May 26, 2014.  Albeniz, Marais, Elgar.  And also Korngold, and Glinka – all were born this week, but we just don’t have enough space to celebrate them all.  Isaac Albéniz was born on May 29th, 1860.  A wonderful composer, the oldest of the trio that transformed Spanish classical music at the end of the 19^th century, he wrote mostly for the piano and guitar.  His music got more and more interesting toward the end of his short life – he composed his masterpiece, Iberia, between 1905 and 1909, and died that year, 10 days short of his 49^th birthday   We wrote about him extensively before (for example, here and here), so this time we’ll just play one of the pieces from Book I of Iberia, Fête-dieu à Seville, which is sometimes called “El Corpus Christi en Sevilla.”  It depicts, so to speak, a Catholic procession celebrating the real presence of body and blood of Jesus Christ.  Fête-dieu is performed by the great Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha.  The cubist picture of the feast is by the Portugese artist Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso.  It was painted in 1913.

Marin Marais was born on May 31st, 1656 in Paris.  He became better known since the release of the French film Tous les matins du monde (All the Mornings of the World) in 1991, than at any time since his death in 1728.  Marais studied composition with Jean-Baptiste Lully and the bass viol with the composer and viol virtuoso Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, the subject of Tous les matins.  In 1685 Marais was appointed Ordinaire de la Musique de la Chambre du Roi, a member of King Louis XIV’s private orchestra.  He stayed in that position for many years, serving Louis XV after the Sun King’s death.  Most of his work was for the viol (viola-da-gamba): between 1686 and 1725 Marais wrote five books of music, around 550 pieces altogether.  He also wrote several operas but those are rarely performed these days.  Here’s a late composition, Sonnerie de Ste. Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris (The Bells of St. Genevieve); it was written in 1723.  Jordi Savall, probably the most famous viola da gamba player of late, is supported by Fabio Biondi on the violin and Pierre Hantaï on the harpsichord.  And here is Marais’s rendition of the famous La Folia or Les folies d'Espagne.  Again, Jordi Savall on viola da gamba, this time with Anne Gallet on the harpsichord and Hopkinson Smith on theorbo, a type of a lute.

Are we terribly amiss if we value the compositional talents of Edward Elgar not quite as highly as the British public seems to do?  Yes, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches are arousing and, in parts, unexpectedly witty.  The Enigma Variations, if perhaps not as enigmatic as the title would suggest, are very well crafted.  And the Cello concerto, especially when performed by Jacquelinedu Pré, is wonderful.  But one has to consider that Elgar’s active career covered the last decade of the 19^th and the first two decades of the 20^th centuries, a time of revolutionary changes in classical music, and in that perspective his contributions may appear somewhat limited.  Elgar was born on June 2nd, 1857 in a small village outside of Worcester in the West Midlands, England.  His father had a music shop and tuned pianos.  Elgar was mostly self-taught, studying music in his father’s shop.  He started composing at the age of 20, but it was not till 1890s that his work became noticed.  In 1899 he wrote the Variations on an Original Theme for Orchestra ("Enigma"), Op. 36, commonly called Enigma Variations.  It consists of a theme and 14 variations.  Each variation is dedicated to a friend or, in the case of the first variation, his wife.  Variation IX, dedicated to August Jaeger, a music publisher and close friend, was subtitled “Nimrod” (Jaeger is hunter in German, and the Biblical Nimrod was "a mighty hunter before the Lord").  This variation became especially popular, and for a good reason: it’s one of the best pieces of music ever written by Elgar.  We can hear all Variations in the performance by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrew Litton conducting.

May 19, 2014.  Richard Wagner.  The great German opera composer was born this week on May 22nd of 1813.  We wrote about his early operas, and last year on his 200^th birthday, about his whole life, in more detail.  This time we’ll look into some of the operas of his mature period.  In 1849 Wagner had to escape Germany after an uprising in Dresden in 1849 – Wagner was known as a supporter of socialists and anarchists and was at risk of being arrested.  He went to Paris and then Switzerland, settling in Zurich.  He maintained a close relationship with Franz Liszt, a friend and eventually his father-in-law, but otherwise felt quite isolated.  In the early years of the exile he didn’t write much music, instead concentrating on articles and essays.  Among them was the notorious “Judaism in Music,” his first openly anti-Semitic opus.  In it Wagner attacked Jews in general (snobbishly, for not being able to speak proper European languages and also for their purported commercialism) and composers Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer in particular.  At the time the essay was practically ignored, though the pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles did object in a letter to the publishers.  In the 1960s, though, in the aftermath of WWII and the Holocaust, it became the subject of a heated debate.  It’s interesting to note that as so many anti-Semites, Wagner had quite a number of Jewish friends. 

During that time Wagner also wrote an important essay titled “Opera and Drama,” in which he described and promoted his idea of musical drama.  While laying out the theoretical basis of his future work (all his “musical dramas” were still yet to be written), he disavowed his earlier operas, even the very successful Rienzi, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, as old-fashioned and “non-dramatic.”  In “Opera and Drama” he talked about the importance of poetry as the engine of the overall dramatic experience, in theory even superseding the music (he changed his opinion later on, after reading a Schopenhauer description of music as supreme art), and, for the first time, described the role of musical motifs associated with specific persons, places or events.  The use of these "leitmotifs" in his later operas became a trademark.

All along Wagner was working on the librettos for the operas Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).  He had written an episode called Siegfried's Death while still in Dresden in 1848, and in Zurich continued writing and revising different episodes that would become a four-opera cycle: Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).  By 1852 he was done with the writing.  Another year had passed till he started composing.  Das Rheingold came first, in 1853 and ’54, then Die Walküre.  He completed the first two operas by 1856.  He started working on Siegfried, but set it aside.  The reason was his developing infatuation with one Mathilde Wesendonck.  Mathilde was the wife of Wagner’s patron, Otto Wesendonck, a rich local merchant.  Wesendonck, a music lover and an admirer of Wagner, became his major patron, paying for his expenses and even giving him a cottage to live and work in.  Musically, Wagner’s infatuation resulted first in the Wesendonck Lieder, five songs set to the poems by Mathilde (here’s "Im Treibhaus" ("In the greenhouse"), from Wesendonck Lieder, performed by the soprano Rebecca Wascoe with Jeffrey Peterson on the piano).  The listener may recognize music from the prelude of Act III of Tristan und Isolde: Wagner just started working on Tristan, a tragic love story set during the Arthurian times.  It’s not clear if Mathilde ever responded to Wagner’s entreaties, but one of Richard’s love letters was intercepted by his wife, Minna.  A scandal ensued, Minna left for Dresden, and Wagner went to Venice, alone.  He continued working on Tristan and completed it in 1859.  Extremely influential (dozens of major composer, from Debussy to Mahler, were affected by it), Tristan is considered the pinnacle of Wagner’s art.  Here’s Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra in the Prelude from Act 3 of Tristan und Isolde.  The recording was made in 1952.

May 12, 2014.  Massenet and Fauré.  Jules Massenet was born on this day in 1842 in Saint-Étienne, France.  The family moved to Paris when Jules was six.  At the age of 11 he entered the Paris Conservatory (admission age was as low as nine).  One of his teachers there was the composer Ambroise Thomas; they continued a relationship even after Massenet’s graduation.  In 1862 he won the coveted Prix de Rome and went to study in Rome for three years.  Massenet wrote his first opera, La grand' tante, in 1866 (it was staged a year later in Opéra-Comique) but it was not till 1884 that he met real success.   That year he wrote Manon, the opera based on Abbé Prévost’s novel about the chevalier des Grieux and his lightheaded lover, Manon Lescaut.  The opera was staged at the same Opéra-Comique in January of 1884. It immediately became very popular and a staple of the Opéra-Comique’s repertoire, with thousands of performances in the following years.  Its fame spread around Europe and South America.  Victoria de los Ángeles, Anna Moffo, Beverly Sills were among the famous Manons, Enrico Caruso and Beniamino Gigli sung the role of des Grieux.  Eight years later, in 1892, Massenet was almost as successful with another opera, Werther.  Massenet wrote 25 operas in all, but only one other, Thais, approached the level he had reached in Manon.  Here’s a duet “Tu pleures!...”, the finale of the opera, performed by Ms. Sills as Manon and the great Swedish tenor, Nicolai Gedda as des Grieux.  The recording was made in 1970.

Another French composer, Gabriel Fauré, was born on the same day three years later, in 1845.  While Massenet was a conservative composer with a wonderful melodic gift, Fauré was a much more complex figure.  In France, he in many ways served as a bridge between the Romanticism of the mid-19^th century and 20^th century music.  His harmonies influenced the “impressionists,” Debussy and Ravel and even composers of subsequent generation.  A professor for many years and eventually the head of the Paris Conservatory, he had a large number of pupils and by the time he retired from the Conservatory at the age of 75, he was considered a national institution.  Two years later, in 1922, he was celebrated in an event organized by the President of the Republic.  But in 1845, when Fauré was born, France was a very different place, both culturally and politically.  Louis-Philippe was the King, Chopin was still alive, Schumann was at the height of his creative powers, and Hector Berlioz reigned on the French music scene.  Fauré was born in a small town of Pamiers, in the southwest of France. His family was not musical, but as a boy he loved to play a harmonium in the chapel of his school.  When he was nine, his father sent him to Paris, to study in the recently opened École de Musique Classique et Religieuse (School of Classical and Religious Music).  He stayed at the school for 11 years.  In 1861 Camille Saint-Saëns joined the school as the head of the piano department.  Saint-Saëns introduced his students to contemporary music, including that of Wagner (in the Paris Conservatory, which at that time was headed by the opera composer Daniel Auber – who incidentally also wrote an opera called Manon Lescaut – Wagner was practically banned). Fauré became Saint-Saëns’s favorite pupil, and even though the teacher was 10 years older than the student, they became close friends.  This friendship lasted for many years, till Saint-Saëns’s death in 1921.  In 1866, upon graduating from the School, Fauré accepted a position of the organist in a church at Rennes, the main city of Brittany.  Four years later he returned to Paris, not without Saint-Saëns’s help, as an assistant organist at the recently completed Notre-Dame de Clignancourt.  At that time he was composing, but not much (and earning even less); it was not till 1880s that his art matured.  Here’s his wonderful, Élégie (Elegy) for cello and piano.  Written in 1880, it was first performed in 1883.  An openly emotional piece, it was one of the last of the kind: very soon Fauré’s style turned more circumspect.  We’ll hear it played by the 24 year-old Jacqueline du Pré, with Gerald Moore on the piano.

Claudio Monteverdi was also born this week.  We’ll try to dedicate an entry to him alone (he fully deserves it) some other time.

May 5, 2014.  Brahms and Tchaikovsky.  Two great composers share a birthday this week: Johannes Brahms and Pyotr (Peter Ilyich) Tchaikovsky were born on May 7th, the former in 1833, the latter seven years later, in 1840.  We feel that in the past years we’ve shortchanged Tchaikovsky a bit, so this year we’ll dedicate an entry to him.  Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, a small town about 800 miles east of Moscow.  His father,an engineer at the local ironworks, was from a line of Cossaks named Chaika ("seagull" in Russian).  His mother, Alexandra, née d'Assier, was French on her father’s side.  A piano teacher was hired when Tchaikovsky was five; he proved to be a quick learner but didn’t exhibit any special talents.  His music studies ended soon after: when Tchaikovsky was 10, his parents decided to send him to St-Petersburg to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, to be prepared for a more practical career.  He started at the boarding prep school and entered the main school at the age of 12.  Tchaikovsky was very close to his mother and suffered from their separation.  When he was 14, Alexandra died of cholera; that traumatic event affected Tchaikovsky for the rest of his life. 

Practically nothing at that time indicated Tchaikovsky’s talent: he took some additional piano lessons but his teacher told his father that he doesn’t see a future of a composer or performer for his pupil.  Still, upon graduating and accepting a low-level position with the Ministry of Justice, Tchaikovsky decided to take classes in music theory organized by the Russian Music Society.  Anton Rubinstein, ten years older than Tchaikovsky and by then already famous as a pianist and composer, was a founder.  In 1862 these music classes evolved into a real conservatory, with Rubinstein at the helm.  Tchaikovsky enrolled as a member of the first class, but still held on to his job at the Ministry, not sure about his musical future.  In three years of studying at the Conservatory, his musical talent greatly evolved; Rubinstein would later call him a “genius.”  That didn’t stop the conservative Rubinstein from criticizing Tchaikovsky’s first serious compositions.  Symphony no. 1 (Winter Dreams) was one of such pieces.  Tchaikovsky composed it in 1866.  By then, he had graduated from the Conservatory and was having a hard time: César Cui, one of The Five, harshly criticized the cantata he wrote for graduation.  In addition, the composition process was difficult and slow.  When Tchaikovsky showed him the score, Rubinstein suggested significant changes.  And even after Tchaikovsky accepted them, he remained dissatisfied with the results. In the end he refused to perform it altogether, and the Symphony was premiered two years later in Moscow, without Rubinstein’s alterations.  It’s dedicated to Nikolai Rubinstein, Anton’s brother, a talented pianist and Tchaikovsky’s dear friend.  Here it is, probably the first important symphony in the history of Russian music.  It is performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Herbert von Karajan.

At that time, Nikolai Rubinstein, with his brother Anton’s help and Prince Nikolai Troubetzkoy’s money, was organizing a conservatory in Moscow.  He offered Tchaikovsky a professorship, which Tchaikovsky accepted, even though the salary was very modest.  During those years Tchaikovsky continued to compose.  The opera The Voyeboda was completed in 1868, and several piano pieces followed.  String Quartet no. 1 was written in 1871 and the Snow Maiden two years later.  He was also making money by writing articles in the newspaper "Russian Vedomosty."  One of the composers he did not appreciate at all was Johannes Brahms.  Tchaikovsky called him mediocre, pretentious, a pedestrian composer – all that after reading the piano transcriptions of Brahms’s symphonies, two piano concertos, the violin concerto and a number of chamber pieces.  To appreciate the difference in insights of Tchaikovsky the composer and Tchaikovsky the critic, let’s listen to one of these scorned pieces, Brahms’s Symphony no. 1.  Tchaikovsky may have been right that some of the Brahms’s writing is pompous and pretentious but still it’s music of genius, and by any measure much better than Tchaikovsky’s own pleasant but not terribly consequential first symphony.  As the Tchaikovsky’s symphony above, this symphony is performed, live in this case, by the Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan conducting.

April 28, 2014.  Alessandro Scarlatti and Giacomo Carissimi.  Alessandro Scarlatti’s birthday is this week.  He was born on May 2nd of 1660 in Palermo, Sicily.  When he was 12, he moved to Rome, and soon after found the patronage of Queen Christina.  In 1684 Scarlatti moved to Naples, where he became the maestro di capelle at the royal court (we wrote about this period of his life at length a year ago).  He stayed in Naples till 1702 and then moved to Florence.  He wrote four operas for the Prince Ferdinando III de Medici and then moved back to Rome..  By 1707 he was working for the Cardinal Ottoboni, the great patron of arts and music.  That year he wrote the opera Il Mitridate Eupatore.  It was premiered in Venice and was received poorly.  Now it is considered (and is) one of Scarlatti’s finest.  The role of Mitridate was written for a castrato but these days it’s sung by sopranos, and so is another leading role, that of Mitridate’s sister, Laodice.  Here’s her aria Di Mitridate genitor... Dolce stimola al tuo bel care, sung by the incomparable Joan Sutherland.  We know that in a few years Scarlatti would be eclipsed by the young Handel, but it seems that this music is on the level of the greatest arias Handel ever wrote.  Edmond Appia conducts the BBC orchestra.  And here’s another one of Laodice’s arias, Dolce cara allegrezza inaudita, from the same production (we have to concede that the voice of La Stupenda brings all music she sings to a different level).  And of course we should remember the wonderful aria Cara tomba of the protagonist, Mitridate.  It’s beautifully sung by the German coloratura Simone Kermes.

Giacomo Carissimi was 55 years older than Scarlatti.  Whereas Scarlatti worked when Baroque was already a highly developed, established style, Carissimi was an early Baroque composer.  He was born around April 18^th of 1605 (that’s the day of his baptism) in Marino, near Rome.  We know that at the age of 20 he became a maestro di capelle in Assisi.  In 1628 he moved back to Rome to assume the same position at Collegium Germanicum, the post held by many great composers, Tomás Luis de Victoria one of them.  He stayed at the College and it’s church, Sant'Apollinare, for the rest of his life, even though he received invitations from many places, including the offer to take over Claudio Monteverdi’s position at San Marco in Venice.  Carissimi was one of the first composers to develop the musical form of oratorio based on the text from an episode in the Bible, with soloists, choir, and the Narrator, whose recitatives linked the story together.  This genre has stayed popular ever since. It reached its pinnacle with Johann Sebastian Bach (the Passions) and Handel (Messiah), but Mendelssohn in the 19^th century, and both Stravinsky and Penderecki in the 20^th produced masterpieces.  One of Carissimi’s best-known oratorios is Jephte, written around 1650.  It’s based on a story from the Book of Judges.  You can hear it in the performance by the ensemble Cantus Cölln, Konrad Junghänel conducting.  Carissimi, who never wrote operas, was instrumental in developing cantatas, which are in many ways similar to shorter operas.  He died on January 12^th, 1674.  By then, the Baroque style was predominant, in no small measure propelled by Carissimi’s work.

April 21, 2014.  Prokofiev and Torelli.  Sergei Prokofiev’s birthday is this week: he was born on April 23rd (new style) of 1891.  Prokofiev was not only a composer of huge talent, he was also a wonderful pianist (his recording of Mussorgsy’s Pictures at an Exhibition, for example, is one of the best).  He premiered all but one of his piano concertos, even though some of them are among the most difficult works for the instrument (his concerto no. 4, for the left hand and written for Paul Wittgenstein who lost his right arm during WWI, was never performed during Prokofiev’s lifetime).  Prokofiev wrote his first concerto in 1911-1912, while still at studying at the St-Petersburg Conservatory.  The premier took place in Moscow in August of 1912.  Two years later he submitted the same work for the Anton Rubinstein competition, which was to determine the best pianist in the graduating class.  At the time Prokofiev joked that as the work was new, the judges wouldn’t know whether he was playing it right or not.  We don’t know if that was the reason, but Prokofiev indeed won the competition, even if Glazunov, the head of the jury, was rather reluctant to award him the first prize.  The first piano concerto is in one movement and the shortest of the five he’d eventually write.  It’s full of energy and youthful charisma.  Here it is, in the 1952 performance by Sviatoslav Richter with what used to be called the Moscow Youth Symphony, the orchestra, which one year later became the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra.  Kirill Kondrashin, its music director of many years, is conducting.

Prokofiev started working on his second piano concerto almost immediately after completing the first one, in 1912.  He finished it in 1913 and dedicated it to Maximilian Schmidthof, his friend from the Conservatory, who committed suicide in the spring of that year.  The work was premiered in Pavlovsk, outside of St.-Petersburg, in August, in a concert for the Russian Musical Society.  The public was scandalized.  Viacheslav Karatygin, a critic, reported that the concerto “left listeners frozen with fright, hair standing on end.”  Another critic called it “a cacophony of sounds that has nothing in common with civilized music.”  During the Revolution of 1917 the orchestral score was lost, and Prokofiev rewrote it in 1923, changing it considerably in the process.  By then Prokofiev had emigrated from Russia, married a Spanish singer, and was living in Paris.  He played at the second premier in Paris in 1924, with Serge Koussevitzky conducting, and the reception was not much better than that of 10 years earlier in Russia.  These days it’s considered a classic.  The concerto is technically extremely challenging.  Prokofiev himself stopped playing it shortly after the premier. Sviatoslav Richter never played Piano concerto no. 2, even though he considered it one of the most fundamental in all piano literature.  Martha Argerich didn’t play it either.  We’ll hear it in the performance by Evgeny Kissin, technically one of the most gifted pianists of his generation; the Philharmonia Orchestra is lead by Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Giuseppe Torelli, a minor Baroque composer, was born on April 22nd, 1658 in Verona.  He studied the violin, but ended up composing a large number of trumpet concertos (he also wrote many concerti grosso).  Here’s one of them, a very pleasant Trumpet concerto in D Major.  Alison Balsom is playing the trumpet, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen is lead by Thomas Klug.