François Couperin

Home ► Composers ► C ► Couperin ► Biography

Biography

Couperin was born in Paris. He was taught by his father, Charles Couperin, who died when François was 10, and by Jacques Thomelin. In 1685 he became the organist at the church of Saint-Gervais, Paris, a post he inherited from his father and that he would pass on to his cousin, Nicolas Couperin. Other members of the family would hold the same position in later years. In 1693 Couperin succeeded his teacher Thomelin as organist at the Chapelle Royale (Royal Chapel) with the title organiste du Roi, organist by appointment to the King. This was the Sun King, Louis XIV.

In 1717 Couperin became court organist and composer, with the title ordinaire de la musique de la chambre du Roi. With his colleagues, Couperin gave a weekly concert, typically on Sunday. Many of these concerts were in the form of suites for violin, viol, oboe, bassoon and harpsichord, on which he was a virtuoso player.

Couperin died in Paris in 1733.

 

References

    * Willi Apel: The History of Keyboard Music to 1700, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972, p. 736-738.
    * Bruce Gustafson: "France" in Keyboard Music Before 1700, ed. Alexander Silbiger, New York: Routledge, 2004, p. 115-116.
    * Edward Higginbottom. "Couperin: (4) François Couperin (ii) [le grand]", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 30 November 2007), grovemusic.com (subscription access).
    * John Gillespie: Five Centuries of Keyboard Music: An historical survey of music for harpsichord and piano, New York NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1965. ISBN 0-486-22855-X
    * Philippe Beaussant: François Couperin, translated from the French by Alexandra Land, Portland OR: Amadeus Press, 1990. ISBN 0-931340-27-6
    * Wilfrid Mellers: "Francois Couperin and the French Classical Tradition", London UK:Faber & Faber; 2nd edition (October 1987) ISBN-13: 978-0571139835

Read the
FULL POST

Arcangelo Corelli

Home ► Composers ► C ► Corelli ► Biography

Biography

Arcangelo Corelli was born at Fusignano, Romagna, in the current-day province of Ravenna. Little is known about his early life. His master on the violin was Giovanni Battista Bassani. Matteo Simonelli, the well-known singer of the pope’s chapel, taught him composition.

His first major success was gained in Paris at the age of nineteen, and to this he owed his European reputation. From Paris, Corelli went to Germany. In 1681 he was in the service of the electoral prince of Bavaria; between 1680 and 1685 he spent a considerable time in the house of his friend and fellow violinist-composer Cristiano Farinelli (believed to be the uncle of the celebrated castrato Farinelli).

In 1685 Corelli was in Rome, where he led the festival performances of music for Queen Christina of Sweden and he was also a favorite of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, grand-nephew of another Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni who in 1689 became Pope Alexander VIII. From 1689 to 1690 he was in Modena; the Duke of Modena was generous to him. In 1708 he returned to Rome, living in the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni. His visit to Naples, at the invitation of the king, took place in the same year.

The style of execution introduced by Corelli and preserved by his pupils, such as Francesco Geminiani, Pietro Locatelli, and many others, was of vital importance for the development of violin playing. It has been said that the paths of all of the famous violinist-composers of 18th-century Italy lead to Arcangelo Corelli who was their "iconic point of reference." (Toussaint Loviko, in the program notes to Italian Violin Concertos, Veritas, 2003)

However, Corelli used only a limited portion of his instrument's capabilities. This may be seen from his writings; the parts for violin very rarely proceed above D on the highest string, sometimes reaching the E in fourth position on the highest string. The story has been told and retold that Corelli refused to play a passage which extended to A in altissimo in the overture to Handel’s oratorio il Trionfo del Tempo e Disinganno (premiered in Rome, 1708), and took serious offense when the composer played the note.

Nevertheless, his compositions for the instrument mark an epoch in the history of chamber music. His influence was not confined to his own country. Johann Sebastian Bach studied the works of Corelli and based an organ fugue (BWV 579) on Corelli's Opus 3 of 1689.

Musical society in Rome also owed much to Corelli. He was received in the highest circles of the aristocracy, and for a long time presided at the celebrated Monday concerts in the palace of Cardinal Ottoboni.

Corelli died in possession of a fortune of 120,000 marks and a valuable collection of pictures, the only luxury in which he had indulged. He left both to his benefactor and friend, who generously made over the money to Corelli's relatives. Corelli is buried in the Pantheon at Rome. One can still trace back many generations of violinists from student to teacher to Corelli.

His compositions are distinguished by a beautiful flow of melody and by a mannerly treatment of the accompanying parts, which he is justly said to have liberated from the strict rules of counterpoint.

His concerti grossi have often been popular in Western culture. For example, a portion of the Christmas Concerto, op.6 no.8, is in the soundtrack of the film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. He is also referred to frequently in the novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

Read the
FULL POST

Aaron Copland

Home ► Composers ► C ► Copland ► Biography

Biography

 

Early life

Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, of Lithuanian Jewish descent in 1900, the last of five children. Before emigrating from Scotland to the United States, Copland's father Anglicized his surname “Kaplan” to “Copland”.[1] Throughout his childhood, Copland and his family lived above his parents' Brooklyn shop (a neighborhood “Macy’s”), on the corner of Dean Street and Washington Avenue[2] and all the children helped out in the store. His father was a staunch Democrat. The family members were active in Congregation Baith Israel Anshei Emes, where Aaron celebrated his Bar Mitzvah.[3] Not especially athletic, the sensitive young man became an avid reader and often read Horatio Alger stories on his front steps.[4]

Copland’s father had no musical interest at all but his mother sang and played the piano, and arranged for music lessons for her children. Of his siblings, oldest brother Ralph was the most advanced musically, proficient on the violin, while his sister Laurine had the strongest connection with Aaron, giving him his first piano lessons, promoting his musical education, and supporting him in his musical career.[5] She attended the Metropolitan Opera School and was a frequent opera goer. She often brought home libretti for Aaron to study.[6] Copland attended Boys’ High School and in the summer went to various camps. Most of his early exposure to music was at Jewish weddings and ceremonies, and occasional family musicales.[7]

At the age of eleven, Copland devised an opera scenario he called Zenatello, which included seven bars of music, his first notated melody.[8] He took music lessons with Leopold Wolfsohn between 1913 and 1917, who taught him the standard classical fare. Copland first public music performance was at a Wanamaker recital.[9]

By 15, after attending a concert by composer-pianist Ignacy Paderewski, Copland decided to become a composer.[10] After attempts to further his music study from a correspondence course, Copland took formal lessons in harmony, theory, and composition from Rubin Goldmark, a noted teacher and composer of American music (who had given George Gershwin three lessons). Goldmark gave the young Copland a solid foundation, especially in the Germanic tradition, as he stated later, “This was a stroke of luck for me. I was spared the floundering that so many musicians have suffered through incompetent teaching.”[11] But Copland also commented that the maestro had “little sympathy for the advanced musical idioms of the day” and his “approved” composers ended with Richard Strauss.[12]

Copland’s graduation piece from his studies with Goldmark was a three-movement piano sonata, in a Romantic style, but he had also composed more original and daring pieces which he did not share with his teacher.[13] In addition to regularly attendance at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Symphony where he heard the standard classical repertory, Copland continued his musical development through an expanding circle of musical friends. After he graduated from high school, Copland played in dance bands.[14] Continuing his musical education, Copland received further piano lessons from Victor Wittgenstein, who found his student to be “quiet, shy, well-mannered, and gracious in accepting criticism.”[15] Copland’s fascination with the Russian Revolution and its promise for freeing the lower classes drew a rebuke from his father and uncles.[16] In spite of that, in his early adult life Copland would develop friendships with people with socialist and communist leanings.[17]

 

Studying in Paris

From 1917 to 1921, Copland composed juvenile works of short piano pieces and art songs.[18] Copland’s passion for the latest European music, plus glowing letters from his friend Aaron Schaffer, inspired him to go to Paris for further study.[19] His father wanted him to go to college but instead, his mother’s vote in the family conference allowed him to give Paris a try. On arriving in France, he studied with Paul Vidal at the Fontainebleau School of Music, but finding him too much like Goldmark, he switched to famed teacher Nadia Boulanger (thirty-four at the time). He had initial reservations, “No one to my knowledge had ever before thought of studying with a woman.”[20] She interviewed him, and recalled later, “One could tell his talent immediately.”[21]

Boulanger had as many as forty students at once and employed a formal regimen that Copland had to follow, too. Copland found her incisive mind much to his liking and stated, “this intellectual Amazon is not only professor at the Conservatoire, is not only familiar with all music from Bach to Stravinsky, but is prepared for anything worse in the way of dissonance. But make no mistake…A more charming womanly woman never lived.”[22] Though he planned on only one year abroad, he studied with her for three years, finding her eclectic approach to inspire his own broad musical taste.

Adding to the heady cultural atmosphere of the early 1920s in Paris was the presence of expatriate American writers Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, as well as artists like Picasso, Chagall, and Modigliani.[23] Also influential on the new music were the French intellectuals Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry, Sartre, and André Gide, the latter cited by Copland as being his personal favorite and most read.[24] Travel to Italy, Austria, and Germany rounded out Copland’s musical education. During his stay in Paris, Copland began writing musical critiques, the first on Gabriel Fauré, which helped spread his fame and stature in the music community.[25] Instead of wallowing in self-pity and self-destruction like many of the expatriate members of the Lost Generation, Copland returned to America optimistic and enthusiastic about the future.[26]

 

Career between 1925 and 1950

Upon returning to America, Copland was determined to make his way as a full-time composer. He rented a studio apartment on the Upper West Side, his home area for the next three decades, which kept him close to Carnegie Hall and other musical venues and publishers (later he would move to Westchester County). He lived frugally and survived financially with help from a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1925 and again in 1926, each worth $2,500.[27] Lecture-recitals, awards, appointments and small commissions, plus some teaching, writing, and personal loans kept him afloat in the subsequent years through World War II.[28] Also important were wealthy patrons who supported the arts community during the Depression, underwriting performances, publication, and promotion of musical events and composers.[29]

Copland’s compositions in the early 1920s reflected the prevailing "modernist" attitude among intellectuals that they were an small vanguard leading the way for the masses, who would only come to appreciate their efforts over time. In this view, music and the other arts need be only to be accessible to a select cadre of the enlightened. Toward this end, Copland formed the Young Composer’s Group, modeled after France's “Six”, gathering together promising young composers, acting as their guiding spirit.[30]

Soon after his return, Copland was introduced to the artistic circle of Alfred Steiglitz and met many of the leading artists of that time. Steiglitz’s conviction that the American artist should reflect “the ideas of American Democracy” influenced Copland and a whole generation of artists and photographers, including Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Georgia O’Keefe, Walker Evans.[31] Copland was directly inspired by the photographs of Walker Evans in his opera The Tender Land.[32]

In his quest to take up Steiglitz’s challenge, Copland had few established American contemporaries to emulate apart from Carl Ruggles and reclusive Charles Ives, although the 1920s were Golden Years for American popular music and jazz, with George Gershwin and Louis Armstrong leading the way.[33] Later, however, Copland joined up with his younger contemporaries, and formed a group termed the “commando unit”, which included Roger Sessions, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, and Walter Piston.[34] They collaborated in joint concerts showcasing their work to new audiences.

Copland’s relationship with the “commando unit” was one of both support and rivalry, and he played a key role in keeping them together. The five young American composers helped promote each other and their works but also had testy exchanges, inflamed by the assertion of the press that Copland was the “truly American” composer.[35] Going beyond the five, Copland was generous with his time with nearly every American young composer he met during his life, later earning the title the “Dean of American Music”.[36]

Mounting troubles with the Symphonic Ode (1929) and Short Symphony (1933) caused him to rethink the paradigm of composing orchestral music for a select group, as it was financially contradictory approach, particularly in the Depression. In many ways, this shift mirrored the German idea of Gebrauchsmusik (“music for use”) as composers sought to create music that could serve a utilitarian as well as artistic purpose. This approach encompassed two trends: one—music that students could easily learn, and two—music which would have wider appeal (incidental music for plays, movies, radio, etc.).[37] Copland undertook both goals, starting in the mid 1930s.

Perhaps also motivated by the plight of children during the Depression, around 1935 Copland began to compose musical pieces for young audiences, in accordance with the first goal of American Gebrauchsmusik. These works included piano pieces (The Young Pioneers) and an opera (The Second Hurricane).[38]

During the Depression years, Copland traveled extensively to Europe, Africa, and Mexico. He formed an important friendship with Mexican composer Carlos Chavez and would return often to Mexico on working vacations and to conduct.[39] During his initial visit to Mexico, Copland began composing the first of his signature works, El Salón México, which he completed four years later in 1936. This and other incidental commissions fulfilled the second goal of American Gebrauchsmusik, creating music of wide appeal.

During this time, he composed (for radio broadcast) "Prairie Journal", a piece which was one of his first to convey a Western flavor.[40] Branching out into theater, Copland also played an important role providing musical advice and inspiration to The Group Theater—Stella Adler’s and Lee Strasberg’s “method” acting school.[41] The Group Theater followed Copland’s musical agenda and focused on plays that illuminated the American experience. After Hitler and Mussolini's attacks on Spain in 1936, leftist parties had united in a Popular Front against Fascism. Many Group Theater members were influenced by Marxism and other progressive philosophies, and several had joined the Communist Party, including Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets.[42] Copland also had contact later with other major American playwrights, including Thorton Wilder, William Inge, Arthur Miller, and Edward Albee and considered projects with all of them.[43] During the 1930s, Copland wrote incidental music for several plays, including Irwin Shaw’s "Quiet City" (1939), considered one of his most personal and poignant scores.[44]

In 1939, Copland completed his first two Hollywood film scores, for Of Mice and Men and Our Town, and received sizable commissions. But it wasn’t until the worldwide market for classical recordings boomed after World War II, however, that he achieved economic security. Even after securing a comfortable income, he continued to write, teach, lecture, and eventually conduct.[45] In the same year, he composed the radio score "John Henry", based on the folk ballad.[46]

Demonstrating his broad range, in the 1930s Copland began composing for ballet, with his highly successful Billy the Kid (1939), the second of four ballets he scored (his "Hear Ye! Hear Ye!" (1934) was his first ballet score).[47] Copland’s ballet music had much the same effect of establishing Copland as an authentic composer of American music as Stravinsky’s ballet scores did for Russian music.[48] Copland’s timing was excellent. He helped fill a vacuum for the American choreographers who needed suitable music to score their own nationalistic dance repertory.[49]

In keeping with the wartime period, Copland’s "Piano Sonata" (1941) was a piece characterized as “grim, nervous, elegiac, with pervasive bell-like tolling of alarm and mourning”. It was later adapted to "Day on Earth", a landmark American dance by Doris Humphrey.[50]

Copland started to publish some of his lectures in the 1930s, "What to Listen for in Music" being one of the most notable of his writings.[51] He also took a leadership role in the American Composers Alliance, whose mission was “to regularize and collect all fees pertaining to performance of their copyrighted music” and “to stimulate interest in the performance of American music”.[52] Copland eventually moved over to rival ASCAP.[53] Through the collection of his royalty fees and with his great success from 1940 on, Copland amassed a multi-million dollar fortune by the time of his death.[54]

The decade of the 1940s was arguably Copland’s most productive and it firmly established his worldwide fame. His two ballet scores for "Rodeo" (1942) and "Appalachian Spring" (1944) were huge successes. His pieces Lincoln Portrait and Fanfare for the Common Man have become patriotic standards (See Popular works, below). Also important was Copland’s Third Symphony, composed in a two-year period from 1944 to 1946, his foremost symphony and the most popular American symphony of the 20th Century.[55]

In 1945, Copland contributed to "Jubilee Variation", a work commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony in which ten America composers collaborated, but the piece is seldom heard in the concert hall.[56] Copland’s "In the Beginning" (1947) is a choral work using the first seven verses of the second chapter of Genesis from the King James Version of the Bible and a masterpiece of the choral repertory.[57]

Copland’s "Clarinet Concerto" (1948), scored for solo clarinet, strings, harp, and piano, was a commission piece for bandleader and clarinetist Benny Goodman, and a complement to Copland’s earlier jazzy work, the "Piano Concerto" (1926).[58] Continuing with jazz influenced works, Copland wrote two short pieces, and combining them with to early works, created "Four Piano Blues", an introspective composition.[59]

Copland completed the 1940s with two film scores, one for William Wyler's 1949 film, The Heiress, and his score for the film adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel The Red Pony.[60]

In 1949, he returned to Europe to find Pierre Boulez dominating the group of post-War radical musicians.[61] He also met with the proponents of the twelve-tone school (Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg) and he found himself in greater sympathy with them than with the French, who were drifting too far from classical principles to suit his taste and producing “ a chaotic impression”.[62]

 

1950s and 1960s

In 1950, Copland received a Fulbright scholarship to study in Rome, Italy, which he did the following year. Around this time, he also composed his Piano Quartet, adopting Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method of composition, and Old American Songs (1950), premiered by William Warfield.[63]

Because of the political climate of that era, A Lincoln Portrait was withdrawn from the 1953 inaugural concert for President Eisenhower. That same year, Copland was called before Congress where he testified that he was never a communist.[64]

Despite the difficulties that his suspected Communist sympathies posed, Copland nonetheless traveled extensively during the 1950s and early 1960s, observing the avant-garde stylings of Europe while experiencing the new school of Soviet music. Additionally, he was rather taken with the work of Toru Takemitsu while in Japan, and began a correspondence that would last over the next decade. Copland wrote that the Japanese composer “He has the ‘pure gold’ touch, he chooses his notes carefully and meaningfully.”[65] Copland also gained exposure to the latest musical trends in Poland and Scandinavia. In observing these new musical forms, Copland revised his text "The New Music" with comments on the styles that he encountered. In particular, while Copland explained the importance of the work of John Cage and others (in his chapter titled “The Music of Chance”), he found that these radical trends in music which appealed to those “who enjoy teetering on the edge of chaos” were less likely to gain the appreciation of a wider audience “who envisage art as a bulwark against the irrationality of man’s nature.” As he summarized, “I’ve spent most of my life trying to get the right note in the right place. Just throwing it open to chance seems to go against my natural instincts.”[66]

In 1954, Copland received a commission from Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein to create music for the opera "The Tender Land", based on James Agee’s "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men".[67] Copland had been leery of writing an opera, being especially aware of the pitfalls of that form, including weak libretti and demanding production values.[68] Nevertheless, Copland decided to try his hand at “la forme fatale”, especially since the 1950s were boom times for American playwriting with Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, and Thorton Wilder doing some of their best works.[69] Originally two acts, later "The Tender Land" was expanded to three. As he feared, critics found the libretto to be the opera’s weak spot and he later stated, “I admit that if I have one regret it is that I never did write a ‘grand opera’.”[70] In spite of its weaknesses, the opera has established itself as one of the few American operas in the standard repertory.

Copland exerted a major influence on the compositional style of his friend and protégé Leonard Bernstein, and a whole generation of American composers as well. Bernstein was considered the finest conductor of Copland's works and cites Copland’s “aesthetic, simplicity with originality” as being his strongest and most influential traits.[71]

 

Later life

Copland found himself conducting more and composing less from the 1960s onward. Though not enamored with the prospect, Copland found himself without new ideas for composition, saying “It was exactly as if someone had simply turned off a faucet.”[72] Copland was a frequent guest conductor of orchestras in the U.S. and the UK. He made a series of recordings of his music, especially during the 1970s, primarily for Columbia Records. In 1960, RCA Victor released Copland's recordings with the Boston Symphony Orchestra of the orchestral suites from Appalachian Spring and The Tender Land; these recordings were later reissued on CD, as were most of Copland's Columbia recordings (by Sony).

He deteriorated through the 1980s and died of Alzheimer's disease and respiratory failure in North Tarrytown, New York (now Sleepy Hollow), on December 2, 1990. Much of his large estate was bequeathed to the creation of the Aaron Copland Fund for Composers, which gives out over $600,000 per year to performing groups.[73]

 

Personal life

A moral conservative by nature, Copland was a calm, affable, modest and mild-mannered man, who masked his feelings. Even friends found it hard to crack his façade. Though shy, he preferred to be in a crowd than alone. He lived simply, and approached composing in the same manner. He was an avid reader. He always remained thrifty, even after he achieved substantial wealth. In company Copland could be “almost devilishly droll” and fun-loving. His tact served him well in his private life and in his public life as a moderator, committee man, and teacher.[74] Copland was a constant and diligent worker and a night owl, who composed primarily at the piano and at a relatively slow pace. He was careful in assembling and storing his documents and scores, as well, so he could later find and re-use earlier ideas and themes.[75]

Deciding not to follow the example of his father, a solid Democrat, Copland never enrolled as a member of any political party; but he espoused a general progressive view and had strong ties with numerous colleagues and friends in the Popular Front, including Odetts.[76] Copland supported the Communist Party USA ticket during the 1936 presidential election, at the height of his involvement with The Group Theater and remained a committed opponent of militarism and the Cold War, which he regarded as having been instigated by the United States. He condemned it as, "almost worse for art than the real thing". Throw the artist "into a mood of suspicion, ill-will, and dread that typifies the cold war attitude and he'll create nothing".[77] In keeping with these attitudes, Copland was a strong supporter of the Presidential candidacy of Henry A. Wallace on the Progressive Party ticket. As a result, he was later investigated by the FBI during the Red scare of the 1950s and found himself blacklisted. Copland was included on an FBI list of 151 artists thought to have Communist associations. Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn questioned Copland about his lecturing abroad, neglecting completely Copland’s works which made a virtue of American values.[78] Outraged by the accusations, many members of the musical community held up Copland's music as a banner of his patriotism. The investigations ceased in 1955 and were closed in 1975. Though taxing of his time, energy, and emotional state, Copland’s career and international artistic reputation were not seriously affected by the McCarthy probes.[79] In any case, beginning in 1950, Copland, who had been appalled at Stalin's persecution of Shostakovich and other artists, began resigning from participation in leftist groups. He decried the lack of artistic freedom in the Soviet Union and in his 1954 Norton lecture, asserted that loss of freedom under Soviet Communism deprived artists of "the immemorial right of the artist to be wrong". He began to vote Democratic, first for Stevenson and then Kennedy.[80]

Copland is documented as a gay man in author Howard Pollack's biography, Aaron Copland: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. Like many of his contemporaries he guarded his privacy, especially in regard to his homosexuality, providing very few written details about his private life. However, he was one of the few composers of his stature to live openly and travel with his lovers, most of whom were talented, much younger men. Among Copland's love affairs, most of which lasted for only a few years yet became enduring friendships, were ones with photographer Viktor Kraft, artist Alvin Ross, pianist Paul Moor, dancer Erik Johns and composer John Brodbin Kennedy[81] .

 

References

   1. ^ Howard Pollack, "Aaron Copland", Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1999, p. 15, ISBN 0-8050-4909-6
   2. ^ The Rest is Noise: Listening To The Twentieth Century, First Edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, p.266
   3. ^ Pollack, p. 26
   4. ^ Julia Smith, "Aaron Copland", E. P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1953, p. 15
   5. ^ Pollack, p. 19
   6. ^ Smith, p. 17
   7. ^ Pollack, p. 26
   8. ^ Pollack, p. 32
   9. ^ Smith, p. 18
  10. ^ Pollack, p. 33
  11. ^ Smith, p. 23
  12. ^ Pollack, p. 35
  13. ^ Pollack, p. 37
  14. ^ Pollack, p. 39
  15. ^ Smith, p. 25, 31
  16. ^ Smith, p. 30
  17. ^ Pollack, p. 237
  18. ^ Pollack, pp. 33-5
  19. ^ Smith, p. 33
  20. ^ Smith, p. 41
  21. ^ Pollack, p. 41
  22. ^ Pollack, p. 47
  23. ^ Pollack, p. 51
  24. ^ Pollack, pp. 53-4
  25. ^ Smith, p. 62
  26. ^ Pollack, p. 55
  27. ^ Pollack, p. 89
  28. ^ Pollack, p. 90
  29. ^ Pollack, p. 90
  30. ^ Berger, Arthur. (1953) Aaron Copland Oxford University Press
  31. ^ Pollack, p. 101
  32. ^ Pollack, p. 103
  33. ^ Pollack, p. 111
  34. ^ Pollack, p. 164
  35. ^ Pollack, p. 170
  36. ^ Pollack, p. 178, 215
  37. ^ Smith, p. 162
  38. ^ Pollack, p. 303
  39. ^ Pollack, p. 178, 226
  40. ^ Pollack, p. 310
  41. ^ Pollack, p. 258
  42. ^ Pollack, p. 259
  43. ^ Pollack, p. 267
  44. ^ Pollack, p. 331
  45. ^ Pollack, p. 92
  46. ^ Smith, p. 169
  47. ^ Smith, p. 187
  48. ^ Smith, p. 184
  49. ^ Smith, p. 185
  50. ^ Pollack, p. 351, 355
  51. ^ Smith, p. 169
  52. ^ Pollack, p. 91
  53. ^ Smith, p. 182
  54. ^ Pollack, p. 93
  55. ^ Pollack, p. 410, 418
  56. ^ Pollack, p. 285
  57. ^ Pollack, p. 421
  58. ^ Pollack, p. 424
  59. ^ Pollack, p. 427
  60. ^ Smith, p. 202
  61. ^ Pollack, p. 460
  62. ^ Pollack, p. 462, 465
  63. ^ Pollack, p. 467
  64. ^ Pollack, p. 456
  65. ^ Pollack, p. 464
  66. ^ Pollack, p. 465
  67. ^ Smith, p. 217
  68. ^ Pollack, p. 470
  69. ^ Pollack, p. 470
  70. ^ Pollack, p. 478
  71. ^ Smith, p. 289
  72. ^ Pollack, p. 516
  73. ^ Pollack, p. 548
  74. ^ Pollack, pp. 4-5
  75. ^ Pollack, p. 9
  76. ^ Smith, p. 60
  77. ^ Pollack, p. 284-85
  78. ^ Pollack, p. 452, 456
  79. ^ Pollack, p. 458
  80. ^ Pollack, p. 285
  81. ^ Aldrich and Wotherspoon, Who's who in gay and lesbian history, London, 2000
  82. ^ Pollack, p. 36
  83. ^ Smith, p. 30
  84. ^ Pollack, p. 41
  85. ^ Pollack, p. 49
  86. ^ Pollack, p. 50
  87. ^ Pollack, p. 49
  88. ^ Pollack, p. 59
  89. ^ Pollack, p. 60
  90. ^ Smith, p. 39
  91. ^ Smith, p. 63
  92. ^ Smith, p. 50
  93. ^ Pollack, p. 65
  94. ^ Pollack, p. 65
  95. ^ Andy Trudeau. "The Copland Story: An Artistic Biography".
  96. ^ According to Charles Hazlewood in Discovering Music from 32:20 to 33:45
  97. ^ Pollack, p. 65
  98. ^ Pollack, p. 71
  99. ^ Smith, p. 60
100. ^ Pollack, p. 120
101. ^ Pollack, p. 116
102. ^ Pollack, p. 120
103. ^ Pollack, pp. 116-117
104. ^ Pollack, p. 115
105. ^ Pollack, p. 120
106. ^ Smith, pp. 292-4
107. ^ Pollack, p. 530
108. ^ Smith, pp. 223-5
109. ^ Pollack, p. 481
110. ^ Pollack, p. 41
111. ^ Smith, p. 51
112. ^ Pollack, p. 44
113. ^ Pollack, p. 86
114. ^ Pollack, pp. 81-82
115. ^ Pollack, pp. 121-122
116. ^ Pollack, p. 123
117. ^ Pollack, p. 114
118. ^ Pollack, p. 298
119. ^ Pollack, p. 299
120. ^ Pollack, p. 300
121. ^ Pollack, p. 302
122. ^ Pollack, p. 317
123. ^ Pollack, p. 315
124. ^ Smith, p. 189
125. ^ Pollack, p. 323
126. ^ Smith, p. 188
127. ^ Pollack, p. 325
128. ^ Pollack, p. 361
129. ^ Pollack, p. 362
130. ^ Pollack, p. 412
131. ^ Pollack, p. 357
132. ^ Pollack, p. 358
133. ^ Pollack, p. 361
134. ^ collected in 1937 by Alan and Elizabeth Lomax and published in Our Singing Country (1941). See Judith Tick's preface to John A. and Alan Lomax and Ruth Crawford Seeger's, Our Singing Country Folk Songs and Ballads (Dover, 2000), p. xvii.
135. ^ Smith, p. 193
136. ^ Pollack, p. 367
137. ^ Pollack, p. 372
138. ^ Grout, Donald Jay, & Palisca, Claud V. (1996). A History of Western Music (5th ed.). New York & London: W. W. Norton and Company.
139. ^ Pollack, p. 388
140. ^ Smith, p. 195
141. ^ Pollack, p. 402
142. ^ Pollack, p. 410
143. ^ Pollack, p. 410
144. ^ Pollack, p. 416
145. ^ Pollack, p. 410
146. ^ Pollack, p. 417
147. ^ Pollack, p. 418
148. ^ Pollack, p. 445
149. ^ Pollack, p. 462
150. ^ Pollack, p. 481
151. ^ Pollack, p. 482
152. ^ Pollack, pp. 484-5
153. ^ Pollack, pp. 487-515
154. ^ Pollack, p. 336
155. ^ Smith, p. 179
156. ^ Pollack, p. 348
157. ^ Pollack, p. 337
158. ^ Pollack, p. 340
159. ^ Pollack, p. 343
160. ^ Pollack, p. 340
161. ^ Pollack, p. 90
162. ^ Pollack, p. 349
163. ^ Pollack, p. 342
164. ^ Pollack, p. 343
165. ^ Pollack, p. 349
166. ^ Pollack, p. 350
167. ^ Smith, p. 215
168. ^ Smith, p. 202
169. ^ Smith, p. 201
170. ^ Pollack, p. 497
171. ^ Smith, p. 265
172. ^ Smith, pp. 264-5
173. ^ Smith, p. 264
174. ^ Smith, p. 285
175. ^ Smith, p. 290
176. ^ Pollack, pp. 534-5
177. ^ Pollack, p. 536
178. ^ Pollack, p. 537
179. ^ Pollack, p. 538
180. ^ Pollack, p. 533
181. ^ Pollack, p. 535
182. ^ Pollack, p. 536
183. ^ Pollack, p. 539
184. ^ Pollack, p. 539
185. ^ Pollack, p. 540
186. ^ Pollack, p. 535
187. ^ "The University of Pennsylvania Glee Club Award of Merit Recipients".
188. ^ Pollack, p. 404
189. ^ Smith, p. 201

    * Kamien, Roger (1997). Music: An Appreciation, 3rd edition, Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill College. ISBN 0-07-036521-0.
    * Carol J. Oja & Judith Tick (Ed.): Aaron Copland and His World. Princeton University Press 2005

Read the
FULL POST

Elliott Carter

Home ► Composers ► C ► Carter ► Biography

Biography

Elliott Cook Carter, Jr. (born in New York City on December 11, 1908) is an American composer from New York City. He studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris in the 1930s, and then returned to the United States. After a neoclassical phase, he went on to write atonal, rhythmically complex music. His compositions, which have been performed all over the world, include orchestral and chamber music as well as solo instrumental and vocal works.

Carter's father, Elliott Carter, Sr. was a businessman and his mother was the former Florence Chambers. The family was well-to-do. As a teenager he developed an interest in music and was encouraged in this regard by the composer Charles Ives (who sold insurance to his family). Although Carter majored in English at Harvard College, he also studied music there and at the nearby Longy School of Music. His professors included Walter Piston and Gustav Holst. He sang with the Harvard Glee Club. He did graduate work in music at Harvard, from which he received a Master's degree in music in 1932. He then went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger (as did Aaron Copland, George Gershwin and many other American composers). Carter worked with Mlle Boulanger from 1932-35 and in 1935 he received a doctorate in music (D Mus) from the Ecole Normale in Paris. Later in 1935 he returned to the US where he directed the Ballet Caravan.

From 1940 to 1944 Elliott Carter taught courses in physics, mathematics and classical Greek, in addition to music, at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. On July 6, 1939, Carter married Helen Frost-Jones. They had one child, a son, David Chambers Carter. During World War II, Carter worked for the Office of War Information. He later held teaching posts at the Peabody Conservatory (1946 - 1948), Columbia University, Queens College, New York (1955-56), Yale University (1960-62), Cornell University (from 1967) and the Juilliard School (from 1972). In 1967 he was appointed a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

 

Recent years

Carter has lived in Greenwich Village[citation needed] and has recently completed Interventions, to be premiered by pianist Daniel Barenboim and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under James Levine when the composer turns 100 in 2008.[2] According to John Link, Carter "is now working on a song cycle on Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos."[3]

 

References

   1. ^ 'Minimalism is death'. Telegraph, 26 July 2003.
   2. ^ Boston Symphony concert listing
   3. ^ Link, John. "Elliott Carter's Late Music?" in the Tanglewood Music Center's program guide Carter's Century: Festival of Contemporary Music, July 20-July 24, 2008.

Doering, William T. Elliott Carter: A Bio-Bibliography. Greenwood Press, 1993.

Read the
FULL POST

Anton Bruckner

Home ► Composers ► B ► Bruckner ► Biography

Biography

Anton Bruckner was born in Ansfelden on September 4, 1824. His father, a schoolmaster[1] and organist, was his first music teacher. He died when Anton was 13 years old.[2] Bruckner worked for a few years as a teacher's assistant, fiddling at village dances at night to supplement his income. He studied at the Augustinian monastery in St. Florian, becoming an organist there in 1851. In 1855, he took up a counterpoint course with Simon Sechter. He later studied with Otto Kitzler, who introduced him to the music of Richard Wagner, which Bruckner studied extensively from 1863 onwards. Bruckner continued his studies to the age of 40. Bruckner's genius, unlike that of a child prodigy (Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for example), did not appear until well into the fourth decade of his life. Furthermore, broad fame and acceptance did not come until he was over 60. A devout Catholic who loved to drink beer, Bruckner was out of step with his contemporaries. He had already in 1861 made acquaintance with Liszt who, like Bruckner, had a strong religious faith and who first and foremost was a harmonic innovator, initiating the new German school together with Wagner. Soon after Bruckner had ended his studies under Sechter and Kitzler, he wrote his first mature work, the Mass in D Minor.

In 1868, after Sechter had died, Bruckner hesitantly accepted Sechter's post as a teacher of music theory at the Vienna Conservatory, during which time he concentrated most of his energy on writing symphonies. These symphonies, however, were poorly received, at times considered "wild" and "nonsensical". He later accepted a post at the Vienna University in 1875,[3] where he tried to make music theory a part of the curriculum. Overall, he was unhappy in Vienna, which was musically dominated by the critic Eduard Hanslick. At the time there was a feud between advocates of the music of Wagner and Brahms; by aligning himself with Wagner, however, Bruckner made an unintentional enemy out of Hanslick. However, he was not without supporters; Deutsche Zeitung's music critic Theodor Helm, and famous conductors such as Arthur Nikisch and Franz Schalk constantly tried to bring his music to the public, and for this purpose proposed 'improvements' for making Bruckner's music more acceptable to the public. While Bruckner allowed these changes, he also made sure in his will to bequeath his original scores to the Vienna National Library, confident of their musical validity. Another proof of Bruckner's confidence in his artistic ability is that he often started work on a new symphony just a few days after finishing another.

In addition to his symphonies, Bruckner wrote masses, motets and other sacred choral works, and a few chamber works, including a string quintet. Unlike his romantic symphonies, Bruckner's choral works are often conservative and contrapuntal in style.

Biographers generally characterize Bruckner as a very simple man,[4] and numerous anecdotes abound as to his dogged pursuit of his chosen craft and his humble acceptance of the fame that eventually came his way. Once, after a rehearsal of his Fourth Symphony, the well-meaning Bruckner tipped the conductor Hans Richter: "When the symphony was over," Richter related, "Bruckner came to me, his face beaming with enthusiasm and joy. I felt him press a coin into my hand. 'Take this' he said, 'and drink a glass of beer to my health.'" Richter, of course, accepted the coin, a Maria Theresa thaler, and wore it on his watch-chain ever after.

Bruckner was a renowned organist in his day, impressing audiences in France in 1869, and England in 1871, giving six recitals on a new Henry Willis organ at Royal Albert Hall in London and five more at the Crystal Palace. Though he wrote no major works for the organ,[5] his improvisation sessions sometimes yielded ideas for the Symphonies. He taught organ performance at the Conservatory; among his students were Hans Rott and Franz Schmidt. Gustav Mahler, who called Bruckner his "forerunner", attended the conservatory at this time (Walter n.d.).

In July 1886, the emperor decorated him with the Order of Franz-Josef.[6]

Bruckner died in Vienna in 1896, of natural causes. He is buried in the crypt of St. Florian monastery church, right below his favorite organ.[7]

Anton Bruckner Private University for Music, Drama, and Dance, an institution of higher education in Linz, close to his native Ansfelden, was named after him in 1932 ("Bruckner Conservatory Linz" until 2004). The Bruckner Orchester Linz was also named in his honor.

 

References

    * Bruckner, Anton. Symphony No. 8/2, c minor, 1890 version. Edited by Leopold Nowak. New York: Eulenberg, 1994.

    * Gilliam, Bryan, The annexation of Anton Bruckner: Nazi revisionism and the politics of appropriation, in Bruckner Studies edited by Timothy Jackson and Paul Hawkshaw.

    * Korstvedt, Benjamin M. Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 8 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 19.

    * Walter, Bruno (November 1940). "Bruckner and Mahler". Chord and Dischord II (2): 2–12. Bruckner Society of America. Retrieved on 2006-07-29.

   1. ^ Hans-Hubert Schōnzeler, Bruckner. New York: Grossman Publishers (1970): 8. "Josef Bruckner had twelve children, and one of them, Anton, born in 1791, became a teacher like his father. ... In 1823 he married Therese Helm from Streyr, a marriage which was to be blessed with eleven children, ... Their eldest was Josef Anton, born on 4 September 1824 and named after his grandfather."
   2. ^ Derek Watson, Bruckner. New York: Schuster & Macmillan (1997): 3
   3. ^ Schōnzeler (1970): 70. "In July 1875 Bruckner ... proposed yet a third time to the university of Vienna that a lectureship in harmony and counterpoint be created, and at long last, despite Hanslick's opposition, his application was successful. Bruckner was appointed to the post, and on 25 November 1875 he gave his opening oration.
   4. ^ Peter Gammond, Bluff Your Way in Music. London: Ravette Books (1985):: 33. "it is generally said that Bruckner was a very simple man ... If, after listening to one of his symphonies, you still feel that he was simple, then you are not the kind of person who should be reading this book."
   5. ^ Derek Watson, Bruckner. New York: Schuster & Macmillan (1997): 73. "Unlike Franck or Reger, however, he [Bruckner] has not left a single composition of any value for his instrument."
   6. ^ Derek Watson, Bruckner. New York: Schuster & Macmillan (1997): 39
   7. ^ Schōnzeler (1970): 108. "Bruckner's ... body was taken to St. Florian. ... There, in a splendid sarcophagus, lie the earthly remains of Anton Bruckner, but from above the crypt, from the great 'Bruckner Organ', his living spirit still bursts forth."
   8. ^ Schōnzeler (1970): 67. "No. 1 he always called 'das kecke Beserl' (impossible to translate into English—perhaps 'the cheeky brat')."
   9. ^ Derek Watson, Bruckner. New York: Schuster & Macmillan (1997): 80. "That Symphony No. 2 is in C minor has actually been cited as a proof of Bruckner's naïvety as a composer."
  10. ^ Robert Simpson, The Essence of Bruckner: An essay towards the understanding of his music. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd (1977): 64. "At this time Bruckner was more obsessed with Wagner's music than at any other time in his life, and the symphony contained a number of deliberate quotations from, mainly, Tristan und Isolde, Die Walküre and Die Meistersinger. This was the version Wagner saw and of which he accepted the dedication; Bruckner sent him a fair copy of the 1874 score."
  11. ^ Derek Watson, Bruckner. New York: Schuster & Macmillan (1997): 101. The Fifth was "the only one of his numbered and completed symphonies of which he was never to hear a note played."
  12. ^ Simpson (1977): 123. "The Sixth is the shortest of the fully mature symphonies. It has always been neglected, and I have never been able to understand why, for it has consistently struck me ... as among his most beautiful and original works; his own high opinion of it seems thoroughly justified."
  13. ^ Derek Watson, Bruckner. New York: Schuster & Macmillan (1997): 113. The Eighth "which he regarded as his finest work, caused him the greatest emotional strain of his whole career."
  14. ^ Simpson (1977): 181 - 182. "When Bruckner knew that he might not finish the Ninth he suggested that the Te Deum could be used as a finale, and the presence in the sketches of a motive ... led to the supposition that he was composing some kind of link between the two works. There is no evidence to suggest that Bruckner, even in the poor state of health and mind the last few months of his life, considered the use of the C major Te Deum as finale to a D minor symphony to be more than a makeshift solution."
  15. ^ Derek Watson, Bruckner. New York: Schuster & Macmillan (1997): 72. "They are of little concern to the non-German listener and do not represent important stages in Bruckner's creative unfolding."
  16. ^ Derek Watson, Bruckner. New York: Schuster & Macmillan (1997): 19. "Studying Tristan Bruckner used a piano score without text — a sign of how unconcerned he was with opera as drama."
  17. ^ Derek Watson, Bruckner (1997) New York: Schuster & Macmillan, p.s 45 - 46
  18. ^ Keith William Kinder, The Wind and Wind-chorus Music of Anton Bruckner. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Publishing Group (2000): 51, note 14
  19. ^ Bruckner in the Movies, TV and Radio
  20. ^ Peter Gammond, Bluff Your Way in Music. London: Ravette Books (1985):: 33. "Another misrepresentation of Bruckner is to bracket him with Mahler."

Read the
FULL POST

Max Bruch

Home ► Composers ► B ► Bruch ► Biography

Biography

Max Christian Friedrich Bruch (January 6, 1838 – October 2, 1920) also known as Max Karl August Bruch, was a German Romantic composer and conductor who wrote over 200 works, including three violin concertos, one of which is a staple of the violin repertoire.

Bruch was born in Cologne, Rhine Province, where he received his early musical training under the composer and pianist Ferdinand Hiller, to whom Robert Schumann dedicated his piano concerto. Ignaz Moscheles recognized his aptitude. He had a long career as a teacher, conductor and composer, moving among musical posts in Germany: Mannheim (1862-1864), Koblenz (1865-1867), Sondershausen, (1867-1870) Berlin (1870-1872), Bonn, where he spent 1873 -1878 working privately. At the height of his reputation he spent three seasons as conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society (1880-83). He taught composition at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik (the Berlin Conservatoire) from 1890 until his retirement in 1910.

His conservatively structured works, in the German romantic musical tradition, placed him in the camp of Romantic classicism exemplified by Johannes Brahms, rather than the opposing "New Music" of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. In his time, he was known primarily as a choral composer.

His Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26 (1866) is one of the most popular Romantic violin concertos. It uses several techniques from Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in E minor. These include the linking of movements, and a departure from the customary orchestral exposition and rigid form of earlier concertos. It is a singularly melodic composition which many critics have said represents the apex of the romantic tradition.

Other pieces which are also well-known and widely played include the Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra which includes an arrangement of the tune "Hey Tuttie Tatie", best known for its use of the song Scots Wha Hae by Robert Burns. Bruch also wrote Kol Nidrei, Op. 47, a popular work for cello and orchestra (its subtitle is "Adagio on Hebrew Melodies for Violoncello and Orchestra"). This piece was based on Hebrew melodies, principally the melody of the Kol Nidre prayer, which gives the piece its name. The success of this work has made many assume that Bruch himself had Jewish ancestry, but there is no evidence for this.

Other works include two other concerti for violin and orchestra (which Bruch himself regarded as at least as fine as the famous first); a Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra; and a Concerto for Viola, Clarinet and Orchestra. There are also 3 symphonies, which, while not displaying any originality in form or structure, nevertheless show Bruch at his best as a composer of fine melodic talent and a gift for orchestration, firmly in the tradition of the Romantics. He wrote a number of chamber works, including a set of eight pieces for piano, clarinet, and viola and a string octet.

The violinists Joseph Joachim and Willy Hess advised Bruch on composing for strings, and Hess performed the premieres of a number of works by Bruch, including the Concert Piece for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 84, which was composed for him.

Bruch died in his house in Berlin-Friedenau.

 

References

    * Fifield, Christopher (1988). Max Bruch His Life and Works. George Braziller. ISBN 0-8076-1204-9.

Read the
FULL POST

Benjamin Britten

Home ► Composers ► B ► Britten ► Biography

Biography

Britten was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, the son of a dentist and a talented amateur musician. He showed musical gifts very early in life, and began composing prolifically as a child. He was educated at Old Buckenham Hall School in Suffolk, a small all-boys prep school, and Gresham's School, Holt. In 1927, he began private lessons with Frank Bridge; he also studied, less happily, at the Royal College of Music under John Ireland, with some input from Ralph Vaughan Williams. Although ultimately held back by his parents (at the suggestion of College staff), Britten had also intended to study with Alban Berg in Vienna. Britten was a prolific juvenile composer; some 800 works and fragments precede his early published works. His first compositions to attract wide attention, however, were the Sinfonietta Op. 1, "A Hymn to the Virgin" (1930) and a set of choral variations A Boy was Born, written in 1934 for the BBC Singers. The following year he met W. H. Auden, and they collaborated on the song-cycle Our Hunting Fathers Op. 8, radical both in politics and musical treatment, and other works. Of more lasting importance to Britten was his meeting in 1937 with the tenor Peter Pears, who was to become his musical collaborator and inspiration as well as his life partner. In the same year he composed a Pacifist March (words, Ronald Duncan) for the Peace Pledge Union, of which, as a pacifist, he had become an active member, but the work was not a success and soon withdrawn.

In early 1939, Britten and Pears followed Auden to America, where Britten composed Paul Bunyan, an operetta (to a libretto by Auden), as well as the first of many song cycles for Pears. The period in America was also remarkable for a number of orchestral works, including Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge Op. 10 (written in 1937 for string orchestra), the Violin Concerto Op. 15, and Sinfonia da Requiem Op. 20 (for full orchestra).

Britten and Pears returned to England in 1942, and both applied for recognition as [[conscientious objector]s; Britten was initially refused recognition, but gained it on appeal. He completed the choral works Hymn to St. Cecilia (his last collaboration with Auden) and A Ceremony of Carols during the long sea voyage. He had already begun work on his opera Peter Grimes based on the writings of Suffolk poet George Crabbe, and its première at Sadler's Wells in 1945 was his greatest success so far. However, Britten encountered opposition from sectors of the English musical establishment and gradually withdrew from the London scene, founding the English Opera Group in 1947 and the Aldeburgh Festival the following year, partly (though not solely) to perform his own works.

Peter Grimes was the first in a series of English operas, of which Billy Budd (1951) and The Turn of the Screw (1954) were particularly admired. These operas share common themes. For example, most feature an 'outsider' character, who is excluded or misunderstood by society. Often this is the eponymous protagonist, as in Peter Grimes and Owen Wingrave. He was appointed a Companion of Honour (CH) in the Coronation Honours, 1953.[1]

An increasingly important influence was the music of the East, an interest that was fostered by a tour with Pears in 1957, when Britten was struck by the music of the Balinese gamelan and by Japanese Noh plays. The fruits of this tour include the ballet The Prince of the Pagodas (1957) and the series of semi-operatic "Parables for Church Performance": Curlew River (1964), The Burning Fiery Furnace (1966) and The Prodigal Son (1968). The greatest success of Britten's career was, however, the musically more conventional War Requiem, written for the 1962 consecration of the newly reconstructed Coventry Cathedral.

Britten developed close friendships with the Russians Dmitri Shostakovich and Mstislav Rostropovich in the 1960s: he composed his Cello Suites, Cello Symphony and Cello Sonata for the latter, and conducted the first Western performance of the former's Fourteenth Symphony. Shostakovich dedicated this score to Britten, and often spoke very highly of his music. Britten himself had previously dedicated 'The Prodigal Son' (the third and last of the 'Church Parables') to Shostakovich. He was honoured again by appointment to the Order of Merit (OM) on 23 March 1965.[2]

In the last decade or so of his life, Britten suffered from increasing ill-health. His late works became progressively more sparse in texture. They include the opera Death in Venice (1973), the Suite on English Folk Tunes "A Time There Was" (1974) and Third String Quartet (1975)— which drew on material from Death in Venice— as well as the dramatic cantata Phaedra (1976), written for Janet Baker.

Having previously declined a knighthood, Britten accepted a life peerage on 2 July 1976 as Baron Britten, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk.[3] A few months later he died of heart failure at his house in Aldeburgh. He is buried in the churchyard of St. Peter and St. Paul's Church there. His grave lies next to that of his partner, Sir Peter Pears, and close to the grave of Imogen Holst, another close friend.

 

References

   1. ^ London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 39863, page 2976, 26 May 1953. Retrieved on 2008-07-16.
   2. ^ London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 43610, page 3047, 26 March 1965. Retrieved on 2008-07-16.
   3. ^ London Gazette: no. 46954, page 9295, 6 July 1976. Retrieved on 2008-07-16.
   4. ^ Hywel Williams, "The Puccini of Lowestoft". The Guardian, 5 December 2006.
   5. ^ Paul Kildea, "In his own words". The Guardian, 18 July 2003.

Read the
FULL POST

Johannes Brahms

Home ► Composers ► B ► Brahms► Biography

Biography

 

Early years

Brahms's father, Johann Jakob Brahms, came to Hamburg from Schleswig-Holstein, seeking a career as a town musician. He was proficient on several instruments, but found employment mostly playing the horn and double bass. He married Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen, a seamstress, who was seventeen years older than he was. Initially, they lived near the city docks, in the Gängeviertel quarter of Hamburg, for six months before moving to a small house on the Dammtorwall, located on the northern perimeter of Hamburg in the Inner Alster.

Johann Jakob gave his son his first musical training. He studied piano from the age of seven with Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel. It is a long-told tale that Brahms was forced in his early teens to play the piano in bars that doubled as brothels; recently Brahms scholar Kurt Hoffman has suggested that this legend is false. Since Brahms himself clearly originated the story, however, some have questioned Hoffman's theory.[1][2]

For a time, Brahms also learned the cello, although his progress was cut short when his teacher absconded with Brahms' instrument.[citation needed] After his early piano lessons with Otto Cossel, Brahms studied piano with Eduard Marxsen, who had studied in Vienna with Ignaz von Seyfried (a pupil of Mozart) and Carl Maria von Bocklet (a close friend of Schubert). The young Brahms gave a few public concerts in Hamburg, but did not become well known as a pianist until he made a concert tour at the age of nineteen. In later life, he frequently took part in the performance of his own works, whether as soloist, accompanist, or participant in chamber music. He was the soloist at the premieres of both his Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1859 and his Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1881. He conducted choirs from his early teens, and became a proficient choral and orchestral conductor.

 

Meeting Joachim and Liszt

He began to compose quite early in life, but later destroyed most copies of his first works; for instance, Louise Japha, a fellow-pupil of Marxsen, reported a piano sonata that Brahms had played or improvised at the age of 11. His compositions did not receive public acclaim until he went on a concert tour as accompanist to the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi in April and May 1853. On this tour he met Joseph Joachim at Hanover, and went on to the Court of Weimar where he met Franz Liszt, Peter Cornelius, and Joachim Raff. According to several witnesses of Brahms' meeting with Liszt (at which Liszt performed Brahms' Scherzo, Op. 4 at sight), Reményi was offended by Brahms' failure to praise Liszt's Sonata in B minor wholeheartedly (Brahms supposedly fell asleep during a performance of the recently composed work), and they parted company shortly afterwards. Brahms later excused himself, saying that he could not help it, having been exhausted by his travels.

 

Brahms and Schumann

Joachim had given Brahms a letter of introduction to Robert Schumann, and after a walking tour in the Rhineland Brahms took the train to Düsseldorf, and was welcomed into the Schumann family on arrival there. Schumann, amazed by the 20 year-old's talent, published an article entitled "Neue Bahnen" (New Paths) in the October 28, 1853 issue of the journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik alerting the public to the young man who he claimed was "destined to give ideal expression to the times."[3] This pronouncement was received with some skepticism outside Schumann's immediate circle, and may have increased Brahms' naturally self-critical need to perfect his works and technique. While he was in Düsseldorf, Brahms participated with Schumann and Albert Dietrich in writing a sonata for Joachim; this is known as the F-A-E Sonata. He became very attached to Schumann's wife, the composer and pianist Clara, fourteen years his senior, with whom he would carry on a lifelong, emotionally passionate, but probably platonic, relationship. Brahms never married, despite strong feelings for several women and despite entering into an engagement, soon broken off, with Agathe von Siebold in Göttingen in 1859. After Schumann's attempted suicide and subsequent confinement in a mental sanatorium near Bonn in February 1854, Brahms was the main intercessor between Clara and her husband, and found himself virtually head of the household.

 

Detmold and Hamburg

After Schumann's death at the sanatorium in 1856, Brahms divided his time between Hamburg, where he formed and conducted a ladies' choir, and the principality of Detmold, where he was court music-teacher and conductor. He first visited Vienna in 1862, staying there over the winter, and in 1863 was appointed conductor of the Vienna Singakademie. Though he resigned the position the following year and entertained the idea of taking up conducting posts elsewhere, he based himself increasingly in Vienna and soon made his home there. From 1872 to 1875 he was director of the concerts of the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde; afterwards he accepted no formal position. He declined an honorary doctorate of music from University of Cambridge in 1877, but accepted one from the University of Breslau in 1879, and composed the Academic Festival Overture as a gesture of appreciation.

He had been composing steadily throughout the 1850s and 60s, but his music had evoked divided critical responses and the Piano Concerto No. 1 had been badly received in some of its early performances. His works were labelled old-fashioned by the 'New German School' whose principal figures included Liszt and Richard Wagner. Brahms admired some of Wagner's music and admired Liszt as a great pianist, but the conflict between the two schools, known as the War of the Romantics, soon embroiled all of musical Europe. In the Brahms camp were his close friends: Clara Schumann, the influential music critic Eduard Hanslick and the leading Viennese surgeon Theodor Billroth. In 1860 Brahms attempted to organize a public protest against some of the wilder excesses of their music.[citation needed] His manifesto, which was published prematurely with only three supporting signatures, was a failure and he never engaged in public polemics again.

 

Years of popularity

It was the premiere of Ein deutsches Requiem, his largest choral work, in Bremen in 1868 that confirmed Brahms' European reputation and led many to accept that he had fulfilled Schumann's prophecy. This may have given him the confidence finally to complete a number of works that he had wrestled with over many years, such as the cantata Rinaldo, his first string quartet, third piano quartet, and most notably his first symphony. This appeared in 1876, though it had been begun (and a version of the first movement seen by some of his friends) in the early 1860s. The other three symphonies then followed in 1877, 1883, and 1885. From 1881 he was able to try out his new orchestral works with the court orchestra of the Duke of Meiningen, whose conductor was Hans von Bülow.

Brahms frequently traveled, for both business (concert tours) and pleasure. From 1878 onwards he often visited Italy in the springtime, and usually sought out a pleasant rural location in which to compose during the summer. He was a great walker and especially enjoyed spending time in the open air, where he felt that he could think more clearly.

In 1889, one Theo Wangemann, a representative of American inventor Thomas Edison visited the composer in Vienna and invited him to make an experimental recording. He played an abbreviated version of his first Hungarian dance on the piano. The recording was later issued on an LP of early piano performances (compiled by Gregor Benko); while the spoken introduction to the short piece of music is quite clear, the piano playing is largely inaudible due to heavy surface noise. Nevertheless, this remains the earliest recording made by a major composer. Analysts and scholars remain divided, however, as to whether the voice that introduces the piece is that of Wangemann or of Brahms.[4]

In 1889 Brahms was named an honorary citizen of Hamburg, until 1948 the only one born in Hamburg. [5]

 

Later years

In 1890, the 57 year-old Brahms resolved to give up composing. However, as it turned out, he was unable to abide by his decision, and in the years before his death he produced a number of acknowledged masterpieces. His admiration for Richard Mühlfeld, clarinetist with the Meiningen orchestra, moved him to compose the Clarinet Trio Op. 114, Clarinet Quintet Op. 115 (1891), and the two Clarinet Sonatas Op. 120 (1894). He also wrote several cycles of piano pieces, Opp. 116-119, the Four Serious Songs (Vier ernste Gesänge), Op. 121 (1896), and the Eleven Chorale Preludes for organ, Op. 122 (1896).

While completing the Op. 121 songs, Brahms developed cancer (sources differ on whether this was of the liver or pancreas). His condition gradually worsened and he died on April 3, 1897. Brahms is buried in the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna.

 

References

   1. ^ Kurt Hoffman, Johannes Brahms und Hamburg (Reinbek, 1986) (in German: includes detailed refutation of the traditional story of Brahms playing piano in brothels, using the writings of those who knew the young Brahms, as well as evidence of the Hamburg's close regulation of those places, preventing the employment of children)
   2. ^ Swafford, Jan (2001). "Did the Young Brahms Play Piano in Waterfront Bars?". 19th-century Music Vol. 24 (No. 3): pp. 268–275. doi:10.1525/ncm.2001.24.3.268. Retrieved on 2007-10-30.
   3. ^ "Robert Schumann's Artikel Neue Bahnen". Retrieved on 2007-10-30.
   4. ^ J. Brahms plays excerpt of Hungarian Dance No. 1 (2:10) at YouTube
   5. ^ Stadt Hamburg Ehrenbürger (German) Retrieved on June 17, 2008
   6. ^ a b James Webster, "Schubert's sonata form and Brahms' first maturity (II)", 19th-century Music 3(1) (1979), pp. 52-71.
   7. ^ Donald Francis Tovey, "Franz Schubert" (1927), rpt. in Essays and Lectures on Music (London, 1949), p. 123. Cf. his similar remarks in "Tonality in Schubert" (1928), rpt. ibid., p. 151.
   8. ^ Charles Rosen, "Influence: plagiarism and inspiration", 19th-century Music 4(2) (1980), pp. 87-100.
   9. ^ H. V. Spanner, "What is originality?", The Musical Times 93(1313) (1952), pp. 310-311.
  10. ^ Beller-McKenna, Daniel. Brahms and the German Spirit. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2004, ISBN 0-674-01318-2
  11. ^ "Johannes Brahms hält Einzug in die Walhalla". Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst (2000-09-14). Retrieved on 2008-04-23.
  12. ^ Brahms as Man, Teacher, and Artist

Read the
FULL POST

Pierre Boulez

Home ► Composers ► B ► Boulez ► Biography

Biography

 

Early years

Boulez was born in Montbrison, France. He initially studied mathematics at Lyon before pursuing music at the Paris Conservatoire under Olivier Messiaen and the wife of Arthur Honegger, Andrée Vaurabourg. He studied twelve-tone technique with René Leibowitz and went on to write atonal music in a post-Webernian serial style. Boulez was initially part of a cadre of early supporters of Leibowitz, but due to an altercation with Leibowitz, their relations turned divisive, as Boulez spent much of his career promoting the music of Messiaen instead. The first fruits of this were his cantatas Le Visage nuptial and Le Soleil des eaux for female voices and orchestra, both composed in the late 1940s and revised several times since, as well as the Second Piano Sonata of 1948, a well-received 32-minute work that Boulez composed at the age of 23. Thereafter, Boulez was influenced by Messiaen's research to extend twelve-tone technique beyond the realm of pitch organization, serialising durations, dynamics, mode of attack, and so on. This technique became known as integral serialism. Boulez quickly became one of the philosophical leaders of the post-war movement in the arts towards greater abstraction and experimentation. Many composers of Boulez's generation taught at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, Germany. The so-called Darmstadt School composers were instrumental in creating a style that, for a time, existed as an antidote to music of nationalist fervor; an international, even cosmopolitan style, a style that could not be 'co-opted' as propaganda in the way that the Nazis used, for example, the music of Ludwig van Beethoven.[1] Boulez was in contact with many young composers who would become influential, including John Cage.

 

Serialism

Boulez's totally serialized, punctual works consist of Polyphonie X (1950–51; withdrawn) for 18 instruments, the two musique-concrète Études (1951–52), and Structures, book I for two pianos.[3] The latter work was quite successful, and seems to sum up the feelings of zero hour in Europe during the early 1950s.[verification needed] Structures was also a turning point for Boulez. As one of the most visible totally serialized works, it became a lightning rod for various kinds of criticism. György Ligeti, for example, published an article that examined its patterns of durations, dynamics, pitch, and attack types in great detail, concluding that its "ascetic attitude" is "akin to compulsion neurosis", and that Boulez "had to break away from it. . . . And so he created the sensual feline world of the 'Marteau'".[4] These criticisms, combined with what Boulez felt was a lack of expressive flexibility in the language, as he outlined in his essay "At the Limit of Fertile Land..." had already led Boulez to refine his compositional language. He loosened the strictness of his total serialism into a more supple and strongly gestural music, and did not publicly reveal much about these techniques, which limited further discussion. His first venture into this new kind of serialism was a work for 12 solo voices titled Oubli signal lapidé (1952), but it was withdrawn after a single performance. Its material was reused in the 1970 composition Cummings ist der Dichter.[5]

 

Le marteau sans maître

Boulez's strongest achievement in this method is his masterpiece Le marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master) for ensemble and voice, from 1953 to 1957, one of the few works of advanced music from the 1950s to remain in the repertoire. Le marteau was a surprising and revolutionary synthesis of many different streams in modern music, as well as seeming to encompass the sound worlds of modern jazz, the Balinese Gamelan, traditional African musics, and traditional Japanese musics. Fluent and expressive, even sensuous, in a way that Boulez's earlier serial works had not been, it was hailed by diverse musicians, including Igor Stravinsky. Boulez described one of the work's innovations, called "pitch multiplication", in several articles, most importantly in the chapter "Musical Technique" in Boulez 1971. It was Lev Koblyakov, however, who first described its presence in the three "L'Artisanat furieux" movements of Le Marteau sans maître,[6] and in his 1981 doctoral thesis.[7] However, an explanation of the processes themselves was not made until 1993.[8] Other techniques used in the "Bourreaux de solitude" cycle were first described by Ulrich Mosch,[9] and later fully elaborated by him.[10]

 

Experimentation

After Le marteau sans maître, Boulez began to strengthen the position of the music post-WWI modern composers through conducting and advocacy. He also began to consider new avenues in his own work. With Pli selon pli for orchestra with solo soprano, he began to work with an idea of improvisation and open-endedness. He considered how the conductor might be able to 'improvise' on vague notations, such as the fermata, and how the players might 'improvise' on irrational durations, such as grace notes. In addition, he worked with the idea of leaving the specific ordering of movements or sections of music open to be chosen for a particular night of a performance, an idea related to the polyvalent form of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Interestingly, though the two works sound similar today, and certainly represent the same impeccable craft, Pli selon pli was not received as well as Le marteau. This is perhaps more of a cultural barometer than a reflection on the work itself. During the time that Boulez was testing these new ideas, those colleagues who had never been entirely comfortable with the prominence of a rigorous musical language, such as György Ligeti, had brought a convincing musical counter argument to Boulez's musical ideals. In a poetic twist, Boulez had moved from peerless respect for Le marteau sans maître to seeming defeat with Pli selon pli (Fold upon fold), which sets a Stéphane Mallarmé poem about the tripping impotence of a swan, unable to take flight from a frozen lake.

 

Controlled chance

From the 1950s, beginning with the Third Piano Sonata (1955–57/63), Boulez experimented with what he called "controlled chance" and he developed his views on aleatoric music in the articles "Aléa" and "Sonate, que me veux-tu?"[12]. His use of chance, which he would later employ in compositions like Éclat (1965), Domaines (1961–68) and Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna (1974–75), is very different from that in the works of, for example, John Cage. While in Cage's music the performers are often given the freedom to improvise and create completely unforeseen sounds, with the object of removing the composer's intention from the music, in works by Boulez they only get to choose between possibilities that have been written out in detail by the composer—a method that, when applied to the successional order of sections, is often described as "mobile form".

 

1970s

Boulez's output since the late 1970s has been of a different kind since the early works that brought him to initial prominence. After a rapid succession of explosive works, such as the three cantatas on poetry by René Char, the first two piano sonatas, and other chamber music, compositions have tended to be contemplated and expanded over a long period of time, during which they were performed in various stages of development. ...explosante-fixe..., now resembling a flute concerto with electronics, was first published in 1971 as a sketch in the journal Tempo as a memorial tribute to Stravinsky, then worked out in various versions, including one for mixed octet with electronics performed in 1973. Éclat/Multiples has remained a large fragment, and Dérive II (1988/2002/2006) and Répons (1980/82/84) have been performed in various stages of development. The desire to expand unrealized possibilities has also lead Boulez to create related works in series. His early twelve miniatures for piano, Notations (1945), has, since the 1970s, been in the process of being expanded as an orchestral cycle. To date, at least seven movements have been completed, although only five have been performed. The material contained in Anthèmes for solo violin was later expanded into an extended composition for violin and electronics Anthèmes 2 and Boulez is currently developing it further into a large-scale work for violin and orchestra.[13] Incises, a short work for solo piano, has since exploded into Sur Incises for three percussive groups (pianos, harps, percussion) in two very extended movements.

 

Electronic music

After the 1960s, in which he had produced little, Boulez began to turn back to the electronic medium and to large extended works. Although unsatisfied with the products of his work with tape in the 1950s (Two Studies, Poésie pour pouvoir) he began to explore the possibilities of live electronic sound manipulation. His first attempt was the 1973 version of ...explosant/fixe... However, at around this time president Georges Pompidou began to discuss with Boulez the possibility of creating an institute for the exploration and development of modern music where there would be a chance to explore the medium seriously. This was to become IRCAM. At IRCAM, Boulez created an environment where composers would have at hand the best performers available, and where the most advanced technology and computer scientists would be at their service. Boulez now began to explore the use of electronic sound transformation in real time. Previously electronic music had to be recorded to tape, which thus 'fixed' it. The temporal aspect of any live music making in which it played a part had to be coordinated with the tape exactly. Boulez found this impossibly restrictive. Now at IRCAM, he composed Répons, for six instrumental groups, chamber orchestra, and electronics. With the assistance of Andrew Gerzso Boulez fashioned a work in which the computer captured the resonance and spatialization of sounds created by the ensemble and processed them in real time.

 

Recent years

Today, Boulez continues to be one of the leaders of the post-World War II musical modernism. His compositions have enriched musical culture, and his advocacy of modern and postmodern music has been decisive for many. Boulez continues to conduct and compose. From 1976 to 1995, Boulez held the Chair in "Invention, technique et langage en musique" at the Collège de France. In 2002 he was awarded the Glenn Gould Prize for his contributions. In 2007, Boulez finished recording the Mahler cycle for Deutsche Grammophon with his recording of Mahler's 8th Symphony with the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Berlin State Opera and Radio choruses.

 

References

   1. ^ Scott G. Burnham. "Beethoven, Ludwig van, §19: Posthumous influence and reception (iii) Political reception.", Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed February 10, 2007), grovemusic.com (subscription access).
   2. ^ Boulez 1991b, 113
   3. ^ Hopkins and Griffiths 2006
   4. ^ Ligeti 1960, 62
   5. ^ Hopkins, G. W., and Paul Griffiths. 2006. "Pierre Boulez", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy Retrieved on 13 November 2006
   6. ^ Koblyakov 1977.
   7. ^ Koblyakov 1981, published as Koblyakov 1990.
   8. ^ Heinemann 1993
   9. ^ Mosch 1997
  10. ^ Mosch 2004.
  11. ^ Boulez 1986, 143.
  12. ^ Boulez 1991c and 1986.
  13. ^ Tom Service: 'You just have to impose your will', interview with Boulez, The Guardian, 28 August 2008
  14. ^ Vermeil 1996.
  15. ^ "Press Quotes for Bartók Piano Concertos Nos.1-3 Boulez 4775330". Deutsche Grammophon. Retrieved on 2007-07-15.
  16. ^ Kozinn, Allan (1 Feb 2005). "Peering Into the Mechanism of Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring'", New York Times. Retrieved on 2007-07-15.
  17. ^ Oestreich, James (16 March 2000). "Music Review; Colorful Sounds, Tuned by a Dynamo", New York Times. Retrieved on 2007-07-15.
  18. ^ Tommasini, Anthony (29 Jan 2005). "A Good Scrubbing for Mahler", New York Times. Retrieved on 2007-07-15.
  19. ^ Marc Bridle. "Review of Boulez's Bruckner 8th Symphony on CD". MusicWeb International. Retrieved on 2007-07-15.
  20. ^ Boulez at 70: Pierre Boulez as conductor in his recent DG recordings and in conversation with Stephen Plaistow. A Gramophone magazine/Deutsche Grammophon CD (1995)
  21. ^ Tim Ashley (4 June 2007). "From the House of the Dead", The Guardian. Retrieved on 2007-09-07.
  22. ^ "What's On / Proms by Day—Friday 15 Ausgust". BBC (2008). Retrieved on 2008-08-18.
  23. ^ Barulich 1988, 50; Blaustein 1989, 273; Harvey 1971, 557; Hayes 1992, 29; McNamee 1992, 286 all cite his writing as "perceptive".
  24. ^ Such as Boulez 1991a[citation needed].
  25. ^ Boulez 1995, 2005a, and 2005b.
  26. ^ Boulez and Albertson 2007; Obrist and Parreno 2008.

Read the
FULL POST

Alexander Borodin

Home ► Composers ► B ► Borodin ► Biography

Biography

Borodin was born in Saint Petersburg, the illegitimate son of a Georgian noble (saeklesio aznauri), Luka Simonis dze Gedevanishvili and a Russian mother, the 25 year old Evdokia Konstantinova Antonova (Евдокии Константиновны Антоновa), who had him registered instead as the son of one of his serfs, Porfiry Borodin. As a boy he received a good education, including piano lessons. He was eventually to earn a doctorate in medicine at the Medico–Surgical Academy, the later home to Ivan Pavlov, and to pursue a career in chemistry (just as his comrade César Cui would do in the field of military fortifications). As a result of his work in chemistry and difficulties in his home-life, Borodin was not as prolific in writing music as many of his contemporaries were - hence his own description of himself as a "Sunday composer." He died during a festive ball, where he was participating with much vigor; he suddenly collapsed from heart failure. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, in Saint Petersburg.

 

Chemical career

In his chemical profession Borodin gained great respect, being particularly noted for his work on aldehydes[4]. Between 1859 and 1862 Borodin held a postdoctorate in Heidelberg. He worked in the laboratory of Emil Erlenmeyer working on benzene derivatives. He also spent time in Pisa, working on organic halogens. One experiment published in 1862 described the first nucleophilic displacement of chlorine by fluorine in benzoyl chloride[5]. A related reaction known to the west as the Hunsdiecker reaction published in 1939 by the Hunsdieckers was promoted by the Soviet Union as the Borodin reaction. In 1862 he returned to the Medico–Surgical Academy. There he worked on the self-condensation of small aldehydes with publications in 1864 and 1869 and in this field he found himself competing with August Kekulé.

Borodin is also credited with the discovery of the Aldol reaction together with Charles-Adolphe Wurtz. In 1872 he announced to the Russian Chemical Society the discovery of a new by-product in aldehyde reactions with properties like that of an alcohol and he noted similarities with compounds already discussed in publications by Wurtz from the same year.

He published his last full article in 1875 on reactions of amides and his last publication concerned a method for the identification of urea in animal urine.

His son-in-law and successor was fellow chemist A. P. Dianin.

 

Musical avocation

 

Opera and orchestral works

Borodin met Mily Balakirev in 1862. While under his tutelage in composition he began his Symphony No. 1 in E flat major; it was first performed in 1869, with Balakirev conducting. In that same year Borodin started on his Symphony No. 2 in B minor, which was not particularly successful at its premiere in 1877 under Eduard Nápravník, but with some minor re-orchestration received a successful performance in 1879 by the Free Music School under Rimsky-Korsakov's direction. In 1880 he composed the popular symphonic poem In the Steppes of Central Asia. Two years later he began composing a third symphony, but left it unfinished at his death; two movements of it were later completed and orchestrated by Glazunov.

In 1869, Borodin became distracted from initial work on the second symphony by preoccupation with the opera Prince Igor, which is seen by some to be his most significant work and one of the most important historical Russian operas. It contains the Polovetsian Dances, which are often performed as a stand-alone concert work as probably Borodin's best known composition. Unfortunately Borodin left the opera (and a few other works) incomplete at his death. Prince Igor was completed posthumously by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov.

 

Chamber music

No other member of the Balakirev circle identified himself so openly with absolute music as Borodin did in his two string quartets. Himself a cellist, he was an enthusiastic chamber music player, an interest deepened during his chemical studies in Heidelberg between 1859 and 1861. This early period yielded, among other chamber works, a string sextet and a piano quintet. In thematic structure and instrumental texture he based his pieces on those of Felix Mendelssohn.[6]

In 1875 he started on his First String Quartet, much to the displeasure of Mussorgsky and Vladimir Stasov. That Borodin did so in the company of The Five, which was hostile to chamber music, speaks to his independence. From the First Quartet on he displayed mastery in the form. His Second Quartet, in which his strong lyricism is represented in the popular "Nocturne" followed in 1881. The First Quartet is richest in changes of mood. The Second Quartet has a more uniform atmosphere and expression.[6]

 

References

   1. ^ Abraham, Gerald. Borodin: the Composer and his Music. London, 1927.
   2. ^ Dianin, Sergei Aleksandrovich. Borodin. London, New York, Oxford University Press, 1963.
   3. ^ Oldani, Robert, William. "Borodin, Aleksandr Porfir′yevich," Grove Music Online (Accessed 27 January 2006, subscription required)
   4. ^ Michael D. Gordin (2006). "Facing the Music: How Original Was Borodin’s Chemistry?". Journal of Chemical Education 83: 561–566.
   5. ^ E. J. Behrman (2006). "Borodin?". Journal of Chemical Education 83: 1138.
   6. ^ a b Maes, 72.

    * Maes, Francis, tr. Pomerans, Arnold J. and Erica Pomerans, A History of Russian Music: From Kamarinskaya to Babi Yar (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002). ISBN 0-520-21815-9.
    * George Sarton (1939). "Borodin (1833-87)". Osiris 7: 224–260. doi:10.1086/368505.
    * A. J. B. Hutchings (1936). "A Study of Borodin: I. The Man". The Musical Times 77 (1124): 881–883. doi:10.2307/920565.
    * George B. Kauffman, Kathryn Bumpass (1988). "An Apparent Conflict between Art and Science: The Case of Aleksandr Porfir'evich Borodin (1833-1887)". Leonardo 21 (4): 429–436. doi:10.2307/1578707

Read the
FULL POST