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

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

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”.^[56]

Reception

Recognition came late to Delius; before 1899, when he was already 37, his works were largely unpublished and unknown to the public. When the symphonic poem Paa Vidderne was performed at Monte Carlo on 25 February 1894 in a programme of works from British composers, The Musical Times listed the composers as “… Balfe, Mackenzie, Oakeley, Sullivan … and one Delius, whoever he may be”.^[73] The work was well received in Monte Carlo, and brought the composer a congratulatory letter from Princess Alice of Monaco, but this did not lead to demands for further performances of this or other Delius works.^[74] Some of his individual songs (he wrote more than 60) were occasionally included in vocal recitals; referring to “the strange songs of Fritz Delius”, The Times critic expressed regret “that the powers the composer undoubtedly possesses should not be turned to better account or undergo proper development at the hands of some musician competent to train them”.^[75]

 

St James’s Hall, London, the venue for Delius’s first London concert, May 1899

Of the May 1899 concert at St. James’s Hall, London, The Musical Times reviewer remarked on the rawness of some of the music, but praised the “boldness of conception and virile strength that command and hold attention.”^[76] Beecham, however, records that despite this “fair show of acclaim”, for all the impetus it gave to future performances of Delius’s work the event might never have happened; none of the music was heard again in England for many years.^[77] Delius was much better received in Germany, where a series of successful performances of his works led to what Beecham describes as a Delius vogue there, “second only to that of Richard Strauss”.^[78]

In England, a performance of the Piano Concerto on 22 October 1907 at the Queen’s Hall was praised for the brilliance of the soloist, Theodor Szántó, and for the power of the music itself.^[79] From that point onwards the music of Delius became increasingly familiar to both British and European audiences, as performances of his works proliferated. Beecham’s presentation of A Mass of Life at the Queen’s Hall in June 1909 did not inspire Hans Haym, who had come from Elberfeld for the concert,^[19] though Beecham says that many professional and amateur musicians thought it “the most impressive and original achievement of its genre written in the last fifty years”^[21] Some reviewers, nevertheless, doubted the popular appeal of Delius’s music, while others were more specifically hostile.^{[n 13]}

From 1910, Delius’s works began to be heard in America: Brigg Fair and In a Summer Garden were performed in 1910–11 by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Walter Damrosch. In November 1915 Grainger gave the first American performance of the Piano Concerto, again with the New York Philharmonic. The New York Times critic described the work as uneven; richly harmonious, but combining colour and beauty with effects “of an almost crass unskillfulness and ugliness”.^[82]

For the rest of his lifetime Delius’s more popular pieces were performed in England and abroad, often under the sponsorship of Beecham, who was primarily responsible for the Delius festival in October–November 1929. In a retrospective comment on the festival The Times critic wrote of full houses and an apparent enthusiasm for “music which hitherto has enjoyed no exceptional vogue”, but wondered whether this new acceptance was based on a solid foundation.^[44] After Delius’s death Beecham continued to promote his works; a second festival was held in 1946, and a third (after Beecham’s death) at Bradford in 1962, to celebrate the centenary of Delius’s birth. These occasions were in the face of a general indifference to the music;^[83] writing in the centenary year, the musicologist Deryck Cooke opined that at that time, “to declare oneself a confirmed Delian is hardly less self-defamatory than to admit to being an addict of cocaine and marihuana”.^[84]

Beecham had died in 1961, and Fenby writes that it “seemed to many then that nothing could save Delius’s music from extinction”, such was the conductor’s unique mastery over the music.^[13] However, other conductors have continued to advocate Delius, and since the centenary year, the Delius Society has pursued the aim of “develop[ing] a greater knowledge of the life and works of Delius”.^[85] The music has never become fashionable, however, a fact often acknowledged by promoters and critics.^{[n 14]} To suggestions that Delius’s music is an “acquired taste”, Fenby answers: “The music of Delius is not an acquired taste. One either likes it the moment one first hears it, or the sound of it is once and for ever distasteful to one. It is an art which will never enjoy an appeal to the many, but one which will always be loved, and dearly loved, by the few.”^[88] Writing in 2004 on the 70th anniversary of Delius’s death, Guardian journalist Martin Kettle recalls Cardus arguing in 1934 that Delius as a composer was unique, both in his technique and in his emotionalism. Although he eschewed classical formalism, it was wrong, Cardus believed, to regard Delius merely as “a tone-painter, an impressionist or a maker of programme music”. His music’s abiding feature is, Cardus wrote, that it “recollects emotion in tranquillity … Delius is always reminding us that beauty is born by contemplation after the event”.^[89]

Memorials and legacy

 

The sculpture A Quatrefoil for Delius, by Amber Hiscott, unveiled in Delius’s honour, in Exchange Square, Bradford, on 23 November 1993.

Just before his death, Delius prepared a codicil to his will whereby the royalties on future performances of his music would be used to support an annual concert of works by young composers. Delius died before this provision could be legally effected; according to Fenby, Beecham then persuaded Jelka in her own will to abandon the concerts idea and apply the royalties towards the editing and recording of Delius’s main works.^[90] After Jelka’s death in 1935 the Delius Trust was established, to supervise this task. As stipulated in Jelka’s will, the Trust operated largely under Beecham’s direction. After Beecham’s death in 1961 advisers were appointed to assist the trustees, and in 1979 the administration of the Trust was taken over by the Musicians’ Benevolent Fund. Over the years the Trust’s objectives have been extended so that it can promote the music of other composers who were Delius’s contemporaries.^[91] The Trust is a co-sponsor of the 2010 Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize for young composers.^[92]

In 1962, enthusiasts for Delius’s music who had gone to Bradford for the centenary festival formed the Delius Society; Fenby became its first president.^[13] With around 400 members, the Society is independent from the Trust, but works closely with it. Its general objectives are the furtherance of knowledge of Delius’s life and works, and the encouragement of performances and recordings.^[85] In 2004, as a stimulus for young musicians to study and perform Delius’s music, the Society established an annual Delius Prize competition, with a prize of £1,000 to the winner.^[93] In June 1984, at the Grand Theatre, Leeds, the Delius Trust sponsored a commemorative production of A Village Romeo and Juliet by Opera North, to mark the 50th anniversary of Delius’s death.^[94]

Public interest in Delius’s life was stimulated in the UK in 1968, with the showing of the Ken Russell film Song of Summer on BBC Television. The film depicted the years of the Delius–Fenby collaboration; Fenby co-scripted with Russell. Max Adrian played Delius, with Christopher Gable as Fenby and Maureen Pryor as Jelka.^[95][96] Kate Bush‘s song “Delius (Song of Summer)”, the B-side of her 1980 “Army Dreamers“, is an appreciation of the composer as portrayed in Russell’s film.^[97][98]

In America, a small memorial to Delius stands in Solano Grove.^[99] The Delius Association of Florida has for many years organised an annual festival at Jacksonville, to mark the composer’s birthday. At Jacksonville University, the Music Faculty awards an annual Delius Composition Prize.^[13] In February 2012 Delius was one of ten prominent Britons honoured by the Royal Mail in the “Britons of Distinction” stamps set.^[100]

Beecham stresses Delius’s role as an innovator: “The best of Delius is undoubtedly to be found in those works where he disregarded classical traditions and created his own forms”.^[101] Fenby echoes this: “the people who really count are those who discover new ways of making our lives more beautiful. Frederick Delius was such a man”.^[95] Palmer writes that Delius’s true legacy is the ability of his music to inspire the creative urge in its listeners and to enhance their awareness of the wonders of life. Palmer concludes by invoking George Eliot‘s poem The Choir Invisible: “Frederick Delius … belongs to the company of those true artists for whose life and work the world is a better place to live in, and of whom surely is composed, in a literal sense, ‘the choir invisible/Whose music is the gladness of the world'”.^[102]

Recordings

The first recordings of Delius’s works, in 1927, were conducted by Beecham for the Columbia label: the “Walk to the Paradise Garden” interlude from A Village Romeo and Juliet, and On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, performed by the orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society. These began a long series of Delius recordings under Beecham that continued for the rest of the conductor’s life.^[103] He was not alone, however; Geoffrey Toye in 1929–30 recorded Brigg Fair, In a Summer Garden, Summer Night on the River and the “Walk to the Paradise Garden”. Fenby recounts that on his first day in Grez, Jelka played Beecham’s First Cuckoo recording.^[104] In May 1934, when Delius was close to death, Fenby played him Toye’s In a Summer Garden, the last music, Fenby says, that Delius ever heard.^[105] By the end of the 1930s Beecham had issued versions for Columbia of most of the main orchestral and choral works, together with several songs in which he accompanied the soprano Dora Labbette on the piano.^[103] By 1936 Columbia and HMV had issued recordings of Violin Sonatas 1 and 2, the Elegy and Caprice, and of some of the shorter works.^[106]

Full recordings of the operas were not available until after the Second World War. Once again Beecham, now with the HMV label, led the way, with A Village Romeo and Juliet in 1948, performed by the new Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus.^[103] Later versions of this work include those of Meredith Davies for EMI in 1971,^[107] Charles Mackerras for Argo in 1989,^[108] and a German-language version conducted by Klauspeter Seibel in 1995.^[109] Beecham’s former protégé Norman Del Mar recorded a complete Irmelin for BBC Digital in 1985.^[110] In 1997 EMI reissued Meredith Davies’s 1976 recording of Fennimore and Gerda,^[111] which Richard Hickox conducted in German the same year for Chandos.^[112] Recordings of all the major works, and of many of the individual songs, have been issued at regular intervals since the Second World War. Many of these recordings have been issued in conjunction with the Delius Society, which has prepared various discographies of Delius’s recorded music.^{[n 15]
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historic musical bits: Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5 / Bernstein · New York Philharmonic Orchestra

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 5 / Bernstein · New York Philharmonic Orchestra

Canal de Josep489

Published on Oct 16, 2012 / 957,745 views

Gran presentación del director norteamericano Leonard Bernstein, conduciendo a la Orquesta Filarmónica de New York interpretando la Sinfonía No. 5 de Dmitri Shostakovich en la localidad japonesa de Bunka Kainan, Tokio en el año 1979.

Great presentation of american conductor Leonard Bernstein with the New York Philharmonic, playing the Symphony No. 5 of Dmitri Shostakovich at a 1979 live perfomance on Bunka Kainan, Tokyo, Japan.

http://www.kultur.com/Bernstein-In-Ja…

historic musical bits: Stravinsky|The Firebird / Gergiev · Vienna Philarmonic · Salzburg Festival 2000 (Wikipedia article on the musical piece

Stravinsky: The Firebird / Gergiev · Vienna Philarmonic · Salzburg Festival 2000

Canal de Josep489

Uploaded on Nov 6, 2011 / 1,452,810 views

Gran presentación de la Orquesta Filarmónica de Viena, conducida por el director ruso Valery Gergiev en [a mi juicio personal] una de las más grandes y magníficas interpretaciones del Pájaro de Fuego (L’Oiseau de feu) de Igor Stravinsky, que se tenga conocimiento, durante el Festival de Salzburgo 2000.

Great presentation of the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by the russian Maestro Valery Gergiev, in one of the most powerful and greatest presentation of The Firebird (L’Oiseau de feu) of Igor Stravinsky at Salzburg Festival 2000.

(C) Deusche Grammophon, ORF/RM Associates Limited , Music Publishing Rights Collecting Society, UMPG Publishing and all their respective owners. There’s no personal work here.

(C) Deutsche Grammophon, ORF/RM Associates Limited et toutes leurs propriétaires respectifs.
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The Firebird

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

This article is about the ballet to Stravinsky’s 1910 music. For other uses of the word, see Firebird.

The Firebird
Léon Bakst: Firebird, Ballerina, 1910
Choreographer	Michel Fokine
Music	Igor Stravinsky
Based on	Russian folk tales
Premiere	25 June 1910 Paris Opera
Original ballet company	Ballets Russes
Characters	The Firebird Prince Ivan Tsarevich Koschei, the Immortal The Beautiful Tsarevna
Design	Aleksandr Golovin (sets) Léon Bakst (costumes)
Created for	Tamara Karsavina, Michel Fokine

The Firebird (French: L’Oiseau de feu; Russian: Жар-птица, Zhar-ptitsa) is a ballet by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, written for the 1910 Paris season of Sergei Diaghilev‘s Ballets Russes, with choreography by Michel Fokine. The scenario by Alexandre Benois and Michel Fokine is based on Russian fairy tales of the magical glowing bird that can be both a blessing and a curse to its owner. At the premiere on 25 June 1910 in Paris, the work was an instant success with both audience and critics.

The ballet has historic significance not only as Stravinsky’s breakthrough piece, but also as the beginning of the collaboration between Diaghilev and Stravinsky that would also produce Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Pulcinella and others.

Background

 Stravinsky, sketched by Picasso

Igor Stravinsky was the son of Fyodor Stravinsky, the principal bass at the Imperial Opera, St Petersburg, and Anna, née Kholodovskaya, a competent amateur singer and pianist from an old-established Russian family. Fyodor’s association with many of the leading figures in Russian music, including Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky, meant that Igor grew up in an intensely musical home.^[1] In 1901 Stravinsky began to study law at St Petersburg University, while taking private lessons in harmony and counterpoint. Having impressed Rimsky-Korsakov with some of his early compositional efforts, Stravinsky worked under the guidance of the older composer. By the time of his mentor’s death in 1908 Stravinsky had produced several works, among them a Piano Sonata in F-sharp minor (1903–04), a Symphony in E-flat major (1907), which he catalogued as “Opus 1”, and in 1908 a short orchestral piece, Feu d’artifice (“Fireworks”).^[2][3]

In 1909 Feu d’artifice was performed at a concert in St Petersburg. Among those in the audience was the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, who at that time was planning to introduce Russian music and art to western audiences.^[4] Like Stravinsky, Diaghilev had initially studied law, but had gravitated via journalism into the theatrical world.^[5] In 1907 he began his theatrical career by presenting five concerts in Paris; in the following year he introduced Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov. In 1909, still in Paris, he launched the Ballets Russes, initially with Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances from Prince Igor and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. To present these works Diaghilev recruited the choreographer Michel Fokine, the designer Léon Bakst and the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. Diaghilev’s intention, however, was to produce new works in a distinctively 20th-century style, and he was looking for fresh compositional talent.^[6]

Genesis and premiere

The ballet was the first of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes productions to have an all-original score composed for it. Alexandre Benois wrote in 1910 that he had two years earlier suggested to Diaghilev the production of a Russian nationalist ballet,^[7] an idea all the more attractive given both the newly awakened French passion for Russian dance and also the ruinously expensive costs of staging opera. The inspiration of mixing the mythical Firebird with the unrelated Russian tale of Koschei the Deathless possibly came from a popular child’s verse by Yakov Polonsky, “A Winter’s Journey” (Zimniy put, 1844), which includes the lines:

And in my dreams I see myself on a wolf’s back
Riding along a forest path
To do battle with a sorcerer-tsar (Koschei)
In that land where a princess sits under lock and key,
Pining behind massive walls.
There gardens surround a palace all of glass;
There Firebirds sing by night
And peck at golden fruit.^[8]

Benois collaborated with the choreographer Michel Fokine, drawing from several books of Russian fairy tales including the collection of Alexander Afanasyev, to concoct a story involving the Firebird and the evil magician Koschei.

Diaghilev approached the Russian composer Anatoly Lyadov (1855–1914) to write the music.^[9] There is no evidence, however, despite the much-repeated story that Lyadov was slow to start composing the work, that he ever accepted the commission to begin with.^[10] There is evidence to suggest that Nikolai Tcherepnin had previously started composing music for the ballet—music which became The Enchanted Kingdom—but that Tcherepnin, for reasons unexplained, withdrew from the project after completing only one scene.^[11] Diaghilev eventually transferred the commission to the 28-year-old Stravinsky.

The ballet was premiered by the Ballets Russes in Paris on 25 June 1910, conducted by Gabriel Pierné.^[12] Even before the first performance, the company sensed a huge success in the making, and every performance of the ballet in that first production, as Karsavina recalled, met a “crescendo” of success.^[13] The critics were ecstatic, praising the ballet for what they saw as an ideal symbiosis between decor, choreography and music: “The old-gold vermiculatino of the fantastic back-cloth seems to have been invented to a formula identical with that of the shimmering web of the orchestra” enthused Henri Ghéon in Nouvelle revue française (1910).^[14] The scenery was designed by Alexander Golovine and the costumes by Léon Bakst.

For Stravinsky, it was a major breakthrough both with the public and with the critics, Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi in particular hailing Stravinsky as the legitimate heir to The Mighty Handful.^[15] The Firebird’s success also secured Stravinsky’s position as Diaghilev’s star composer, and there were immediate talks of a sequel,^[16] leading to the composition of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. “Mark him well—said Sergei Diaghilev to Tamara Karsavina, who was dancing the title role—he is a man on the eve of celebrity…”^[17]

Stravinsky used several ideas from works by Rimsky-Korsakov in his score. Koschei’s “Infernal Dance” borrows the highly chromatic scale Rimsky-Korsakov created for the character Chernobog in his opera Mlada. The Khorovod, meanwhile, uses the same folk tune Rimsky-Korsakov presented in his Sinfonietta, Op. 31.

Subsequent ballet performances

Main article: List of Firebird casts

The Firebird has been restaged by many choreographers, including George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins (co-coreographers), Graeme Murphy, Alexei Ratmansky, and Yuri Possokhov.

The ballet was revived in 1934 by Colonel Wassily de Basil‘s company, the Ballets Russes de Monte-Carlo, in a production staged in London, using the original decor and costumes from Diaghilev’s company.^[18] The company subsequently performed the ballet in Australia, during the 1936–37 tour.^[19]

The work was staged by George Balanchine for the New York City Ballet in 1949 with Maria Tallchief as the Firebird, with scenery and costumes by Marc Chagall, and was kept in the repertory until 1965. The ballet was restaged by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins in 1970 for the New York City Ballet with elaborated scenery by Chagall, and with new costumes by Karinska based on Chagall’s for the 1972 Stravinsky Festival that introduced Gelsey Kirkland as the Firebird.^[20]

The Mariinsky Ballet performed the original choreography at Covent Garden in August 2011, as part of their Fokine retrospective.

The National Ballet of Canada created a version of the Firebird for television, occasionally rebroadcast, in which special effects were used to make it appear that the Firebird is in flight.

On 29 March 2012, the American Ballet Theatre premiered the ballet with choreography by Alexei Ratmansky at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa, California, starring Misty Copeland.

Plot summary

The ballet centers on the journey of its hero, Prince Ivan. While hunting in the forest, he strays into the magical realm of Koschei the Immortal, whose immortality is preserved by keeping his soul in a magic egg hidden in a casket. Ivan chases and captures the Firebird and is about to kill her; she begs for her life and he spares her. As a token of thanks she offers him an enchanted feather which he can use to summon her should he be in dire need.

Prince Ivan then meets thirteen princesses who are under the spell of Koschei and falls in love with one of them. The next day, Ivan confronts the magician and eventually they begin quarrelling. When Koschei sends his minions after Ivan, he summons the Firebird. She intervenes, bewitching the monsters and making them dance an elaborate, energetic dance (the “Infernal Dance”). The creatures and Koschei then fall into a deep sleep. While they sleep, the Firebird directs Ivan to a tree stump where the casket with the egg containing Koschei’s soul is hidden. Ivan destroys the egg and with the spell broken, the magical creatures that Koschei held captive are freed and the palace disappears. All of the “real” beings, including the princesses, awaken and with one final hint of the Firebird’s music (though in Fokine’s choreography she makes no appearance in that final scene on-stage), celebrate their victory.

Order of numbers in the 1910 ballet score

Most common numbers separation in most recordings I. Introduction First Tableau II. Le Jardin enchanté de Kachtcheï (The Enchanted Garden of Kastchei) III. Apparition de l’Oiseau de feu, poursuivi par Ivan Tsarévitch (Appearance of the Firebird, Pursued by Prince Ivan) IV. Danse de l’Oiseau de feu (Dance of the Firebird) V. Capture de l’Oiseau de feu par Ivan Tsarévitch (Capture of the Firebird by Prince Ivan) VI. Supplications de l’Oiseau de feu (Supplication of the Firebird) VII. Apparition des treize princesses enchantées (Appearance of the Thirteen Enchanted Princesses) VIII. Jeu des princesses avec les pommes d’or (The Princesses’ Game with the Golden Apples). Scherzo IX. Brusque apparition d’Ivan Tsarévitch (Sudden Appearance of Prince Ivan) X. Khorovode (Ronde) des princesses (Khorovod (Round Dance) of the Princesses) XI. Lever du jour (Daybreak) XII. Ivan Tsarévitch pénètre dans le palais de Kachtcheï (Prince Ivan Penetrates Kastchei’s Palace) XIII. Carillon Féerique, apparition des monstres-gardiens de Kachtcheï et capture d’Ivan Tsarévitch (Magic Carillon, Appearance of Kastchei’s Monster Guardians, and Capture of Prince Ivan) XIV. Arrivée de Kachtcheï l’Immortel (Arrival of Kastchei the Immortal) XV. Dialogue de Kachtcheï avec Ivan Tsarévitch (Dialogue of Kastchei and Prince Ivan) XVI. Intercession des princesses (Intercession of the Princesses) XVII. Apparition de l’Oiseau de feu (Appearance of the Firebird) XVIII. Danse de la suite de Kachtcheï, enchantée par l’Oiseau de feu (Dance of Kastchei’ Retinue, Enchanted by the Firebird) XIX. Danse infernale de tous les sujets de Kachtcheï (Infernal Dance of All Kastchei’s Subjects) XX. Berceuse (L’Oiseau de feu) (Lullaby) XXI. Réveil de Kachtcheï (Kastchei’s Awakening) XXII. Mort de Kachtcheï (Kastchei’s Death) XXIII. Profondes ténèbres (Profound Darkness) Second Tableau XXIV. Disparition du palais et des sortilèges de Kachtcheï, animation des chevaliers pétrifiés, allégresse générale (Disappearance of Kastchei’s Palace and Magical Creations, Return to Life of the Petrified Knights, General Rejoicing)

Numbers separated by Stravinsky himself I. Introduction First Tableau II. Le Jardin enchanté de Kachtcheï (The Enchanted Garden of Kastchei) III. Apparition de l’Oiseau de feu, poursuivi par Ivan Tsarévitch (Appearance of the Firebird, Pursued by Prince Ivan) IV. Danse de l’Oiseau de feu (Dance of the Firebird) V. Capture de l’Oiseau de feu par Ivan Tsarévitch (Capture of the Firebird by Prince Ivan) VI. Supplications de l’Oiseau de feu (Supplication of the Firebird) – Apparition des treize princesses enchantées (Appearance of the Thirteen Enchanted Princesses) VII. Jeu des princesses avec les pommes d’or (The Princesses’ Game with the Golden Apples). Scherzo VIII. Brusque apparition d’Ivan Tsarévitch (Sudden Appearance of Prince Ivan) IX. Khorovode (Ronde) des princesses (Khorovod (Round Dance) of the Princesses) X. Lever du jour (Daybreak) – Ivan Tsarévitch pénètre dans le palais de Kachtcheï (Prince Ivan Penetrates Kastchei’s Palace) XI. Carillon Féerique, apparition des monstres-gardiens de Kachtcheï et capture d’Ivan Tsarévitch (Magic Carillon, Appearance of Kastchei’s Monster Guardians, and Capture of Prince Ivan) – Arrivée de Kachtcheï l’Immortel (Arrival of Kastchei the Immortal) – Dialogue de Kachtcheï avec Ivan Tsarévitch (Dialogue of Kastchei and Prince Ivan) – Intercession des princesses (Intercession of the Princesses) – Apparition de l’Oiseau de feu (Appearance of the Firebird) XII. Danse de la suite de Kachtcheï, enchantée par l’Oiseau de feu (Dance of Kastchei’ Retinue, Enchanted by the Firebird) XIII. Danse infernale de tous les sujets de Kachtcheï (Infernal Dance of All Kastchei’s Subjects) – Berceuse (L’Oiseau de feu) (Lullaby) – Réveil de Kachtcheï (Kastchei’s Awakening) – Mort de Kachtcheï (Kastchei’s Death) – Profondes ténèbres (Profound Darkness) Second Tableau XIV. Disparition du palais et des sortilèges de Kachtcheï, animation des chevaliers pétrifiés, allégresse générale (Disappearance of Kastchei’s Palace and Magical Creations, Return to Life of the Petrified Knights, General Rejoicing)

Orchestration: 4 flutes (3rd & 4th also Piccolo); 3 oboes; cor anglais; 3 clarinets (3rd also D Clarinet); bass clarinet; 3 bassoons (2nd also 2nd contrabassoon); contrabassoon; 4 horns; 3 trumpets; 3 trombones; tuba; 3 trumpets (onstage); 4 Wagner tubas (two tenor and two bass, onstage); timpani; bass drum; cymbals; triangle; tambourine; tamtam; tubular bells; glockenspiel; xylophone; celesta; 3 harps; pianoforte; strings.

The Firebird ballet suites

 

Ivan Bilibin. A warrior — costume design for 1931 performance of The Firebird

Besides the complete 50-minute ballet score of 1909–10 (written for a very large orchestra including quadruple woodwind and three harps, as well as a piano), there are three shorter suites arranged by the composer himself for concert performance by a smaller orchestra, which date from 1911, 1919 and 1945. While the 1919 suite remains the most well known and often played, the 1945 version contains the most music from the original ballet score (partly motivated by the need to secure copyright in a USA that did not recognize European agreements).

There is no consensus for the precise naming of either the different versions, or of the movements, or the numbering of the movements. Different recordings tend to follow different naming conventions. While this partly might be due to the English translation from the original French names, some recordings of the orchestral suites even avoid referring to the tale by just calling the movements by their tempo markings (i.e., Adagio, Allegro, etc.) or the name of the musical form (Scherzo, Rondo, etc.).

Many adaptations of The Firebird Suite for concert band, marching band and drum corps have been made throughout the years.

Order of movements in the 1911 Suite

“Concert suite for orchestra No. 1”

1. Introduction – Kashchei’s Enchanted Garden – Dance of the Firebird
2. Supplication of the Firebird
3. The Princesses’ Game with Apples
4. The Princesses’ Khorovod (Rondo, round dance)
5. Infernal dance of all Kashchei’s Subjects

Orchestration: essentially as per the original ballet—the score was printed from the same plates, with only the new endings for the movements being newly engraved.

Some recordings will list movement no. 1 as three movements.

In 1928, Stravinsky conducted a group of Parisian musicians in a recording of this suite for Columbia Records, which was released on a set of 12-inch 78-rpm discs.

The Kalmus orchestral score for this suite is dated “1910”, while Luck’s Music publishes this version as “1912”

The 2005 remastered edition on Sony with conductor Pierre Boulez calls it “Ballet suite for orchestra”, while in 1991 Sony called it “Suite, 1910”.

Order of movements in the 1919 Suite

“Concert suite for orchestra No. 2”

	Infernal Dance of Kastchei   Menu       0:00   The “Infernal Dance of Kastchei” performed in 1994 by the United States Marine Corps Band
Problems playing this file? See media help.

1. Introduction—The Firebird and its dance—The Firebird’s variation
2. The Princesses’ Khorovod (Rondo, round dance)
3. Infernal dance of King Kashchei
4. Berceuse (Lullaby)
5. Finale

Orchestration: 2 Flutes (2nd also Piccolo); 2 Oboes (2nd also English Horn for one measure); 2 Clarinets; 2 Bassoons; 4 Horns; 2 Trumpets; 3 Trombones; Tuba; Timpani; Bass Drum; Tambourine; Cymbals; Triangle; Xylophone; Harp; Pianoforte (also opt. Celesta); Strings.

Some recordings will list movement no. 1) as two or three movements. It is sometimes also referred to as a “Symphonic Suite”.

Order of movements in the 1945 Suite

“Ballet suite for orchestra”

1. Introduction—The Firebird and its dance—The Firebird’s variation
2. Pantomime I
3. Pas de deux: Firebird and Ivan Tsarevich
4. Pantomime II
5. Scherzo: Dance of the Princesses
6. Pantomime III
7. The Princesses’ Khorovod (Rondo, round dance)
8. Infernal dance of King Kashchei
9. Berceuse (Lullaby)
10. Finale

Orchestration: 2 Flutes (2nd also Piccolo); 2 Oboes; 2 Clarinets; 2 Bassoons; 4 Horns; 2 Trumpets; 3 Trombones; Tuba; Timpani; Bass Drum; Snare Drum; Tambourine; Cymbals; Triangle; Xylophone; Harp; Pianoforte; Strings.

Once again, some recordings will list movement no. 1) as three movements or may refer to this as a “Symphonic Suite”. Stravinsky recorded this suite in 1967, his last commercial recording for Columbia Records.

In popular culture

The numbers The Princesses’ Khorovod and The Infernal Dance of King Katscheï were used in Bruno Bozzetto‘s animated film Allegro Non Troppo. The segment visualizes a variant of the Adam and Eve story.^[21] However, in this version, both Adam and Eve refuse to eat the apple offered by the Serpent, who then swallows it himself. Falling asleep, he is immediately plunged into a nightmare where he is first tormented by fiery demons and then plagued by things that are supposed to corrupt mankind (sex, alcohol, money, material objects, drugs, violence); he also somehow grows arms and legs and is magicked into a suit and fedora. When he wakes up, he is still wearing the suit and hat; after telling Adam and Eve his dream in a fast-motion and incomprehensible fashion, he sheds the suit (losing his arms and legs but keeping the hat) and spits up the still-whole apple.

The chapter in the animated film Fantasia 2000 based on Stravinsky’s piece uses an abridged version (this can be most evidenced by a shortened Infernal Dance) of the 1919 suite to tell the story of the Spring Sprite and her companion, an elk. After a long winter, the Sprite is brought forth by the Elk and attempts to restore life to a forest but accidentally wakes the “Firebird” spirit of a nearby volcano. Angered, the Firebird proceeds to destroy the forest and seemingly the Sprite. She survives, but is initially despondent. With the Elk to comfort her, she quickly regains her confidence and restores the forest to its prior glory. The Fantasia 2000 Firebird chapter is considered an exercise in the theme of life-death-rebirth deities; the depiction of the Firebird in it as a violent, flaming volcanic spirit is not related to Stravinsky’s original theme.

Saviour Pirotta and Catherine Hyde’s picture book, Firebird, is based on the original stories that inspired the ballet. It was published by Templar in the UK and Candlewick Press in 2010 to celebrate the ballet’s centenary. It won an Aesop Accolade in the US and was nominated for the Kate Greenaway Award in the UK. The paperback was published in 2014.^[22]

The ending section of the ballet is closely associated with the progressive rock band Yes, who regularly used it as their “walk-on” music in concert in the 1970s. It was used in the opening ceremony of Sochi 2014 during the Cauldron Lighting segment.^[23]

 

 

great compositions/performances: Peter von Winter – Oboe Concerto No.2 in F-major

Peter von Winter – Oboe Concerto No.2 in F-major

KuhlauDilfeng2

Published on Nov 20, 2013

Picture: Anton Raphael Mengs – Perseus befreit Andromeda, detail

Peter von Winter (baptized 28 August 1754 — 17 October 1825) was a German opera composer who followed Mozart and preceded Weber, acting as a bridge between the two in the development of German opera.

Work: Oboe Concerto No.2 in F-major

Mov.I: Allegro 00:00
Mov.II: Romance 09:09
Mov.III: Rondo 13:11

Oboe: Kurt Meier

Orchestra: Northern Sinfonia

Conductor: Howard Griffiths

Kozeluh: Concerto For Oboe And Orchestra In F Major

Kozeluh: Concerto For Oboe And Orchestra In F Major – 1. Vivace

#AlbrechtMayer

Published on Jul 2, 2015

Movements:

1. Vivace

2. Adagio

3. Rondo Allegretto

Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group International

Kozeluh: Concerto For Oboe And Orchestra In F Major – 1. Vivace · Albrecht Mayer · Kammerakademie Potsdam

Lost And Found – Oboenkonzerte des 18. Jahrhunderts von Hoffmeister, Lebrun, Fiala und Koželuh

℗ 2014 Deutschlandradio / Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Berlin

Released on: 2014-01-01

Composer: Jan Antonín Kozeluh

Dream Children, Dorabella, and Carissima by Sir Edward Elgar

Gilda Tabarez

Uploaded on Aug 21, 2010

The beautiful music of Elgar set to images of children, flowers and pets.
1. Dream Children Op.43 : II Allegretto piacevole
2. Enigma Variations Op. 36 :X. Intermezzo: Dorabella (Dora Penny)
3. Excerpt from “Carissima”

Best compositions/performances: Dvořák Symphony No 9 “New World” Sergiu Celibidache (Bio.) , Münchner Philharmoniker, 1991

Dvořák Symphony No 9 “New World” Sergiu Celibidache, Münchner Philharmoniker, 1991

1Furtwangler

Published on Apr 12, 2013

Dvořák – Symohony No. 9 in E minor op. 95 “From The New World”
Münchner Philharmoniker conducted by Sergiu Celibidache
Recorded 1991
1. Adagio – Allegro molto
2. Largo
3. Scherzo. Molto vivace
4. Allegro con fuoco
****************************************************************

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 Sergiu Celibidache giving a conducting lesson at the Curtis Institute in 1984 to student David Bernard

Sergiu Celibidache (Romanian: [ˈserd͡ʒju t͡ʃelibiˈdake]; 11 July [O.S. 28 June] 1912 – 14 August 1996) was a Romanian conductor, composer, and teacher. Educated in his native Romania, and later in Paris and Berlin, Celibidache’s career in music spanned over five decades, including tenures as principal conductor for the Munich Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic and several European orchestras. Later in life, he taught at Mainz University in Germany and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Celibidache frequently refused to release his performances on commercial recordings during his lifetime claiming that a listener could not obtain a “transcendental experience” outside of the concert hall. Many of the recordings of his performances were released posthumously. Nonetheless, he earned international acclaim for celebrated interpretations of classical music repertoire and was known for a spirited performance style informed by his study and experiences in Zen Buddhism. His later career was marred by controversy and accusations of sexism and discrimination that came to light during a 12-year legal battle that dominated his tenure at the Munich Philharmonic.^[1]

Biography

Early life and education

Sergiu Celibidache was born on 28 June 1912^{[note 1]} in Roman, a small town in North East Romania, where his father was a government official.^[2][3] Early in his youth, he began studying piano and after traditional schooling in Romania, he was sent by his father to Bucharest and then to Paris where he studied music, philosophy and mathematics.^[2] His father had expected him to pursue a political career in Romania.^[2] However, Celibidache chose to enroll in the Hochschule für Musik (Academy of Music) in Berlin, Germany in 1936 where he studied composition under Heinz Thiessen and later conducting under Kurt Thomas, Walter Gmeindl and Fritz Stein.^[2][3] He continued with doctoral studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University (Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität) in Berlin where he studied philosophy with Nicolai Hartmann and Eduard Spranger and musicology with Arnold Schering and Georg Schünemann.^[2] He submitted a dissertation on Franco-Flemish composer Josquin des Prez (c. 1450–1521) and his work during the Renaissance. He received his degree in 1944.^[2][3] During his studies in Berlin, Celibidache was introduced to Zen Buddhism through the influence of his teacher, Martin Steinke, and the tenets of Buddhism informed Celibidache’s worldview and work for the rest of his life.^[3]

Career

Sergiu Celibidache studied in Berlin and, from 1945 to 1952, he was principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. He later worked with radio orchestras in Stockholm, Stuttgart and Paris. He also worked in Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s, due partly to the promotional efforts of the pianist Eileen Joyce and her partner, an artists’ agent. Joyce said that Celibidache was the greatest conductor she had ever worked with – “he was the only one who got inside my soul”.^[4] In 1970 he was awarded Denmark‘s Sonning Award. From 1979 until his death he was music director of the Munich Philharmonic. He regularly taught at Mainz University in Germany and in 1984 taught at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Teaching was a major focus throughout his life and his courses were frequently open to all without fee. Among his notable students are Françoys Bernier, Jordi Mora, Peter Perret, Markand Thakar, Konrad von Abel,^[5] Nils-Göran Areskoug and Tom Zelle as well as The Danish Windquintet.^{[citation needed]}

He appeared in the film Botschafter der Musik where he conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a complete performance of Ludwig van Beethoven‘s Egmont overture.

One controversial incident during his tenure with the Munich Philharmonic was a protracted legal battle to oust principal trombonist Abbie Conant that lasted 12 years, with Conant ultimately prevailing. Judge Angela Mack ruled that the City of Munich through the orchestra had broken the law concerning the equal treatment of employees.^[6] A detailed description of the case and the sexism Ms. Conant had to endure can be found in an internet article published by her husband, William Osbourne. Her audition and controversy is discussed in Malcolm Gladwell‘s book Blink.

Death

Celibidache died at the age of 84 on 14 August 1996 at La Neuville-sur-Essonne, in the Arrondissement Pithiviers, near Paris. He was buried in the Cimetière de Neuville sur Essone.

Personal life

In 1965, Celibidache married Ioana Procopie Dimitrescu. They had one son, Sergiu Ioan Celibidache (“Serge”), born 19 June 1968.^{[note 2]}

Legacy

Performance style and criticism

Celibidache’s approach to music-making is often described more by what he did not do instead of what he did. For example, much has been made of Celibidache’s “refusal” to make recordings even though almost all of his concert activity actually was recorded with many released posthumously by major labels such as EMI and Deutsche Grammophon with the consent of his family.^[7] Nevertheless, Celibidache paid little attention to making these recordings, which he viewed merely as by-products of his orchestral concerts.

Celibidache’s focus was instead on creating, during each concert, the optimal conditions for what he called a “transcendent experience”. Aspects of Zen Buddhism, such as ichi-go ichi-e, were strongly influential on him. He believed that transcendental experiences were extremely unlikely to ensue when listening to recorded music, so he eschewed them. As a result, some of his concerts did provide audiences with exceptional and sometimes life-altering experiences, including, for example, a 1984 concert in Carnegie Hall by the Orchestra of the Curtis Institute that New York Times critic John Rockwell touted as the best of his twenty-five years of concert-going.^[8]

Celibidache was well known for his demands for extensive rehearsal time with orchestras.^[9] An oft-mentioned feature of many of his concerts, captured in the live recordings of them, is a slower tempo than what is considered the norm, while, in fast passages, his tempos often exceeded expectations.^[10] In Celibidache’s own view, however, criticism of a recording’s tempo is irrelevant, as it is not (and cannot be) a critique of the performance but rather of a transcription of it, without the ambience of the moment – for him, a key factor in any musical performance. As Celibidache explained, the acoustic space in which one hears a concert directly affects the likelihood of the emergence of his sought-after transcendent experience. The acoustic space within which one hears a recording of one of his performances, on the other hand, has no impact on the performance, as it is impossible for the acoustic features of that space to stimulate musicians to play slower or faster.

That his recorded performances differ so widely from the majority of other recordings has led them to be seen by some as collectors’ items rather than mainstream releases, ‘one-offs’ rather than reference recordings.^[11]

Discography

Notable releases have been his Munich performances of Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, Robert Schumann, Johann Sebastian Bach, Gabriel Fauré and a series of live performances with the London Symphony Orchestra and the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra.

• 1969: Tchaikovsky: Symphony No.5 in E Minor, Op.64 (Decca Eclipse)
• 1985: Beethoven: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (Electrecord)
• 1988: Mendelssohn: Sinfonia N. 4 Italiana; Dvořák: Sinfonia N. 9 Dal Nuovo Mondo (Frequenz)
• n.d.: Beethoven: Concerto No.5 for Piano and Orchestra “Emperor” (Electrecord)
• 1990: Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5; Nutcracker Suite (London)
• 1991: Mozart: Requiem; Vivaldi: Stabat Mater (Arkadia)
• 1991: Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 “Pathetique”; Roméo et Juliette (Arkadia)
• 1994: Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 (Andromeda)
• 1994: Brahms: Symphony Nos. 3 & 4 (Fonit-Cetra Italia)
• 1994: Brahms: Symphony No. 2 & Haydn Variations, Op. 56a (Fonit-Cetra Italia)
• 1994: Mozart: Grand Mass, K. 427 (Cetra)
• 1995: Beethoven: Symphony Nos. 2&4 (Nas)
• 1997: Béla Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1997: Beethoven: Symphony Nos. 4&5 (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1997: Debussy: La Mer; Iberia (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1997: Haydn: Symphony Nos 103 & 104 (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1997: Mozart: Symphony No. 40; Haydn: “Oxford Symphony” (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1997: Ravel: Ma Mère l’Oye; Bolero, Le tombeau de Couperin; Alborada del Gracioso (Fonit-Cetra Italia)
• 1997: S. Celibidache Conducts Beethoven & Brahms (Tahra)
• 1997: Schubert: Symphony No. 9 (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1997: Schumann: Symphonies 3 &4 (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1997: Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy; Overture/Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1997: Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1997: Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6 (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1997: The Young Celibidache, Vol. II (Tahra)
• 1997: Wagner: Orchestral Music (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1998: Bruckner 3 (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1998: Bruckner 4 (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1998: Bruckner 6 (EMI Classics)
• 1998: Bruckner 7; Te Deum (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1998: Bruckner 8 (EMI Classics)
• 1998: Bruckner 9 in Concert and Rehearsal (EMI Classics)
• 1998: Bruckner: Mass in F minor (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1998: Bruckner: Symphonies No. 3-9; Mass in F minor, Te Deum (EMI Classics)
• 1998: Shostakovich: S No. 7 (Magic Talent)
• 1999: Sergei Celebidache (Box) (No Noise)
• 1999: Beethoven: Symphonies No. 2 & 4 (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1999: Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1999: Beethoven: Symphony No. 6; Leonore (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1999: Brahms: Symphonies Nos. 2, 3, 4 (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1999: Brahms: Symphony No. 1; Ein deutsches Requiem (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1999: Celibidache Conducts Beethoven 7 & 8 (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1999: Tchaikovsky: Sinfonia No. 2 Op. 17 “Piccola Russia”; Dvořák: Concerto Op. 104 (Urania)
• 1999: Brahms: Deutsches Requiem (Audiophile Classics)
• 1999: Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition; Stravinsky: The Fairy’s Kiss Suite (Deutsche Grammophon)
• 1999: Prokofiev: Scythian Suite; Symphony No. 5 (Deutsche Grammophon)
• 1999: Rimsky-Korsakov: Sheherazade; Stravinsky: The Firebird Suite (Version 1923) (Deutsche Grammophon)
• 1999: Schumann: Symphony No. 2; Brahms: Haydn Variations (EMI Music Distribution)
• 1999: Strauss: Don Juan; Tod und Verklärung; Respighi: Pini di Roma (Rehearsals) (Deutsche Grammophon)
• 1999: Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 2; Brahms: Symphony No. 4 (Arkadia)
• 2000: Brahms: Sinfonia N. 2; Mozart: Sinfonia No. 25 (Urania)
• 2000: Bruckner: Symphonies Nos. 3–5 (Box Set) (Deutsche Grammophon)
• 2000: Bruckner: Symphony No. 3 (Deutsche Grammophon)
• 2000: Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 (Deutsche Grammophon)
• 2000: Bruckner: Symphony No. 5 (Rehearsal) (Deutsche Grammophon)
• 2000: Bruckner: Symphony No. 5; Mozart: Symphony No. 35 (Deutsche Grammophon)
• 2000: Franck: Symphony in D; Hindemith: Mathis der Mahler (Deutsche Grammophon)
• 2000: Richard Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel; Don Juan; Shostakovich: Symphony No. 9 (Deutsche Grammophon)
• 2000: Schubert: Symphony No. 8 “Unfinished”; Tchaikovsky: Nutcracker Suite (Aura Classics)
• 2000: Sibelius: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 5 (Deutsche Grammophon)
• 2001: Sergiu Celibidache (Classica d’Oro)
• 2001: Sergiu Celibidache et la Philharmonie de Berlin (Tahra)
• 2001: Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7 “Leningrad” (Classica d’Oro)
• 2002: Prokofiev: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 5; Violin Concerto No. 1 (Classica d’Oro)
• 2003: Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4 “Italian”; Bizet: Symphony in C (Archipel)
• 2004: Bach: Mass in B minor (EMI Classics)
• 2004: Bruckner: Symphonies Nos. 3–5, 7–9 [Box Set] (Deutsche Grammophon)
• 2004: Celibidache Conducts Milhaud & Rousel (EMI Music Distribution)
• 2004: Celibidache Plays Mozart’s Requiem (EMI Classics)
• 2004: Fauré: Requiem; Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms [Live] (EMI Music Distribution)
• 2004: Overtures by Berlioz; Mendelssohn; Schubert; Smetana & Strauss (EMI Music Distribution)
• 2004: Prokofiev: Symphonies 1 & 5 (EMI Music Distribution)
• 2004: Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade (EMI Music Distribution)
• 2004: Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7 ‘Leningrad’ (Pickwick)
• 2006: Celibidache: Der Taschengarten (Universal Classics & Jazz)
• 2006: Celibidache: The Complete EMI Edition [Limited Edition] [Box Set] (EMI Classics)
• 2006: Sergiu Celibidache: Lesen & Hören [CD+Book]
• 2007: Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 “Eroica”; Overture Leonre III (Archipel)
• 2007: Bruckner: Symphony No. 5
• 2007: Schumann: Symphony No. 4; Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition
• 2008: Sergiu Celibedache Conducts Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester (Orfeo)
• n.d.: Anton Bruckner: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 8; Brahms: Haydn-Variationen Op. 56 (Exclusive)
• n.d.: Anton Bruckner: Symphony No.7, In E Major (As Disc)
• n.d.: Antonín Dvořák: Symphony N. 7; Johann Strauss Jr.: Die Fledermaus, Overture (Artists)
• n.d.: Bach: Mass in B minor (Exclusive)
• n.d.: Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 4 (Artists)
• n.d.: Beethoven: Symphony No. 7; Bach: Brandenburg Coincerto No. 3; Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin (Archipel)
• n.d.: Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique op. 14; Roméo et Juliette (Arkadia)
• n.d.: Brahms: German Requiem (Myto Records)
• n.d.: Brahms: Symphonies Nos. 1–4 [Box Set] (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Brahms: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3 (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Brahms: Symphonies Nos. 2–4; Variations on a theme from Haydn (Acum)
• n.d.: Brahms: Symphony No. 1 (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Brahms: Symphony No. 1 (Acum)
• n.d.: Brahms: Symphony No. 4 (Rehearsal) (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Brahms: Symphony Nos. 2 & 3 (Legend)
• n.d.: Brahms: The Complete Symphonies; Haydn Variations; Alto Rhapsody (Living Stage)
• n.d.: Bruckner: Symphonies 4 & 9 (Exclusive)
• n.d.: Bruckner: Symphonies 7 & 8 (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Bruckner: Symphonies 7–9 [Box Set] (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Bruckner: Symphony 7 (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Bruckner: Symphony 9 (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Bruckner: Symphony No. 3 (Exclusive)
• n.d.: Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 (Arkadia)
• n.d.: Bruckner: Symphony No8, WAB108; Schubert: Symphony in Bf No5, D485 (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Celibidache Conducts Debussy & Ravel (Box Set) (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Celibidache Conducts Debussy/Respighi/Milhaud (Originals)
• n.d.: Celibidache Conducts Mussorgsky, Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev (Box Set) (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Celibidache Conducts Ravel & Stravinsky (Originals)
• n.d.: Celibidache Conducts Tchaikovsky (Grammofono 2000)
• n.d.: Celibidache Festival (Originals)
• n.d.: Celibidache [Box Set] (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Celibidache conducts Debussy (FED)
• n.d.: Celibidache, Vol. 1: Symphonies (EMI Classics)
• n.d.: Celibidache, Vol. 3: French & Russian Music (EMI Classics)
• n.d.: Celibidache, Vol. 4: Sacred Music & Opera (EMI Classics)
• n.d.: Conducts Stravinsky 13 (Arlecchino)
• n.d.: Debussy: Ibéria; Ravel: Rapsodie espagnole; Alborada del gracioso (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Debussy: La Mer (Rehearsal) (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Debussy: La mer; La damoiselle élue; Milhaud: Saudades do Brazil (Fonit-Cetra Italia)
• n.d.: Debussy: Nocturnes; La Mer (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Dvořák: Concerto in B Minor/Eight Slavonic Dances (Arkadia)
• n.d.: Dvořák: Concerto per Violino e Orchestra; Sinfonia No. 9 “Dal Nuovo Mondo” (Concerto)
• n.d.: Franck: Symphonie en Ré mineur; Wagner: Siegfried-Idyll; Tristan und Isolde vorspiel (Arkadia)
• n.d.: Great Conductors of the 20th century, Vol. 39: Sergiu Celibidache (EMI Music Distribution)
• n.d.: Haydn: Sinfonia No. 104 “London”; Claude Debussy: Jeux; Igor Stravinsky: Jeux de Cartes (Urania)
• n.d.: Haydn: Symphony No.103/Mozart: Symphony No.38 (Originals)
• n.d.: Legendary Performers Vol.2 (As Disc)
• n.d.: Modest Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition/Richard Strauss: Don Juan (Artist)
• n.d.: Mozart: Grande Messa K 427; Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra K 365; Serenata “Haffner” K 250 (Acum)
• n.d.: Mozart: Grande Messa/Concerto KV.365/Serenata KV.250 (Fonit-Cetra Italia)
• n.d.: Mozart: Messa di Requiem (Il Sabato)
• n.d.: Mozart: Requiem in Dm (Artists)
• n.d.: Mozart: Symphonies Nos. 40 & 41; Schubert: Symphony No. 5; Schumann: Symphony No. 2 (Living Stage)
• n.d.: Mozart:Symphony No.41/Schubert:Symphony No.5 (Memories)
• n.d.: Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition; Cherubini: Symphony in D Major; Bäck: Intrada for Orchestra (Originals)
• n.d.: Prokofiev: Romeo & Juliet (Extracts) (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Prokofiev: Romeo E Giulietta/Berlioz: Romeo E Giulietta/Tchaikovsky: Romeo E Giulietta (Fonit-Cetra Italia)
• n.d.: Prokofiev: Symphony No. 5; Prokofiev, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet (Acum)
• n.d.: RTSI Orchestra Conducted by Sergiu Celibidache: Schubert, Tchaikovsky
• n.d.: Ravel: Valse; Daphnis et Chloé; Suite No. 2; Le Tombeau de Couperin (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Richard Strauss: Tod und Verklärung; Vier letzte Lieder; Igor Stravinsky: L’oiseau de feu; Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé (Acum)
• n.d.: Rimsky-Korsakov: Schéhérazade (Originals)
• n.d.: Schubert/Schumann: Sinfonie (Fonit-Cetra Italia)
• n.d.: Schubert: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 8; Schumann: Symphonies Nos. 1 “Primavera” & 2 (Acum)
• n.d.: Schubert: Symphonies Nos. 8 & 9; Franck: Symphony in D minor; Mussorgsky-Ravel: Pictures at an Exhibition (Urania)
• n.d.: Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 54; Richard Strauss: Vier letzte Lieder (Artists Live Recording)
• n.d.: Schumann: Symphony Nos. 1 & 2 (Cetra)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache Alla Rai, Vol.5 (Fonit-Cetra Italia)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache Conducts (Artists)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache Conducts (EMI Classics)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache Conducts (Enterprise)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache Conducts (Urania)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache Conducts Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 2 & 4 (FED)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache Conducts Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requeim, Op. 45 (IDIS)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache Conducts Mendelssohn, Haydn, Beethoven (IDIS)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache Conducts the Berliner Philharmoniker (Myto Records)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache alla RAI, Vol. 1: Johannes Brahms – Sinfonie 1–4, Variazione su un tema di Haydn (Fonit-Cetra Italia)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache conducts Blacher, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Cherubini, Schwarz-Schilling (Tahra)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache conducts Franck, Tchaikovsky (IDIS)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache conducts Schubert & Schumann (IDIS)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache, Vol.1 (Arlecchino)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache: From the collection of Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv (Music & Arts)
• n.d.: Sergiu Celibidache: Magier des Klangs (Documents)
• n.d.: Shostakovich: Symphony No.7 “Leningrad” (Grammofono 2000)
• n.d.: Shostakovich: Symphony No5, Op47; Symphony No9, Op70 (Arkadia)
• n.d.: Shostokovich: Symphonies 1 & 9; Barber: Adagio for Strings (EMI Classics)
• n.d.: Strauss: Don Juan; Tod und Verklärung; Respighi: Pini di Roma (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Strauss: Ein Heldenleben (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: Stravinsky: L’Oiseau de feu; Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé; La Valse; Pavane pour une infante défunte (Cetra)
• n.d.: Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4; Nutcracker Suite (Angel Records / EMI Classics)
• n.d.: Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6; Monteverdi: Vespers of 1610 – Ave Maris Stella (Archipel)
• n.d.: The Art of Sergiu Celibidache, Volume 1–7 (Arlecchino)
• n.d.: The Complete RIAS Recordings (Audite)
• n.d.: The Stuttgart Recordings, Vol. 3 (Deutsche Grammophon)
• n.d.: The Unpublished Celibidache in Naples (Originals)
• n.d.: Verdi: Requiem (EMI Classics)
• n.d.: Wagner: Tristan und Isolde WWV90; Siegfried Idyll in E WWV103 (Arkadia)

Honors and awards

• 1970: Léonie Sonning Music Prize (Denmark)
• 1992: Honorary Citizen of the City of Munich (Ehrenbürgerrecht von München)^[12]
• 1992: Grand Officers Cross with star, Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (Großes Verdienstkreuz mit Stern, Verdienstorden der Bundesrepublik Deutschland)
• 1992: Honorary Member of the Romanian Academy
• 1992: Doctor honoris causa, Iași Academy of Art and University of Iași
• 1993: Member of the Bavarian Maximilian Order for Science and Art (Bayerische Maximiliansorden für Wissenschaft und Kunst) (Germany)
• Bavarian Order of Merit (Bayerischer Verdienstorden)
• Honorary Citizen (Cetățean de Onoare) of Iași, Romania

References

Notes

 

 

• The 28 June 1912 date of birth was based on the old style Julian calendar then officially used in Romania. According to the modern Gregorian calendar that is currently used in the West, Celibidache’s birthdate would be 11 July 1912.

In several sources, his son’s name is rendered as Serge Ioan Celebidachi.

 

historic musical bits: Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 “From The New World” / Karajan · Vienna Philarmonic

Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 “From The New World” / Karajan · Vienna Philarmonic

Canal de Josep489

Uploaded on Sep 21, 2011

Great presentation of the Great Wiener Philharmoniker conducted by Herbert von Karajan, playing the 9th Symphony of Antonin Dvorak “From the new world”.

Gran presentación de la Filarmónica de Viena conducida por Herbert von Karajan, interpretando la novena sinfonía de Antonin Dvorak “Sinfonía del Nuevo Mundo”.

(C) Telemonde 1992, UMG and all their respective owners. No commercial use of this material.

(0:37) 1st mvt (Adagio, Allegro Molto)
(10:42) 2nd mvt (Largo)
(23:30) 3rd mvt (Scherzo, Molto Vivace)
(32:07) 4rth mvt (Allegro con fuoco)
**********************************************************************

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

“New World Symphony” redirects here. For the Miami-based orchestra, see New World Symphony (orchestra).

 Title page of the autograph score of Dvořák’s ninth symphony

The Symphony No. 9 in E minor, “From the New World,” Op. 95, B. 178 (Czech: Symfonie č. 9 e moll „Z nového světa“), popularly known as the New World Symphony, was composed by Antonín Dvořák in 1893 while he was the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America from 1892 to 1895. It is by far his most popular symphony, and one of the most popular of all symphonies. In older literature and recordings, this symphony was often numbered as Symphony No. 5. Neil Armstrong took a recording of the New World Symphony to the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission, the first Moon landing, in 1969.^[1]

Instrumentation

 

Opening english horn theme from the second movement of the work

This symphony is scored for an orchestra of at least the following^{[citation needed]}:

• 2 flutes (one doubling piccolo)^[2]
• 2 oboes (one doubling English horn)
• 2 clarinets in A
• 2 bassoons
• 4 horns in E, C and F
• 2 trumpets in E, C and E♭
• 2 tenor trombones
• Bass trombone
• Tuba (second movement only)^[3]
• Timpani
• Triangle (third movement only)
• Cymbals (fourth movement only)
• Strings

Movements

	1. Adagio – Allegro molto     2. Largo     3. Scherzo: Molto vivace     4. Allegro con fuoco
Problems playing these files? See media help.

The piece has four movements:

1. Adagio, 4/8 – Allegro molto, 2/4, E minor
2. Largo, common time, D-flat major, then later C-sharp minor
3. Scherzo: Molto vivace – Poco sostenuto, 3/4, E minor
4. Allegro con fuoco, common time, E minor, ends in E major

Influences

Dvořák was interested in Native American music and the African-American spirituals he heard in America. As director of the National Conservatory he encountered an African-American student, Harry T. Burleigh, later a composer himself, who sang traditional spirituals to him and said that Dvořák had absorbed their ‘spirit’ before writing his own melodies.^[4] Dvořák stated:

I am convinced that the future music of this country must be founded on what are called Negro melodies. These can be the foundation of a serious and original school of composition, to be developed in the United States. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are the folk songs of America and your composers must turn to them.^[5]

The symphony was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, and premiered on December 16, 1893, at Carnegie Hall conducted by Anton Seidl. A day earlier, in an article published in the New York Herald on December 15, 1893, Dvořák further explained how Native American music had been an influence on this symphony:

I have not actually used any of the [Native American] melodies. I have simply written original themes embodying the peculiarities of the Indian music, and, using these themes as subjects, have developed them with all the resources of modern rhythms, counterpoint, and orchestral colour.^[6]

In the same article, Dvořák stated that he regarded the symphony’s second movement as a “sketch or study for a later work, either a cantata or opera … which will be based upon Longfellow‘s [The Song of] Hiawatha“^[7] (Dvořák never actually wrote such a piece).^[7] He also wrote that the third movement scherzo was “suggested by the scene at the feast in Hiawatha where the Indians dance”.^[7]

In 1893, a newspaper interview quoted Dvořák as saying “I found that the music of the negroes and of the Indians was practically identical”, and that “the music of the two races bore a remarkable similarity to the music of Scotland“.^[8][9] Most historians agree that Dvořák is referring to the pentatonic scale, which is typical of each of these musical traditions.^[10]

In a 2008 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, prominent musicologist Joseph Horowitz asserts that African-American spirituals were a major influence on Dvořák’s music written in America, quoting him from an 1893 interview in the New York Herald as saying, “In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.”^[11] Dvořák did, it seems, borrow rhythms from the music of his native Bohemia, as notably in his Slavonic Dances, and the pentatonic scale in some of his music written in America from African-American and/or Native American sources. Statements that he borrowed melodies are often made but seldom supported by specifics. One verified example is the song of the Scarlet Tanager in the Quartet. Michael Steinberg writes^[12] that a flute solo theme in the first movement of the symphony resembles the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot“.^[13] Leonard Bernstein averred that the symphony was truly multinational in its foundations.^[14]

Dvořák was influenced not only by music he had heard, but by what he had seen, in America. He wrote that he would not have composed his American pieces as he had, if he had not seen America.^[15] It has been said that Dvořák was inspired by the American “wide open spaces” such as prairies he may have seen on his trip to Iowa in the summer of 1893.^[16] Notices about several performances of the symphony include the phrase “wide open spaces” about what inspired the symphony and/or about the feelings it conveys to listeners.^[17]

Dvořák was also influenced by the style and techniques used by earlier classical composers including Beethoven and Schubert.^[18] The falling fourths and timpani strokes in the New World Symphony‍ ’​s Scherzo movement evokes the Scherzo of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony. In his fourth movement, Dvořák’s use of flashbacks to prior movements is reminiscent of Beethoven quoting prior movements as part of the opening Presto of the last movement.^[19]

Reception

At the premiere in Carnegie Hall, the end of every movement was met with thunderous clapping and Dvořák felt obliged to stand up and bow.^[20] This was one of the greatest public triumphs of Dvořák’s career. When the symphony was published, several European orchestras soon performed it. Alexander Mackenzie conducted the London Philharmonic Society in the European premiere on June 21, 1894.^[20] Clapham says the symphony became “one of the most popular of all time” and at a time when the composer’s main works were being welcomed in no more than ten countries, this symphony reached the rest of the musical world and has become a “universal favorite.“^[20] It is performed [as of 1978] more often “than any other symphony at the Royal Festival Hall, London” and is in “tremendous demand in Japan.”^[20]

Several themes from the symphony have been used widely in films, TV shows, anime, video games, and advertisements.

The song “Goin’ Home”

The theme from the Largo was adapted into the spiritual-like song “Goin’ Home”, often mistakenly considered a folk song or traditional spiritual, by Dvořák’s pupil William Arms Fisher, who wrote the lyrics in 1922.^{[21][22][23][24][25]}

great compositions/performances: Saint-Saëns – Le carnaval des animaux (The Carnival of the Animals) (1886)

Saint-Saëns – Le carnaval des animaux (The Carnival of the Animals) (1886)

musicanth

Uploaded on May 24, 2011

Le carnaval des animaux (The Carnival of the Animals) (1886)

I. Introduction et marche royale du lion (Introduction and Royal March of the Lion) [0:00]
II. Poules et coqs (Hens and Roosters) [1:58]
III. Hémiones – animaux véloces (Wild Asses – quick animals) [2:42]
IV. Tortues (Tortoises) [3:22]
V. L’éléphant (The Elephant) [5:24]
VI. Kangourous (Kangaroos) [6:55]
VII. Aquarium [7:51]
VIII. Personnages à longues oreilles (Characters with Long Ears) [9:58]
IX. Le coucou au fond des bois (The Cuckoo in the Depths of the Woods) [10:35]
X. Volière (Aviary) [12:40]
XI. Pianistes (Pianists) [13:52]
XII. Fossiles (Fossils) [15:15]
XIII. Le cygne (The Swan) [16:41]
XIV. Finale [19:40]

This is a famous musical suite by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921), written while on vacation in Austria in 1886. It is scored for a chamber ensemble of flute/piccolo, clarinet (B flat and C), two pianos, glass harmonica, xylophone, two violins, viola, cello and double bass – in this recording, a full orchestral string section is used, and instead of the glass harmonica, there is a glockenspiel. Saint-Saëns believed that the work was too frivolous to publish during his lifetime, and for this reason, he only gave private performances to his close friends. He left a provision for it to be published posthumously, so the Carnival of the Animals only received a formal premiere one year after the composer’s death.

Each of the fourteen movements depicts a different animal, often with plenty of humour and wit. The first is the majestic march of the king of the animals – the lion – played by strings and pianos. The low, rumbling octave figure passed between the pianos is, of course, the lion’s mighty roar. The second movement (for pianos, clarinet, violins and violas) sees hens and roosters squawking while pecking at grains on the ground. The distinctive theme played by the piano is the rooster’s “cock a doodle doo” call. Next, Tibetan wild asses – portrayed by the two pianos in unison – gallop frenetically through the scene. In contrast, the next movement for strings and piano depicts the slow, laborious movement of tortoises. This satirical section takes its main theme from the famous Galop infernal (or the can-can) in Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld” – but it is played exceedingly slowly. Then, the double bass and piano play a pompous, heavy-handed dance for the elephant. The thematic material derives from the scherzo in Mendelssohn’s incidental music to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the ballet of the sylphs in Berlioz’s “The Damnation of Faust”. The brief sixth movement sees two pianos play an abrupt, bouncy figure depicting hopping kangaroos. Next, we find ourselves inside the shimmering water of an aquarium full of graceful fish. This movement is played by strings, pianos, flute, and glockenspiel. The pianos play a high rolling ostinato – one in decuplets and the other in sextuplets. There follows a short movement for violins that sound like braying donkeys; perhaps Saint-Saëns meant the donkeys to represent asinine music critics. Next, the pianos and an offstage clarinet play a slow movement where a cuckoo’s call breaks the quiet of the woods. The tenth movement for flute, piano and strings depicts an aviary abuzz with quiet activity, over which a tropical bird (the flute) sings a melody full of trills and scales. Then, we see a very different type of animal – pianists (who, after all, are primates). The two pianists awkwardly practice scale patterns similar to those found in Hanon exercises. The whole time, they stumble over notes and break unison – evidently they need more practice. Three loud unresolved chords lead into the next movement for strings, pianos, clarinet and xylophone, depicting fossils. The hollow sound of the xylophone evokes bones clacking together. The melody is from Saint-Saëns’ “Danse macabre”, the dance of skeletons. Other musical allusions in this movement include “Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman” (a.k.a. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”), “Partant pour la Syrie”, the nursery rhymes “Au clair de la lune” and “J’ai du bon tabac”, and a snippet from the aria “Una voce poco fa” from Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville”. The series of allusions is itself a musical joke, since these old tunes are cultural fossils. The penultimate movement played by the cello and pianos shows the graceful gliding of a swan over a rippling lake. This very well-known section has become a stand-alone staple of the cello repertoire as well as the brief Fokine ballet “The Dying Swan”. Last comes the finale for the full ensemble, where themes from previous movements are reprised and combined to close the suite with excitement and panache.

Pianists: Vivian Troon, Roderick Elms
Conductor: Andrea Licata
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

Historic Musical Bits: Mendelssohn – A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture Op. 21 | The Philharmonia Orchestra Conductor: Otto Klemperer

Mendelssohn – A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture Op. 21

panharmonicon

Published on Mar 21, 2012

Felix Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn – A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture Op. 21

The Philharmonia Orchestra
Conductor: Otto Klemperer

Best Romantic Music: Antonín Dvořák – Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 10

Antonín Dvořák – Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 10

Jiří Slabihoudek

 

Published on Feb 24, 2013

Symfonie č. 3 Es dur, Op. 10 (1873)

00:00 Allegro moderato
11:33 Adagio molto, tempo di marcia
28:27 Finale. Allegro vivace

Czech philharmonic orchestra, Václav Neumann
–
Česká filharmonie, Václav Neumann
EN
Symphony no.3 in E flat major was premiered by Bedřich Smetana in 1874. It was a great moment for young Dvořák, because it was his first big score played in public. You can heard in this symphony typical dvořák’s melodies but also some inspiration from Liszt or Wagner (work with motives, harmonies).

CZ
Narozdíl od předchozích symfonií Dvořák ve své třetí pracoval s tématy úsporněji a více se zaměřoval na motivickou práci. Docílil tak formálně jasné symfonie, která slavila okamžitý úspěch. Pro Dvořáka to byla zvlášť důležitá událost, jelikož premiéry se zhostil sám Bedřich Smetana. Mladý Antonín tehdy nejspíš seděl u violového pultu.

Symphony No. 3 (Dvořák)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

The first page of the autograph score of Dvořák’s third symphony

The Symphony No. 3 in E-flat major, Op. 10, B. 34 is a classical composition by Czech composer Antonín Dvořák.

It is not known precisely when the work was created (Dvořák scratched out the note on the title page with a knife so effectively that it is not possible to reconstruct the most important data).^[1] However, the symphony was composed probably in 1872, but possibly not scored until the following year.^[1] It is also not possible to find out with certainty the original text of the work. It was premiered by Prague Philharmonic Orchestra on March 29, 1874 at the fourth philharmonic concert in the hall on Žofín (Sophia Island), conducted by Bedřich Smetana. The composition was revised by Dvořák in 1887–1889, though not printed until 1912 (after the composer’s death) by N. Simrock in Berlin.

Form

The work, unlike his other symphonies, is in three movements:

1. Allegro moderato (E-flat major)
2. Adagio molto, tempo di marcia (C-sharp minor)
3. Allegro vivace (E-flat major)

There is no scherzo, the 3rd being the only three-movement symphony he wrote. The Adagio molto is his longest symphonic slow movement, and the Finale is the shortest finale. It was the first of his symphonies that Dvořák heard played.

The symphony bears the marks of Dvořák’s preceding strongly neo-romantic period, but also show the progress towards classically disciplined progression.^[2] A typical performance of the work has a duration of about thirty minutes.

Instrumentation

The work is scored for an orchestra of two flutes, piccolo, two oboes, English horn, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, harp, and strings.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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great compositions/performances: Mozart – Symphony No. 40 in G minor, K. 550

Mozart – Symphony No. 40,

in G minor, K. 550

Am4d3usM0z4rt

Uploaded on Feb 20, 2012

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 minor key symphonies Mozart wrote. 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). 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 (fast movement, slow movement, minuet, fast movement) for a classical-style symphony:
1. Molto allegro, 2/2
2. Andante, 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. 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. Ludwig van Beethoven knew the symphony well, copying out 29 measures from the score in one of his sketchbooks. It is thought that the opening theme of the last movement may have inspired Beethoven in composing the third movement of his Fifth Symphony.
—————————————-­————————————-
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/

Amazing Music /performances: Dvorak : In Nature’s Realm Overture op 91

Dvorak : In nature’s realm ouverture op 91

jessiemelodyworld k

Published on May 18, 2013

* In Nature’s Realm (overture), Op.91 (Dvořák, Antonín)
Composition Year 1891

* cover by John Constable 1776–1837
Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, with a Boy Sitting on a Bank circa 1825
Oil on canvas

* The concert overture In Nature’s Realm (Czech: V přírodě, koncertní ouvertura), Op. 91, B. 168, was written by Antonín Dvořák in 1891. It is part of a “Nature, Life and Love” trilogy of overtures written by Dvořák, forming the first part – “Nature”. The other two parts of the trilogy are the Carnival Overture, Op. 92 (“Life”) and Othello, Op. 93 (“Love”).
The overture is scored for two flutes, two oboes, english horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, triangle, cymbals and strings.

great compositions/performances: Glazunov “Symphony No 7” USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony OrchestraGennadi Rozhdestvensky

Glazunov “Symphony No 7” Gennadi Rozhdestvensky

Ulrich Dünnebach

Published on Jun 21, 2015

Symphony No 7 in F Major op 77
by Alexander Glazunov
1.  Allegro moderato
2.  Andante
3.  Scherzo-Allegro giocoso
4.  Finale: Allegro maestoso

USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, conductor

• Music

  • “Symphony No. 7 in F Major, Op. 77 – “Pastorale”: II. Andante” by USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra (Google Play • iTunes)

Antonin Dvorak, : The Wood Dove, Op. 110, B. 198 , great compositions/performances, (Fritz Lehmann · Symphony Orchestra of Radio Berlin)

The Wood Dove, Op. 110, B. 198

Various Artists – Topic

Published on Jul 23, 2014

Provided to YouTube by Ingrooves

The Wood Dove, Op. 110, B. 198 · Fritz Lehmann · Symphony Orchestra of Radio Berlin

℗ Broken Audio

Writer, Composer: Antonín Dvořák

make music part of your life series: Franz Anton Rösler (Rosetti). Symphony in D major, A12

Franz Anton Rösler (Rosetti). Symphony in D major, A12

Папа Ген

Published on Sep 9, 2014

Franz Anton Rösler (Francesco Antonio Rosetti)

Symphony in D major, A12

I. Allegro Moderato 00:00
II. Andantino 07:15
III. Menuetto: Trio & Moderato 11:37
IV. Allegretto Capriccio 14:05

London Mozart Players
Matthias Bamert, conductor

Recorded in London; 9–10 October 1996

The music and video published in this channel is exclusively dedicated to divulgation purposes and not commercial. If someone, for any reason, would deem that a video appearing in this channel violates the copyright, please inform me immediately before you submit a claim to YouTube, and it will be our care to remove immediately the video accordingly.

• Music

  • “III. Menuetto and Trio: Moderato” by Bamert, Matthias, Bamert, Matthias (Google Play • eMusic • AmazonMP3 • iTunes)

• Category

  • Music

great compositions/performances: ,Hilary Hahn – Mozart – Violin Concerto No 4 in D major, K 218

Hilary Hahn – Mozart – Violin Concerto No 4 in D major, K 218

Classical Vault 2

Published on Jul 30, 2013

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Violin Concerto No 4 in D major, K 218

1 Allegro
2 Andante cantabile
3 Rondeau. Andante grazioso – Allegro ma non troppo

Hilary Hahn, violin

BBC Symphony Orchestra
Andrew Davis, conductor

make music part of your life series: , Ottorino Respighi Ancient Airs and Dances Suite III

O. Respighi Ancient Airs and Dances Suite III.

HarpsichordM

Published on Jun 14, 2012

O. Respighi Ancient Airs and Dances Suite III. Complete

• Music

  • “Respighi: Ancient Airs And Dances, Suite No.3, [P. 172] – 1. Italiana” by Boston Symphony Orchestra (Google Play • AmazonMP3 • iTunes)

***************************************************************************
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

English: Ottorino Respighi, photography by Madeline Grimoldi at 1935 Deutsch: Ottorino Respighi, Fotografie von Madeline Grimoldi um 1935 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2013)

Ancient Airs and Dances (Italian: Antiche arie e danze) is a set of three orchestral suites by Italian composer Ottorino Respighi. In addition to being a renowned composer and conductor, Respighi was also a notable musicologist. His interest in Italian music of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries led him to compose works inspired by the music of these periods.

Suite No. 3 (1932)

Suite No. 3 was composed in 1932. It differs from the previous two suites in that it is arranged for strings only and somewhat melancholy in overall mood. It is based on lute songs by Besard, a piece for baroque guitar by Ludovico Roncalli, and lute pieces by Santino Garsi da Parma and additional anonymous composers.

1. Italiana (Anonymous: Italiana (Fine sec.XVI) – Andantino)
2. Arie di corte (Jean-Baptiste Besard: Arie di corte (Sec.XVI) – Andante cantabile – Allegretto – Vivace – Slow with great expression – Allegro vivace – Vivacissimo – Andante cantabile)
3. Siciliana (Anonymous: Siciliana (Fine sec.XVI) – Andantino)
4. Passacaglia (Lodovico Roncalli: Passacaglia (1692) – Maestoso – Vivace)

great compositions/performances: Richard Wagner Overture from the Flying Dutchman (The Met Orchestra James Levine conducting)

Richard Wagner Overture from the Flying Dutchman

Anthony Seta

Richard Wagner Overture to the Flying Dutchman
The Met Orchestra James Levine conducting

great compositions/performances: ,Edvard Grieg – Norwegian Dances / Danses Norvégiennes

Edvard Grieg – Norwegian Dances / Danses Norvégiennes

miljkmi

Published on Mar 29, 2012

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907), Norge

– Danses norvegiénnes (pour orchestre), op. 35
– Norwegian Dances (for Orchestra), Op. 35

I. Allegro marcato
II. Allegro tranquille e grazioso
III. Allegro moderato alla marcia
IV. Allegro molto

Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra
Neeme Järvi

Related articles

• Edvard Grieg conducts London concert: from the archive, 18 May 1906

Historic musical bits: Bedřich Smetana : “Die Moldau” / Karajan / Vienna Philharmonic

 Bedřich Smetana : “Die Moldau” / Karajan / Vienna Philharmonic

Michel R.

Uploaded on Sep 19, 2010

Bedřich Smetana “Die Moldau” conducted by Herbert von Karajan (with the Vienna Philharmonic) (1985)

• Music

  • “Smetana: The Moldau (From Má Vlast)” by Herbert von Karajan (AmazonMP3)

Tanglewood

Tanglewood

Tanglewood is an estate and music venue in Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and is the home of the annual summer Tanglewood Music Festival and the Tanglewood Jazz Festival. It has been the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home since 1937. Its summer school is one of the world’s preeminent training grounds for composers, conductors, instrumentalists, and vocalists. The name “Tanglewood” pays homage to what American author who spent time in the region? More… Discuss

Edvard Grieg – Lyric Pieces Op. 65 No. 6 – Wedding Day at Troldhaugen Pianist: Gerhard Oppitz

Group photograph showing Edvard Grieg, Percy Grainger, Nina Grieg and Julius Rontgen, at Grieg’s home, Troldhaugen, in July 1907 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

Edvard Grieg – Lyric Pieces Op. 65 No. 6 – Wedding Day at Troldhaugen

Fledermaus1990

Uploaded on Jul 28, 2011

Pianist: Gerhard Oppitz

Photo: Edvard Grieg and his wife Nina.

Related articles

• Hough Plays Grieg.
• Edvard Grieg conducts London concert: from the archive, 18 May 1906
• Stephen Hough Puts His Experience Of A Miracle Into His Music

historic musical bits: Arthur Rubinstein – Chopin – Piano Concerto No 2 in F minor, Op 21/ London Symphony Orchestra André Previn, conductor Classical Vault 2 Classical Vault 2

Arthur Rubinstein – Chopin – Piano Concerto No 2 in F minor, Op 21

Classical Vault 2

Published on Jul 22, 2013

Frédéric Chopin
Piano Concerto No 2 in F minor, Op 21

1 Allegro
2 Larghetto
3 Allegro vivace

Arthur Rubinstein, piano

London Symphony Orchestra
André Previn, conductor
***************************************
From Wikipedia

The Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21, is a piano concerto composed by Frédéric Chopin in 1830. Chopin wrote the piece before he had finished his formal education, at around 20 years of age. It was first performed on 17 March 1830, in Warsaw, Poland, with the composer as soloist. It was the second of his piano concertos to be published (after the Piano Concerto No. 1), and so was designated as “No. 2”, even though it was written first.

Structure

The work contains the three movements typical of instrumental concertos of the period: Maestoso, Larghetto and Allegro vivace.

In the finale, the violins and violas are at one point instructed to play col legno (with the wood of the bow).

Analysis

Kevin Bazzana states “Chopin’s concertos – indeed, all of his works in classical forms – have always suffered from comparisons with those of Mozart and Beethoven. It is an old cliché that the larger classical forms he had studied at the Warsaw Conservatory were incompatible with his imagination. As early as 1852, writers such as Liszt remarked that Chopin “did violence to his genius every time he sought to fetter it by rules.” But he was not trying to re-interpret the classical concerto. He was working in a different tradition called stile brillante, made fashionable by such virtuoso pianist-composers as Weber and Hummel. Chopin borrowed from their example a conception of the concerto as a loosely organized showcase for a virtuoso soloist, as opposed to a more balanced, cohesive and densely argued musical drama in the classical vein.

There is no denying that Chopin’s concertos betray a youthful want of formal sophistication but, as one observer wrote, they “linger in the memory for the poetry of their detail rather than the strength of their structures.” Those details are so bold and colourful, so imaginative and personal, that the concertos have become the only large-scale early works of Chopin to retain a place in the repertoire.

References

• Ledbetter, Steven (1994). Pro Arte: Piano Concerto #2 in F minor.^{[dead link]}
• Bazzana, Kevin “Programme Notes“.

External links

Book: Frédéric Chopin

• Piano Concerto No. 2: Scores at the International Music Score Library Project

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• Andre Previn to visit Orange County for the Pacific Symphony’s American Composers Festival

historic musical bits: Johannes Brahms – Symphony No.1 – Wiener Philharmoniker – Bernstein – 1981

Johannes Brahms – Symphony No.1 – Wiener Philharmoniker – Bernstein – 1981

PalamedeDePalamede

Published on Mar 3, 2013

Johannes Brahms: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68

I. Un poco sostenuto – Allegro – Meno allegro . . . . . . . . . . (00:55)
II. Andante sostenuto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (18:40)
III. Un poco allegretto e grazioso . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (29:44)
IV. Adagio – Più andante – Allegro non troppo, ma con brio . (35:25)

Violin solo (2nd Movement): Gerhart Hetzel
Wiener Philharmoniker
Leonard Bernstein

Recorded live at the Große Musikvereinssaal
Vienna, 3-11 October 1981

• Music

  • “Brahms: Symphony No.1 In C Minor, Op.68 – 3. Un poco allegretto e grazioso (Live From Grosser Saal, Musikverein, Vienna / 1981)” by Wiener Philharmoniker (Google Play • AmazonMP3 • iTunes)