August 7, 2017.  Jolivet and Biber.  A very interesting French composer, André Jolivet was born on August 8^th of 1905 in Paris.  In his childhood, he studied the cello but never went to the conservatory (his parents encouraged him to become a teacher).  For a while he studied composition with Paul Le Fem, a composer and critic.  In his youth Jolivet was influenced by Debussy and Ravel, but it all changed when he became familiar with atonal music: in December of 1927 he attended a concert at the Salle Pleyel during which Pierrot lunaire and several other Schoenberg pieces were performed.  That concert changed his life.  Soon after he became a pupil of Edgard Varèse, an influential French-American avant-garde composer, whose Amériques was another strong influence.  He also befriended Olivier Messiaen, who was very helpful in promoting Jolivet’s music.  During the war Jolivet moved away from the atonality, saying that he strives for “evasion and relaxation,” understandable goals during the difficult time but ones that were not shared by his friend Messaien.  Jolivet wrote a comic opera, Dolorès, and the ballet Guignol et Pandore.  After the war Jolivet became the musical director of the Comédie Française but continued to compose till his last days.  He died in Paris on December 20^th of 1974.

July 31, 2017.  Granados and Schuman.  We got so involved with the masters of Renaissance music, especially the great Spaniard Tomás Luis de Victoria, that we missed a very special anniversary: July 27^th marked the 150^th anniversary of the birth of another Spanish composer, Enrique Granados.  More than three centuries separate Victoria and Granados, and during that period the music in Spain didn’t develop in a straight line.  To be fair, arts never develop in a constant progression, even Italy and Germany at some point or other experienced periods of decline.  (Flemish music dissolved completely, but that was more a matter of political rearrangements than cultural trends).  In the 15^th and especially16^th century Spain was one of the musical centers of Europe, close to the Franco-Flemish school since Charles I was not just the King of Spain but the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.  His possessions included Burgundy, the Netherlands and parts of Italy, and Spanish musicians traveled across the realm, learning from the locals while the Flemish and the Italians gravitated toward the courts of Spain.  The following Baroque period was still quite productive (Domenico Scarlatti spent much of his life in Spain) but by the end of the 17^th century musical culture was in a decline.  This decline continued longer than in any other country of major cultural significance.  And it stopped only with the arrival of a brilliant group of composers in the second half of the 19^th century, Isaac Albéniz, Manuel de Falla, Joaquin Turina, and of course Enrique Granados.  We’ve written about Granados many times (for example, here), so we’ll address some of his works (his output was not very large as he tragically died at the age of 50).  While his piano pieces, such as Twelve danzas españolas, Goyescas Eight Valses Poéticos are among his most popular pieces, Granados also wrote many wonderful songs.  One cycle is called Tonadillas al estilo antiguo (Little tunes in ancient style).  We’ll hear three of them, El tra la la y el punteado, El majo tímido and La maja dolorosa.  They are performed by one of the greatest mezzo-sopranos of the 20^th century, Teresa Berganza, with Félix Lavilla at the piano (at the time of the recording, 1961, Berganza and Lavilla were married).

July 24, 2017.  Tomás Luis de Victoria.  A week ago, when we presented three great composers of the High Renaissance, we gave Tomás Luis de Victoria short shift.  We’ll try to correct it in this post.  A younger contemporary of Palestrina and Orlando di Lasso, Victoria was born in 1548 in a small town of Sanchidrián near Ávila‎.  We know some unusual facts about him, for example, that his mother was from a converso family, that is a family of Spanish Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism.  Victoria went to school in Ávila, sang as a choirboy in the local cathedral and probably learned there to play the organ.  The cathedral of Ávila was one of Spain’s musical centers, and Victoria’s teachers were prominent composers and musicians. Some speculate that while in Ávila, he met Antonio de Cabezón, the famous blind composer, second in fame only to Cristóbal de Morales.  Somewhere around 1563, once his voice had broken, Victoria was sent to Rome, to the Collegio Germanico, a preeminent Catholic school known for its excellent music education.  As we mentioned last week, while at the Collegio, Victoria almost certainly met Palestrina, who at the time was maestro di cappella at the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, and very likely was his pupil.  In 1569 Victoria became a singer and the organist at Santa Maria in Monserrato degli Spagnoli, the Spanish national church in Rome.  Such was his reputation, that a couple years later he was invited to teach music at the Collegio Germanico and eventually was appointed maestro di cappella.  In 1574, he was ordained a priest.  A year later he was appointed maestro di capella at Sant'Apollinare alle Terme, the church of the Collegium.  By then Victoria was already a widely known and well-published composer. 

July 17, 2017.  Music of High Renaissance.  With the dearth of prominent composers born this week, we’ll celebrated three great masters of the Renaissance whose birthdays remain unknown to music historians.  Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was born around 1525, Orlando di Lasso (or Orlande de Lassus, as his name is sometimes spelled) – in 1530 or 1532, and Tomás Luis de Victoria – in 1548.  Even though Palestrina was the only Italian among the three (Lasso was Flemish, born in Mons, County of Hainaut, while Victoria was Spanish), Rome was the place were all three had lived and thrived artistically.  Also, all three were influenced by the music of their Franco-Flemish predecessors, Josquin des Prez in particular.  Palestrina, the great master of polyphony, was born in the town of the same name (“da Palestrina” means “from Palestrina”).  In 1537, he was a chorister at the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome but then had to return to Palestrina.  His career didn’t take off till 1551, when Pope Julius III, the former Cardinal-Bishop of Palestrina, heard his music and appointed him maestro di cappella of the Cappella Giulia, one of the papal choirs at Saint Peter’s Basilica.  In January of 1555 Palestrina was promoted to the Sistine Chapel, the pope’s official musical chapel.  Unfortunately, just three months later Julius III died.  Marcellus II became the pope (you can read about Palestrina’s famous Missa Papae Marcelli here) but he died three weeks later.  The next pope, Paul IV, dismissed Palestrina from the Basilica as the composer was married (previous popes were happy to overlook this predicament).  In October of the same year Palestrina was appointed maestro di cappella at the basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano, a position previously held by Lasso.  In 1560, he moved to another great basilica, Santa Maria Maggiore.  He returned to Saint Peter’s Capella Giulia in 1571 and remained there for the rest of his life.  Palestrina died on February 2^nd of 1594.  He wrote more than 100 masses, 300 motets and 140 madrigals.  Here’s one of his motets, Sicut Cervus, performed by the Cambridge Singers, John Rutter conducting.

July 10, 2017.  Recent anniversaries: Gluck and more.  We missed several significant anniversaries and will make up for at least some of them.  The great reformer of the opera,  Christoph Willibald Gluck was born in a small town of Erasbach in Bavaria on July 2^nd of 1714.  He was four when his family moved to Bohemia (Antonio Salieri, his pupil, wrote in his memoir that Czech was Gluck’s native language and that he expressed himself in German with difficulty).  Gluck studied mathematics at the university of Prague but probably never graduated.  In 1737 he went to Milan to study music with Giuseppe Sammartini.  Gluck’s first opera was Artaserse, on the libretto of the famous Metastasio, composed for the Carnival of 1742 and performed in the Teatro Regio Ducal (the theater, one of the largest in Milan, burned down in 1776 and as his replacement Nuovo Regio Ducal Teatro alla Scala was built; we now know it as La Scala).  In 1745 Gluck traveled to London.  There he composed an opera, but more importantly, became familiar with the operas of George Frideric Handel.  Handel was not terribly impressed with Gluck’s compositions: the music historian Charles Burney wrote in his “Life of Handel” that the great master said of Gluck “he knows no more of contrapunto, as mein cook, Waltz” (an interesting mixture of three languages that is).  Gluck didn’t stay in London for too long; in 1747 he was back in Vienna, writing an opera to celebrate the Empress Maria Theresa's birthday.   The opera was La Semiramide riconosciuta, again on Metastasio's libretto, and the assignment was very prestigious: Gluck got it ahead of the much more established Johann Adolph Hasse.  The opera was a popular success but Metastasio called it “archvandalian music, which is insupportable’” and Gluck left Vienna shortly after. 

July 3, 2017.  Mahler, Symphony no. 5.  Gustav Mahler was born on July 7^th of 1860, and to celebrate his birthday we will again turn to one of his symphonies, this time the Fifth.  The time of its composition, the years of 1901 and 1902, is closely linked to Mahler’s marriage to Alma Schindler.  In 1897 Mahler was appointed the music director of the Vienna Hofoper, one of the most important opera theaters in Europe, whose orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, was (and still is) one of the best.  Mahler’s early years as the director were rather turbulent.  As he was mounting new opera productions (the first two were Wagner’s Lohengrin and Mozart’s Zauberflöte), Mahler required utter discipline and precision.  Very demanding, he was not too sensitive toward the singers and orchestra players, whose feelings he often hurt.  The atmosphere within the opera house was difficult but results were of a very high quality.  Problems of a different sort accompanied Mahler as the conductor of subscription concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic.  To many conservative music critic, he appeared not sufficiently felicitous to the classical scores.  And indeed, Mahler often altered the orchestration and was known to amplify musical dynamics beyond the generally accepted practices of the day.  Things were exacerbated by the partisan, and often very hostile, critics.  A large section of the society was deeply anti-Semitic (the Mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, was the leader of the anti-Semitic Austrian Christian Social Party), and even though Mahler converted to Christianity to take a position with the Hofoper, they never forgot his Jewish roots.