Gluck, Henze and Janáček 2020

Gluck, Henze and Janáček 2020

This Week in Classical Music: June 29, 2020.  Henze, Gluck and Janáček.  The calendar divides composers into serendipitous groups, and this week we have three that are as musically Christoph Willibald Gluckdifferent as they can get.   Christoph Willibald Gluck was a famous opera composer, who created a new style by merging the Italian and French traditions; for six years he was feted in Paris where some of his best operas,  Orphée et Euridice, Iphigénie en Aulide, Alceste and Iphigénie en Tauride saw their premiers.  Then, after one failure (with Echo et NarcisseI), he fell out of favor, left Paris and lived the rest of his live in Vienna suffering from melancholy.  Gluck was born on July 2nd of 1714, you can read more about him here.

While Gluck was born in what is now Germany, in his youth he spent many years in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic; Leoš Janáček, also born this week (July 3rd of 1854), is one of the most interesting Czech composers.  He, like Gluck is also remembered mostly for his operas: Jenůfa (1904), Káťa Kabanová, based on a play Storm by the Russian playwright Alexander Ostrovsky (the opera was composed in 1921) and The Cunning Little Vixen, completed in 1923.  Unlike Gluck, Janáček also wrote a number of orchestral, chamber and piano pieces (On the Overgrown Path is probably the most popular of the latter).  Here’s his Sinfonietta, from 1926.  The Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra is conducted by Antoni Wit.

Hans Werner Henze, a German composer, was born on July 1st of 1926.  We usually don’t care much about political views of composers, but Henze lived very recently (he died in 2012) and his political views affected much of what he wrote.  He was a Marxist, a member of the Italian Communist Party (Henze moved to Italy when he was 27 and lived there for many years), he composed works honoring Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, he supported the Cuban revolution (and spent time in Cuba) and wrote songs based on communist verses.  At the same time, Henze was creating some of the most original and interesting music, incorporating different styles, from jazz to twelve-tone.  Henze was very prolific: as Gluck and Janáček, Henze wrote several operas, he also wrote ten symphonies, ballet scores, choral pieces and chamber music.  Here’s a more accessible, lyrical piece by Henze, his Adagio Adagio. It’s performed by Edna Michell (violin), Michal Kanka (cello) and Igor Ardašev (piano).

Also, two wonderful Hungarian musicians were born this week: the pianist Annie Fischer, on July 5th of 1914 and the cellist János Starker, exactly 10 years later.  Both were of Jewish descent; Fischer fled to Sweden in 1940 and returned to Hungary after the war, Starker survived the war in Hungary (his brothers perished in the Holocaust), left the country in 1946 and moved to the US in 1948.  He was the principal cello at the Dallas, Metropolitan and Chicago symphonies and widely toured the world as a solo performer.  He was considered one of the greatest cellists of the second half of the 20th century.