This Week in Classical Music: July 14, 2025.  Bastille Day.  Today is the French national holiday, and we’ll play some music from that great country, without any pretense of a comprehensive survey.  France has an incredibly long record of what we call “classical” music, dating back to medieval times: Leonin and Perotin lived in Paris in the second half of the 12th to early 13th centuries and worked at the recently built Notre-Dame Cathedral.  They left a written record of their music, which can still be heard today performed by the old-music ensembles.

The Renaissance that followed brought us several important composers who were either French or Franco-Flemish, from what is now Belgium.  Among them were Guillaume Dufay, considered by many the “founding father” of Renaissance music, and Gilles Binchois; both worked in the mid-15^th century.  A couple of generations later came Josquin des Prez, the most important composer of the last quarter of the 15^th – first quarter of the 16^th century.  This vibrant milieu produced a plethora of composers, many on the French side of the border with Flanders.

The Baroque period was also rich in talent: we could mention just three stars: Jean-Baptiste Lully, François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau.  Here’s a section of a suite from Les Boréades, Rameau’s last opera.  Les Musiciens du Louvre are conducted by Marc Minkowski.

Somewhat surprisingly, the French composers weren’t very productive during the Classical era (that was the domain of the Germans and Austrians), but they flourished in the following years during what we call the Romantic period.  Hector Berlioz, Charles Gounod, César Franck (a Belgian by birth, he lived most of his productive life in Paris), Camille Saint-Saëns, Georges Bizet, and Jules Massenet are just the best-known names; there were many others.  Berlioz stands somewhat alone, considering both the size of his talent and the audacity of some of his compositions.  Here’s a symphonic interlude from his opera Les Troyens, which usually runs close to five hours.  It’s called Chasse royale et orage (Royal hunt and thunderstorm); it is performed by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House under the direction of Colin Davis.

Since the end of the 19^th century, French composers have been at the forefront, while Paris has turned into a veritable Mecca for musicians from all over the world.  The great Debussy was followed by the quirky Eric Satie and then the ever-popular Ravel (we have large samples of their works in our library).  Les Six (Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre) followed.  Then came Olivier Messiaen, a great talent and the inspiration for a group of young composers who completely abandoned tonality and even went beyond the 12-tone system of Schoenberg and his pupils.  Pierre Boulez was one of their leaders.

At the end of WWII, in 1944, Messiaen composed a set of twenty pieces for solo piano titled Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus (Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus).  It was dedicated to his student, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, who later became Messiaen’s second wife.  Here's one of the Regards, Regard de la Vierge (Contemplation of the Virgin).  It’s performed by Pierre-Laurent Aimard.

This Week in Classical Music: July 7, 2025.  Mahler and Antheil.  There are several “semi-round” anniversaries this week, Mahler’s being the most significant: he was born on this day 165 years ago.  Our readers may know how we feel and think about Gustav Mahler: not only was he one of the most important composers, he also became  a litmus test of sorts – during the crazy woke days of 2020-2021, he completely disappeared from the musical scene, being singled out as the “really bad boy” of Western music.  The trend was reversed a couple of years ago, and we’re happy to report that by now, Mahler has resumed his rightful place in classical repertory, both on stage and on the radio (he also never disappeared for real music lovers, who continued listening to his amazing music on streaming services and YouTube through those years). 

George Antheil was born 125 years ago, on July 8^th of 1900 in Trenton, NJ.  Antheil had an interesting life: born into a German immigrant family, he was bilingual, started playing piano at the age of six, got involved with a modernist crowd when he was 19, and at 21 sailed to Europe, ready to make a name for himself as a “modern composer.”  He spent a year in Berlin, where he met Stravinsky, and then moved to Paris.  In Paris, Antheil lived in an apartment above Sylvia Beach’s bookstore, “Shakespeare and Co.”  Beach took an interest in the young man and introduced him to several extraordinary Americans who lived in Paris in the 1920s, among them Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Virgil Thomson.  Antheil also became close with the Frenchmen Eric Satie and Jean Cocteau.  The Paris years were a productive period for Antheil. He wrote several large piano pieces; during the premiere of one of them, Mechanisms, a riot broke out, to the composer’s delight (it made him, in his mind, equal to Stravinsky, whose premiere of the Rite of Spring was also met with a riot).  Mechanisms was not the only piece that created a disturbance: Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique provoked the same reaction.  The “ballet” was written as music to accompany the film by French painter Fernand Léger and American filmmaker Dudley Murphy.  The effort was poorly coordinated, as Antheil’s music ran twice as long as the film, so the premiere presented the music on its own.  It was scored (in its final, less extravagant form) for a pianola, several pianists, and airplane propellers that made a roaring noise when the pianos and the pianola stopped playing. 

After another stint in Germany, Antheil returned to the US in 1933, pushed out by the Nazis.  In 1936, he moved to Hollywood and became a very successful film composer, a far cry from his avant-garde days in Paris (the trajectory of Antheil’s life reminds us of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a child prodigy who also settled for a life of film composing after emigrating to the US).  In his later days, Antheil wrote some “serious” music, tonal and “neoromantic,” very different than what he was composing in his youth.  He died of a heart attack in 1959.   

Antheil had many interests: he wrote novels and worked as a literary critic.  A most unusual thing happened after he met the Austrian-American actress Hedy Lamarr: the two of them invented what is called “frequency-hopping” for radio-controlled torpedoes.  When a single frequency is used, it can be detected and then jammed by the enemy.  The Lamarr-Antheil idea was to change frequencies rapidly, based on a code shared by the ship and the torpedo.  There were 88 frequencies to be used – the number equal to the number of keys on a piano keyboard.  The invention was patented by the actress and composer, but never implemented by the US Navy. 

We’ll post samples of his music later this week. 

This Week in Classical Music: June 30, 2025.  Eisler and more.  Next Sunday is the birthday of the German composer Hanns Eisler, who was born on July 6^th of 1898, in Leipzig.  As a young man, he studied with Arnold Schoenberg; he then cooperated with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, creating music for many of his plays but abandoning the 12-tone technique in the process.  In the late 1920s – early 1930s, Eisler became very political, turning hard left.  He emigrated to the US during the Nazi years, but ended his life in East Germany, having composed the national anthem of this Communist totalitarian regime.  We found his life so fascinating that we’ve posted not one but two entries about it, here and here.

Jiří Benda, also known by his German name, Georg Benda, was born in Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire, on June 30^th of 1722.  His older brother was the noted composer František (Franz) Benda.  When he was 19, Jiří Benda was called to Berlin by none other than Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, to play the violin in the Royal Chapel in Berlin.  He was later summoned to join his brother Franz at Potsdam, where the royal court resided.  Later in his life, Georg Benda worked for the Duke of Gotha; he also traveled to Italy and Paris.  In 1788, he moved to Vienna, hoping to be hired as the Kapellmeister of the new German opera, planned by the Emperor Joseph II.  That didn’t work out, and the disappointed Benda abandoned music for good, traveling and studying philosophy.  Benda's melodramas, the precursors of German opera, were highly valued by Mozart.

Christoph Willibald Gluck was born on July 2^nd of 1714.  He was one of the greatest composers of the mid-18^th century.  Gluck was especially good in the genre of opera, which he, to a large extent, defined for his time.  We’ve written about Gluck many times and have samples of his music in our library.

Hans Werner Henze, a German modernist composer, was born on July 1^st of 1926.  Like Eisler, but in a very different context, he had strong political convictions and supported leftist causes.  He was a member of the Italian Communist Party (Henze moved to Italy in 1953) and wrote music glorifying Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara.  In spite of that, he was a talented composer who worked in many different styles, from the 12-tone and serial idiom to jazz, and created music that is interesting to listen to years after it was first performed.

Finally, we should mention Leoš Janáček, another Czech composer (Benda, though he lived his life in the Austrian Empire, was Czech by birth).  Janáček was born on July 3^rd of 1854, in the Moravian village of Hukvaldy, when his country, Czechoslovakia, was still part of Austria-Hungary.  Janáček was a friend of Antonín Dvořák, was influenced by him, and together with Dvořák and Smetana, is considered one of the greatest Czech composers.

This Week in Classical Music: June 23, 2025.  Miscellanea.  Two composers were born this week: Benedetto Macello on June 24^th (but maybe July 24^th) of 1686 in Venice, and Gustave Charpentier on June 25^th of 1860 in the French town of Dieuze.  Marcello, a nobleman and amateur composer, was known for a setting of 50 psalms called “Estro Poetico-Armonico.”  Interestingly, some of the psalms appear to be based on traditional Jewish tunes. Considering that Venice was the first city to segregate its Jews in a ghetto, this seems rather unusual.  We’ll look into this and report back.  In the meantime, here’s our earlier entry about Benedetto Marcello. 

Gustave Charpentier was a French composer noted for his opera Louise (and shouldn’t be confused with the French composer of the Baroque era, Marc-Antoine Charpentier).  Luise isn’t staged often these days, but one aria, Depuis le jour, is sung frequently as a concert piece. Here’s Anna Netrebko in her better years, doing a good job of it. 

Three conductors were also born this week: James Levine on June 23^rd of 1943 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Claudio Abbado on June 26^th of 1933 in Milan, and Rafael Kubelik on June 29^th of 1914 in Býchory, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary, now in the Czech Republic.  The phenomenally talented Levine was the music director of the Metropolitan Opera for 40 years, from 1976 to 2016, when he was terminated over allegations of sexual misconduct.  Levine made the Met orchestra into a world-class ensemble, was instrumental in developing the careers of many singers, and presided over some remarkable performances, including a great staging of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen.  For several years, he was also the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (and the first American-born person in that position).  Though the rumors of Levine’s sexual misconduct persisted for years, they were ignored (and suppressed) by the Met management till publicly revealed in 2016.  The allegations were so damaging that the Met had no choice but to let Levine go.  In an overreaction, the Met also decided to wipe out all Levine’s recordings from the Met’s history.  Soon it became obvious that, without Levine, there were not many things to broadcast, and his recordings were restored. 

Claudio Abbado is one of our all-time favorite conductors; we’ve written about him and quoted his performances too many times to mention here. 

Rafael Kubelik was born one day after the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand.  A month and a half later, the world descended into the Great War, and in another four years, the country of his birth was gone.  After graduating from the Prague Conservatory, Kubelik, at the age of 25, became the music director of the Brno Opera.  As the Nazis took over the Czech part of Czechoslovakia (Slovakia remained formally independent under a puppet regime), they closed the opera but allowed the Czech Philharmonic to continue operating.  Kubelik became the principal conductor.  It's said that he refused to give the Hitler salute to high Nazi officials (that could have cost him his life).  He also didn’t perform Wagner’s music, so beloved by Hitler.  In 1948, as the Czech Communists, organized and supported by Stalin’s Soviet Union, took over, Kubelik escaped to the UK.  In 1950, he became the Music Director of the Chicago Symphony but left three years later.  He then led the Covent Garden opera and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (BRSO).  He stayed in Munich for 18 years, till 1979.  Under his baton, BRSO made several excellent recordings (he recorded all of Mahler’s symphonies with them).  During his career, Kubelik guest-conducted all major symphony orchestras.  Here’s the second movement of Bruckner’s Symphony no 3.  Rafael Kubelik conducts the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. 

This Week in Classical Music: June 16, 2025.  Vicenza.  On our latest trip, we visited two musically famous cities, Cremona and Mantua, which we’ve written about in our previous posts.  There was one more city, Vicenza, not as renowned, but worth a visit for a music lover, if just for one building, its Teatro Olimpico.  Vicenza boasts more buildings designed by the great Renaissance architect, Andrea Palladio, than any other city, and Teatro Olimpico is one of them.  The theater was Palladio’s last project; he started it in 1580 but died before the work on it had even begun.  After Palladio’s death, the construction was supervised by another architect, Vincenzo Scamozzi, who also designed the stage scenery.  The theater is majestic in its proportions, but it’s Scamozzi’s trompe l'oeil stage set that makes it all work.  What you see is a fanciful cityscape, with a wall decorated by columns, pilasters, and Roman-looking statues, and several gates opening into streets that seem to go back for hundreds of yards.  In reality, they are only 2-3 yards deep.  There are columns and statues all over the theater, not only on the wall at the back of the stage, but also on the proscenium and the loggia that surrounds the seating area.  The combination of the real statuary and the one on the trompe l'oeil creates a visual effect that is as strong now as it was 500 years ago, when the theater was built.  The amphitheater of the seating area has no chairs: there are only cushions to make the public somewhat comfortable, but the absence of chairs eliminates the distraction to the architectural marvel of the theater. 

It’s not by chance that Scamozzi did such a spectacular job in following Palladio’s design and creating the stage scenery: he was a talented architect.  If you are in Venice, you can’t miss his most visible job, Procuratie Nuove, a row of buildings framing the Piazza San Marco on the right, as you face the cathedral.

Teatro Olimpico, completed in 1585, was one of the first permanent covered theaters in European history since the Greeks and the Romans built their open theaters millennia earlier.  Of course, plays were staged and music played long before that, but usually it was in the palazzos of the princes and the cardinals.  Olimpico was a “real,” permanent theater and it’s used today: in the Fall, classical plays are staged, and, in the Spring, a musical festival takes place.  This year, for example, the theater hosted productions of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni, Verdi’s Falstaff, and a performance of Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem.  Few people can experience these masterpieces in such a setting: the theater is small and seats only 400 lucky ones.  Maybe one day…

This Week in Classical Music: June 9, 2025.  Mantua.  Last week, we wrote about Cremona, one of the most musical cities in the northern part of Italy.  We should mention Mantua, which was also on our itinerary.  For two centuries, from mid-15^th to mid-17^th, Mantua was even more prominent; musically, the city was second only to Ferrara, and, as the ruling families of the cities, the Gonzagas and the d’Este, were very close, intermarried and friendly, the cultural life of these two cities was similar.  For example, Francesco II Gonzaga (1466 – 1519), Marquess of Mantua (the lords of Mantua were made Dukes in 1530 by the Emperor Charles V), was married to Isabella d’Este, the daughter of Ercole d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara.  While her husband was fighting wars on behalf of the Republic of Venice and having numerous affairs, Isabella ruled Mantua on his behalf, promoting arts and music. Isabella was born in Ferrara in 1474 and died in Mantua in 1539, so her life covered the richest period of the Renaissance.  She extended her patronage to some of the best painters of the time, among them Giovanni Bellini, Mantegna, Giorgione, Leonardo, Perugino, Rafael, and Titian.  Isabella’s favorite composer was Bartolomeo Tromboncino (1470 – 1535).  Here’s Vergine bella, one of his frottolas, secular songs of the time (a predecessor to the madrigal).  The great British soprano Emma Kirkby is accompanied by the Consort of Musicke under the direction of Anthony Rooley. 

Isabella’s son Federico II Gonzaga, the first Duke of Mantua, commissioned Palazzo Te to Giulio Romano, Rafael’s favorite student.  The result is one of the most unusually decorated palaces of Renaissance Europe.  Federico also established the first permanent cappella.  Giaches de Wert became the maestro di cappella under the Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga, who himself was a composer.  Among the composers who worked at the court were Palestrina (briefly) and Benedetto Pallavicino (1551 – 1601), an associate of de Wert and, for a while, Monteverdi’s rival.  Pallavicino was a maestro di cappella for about five years.  Here is his madrigal Cor mio, deh, non languire.  The performers, again, are the Consort of Musicke under the direction of Anthony Rooley.  Beautifully done.

The 22-year-old Claudio Monteverdi arrived in Mantua in 1589, two years after the coronation of Vincenzo I Gonzaga as the Duke of Mantua.  Vincenzo was a great patron of the arts, supporting poets (Tasso), architects, and composers, Monteverdi first and foremost.  Monteverdi assumed the directorship of the cappella in 1601 and stayed in Mantua till 1613. Some of the first operas were staged in Mantua: Monteverdi’s Orfeo was staged there in 1607.  His Arianna and Il ballo delle ingrate, an opera-ballet, was staged a year later. Other prominent composers were active during the same time, one of them Salamone Rossi, a Jewish composer and virtuoso violinist born in the city.  He served at the court from 1587 to 1626; Mantua at the time had a large Jewish community, protected by the duke. 

Vincenzo died in 1612, and the great period of music development in Mantua came to an end.  Some notable composers continued visiting Mantua, as Frescobaldi did in 1615, or, later, Antonio Caldara, who was the maestro di cappella to the last duke of Mantua, Ferdinando Carlo.  Caldara composed and staged several operas in Mantua in the early 1700s.

Here’s a madrigal by Claudio Monteverdi, De la bellezza le dovute lodi, from his Mantuan period.  It is one of the songs from his 1606 publication, Scherzi Musicali (Musical jokes).  The performers are the Concerto delle Dame di Ferrara, Sergio Vartolo conducting.