Luigi Boccherini

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Biography

Boccherini was born in Lucca, Italy, in a musical family. At a young age his father, a cellist and double bass player, sent Luigi to study in Rome. In 1757 he went to Vienna with his son where the two of them were employed by the court as musicians in the Burgtheater. In 1761 Boccherini went to Madrid, where he was employed by Don Luis, the younger brother of King Charles III. There he flourished under royal patronage, until one day when the King expressed his disapproval at a passage in a new trio, and ordered Boccherini to change it. The composer, no doubt irritated with this intrusion into his art, doubled the passage instead, leading to his immediate dismissal. Then he accompanied Don Luis to Arenas de San Pedro a little town at the Gredos mountains, there and in the closest town of Candeleda Boccherini wrote many of his most brilliant works.

Among his late patrons was the French consul Lucien Bonaparte, as well as King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, himself an amateur cellist, flutist, and avid supporter of the arts. Boccherini fell on hard times following the deaths of his Spanish patron, two wives, and two daughters, and he died almost in poverty in 1805, being survived by two sons. His blood line continues to this day in Spain.

Much of his chamber music follows models established by Joseph Haydn; however, Boccherini is often credited with improving Haydn's model of the string quartet by bringing the cello to prominence, whereas Haydn had always relegated it to an accompaniment role. Rather, some sources for Boccherini's style are in the works of a famous Italian cellist, Giovanni Battista Cirri, who was born before Boccherini and before Haydn and the Spanish popular music.

A virtuoso cellist of the first caliber (possibly the most accomplished cellist in history), Boccherini often played violin repertoire on the cello, at pitch, a skill he developed by substituting for ailing violinists while touring. This supreme command of the instrument brought him much praise from his contemporaries (notably Baillot, Rode, and Romberg), and is evident in the cello parts of his compositions (particularly in the quintets for two cellos, treated often as cello concertos with string quartet accompaniment).

He wrote a large amount of chamber music, including over one hundred string quintets for two violins, viola and two cellos (a type which he pioneered, in contrast with the then common scoring for two violins, two violas and one cello), a dozen guitar quintets, not all of which have survived, nearly a hundred string quartets, and a number of string trios and sonatas (including at least 19 for the cello). His orchestral music includes around 30 symphonies and 12 virtuoso cello concertos.

Boccherini's works have been catalogued by the French musicologist Yves Gérard (born 1932) in the Gérard catalog, published in London (1969), hence the "G" numbers for his output.

With a ministerial decree dated 27 April 2006, the Opera Omnia of the composer Luigi Boccherini was promoted to the status of Italian National Edition. The director of the new critical edition is professor Christian Speck (Koblenz-Landau), and the advisory committee includes Theophil Antonicek (Vienna), Sergio Durante (Padua), Ludwig Finscher (Heidelberg), Yves Gérard (Paris), Roberto Illiano (Cremona-Lucca), Fulvia Morabito (Cremona-Lucca), Rudolf Rasch (Utrecht), Massimiliano Sala (Cremona-Lucca), and Andrea Schiavina (Bologna).

Boccherini's style is characterized by the typical Rococo charm, lightness, and optimism, and exhibits much melodic and rhythmic invention, coupled with frequent influences from the guitar tradition of his adopted country, Spain. Neglected after his death—the dismissive sobriquet "Haydn's wife" dates from the nineteenth century— his works have been gaining more recognition lately, in print, record, and concert hall. His famous "Musica notturna delle strade di Madrid" (String Quintet in C Major, Op. 30 No. 6), has recently been popularised through the Peter Weir film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

His distinctive compositions for string quintet (two violins, one viola, two cellos), long neglected after his death, have been brought back to life by the Boccherini Quintet in the second half of the XX century, when two of its founding members discovered a complete collection of the first edition of the 141 string quintets in Paris and began playing and recording them around the world.

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Ernest Bloch

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Biography

Bloch was born in Geneva and began playing the violin at age 9. He began composing soon afterwards. He studied music at the conservatory in Brussels, where his teachers included the celebrated violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. He then travelled around Europe, moving to Germany (where he studied at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt), on to Paris in 1903 and back to Geneva before settling in the United States of America in 1916, taking American citizenship in 1924. He held several teaching appointments in the U.S., with George Antheil, Frederick Jacobi, Bernard Rogers, and Roger Sessions among his pupils. In December 1920 he was appointed the first Musical Director of the newly formed Cleveland Institute of Music, a post he held until 1925. Following this he was director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music until 1930.

In 1941 Bloch moved to the small coastal community of Agate Beach, Oregon[1] and lived there the rest of his life. He died in 1959 in Portland, Oregon, of cancer at the age of 78. The Bloch Memorial has been moved from near his house in Agate Beach to a more prominent location at the Newport Performing Arts Center in Newport, Oregon[2].

References

# ^ Bloch Festival Program
# ^ "Ernest Bloch Project"

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Georges Bizet

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Biography

Bizet was born at 28 rue de la Tour d'Auvergne in the 9th arrondissement of Paris in 1838. He was registered with the legal name Alexandre César Léopold Bizet[1], but he was baptised on 16 March 1840 with the first name Georges, and he was always known thereafter as Georges Bizet. His father was an amateur singer and composer, and his mother was the sister of the famous singing teacher François Delsarte. He entered the Paris Conservatory of Music in 1848, a fortnight before his tenth birthday.

His first symphony, the Symphony in C Major, was written in November 1855, when he was still only sixteen, evidently as a student assignment. It seems that Bizet completely forgot about it himself, and it was not discovered again until 1933, in the archives of the Paris Conservatory library where it had been deposited by Reynaldo Hahn, to whom it had been given by Bizet's widow[2]. Upon its first performance on 26 February 1935, under the baton of Felix Weingartner, it was immediately hailed as a junior masterwork and a welcome addition to the early Romantic period repertoire. The symphony is a delightful work (and a prodigious one, from a sixteen-year-old boy), and is noteworthy for bearing an amazing stylistic resemblance to the first symphony of Charles Gounod [3] first played earlier in the same year, and which Bizet had arranged for two pianos[4] although present-day listeners may discern a similarity to music of Franz Schubert, whose work was little known in France at the time the symphony was written.

At the Conservatoire Bizet studied under Fromental Halévy, whose daughter Geneviève he married in 1869. Halévy died in 1862, leaving his last opera Noé unfinished. Bizet completed it, but it was not performed until 1885, ten years after Bizet's own death.

In 1857, a setting of the one-act operetta Le docteur Miracle won him a share in a prize offered by Jacques Offenbach. He also won the music composition scholarship of the Prix de Rome, the conditions of which required him to study in Rome for three years. There, his talent developed as he wrote such works as the opera buffa Don Procopio (1858-59). There he also composed his only major sacred work, Te Deum (1858), which he submitted to the Prix Rodrigues competition, a contest for Prix de Rome winners only. Bizet failed to win the Prix, and the Te Deum score remained unpublished until 1971. He made two attempts to write another symphony in 1859, but destroyed the manuscripts in December of that year. Apart from this period in Rome, Bizet lived in the Paris area all his life.

His mother died shortly after his return to Paris. He composed the opera Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers) for the Théâtre Lyrique in 1863, which was initially a failure. He followed it with La jolie fille de Perth (premiered also in the Théâtre Lyrique, in 1867), a symphony titled Roma (1868), and Jeux d'enfants (Children's games) for piano duet (1871).

The popular L'Arlésienne was originally produced as incidental music for a play by Alphonse Daudet, first performed on 1 October 1872. Bizet himself derived a suite from the music (first performed 10 November 1872), and Ernest Guiraud later arranged a second suite; both these suites contain considerable rewriting of the original score. Most performances or broadcasts of the second suite omit any mention of Guiraud's contribution.

That year (22 May 1872) also saw the production of the one-act opéra comique Djamileh, which is often seen as a precursor to Carmen. His overture Patrie was written in 1873 (it had no connection with Victorien Sardou's play Patrie!).

Carmen (1875) is Bizet's best-known work and is based on a novella of the same title written in 1846 by Prosper Mérimée. Bizet composed the title role for a mezzo-soprano. Carmen was not initially well-received but praise for it eventually came from well-known contemporaries including Debussy, Saint-Saëns and Tchaikovsky. Brahms attended over twenty performances of it, and considered it the greatest opera produced in Europe since the Franco-Prussian War. The views of these composers proved to be prophetic, as Carmen has since become one of the most popular works in the entire operatic repertoire. However, Bizet did not live to see its success. He died from a heart attack at the age of 36 in Bougival (Yvelines), about 10 miles west of Paris. His death occurred on his sixth wedding anniversary, only a few months after Carmen's first performances. He was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

His widow Geneviève later had an alliance with Élie-Miriam Delaborde, generally believed to have been the illegitimate son of Charles-Valentin Alkan. However, she married Émile Straus, a banker with Rothschild family connections, and became a noted society hostess. Marcel Proust used her as a model for the Duchesse de Guermantes in his roman fleuve À la recherche du temps perdu. The Bizets' son Jacques (1872-1922), a writer, had been a school-friend of Proust.

Bizet's music has been used in the twentieth century as the basis for several important ballets. The Soviet-era Carmen Suite (1967), set to music drawn from Carmen arranged by Rodion Shchedrin, gave the Bolshoi ballerina Maya Plisetskaya one of her signature roles; it was choreographed by Alberto Alonso. In the West the L'Arlesienne of Roland Petit is well-regarded, and the Symphony in C by George Balanchine is considered to be one of the great ballets of the twentieth century. It was first presented as Le Palais de Crystal by the Paris Opera Ballet in 1947, and has been in the repertory there ever since. The ballet has no story; it simply fits the music: each movement of the symphony has its own ballerina, cavalier, and corps de ballet, all of whom dance together in the finale.

Bizet's work as a composer has overshadowed how fine a pianist he was. On 26 May 1861, at a dinner party at the Halévys at which Franz Liszt was present, Bizet gave a faultless performance of an elaborate work of Liszt's, reading at sight from the unpublished manuscript. Liszt proclaimed that Bizet was one of the three finest pianists in Europe.[5]

References

   1. ^ Sadie, Stanley (Ed.) [1992] (1994), The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, vol. 1, A-D, chpt: "Bizet, Georges (Alexandre César Léopold)" by Hugh MacDonald, New York: MacMillan. p. 485. ISBN 0-935859-92-6
   2. ^ Dean W., Bizet, London, J M Dent & Sons, 1978.
   3. ^ Curtiss M., Bizet and his world, New York, Vienna House, 1958
   4. ^ Dean, 1978, ibid
   5. ^ Grove's Dictionary (V), vol. I, Georges Bizet, p. 731
   6. ^ Sadie, p. 489.
   7. ^ Dean, 1978, ibid.

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Heinrich Ignaz Biber

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Biography

Biber was born in Wartenberg (now Stráž pod Ralskem, Czech Republic). He received his first position in 1668 as musician in the court of Archbishop Karl Liechtenstein-Kastelkorn at Olmutz. But Biber failed to return from a visit to Innsbruck without permission. On this visit he met the at the time famous violin maker Jakob Stainer, who mentioned him in a later document as "der vortreffliche Virtuos (the outstanding virtuoso) Herr Biber." He was first a violinist at the castle of Kroměříž, and in 1684 became Kapellmeister in Salzburg, where he died twenty years later.

Biber's music exemplifies the Austrian baroque style, which is a combination of Italian and German influences. His works show a predilection for canonic use and harmonic diapason that pre-date the later Baroque works of Johann Pachelbel and Johann Sebastian Bach. He was known as a violin virtuoso and is best known for his highly virtuosic and expressive violin works, many of which employ scordatura (unconventional tunings of the open strings). In his violin music Biber built on the achievements of earlier Italian violinist/composers such as Marini, Fontana, and Uccellini, as well as his Austrian near-contemporary (and possible teacher) Johann Heinrich Schmelzer.

The music of Biber has enjoyed a renaissance, in part, because of the Rosary Sonatas. This remarkable set of 16 sonatas is also known as the Mystery Sonatas (in reference to key events in the lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ) and the Copper-Engraving Sonatas (because of the engravings at the head of the sonatas). Each sonata employs a different tuning of the violin. This use of scordatura transforms the violin's expressivity from the pleasures of the Five Joyful Mysteries (the Annunciation, etc.) through the trauma of the Five Sorrowful Mysteries (the Crucifixion, etc.) to the ethereal nature of the Six Glorious Mysteries. The Glorious Mysteries start with the Resurrection Sonata—where the two middle strings are symbolically crossed over—and end with a passacaglia for solo violin using standard tuning (Sonata No 16), thereby completing the cycle of scordaturas. Remarkably, in Sonata No 15 Biber anticipates the theme of Paganini's Capriccio No 24 almost exactly. We can assume that Paganini took his inspiration from Biber (just as Liszt, Brahms and Rachmaninov were later inspired by Paganini's famous Caprice).

The Rosary Sonatas remained unpublished during Biber's lifetime. Among his important published collections of instrumental music are a set of eight sonatas (1681) for violin and continuo and the magisterial Harmonia artificioso-ariosa (consisting of seven trio sonata-suites utilizing scordatura violins and violas d'amore). Biber was a prolific composer of sacred vocal music, of the which the two Requiems and the Missa Christi resurgentis are outstanding examples. The Missa Salisburgensis is an astonishing polyphonic setting of the mass for 53 independent voices which is currently attributed to Biber (it was previously thought to be the work of Orazio Benevoli).

References

^ Linn Records - Virtuoso in the Making - Bibe

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Franz Berwald

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Biography

Berwald came from a family with four generations of musicians; his father, a violinist in the Royal Opera Orchestra, taught Franz the violin from an early age; he soon appeared in concerts. In 1811, Karl XIII came to power and reinstated the Royal Chapel; the following year Berwald started working there, as well as playing the violin in the court orchestra and the opera, receiving lessons from Edouard du Puy, and also started composing. The summers were off-season for the orchestra, and Berwald travelled around Scandinavia, Finland and Russia. Of his works from that time, a septet and a serenade he still considered worthwhile music in his later years.

In 1818 Berwald started publishing the Musikalisk journal, later renamed Journal de musique, a periodical with easy piano pieces and songs by various composers as well as some of his own original work. In 1821, his Violin Concerto was premiered by his brother August. It was not well received; some people in the audience burst out laughing during the slow movement.[1]

His family got into dire economic circumstances after the death of his father in 1825. Berwald tried to get several scholarships, but only got one from the King, which enabled him to study in Berlin, where he worked hard on operas despite not having any chance to put them on the stage. To make a living, Berwald started an orthopedic and physiotherapy clinic in Berlin in 1835, which turned out to be profitable. Some of the orthopedic devices he invented were still in use decades after his death.

He stopped composing during his time in Berlin, resuming only in 1841 with a move to Vienna and marriage to Mathilde Scherer. In 1842 a concert of his tone poems at the Redoutensaal at the Hofburg Imperial Palace received extremely positive reviews, and over the course of the next three years Berwald wrote four Symphonies.

The Symphony No. 1 in G minor, "Sérieuse", was the only one of Berwald's four symphonies that was performed in his lifetime. In 1843, it was premiered in Stockholm with his cousin Johan Frederik conducting the Royal Opera House Orchestra. At that same concert, his operetta Jag går i kloster ("I enter a monastery") was also performed, but its success is credited to one of the roles having been sung by Jenny Lind.[citation needed]

His Piano Concerto, finished in 1855, intended for his piano pupil Hilda Aurora Thegerström, who continued her studies with Antoine François Marmontel and Franz Liszt, did not see the light of day until 1904, when Berwald's granddaughter Astrid performed it at a Stockholm student concert. Particularly in its brilliant last movement it may be compared favourably to Robert Schumann or Edvard Grieg. Its three movements are played without a break.

Berwald's music was not recognised favourably in Sweden during his lifetime, even drawing hostile newspaper reviews, but fared a little better in Germany and Austria. The Mozarteum Salzburg made him an honorary member in 1847.

When Berwald returned to Sweden in 1849, he managed a glass works at Sandö in Ångermanland owned by Ludvig Petré, an amateur violinist. During that time Berwald focused his attention on producing chamber music.

One of his few operas to be staged in his lifetime, Estrella de Soria, was heartily applauded at its premiere at the Royal Theater in April 1862, and was given four more performances in the same month. Following this success, he wrote Drottningen av Golconda ("The Queen of Golconda"), which would have been premiered in 1864, but was not, due to a change of directors at the Royal Opera.

In 1866, Berwald received the Swedish Order of the Polar Star, in recognition of his musical achievements. The following year, the Board of the Royal Musical Academy appointed Berwald professor of musical composition at the Stockholm Conservatory, only to have the Conservatory Board reverse the decision a few days later, and appoint another. The royal family stepped in, and Berwald got the post. At around that time he was also given many important commissions, but he did not live to fulfill them all.

Berwald died in Stockholm in 1868 of pneumonia and was interred there in the Norra begravningsplatsen (Northern Cemetery). The second movement of the Symphony No. 1 was played at his funeral.

Ten years after Berwald's death, his Symphony No. 4 in E-flat major, "Naïve", was premiered in 1878 (the originally planned 1848 premiere in Paris having been cancelled because of the political unrest of the time). This gap between composition and first performance was relatively short, however, compared to what befell the Symphony No. 2 in D major, "Capriceuse" and Symphony No. 3 in C major, "Singulière". Those two pieces were not premiered until 1914 and 1905, respectively.

References

^ Sven Kruckenberg, programme notes for Naxos CD 8.554287, Swedish Romantic Violin Concertos, translated by Andrew Smith. "The press were not enthusiastic. The Concerto was deemed to be too unwieldy and the soloist to lack any feeling for melody – except in the central movement, in which the accompaniment was so ridiculous that some members of the audience burst out laughing."

Robert Layton, editor, A Guide To The Symphony, Chapter 13, "The Symphony in Scandinavia", written by Robert Layton.
Harold Truscott, "The Music of the Symphony" in Havergal Brian's Gothic Symphony: Two Studies, David Brown, editor. Kent: Alan Pooley Printing Ltd. (1981)

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