Tag: Classical Gassing

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.

His father Giuseppe was an inspector of slaughter houses until he was arrested in 1796 for French Revolutionary sympathies by the Austrians.  While he was imprisoned his wife and son moved to Bologna were she made a living singing in theaters and upon Giuseppe’s release he joined her as a horn player in the bands where she sang.

Because his grandmother couldn’t handle him while his mom and dad were on the road, Rossini was apprenticed to a pork butcher and received his first musical instruction, which was not of very high quality.  After about 3 years he switched to a blacksmith and found some better teachers.  He had composed 6 String Sonatas by the age of twelve.

By the time he was 14 he had already composed his first Opera (though it would not be staged until he was 20) and he also gained admission to the Bologna Conservatory where he studied for 4 years before the debut of his first commercial production.

Italian music is all about the Opera and it’s hard to find a composer of note who hasn’t written a dozen or two.  Rossini’s rise to fame was meteoric and by 21 he had already retired and had to be coaxed out of it at 23 when he received an offer from a Naples theater impresario he couldn’t refuse.  In return for one Opera a year, 200 ducats a month and a cut from the tables in the theater Casino.

The Barber of Seville, while one of Rossini’s most famous, premiered to some controversy.  Giovanni Paisiello had already written a fairly popular Opera with the same name and subject 25 years earlier and his supporters protested the opening with boos and cat-calls.

After his return to the stage Rossini produced about 20 Operas by 1823, some of the librettos of which were highly bowdlerized to appeal to the tastes of his audience.  In 1822 he married one of his leading ladies and made a trip to Vienna where he was highly celebrated.  After that he went to London where George IV gave him 7000 pounds for 5 months work, and then to Paris where he made 800 pounds a year as the Director of the Theatre des Italiens plus a contract from Charles X for 5 Operas a year.

He stayed there for 5 years before returning to Bologna in 1829.  After that he composed but sporadically.  His first wife died in 1845, he remarried in 1846.  After leaving Bologna in 1848 due to the political unrest he eventually took up permanent residence in Paris where he devoted himself to the life of a foodie.  At the time of his death in 1868 he was acclaimed as the greatest composer of Opera ever known.

The piece I have selected tonight is one of his Sins of Old Age, Salon Music he composed at his home in Paris after his retirement.  This particular one, La Regata Veneziana, is a three song cycle posted by GermanOperaSinger and featuring Renata Tebaldi.  She was born in Pesaro, the very same town as Rossini.

Edvard Grieg is pretty much the national composer of Norway the same way Sibelius is of Finland, quite an accomplishment for a Scotsman.

Actually, for a composer, he led a pretty normal life.  Well traveled and mostly liked by his mid century contemporaries, he was a particularly gifted pianist.  He wrote 5 songs dedicated to Louis Hornbeck which ingratiates him to me (not that there is any relation, like Athena I sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus).

Tonight’s pieces are two Piano Rolls where he demonstrates his virtuosity playing his own compositions.

The first one is Bridal Procession which can come in handy if you are on your Larry Kingth marriage and are tired of Mendelssohn’s Wedding March.  The second is called Butterfly, Op. 43 #1, both posted by d60944.

What I notice about Piano Rolls in general is that the performances are quite up tempo compared to what I expected.  This is reflective of the desires and talent of the composers, speed is one of the things they are best at preserving.

Jacques Offenbach was the son of a Cantor and his problem was that he was either too funny, or not quite funny enough.

You see, he made his mark as a composer and producer of Operettas that satirized not only the politics and culture of the day, but also the musical styles of other famous composers.  If you don’t speak French perhaps the best way to think about him is as the Arthur Sullivan of Paris, only without quite as much pretension.

Instead of Gilbert he had a pair of lyricists that he commonly worked with, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halevy.

The Second Empire had quite an appetite for frivolity and farce and Offenbach was very popular, but at the onset of the Franco Prussian War he was accused of being a Bismarkian mole and chased from Paris, based mostly on the unfortunate circumstances of his birth.  You see, he wasn’t just a Jew, he was also born in Cologne.

He fled to Spain with his family and did some touring in Italy and Austria, but he really was quite a patriotic Frenchman and soon returned to Paris.

Alas the climate had changed.  The Third Republic, as new regimes often do, ushered in a new puritanical spirit and farce and comedy were not as trendy as they once were.  He was criticized by the Right for his disrespect for the Monarchy and Army, and by the Left as being a lapdog of the establishment and a sellout, including Emile Zola in the novel Nana.

Perhaps it’s not surprising, Zola was a ‘Naturalist’ author who couldn’t write a character without using cardboard, which is kind of a fundamental failing given his philosophy.  Nietzsche on the other hand thought Offenbach 6 times the composer Wagner was, which is high praise indeed.

So he was harassed by the Police and forced into bankruptcy, but was able to make some money back with a tour of the U.S. and was able to mount a few more successful productions before his death in 1880.

Tonight’s piece, Les belles Américaines is a Waltz he composed late in his career.  It was posted by ZIEHRER18431922.

Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.

His father Giuseppe was an inspector of slaughter houses until he was arrested in 1796 for French Revolutionary sympathies by the Austrians.  While he was imprisoned his wife and son moved to Bologna were she made a living singing in theaters and upon Giuseppe’s release he joined her as a horn player in the bands where she sang.

Because his grandmother couldn’t handle him while his mom and dad were on the road, Rossini was apprenticed to a pork butcher and received his first musical instruction, which was not of very high quality.  After about 3 years he switched to a blacksmith and found some better teachers.  He had composed 6 String Sonatas by the age of twelve.

By the time he was 14 he had already composed his first Opera (though it would not be staged until he was 20) and he also gained admission to the Bologna Conservatory where he studied for 4 years before the debut of his first commercial production.

Italian music is all about the Opera and it’s hard to find a composer of note who hasn’t written a dozen or two.  Rossini’s rise to fame was meteoric and by 21 he had already retired and had to be coaxed out of it at 23 when he received an offer from a Naples theater impresario he couldn’t refuse.  In return for one Opera a year, 200 ducats a month and a cut from the tables in the theater Casino.

The Barber of Seville, while one of Rossini’s most famous, premiered to some controversy.  Giovanni Paisiello had already written a fairly popular Opera with the same name and subject 25 years earlier and his supporters protested the opening with boos and cat-calls.

After his return to the stage Rossini produced about 20 Operas by 1823, some of the librettos of which were highly bowdlerized to appeal to the tastes of his audience.  In 1822 he married one of his leading ladies and made a trip to Vienna where he was highly celebrated.  After that he went to London where George IV gave him 7000 pounds for 5 months work, and then to Paris where he made 800 pounds a year as the Director of the Theatre des Italiens plus a contract from Charles X for 5 Operas a year.

He stayed there for 5 years before returning to Bologna in 1829.  After that he composed but sporadically.  His first wife died in 1845, he remarried in 1846.  After leaving Bologna in 1848 due to the political unrest he eventually took up permanent residence in Paris where he devoted himself to the life of a foodie.  At the time of his death in 1868 he was acclaimed as the greatest composer of Opera ever known.

The piece I have selected tonight is one of his Sins of Old Age, Salon Music he composed at his home in Paris after his retirement.  This particular one, La Regata Veneziana, is a three song cycle posted by GermanOperaSinger and featuring Renata Tebaldi.  She was born in Pesaro, the very same town as Rossini.

There are an awful lot of Strausses in German music (and I include Austrian in that category though purists would say I probably shouldn’t).  Johann Strauss was a very successful Viennese band leader and composer who was instrumental in the development of the Waltz, a sexually revolutionary dance where couples actually danced in a (gasp) closed position.

Being such a dangerous degenerate he was of course wildly popular and toured with his band all over Europe and even performed at Queen Victoria’s coronation.

Like most successful Rock Stars the last thing he wanted was for his own (legitimate) family to follow in his footsteps of constant adulation and debauchery so for his sons he selected the professions of military and foreign service, and banking,

After he acknowledged his libertine ways by recognizing one of his illegitimate daughters, his wife divorced him and Junior, the banker, was free to take up his own musical career for which his father never forgave him.

While never quite as popular during his father’s lifetime as his Dad, Junior was quite popular indeed and soon had a band of his own.  When there was a revolution in Vienna in 1848 Junior sided with the Revolutionaries while Dad supported the Monarchy.  Junior was arrested for playing The Marseillaise in public, no doubt as part of his father’s Paris-Walzer which used the theme because Junior frequently performed Dad’s music.

Senior died the year after that and Junior took over his band.  When, after 4 years of constant touring, he took a little mental vacation, he recruited his brothers to run the band while he was resting.

Junior eventually eclipsed his father in fame and composed and performed constantly until his death at the turn of the century.  He was so influential that Hitler, rather than admit Junior’s Jewish heritage, had his birth records stolen and famously declared, “I decide who is Jewish.”

See, he was a deciderer too.

Any way tonight’s piece is Weiner Blut Op. 354, posted by TheWickedNorth.

Camile Saint-Saens is another one of those child prodigy musical geniuses who could read and write at 3, was composing at 4, and performing in public at 5.  He was an expert Mathmatician and in addition to scholarly articles on acoustics, occult sciences, Roman theatre decoration, and ancient instruments, wrote a volume on Philosophy, Problems and Mysteries, about Science and Art replacing Religion; the pessimistic and atheistic ideas of which read like an early version of Existentialism.  He also wrote a book of poetry and a theatrical farce as well as several travelogues.

He was considered the greatest organist in the world by Liszt but other contemporaries found his style, while technically flawless, mechanical and devoid of spirit.  When he played he sat rock still, only his fingers, hands, and arms moving.

Speaking of philosophy, he underwent some remarkable changes of mind in the course of his life.  Initially a big fan of Wagner he cooled on him considerably after the Franco-Prussian War.  From being a ground breaking progressive in his early career, he came to despise the work of Impressionists like Debussy, Strauss, and Stravinsky.

Today, of course, his most performed work is the one he most hated- Carnival of the Animals; so much so that he suppressed it’s publication until after his death for fear it would make him look less “serious”.  Now it’s a staple of Children’s Concerts along with Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra.  As a child I loved the 12th Movement, Fossils, because of that crazy Xylophone.

I wanted to find Opus 128, his film score for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise– he was the first major composer to do one.  Alas it appears to be unavailable except to those who have better YouTube search skills than I.  Instead you will have to settle for an episode of The Shadow which uses the middle section of Le rouet d’Omphale Op. 31 as its theme.

This episode, Triangle of Death, features Orson Wells as The Shadow.  Also Borodin.  It was posted by TheRadioGhost in three parts, the last 2 of which are below the fold.

Who says the English have no sense of humor?  The food is an exquisite exercise in irony and their two most famous composers, Haydn and Handel are, well, German.  But then so is the Monarchy.

Yet if ever a composer could be said to be ‘The’ English Composer, it would probably be Edward Elgar.  If you graduated even from Beauty School in the last hundred or so years, you were shepherded into the ceremony to the Trio of March #1 in D– Land of Hope and Glory.

He was a product of late Victorian/Edwardian Nationalism and like many after World War I, came to question some of his previous assumptions.  By that time however he was already looked at as the Rudyard Kipling of English music and his reputation has suffered from it since.

It can’t be said he lacked a sense of humor, his first ‘famous’ piece, the Enigma Variations, was actually an extended satire of the various musical acquaintances he had made in 20 odd years as a professional performer.  But that’s not the joke, the joke is that the true ‘theme’ the variations were composed around is never played and was never disclosed and remains a subject of controversy to this day.

Elgar came to be seen as the successor to Arthur Sullivan and after an incredible surge of popularity between 1900 and 1912 he was Knighted and eventually appointed Master of the King’s Musick (where he eliminated the ‘k’, I told you he had a sense of humor).

After his wife’s death and post war loss of popularity he devoted himself to his ‘hobbies’, rooting for the Wolverhampton Wanderers and playing the ponies (“Get your ice cream.  Get your Tootsie Fruitsie ice cream.”).

He also recorded and was one of the very first people to use EMI’s famous Abbey Road Studios (yes, that one).  Of course it was March #1 in D, “Play this tune as though you’ve never heard it before.”

The Cello Concerto in E Minor (Op. 85) that I am featuring tonight is highly regarded by Elgarians, it has 4 Movements posted by markvogue in 5 parts.  This performance is by Jaqueline DuPre conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

So I was looking at Debussy (which I swear I’ll get to, but it’s really complicated) and shopping for YouTubes when I ran across 2 Piano Rolls of his.

What’s a Piano Roll?  Basically a Paper Tape to program your Player Piano which is one reason why aficionados like to call them ‘digital recordings’ (another would be a lame pun about fingers).

You see, your performer sits down at a Reproducing Piano, plays the piece, and punches holes in the tape.  Then you take your master tape to a duplicator and sooner than you can say ‘Bob’s your Uncle’ you can be selling them to every bar, honky tonk, saloon, or whatever too cheap to hire a piano player, but willing to spend big bucks on a hunk of obsolete equipment (capitalism, gotta love it).

The beauty part is the sound reproduction.

Instead of a scratchy unrecognizable mess like we heard from Brahms on Saturday, you get an exact duplicate of the tempo, duration, and pitch (assuming your piano is tuned) of each note.  It doesn’t do volume so well, or at least not in a standardized way.

Still it is a remarkable ‘voice of the pharohs’ device that has preseved the performances of such famous composers as Debussy (of course), but also Gershwin, Grieg, Joplin, Mahler, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, and Scriabin (well, that wiki lists, there are doubtless others).

Both pieces tonight are Debussy playing Debussy via Piano Roll.  The one on the left is Arabesque #2 posted by jero13595.  It has pretty pictures.  The one on the right is very static visually, but you’ll instantly recognize it (and perhaps be reminded of another Piano Roll composer).  The title is Golliwogg’s Cakewalk and it was posted by theoshow2.

Well I told you I wanted to get away from those depressing Russians and Germans so I went looking far across the Atlantic where I found a little place called Hennicker, New Hampshire and a composer named Amy Beach.

She was quite the prodigy and started composing at the age of 4.  In her whole life she only had one year of formal education in composition, when she was 14, although she did receive extensive training in performance.

At 16 she made her professional debut and was soon a soloist with the Boston Symphony Opera.  Two years later she married a surgeon 24 years older who requested that she perform only once a year.

So she devoted herself to composing and was soon considered one of the major American composers.  She composed a piece to open the Women’s Building at the Columbia Exposition in 1893.

When her husband died she toured Europe for several years and upon her return was particularly noted for teaching and mentoring young musicians.  She was the first President of the Society of American Women Composers and wrote a book laying out her mostly self-taught compositional principles- Ten Commandments for Young Composers.

Her best known works are her Mass in E Flat Major, the Gaelic Symphony, and her opera Cabildo.  This piece, Piano Concerto Op. 45, starts on the right and continues below the fold.  It was posted by deviantrake.

Sigh.

I promise to try and get away from the stranglehold of Middle Europeans and explore some more western composers, but I can’t help recalling that commercial for 100 famous classical music themes.

You know, the one that intones- “And who can forget Polovtsian Dance #17 (Stranger in Paradise) by Borodin?” as screen after screen of titles scrolls up.

Yeah, well, Borodin.

His day gig was as a chemist where he is justly famous for his research on aldehydes and unjustly famous for the Hunsdiecker reaction.

His ouvre as a composer reflects his amateur status, consisting of 2 Symphonies and an Opera, Prince Igor, that contains the Polovtsian Dances and was finished by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov after his death in 1887, as well as some Chamber Music.

He was a big proponent of absolute music as opposed to the programmatic music embraced by many of the popular composers of the time (for instance the Sibelius piece we looked at last night).

His most powerful statement of this philosophy is found in his 2 String Quartets.  His second one is more famous, but I have included both below the fold.  Each is perfomed by The Borodin Quartet which, since they are moderately famous and have recorded many composers, made my search… interesting.

The First Quartet (which starts on the left) was posted by novichok3, the Second by truecrypt.

Sibelius is frequently grouped with the ‘Romantic Nationalist’ composers (think Wagner or Tchaikovsky).  Certainly Finlandia is one of his best known works though contrary to some opinions it is not the National Anthem of Finland (that would be Maamme), but was used as the melody of the National Anthem of the short lived African country of Biafra (Land of the Rising Sun).

But rather than point you at the short (7 to 9 minutes) and cliche, I’d much rather bore you with the obscure and trivial.  The piece I have selected, Nightride and Sunrise, is a tone poem meant to evoke the emotions of an actual experience, in this case a night time ride and the rise of the sun (duh).

This recording is not the famous 1956 version by Boult and the London Philharmonic but the rather less famous undated performance of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra posted by billystewart4.

Sibelius lived quite a long time despite an early diagnosis of throat cancer.  He died in 1957 at the age of 91.  However after his 7th Symphony in 1926 his published output was very slight and in 1945 he destroyed many personal papers, presumably including the score of an unfinished 8th Symphony.

While he’s considered a national hero by the Finns, his music has received uneven reviews in other quarters with many critics calling it ‘conservative’ and ‘simplistic’ (among less kind opinions).

His reply?

“Pay no attention to what critics say. No statue has ever been put up to a critic.”

So I wanted to do something special for Mother’s Day and it turned into another research sinkhole.

I had it in my mind to do Schubert at some point (probably still will) and I recalled that somewhere in his wiki was a piece he had dedicated to hs mother.  Sure enough- an Octet for Winds (D. 72/72a) but try finding it on YouTube.

Ok, now Google is my friend and classical+music+mother turns up… a gagillion hits for Amazon’s Mozart Lullabies for Mothers.

And Brahms’ German Requiem.

But ek, you say, we just did Brahms and Requiems are so… morbid.

And lingering too I will add, this monstrosity is Brahms’ longest work consisting of 7 movements and clocking in at a whopping 65 to 80 minutes depending on the generosity of the conductor.  On the other hand the Octet is also a memorial for Schubert’s mom who died in 1813.

I had the good fortune to stumble across a complete collection of YouTubes posted by Nachtmarchen.  It’s split into 11 parts and features-

• The Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra
• The Leipzig Radio Choir
• Mari Anne Haggander
• Siegfried Lorenz

• Conducted by Herbert Kegel (that glowery looking guy in the thumbnail)

The video part is not at all expressive so I’ve shrunk it in the interests of space.  It’s not particularly loud, but it is all the same loudness so I hope you won’t have to fuss with your volume much between the pieces.

It is ALL 7 movements complete by the same artists.  They are ALL embeddable.

I hope those virtues compensate for whatever deficiencies the recording and performances have.