musical bits: Claudio Arrau Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 30

Claudio Arrau Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 30

Farookhq17

Uploaded on Jan 17, 2012

Piano Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109

I. Vivace ma non troppo – Adagio espressivo
II. Prestissimo
III. Gesangvoll, mit innigster Empfindung.
Andante molto cantabile ed espressivo

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Claudio Arrau (1903-1991)

historic musical bits: MOZART Symphony No 40 in G minor, KV550, LEONARD BERNSTEIN|Boston Symphony Orchestra

MOZART Symphony No 40 in G minor KV550 LEONARD BERNSTEIN

roger bridgland

Published on Feb 23, 2014

Mozart Symphony No.40 in G minor KV550

four movements, in the usual arrangement for a classical-style symphony (fast movement, slow movement, minuet, fast movement):

1. Molto allegro, 2/2

2. Andante in E-flat major, 6/8

3. Menuetto. Allegretto – Trio, 3/4

4. Finale. Allegro assai, 2/2

*****Leonard Bernstein (conductor)
*****Boston Symphony Orchestra
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Symphony No. 40 (Mozart)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Symphony No. 40 in G minor, KV. 550, in 1788. It is sometimes referred to as the “Great G minor symphony,” to distinguish it from the “Little G minor symphony,” No. 25. The two are the only extant minor key symphonies Mozart wrote.^[1]

Composition

The 40th Symphony was completed on 25 July 1788. The composition occupied an exceptionally productive period of just a few weeks in 1788, during which time he also completed the 39th and 41st symphonies (26 June and 10 August, respectively).^[2] Nikolaus Harnoncourt argues that Mozart composed the three symphonies as a unified work, pointing, among other things, to the fact that the Symphony No. 40, as the middle work, has no introduction (unlike No. 39) and does not have a finale of the scale of No. 41’s.^[3]

Premiere

As Neal Zaslaw has pointed out, writers on Mozart have often suggested – or even asserted – that Mozart never heard his 40th Symphony performed. Some commentators go further, suggesting that Mozart wrote the symphony (and its companions, #39 and #41) without even intending it to be performed, but rather for posterity; as (to use Alfred Einstein‘s words), an “appeal to eternity”.^[4]

Modern scholarship suggests that these conjectures are not correct. First, in a recently discovered 10 July 1802 letter by the musician Johann Wenzel (1762-1831) to the publisher Ambrosius Kühnel in Leipzig, Wenzel refers to a performance of the symphony at the home of Baron Gottfried van Swieten with Mozart present, but the execution was so poor that the composer had to leave the room.^[5]

There is strong circumstantial evidence for other, probably better, performances. On several occasions between the composition of the symphony and the composer’s death, symphony concerts were given featuring Mozart’s music for which copies of the program have survived, announcing a symphony unidentified by date or key. These include:^[6]

• Dresden, 14 April 1789, during Mozart’s Berlin journey
• Leipzig, 12 May 1789, on the same trip
• Frankfurt, 15 October 1790
• Copies survive of a poster for a concert given by the Tonkünstlersocietät (Society of Musicians) 17 April 1791 in the Burgtheater in Vienna, conducted by Mozart’s colleague Antonio Salieri. The first item on the program was billed as “A Grand Symphony composed by Herr Mozart”.^[7]

Most important is the fact that Mozart revised his symphony (the manuscripts of both versions still exist).^[8] As Zaslaw says, this “demonstrates that [the symphony] was performed, for Mozart would hardly have gone to the trouble of adding the clarinets and rewriting the flutes and oboes to accommodate them, had he not had a specific performance in view.”^[9] The orchestra for the 1791 Vienna concert included the clarinetist brothers Anton and Johann Nepomuk Stadler; which, as Zaslaw points out, limits the possibilities to just the 39th and 40th symphonies.^[9]

Zaslaw adds: “The version without clarinets must also have been performed, for the reorchestrated version of two passages in the slow movement, which exists in Mozart’s hand, must have resulted from his having heard the work and discovered an aspect needing improvement.”^[10][11]

Regarding the concerts for which the Symphony was originally intended when it was composed in 1788, Otto Erich Deutsch suggests that Mozart was preparing to hold a series of three “Concerts in the Casino”, in a new casino in the Spiegelgasse owned by Philipp Otto. Mozart even sent a pair of tickets for this series to his friend Michael Puchberg. But it seems impossible to determine whether the concert series was held, or was cancelled for lack of interest.^[2] Zaslaw suggests that only the first of the three concerts was actually held.

The music

The symphony is scored (in its revised version) for flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, and strings. Notably missing are trumpets and timpani.

The work is in four movements, in the usual arrangement for a classical-style symphony (fast movement, slow movement, minuet, fast movement):

1. Molto allegro, 2/2

2. Andante in E-flat major, 6/8

3. Menuetto. Allegretto – Trio, 3/4

4. Finale. Allegro assai, 2/2

Every movement but the third is in sonata form; the minuet and trio are in the usual ternary form.

The first movement begins darkly, not with its first theme but with accompaniment, played by the lower strings with divided violas. The technique of beginning a work with an accompaniment figure was later used by Mozart in his last piano concerto (KV. 595) and later became a favorite of the Romantics (examples include the openings of Mendelssohn‘s Violin Concerto and Sergei Rachmaninoff‘s Third Piano Concerto). The first theme is as follows.

The second movement is a lyrical work in 6/8 time, in E flat major, the submediant major of the overall G minor key of the symphony. The contrapuntal opening bars of this movement appear thus in keyboard reduction:

The minuet begins with an angry, cross-accented hemiola rhythm and a pair of three-bar phrases; various commentators have asserted that while the music is labeled “minuet,” it would hardly be suitable for dancing. The contrasting gentle trio section, in G major, alternates the playing of the string section with that of the winds.

The fourth movement opens with a series of rapidly ascending notes outlining the tonic triad illustrating what is commonly referred to as the Mannheim rocket.

The movement is written largely in eight-bar phrases, following the general tendency toward rhythmic squareness in the finales of classical-era symphonies. A remarkable modulating passage in which every tone in the chromatic scale but one is played, strongly destabilizing the key, occurs at the beginning of the development section. The single note left out is in fact a G (the tonic).

The symphony typically has a duration of about 25 minutes.

Reception

This work has elicited varying interpretations from critics. Robert Schumann regarded it as possessing “Grecian lightness and grace”. Donald Francis Tovey saw in it the character of opera buffa. Almost certainly, however, the most common perception today is that the symphony is tragic in tone and intensely emotional; for example, Charles Rosen (in The Classical Style) has called the symphony “a work of passion, violence, and grief.”

Although interpretations differ, the symphony is unquestionably one of Mozart’s most greatly admired works, and it is frequently performed and recorded.

Influence

Ludwig van Beethoven knew the symphony well, copying out 29 bars from the score in one of his sketchbooks.^[12] As Gustav Nottebohm observed in 1887, the copied bars appear amid the sketches for Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, whose third movement begins with a pitch sequence similar to that of Mozart’s finale (see example above).^[13]

In the 1860s, composer Johannes Brahms obtained Mozart’s original score, “the crown of his manuscript collection.”^[14]

Media

The following files contain a digital recording of a performance of the 40th Symphony by the Fulda Symphonic Orchestra. The performance took place on March 18, 2001 in the Orangerie in Fulda, Germany.

historic musical bits: Franz Schubert Symphony No.8 “Unfinished” D 759, Leonard Bernstein

Franz Schubert Symphony No.8 “Unfinished” D 759, Leonard Bernstein

HarpsichordA6

Published on Mar 14, 2015

Franz Schubert Symphony No.8 “Unfinished” D 759
1. Allegro Moderato
2. Andante con moto
Concertgebouw Orchestra
Leonard Bernstein Conductor
******************************************************

Franz Schubert

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

“Schubert” redirects here. For the other composer of the same name, see François Schubert. For other uses, see Schubert (disambiguation).

 

Oil painting of Franz Schubert by Wilhelm August Rieder (1875), made from his own 1825 watercolor portrait.

Franz Peter Schubert (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁant͡s ˈʃuːbɐt]; 31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828) was an Austrian composer. Schubert died at 31 but was extremely prolific during his lifetime. His output consists of over six hundred secular vocal works (mainly Lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and piano music. Appreciation of his music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works. Today, Schubert is ranked among the greatest composers of the late Classical era and early Romantic era and is one of the most frequently performed composers of the early nineteenth century.

Biography

Early life and education

Schubert was born in Himmelpfortgrund (now a part of Alsergrund), Vienna, Archduchy of Austria on 31 January 1797. His father, Franz Theodor Schubert, the son of a Moravian peasant, was a parish schoolmaster; his mother, Elisabeth (Vietz), was the daughter of a Silesian master locksmith and had been a housemaid for a Viennese family before marriage. Of Franz Theodor’s fourteen children (one of them illegitimate, born in 1783),^[1] nine died in infancy.

Their father was a well-known teacher, and his school in Lichtental (in Vienna’s ninth district) had numerous students in attendance.^[2] Though he was not recognized or even formally trained as a musician, he passed on certain musical basics to his gifted son.^[3]

The house in which Schubert was born, today Nussdorfer Strasse 54

At age six, Franz began to receive regular instruction from his father, and a year later was enrolled at his father’s school. His formal musical education started around the same time. His father taught him basic violin technique,^[3] and his brother Ignaz gave him piano lessons.^[4] At age seven, he was given his first lessons outside the family by Michael Holzer, organist and choirmaster of the local parish church in Lichtental; the lessons may have largely consisted of conversations and expressions of admiration.^[5] The boy seemed to gain more from an acquaintance with a friendly joiner‘s apprentice who took him to a neighboring pianoforte warehouse where Franz could practice on better instruments.^[6] He also played viola in the family string quartet, with brothers Ferdinand and Ignaz on first and second violin and his father on the violoncello. Franz wrote his earliest string quartets for this ensemble.^[7]

Young Schubert first came to the attention of Antonio Salieri, then Vienna’s leading musical authority, in 1804, when his vocal talent was recognized.^[7] In October 1808, he became a pupil at the Stadtkonvikt (Imperial Seminary) through a choir scholarship. At the Stadtkonvikt, he was introduced to the overtures and symphonies of Mozart, and the symphonies of Joseph Haydn and his younger brother Michael.^[8] His exposure to these and lesser works, combined with occasional visits to the opera, laid the foundation for a broader musical education.^[9] One important musical influence came from the songs by Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg, an important Lieder composer of the time. The precocious young student “wanted to modernize” them, as reported by Joseph von Spaun, Schubert’s friend.^[10] Schubert’s friendship with Spaun began at the Stadtkonvikt and lasted throughout his short life. In those early days, the financially well-off Spaun furnished the impoverished Schubert with much of his manuscript paper.^[9]

In the meantime, his genius began to show in his compositions. Schubert was occasionally permitted to lead the Stadtkonvikt’s orchestra, and Salieri decided to start training him privately in music theory and even in composition.^[11] It was the first orchestra he wrote for, and he devoted much of the rest of his time at the Stadtkonvikt to composing chamber music, several songs, piano pieces and, more ambitiously, liturgical choral works in the form of a “Salve Regina” (D 27), a “Kyrie” (D 31), in addition to the unfinished “Octet for Winds” (D 72, said to commemorate the 1812 death of his mother),^[12] the cantata Wer ist groß? for male voices and orchestra (D 110, for his father’s birthday in 1813), and his first symphony (D 82).^[13]

Mass No. 2 in G major, D 167 (1815) Kyrie     Gloria   Credo     Sanctus     Benedictus     Agnus Dei   Performance by the MIT Concert Choir Problems playing these files? See media help.

Teacher at his father’s school

At the end of 1813, he left the Stadtkonvikt and returned home for teacher training at the Normalhauptschule. In 1814, he entered his father’s school as teacher of the youngest pupils. For over two years young Schubert endured such drudgery, dragging himself through it with resounding indifference.^[14] There were, however, compensatory interests even then. He continued to take private lessons in composition from Salieri, who gave Schubert more actual technical training than any of his other teachers, before they parted ways in 1817.^[11]

In 1814, Schubert met a young soprano named Therese Grob, daughter of a local silk manufacturer and wrote several of his liturgical works (including a “Salve Regina” and a “Tantum Ergo”) for her; she also was a soloist in the premiere of his Mass No. 1 (D. 105) in September^[15] 1814.^[14] Schubert wanted to marry her, but was hindered by the harsh marriage-consent law of 1815^[16] requiring an aspiring bridegroom to show he had the means to support a family.^[17] In November 1816, after failing to gain a musical post in Laibach (now Ljubljana, Slovenia). Schubert sent Grob’s brother Heinrich a collection of songs retained by the family into the twentieth century.^[18]

One of Schubert’s most prolific years was 1815. He composed over 20,000 bars of music, more than half of which was for orchestra, including nine church works (despite being agnostic^[19][20]), a symphony, and about 140 Lieder.^[21] In that year, he was also introduced to Anselm Hüttenbrenner and Franz von Schober, who would become his lifelong friends. Another friend, Johann Mayrhofer, was introduced to him by Spaun in 1814.^[22] Maynard Solomon suggested that Schubert was erotically attracted to men,^[23] a thesis that has, at times, been heatedly debated.^[24] Musicologist and Schubert expert Rita Steblin claimed that he was “chasing women”.^[25]

Supported by friends

Significant changes happened in 1816. Schober, a student and of good family and some means, invited Schubert to room with him at his mother’s house. The proposal was particularly opportune, for Schubert had just made the unsuccessful application for the post of kapellmeister at Laibach, and he had also decided not to resume teaching duties at his father’s school. By the end of the year, he became a guest in Schober’s lodgings. For a time, he attempted to increase the household resources by giving music lessons, but they were soon abandoned, and he devoted himself to composition. “I compose every morning, and when one piece is done, I begin another.”^[26] During this year, he focused on orchestral and choral works, although he also continued to write Lieder (songs).^[27] Much of this work was unpublished, but manuscripts and copies circulated among friends and admirers.^[28]

Caricature of Johann Michael Vogl and Franz Schubert by Franz von Schober (1825)

In early 1817, Schober introduced Schubert to Johann Michael Vogl, a prominent baritone twenty years Schubert’s senior. Vogl, for whom Schubert went on to write a great many songs, became one of Schubert’s main proponents in Viennese musical circles. He also met Joseph Hüttenbrenner (brother to Anselm), who also played a role in promoting Schubert’s music.^[29] These, and an increasing circle of friends and musicians, became responsible for promoting, collecting, and, after his death, preserving his work.^[30]

In late 1817, Schubert’s father gained a new position at a school in Rossau, not far from Lichtental. Schubert rejoined his father and reluctantly took up teaching duties there. In early 1818, he was rejected for membership in the prestigious Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, something that might have furthered his musical career.^[31] However, he began to gain more notice in the press, and the first public performance of a secular work, an overture performed in February 1818, received praise from the press in Vienna and abroad.^[32]

Schubert spent the summer of 1818, as a music teacher to the family of Count Johann Karl Esterházy at their château in Zseliz (now Želiezovce, Slovakia). The pay was relatively good, and his duties teaching piano and singing to the two daughters were relatively light allowing to happily compose alongside. Both Marie and Karoline being his piano students, and the original score of the Marche Militaire in D major (D. 733 no. 1) being a piano duet, lend credence to the view that it may have been at this time that he wrote this now world-famous composition. On his return from Zseliz, he took up residence with his friend Mayrhofer.^[31] The respite at Zseliz led to a succession of compositions for piano duet.^[33]

During the early 1820s, Schubert was part of a close-knit circle of artists and students who had social gatherings together that became known as Schubertiaden. The tight circle of friends with which Schubert surrounded himself was dealt a blow in early 1820. Schubert and four of his friends were arrested by the Austrian police, who (in the aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars) were on their guard against revolutionary activities and suspicious of any gathering of youth or students. One of Schubert’s friends, Johann Senn, was put on trial, imprisoned for over a year, and then permanently forbidden to enter Vienna. The other four, including Schubert, were “severely reprimanded”, in part for “inveighing against [officials] with insulting and opprobrious language”.^[34] While Schubert never saw Senn again, he did set some of his poems, “Selige Welt” (D. 743) and Schwanengesang (D 744), to music. The incident may have played a role in a falling-out with Mayrhofer, with whom he was living at the time.^[35]

He was nicknamed “Schwammerl” by his friends, which Gibbs describes as translating to “Tubby” or “Little Mushroom”. Schubert, at 1.52 m height, was not quite five feet tall. “Schwamm” is Austrian (and other) dialect for mushroom; the ending “-erl” makes it a diminutive.

Musical maturity

The compositions of 1819 and 1820 show a marked advance in development and maturity of style.^[36] The unfinished oratorio Lazarus (D. 689) was begun in February; later followed, amid a number of smaller works, by the hymn “Der 23. Psalm” (D. 706), the octet “Gesang der Geister über den Wassern” (D. 714), the Quartettsatz in C minor (D. 703), and the Wanderer Fantasy in C major for piano (D. 760). Of most notable interest is the staging in 1820 of two of Schubert’s operas: Die Zwillingsbrüder (D. 647) appeared at the Theater am Kärntnertor on 14 June, and Die Zauberharfe (D. 644) appeared at the Theater an der Wien on 21 August.^[37] Hitherto, his larger compositions (apart from his masses) had been restricted to the amateur orchestra at the Gundelhof, a society which grew out of the quartet-parties at his home. Now he began to assume a more prominent position, addressing a wider public.^[37] Publishers, however, remained distant, with Anton Diabelli hesitantly agreeing to print some of his works on commission.^[38] The first seven opus numbers (all songs) appeared on these terms; then the commission ceased, and he began to receive the pittances which were all that the great publishing houses ever paid him. The situation improved somewhat in March 1821 when Vogl performed the song “Der Erlkönig” (D. 328) at a concert that was extremely well received.^[39] That month, Schubert composed a Variation on a Waltz by Diabelli (D 718), being one of the fifty composers who contributed to the Vaterländischer Künstlerverein publication.

	Piano Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960 (1828) I. Molto moderato     II. Andante sostenuto   III. Scherzo. Allegro vivace con delicatezza     IV. Allegro, ma non-troppo Performed by Randolph Hokanson
Problems playing these files? See media help.

The production of the two operas turned Schubert’s attention more firmly than ever in the direction of the stage, where, for a variety of reasons, he was almost completely unsuccessful. All in all, he embarked on twenty stage projects, each of them failures which were quickly forgotten. In 1822, Alfonso und Estrella was refused, partly owing to its libretto.^[40] Fierabras (D 796) was rejected in the fall of 1823, but this was largely due to the popularity of Rossini and the Italian operatic style, and the failure of Carl Maria von Weber‘s Euryanthe.^[41] Die Verschworenen (The Conspirators, D 787) was prohibited by the censor (apparently on the grounds of its title),^[42] and Rosamunde, Fürstin von Zypern (D 797) was withdrawn after two nights, owing to the poor quality of the play for which Schubert had written incidental music. Of these works, the two former ones are written on a scale which would make their performances exceedingly difficult (Fierabras, for instance, contains over 1,000 pages of manuscript score), but Die Verschworenen is a bright attractive comedy, and Rosamunde contains some of the most charming music that Schubert ever composed. In 1822, he made the acquaintance with both Weber and Beethoven, but little came of it in either case. Beethoven is said to have acknowledged the younger man’s gifts on a few occasions, but some of this is likely legend and in any case he could not have known the real scope of Schubert’s music, especially not the instrumental works, as so little of it was printed or performed in the composer’s lifetime. On his deathbed, Beethoven is said to have looked into some of the younger man’s works and exclaimed: “Truly, the spark of divine genius resides in this Schubert!”,^[43] but what would have come of it, if he had recovered, we can never know.

Watercolor of Franz Schubert by Wilhelm August Rieder (1825)

Last years and masterworks

Despite his preoccupation with the stage, and later with his official duties, Schubert found time during these years for a significant amount of composition. He completed the Mass in A-flat major (D. 678) and, in 1822, embarked suddenly on a work which more decisively than almost any other in those years showed his maturing personal vision, the Symphony in B minor Unfinished (D. 759). The reason he left it unfinished after two movements and sketches some way into a third remains an enigma, and it is also remarkable that he did not mention it to any of his friends even though, as Brian Newbould notes, he must have felt thrilled by what he was achieving. The event has been debated endlessly without resolution.

In 1823 Schubert, in addition to Fierrabras, also wrote his first large-scale song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin (D. 795), setting poems by Wilhelm Müller.^[44] This series, together with the later cycle Winterreise (D. 911, also setting texts of Müller in 1827) is widely considered one of the pinnacles of Lieder.^[45] He also composed the song Du bist die Ruh (You are stillness/peace, D. 776) during this year. Also in that year, symptoms of syphilis first appeared.^[46]

In 1824, he wrote the Variations in E minor for flute and piano Trockne Blumen, a song from the cycle Die schöne Müllerin, and several string quartets. He also wrote the Sonata in A minor for arpeggione and piano (D. 821) at the time when there was a minor craze over that instrument.^[47] In the spring of that year, he wrote the Octet in F major (D. 803), a sketch for a ‘Grand Symphony’; and in the summer went back to Zseliz. There he became attracted to Hungarian musical idiom, and wrote the Divertissement à la hongroise in G minor for piano duet (D. 818) and the String Quartet in A minor Rosamunde (D. 804). It has been said that he held a hopeless passion for his pupil, the Countess Karoline Eszterházy, but the only work he dedicated to her was his Fantasy in F minor for piano duet (D. 940).^[48] His friend Eduard von Bauernfeld penned the following verse, which appears to reference Schubert’s unrequited sentiments:

In love with a Countess of youthful grace,
—A pupil of Galt’s; in desperate case
Young Schubert surrenders himself to another,
And fain would avoid such affectionate pother^[49]

“Ellens Gesang III”, D. 839 (“Ave Maria”) Performed by Dorothea Fayne (voice) and Uwe Streibel (piano)

The setbacks of previous years were compensated by the prosperity and happiness of 1825. Publication had been moving more rapidly, the stress of poverty was for a time lightened, and in the summer he had a pleasant holiday in Upper Austria where he was welcomed with enthusiasm. It was during this tour that he produced the 7-song cycle Fräulein am See based on Walter Scott‘s Lady of the Lake and including “Ellens Gesang III” (“Hymn to the Virgin”) (D. 839, Op. 52, No. 6) with the lyrics of Adam Storck’s German translation of the Scott’s poem now frequently substituted by the full text of the traditional Roman Catholic prayer Hail Mary (Ave Maria in Latin), for which the Schubert’s melody is not an original setting, as it is widely, though mistakenly, thought. The original only opens with the greeting “Ave Maria”, which also recurs only in the refrain.^[50] In 1825, Schubert also wrote the Piano Sonata in A minor (D 845, first published as op. 42), and began the Symphony in C major (Great C major, D. 944), which was completed the following year.^[51]

Portrait of Franz Schubert by Franz Eybl (1827)

From 1826 to 1828, Schubert resided continuously in Vienna, except for a brief visit to Graz in 1827. The history of his life during these three years was comparatively uninteresting, and is little more than a record of his compositions. In 1826, he dedicated a symphony (D. 944, that later came to be known as the Great C major) to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and received an honorarium in return.^[52] In the spring of 1828, he gave, for the only time in his career, a public concert of his own works, which was very well received.^[53] The compositions themselves are a sufficient biography. The String Quartet No. 14 in D minor (D. 810), with the variations on Death and the Maiden, was written during the winter of 1825–1826, and first played on 25 January 1826. Later in the year came the String Quartet No. 15 in G major, (D 887, first published as op. 161), the Rondo in B minor for violin and piano (D. 895), Rondeau brillant, and the Piano Sonata in G major, (D 894, first published as Fantasie in G, op. 78). To these should be added the three Shakespearian songs, of which “Ständchen” (D. 889) and “An Sylvia” (D. 891) were allegedly written on the same day, the former at a tavern where he broke his afternoon’s walk, the latter on his return to his lodging in the evening.^[54]

In 1827, Schubert wrote the song cycle Winterreise (D. 911), a colossal peak in art song (“remarkable” was the way it was described at the Schubertiades), the Fantasy in C major for violin and piano (D. 934, first published as op. post. 159), the Impromptus for piano, and the two piano trios (the first in B-flat major (D. 898), and the second in E-flat major, (D. 929);^[55] in 1828 the cantata Mirjams Siegesgesang (Victory Song of Miriam, D 942) on a text by Franz Grillparzer, the Mass in E-flat major (D. 950), the Tantum Ergo (D. 962) in the same key, the String Quintet in C major (D. 956), the second “Benedictus” to the Mass in C major (D. 452), the three final piano sonatas (D. 958, D. 959, and D. 960), and the song cycle 13 Lieder nach Gedichten von Rellstab und Heine for voice and piano, also known as Schwanengesang (Swan-song, D. 957).^[56] This collection, while not a true song cycle, retains a unity amongst the individual songs, touching depths of tragedy and of the morbidly supernatural, which had rarely been plumbed by any composer in the century preceding it. Six of these are set to words by Heinrich Heine, whose Buch der Lieder appeared in the autumn. The Symphony in C major (D. 944) is dated 1828, but Schubert scholars believe that this symphony was largely written in 1825–1826 (being referred to while he was on holiday at Gastein in 1825 – that work, once considered lost, is now generally seen as an early stage of his C major symphony) and was revised for prospective performance in 1828.This was a fairly unusual practice for Schubert, for whom publication, let alone performance, was rarely contemplated for most of his larger-scale works during his lifetime. The huge, Beethovenian work was declared “unplayable” by a Viennese orchestra.^[57] In the last weeks of his life, he began to sketch three movements for a new Symphony in D major (D 936A).^[58]

 

Schubert’s glasses

Impromptu in B-flat major, D 935 no. 3 (1827) This Impromptu is a theme and variations based on a theme from Rosamunde. Performed by Randolph Hokanson.

The works of his last two years reveal a composer increasingly meditating on the darker side of the human psyche and human relationships, and with a deeper sense of spiritual awareness and conception of the ‘beyond’. He reaches extraordinary depths in several chillingly dark songs of this period, especially in the larger cycles. For example, the song “Der Doppelgänger” (D 957, No. 13, “The double”) reaching an extraordinary climax, conveying madness at the realization of rejection and imminent death – a stark and visionary picture in sound and words that had been prefigured a year before by “Der Leiermann” (D 911, No. 24, “The Hurdy-Gurdy Man”) at the end of Winterreise – and yet the composer is able to touch repose and communion with the infinite in the almost timeless ebb and flow of the string quintet and his last three piano sonatas, moving between joyful, vibrant poetry and remote introspection. Even in large-scale works he was sometimes using increasingly sparse textures; Newbould cites his writing in the fragmentary Symphony in D major (D 936A), probably the work of his very last two months. In this work, he anticipates Mahler‘s use of folksong-like harmonics and bare soundscapes.^[59] Schubert expressed the wish, were he to survive his final illness, to further develop his knowledge of harmony and counterpoint, and had actually made appointments for lessons with the counterpoint master Simon Sechter.^[60]

Final illness and death

Memorial at the Kalvarienberg Church, Hernals

 

The site of Schubert’s first tomb at Währing

In the midst of this creative activity, his health deteriorated. The cause of his death was officially diagnosed as typhoid fever, though other theories have been proposed, including the tertiary stage of syphilis.^[61] By the late 1820s, Schubert’s health was failing and he confided to some friends that he feared that he was near death.^{[62][page needed]} In the late summer of 1828, the composer saw court physician Ernst Rinna, who may have confirmed Schubert’s suspicions that he was ill beyond cure and likely to die soon.^{[63][page needed]} Some of his symptoms matched those of mercury poisoning (mercury was then a common treatment for syphilis, again suggesting that Schubert suffered from it).^[64] At the beginning of November, he again fell ill, experiencing headaches, fever, swollen joints, and vomiting. He was generally unable to retain solid food and his condition worsened. Schubert died in Vienna, at age 31, on 19 November 1828, at the apartment of his brother Ferdinand. The last musical work he had wished to hear was Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131; his friend, violinist Karl Holz, who was present at the gathering, five days before Schubert’s death, commented: “The King of Harmony has sent the King of Song a friendly bidding to the crossing”.^[65] It was next to Beethoven, whom he had admired all his life, that Schubert was buried by his own request, in the village cemetery of Währing, Vienna.^[66]

In 1872, a memorial to Franz Schubert was erected in Vienna’s Stadtpark.^[66] In 1888, both Schubert’s and Beethoven’s graves were moved to the Zentralfriedhof where they can now be found next to those of Johann Strauss II and Johannes Brahms.^[67] The cemetery in Währing was converted into a park in 1925, called the Schubert Park, and his former grave site was marked by a bust.

Music

 

Franz Schubert Memorial by Carl Kundmann in Vienna’s Stadtpark

See also: List of compositions by Franz Schubert by genre

Schubert was remarkably prolific, writing over 1,500 works in his short career. His compositional style progressed rapidly throughout his short life.^[68] The largest number of his compositions are songs for solo voice and piano (over 600). He also composed a considerable number of secular works for two or more voices, namely part songs, choruses and cantatas. He completed eight orchestral overtures and seven complete symphonies, in addition to fragments of six others. While he composed no concertos, he did write three concertante works for violin and orchestra. There is a large body of music for solo piano, including fourteen complete sonatas, numerous miscellaneous works and many short dances. There is also a relatively large set of works for piano duet. There are over fifty chamber works, including some fragmentary works. His sacred output includes seven masses, one oratorio and one requiem, among other mass movements and numerous smaller compositions.^[69] He completed only eleven of his twenty stage works.^[70]

Style

In July 1947 the 20th-century composer Ernst Krenek discussed Schubert’s style, abashedly admitting that he had at first “shared the wide-spread opinion that Schubert was a lucky inventor of pleasing tunes … lacking the dramatic power and searching intelligence which distinguished such ‘real’ masters as J.S. Bach or Beethoven“. Krenek wrote that he reached a completely different assessment after close study of Schubert’s pieces at the urging of friend and fellow composer Eduard Erdmann. Krenek pointed to the piano sonatas as giving “ample evidence that [Schubert] was much more than an easy-going tune-smith who did not know, and did not care, about the craft of composition.” Each sonata then in print, according to Krenek, exhibited “a great wealth of technical finesse” and revealed Schubert as “far from satisfied with pouring his charming ideas into conventional molds; on the contrary he was a thinking artist with a keen appetite for experimentation.”^[71]

Instrumental music, stage works and church music

See also: Sonatas, duos and fantasies by Franz Schubert, List of solo piano compositions by Franz Schubert and Stage works by Franz Schubert

That “appetite for experimentation” manifests itself repeatedly in Schubert’s output in a wide variety of forms and genres, including opera, liturgical music, chamber and solo piano music, and symphonic works. Perhaps most familiarly, his adventurousness manifests itself as a notably original sense of modulation, as in the second movement of the String Quintet (D. 956) where he modulates from E major through F minor, to reach the tonic key of E major.^[72] It also appears in unusual choices of instrumentation, as in the Sonata in A minor for arpeggione and piano (D. 821), or the unconventional scoring of the Trout Quintet (D. 667).

Sonata in A minor for arpeggione and piano, D 821 I. Allegro Moderato     II. Adagio and III. Allegretto   Performed by Hans Goldstein (cello) and Clinton Adams (piano)

While he was clearly influenced by the Classical sonata forms of Beethoven and Mozart (his early works, among them notably the 5th Symphony, are particularly Mozartean), his formal structures and his developments tend to give the impression more of melodic development than of harmonic drama.^[73] This combination of Classical form and long-breathed Romantic melody sometimes lends them a discursive style: his Great C major Symphony was described by Robert Schumann as running to “heavenly lengths”.^[74] His harmonic innovations include movements in which the first section ends in the key of the subdominant rather than the dominant (as in the last movement of the Trout Quintet). Schubert’s practice here was a forerunner of the common Romantic technique of relaxing, rather than raising, tension in the middle of a movement, with final resolution postponed to the very end.^{[citation needed]}

Lieder and part songs

See also: List of songs composed by Franz Schubert and Schubert’s song cycles

It was in the genre of the Lied, however, that Schubert made his most indelible mark. Leon Plantinga remarks, “In his more than six hundred Lieder he explored and expanded the potentialities of the genre, as no composer before him.”^[75] Prior to Schubert’s influence, Lieder tended toward a strophic, syllabic treatment of text, evoking the folksong qualities engendered by the stirrings of Romantic nationalism.^[76]

Among Schubert’s treatments of the poetry of Goethe, his settings of “Gretchen am Spinnrade” (D. 118) and “Der Erlkönig” (D. 328) are particularly striking for their dramatic content, forward-looking uses of harmony, and their use of eloquent pictorial keyboard figurations, such as the depiction of the spinning wheel and treadle in the piano in “Gretchen” and the furious and ceaseless gallop in “Erlkönig“.^[77] He composed music using the poems of a myriad of poets, with Goethe, Mayrhofer and Schiller being the top three most frequent, and others like Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Rückert and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff among many others. Also of particular note are his two song cycles on the poems of Wilhelm Müller, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, which helped to establish the genre and its potential for musical, poetic, and almost operatic dramatic narrative. His last song cycle published in 1828 after his death, Schwanengesang, is also an innovative contribution to German lieder literature, as it features poems by different poets, namely Ludwig Rellstab, Heine, and Johann Gabriel Seidl. The Wiener Theaterzeitung, writing about Winterreise at the time, commented that it was a work that “none can sing or hear without being deeply moved”.^[78]

Antonín Dvořák wrote in 1894 that Schubert, whom he considered one of the truly great composers, was clearly influential on shorter works, especially Lieder and shorter piano works: “The tendency of the romantic school has been toward short forms, and although Weber helped to show the way, to Schubert belongs the chief credit of originating the short models of piano forte pieces which the romantic school has preferably cultivated. […] Schubert created a new epoch with the Lied. […] All other songwriters have followed in his footsteps.”^[79]

Publication – catalogue

 

Interior of museum at Schubert’s birthplace, Vienna, 1914

When Schubert died he had around 100 opus numbers published, mainly songs, chamber music and smaller piano compositions.^[80] Publication of smaller pieces continued (including opus numbers up to 173 in 1860s, 50 installments with songs published by Diabelli and dozens of first publications Peters),^[81] but the manuscripts of many of the longer works, whose existence was not widely known, remained hidden in cabinets and file boxes of Schubert’s family, friends, and publishers.^[82] Even some of Schubert’s friends were unaware of the full scope of what he wrote, and for many years he was primarily recognized as the “prince of song”, although there was recognition of some of his larger-scale efforts.^[83] In 1838 Robert Schumann, on a visit to Vienna, found the dusty manuscript of the C major Symphony (D. 944) and took it back to Leipzig where it was performed by Felix Mendelssohn and celebrated in the Neue Zeitschrift. An important step towards the recovery of the neglected works was the journey to Vienna which Sir George Grove (widely known for the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians) and Arthur Sullivan made in the autumn of 1867. The travellers rescued from oblivion seven symphonies, the Rosamunde incidental music, some of the masses and operas, several chamber works, and a vast quantity of miscellaneous pieces and songs.^[82] This led to more widespread public interest in Schubert’s work.^[84]

The complete editions

 

Lithograph of Franz Schubert by Josef Kriehuber (1846)

See also: Franz Schubert’s Works and Neue Schubert-Ausgabe

From 1884 to 1897, Breitkopf & Härtel published Franz Schubert’s Works, a critical edition including a contribution made – among others – by Johannes Brahms, editor of the first series containing eight symphonies. The publication of the Neue Schubert-Ausgabe by Bärenreiter started in the second half of 20th century.

Deutsch catalogue

	Examples of works for violin and piano Rondo in B minor for violin and piano Rondeau brillant, D 895     Fantasy in C major for violin and piano, D 934   Performed by Dénes Zsigmondy (violin) and Anneliese Nissen (piano)
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See also: Schubert Thematic Catalogue, Schubert opus/Deutsch number concordance and List of compositions by Franz Schubert

Since relatively few of Schubert’s works were published in his lifetime, only a small number of them have opus numbers assigned, and even in those cases, the sequence of the numbers does not give a good indication of the order of composition. Austrian musicologist Otto Erich Deutsch (1883–1967) is known for compiling the first comprehensive catalogue of Schubert’s works. This was first published in English in 1951 (Schubert Thematic Catalogue) and subsequently revised for a new edition in German in 1978 (Franz Schubert: Thematisches Verzeichnis seiner Werke in chronologischer Folge – Franz Schubert: Thematic Catalogue of his Works in Chronological Order).

Numbering issues

See also: Schubert’s symphonies § Numbering issues and Sonatas, duos and fantasies by Franz Schubert § Numbering of the Piano Sonatas

Confusion arose quite early over the numbering of Schubert’s late symphonies. Schubert’s last completed symphony, the Great C major D 944, was assigned the Nos 7, 8, 9 and 10, depending on publication. Similarly the Unfinished D 759 was indicated with the Nos 8, as well as 7 and 9.^[85]

The order usually followed for these late symphonies by English-language sources is:

• No. 7: E major, D 729
• No. 8: B minor, D 759 Unfinished
• No. 9: C major, D 944 Great C major
• No. 10: D major, D 936A

An even broader confusion arose over the numbering of the piano sonatas, with numbering systems ranging from 15 to 23 sonatas.

Recognition

A feeling of regret for the loss of potential masterpieces caused by his early death at age 31 was expressed in the epitaph on his large tombstone written by his friend the poet Franz Grillparzer: “Here music has buried a treasure, but even fairer hopes.”^[86] Some have disagreed with this early view, arguing that Schubert in his lifetime did produce enough masterpieces not to be limited to the image of an unfulfilled promise. This is in particular the opinion of pianists, including Alfred Brendel, who dryly billed the Grillparzer epitaph as “inappropriate”.

Schubert’s chamber music continues to be popular. In a poll, the results of which were announced in October 2008, the ABC in Australia found that Schubert’s chamber works dominated the field, with the Trout Quintet coming first, followed by two of his other works.^[87]

The New York Times music critic, Anthony Tommasini, who ranked Schubert as the fourth greatest composer, wrote of him:

You have to love the guy, who died at 31, ill, impoverished and neglected except by a circle of friends who were in awe of his genius. For his hundreds of songs alone – including the haunting cycle Winterreise, which will never release its tenacious hold on singers and audiences – Schubert is central to our concert life…. Schubert’s first few symphonies may be works in progress. But the Unfinished and especially the Great C major Symphony are astonishing. The latter one paves the way for Bruckner and prefigures Mahler.^[88]

Tributes by other musicians

From the 1830s through the 1870s, Franz Liszt transcribed and arranged a number of Schubert’s works, particularly the songs. Liszt, who was a significant force in spreading Schubert’s work after his death, said Schubert was “the most poetic musician who ever lived.”^[89] Schubert’s symphonies were of particular interest to Antonín Dvořák, with Hector Berlioz and Anton Bruckner acknowledging the influence of the Great C major Symphony.^[90] In the 20th century, composers such as Benjamin Britten, Richard Strauss, and George Crumb either championed or paid homage to Schubert in their work. Britten, an accomplished pianist, accompanied many of Schubert’s Lieder and performed many piano solo and duet works.^[90]

In 1977, the German electronic band Kraftwerk recorded a tribute song called “Franz Schubert” on their album Trans-Europe Express.^[91]

Commemorations

 

Austrian 50 Schilling Silver Coin 1978: 150th Anniversary of his death

Portrayal in film

Schubert has featured as a character in a number of films including Schubert’s Dream of Spring (1931), Gently My Songs Entreat (1933), Serenade (1940), The Great Awakening (1941), It’s Only Love (1947), Franz Schubert (1953) and Das Dreimäderlhaus (1958).

 

 

historic musical bits: Leonard Bernstein “Overture König Stephan” Beethoven, Wiener Philharmoniker

Leonard Bernstein “Overture König Stephan” Beethoven

Addiobelpassato

Published on Mar 5, 2013

Overture König Stephan, op. 117
by Ludwig van Beethoven
Wiener Philharmoniker
Leonard Bernstein, conductor

great compositions/performances: Beethoven Piano Sonata 10 G major Barenboim

Beethoven Piano Sonata 10 G major Barenboim

Sonorum Concentus

Published on Sep 23, 2014

Ludwig van Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 10 in G major, Op. 14, No. 2
Daniel Barenboim, piano
-Allegro in G major
-Andante variations in C major, subdominant of G major 7:15
-Scherzo: Allegro assai in G major 12:46

 

Historic Musical Bits: Mozart: Piano concerto n. No. 21 in C major, K.467(“Elvira Madigan”) Pollini-Muti

Mozart: Piano concerto n. No. 21 in C major, K.467 (“Elvira Madigan”) Pollini-Muti

Alessandro152

Uploaded on Sep 12, 2011

Mozart:Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467

Orchestra filarmonica della Scala
Maurizio Pollini, piano
Riccardo Muti, conductor
(2004)
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart –

Piano Concerto No. 21,

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

The Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467, was completed on March 9, 1785 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, four weeks after the completion of the previous D minor concerto, K. 466.^[1][2]

Structure

	Third movement Performed by: Giorgi Latso, piano
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The concerto has three movements:

1. Allegro maestoso; in common time. The tempo marking is in Mozart’s catalog of his own works, but not in the autograph manuscript.^[3]
2. Andante in F major. In both the autograph score and in his personal catalog, Mozart notated the meter as Alla breve. ^[3]
3. Allegro vivace assai

The opening movement begins quietly with a march figure, but quickly moves to a more lyrical melody interspersed with a fanfare in the winds. The music grows abruptly in volume, with the violins taking up the principal melody over the march theme, which is now played by the brass. This uplifting theme transitions to a brief, quieter interlude distinguished by a sighing motif in the brass. The march returns, eventually transitioning to the entrance of the soloist. The soloist plays a brief Eingang (a type of abbreviated Cadenza) before resolving to a trill on the dominant G while the strings play the march in C major. The piano then introduces new material in C major and begins transitioning to the dominant key of G major. Immediately after an orchestral cadence finally announces the arrival of the dominant, the music abruptly shifts to G minor in a passage that is reminiscent of the main theme of the Symphony No. 40 in that key.^[4] A series of rising and falling chromatic scales then transition the music to the true second theme of the piece, an ebullient G major theme which Mozart had previously used in his Third Horn Concerto. The usual development and recapitulation follow. There is a cadenza at the end of the movement, although Mozart’s original has been lost.

The famous Andante is in three parts. The opening section is for orchestra only and features muted strings. The first violins play with a dreamlike melody over an accompaniment consisting of second violins and violas playing repeated-note triplets and the cellos and bass playing pizzicato arpeggios. All of the major melodic material of the movement is contained in this orchestral introduction, in either F major or F minor. The second section introduces the solo piano and starts off in F major. It is not a literal repeat, though, as after the first few phrases, new material is interjected which ventures off into different keys. When familiar material returns, the music is now in the dominant keys of C minor and C major. More new material in distant keys is added, which transitions to the third section of the movement. The third section begins with the dreamlike melody again, but this time in A-flat major. Over the course of this final section, the music makes it way back to the tonic keys of F minor and then F major and a short coda concludes the movement.

The final rondo movement begins with the full orchestra espousing a joyous “jumping” theme. After a short cadenza, the piano joins in and further elaborates. A “call and response” style is apparent, with the piano and ensemble exchanging parts fluidly. The soloist gets scale and arpeggio figurations that enhance the themes, as well as a short cadenza that leads right back to the main theme. The main theme appears one final time, leading to an upward rush of scales that ends on a triumphant note.

Cultural references

The second movement was featured in the 1967 Swedish film Elvira Madigan.^[1][5] This has led to an anachronistic nickname of Elvira Madigan for the concerto.^[6][7][8]

Neil Diamond‘s 1972 song “Song Sung Blue” was based on a theme from the andante movement of the concerto.^[9]

An electronic arrangement of the concerto’s first movement was used as the main theme of the TV series Whiz Kids.
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Great compositions/performances: Mendelssohn – Violin Sonata in F minor, Op. 4 Classical Music Best Piano and Violin

Mendelssohn – Violin Sonata in F minor, Op. 4 – Classical Music Best Piano and Violin

Live your Dreams 2

Published on May 11, 2014

Violin Sonata in F minor, Op. 4 by Felix Mendelssohn.

I. Adagio – Allegro moderato (0:00)
II. Poco adagio (7:15)
III. Allegro agitato (15:08)

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The Violin Sonata in F minor, Op. 4, for violin and piano was composed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1825 and is the only one to carry an opus number. Mendelssohn composed two other violin sonatas, both in F major, that are without opus numbers.

Unlike his famous violin work, the Violin Concerto in E minor, the sonata lacks dramatic expositions, however still containing composer’s calm chamber music and early-onset brilliancy.

historic musical bits: Shostakovich Plays Shostakovich – Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major, Op. 102

Shostakovich Plays Shostakovich – Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major, Op. 102

Published on Apr 10, 2013

Dmitri Shostakovich
Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major, Op. 102

Dmitri Shostakovich, piano

Orchestre National de la Radiodiffusion Française
André Cluytens, conductor
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Instrumentation

The work is scored for solo piano, three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, timpani, snare drum and strings.

Movements

The concerto lasts around 20 minutes and has three movements, with the second movement played attacca, thereby moving directly into the third (although the second movement does come to an acceptable resolution in C minor, such that the third movement is not entirely necessary to bring the music to a conclusion):

1. Allegro

   The jolly main theme of the first movement is played first by the bassoon, then soon accompanied by the clarinets and oboes. The piano enters unobtrusively with an answering theme, played as single notes in both hands an octave apart. A new theme in D minor, unisons two octaves apart on the piano, gives a song-like effect, winding down to nothing when an abrupt blast from the orchestra leads into tumultuous and jumping octaves in the lower piano register while the orchestra plays a variation on the original piano melody fortissimo. The piano builds in a triplet pattern to introduce the D minor theme (now in D major) in an augmentation in a triumphant tutti. At the climax, everything comes to a silent pause, and the piano comes in with a fugue-like counterpoint solo. After a minute of the fugue, the orchestra comes back in, playing the melody in the high winds. The orchestra builds on the main melody while the piano plays scales and tremolos, which lead into a joyous few lines of chords and octaves by the piano, with the main theme finally resurfacing and bringing the movement to a close.

2. Andante

   The second movement is subdued and romantic. The mood can be considered tender with a touch of melancholy. Strings start gently in C minor, with a short introduction before the piano comes in with a gentle triplet theme in C major. Although it remains slow throughout, and works within a comparatively small range, it is marked by the recurrence of two- or four-on-three rhythms. The expressiveness of this movement is notable.

3. Allegro

   The finale is a lively dance in duple time, making much use of pentatonic scales and modes. Soon, the second theme is introduced, in 7/8 time, with the piano accompanied by balalaika-like pizzicato strings. This carries on for a short time before a new motif arrives in “Hanon” exercise mode, with scales in sixths and semiquaver runs, this being the joke for Maxim’s graduation. These three themes are then developed and interwoven before a final statement of the 7/8 theme and finally a virtuoso coda in F major.

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Dmitri Shostakovich

“Shostakovich” redirects here. For the conductor and son of Dmitri Shostakovich, see Maxim Shostakovich.

This name uses Eastern Slavic naming customs; the patronymic is Dmitriyevich and the family name is Shostakovich.

Dmitri Shostakovich in 1950

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (Russian:  Дми́трий Дми́триевич Шостако́вич , tr. Dmitriy Dmitrievich Shostakovich, pronounced [ˈdmʲitrʲɪj ˈdmʲitrʲɪɪvʲɪtɕ ʂəstɐˈkovʲɪtɕ]; 25 September^[1] 1906 – 9 August 1975) was a Russian composer and pianist, and a prominent figure of 20th-century music.^[2]

Shostakovich achieved fame in the Soviet Union under the patronage of Soviet chief of staff Mikhail Tukhachevsky, but later had a complex and difficult relationship with the government. Nevertheless, he received accolades and state awards and served in the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR (1947–1962) and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union (from 1962 until his death).

A poly-stylist, Shostakovich developed a hybrid voice, combining a variety of different musical techniques into his music. Shostakovich’s music is characterized by sharp contrasts, elements of the grotesque, and ambivalent tonality; the composer was also heavily influenced by the neo-classical style pioneered by Igor Stravinsky, and (especially in his symphonies) by the post-Romanticism associated with Gustav Mahler.

Shostakovich’s orchestral works include 15 symphonies and six concerti. His chamber output includes 15 string quartets, a piano quintet, two piano trios, and two pieces for string octet. His piano works include two solo sonatas, an early set of preludes, and a later set of 24 preludes and fugues. Other works include three operas, several song cycles, ballets, and a substantial quantity of film music; especially well known is The Second Waltz, Op. 99, music to the film The First Echelon (ru) (1955–1956), as well as the Suites composed for The Gadfly.^[3][4]

Biography

Early life

Birthplace of Shostakovich (now School No. 267). Commemorative plaque at left

Born at Podolskaya street in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Shostakovich was the second of three children of Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich and Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina. Shostakovich’s paternal grandfather, originally surnamed Szostakowicz, was of Polish Roman Catholic descent (his family roots trace to the region of the town of Vileyka in today’s Belarus), but his immediate forebears came from Siberia.^[5] A Polish revolutionary in the January Uprising of 1863–4, Bolesław Szostakowicz would be exiled to Narym (near Tomsk) in 1866 in the crackdown that followed Dmitri Karakozov‘s assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander II.^[6] When his term of exile ended, Szostakowicz decided to remain in Siberia. He eventually became a successful banker in Irkutsk and raised a large family. His son, Dmitri Boleslavovich Shostakovich, the composer’s father, was born in exile in Narim in 1875 and studied physics and mathematics in Saint Petersburg University, graduating in 1899. He then went to work as an engineer under Dmitri Mendeleev at the Bureau of Weights and Measures in Saint Petersburg. In 1903, he married another Siberian transplant to the capital, Sofiya Vasilievna Kokoulina, one of six children born to a Russian Siberian native.^[6]

Their son, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, displayed significant musical talent after he began piano lessons with his mother at the age of nine. On several occasions, he displayed a remarkable ability to remember what his mother had played at the previous lesson, and would get “caught in the act” of playing the previous lesson’s music while pretending to read different music placed in front of him.^[7] In 1918, he wrote a funeral march in memory of two leaders of the Kadet party, murdered by Bolshevik sailors.^[8]

In 1919, at the age of thirteen, he was allowed to enter the Petrograd Conservatory, then headed by Alexander Glazunov, who monitored Shostakovich’s progress closely and promoted him.^[9] Shostakovich studied piano with Leonid Nikolayev after a year in the class of Elena Rozanova, composition with Maximilian Steinberg, and counterpoint and fugue with Nikolay Sokolov, with whom he became friends.^[10] Shostakovich also attended Alexander Ossovsky‘s history of music classes.^[11] Steinberg tried to guide Shostakovich in the path of the great Russian composers, but was disappointed to see him ‘wasting’ his talent and imitating Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Prokofiev. He also suffered for his perceived lack of political zeal, and initially failed his exam in Marxist methodology in 1926. His first major musical achievement was the First Symphony (premiered 1926), written as his graduation piece at the age of nineteen.

Shostakovich in 1925

Early career

After graduation, Shostakovich initially embarked on a dual career as concert pianist and composer, but his dry style of playing was often unappreciated (his American biographer, Laurel Fay, comments on his “emotional restraint” and “riveting rhythmic drive”). He nevertheless won an “honorable mention” at the First International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1927. After the competition Shostakovich met the conductor Bruno Walter, who was so impressed by the composer’s First Symphony that he conducted it at its Berlin premiere later that year. Leopold Stokowski was equally impressed and gave the work its U.S. premiere the following year in Philadelphia and also made the work’s first recording.

Thereafter, Shostakovich concentrated on composition and soon limited his performances primarily to those of his own works. In 1927 he wrote his Second Symphony (subtitled To October), a patriotic piece with a great pro-Soviet choral finale. Due to its experimental nature, as with the subsequent Third Symphony, the pieces were not critically acclaimed with the enthusiasm granted to the First.

The year 1927 also marked the beginning of Shostakovich’s relationship with Ivan Sollertinsky, who remained his closest friend until the latter’s death in 1944. Sollertinsky introduced the composer to the music of Gustav Mahler, which had a strong influence on his music from the Fourth Symphony onwards.

While writing the Second Symphony, Shostakovich also began work on his satirical opera The Nose, based on the story by Gogol. In June 1929, the opera was given a concert performance, against Shostakovich’s own wishes, and was ferociously attacked by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM).^[12] Its stage premiere on 18 January 1930 opened to generally poor reviews and widespread incomprehension amongst musicians.^[13]

Shostakovich composed his first film score for the 1929 silent movie, The New Babylon, set during the 1871 Paris Commune.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Shostakovich worked at TRAM, a proletarian youth theatre. Although he did little work in this post, it shielded him from ideological attack. Much of this period was spent writing his opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which was first performed in 1934. It was immediately successful, on both popular and official levels. It was described as “the result of the general success of Socialist construction, of the correct policy of the Party”, and as an opera that “could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best tradition of Soviet culture”.^[14]

Shostakovich married his first wife, Nina Varzar, in 1932. Initial difficulties led to a divorce in 1935, but the couple soon remarried when Nina became pregnant with their first child.^[15]

First denunciation

Muddle instead of music, article published on Pravda on January 18, 1936, harshly criticizing Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.

In 1936, Shostakovich fell from official favour. The year began with a series of attacks on him in Pravda, in particular an article entitled, “Muddle Instead of Music“. Shostakovich was away on a concert tour in Arkhangelsk when he heard news of the first Pravda article. Two days before the article was published on the evening of 28 January,^[16] a friend had advised Shostakovich to attend the Bolshoi Theatre production of Lady Macbeth. When he arrived, he saw that Joseph Stalin and the Politburo were there. In letters written to his friend Ivan Sollertinsky, Shostakovich recounted the horror with which he watched as Stalin shuddered every time the brass and percussion played too loudly. Equally horrifying was the way Stalin and his companions laughed at the love-making scene between Sergei and Katerina. Eyewitness accounts testify that Shostakovich was “white as a sheet” when he went to take his bow after the third act.^[17]

The article condemned Lady Macbeth as formalist, “coarse, primitive and vulgar”.^[18] Consequently, commissions began to fall off, and his income fell by about three quarters. Even Soviet music critics who had praised the opera were forced to recant in print, saying they “failed to detect the shortcomings of Lady Macbeth as pointed out by Pravda”.^[19] Shortly after the “Muddle Instead of Music” article, Pravda published another, “Ballet Falsehood,” that criticized Shostakovich’s ballet The Limpid Stream. Shostakovich did not expect this second article because the general public and press already accepted this music as “democratic” – that is, tuneful and accessible. However, Pravda criticized The Limpid Stream for incorrectly displaying peasant life on the collective farm.^[20]

More widely, 1936 marked the beginning of the Great Terror, in which many of the composer’s friends and relatives were imprisoned or killed. These included his patron Marshal Tukhachevsky (shot months after his arrest); his brother-in-law Vsevolod Frederiks (a distinguished physicist, who was eventually released but died before he got home); his close friend Nikolai Zhilyayev (a musicologist who had taught Tukhachevsky; shot shortly after his arrest); his mother-in-law, the astronomer Sofiya Mikhaylovna Varzar (sent to a camp in Karaganda); his friend the Marxist writer Galina Serebryakova (20 years in camps); his uncle Maxim Kostrykin (died); and his colleagues Boris Kornilov and Adrian Piotrovsky (executed).^[21] His only consolation in this period was the birth of his daughter Galina in 1936; his son Maxim was born two years later.

Withdrawal of the Fourth Symphony

The publication of the Pravda editorials coincided with the composition of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony. The work marked a great shift in style for the composer due to the substantial influence of Gustav Mahler and a number of Western-style elements. The symphony gave Shostakovich compositional trouble, as he attempted to reform his style into a new idiom. The composer was well into the work when the fatal articles appeared. Despite this, Shostakovich continued to compose the symphony and planned a premiere at the end of 1936. Rehearsals began that December, but after a number of rehearsals Shostakovich, for reasons still debated today, decided to withdraw the symphony from the public. A number of his friends and colleagues, such as Isaak Glikman, have suggested that it was in fact an official ban which Shostakovich was persuaded to present as a voluntary withdrawal.^[22] Whatever the case, it seems possible that this action saved the composer’s life: during this time Shostakovich feared for himself and his family. Yet Shostakovich did not repudiate the work; it retained its designation as his Fourth Symphony. A piano reduction was published in 1946, and the work was finally premiered in 1961, well after Stalin’s death.

During 1936 and 1937, in order to maintain as low a profile as possible between the Fourth and Fifth symphonies, Shostakovich mainly composed film music, a genre favored by Stalin and lacking in dangerous personal expression.^[23]

“A Soviet artist’s creative response to just criticism”

The composer’s response to his denunciation was the Fifth Symphony of 1937, which was musically more conservative than his earlier works. Premiering on 21 November 1937 in Leningrad, it was a phenomenal success: many in the Leningrad audience had lost family or friends to the mass executions. The Fifth drove many to tears and welling emotions.^[24] Later, Shostakovich wrote in his supposed memoirs, Testimony: “I’ll never believe that a man who understood nothing could feel the Fifth Symphony. Of course they understood, they understood what was happening around them and they understood what the Fifth was about.”^[25]

The success put Shostakovich in good standing once again. Music critics and the authorities alike, including those who had earlier accused Shostakovich of formalism, claimed that he had learned from his mistakes and had become a true Soviet artist. The composer Dmitry Kabalevsky, who had been among those who disassociated himself from Shostakovich when the Pravda article was published, praised the Fifth Symphony and congratulated Shostakovich for “not having given in to the seductive temptations of his previous ‘erroneous’ ways.”^[26]

It was also at this time that Shostakovich composed the first of his string quartets. His chamber works allowed him to experiment and express ideas which would have been unacceptable in his more public symphonic pieces. In September 1937, he began to teach composition at the Leningrad Conservatory, which provided some financial security but interfered with his own creative work.

Second World War

In 1939, before the Soviet forces attempted to invade Finland, the Party Secretary of Leningrad Andrei Zhdanov commissioned a celebratory piece from Shostakovich, entitled Suite on Finnish Themes to be performed as the marching bands of the Red Army would be parading through the Finnish capital Helsinki. The Winter War was a bitter experience for the Red Army, the parade never happened, and Shostakovich would never lay claim to the authorship of this work.^[27] It was not performed until 2001.^[28]

Lev A. Russov. The Leningrad Symphony conducted by Yevgeny Mravinsky, 1980

After the outbreak of war between the Soviet Union and Germany in 1941, Shostakovich initially remained in Leningrad. He tried to enlist for the military but was turned away because of his poor eyesight. To compensate, Shostakovich became a volunteer for the Leningrad Conservatory’s firefighter brigade and delivered a radio broadcast to the Soviet people  listen . The photograph for which he posed was published in newspapers throughout the country.^[29]

But his greatest and most famous wartime contribution was the Seventh Symphony. The composer wrote the first three movements in Leningrad and completed the work in Kuibyshev (now Samara) where he and his family had been evacuated. Whether or not Shostakovich really conceived the idea of the symphony with the siege of Leningrad in mind, it was officially claimed as a representation of the people of Leningrad’s brave resistance to the German invaders and an authentic piece of patriotic art at a time when morale needed boosting. The symphony was first premiered by the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra in Kuibyshev and was soon performed abroad in London and the United States. However, the most compelling performance was the Leningrad premiere by the Radio Orchestra in the besieged city. The orchestra had only fourteen musicians left, so the conductor Karl Eliasberg had to recruit anyone who could play a musical instrument to perform the symphony.^[30]

In spring 1943, the family moved to Moscow. At the time of the Eighth Symphony‘s premiere, the tide had turned for the Red Army. Therefore, the public, and most importantly the authorities, wanted another triumphant piece from the composer. Instead, they got the Eighth Symphony, perhaps the ultimate in sombre and violent expression within Shostakovich’s output. In order to preserve the image of Shostakovich (a vital bridge to the people of the Union and to the West), the government assigned the name “Stalingrad” to the symphony, giving it the appearance of a mourning of the dead in the bloody Battle of Stalingrad. However, the symphony did not escape criticism. Shostakovich is reported to have said: “When the Eighth was performed, it was openly declared counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet. They said, ‘Why did Shostakovich write an optimistic symphony at the beginning of the war and a tragic one now? At the beginning we were retreating and now we’re attacking, destroying the Fascists. And Shostakovich is acting tragic, that means he’s on the side of the fascists.'”^[31] The work was unofficially but effectively banned until 1956.^[32]

The Ninth Symphony (1945), in contrast, was much lighter in tone. Gavriil Popov wrote that it was “splendid in its joie de vivre, gaiety, brilliance, and pungency!!^[33] By 1946, however, it was the subject of criticism. Israel Nestyev asked whether it was the right time for “a light and amusing interlude between Shostakovich’s significant creations, a temporary rejection of great, serious problems for the sake of playful, filigree-trimmed trifles.”^[34] The New York World-Telegram of 27 July 1946 was similarly dismissive: “The Russian composer should not have expressed his feelings about the defeat of Nazism in such a childish manner”. Shostakovich continued to compose chamber music, notably his Second Piano Trio (Op. 67), dedicated to the memory of Sollertinsky, with a bittersweet, Jewish-themed totentanz finale.

Second denunciation

From left to right: Sergei Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian, 1945^[35]

In 1948, Shostakovich, along with many other composers, was again denounced for formalism in the Zhdanov decree. Andrei Zhdanov, Chairman of the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, accused Shostakovich and other composers (such as Sergei Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian) for writing inappropriate and formalist music. This was part of an ongoing anti-formalism campaign intended to root out all Western compositional influence as well as any perceived “non-Russian” output. The conference resulted in the publication of the Central Committee’s Decree “On V. Muradeli’s opera The Great Friendship,” which was targeted towards all Soviet composers and demanded that they only write “proletarian” music, or music for the masses. The accused composers, including Shostakovich, were summoned to make public apologies in front of the committee.^[36][37] Most of Shostakovich’s works were banned, and his family had privileges withdrawn. Yuri Lyubimov says that at this time “he waited for his arrest at night out on the landing by the lift, so that at least his family wouldn’t be disturbed.”^[38]

The consequences of the decree for composers were harsh. Shostakovich was among those who were dismissed from the Conservatoire altogether. For Shostakovich, the loss of money was perhaps the largest blow. Others still in the Conservatory experienced an atmosphere that was thick with suspicion. No one wanted their work to be understood as formalist, so many resorted to accusing their colleagues of writing or performing anti-proletarian music.^[39]

In the next few years, he composed three categories of work: film music to pay the rent, official works aimed at securing official rehabilitation, and serious works “for the desk drawer”. The latter included the Violin Concerto No. 1 and the song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry. The cycle was written at a time when the post-war anti-Semitic campaign was already under way, with widespread arrests including of I. Dobrushin and Yiditsky, the compilers of the book from which Shostakovich took his texts.^[40]

The restrictions on Shostakovich’s music and living arrangements were eased in 1949, when Stalin decided that the Soviets needed to send artistic representatives to the Cultural and Scientific Congress for World Peace in New York City, and that Shostakovich should be amongst them. For Shostakovich, it was a humiliating experience culminating in a New York press conference where he was expected to read a prepared speech. Nicolas Nabokov, who was present in the audience, witnessed Shostakovich starting to read “in a nervous and shaky voice” before he had to break off “and the speech was continued in English by a suave radio baritone”.^[41] Fully aware that Shostakovich was not free to speak his mind, Nabokov publicly asked the composer whether he supported the then recent denunciation of Stravinsky’s music in the Soviet Union. Shostakovich, who was a great admirer of Stravinsky and had been influenced by his music, had no alternative but to answer in the affirmative. Nabokov did not hesitate to publish that this demonstrated that Shostakovich was “not a free man, but an obedient tool of his government.”^[42] Shostakovich never forgave Nabokov for this public humiliation.^[43] That same year Shostakovich was obliged to compose the cantata Song of the Forests, which praised Stalin as the “great gardener.” In 1951 the composer was made a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of RSFSR.

Stalin’s death in 1953 was the biggest step towards Shostakovich’s rehabilitation as a creative artist, which was marked by his Tenth Symphony. It features a number of musical quotations and codes (notably the DSCH and Elmira motifs, Elmira Nazirova being a pianist and composer who had studied under Shostakovich in the year prior to his dismissal from the Moscow Conservatoire),^[44] the meaning of which is still debated, whilst the savage second movement, according to Testimony, is intended as a musical portrait of Stalin himself. The Symphony ranks alongside the Fifth and Seventh as one of his most popular works. 1953 also saw a stream of premieres of the “desk drawer” works.

During the forties and fifties, Shostakovich had close relationships with two of his pupils: Galina Ustvolskaya and Elmira Nazirova. In the background to all this remained Shostakovich’s first, open marriage to Nina Varzar until her death in 1954. He taught Ustvolskaya from 1937 to 1947. The nature of their relationship is far from clear: Mstislav Rostropovich described it as “tender”. Ustvolskaya rejected a proposal of marriage from him after Nina’s death.^[45] Shostakovich’s daughter, Galina, recalled her father consulting her and Maxim about the possibility of Ustvolskaya becoming their stepmother.^[46] Ustvolskaya’s friend, Viktor Suslin, said that she had been “deeply disappointed” in Shostakovich by the time of her graduation in 1947. The relationship with Nazirova seems to have been one-sided, expressed largely through his letters to her, and can be dated to around 1953 to 1956. He married his second wife, Komsomol activist Margarita Kainova, in 1956; the couple proved ill-matched, and divorced three years later.

In 1954, Shostakovich wrote the Festive Overture, opus 96, that was used as the theme music for the 1980 Summer Olympics.^[47] In addition his ‘”Theme from the film Pirogov, Opus 76a: Finale” was played as the cauldron was lit at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.

In 1959, Shostakovich appeared on stage in Moscow at the end of a concert performance of his Fifth Symphony, congratulating Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for their performance (part of a concert tour of the Soviet Union). Later that year, Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic recorded the symphony in Boston for Columbia Records.

Joining the Party

The year 1960 marked another turning point in Shostakovich’s life: he joined the Communist Party. The government wanted to appoint him General Secretary of the Composers’ Union, but in order to hold that position he was required to attain Party membership. It was understood that Nikita Khrushchev, the First Secretary of the Communist Party from 1958 to 1964, was looking for support from the leading ranks of the intelligentsia in an effort to create a better relationship with the Soviet Union’s artists.^[48] This event has been interpreted variously as a show of commitment, a mark of cowardice, the result of political pressure, or as his free decision. On the one hand, the apparat was undoubtedly less repressive than it had been before Stalin’s death. On the other, his son recalled that the event reduced Shostakovich to tears,^[49] and he later told his wife Irina that he had been blackmailed.^[50] Lev Lebedinsky has said that the composer was suicidal.^[51] Once he joined the Party, several articles denouncing individualism in music were published in Pravda under his name, though he did not actually write them. In addition, in joining the party, Shostakovich was also committing himself to finally writing the homage to Lenin that he had promised before. His Twelfth Symphony, which portrays the Bolshevik Revolution and was completed in 1961, was dedicated to Vladimir Lenin and called “The Year 1917.”^[52] Around this time, his health also began to deteriorate.

Shostakovich in 1950

Shostakovich’s musical response to these personal crises was the Eighth String Quartet, composed in only three days. He subtitled the piece, “To the victims of fascism and war”,^[53] ostensibly in memory of the Dresden fire bombing that took place in 1945. Yet, like the Tenth Symphony, this quartet incorporates quotations from several of his past works and his musical monogram: Shostakovich confessed to his friend Isaak Glikman “I started thinking that if some day I die, nobody is likely to write a work in memory of me, so I had better write one myself.”^[54] Several of Shostakovich’s colleagues, including Natalya Vovsi-Mikhoels^[55] and the cellist Valentin Berlinsky,^[56] were also aware of the Eighth Quartet’s biographical intent.

In 1962 he married for the third time, to Irina Supinskaya. In a letter to Glikman, he wrote “her only defect is that she is 27 years old. In all other respects she is splendid: clever, cheerful, straightforward and very likeable.”^[57] According to Galina Vishnevskaya, who knew the Shostakoviches well, this marriage was a very happy one: “It was with her that Dmitri Dmitriyevich finally came to know domestic peace… Surely, she prolonged his life by several years.”^[58] In November he made his only venture into conducting, conducting a couple of his own works in Gorky;^[59] otherwise he declined to conduct, citing nerves and ill health as his reasons.

That year saw Shostakovich again turn to the subject of anti-Semitism in his Thirteenth Symphony (subtitled Babi Yar). The symphony sets a number of poems by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the first of which commemorates a massacre of Ukrainian Jews during the Second World War. Opinions are divided how great a risk this was: the poem had been published in Soviet media, and was not banned, but it remained controversial. After the symphony’s premiere, Yevtushenko was forced to add a stanza to his poem which said that Russians and Ukrainians had died alongside the Jews at Babi Yar.

In 1965 Shostakovich raised his voice in defense of poet Joseph Brodsky, who was sentenced to five years of exile and hard labor. Shostakovich co-signed protests together with Yevtushenko and fellow Soviet artists Kornei Chukovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Samuil Marshak, and the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. After the protests the sentence was commuted, and Brodsky returned to Leningrad. Shostakovich also joined a group of 25 distinguished intellectuals in signing a letter to Leonid Brezhnev asking not to rehabilitate Stalin.^[60]

• (Russian) Original: “Pismo 25-ti deyatelei kulturi Brezhnevu o tendezii reabilitazii Stalina” [About the tendency toward Stalin’s rehabilitation: The letter to Brezhnev signed by twenty-five intellectuals], Sobranie Documentov Samizdata [Collection of Samizdat Documents, SDS], vol. 4, AC no. 273 (1966)

• (Russian) Online: “Письмо 25 деятелей советской науки, литературы и искусства Л. И. Брежневу против реабилитации И. В. Сталина”. Институт истории естествознания и техники им. С.И. Вавилова РАН. Retrieved 26 February 2013.

Later life

In 1964 Shostakovich composed the music for the Russian film Hamlet, which was favourably reviewed by the New York Times: “But the lack of this aural stimulation – of Shakespeare’s eloquent words – is recompensed in some measure by a splendid and stirring musical score by Dmitri Shostakovich. This has great dignity and depth, and at times an appropriate wildness or becoming levity”.^[61]

In later life, Shostakovich suffered from chronic ill health, but he resisted giving up cigarettes and vodka. Beginning in 1958 he suffered from a debilitating condition that particularly affected his right hand, eventually forcing him to give up piano playing; in 1965 it was diagnosed as poliomyelitis. He also suffered heart attacks the following year and again in 1971, and several falls in which he broke both his legs; in 1967 he wrote in a letter:

“Target achieved so far: 75% (right leg broken, left leg broken, right hand defective). All I need to do now is wreck the left hand and then 100% of my extremities will be out of order.”^[62]

A preoccupation with his own mortality permeates Shostakovich’s later works, among them the later quartets and the Fourteenth Symphony of 1969 (a song cycle based on a number of poems on the theme of death). This piece also finds Shostakovich at his most extreme with musical language, with twelve-tone themes and dense polyphony used throughout. Shostakovich dedicated this score to his close friend Benjamin Britten, who conducted its Western premiere at the 1970 Aldeburgh Festival. The Fifteenth Symphony of 1971 is, by contrast, melodic and retrospective in nature, quoting Wagner, Rossini and the composer’s own Fourth Symphony.

Shostakovich died of lung cancer on 9 August 1975 and after a civic funeral was interred in the Novodevichy Cemetery, Moscow. Even before his death he had been commemorated with the naming of the Shostakovich Peninsula on Alexander Island, Antarctica.

Shostakovich voting in the election of the Council of Administration of Soviet Musicians in Moscow in 1974

He was survived by his third wife, Irina; his daughter, Galina; and his son, Maxim, a pianist and conductor who was the dedicatee and first performer of some of his father’s works. Shostakovich himself left behind several recordings of his own piano works, while other noted interpreters of his music include his friends Emil Gilels, Mstislav Rostropovich, Tatiana Nikolayeva, Maria Yudina, David Oistrakh, and members of the Beethoven Quartet.

His last work was his Viola Sonata, which was first performed on 28 December 1975, four months after his death.

Shostakovich’s musical influence on later composers outside the former Soviet Union has been relatively slight, although Alfred Schnittke took up his eclecticism, and his contrasts between the dynamic and the static, and some of André Previn‘s music shows clear links to Shostakovich’s style of orchestration. His influence can also be seen in some Nordic composers, such as Lars-Erik Larsson.^[63] Many of his Russian contemporaries, and his pupils at the Leningrad Conservatory, however, were strongly influenced by his style (including German Okunev, Boris Tishchenko, whose 5th Symphony of 1978 is dedicated to Shostakovich’s memory, Sergei Slonimsky, and others). Shostakovich’s conservative idiom has grown increasingly popular with audiences both within and beyond Russia, as the avant-garde has declined in influence and debate about his political views has developed.

Music

For a complete list of Shostakovich’s compositions, see List of compositions by Dmitri Shostakovich.

For a thematical selection of works by Shostakovich, see Category:Compositions by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Overview

Shostakovich’s works are broadly tonal and in the Romantic tradition, but with elements of atonality and chromaticism. In some of his later works (e.g., the Twelfth Quartet), he made use of tone rows. His output is dominated by his cycles of symphonies and string quartets, each totaling fifteen works. The symphonies are distributed fairly evenly throughout his career, while the quartets are concentrated towards the latter part. Among the most popular are the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies and the Eighth and Fifteenth Quartets. Other works include the operas Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, The Nose and the unfinished The Gamblers based on the comedy of Nikolai Gogol; six concertos (two each for piano, violin and cello); two piano trios; and a large quantity of film music.

Shostakovich’s music shows the influence of many of the composers he most admired: Bach in his fugues and passacaglias; Beethoven in the late quartets; Mahler in the symphonies and Berg in his use of musical codes and quotations. Among Russian composers, he particularly admired Modest Mussorgsky, whose operas Boris Godunov and Khovanshchina he re-orchestrated; Mussorgsky’s influence is most prominent in the wintry scenes of Lady Macbeth and the Eleventh Symphony, as well as in his satirical works such as “Rayok“.^[64] Prokofiev‘s influence is most apparent in the earlier piano works, such as the first sonata and first concerto.^[65] The influence of Russian church and folk music is very evident in his works for unaccompanied choir of the 1950s.

Shostakovich’s relationship with Stravinsky was profoundly ambivalent; as he wrote to Glikman, “Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.”^[66] He was particularly enamoured of the Symphony of Psalms, presenting a copy of his own piano version of it to Stravinsky when the latter visited the USSR in 1962. (The meeting of the two composers was not very successful, however; observers commented on Shostakovich’s extreme nervousness and Stravinsky’s “cruelty” to him.)^[67]

Many commentators have noted the disjunction between the experimental works before the 1936 denunciation and the more conservative ones that followed; the composer told Flora Litvinova, “without ‘Party guidance’ … I would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, I could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage.”^[68] Articles published by Shostakovich in 1934 and 1935 cited Berg, Schoenberg, Krenek, Hindemith, “and especially Stravinsky” among his influences.^[69] Key works of the earlier period are the First Symphony, which combined the academicism of the conservatory with his progressive inclinations; The Nose (“The most uncompromisingly modernist of all his stage-works”^[70]); Lady Macbeth. which precipitated the denunciation; and the Fourth Symphony, described in Grove’s Dictionary as “a colossal synthesis of Shostakovich’s musical development to date”.^[71] The Fourth Symphony was also the first in which the influence of Mahler came to the fore, prefiguring the route Shostakovich was to take to secure his rehabilitation, while he himself admitted that the preceding two were his least successful.^[72]

In the years after 1936, Shostakovich’s symphonic works were outwardly musically conservative, regardless of any subversive political content. During this time he turned increasingly to chamber works, a field that permitted the composer to explore different and often darker ideas without inviting external scrutiny.^[73] While his chamber works were largely tonal, they gave Shostakovich an outlet for sombre reflection not welcomed in his more public works. This is most apparent in the late chamber works, which portray what is described in Grove’s Dictionary as a “world of purgatorial numbness”;^[74] in some of these he included the use of tone rows, although he treated these as melodic themes rather than serially. Vocal works are also a prominent feature of his late output, setting texts often concerned with love, death and art.

Jewish themes

Even before the Stalinist anti-Semitic campaigns in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Shostakovich showed an interest in Jewish themes. He was intrigued by Jewish music’s “ability to build a jolly melody on sad intonations”.^[75] Examples of works that included Jewish themes are the Fourth String Quartet (1949), the First Violin Concerto (1948), and the Four Monologues on Pushkin Poems (1952), as well as the Piano Trio in E minor (1944). He was further inspired to write with Jewish themes when he examined Moisei Beregovski’s thesis on the theme of Jewish folk music in 1946.

In 1948, Shostakovich acquired a book of Jewish folk songs, and from this he composed the song cycle From Jewish Poetry. He initially wrote eight songs that were meant to represent the hardships of being Jewish in the Soviet Union. However in order to disguise this, Shostakovich ended up adding three more songs meant to demonstrate the great life Jews had under the Soviet regime. Despite his efforts to hide the real meaning in the work, the Union of Composers refused to approve his music in 1949 under the pressure of the anti-Semitism that gripped the country. From Jewish Poetry could not be performed until after Stalin’s death in March 1953, along with all the other works that were forbidden.^[76]

Posthumous publications

In 2004, the musicologist Olga Digonskaya discovered a trove of Shostakovich manuscripts at the Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture, Moscow. In a cardboard file were some “300 pages of musical sketches, pieces and scores” in the hand of Shostakovich. “A composer friend bribed Shostakovich’s housemaid to regularly deliver the contents of Shostakovich’s office waste bin to him, instead of taking it to the garbage. Some of those cast-offs eventually found their way into the Glinka. … The Glinka archive ‘contained a huge number of pieces and compositions which were completely unknown or could be traced quite indirectly,’ Digonskaya said.”^[77]

Among these were Shostakovich’s piano and vocal sketches for a prologue to an opera, Orango (1932). They have been orchestrated by the British composer Gerard McBurney and this work was premiered in December 2011 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.^{[77][78][79][80][81]}

Criticism

According to Shostakovich scholar Gerard McBurney, opinion is divided on whether his music is “of visionary power and originality, as some maintain, or, as others think, derivative, trashy, empty and second-hand”.^[82] William Walton, his British contemporary, described him as “the greatest composer of the 20th century”.^[83] Musicologist David Fanning concludes in Grove’s Dictionary that, “Amid the conflicting pressures of official requirements, the mass suffering of his fellow countrymen, and his personal ideals of humanitarian and public service, he succeeded in forging a musical language of colossal emotional power.”^[84]

Some modern composers have been critical. Pierre Boulez dismissed Shostakovich’s music as “the second, or even third pressing of Mahler“.^[85] The Romanian composer and Webern disciple Philip Gershkovich called Shostakovich “a hack in a trance”.^[86] A related complaint is that Shostakovich’s style is vulgar and strident: Stravinsky wrote of Lady Macbeth: “brutally hammering … and monotonous”.^[87] English composer and musicologist Robin Holloway described his music as “battleship-grey in melody and harmony, factory-functional in structure; in content all rhetoric and coercion.”^[88]

In the 1980s, the Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen was critical of Shostakovich and refused to conduct his music. For instance, he said in 1987:

Shostakovich is in many ways a polar counter-force for Stravinsky. […] When I have said that the 7th symphony of Shostakovich is a dull and unpleasant composition, people have responded: “Yes, yes, but think of the background of that symphony.” Such an attitude does no good to anyone.^[89]

However, Salonen has since performed and recorded several of Shostakovich’s works, including the Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2 (1999), the Violin Concerto No. 1 (2010), the Prologue to “Orango” and the Symphony No. 4 (2012).

It is certainly true that Shostakovich borrows extensively from the material and styles both of earlier composers and of popular music; the vulgarity of “low” music is a notable influence on this “greatest of eclectics”.^[90] McBurney traces this to the avant-garde artistic circles of the early Soviet period in which Shostakovich moved early in his career, and argues that these borrowings were a deliberate technique to allow him to create “patterns of contrast, repetition, exaggeration” that gave his music the large-scale structure it required.^[91]

Personality

Shostakovich with close friend Ivan Sollertinsky

Shostakovich was in many ways an obsessive man: according to his daughter he was “obsessed with cleanliness”;^[92] he synchronised the clocks in his apartment; he regularly sent cards to himself to test how well the postal service was working. Elizabeth Wilson‘s Shostakovich: A Life Remembered (1994 edition) indexes 26 references to his nervousness. Mikhail Druskin remembers that even as a young man the composer was “fragile and nervously agile”.^[93] Yuri Lyubimov comments, “The fact that he was more vulnerable and receptive than other people was no doubt an important feature of his genius”.^[94] In later life, Krzysztof Meyer recalled, “his face was a bag of tics and grimaces”.^[95]

In his lighter moods, sport was one of his main recreations, although he preferred spectating or umpiring to participating (he was a qualified football referee). His favourite football club was Zenit Leningrad, which he would watch regularly.^[96] He also enjoyed playing card games, particularly patience. He was fond of satirical writers such as Gogol, Chekhov and Mikhail Zoshchenko. The influence of the latter in particular is evident in his letters, which include wry parodies of Soviet officialese. Zoshchenko himself noted the contradictions in the composer’s character: “he is … frail, fragile, withdrawn, an infinitely direct, pure child … [but he is also] hard, acid, extremely intelligent, strong perhaps, despotic and not altogether good-natured (although cerebrally good-natured)”.^[97]

He was diffident by nature: Flora Litvinova has said he was “completely incapable of saying ‘No’ to anybody.”^[98] This meant he was easily persuaded to sign official statements, including a denunciation of Andrei Sakharov in 1973; on the other hand he was willing to try to help constituents in his capacities as chairman of the Composers’ Union and Deputy to the Supreme Soviet. Oleg Prokofiev commented that “he tried to help so many people that … less and less attention was paid to his pleas.”^[99] When asked if he believed in God, Shostakovich said “No, and I am very sorry about it.”^[100]

 

Orthodoxy and revisionism

Shostakovich represented himself in some works with the DSCH motif, consisting of D-E♭-C-B.

Main article: Testimony (book)

Shostakovich’s response to official criticism and, what is more important, the question of whether he used music as a kind of covert dissidence is a matter of dispute. He outwardly conformed to government policies and positions, reading speeches and putting his name to articles expressing the government line.^[101] But it is evident he disliked many aspects of the regime, as confirmed by his family, his letters to Isaak Glikman, and the satirical cantata “Rayok“, which ridiculed the “anti-formalist” campaign and was kept hidden until after his death.^[102] He was a close friend of Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who was executed in 1937 during the Great Purge.

It is also uncertain to what extent Shostakovich expressed his opposition to the state in his music. The revisionist view was put forth by Solomon Volkov in the 1979 book Testimony, which was claimed to be Shostakovich’s memoirs dictated to Volkov. The book alleged that many of the composer’s works contained coded anti-government messages, that would place Shostakovich in a tradition of Russian artists outwitting censorship that goes back at least to the early 19th century poet Alexander Pushkin. It is known that he incorporated many quotations and motifs in his work, most notably his signature DSCH theme.^[103] His longtime collaborator Yevgeny Mravinsky said that “Shostakovich very often explained his intentions with very specific images and connotations.”^[104]

The revisionist perspective has subsequently been supported by his children, Maxim and Galina, and many Russian musicians. Volkov has further argued, both in Testimony and in Shostakovich and Stalin, that Shostakovich adopted the role of the yurodivy or holy fool in his relations with the government. Other prominent revisionists are Ian MacDonald, whose book The New Shostakovich put forward further revisionist interpretations of his music, and Elizabeth Wilson, whose Shostakovich: A Life Remembered provides testimony from many of the composer’s acquaintances.

Musicians and scholars including Laurel Fay^[105] and Richard Taruskin contest the authenticity and debate the significance of Testimony, alleging that Volkov compiled it from a combination of recycled articles, gossip, and possibly some information direct from the composer. Fay documents these allegations in her 2002 article ‘Volkov’s Testimony reconsidered’,^[106] showing that the only pages of the original Testimony manuscript that Shostakovich had signed and verified are word-for-word reproductions of earlier interviews given by the composer, none of which are controversial. (Against this, it has been pointed out by Allan B. Ho and Dmitry Feofanov that at least two of the signed pages contain controversial material: for instance, “on the first page of chapter 3, where [Shostakovich] notes that the plaque that reads ‘In this house lived [Vsevolod] Meyerhold‘ should also say ‘And in this house his wife was brutally murdered’.”)^[107]

Recorded legacy

A Russian stamp in Shostakovich’s memory

In May 1958, during a visit to Paris, Shostakovich recorded his two piano concertos with André Cluytens, as well as some short piano works. These were issued by EMI on an LP, reissued by Seraphim Records on LP, and eventually digitally remastered and released on CD. Shostakovich recorded the two concertos in stereo in Moscow for Melodiya. Shostakovich also played the piano solos in recordings of the Cello Sonata, Op. 40 with cellist Daniil Shafran and also with Mstislav Rostropovich; the Violin Sonata, Op. 134, with violinist David Oistrakh; and the Piano Trio, Op. 67 with violinist David Oistrakh and cellist Miloš Sádlo. There is also a short sound film of Shostakovich as soloist in a 1930s concert performance of the closing moments of his first piano concerto. A colour film of Shostakovich supervising one of his operas, from his last year, was also made.^[108] A major achievement was the recording of the original, unexpurgated score for Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by EMI. There was at least one recording of the cleaned up version, Katerina Ismailova that Shostakovich had made to satisfy Soviet censorship. But when conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya were finally allowed to emigrate to the West, the composer begged them to record the full original score, which they did in 1979. It features Vishnevskaya as Katerina, Nicolai Gedda as Sergei, Dimiter Petkov as Boris Ismailov and a brilliant supporting cast under Rostropovich’s direction.

Awards

Soviet Union

• Hero of Socialist Labor (1966)
• Order of Lenin (1946, 1956, 1966)
• Order of the October Revolution (1971)
• Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1940)
• Order of Friendship of Peoples (1972)
• People’s Artist of the USSR (1954)
• People’s Artist of the RSFSR (1948)
• International Peace Prize (1954)
• Lenin Prize (1958 – for the 11th symphony “1905”)
• Stalin Prize in arts (1941 – 1st class, for Piano Quintet; 1942 – 1st class, for the 7th (“Leningrad”) Symphony; 1946 – 2nd class, for Trio; 1950 – 1st class, for the music for the film Encounter at the Elbe; 1952 – 2nd class, for 10 poems for chorus)
• USSR State Prize (1968 – for the poem “The Execution of Stepan Razin” for bass, chorus and orchestra)
• Glinka State Prize of the RSFSR (1974 – for the 14th string quartet and choral cycle “Fidelity”)
• National Prize of Ukraine Taras Shevchenko (posthumously, 1976 – USSR State Prize named after Taras Shevchenko – for the opera “Katerina Ismailov,” staged in KUGATOB Shevchenko)

United Kingdom

• Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society (1966)

Finland

• Sibelius Award (1958)

United States

• Oscar nomination for Khovanshchina, Best Score (Musical) in 1961

Austria

• Decoration for Services to the Republic of Austria in Silver (1967)

Denmark

• Léonie Sonning Music Prize (1974)

 

 

Historic musical bits: Mendelssohn: Symphony no. 3 “Scottish” – Klemperer & Philharmonia Orchestra

Mendelssohn: Symphony no. 3 “Scottish” – Klemperer & Philharmonia Orchestra

Kanal von shostakk

Published on Aug 7, 2012

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809-1847)

Symphony no. 3 in A minor op. 56 “Scottish”

I. Andante con moto – Allegro un poco agitato (0:00)
II. Scherzo (Vivace non troppo) (15:16)
III.Adagio (20:29)
IV. Allegro vivacissimo – Allegro maestoso assai (30:04)

*** Philharmonia Orchestra
*** Otto Klemperer

************************************************************

Felix Mendelssohn

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

This article is about the German musician. For other people with the same surname, see Mendelssohn (surname) and Bartholdy.

 

Portrait of Mendelssohn by the English miniaturist James Warren Childe (1778–1862), 1839

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (German: [ˈjaːkɔp ˈluːtvɪç ˈfeːlɪks ˈmɛndl̩szoːn baʁˈtɔldi]; 3 February 1809 – 4 November 1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn,^{[n 1]} was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early Romantic period.

A grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn was born into a prominent Jewish family. Although initially he was brought up without religion, he was later baptised as a Reformed Christian. Mendelssohn was recognised early as a musical prodigy, but his parents were cautious and did not seek to capitalise on his talent.

Mendelssohn enjoyed early success in Germany, where he also revived interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and in his travels throughout Europe. He was particularly well received in Britain as a composer, conductor and soloist, and his ten visits there – during which many of his major works were premiered – form an important part of his adult career. His essentially conservative musical tastes, however, set him apart from many of his more adventurous musical contemporaries such as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner and Hector Berlioz. The Leipzig Conservatoire (now the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig), which he founded, became a bastion of this anti-radical outlook.

Mendelssohn wrote symphonies, concerti, oratorios, piano music and chamber music. His best-known works include his Overture and incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Italian Symphony, the Scottish Symphony, the overture The Hebrides, his mature Violin Concerto, and his String Octet. His Songs Without Words are his most famous solo piano compositions. After a long period of relative denigration due to changing musical tastes and anti-Semitism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, his creative originality has now been recognized and re-evaluated. He is now among the most popular composers of the Romantic era.

Life

Childhood

Mendelssohn aged 12 (1821) by Carl Joseph Begas

Felix Mendelssohn was born on 3 February 1809, in Hamburg, at the time an independent city-state,^{[n 2]} in the same house where, a year later, the dedicatee and first performer of his Violin Concerto, Ferdinand David, was to be born. Mendelssohn’s father was the banker Abraham Mendelssohn, the son of the German Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. His mother was Lea Salomon, a member of the Itzig family and a sister of Jakob Salomon Bartholdy.^[1] Mendelssohn was the second of four children; his older sister Fanny also displayed exceptional and precocious musical talent.^[2]

The family moved to Berlin in 1811, leaving Hamburg in disguise fearing French revenge for the Mendelssohn bank‘s role in breaking Napoleon‘s Continental System blockade.^[3] Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn sought to give their children – Fanny, Felix, Paul and Rebecka – the best education possible. Fanny became a well-known pianist and amateur composer; originally Abraham had thought that she, rather than Felix, would be the more musical. However, at that time, it was not considered proper, by either Abraham or Felix, for a woman to have a career in music, so Fanny remained an active but non-professional musician. Abraham was also disinclined to allow Felix to follow a musical career until it became clear that he seriously intended to dedicate himself to it.^[4]

Mendelssohn grew up in an intellectual environment. Frequent visitors to the salon organised by his parents at the family’s home in Berlin included artists, musicians and scientists, amongst them Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, and the mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (whom Mendelssohn’s sister Rebecka would later marry).^[5] Sarah Rothenburg wrote of the household that “Europe came to their living room”.^[6]

Surname

Abraham Mendelssohn renounced the Jewish religion; he and his wife deliberately decided not to have Felix circumcised, in contravention of the Jewish tradition.^[7] Felix and his siblings were first brought up without religious education, and were baptised by a Reformed Church minister in 1816,^[8] at which time Felix was given the additional names Jakob Ludwig. Abraham and his wife Lea were themselves baptised in 1822, formally adopting the surname Mendelssohn Bartholdy (which they had used since 1812) for themselves and their children.^[9] The name Bartholdy was added at the suggestion of Lea’s brother, Jakob Salomon Bartholdy, who had inherited a property of this name in Luisenstadt and adopted it as his own surname.^[10] In an 1829 letter to Felix, Abraham explained that adopting the Bartholdy name was meant to demonstrate a decisive break with the traditions of his father Moses: “There can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucius”.^[11] On embarking on his musical career, Felix did not entirely drop the name Mendelssohn as Abraham requested, but in deference to his father signed his letters and had his visiting cards printed using the form ‘Mendelssohn Bartholdy’.^[12] In 1829, his sister Fanny wrote to him of “Bartholdy […] this name that we all dislike”.^[13]

Career

Musical education

Like Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart before him, Mendelssohn was regarded as a child prodigy. He began taking piano lessons from his mother when he was six, and at seven was tutored by Marie Bigot in Paris.^[14] After the family moved to Berlin, all four Mendelssohn children studied piano with Ludwig Berger, who was himself a former student of Muzio Clementi.^[15] From at least May 1819 Felix (and his sister Fanny) studied counterpoint and composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter in Berlin.^[16] This was an important influence on his future career. Zelter had almost certainly been recommended as a teacher by his aunt Sarah Levy, who had been a pupil of W. F. Bach and a patron of C. P. E. Bach. Sarah Levy was a talented keyboard player in her own right, often playing with Zelter’s orchestra at the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin, of which she and the Mendelssohn family were leading patrons. Sarah had formed an important collection of Bach family manuscripts which she bequeathed to the Singakademie; Zelter, whose tastes in music were conservative, was also an admirer of the Bach tradition.^[17] This undoubtedly played a significant part in forming Felix Mendelssohn’s musical tastes. His works show his study of Baroque and early classical music. His fugues and chorales especially reflect a tonal clarity and use of counterpoint reminiscent of Johann Sebastian Bach, by whose music he was deeply influenced.^[18]

Early maturity

First page of the manuscript of Mendelssohn’s Octet (1825) (now in the US Library of Congress)

Mendelssohn probably made his first public concert appearance at age 9, when he participated in a chamber music concert accompanying a horn duo.^[19] He was also a prolific composer from an early age. As an adolescent, his works were often performed at home with a private orchestra for the associates of his wealthy parents amongst the intellectual elite of Berlin.^[20] Between the ages of 12 and 14, Mendelssohn wrote 12 string symphonies for such concerts. These works were ignored for over a century, but are now recorded and occasionally played in concerts. He wrote his first published work, a piano quartet, by the time he was 13. It was probably Abraham Mendelssohn who procured the publication of Mendelssohn’s early piano quartet by the house of Schlesinger.^[21] In 1824, the 15-year-old wrote his first symphony for full orchestra (in C minor, Op. 11).

At age 16 Mendelssohn wrote his String Octet in E-flat major, the first work which showed the full power of his genius.^[22] This Octet and his Overture to Shakespeare‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which he wrote a year later in 1826, are the best-known of his early works. (He later also wrote incidental music for the play, including the famous Wedding March, in 1842). The Overture is perhaps the earliest example of a concert overture – that is, a piece not written deliberately to accompany a staged performance, but to evoke a literary theme in performance on a concert platform; this was a genre which became a popular form in musical Romanticism.^[23]

In 1824 Mendelssohn studied under the composer and piano virtuoso Ignaz Moscheles, who however confessed in his diaries^[24] that he had little to teach him. Moscheles became a close colleague and lifelong friend. The year 1827 saw the premiere – and sole performance in his lifetime – of Mendelssohn’s opera, Die Hochzeit des Camacho. The failure of this production left him disinclined to venture into the genre again.^[25]

Besides music, Mendelssohn’s education included art, literature, languages, and philosophy. He had a particular interest in classical literature^[26] and translated Terence‘s Andria for his tutor Heyse in 1825; Heyse was impressed and had it published in 1826 as a work of “his pupil, F****” [i.e. “Felix” (asterisks as provided in original text)].^[27] This translation also qualified Mendelssohn to study at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where from 1826 to 1829 he attended lectures on aesthetics by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, on history by Eduard Gans and on geography by Carl Ritter.^[28]

Meeting Goethe and conducting Bach

In 1821 Zelter introduced Mendelssohn to his friend and correspondent, the elderly Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was greatly impressed by the child, leading to perhaps the earliest confirmed comparison with Mozart in the following conversation between Goethe and Zelter:

“Musical prodigies … are probably no longer so rare; but what this little man can do in extemporizing and playing at sight borders the miraculous, and I could not have believed it possible at so early an age.” “And yet you heard Mozart in his seventh year at Frankfurt?” said Zelter. “Yes”, answered Goethe, “… but what your pupil already accomplishes, bears the same relation to the Mozart of that time that the cultivated talk of a grown-up person bears to the prattle of a child.”^[29]

Mendelssohn was invited to meet Goethe on several later occasions, and set a number of Goethe’s poems to music. His other compositions inspired by Goethe include the overture Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, (Op. 27, 1828) and the cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The First Walpurgis Night, Op. 60, 1832).

In 1829, with the backing of Zelter and the assistance of actor Eduard Devrient, Mendelssohn arranged and conducted a performance in Berlin of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Four years previously his grandmother, Bella Salomon, had given him a copy of the manuscript of this (by then all-but-forgotten) masterpiece.^[30] The orchestra and choir for the performance were provided by the Berlin Singakademie. The success of this performance – the first since Bach’s death in 1750 – was an important element in the revival of J. S. Bach’s music in Germany and, eventually, throughout Europe.^[31] It earned Mendelssohn widespread acclaim at the age of 20. It also led to one of the few references which Mendelssohn made to his origins: “To think that it took an actor and a Jew’s son to revive the greatest Christian music for the world!”^[32][33]

Over the next few years Mendelssohn traveled widely, including making his first visit to England in 1829, and also visiting amongst other places Vienna, Florence, Milan, Rome and Naples, in all of which he met with local and visiting musicians and artists. These years proved the germination for some of his most famous works, including the Hebrides Overture and the Scottish and Italian symphonies.^[34]

Düsseldorf

On Zelter’s death in 1832, Mendelssohn had hopes of succeeding him as conductor of the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin. However, at a vote in January 1833 he was defeated for the post by the less distinguished Carl Friedrich Rungenhagen. This may have been because of Mendelssohn’s youth, and fear of possible innovations; it was also suspected by some to be attributable to his Jewish ancestry.^[35] Following this rebuff, Mendelssohn divided most of his professional time over the next few years between Britain and Düsseldorf, where he was appointed musical director (his first paid post as a musician) in 1833.

In the spring of that year Mendelssohn directed the Lower Rhenish Music Festival in Düsseldorf, beginning with a performance of Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt prepared from the original score which he had found in London. This precipitated a Handel revival in Germany, similar to the reawakened interest in J. S. Bach following his performance of the St Matthew Passion.^[36] Mendelssohn worked with dramatist Karl Immermann to improve local theatre standards, and made his first appearance as an opera conductor in Immermann’s production of Mozart‘s Don Giovanni at the end of 1833, where he took umbrage at the audience’s protests about the cost of tickets.^[37] His frustration at his everyday duties in Düsseldorf, and the city’s provincialism, led him to resign his position at the end of 1834. He had offers from both Munich and Leipzig for important musical posts, and decided in 1835 to accept the latter.^[38]

Leipzig and Berlin

 Felix Mendelssohn’s study in Leipzig

In 1835 Mendelssohn was named conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra.^[39] He chose this position although he had also been offered direction of the opera house in Munich and the editorship of the prestigious music journal, the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung.^[40] Mendelssohn concentrated on developing the musical life of Leipzig, working with the orchestra, the opera house, the Choir of St. Thomas Church, and the city’s other choral and musical institutions. Mendelssohn’s concerts included, in addition to many of his own works, three series of “historical concerts” and a number of works by his contemporaries. He was deluged by offers of music from rising composers and would-be composers; amongst these was Richard Wagner, who submitted his early Symphony, which to Wagner’s disgust Mendelssohn lost or mislaid.^[41] Mendelssohn also revived interest in Franz Schubert. Robert Schumann discovered the manuscript of Schubert’s 9th Symphony and sent it to Mendelssohn, who promptly premiered it in Leipzig on 21 March 1839, more than a decade after Schubert’s death.^[42]

A landmark event during Mendelssohn’s Leipzig years was the premiere of his oratorio St. Paul, given at the Lower Rhenish Festival in Düsseldorf in 1836, shortly after the death of the composer’s father, which much affected him; Felix wrote that he would “never cease to endeavour to gain his approval […] although I can no longer enjoy it”.^[43] St. Paul seemed to many of Mendelssohn’s contemporaries to be his finest work, and sealed his European reputation.^[44]

When Friedrich Wilhelm IV came to the Prussian throne in 1840 with ambitions to develop Berlin as a cultural centre (including the establishment of a music school, and reform of music for the church), the obvious choice to head these reforms was Mendelssohn. He was however reluctant to undertake the task, especially in the light of his existing strong position in Leipzig.^[45] Mendelssohn did however spend some time in Berlin, writing some church music, and, at the King’s request, music for productions of Sophocles‘s Antigone (1841) and Oedipus at Colonus (1845), Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1843) and Racine‘s Athalie (1845). But the funds for the school never materialised, and various of the court’s promises to Mendelssohn regarding finances, title, and concert programming were broken. He was therefore not displeased to have the excuse to return to Leipzig.

In 1843 Mendelssohn founded a major music school – the Leipzig Conservatory, now the Hochschule für Musik und Theater “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” or (in its own English self-designation) the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy University of Music and Theatre – where he persuaded Ignaz Moscheles and Robert Schumann to join him. Other prominent musicians, including string players Ferdinand David and Joseph Joachim and music theorist Moritz Hauptmann, also became staff members.^[46] After Mendelssohn’s death in 1847, his conservative tradition was carried on when Moscheles succeeded him as head of the Conservatory.

Mendelssohn in Britain

In 1829 Mendelssohn paid his first visit to Britain, where his former teacher Ignaz Moscheles, already settled in London, introduced him to influential musical circles. In the summer he visited Edinburgh, where he met among others the composer John Thomson, whom he later recommended to be Professor of Music at Edinburgh University.^[47] On his eighth visit in the summer of 1844, he conducted five of the Philharmonic concerts in London, and wrote:

[N]ever before was anything like this season – we never went to bed before half-past one, every hour of every day was filled with engagements three weeks beforehand, and I got through more music in two months than in all the rest of the year.^[48]

On subsequent visits he met Queen Victoria and her musical husband Prince Albert, who both greatly admired his music.^[49][50]

 

Felix Mendelssohn’s grave

In the course of ten visits to Britain during his life, totalling about 20 months, Mendelssohn won a strong following, sufficient for him to make a deep impression on British musical life.^[51] He composed and performed, and he edited for British publishers the first critical editions of oratorios of Handel and of the organ music of J.S. Bach. Scotland inspired two of his most famous works: the overture The Hebrides (also known as Fingal’s Cave); and the Scottish Symphony (Symphony No. 3).^[52]

Mendelssohn also worked closely with his protégé, the British composer and pianist William Sterndale Bennett (whom he had first heard in London in 1833 when Bennett was 17), both in London and Leipzig, where Bennett appeared throughout the 1836/1837 season.^[41] Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah was commissioned by and premiered at the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival on 26 August 1846, composed to a German text translated into English by William Bartholomew, who authored and translated many of Mendelssohn’s works during his time in England.^[53] On his last visit to Britain in 1847, Mendelssohn was the soloist in Beethoven‘s Piano Concerto No. 4 and conducted his own Scottish Symphony with the Philharmonic Orchestra before the Queen and Prince Albert.^[54]

Death

Mendelssohn suffered from poor health in the final years of his life, probably aggravated by nervous problems and overwork. A final tour of England left him exhausted and ill from a hectic schedule. The death of his sister Fanny on 14 May 1847 caused him great distress. Less than six months later, on 4 November, Mendelssohn himself died in Leipzig after a series of strokes. He was 38. His grandfather Moses, his sister Fanny and both his parents had died from similar apoplexies.^[55] Felix’s funeral was held at the Paulinerkirche, Leipzig, and he was buried at the Dreifaltigkeitsfriedhof I in Berlin-Kreuzberg. The pallbearers included Moscheles, Schumann and Niels Gade.^[56] Mendelssohn had once described death, in a letter to a stranger, as a place “where it is to be hoped there is still music, but no more sorrow or partings”.^[57]

Personal life

Personality

 

View of Lucerne – watercolour by Mendelssohn, 1847

Although the image was cultivated, especially after his death in the detailed family memoirs by his nephew Sebastian Hensel,^[58] of a man always equable, happy and placid in temperament, this was misleading. The nickname “discontented Polish count” was given to Mendelssohn because of his aloofness, and he referred to the epithet in his letters.^[59] Mendelssohn was frequently given to alarming fits of temper which occasionally led to collapse. On one occasion in the 1830s, when his wishes had been crossed, “his excitement was increased so fearfully … that when the family was assembled … he began to talk incoherently, and in English, to the great terror of them all. The stern voice of his father at last checked the wild torrent of words; they took him to bed, and a profound sleep of twelve hours restored him to his normal state”.^[60] Such fits may be related to his early death.^[61]

Mendelssohn was a fine and enthusiastic artist in pencil and watercolour, a skill which he used throughout his life for his own amusement and that of his friends.^[62][63] His enormous correspondence shows that he could also be a witty writer in German and English – sometimes accompanied by humorous sketches and cartoons in the text.

Religion

On 21 March 1816, at the age of seven years, his parents prompted the baptism of Mendelssohn and his brother and sisters in a home ceremony by Johann Jakob Stegemann, minister of the Evangelical congregation of Berlin’s Jerusalem Church and New Church. Although Mendelssohn was a conforming (if not over-zealous) Christian as a member of the Reformed Church,^{[n 3]} he was both conscious and proud of his Jewish ancestry and notably of his connection with his grandfather Moses Mendelssohn. He was the prime mover in proposing to the publisher Heinrich Brockhaus a complete edition of Moses’s works, which continued with the support of his uncle Joseph Mendelssohn.^[64] Mendelssohn was notably reluctant, either in his letters or conversation, to comment on his innermost beliefs; his friend Devrient wrote that “[his] deep convictions were never uttered in intercourse with the world; only in rare and intimate moments did they ever appear, and then only in the slightest and most humorous allusions”.^[65] Thus for example in a letter to his sister Rebecka, Mendelssohn rebukes her complaint about an unpleasant relative: “What do you mean by saying you are not hostile to Jews? I hope this was a joke […] It is really sweet of you that you do not despise your family, isn’t it?”.^[66] Some modern scholars have devoted considerable energy to demonstrate either that Mendelssohn was deeply sympathetic to his ancestors’ Jewish beliefs, or that he was hostile to this and sincere in his Christian beliefs.^{[n 4]}

Mendelssohn and his contemporaries

Throughout his life Mendelssohn was wary of the more radical musical developments undertaken by some of his contemporaries. He was generally on friendly, if sometimes somewhat cool, terms with the likes of Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and Giacomo Meyerbeer, but in his letters expresses his frank disapproval of their works, for example writing of Liszt that his compositions were “inferior to his playing, and [..] only calculated for virtuosos”;^[67] of Berlioz’s overture Les francs-juges “the orchestration is such a frightful muddle […] that one ought to wash one’s hands after handling one of his scores”;^[68] and of Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le diable “I consider it ignoble”, calling its villain Bertram “a poor devil”.^[69] When his friend the composer Ferdinand Hiller suggested in conversation to Mendelssohn that he looked rather like Meyerbeer – they were actually distant cousins, both descendants of Rabbi Moses Isserlis – Mendelssohn was so upset that he immediately went to get a haircut to differentiate himself.^[70]

In particular, Mendelssohn seems to have regarded Paris and its music with the greatest of suspicion and an almost puritanical distaste. Attempts made during his visit there to interest him in Saint-Simonianism ended in embarrassing scenes.^[71]

It is significant that the only musician with whom he remained a close personal friend, Ignaz Moscheles, was of an older generation and equally conservative in outlook. Moscheles preserved this outlook at the Leipzig Conservatory until his own death in 1870.

Marriage and children

Mendelssohn’s wife Cécile (1846) by Eduard Magnus

Mendelssohn married Cécile Charlotte Sophie Jeanrenaud (10 October 1817 – 25 September 1853), the daughter of a French Reformed Church clergyman, on 28 March 1837.^[72] The couple had five children: Carl, Marie, Paul, Lilli and Felix. The second youngest child, Felix August, contracted measles in 1844 and was left with his health impaired; he died in 1851.^[73] The eldest, Carl Mendelssohn Bartholdy (7 February 1838 – 23 February 1897), became a distinguished historian, and professor of history at Heidelberg and Freiburg universities, dying in 1897 in a psychiatric institution in Freiburg.^[74] Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1841–1880) was a noted chemist and pioneered the manufacture of aniline dye. Marie married Victor Benecke and lived in London. Lili married Adolph Wach, later Professor of Law at Leipzig University.^[75] The family papers inherited by Marie and Lili’s children form the basis of the extensive collection of Mendelssohn manuscripts, including the so-called ‘Green Books’ of his correspondence, now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.^[76]

Cécile Mendelssohn Bartholdy died less than six years after her husband, on 25 September 1853.^[77]

Jenny Lind

 Jenny Lind

In general Mendelssohn’s personal life seems to have been fairly conventional compared to those of his contemporaries Wagner, Berlioz, and Schumann – except for his relationship with Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, whom he met in October 1844, and with whom, it was rumoured, he became emotionally involved. Papers confirming this were alleged to exist, although their contents had not been made public.^{[78][n 5]} In 2013 George Biddlecombe confirmed in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association that “The Committee of the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation possesses material indicating that Mendelssohn wrote passionate love letters to Jenny Lind entreating her to join him in an adulterous relationship and threatening suicide as a means of exerting pressure upon her, and that these letters were destroyed on being discovered after her death.”^[80]

Mendelssohn met and worked with Lind many times, and started an opera, Lorelei, for her, based on the legend of the Lorelei Rhine maidens; the opera was unfinished at his death. He is said to have tailored the aria “Hear Ye Israel” in his oratorio Elijah to Lind’s voice,^[81] although she did not sing this part until after his death, at a concert in December 1848.^[82] In 1847 Mendelssohn attended a London performance of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable – an opera which musically he despised – in order to hear Lind’s British debut, in the role of Alice. The music critic Henry Chorley, who was with him, wrote “I see as I write the smile with which Mendelssohn, whose enjoyment of Mdlle. Lind’s talent was unlimited, turned round and looked at me, as if a load of anxiety had been taken off his mind. His attachment to Mlle. Lind’s genius as a singer was unbounded, as was his desire for her success”.^[83]

Upon Mendelssohn’s death Lind wrote, “[He was] the only person who brought fulfillment to my spirit, and almost as soon as I found him I lost him again”. In 1849 she established the Mendelssohn Scholarship Foundation, which makes an award to a British resident young composer every two years in Mendelssohn’s memory.^[78] The first winner of the scholarship was Arthur Sullivan, then aged 14, in 1856. In 1869 Lind erected a plaque in Mendelssohn’s memory at his birthplace in Hamburg.

Mendelssohn as musician

See also: List of compositions by Felix Mendelssohn and Category:Compositions by Felix Mendelssohn

Composer

Richard Taruskin points out that, although Mendelssohn produced works of extraordinary mastery at a very early age,

he never outgrew his precocious youthful style. […] He remained stylistically conservative […] feeling no need to attract attention with a display of ‘revolutionary’ novelty. Throughout his short career he remained comfortably faithful to the musical status quo – that is, the “classical” forms, as they were already thought of by his time. His version of romanticism, already evident in his earliest works, consisted in musical “pictorialism” of a fairly conventional, objective nature (though exquisitely wrought).^[84]

In this way he differed substantially from contemporaries such as Wagner and Berlioz, and even from Schumann and Chopin. The absence of real stylistic ‘development’ during Mendelssohn’s career makes it appropriate to consider his works by genre, rather than in order of composition.

Early works

The young Mendelssohn was greatly influenced in his childhood by the music of Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, traces of whom can be seen in the 12 early string symphonies, which were mainly written for performance in the Mendelssohn household and not published or publicly performed until long after his death. He wrote these from 1821 to 1823, when he was between the ages of 12 and 14.

Mendelssohn’s first published works were his three piano quartets, (1822–1825; Op. 1 in C minor, Op. 2 in F minor and Op. 3 in B minor); but his capacities are especially revealed in a group of works of his early maturity:

• the String Octet (1825)
• the Overture A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1826), which in its finished form also owes much to the influence of Adolf Bernhard Marx, at the time a close friend of Mendelssohn.
• the two early quartets: Op. 12 (1829) and Op. 13 (1827), which both show a remarkable grasp of the techniques and ideas of Beethoven’s last quartets that Mendelssohn had been closely studying^[85]

These four works show an intuitive grasp of form, harmony, counterpoint, colour, and compositional technique, which justify claims frequently made that Mendelssohn’s precocity exceeded even that of Mozart in its intellectual grasp.^[86]

Symphonies

Mendelssohn’s mature symphonies are numbered approximately in the order that they were published, rather than the order in which they were composed. The order of actual composition is: 1, 5, 4, 2, 3. The placement of No. 3 in this sequence is problematic because he worked on it for over a decade, starting sketches for it soon after beginning work on No. 5, but completing it after both Nos. 5 and 4.

The Symphony No. 1 in C minor for full-scale orchestra was written in 1824, when Mendelssohn was aged 15. This work is experimental, showing the influences of Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber.^[87] Mendelssohn conducted this symphony on his first visit to London in 1829, with the orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society. For the third movement he substituted an orchestration of the Scherzo from his Octet. In this form the piece was a success, and laid the foundations of his British reputation.^[88]

During 1829 and 1830 Mendelssohn wrote his Symphony No. 5, known as the Reformation. It celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Lutheran Church. Mendelssohn remained dissatisfied with the work and did not allow publication of the score.^[89]

The Scottish Symphony (Symphony No. 3 in A minor) was written and revised intermittently between 1829 (when Mendelssohn noted down the opening theme during a visit to Holyrood Palace)^[90] and 1842, when it was given its premiere in Leipzig, the last of his symphonies to be performed in public. This piece evokes Scotland’s atmosphere in the ethos of Romanticism, but does not employ any identified Scottish folk melodies.^[91]

Mendelssohn’s travels in Italy inspired him to write the Symphony No. 4 in A major, known as the Italian Symphony. Mendelssohn conducted the premiere in 1833, but did not allow the score to be published during his lifetime, as he continually sought to rewrite it.^[92]

Mendelssohn wrote the symphony-cantata Lobgesang (Hymn of Praise) in B-flat major, posthumously named Symphony No. 2, to mark the celebrations in Leipzig of the 400th anniversary of the invention of the printing press; the first performance took place on 25 June 1840.^[93]

Other orchestral music

Trumpet part, including main theme, of the Wedding March from Mendelssohn’s Op. 61

Mendelssohn wrote the concert Hebrides Overture (Fingal’s Cave) in 1830, inspired by visits to Scotland around the end of the 1820s. He visited Fingal’s Cave, on the Hebridean isle of Staffa, as part of his Grand Tour of Europe, and was so impressed that he scribbled the opening theme of the overture on the spot, including it in a letter he wrote home the same evening.

Throughout his career he wrote a number of other concert overtures. Those most frequently played today include an overture to Ruy Blas, commissioned for a charity performance of Victor Hugo‘s drama, which Mendelssohn hated; Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage (Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt), inspired by a pair of poems by Goethe; and The Fair Melusine.

The incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Op. 61), including the well-known Wedding March, was written in 1843, seventeen years after the overture.

Opera

Mendelssohn wrote some Singspiels for family performance in his youth. His opera Die beiden Neffen (The Two Nephews) was rehearsed for him on his 15th birthday.^[94] 1829 saw Die Heimkehr aus der Fremde (Son and Stranger or Return of the Roamer), a comedy of mistaken identity written in honor of his parents’ silver anniversary and unpublished during his lifetime. In 1825 he wrote a more sophisticated work, Die Hochzeit des Camacho (Camacho’s Wedding), based on an episode in Don Quixote, for public consumption. It was produced in Berlin in 1827, but coolly received. Mendelssohn left the theatre before the conclusion of the first performance, and subsequent performances were cancelled.^[95]

Although he never abandoned the idea of composing a full opera, and considered many subjects – including that of the Nibelung saga later adapted by Wagner – he never wrote more than a few pages of sketches for any project. In Mendelssohn’s last years the opera manager Benjamin Lumley tried to contract him to write an opera from Shakespeare’s The Tempest on a libretto by Eugène Scribe, and even announced it as forthcoming in 1847, the year of Mendelssohn’s death.^[96] The libretto was eventually set by Fromental Halévy. At his death Mendelssohn left some sketches for an opera on the story of the Lorelei.

Concertos

Violin Concerto op.64, main theme of second movement

The Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64 (1844), written for Ferdinand David, has become one of the most popular of all of Mendelssohn’s compositions. David, who had worked closely with Mendelssohn during the piece’s preparation, gave the premiere of the concerto on his Guarneri violin.^[97]

Mendelssohn also wrote a lesser-known, early concerto for violin and strings in D minor (1822); four piano concertos (“no. 0” in A minor, 1822; 1 in G minor, Op. 25, 1831; 2 in D minor, Op. 40, 1837; and 3 in E minor, Op. posth., a fragment from 1844); two concertos for two pianos and orchestra, E major (MWV O5), which he wrote at 15, and A-flat major (MWV O6), at 17; and another double concerto, for violin and piano (1823). In addition, there are several single-movement works for soloist and orchestra. Those for piano are the Rondo Brillante, Op. 29, of 1834; the Capriccio Brillante, Op. 22, of 1832; and the Serenade and Allegro Giocoso Op. 43, of 1838. He also wrote two concertinos (Konzertstücke), Opp. 113 and 114, originally for clarinet, basset horn and piano; Op. 113 was orchestrated by the composer.^[98]

Chamber music

Mendelssohn’s mature output contains numerous chamber works, many of which display an emotional intensity lacking in some of his larger works. In particular, his String Quartet No. 6, the last of his string quartets and his last major work – written following the death of his sister Fanny – is both powerful and eloquent. Other mature works include two other string quintets; sonatas for the clarinet, cello, viola and violin; and two piano trios. For the Piano Trio No. 1 in D minor, Mendelssohn uncharacteristically took the advice of his fellow composer, Ferdinand Hiller, and rewrote the piano part in a more romantic, “Schumannesque” style, considerably heightening its effect.^[99]

Choral works

 Part of the overture to ‘Elijah’ arranged by Mendelssohn for piano duet (manuscript in the Library of Congress)

Mendelssohn’s two large biblical oratorios, St Paul in 1836 and Elijah in 1846, are greatly influenced by Bach. His unfinished oratorio, Christus, consists of a recitative, a chorus “There Shall a Star Come out of Jacob,” and a male trio; the chorus is sometimes performed.

Strikingly different is the more overtly romantic Die erste Walpurgisnacht (The First Walpurgis Night), a setting for chorus and orchestra of a ballad by Goethe describing pagan rituals of the Druids in the Harz mountains in the early days of Christianity. This remarkable score has been seen by the scholar Heinz-Klaus Metzger as a “Jewish protest against the domination of Christianity”.^[100]

Mendelssohn also wrote many smaller-scale sacred works for unaccompanied choir and for choir with organ. Most are written in or translated into English, and remain highly popular. Amongst the most famous is Hear My Prayer, whose second half contains “O for the Wings of a Dove,” which became extremely popular as a separate item. The piece is written for full choir, organ, and a treble or soprano soloist who has many challenging and extended solo passages. As such, it is a particular favourite for choirboys in churches and cathedrals and has frequently been recorded as a treble solo. Mendelssohn’s biographer Todd comments “The very popularity of the anthem in England […] later exposed it to charges of superficiality from those contemptuous of Victorian mores“.^[101]

The hymn tune Mendelssohn – an adaptation by William Hayman Cummings of a melody from Mendelssohn’s cantata Festgesang (Festive Hymn) – is the standard tune for Charles Wesley‘s popular hymn Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. This extract from an originally secular 1840s composition, which Mendelssohn felt unsuited to sacred music,^[93] is ubiquitous at Christmas.

Songs

Mendelssohn wrote many songs, both for solo voice and for duet, with piano. Many of these are simple, or slightly modified, strophic settings. Some, including Auf Flügeln des Gesanges (On Wings of Song), became popular. Nine of Mendelssohn’s songs, including Auf Flügeln des Gesanges and Neue Liebe (New Love, set to a poem by Heinrich Heine) were transcribed for piano solo, in a virtuoso style, by Franz Liszt.

A number of songs written by Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny originally appeared under her brother’s name; this may have been partly due to the prejudice of the family, and partly to her own retiring nature.^[102]

Piano music

Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words (Lieder ohne Worte), eight cycles each containing six lyric pieces (two published posthumously), remain his most famous solo piano compositions. They became standard parlour recital items even during the composer’s lifetime,^[103] and their overwhelming popularity has itself caused many critics to underrate their musical value.^[104] Other composers who were inspired to produce similar pieces of their own, included Charles-Valentin Alkan (his five sets of Chants, each ending with a barcarole), Anton Rubinstein, Ignaz Moscheles, and Edvard Grieg.

Other notable piano pieces by Mendelssohn include his Variations sérieuses, Op. 54 (1841), the Rondo Capriccioso, the set of six Preludes and Fugues, Op. 35 (written between 1832 and 1837), and the Seven Characteristic Pieces, Op. 7 (1827).

Organ music

 Advertisement for the Organ Sonatas in the Musical World, 24 July 1845

Mendelssohn played the organ and composed for it from the age of 11 to his death. His primary organ works are the Three Preludes and Fugues, Op. 37 (1837), and the Six Sonatas, Op. 65 (1845), of which Eric Werner wrote “next to Bach’s works, Mendelssohn’s Organ Sonatas belong to the required repertory of all organists”.^[105]

Performer

Mendelssohn was renowned during his lifetime as a keyboard performer, both on the piano and on the organ. One of his obituarists noted:

First and chiefest we esteem his pianoforte-playing, with its amazing elasticity of touch, rapidity, and power; next his scientific and vigorous organ playing […] his triumphs on these instruments are fresh in public recollection.^[106]

In his concerts and recitals Mendelssohn performed both his own works and those of his predecessor German composers, notably works of Weber, Beethoven and (on the organ) J.S. Bach.^[107]

Both in private and public performances, Mendelssohn was also renowned for his improvisations. On one occasion in London, when asked by the soprano Maria Malibran after a recital to extemporise, he created a piece which included the melodies of all the songs she had sung. The music publisher Victor Novello who was present remarked ‘He has done some things that seem to me impossible, even after I have heard them done.’^[108] At another recital in 1837, where Mendelssohn played the piano for a singer, Robert Schumann ignored the soprano and wrote ‘Mendelssohn accompanied like a God’.^[109]

Conductor

Mendelssohn was a noted conductor, both of his own works and of other composers. At his London debut in 1829, he was noted for his innovatory use of a baton (then a great novelty).^[110] But his novelty also extended to taking great care over tempo, dynamics and the orchestral players themselves – both rebuking them when they were recalcitrant and praising them when they satisfied him.^[111] It was his success at conducting at the Lower Rhine music festival of 1836 that led to him taking his first paid professional position as director at Düsseldorf. Amongst those who appreciated Mendelssohn’s conducting was Hector Berlioz, who in 1843, invited to Leipzig, exchanged batons with Mendelssohn, writing “When the Great Spirit sends us to hunt in the land of souls, may our warriors hang our tomahawks side by side at the door of the council chamber”.^[112] At Leipzig, Mendelssohn led the Gewandhaus orchestra to great heights; although concentrating on the great composers of the past (already becoming canonised as the ‘classics’) he also included new music by Schumann, Berlioz, Gade and many others (including of course his own music).^[113] One critic who was not impressed however was Richard Wagner; he accused Mendelssohn of using tempos in his performances of Beethoven symphonies that were far too fast.^[114]

Editor

Mendelssohn’s interest in baroque music was not limited to the Bach St Matthew Passion which he had revived in 1829. He was concerned in preparing and editing such music, whether for performance or for publication, to be as close as possible to the original intentions of the composers, including wherever possible a close study of early editions and manuscripts. This could lead him into conflict with publishers; for instance, his edition of Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt for the London Handel Society (1845) evoked an often contentious correspondence, with Mendelssohn refusing for example to add dynamics where not given by Handel, or to add parts for trombones. Mendelssohn also edited a number of Bach’s works for organ, and apparently discussed with Robert Schumann the possibility of producing a complete Bach edition.^[115]

Teacher

Although Mendelssohn attributed great importance to musical education, and made a substantial commitment to the Conservatoire he founded in Leipzig, he did not greatly enjoy teaching and undertook only a very few private pupils; these he took only if he believed they had notable qualities or potential.^[116] Amongst such students were composer William Sterndale Bennett, the pianist Camille-Marie Stamaty, the violinist and composer Julius Eichberg, and Walther von Goethe (grandson of the poet).^[117] At the Leipzig Conservatoire Mendelssohn taught classes in composition and ensemble playing.^[118]

Reputation and legacy

The first century

The Leipzig Gewandhaus Mendelssohn monument in 1900 (removed in 1936)

In the immediate wake of Mendelssohn’s death, he was mourned both in Germany and England. However, the conservative strain in Mendelssohn, which set him apart from some of his more flamboyant contemporaries, bred a corollary condescension amongst some of them toward his music. Mendelssohn’s relations with Berlioz, Liszt and others had been uneasy and equivocal. Listeners who had raised questions about Mendelssohn’s talent included Heinrich Heine, who wrote in 1836 after hearing the oratorio St. Paul that his work was “characterized by a great, strict, very serious seriousness, a determined, almost importunate tendency to follow classical models, the finest, cleverest calculation, sharp intelligence and, finally, complete lack of naïveté. But is there in art any originality of genius without naïveté?”^[119][120]

Such criticism of Mendelssohn for his very ability – which could be characterised negatively as facility – was taken to further lengths by Richard Wagner. Mendelssohn’s success, his popularity and his Jewish origins irked Wagner sufficiently to damn Mendelssohn with faint praise, three years after his death, in an anti-Jewish pamphlet Das Judenthum in der Musik:

[Mendelssohn] has shown us that a Jew may have the amplest store of specific talents, may own the finest and most varied culture, the highest and tenderest sense of honour – yet without all these pre-eminences helping him, were it but one single time, to call forth in us that deep, that heart-searching effect which we await from art […] The washiness and the whimsicality of our present musical style has been […] pushed to its utmost pitch by Mendelssohn’s endeavour to speak out a vague, an almost nugatory Content as interestingly and spiritedly as possible.^[121]

This was the start of a movement to downgrade Mendelssohn’s status as a composer which lasted almost a century, the echoes of which still survive today in critiques of Mendelssohn’s supposed mediocrity.^{[n 6]}

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche expressed consistent admiration for Mendelssohn’s music, in contrast to his general scorn for “Teutonic” Romanticism:

At any rate, the whole music of romanticism [e.g. Schumann and Wagner] … was second-rate music from the very start, and real musicians took little notice of it. Things were different with Felix Mendelssohn, that halcyon master who, thanks to his easier, purer, happier soul, was quickly honored and just as quickly forgotten, as a lovely incident in German music.^[122]

Some readers, however, have interpreted Nietzsche’s characterization of Mendelssohn as a ‘lovely incident’ as condescending.^[123]

In the 20th century the Nazi regime and its Reichsmusikkammer cited Mendelssohn’s Jewish origin in banning performance and publication of his works, even asking Nazi-approved composers to rewrite incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Carl Orff obliged.)^[124] Under the Nazis, “Mendelssohn was presented as a dangerous ‘accident’ of music history, who played a decisive role in rendering German music in the 19th century ‘degenerate’.”^[125] The German Mendelssohn Scholarship for students at the Leipzig Conservatoire was discontinued in 1934 (and not revived until 1963). The monument dedicated to Mendelssohn erected in Leipzig in 1892 was removed by the Nazis in 1936. A replacement was erected in 2008.^[126] His grave however remained unmolested during the National Socialist years.^[127]

 The reconstructed Mendelssohn monument near Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church, dedicated in 2008^[128]

Mendelssohn’s reputation in England remained high throughout the 19th century. Prince Albert inscribed (in German), a libretto for the oratorio Elijah in 1847:

To the noble artist who, surrounded by the Baal-worship of false art, has been able, like a second Elijah, through genius and study, to remain true to the service of true art.^[129]

In 1851 an adulatory novel by the teenaged Sarah Sheppard was published, entitled Charles Auchester.^[130] The book features Mendelssohn as the “Chevalier Seraphael”, and remained in print for nearly 80 years. In 1854 Queen Victoria requested that the Crystal Palace include a statue of Mendelssohn when it was rebuilt.^{[n 7]} Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from A Midsummer Night’s Dream was played at the wedding of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Victoria, The Princess Royal, to Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia in 1858, and it remains popular at marriage ceremonies.^[131] Mendelssohn’s sacred choral music, particularly the smaller-scale works, remains popular in the choral tradition of the Church of England. However many critics, including Bernard Shaw, began to condemn Mendelssohn’s music for its association with Victorian cultural insularity; Shaw in particular complained of the composer’s “kid-glove gentility, his conventional sentimentality, and his despicable oratorio-mongering”.^[132] In the 1950s the scholar Wilfrid Mellers complained of Mendelssohn’s “spurious religiosity which reflected the element of unconscious humbug in our morality”.^[133]

A contrasting opinion came from the pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni, who considered Mendelssohn “a master of undisputed greatness” and “an heir of Mozart”.^[134] Busoni and other pianists such as Anton Rubinstein^[135] and Alkan^[136] all regularly included Mendelssohn’s piano works in their recitals.

Modern opinions

 German postage stamp issued on the 200th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s birth

Charles Rosen in a chapter on Mendelssohn in his 1995 book The Romantic Generation both praises and criticizes the composer, calling him a “genius” with a “profound” comprehension of Beethoven and “the greatest child prodigy the history of Western music has ever known”. Although Rosen feels that in his later years, without losing his craft or genius, the composer “renounced … his daring”, he calls Mendelssohn’s relatively late Violin Concerto in E minor “the most successful synthesis of the Classical concerto tradition and the Romantic virtuoso form”. Rosen calls the Fugue in E minor (later included in Mendelssohn’s Op. 35 for piano) a “masterpiece”; but in the same paragraph calls Mendelssohn “the inventor of religious kitsch in music”.^[137]

Such opinions are evidence of how a more nuanced appreciation of Mendelssohn’s work has developed over the last 50 years, together with the publication of a number of modern biographies placing his achievements in context.^[138] Mercer-Taylor comments on the irony that “this broad-based reevaluation of Mendelssohn’s music is made possible, in part, by a general disintegration of the idea of a musical canon”, an idea which Mendelssohn “as a conductor, pianist and scholar” had done so much to establish.^[139]

A large portion of Mendelssohn’s 750 works still remained unpublished in the 1960s, but most of them have now been made available.^[140] A scholarly edition of Mendelssohn’s complete works and correspondence is in preparation but is expected to take many years to complete, and will be in excess of 150 volumes. This includes a modern and fully researched catalogue of his works, the Mendelssohn-Werkverzeichnis (MWV).^[141] All of Mendelssohn’s oeuvre – including the most popular works such as the E minor Violin Concerto and the Italian Symphony – has been explored more deeply, and prior concepts about the Victorian conventionality of the oratorio Elijah have been shed.^{[n 8]} The frequently intense and dramatic world of Mendelssohn’s chamber works has been more fully recognized. Virtually all of Mendelssohn’s published works are now available on CD, and his works are frequently heard in the concert hall and on broadcasts.^[142] An English Heritage blue plaque commemorating Mendelssohn was placed at 4 Hobart Place in Belgravia, London, in 2013.^[143] As the critic H. L. Mencken concluded, if Mendelssohn indeed missed true greatness, he missed it “by a hair”.^[144]

great compositions/performances: Frederick Delius: Florida Suite (1888, Reedited by Beecham, 1963)

Frederick Delius: Florida Suite (1888, Reedited by Beecham, 1963)

Past_notes

Published on Mar 19, 2014

Welsh Opera Orchestra conducted by/dirigida por: Sir Charles Groves.

1. Daybreak (0:00 – 12:35)
2. By the River (12:36 – 19:14)
3. Sunset (19:15 – 29:15)
4. At Night (29:16 – 37:57)

Frederick Delius wrote his Florida Suite in 1888 and it was largely forgotten until the 1960’s when Sir Thomas Beecham, friend of the composer, made a reedition. Here, Delius showcases his musical memories and inspirations from his two years in the United States of America.

Frederick Delius escribió la Suite Florida en 1888 y fue olvidada hasta que en 1960 Sir Thomas Beecham, gran amigo del compositor, hizo una reedición. En esta obra, Delius recuerda la música que lo inspiró durante su estadía de dos años en los Estados Unidos de América.

More info: http://past-notesmusichist.blogspot.m…

Image / Imagen: St. John’s River near Jacksonville, FL. / Rio St. John cerca de Jacksonville, Florida
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Frederick Delius

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

Delius, aged 45, photographed in 1907

Frederick Theodore Albert Delius, CH (/ˈdiːlɪəs/^[1] 29 January 1862 – 10 June 1934) was an English composer. Born in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family, he resisted attempts to recruit him to commerce. He was sent to Florida in the United States in 1884 to manage an orange plantation. There he soon neglected his managerial duties, and in 1886 returned to Europe. Having been influenced by African-American music during his short stay in Florida, he began composing. After a brief period of formal musical study in Germany beginning in 1886, he embarked on a full-time career as a composer in Paris and then in nearby Grez-sur-Loing, where he and his wife Jelka lived for the rest of their lives, except during the First World War.

Delius’s first successes came in Germany, where Hans Haym and other conductors promoted his music from the late 1890s. In Delius’s native Britain, it was 1907 before his music made regular appearances in concert programmes, after Thomas Beecham took it up. Beecham conducted the full premiere of A Mass of Life in London in 1909 (he had premiered Part II in Germany in 1908); he staged the opera A Village Romeo and Juliet at Covent Garden in 1910; and he mounted a six-day Delius festival in London in 1929, as well as making gramophone recordings of many of Delius’s works. After 1918 Delius began to suffer the effects of syphilis, contracted during his earlier years in Paris. He became paralysed and blind, but completed some late compositions between 1928 and 1932 with the aid of an amanuensis, Eric Fenby.

The lyricism in Delius’s early compositions reflected the music he had heard in America and the influences of European composers such as Edvard Grieg and Richard Wagner. As his skills matured, he developed a style uniquely his own, characterised by his individual orchestration and his uses of chromatic harmony. Delius’s music has been only intermittently popular, and often subject to critical attacks. The Delius Society, formed in 1962 by his more dedicated followers, continues to promote knowledge of the composer’s life and works, and sponsors the annual Delius Prize competition for young musicians.

Life

Early years

 

The Victorian Town Hall in Bradford, Yorkshire, the city where Delius was born and grew up

Delius was born in Bradford in Yorkshire. He was baptised as “Fritz Theodore Albert Delius”,^[2] and used the forename Fritz until he was about 40.^[3] He was the second of four sons (there were also ten daughters) born to Julius Delius (1822–1901) and his wife Elise Pauline, née Krönig (1838–1929).^[4] Delius’s parents were born in Bielefeld, Westphalia,^{[n 1]} of Dutch origin;^{[n 2]} the family had for some generations been settled in German lands near the Rhine. Julius’s father, Ernst Friedrich Delius, had served under Blücher in the Napoleonic Wars.^[6] Julius moved to England to further his career as a wool merchant, and became a naturalised British subject in 1850. He married Elise in 1856.^[3]

The Delius household was musical; famous musicians such as Joseph Joachim and Carlo Alfredo Piatti were guests, and played for the family.^[3] Despite his German parentage, the young Fritz was drawn to the music of Chopin and Grieg rather than the Austro-German music of Mozart and Beethoven, a preference that endured all his life.^[4] The young Delius was first taught the violin by a Mr. Bauerkeller of the Hallé Orchestra, and had more advanced studies under Mr. George Haddock^[7] of Leeds. Although he achieved enough skill as a violinist to set up as a violin teacher in later years, his chief musical joy was to improvise at the piano, and it was a piano piece, a waltz by Chopin, that gave him his first ecstatic encounter with music.^{[6][n 3]} From 1874 to 1878, Delius was educated at Bradford Grammar School, where the singer John Coates was his slightly older contemporary.^[8] He then attended the International College at Isleworth between 1878 and 1880. As a pupil he was neither especially quick nor diligent,^[6] but the college was conveniently close to London for Delius to attend concerts and opera.^[9]

Julius Delius assumed that his son would play a part in the family wool business, and for the next three years he tried hard to persuade him to do so. Delius’s first job was as the firm’s representative in Stroud in Gloucestershire, where he did moderately well. After being sent in a similar capacity to Chemnitz, he neglected his duties in favour of trips to the major musical centres of Germany, and musical studies with Hans Sitt.^[9] His father sent him to Sweden, where he again put his artistic interests ahead of commerce, coming under the influence of the Norwegian dramatists Henrik Ibsen and Gunnar Heiberg. Ibsen’s denunciations of social conventions further alienated Delius from his commercial background.^[3] Delius was then sent to represent the firm in France, but he frequently absented himself from business for excursions to the French Riviera.^[9] After this, Julius Delius recognised that there was no prospect that his son would succeed in the family business, but he remained opposed to music as a profession, and instead sent him to America to manage an orange plantation.^[9]

Florida

Whether the move to America was Julius’s idea or his son’s is unknown.^{[n 4]} A leading Florida property firm had branches in several English cities including Bradford; in an article on Delius’s time in Florida, William Randel conjectures that either Julius Delius visited the Bradford office and conceived the notion of sending his wayward son to grow oranges in Florida, or that Fritz himself saw it as a way to escape the hated family wool business and suggested the idea to his father.^[11] Delius was in Florida from the spring of 1884 to the autumn of 1885, living on a plantation at Solano Grove on the Saint Johns River, about 35 miles (55 kilometers) south of Jacksonville. He continued to be engrossed in music, and in Jacksonville he met Thomas Ward, who became his teacher in counterpoint and composition. Delius later said that Ward’s teaching was the only useful music instruction he ever had.^[12]

Delius later liked to represent his house at Solano Grove as “a shanty”, but it was a substantial cottage of four rooms, with plenty of space for Delius to entertain guests.^{[n 5]} Ward sometimes stayed there, as did an old Bradford friend, Charles Douglas, and Delius’s brother Ernest. Protected from excessive summer heat by river breezes and a canopy of oak trees, the house was an agreeable place to live in. Delius paid little attention to the business of growing oranges, and continued to pursue his musical interests. Jacksonville had a rich, though to a European, unorthodox musical life. Randel notes that in local hotels, the African-American waiters doubled as singers, with daily vocal concerts for patrons and passers-by, giving Delius his introduction to spirituals. Additionally, ship owners encouraged their deckhands to sing as they worked. “Delius never forgot the singing as he heard it, day or night, carried sweet and clear across the water to his verandah at Solano Grove, whenever a steam-ship passed; it is hard to imagine conditions less conducive to cultivating oranges—or more conducive to composing.”^[11]

While in Florida, Delius had his first composition published, a polka for piano called Zum Carnival.^[11] In late 1885 he left a caretaker in charge of Solano Grove and moved to Danville, Virginia. Thereafter he pursued a wholly musical career. An advertisement in the local paper announced, “Fritz Delius will begin at once giving instruction in Piano, Violin, Theory and Composition. He will give lessons at the residences of his pupils. Terms reasonable.”^[11] Delius also offered lessons in French and German. Danville had a thriving musical life, and early works of his were publicly performed there.^[11]

Leipzig and Paris

 

Edvard Grieg, who was a strong influence on Delius’s earlier music

In 1886 Julius Delius finally agreed to allow his son to pursue a musical career, and paid for him to study music formally. Delius left Danville and returned to Europe via New York, where he paused briefly to give a few lessons.^[3] Back in Europe he enrolled at the conservatoire in Leipzig, Germany. Leipzig was a major musical centre, where Nikisch and Mahler were conductors at the Opera House, and Brahms and Tchaikovsky conducted their works at the Gewandhaus.^[6] At the conservatoire, Delius made little progress in his piano studies under Carl Reinecke, but Salomon Jadassohn praised his hard work and grasp of counterpoint; Delius also resumed studies under Hans Sitt.^[3] Delius’s early biographer, the composer Patrick Hadley, observed that no trace of his academic tuition can be found in Delius’s mature music “except in certain of the weaker passages”.^[4] Much more important to Delius’s development was meeting the composer Edvard Grieg in Leipzig. Grieg, like Ward before him, recognised Delius’s potential. In the spring of 1888, Sitt conducted Delius’s Florida Suite for an audience of three: Grieg, Christian Sinding and the composer.^{[n 6]} Grieg and Sinding were enthusiastic and became warm supporters of Delius. At a dinner party in London in April 1888, Grieg finally convinced Julius Delius that his son’s future lay in music.^[4]

After leaving Leipzig in 1888, Delius moved to Paris where his uncle, Theodore, took him under his wing and looked after him socially and financially.^[3] Over the next eight years, Delius befriended many writers and artists, including August Strindberg, Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin. He mixed very little with French musicians,^[3] although Florent Schmitt arranged the piano scores of Delius’s first two operas, Irmelin and The Magic Fountain (Ravel later did the same for his verismo opera Margot la rouge).^[6] As a result, his music never became widely known in France.^{[n 7]} Delius’s biographer Diana McVeagh says of these years that Delius “was found to be attractive, warm-hearted, spontaneous, and amorous.” It is generally believed that during this period he contracted the syphilis that caused the collapse of his health in later years.^[3][16]

Delius’s Paris years were musically productive. His symphonic poem Paa Vidderne was performed in Christiania in 1891 and in Monte Carlo in 1894; Gunnar Heiberg commissioned Delius to provide incidental music for his play Folkeraadet in 1897; and Delius’s second opera, The Magic Fountain, was accepted for staging at Prague, but the project fell through for unknown reasons.^[17] Other works of the period were the fantasy overture Over the Hills and Far Away (1895–97) and orchestral variations, Appalachia (1896, rewritten in 1904 for voices and orchestra).^[9]

First successes

 

Delius in 1897 by Christian Krohg

In 1897, Delius met the German artist Jelka Rosen, who later became his wife. She was a professional painter, a friend of Auguste Rodin, and a regular exhibitor at the Salon des Indépendants.^[3] Jelka quickly declared her admiration for the young composer’s music,^[18] and the couple were drawn closer together by a shared passion for the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the music of Grieg.^[3] Jelka bought a house in Grez-sur-Loing, a village 40 miles (64 km) outside Paris on the edge of Fontainebleau.^[3] Delius visited her there, and after a brief return visit to Florida, he moved in with her. In 1903 they married, and, apart from a short period when the area was threatened by the advancing German army during the First World War, Delius lived in Grez for the rest of his life.^[3] The marriage was not conventional: Jelka was, at first, the principal earner; there were no children; and Delius was not a faithful husband. Jelka was often distressed by his affairs, but her devotion did not waver.^[3]

In the same year, Delius began a fruitful association with German supporters of his music, the conductors Hans Haym, Fritz Cassirer and Alfred Hertz at Elberfeld, and Julius Buths at Düsseldorf.^[4] Haym conducted Over the Hills and Far Away, which he gave under its German title Über die Berge in die Ferne on 13 November 1897, believed to be the first time Delius’s music was heard in Germany.^[19] In 1899 Hertz gave a Delius concert in St. James’s Hall in London, which included Over the Hills and Far Away, a choral piece, Mitternachtslied, and excerpts from the opera Koanga. This occasion was an unusual opportunity for an unknown composer at a time when any sort of orchestral concert was a rare event in London.^[20] In spite of encouraging reviews, Delius’s orchestral music was not heard again in an English concert hall until 1907.^[19]

The orchestral work Paris: The Song of a Great City was composed in 1899 and dedicated to Haym. He gave the premiere at Elberfeld on 14 December 1901. It provoked some critical comment from the local newspaper, which complained that the composer put his listeners on a bus and shuttled them from one Parisian night-spot to another, “but he does not let us hear the tuneful gypsy melodies in the boulevard cafés, always just cymbals and tambourine and mostly from two cabarets at the same time at that”.^[19] The work was given under Busoni in Berlin less than a year later.^[19]

Most of Delius’s premieres of this period were given by Haym and his fellow German conductors. In 1904 Cassirer premiered Koanga, and in the same year the Piano Concerto was given in Elberfeld, and Lebenstanz in Düsseldorf. Appalachia (choral orchestral variations on an old slave song, also inspired by Florida) followed there in 1905. Sea Drift (a cantata with words taken from a poem by Walt Whitman) was premiered at Essen in 1906, and A Village Romeo and Juliet in Berlin in 1907.^[3] Delius’s reputation in Germany remained high until the First World War; in 1910 his rhapsody Brigg Fair was given by 36 different German orchestras.^[4]

Growing reputation

 

Thomas Beecham in 1910

By 1907, thanks to performances of his works in many German cities, Delius was, as Thomas Beecham said, “floating safely on a wave of prosperity which increased as the year went on”.^[21] Henry Wood premiered the revised version of Delius’s Piano Concerto that year. Also in 1907 Cassirer conducted some concerts in London, at one of which, with Beecham’s New Symphony Orchestra, he presented Appalachia. Beecham, who had until then heard not a note of Delius’s music, expressed his “wonderment” and became a lifelong devotee of the composer’s works.^[22] Just a few weeks later, in Liverpool on 11 January 1908, he conducted the British premiere of Paris: The Song of a Great City.^[23] Later that year, Beecham introduced Brigg Fair to London audiences,^[24] and Fernández Arbós presented Lebenstanz.^[25]

In 1909, Beecham conducted the first complete performance of A Mass of Life, the largest and most ambitious of Delius’s concert works, written for four soloists, a double choir, and a large orchestra.^[3] Although the work was based on the same Nietzsche work as Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, Delius distanced himself from the Strauss work, which he considered a complete failure.^[19] Nor was Strauss an admirer of Delius, as he was of Elgar; he told Delius that he did not wish to conduct Paris: “the symphonic development seems to me to be too scant, and it seems moreover to be an imitation of Charpentier“.^[26]

In early years of the 20th century, Delius composed some of his most popular works, including Brigg Fair (1907), In a Summer Garden (1908, revised 1911), Summer Night on the River (1911), and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1912), of which McVeagh comments, “These exquisite idylls, for all their composer’s German descent and French domicile, spell ‘England’ for most listeners.”^[3] In 1910, Beecham put on an opera season at the Royal Opera House in London. Having access to the Beecham family’s considerable fortune, he ignored commercial considerations and programmed several works of limited box-office appeal, including A Village Romeo and Juliet.^{[n 8]} The reviews were polite, but The Times, having praised the orchestral aspects of the score, commented, “Mr. Delius seems to have remarkably little sense of dramatic writing for the voice”.^[28] Other reviewers agreed that the score contained passages of great beauty, but was ineffective as drama.^[29]

War and post-war

During the First World War, Delius and Jelka moved from Grez to avoid the hostilities. They took up temporary residence in the south of England, where Delius continued to compose. In 1915, The Musical Times published a profile of him by his admirer, the composer Philip Heseltine (known as “Peter Warlock”), who commented:

[H]e holds no official position in the musical life of the country [i.e. Britain]; he does not teach in any of the academies, he is not even an honorary professor or doctor of music. He never gives concerts or makes propaganda for his music; he never conducts an orchestra, or plays an instrument in public (even Berlioz played the tambourine!)^[10]

Heseltine depicted Delius as a composer uncompromisingly focused on his own music. “There can be no superficial view of Delius’s music: either one feels it in the very depths of one’s being, or not at all. This may be a part of the reason why one so seldom hears a really first-rate performance of Delius’s work, save under Mr. Beecham”.^{[30][n 9]}

 

James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915). Delius provided incidental music to Flecker’s Hassan, premiered in 1923.

One of Delius’s major wartime works was his Requiem, dedicated “to the memory of all young Artists fallen in the war”. The work owes nothing to the traditional Christian liturgy, eschewing notions of an afterlife and celebrating instead a pantheistic renewal of Nature. When Albert Coates presented the work in London in 1922, its atheism offended some believers.^{[n 10]} This attitude persisted long after Delius’s death, as the Requiem did not receive another performance in the UK until 1965, and by 1980 had still had only seven performances world-wide. In Germany, the regular presentation of Delius’s works ceased at the outbreak of the war, and never resumed.^[32] Nevertheless, his standing with some continental musicians was unaffected; Beecham records that Bartók and Kodály were admirers of Delius, and the former grew into the habit of sending his compositions to Delius for comment and tried to interest him in both Hungarian and Romanian popular music.^[33]

By the end of the war, Delius and Jelka had returned to Grez. He had begun to show symptoms of syphilis that he had probably contracted in the 1880s. He took treatment at clinics across Europe, but by 1922 he was walking with two sticks, and by 1928 he was paralysed and blind. There was no return to the prosperity of pre-war years: Delius’s medical treatment was an additional expense, his blindness prevented him from composing, and his royalties were curtailed by the lack of continental performances of his music. Beecham gave discreet financial help, and the composer and musical benefactor H. Balfour Gardiner bought the house at Grez and allowed Delius and Jelka to live there rent-free.^[3]

Beecham was temporarily absent from the concert hall and opera house between 1920 and 1923, but Coates gave the first performance of A Song of the High Hills in 1920, and Henry Wood and Hamilton Harty programmed Delius’s music with the Queen’s Hall and Hallé Orchestras.^[4] Wood gave the British première of the Double Concerto for violin and cello in 1920, and of A Song Before Sunrise and the Dance Rhapsody No. 2 in 1923.^[34] Delius had a financial and artistic success with his incidental music for James Elroy Flecker‘s play Hassan (1923) with 281 performances at His Majesty’s Theatre.^[9] With Beecham’s return the composer became, in Hadley’s words, “what his most fervent admirers had never envisaged—a genuine popular success.” Hadley cites, in particular, the six-day Delius festival at the Queen’s Hall in 1929 under Beecham’s general direction, in the presence of the composer in his bath-chair. “[T]he cream of his orchestral output with and without soli and chorus was included,” and the hall was filled.^[4] Beecham was assisted in the organisation of the festival by Philip Heseltine, who wrote the detailed programme notes for three of the six concerts.^[31][35] The festival included chamber music and songs, an excerpt from A Village Romeo and Juliet, the Piano and Violin Concertos, and premières of Cynara and A Late Lark, concluding with A Mass of Life.^[9] The Manchester Guardian‘s music critic, Neville Cardus, met Delius during the festival. He describes the wreck of the composer’s physique, yet “there was nothing pitiable about him … his face was strong and disdainful, every line graven on it by intrepid living”. Delius, Cardus says, spoke with a noticeable Yorkshire accent as he dismissed most English music as paper music that should never be heard, written by people “afraid of their feelin’s”.^[36]

Last years

A young English admirer, Eric Fenby, learning that Delius was trying to compose by dictating to Jelka, volunteered his services as unpaid amanuensis. For five years, from 1928, he worked with Delius, taking down his new compositions from dictation, and helping him revise earlier works. Together they produced Cynara (a setting of words by Ernest Dowson), A Late Lark (a setting of W. E. Henley), A Song of Summer, a third violin sonata, the Irmelin prelude, and Idyll (1932), which reused music from Delius’s short opera Margot la rouge, composed thirty years earlier. McVeagh rates their greatest joint production as The Songs of Farewell, settings of Whitman poems for chorus and orchestra, which were dedicated to Jelka.^[3] Other works produced in this period include a Caprice and Elegy for cello and orchestra written for the distinguished British cellist Beatrice Harrison, and a short orchestral piece, Fantastic Dance, which Delius dedicated to Fenby.^[37] The violin sonata incorporates the first, incomprehensible, melody that Delius had attempted to dictate to Fenby before their modus operandi had been worked out. Fenby’s initial failure to pick up the tune led Delius to the view that “[the] boy is no good … he cannot even take down a simple melody”.^{[38][n 11]} Fenby later wrote a book about his experiences of working with Delius. Among other details, Fenby reveals Delius’s love of cricket. The pair followed the 1930 Test series between England and Australia with great interest, and regaled a bemused Jelka with accounts of their boyhood exploits in the game.^[39]

The first instance of a work by a major composer being heard on record before any public performance was Delius’s Air and Dance. It was written in 1915 but had never been performed. In 1929 Heseltine persuaded Beecham to record the work in May; it had its first public performance in October, at the Aeolian Hall.^[40]

 

Delius’s grave at St Peter’s Church in Limpsfield, Surrey, photographed in 2013

In 1933, the year before both composers died, Elgar, who had flown to Paris to conduct a performance of his Violin Concerto, visited Delius at Grez. Delius was not on the whole an admirer of Elgar’s music,^{[n 12]} but the two men took to each other, and there followed a warm correspondence until Elgar’s death in February 1934.^[9] Elgar described Delius as “a poet and a visionary”.^[41]

Delius died at Grez on 10 June 1934, aged 72. He had wished to be buried in his own garden, but the French authorities forbade it. His alternative wish, despite his atheism, was to be buried “in some country churchyard in the south of England, where people could place wild flowers”.^[9] At this time Jelka was too ill to make the journey across the Channel, and Delius was temporarily buried in the local cemetery at Grez.

By May 1935, Jelka felt she had enough strength to undertake the crossing to attend a reburial in England. St Peter’s Church, Limpsfield, Surrey, was chosen. Jelka became ill en route, and on arrival was taken to hospital in Dover and then Kensington in London, missing the reburial on 26 May. The ceremony took place at midnight; the headline in the Sunday Dispatch was “Sixty People Under Flickering Lamps In A Surrey Churchyard”.^[42] The vicar offered a prayer: “May the souls of the departed through the mercy of God rest in peace.”^[43] Jelka died two days later, on 28 May. She was buried in the same grave as Delius.^[3]

Sir Thomas Beecham, who was originally buried elsewhere in Surrey in 1961, was reinterred in 1991 a short distance from the Deliuses.^[23]

Music

For a complete listing of Delius’s works, see List of compositions by Frederick Delius.

Influences

 

The Fisk Jubilee Singers, portrayed during a European tour in the 1870s

After the 1929 London festival The Times music critic wrote that Delius “belongs to no school, follows no tradition and is like no other composer in the form, content or style of his music”.^[44] This “extremely individual and personal idiom”^[45] was, however, the product of a long musical apprenticeship, during which the composer absorbed many influences. The earliest significant experiences in his artistic development came, Delius later asserted, from the sounds of the plantation songs carried down the river to him at Solano Grove. It was this singing, he told Fenby, that first gave him the urge to express himself in music;^[46] thus, writes Fenby, many of Delius’s early works are “redolent of Negro hymnology and folk-song”, a sound “not heard before in the orchestra, and seldom since”.^[47] Delius’s familiarity with “black” music possibly predates his American adventures; during the 1870s a popular singing group, the Fisk Jubilee Singers from Nashville, Tennessee, toured Britain and Europe, giving several well-received concerts in Bradford. When Delius wrote to Elgar in 1933 of the “beautiful four-part harmonies” of the black plantation workers, he may have been unconsciously alluding to the spirituals sung by the Fisk group.^[48]

At Leipzig, Delius became a fervent disciple of Wagner, whose technique of continuous music he sought to master. An ability to construct long musical paragraphs is, according to the Delius scholar Christopher Palmer, Delius’s lasting debt to Wagner, from whom he also acquired a knowledge of chromatic harmonic technique, “an endlessly proliferating sensuousness of sound”.^[49] Grieg, however, was perhaps the composer who influenced him more than any other. The Norwegian composer, like Delius, found his primary inspiration in nature and in folk-melodies, and was the stimulus for the Norwegian flavour that characterises much of Delius’s early music.^[50] The music writer Anthony Payne observes that Grieg’s “airy texture and non-developing use of chromaticism showed [Delius] how to lighten the Wagnerian load”.^[9] Early in his career Delius drew inspiration from Chopin, later from his own contemporaries Ravel and Richard Strauss,^[51] and from the much younger Percy Grainger, who first brought the tune of Brigg Fair to Delius’s notice.^[52]

According to Palmer, it is arguable that Delius gained his sense of direction as a composer from his French contemporary Claude Debussy.^[53] Palmer identifies aesthetic similarities between the two, and points to several parallel characteristics and enthusiasms. Both were inspired early in their careers by Grieg, both admired Chopin; they are also linked in their musical depictions of the sea, and in their uses of the wordless voice. The opening of Brigg Fair is described by Palmer as “perhaps the most Debussian moment in Delius”.^[54] Debussy, in a review of Delius’s Two Danish Songs for soprano and orchestra given in a concert on 16 March 1901, wrote: “They are very sweet, very pale—music to soothe convalescents in well-to-do neighbourhoods”.^[55] Delius admired the French composer’s orchestration, but thought his works lacking in melody^[54]—the latter a comment frequently directed against Delius’s own music.^[56][57] Fenby, however, draws attention to Delius’s “flights of melodic poetic-prose”,^[58] while conceding that the composer was contemptuous of public taste, of “giving the public what they wanted” in the form of pretty tunes.^[59]

Stylistic development

From the conventional forms of his early music, over the course of his creative career Delius developed a style easily recognisable and “unlike the work of any other”, according to Payne.^[9] As he gradually found his voice, Delius replaced the methods developed during his creative infancy with a more mature style in which Payne discerns “an increasing richness of chord structure, bearing with it its own subtle means of contrast and development”.^[56] Hubert Foss, the Oxford University Press‘s musical editor during the 1920s and 1930s, writes that rather than creating his music from the known possibilities of instruments, Delius “thought the sounds first” and then sought the means for producing these particular sounds.^[60] Delius’s full stylistic maturity dates from around 1907, when he began to write the series of works on which his main reputation rests.^[56] In the more mature works Foss observes Delius’s increasing rejection of conventional forms such as sonata or concerto; Delius’s music, he comments, is “certainly not architectural; nearer to painting, especially to the pointilliste style of design”.^[60] The painting analogy is echoed by Cardus.^[57]

Towards recognition

Delius’s first orchestral compositions were, in Christopher Palmer‘s words, the work of “an insipid if charming water-colourist”.^[61] The Florida Suite (1887, revised 1889) is “an expertly crafted synthesis of Grieg and Negroid Americana”,^[62] while Delius’s first opera Irmelin (1890–92) lacks any identifiably Delian passages. Its harmony and modulation are conventional, and the work bears the clear fingerprints of Wagner and Grieg. Payne asserts that none of the works prior to 1895 are of lasting interest. The first noticeable stylistic advance is evident in Koanga (1895–97), with richer chords and faster harmonic rhythms; here we find Delius “feeling his way towards the vein that he was soon to tap so surely”.^[56] In Paris (1899), the orchestration owes a debt to Richard Strauss; its passages of quiet beauty, says Payne, nevertheless lack the deep personal involvement of the later works. Paris, the final work of Delius’s apprentice years, is described by Foss as “one of the most complete, if not the greatest, of Delius’s musical paintings”.^[60]

 

Woodcut illustration (1919) of the young lovers from Gottfried Keller‘s original story, which became Delius’s opera A Village Romeo and Juliet

In each of the major works written in the years after Paris, Delius combined orchestral and vocal forces. The first of these works was A Village Romeo and Juliet, a music drama which departs from the normal operatic structure of acts and scenes and tells its story of tragic love in a series of tableaux. Musically it shows a considerable advance in style from the early operas of the apprentice years. The entr’acte known as “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” is described by Heseltine as showing “all the tragic beauty of mortality … concentrated and poured forth in music of overwhelming, almost intolerable poignancy”.^[10] In this work Delius begins to achieve the texture of sound that characterised all his later compositions.^[56] Delius’s music is often assumed to lack melody and form. Cardus argues that melody, while not a primary factor, is there abundantly, “floating and weaving itself into the texture of shifting harmony” – a characteristic which Cardus believes is shared only by Debussy.^[57]

Delius’s next work, Appalachia, introduces a further feature that recurred in later pieces—the use of the voice instrumentally in wordless singing, in this case depicting the distant plantation songs that had inspired Delius at Solano Grove.^[56] Although Payne argues that Appalachia shows only a limited advance in technique, Fenby identifies one orchestral passage as the first expression of Delius’s idea of “the transitoriness of all mortal things mirrored in nature”. Hereafter, whole works rather than brief passages would be informed by this idea.^[63] The transitional phase of the composer’s career concludes with three further vocal pieces: Sea Drift (1903), A Mass of Life (1904–05), and Songs of Sunset (1906–07). Payne salutes each of these as masterpieces, in which the Delian style struggles to emerge in its full ripeness.^[56] Fenby describes A Mass of Life as standing outside the general progression of Delius’s work, “a vast parenthesis”, unlike anything else he wrote, but nevertheless an essential ingredient in his development.^[64]

Full flowering

Brigg Fair (1907) announced the composer’s full stylistic maturity, the first of the pieces for small orchestra that confirm Delius’s status as a musical poet, with the influences of Wagner and Grieg almost entirely absent.^[56] The work was followed in the next few years by In a Summer Garden (1908), Life’s Dance (1911), Summer Night on the River (1911) and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring (1912). The critic R.W.S. Mendl described this sequence as “exquisite nature studies”, with a unity and shape lacking in the earlier formal tone poems.^[65] These works became part of the standard English concert repertory, and helped to establish the character of Delius’s music in the English concert-goer’s mind, although according to Ernest Newman, the concentration on these works to the neglect of his wider output may have done Delius as much harm as good.^[66] The typical mature Delian orchestral sound is apparent in these works, through the division of the strings into ten or more sections, punctuated by woodwind comments and decorations.^[56] In the North Country Sketches of 1913–14, Delius divides the strings into 12 parts, and harps, horns, clarinets and bassoons evoke a lifeless winter scene.^[67] In Payne’s view, the Sketches are the high water mark of Delius’s compositional skill,^[56] although Fenby awards the accolade to the later Eventyr (Once Upon a Time) (1917).^[68]

During this period Delius did not confine himself to purely orchestral works; he produced his final opera, Fennimore and Gerda (1908–10), like A Village Romeo and Juliet written in tableau form, but in his mature style. His choral works of the period, notably An Arabesque (1911) and A Song of the High Hills (1911) are among the most radical of Delius’s writings in their juxtapositions of unrelated chords.^[9] The latter work, entirely wordless, contains some of the most difficult choral music in existence, according to Heseltine.^[30] After 1915, Delius turned his attention to traditional sonata, chamber and concerto forms, which he had largely left alone since his apprentice days. Of these pieces Payne highlights two: the Violin Concerto (1916), as an example of how, writing in unfamiliar genres, Delius remained stylistically true to himself; and the Cello Sonata of 1917, which, lacking the familiarity of an orchestral palate, becomes a melodic triumph.^[56] Cardus’s verdict, however, is that Delius’s chamber and concerto works are largely failures.^[57] After 1917, according to Payne, there was a general deterioration in the quantity and quality of Delius’s output as illness took hold, although Payne exempts the incidental music to Hassan (1920–23) from condemnation, believing it to contain some of Delius’s best work.^[9][56]

Final phase

The four-year association with Fenby from 1929 produced two major works, and several smaller pieces often drawn from unpublished music from Delius’s early career. The first of the major works was the orchestral A Song of Summer, based on sketches that Delius had previously collected under the title of A Poem of Life and Love.^[69] In dictating the new beginning of this work, Delius asked Fenby to “imagine that we are sitting on the cliffs in the heather, looking out over the sea”.^[70] This does not, says Fenby, indicate that the dictation process was calm and leisurely; the mood was usually frenzied and nerve-wracking.^[71] The other major work, a setting of Walt Whitman poems with the title Songs of Farewell, was an even more alarming prospect to Fenby: “the complexity of thinking in so many strands, often all at once; the problems of orchestral and vocal balance; the wider area of possible misunderstandings …” combined to leave Delius and his helper exhausted after each session of work—yet both these works were ready for performance in 1932.^[37] Of the music in this final choral work, Beecham wrote of its “hard, masculine vigour, reminiscent in mood and fibre of some of the great choral passages in A Mass of Life“.^[72] Payne describes the work as “bracing and exultant, with in places an almost Holstian clarity”.