Robert Schumann Op 12 N° 1 - Des Abends Fantasiestücke, op. 12, a set of eight pieces for piano, was compos...
Robert Schumann Op 12 N° 2 - Aufschwung Fantasiestücke, op. 12, a set of eight pieces for piano, was compos...
Robert Schumann Op 12 N° 3 - Warum? Fantasiestücke, op. 12, a set of eight pieces for piano, was compos...
Robert Schumann Op 12 N° 4 - Grillen Fantasiestücke, op. 12, a set of eight pieces for piano, was compos...
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This Week in Classical Music: February 17, 2025.Handel and Kurtág.The great was born on February 23rd of 1685.In one year, between 1724 and 1725, while Handel was the “Master of the orchestra” at the Royal Academy of Music in London, he created three very successful operas, Rodelinda, Giulio Cesare, and Tamerlano.Each of these operas had his favorite singers in leading roles: the castrato Senesino, and the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni.The aria Dove sei, amato bene? (Where are you, my dear?), from Act I of Rodelinda was written for Senesino and is performed here by the wonderful countertenor Andreas Scholl. The supporting Accademia Bizantina is led by Ottavio Dantone.
Last week we celebrated the 98th birthday of Leontyne Price; this week it’s György Kurtág’s turn: in two days he will be 99!György Kurtág (his first name is pronounced closer to Dyerd rather than George) was born on February 19th of 1926 in Lugoj, Banat.Most of the historical Banat now belongs to Romania, but before the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918, Banat was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the majority of its inhabitants were Hungarian speakers.It also had a large Jewish population; Kurtág himself is half-Jewish.He spoke Hungarian at home and Romanian at school.As a child, he studied the piano on and off, first with his mother and then with professional teachers.After WWII, in 1946, the 20-year-old Kurtág moved to Budapest and continued taking piano lessons, eventually entering the Franz Liszt Music Academy.There he met György Ligetiand they became friends for life (Ligeti, who died in 2006, was also of Hungarian-Jewish descent, and also born in a part of Austria-Hungary that now lies in Romania; he rivals Kurtág as one of the most important classical composers of the second half of the 20th century).After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Kurtág moved to Paris.There he studied with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud.He returned to Hungary in 1959 and stayed there for the duration of the Communist regime – the only Hungarian composer of international renown to do so (Ligeti, for example, fled to Vienna right after the failed revolution and stayed in the West for the rest of his life). At that time Kurtág became influential as a teacher.Surprisingly, he didn’t teach composition but rather interpretation: pianists Zoltán Kocsis and András Schiff, and the first Takács String Quartet were among his pupils. Kurtág resumed traveling only after the fall of communism in 1989, moving first to Berlin (he was the composer in residence for the Berlin Philharmonic in the mid-90s), then Vienna, the Netherlands and Paris, where he worked with Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain.In 2002, the Kurtágs settled in Bordeaux but in 2015 he and his wife returned to Budapest (Kurtág’s wife Márta, a pianist, died in 2019).
Last week, when we played Luigi Nono’s Con Luigi Dallapiccola, we marveled at how a piece of interesting music could be created by limited means, in Nono’s case, an ensemble of percussion instruments.Here is another example, a piece by Kurtág titled...quasi una fantasia... (Kurtág likes ellipses in his titles).It was written in 1988.Very different from Nono’s, it is also very economical in how Kurtág uses different instruments.The piano, for example, works more as a percussion, rather than the Romantic instrument capable of creating a wall of sound.In this recording, Bahar Dördüncü is the pianist.We don’t know the name of the ensemble.
We should mention Arcangello Corelli, who was born on this day in 1653.And Luigi Boccherini was also born this week, on February 19th of 1743.
This Week in Classical Music: February 10, 2025. Still Catching Up. We’ve missed several important anniversaries during the last month and would like to acknowledge some of them now. But first, today is the birthday of Leontyne Price, one of the greatest sopranos of the 20th century.She’s with us and turned 98 today!
But back to the missed anniversaries.The Italians constitute the largest group. First, two important 20th-century composers: Luigi Dallapiccola, born on February 3rd of 1904, and Luigi Nono, born January 29th of 1924. We posted two entries on Dallapiccola last year (here and here). Last year was Nono’s 100th anniversary but we failed to commemorate the event appropriately. So, here's a short outline of Nono’s life and work.
Luigi Nono was born on January 29th of 1924 in Venice. He studied at the Liceo Musicale with the noted composer Gian Francesco Malipiero. In 1946 he met Bruno Maderna, one of the first avant-garde Italian composers. Maderna was only four years older but more established; as he and Nono were working in Venice, and a small community of musicians organized themselves around them. Dallapiccola, of an older generation but a friend of both, had a significant influence on their development.
Several early works by Nono were presented at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, the most important gathering of new composers. Soon after he became an active participant and, together with Boulez and Stockhausen, one of the leaders of the new music movement. In 1955 he married Nuria Schoenberg, daughter of Arnold Schoenberg. Nono was a leftist, as were many of his fellow composers. A principled anti-fascist, he went much further to the left than many. For example, his opera Al gran sole carico d'amore, (the libretto for which he co-wrote with Yuri Lyubimov, the director of the original production and also the director of the famous Moscow Taganka theater), was loosely based on plays by Bertolt Brecht and contained excerpts of speeches by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Karl Marx and Lenin. Some of his music composed during the 60s was extremely political and dogmatic. For example, his Non Consumiamo Marx consists of sounds recorded during the 1968 student uprising in Paris and a voice reading the messages left on the walls during that period. A much more interesting piece was his Prometeo, tragedia dell’ascolto composed over several years in the early 1980s, the period when his work became less political. Prometeo is called “opera,” although the word should be taken in its original Italian sense, “work” – it is a composition for five singers, two speakers, a chorus, and a small orchestra, with sounds being electronically manipulated. To celebrate both Nono and Dallapiccola, here is Luigi Nono’s piece from 1979, Con Luigi Dallapiccola, performed by the ensemble Percussions de Strasbourg. It’s about 12 minutes of different sound effects created by the different percussion instruments; we think there’s more music here, however unusual it is, than in many established compositions.
And then there is another Italian, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance. He was born between February 3rd of 1525 and February 2nd of 1526. We don’t play him often enough, so no matter when his actual birthday was, here is Palestrina’s late motet, Peccantem me quotidie (I sin every day). Ensemble The Sixteen is led by their founder, Harry Christophers.
This Week in Classical Music: February 3, 2025. Post-Scriabin, catching up. For the whole month of January, we were preoccupied with Scriabin and his common-law wife, Tatiana Schloezer. We concede that we may have overdone it a bit, but many aspects of Scriabin’s story are fascinating. He was a complicated, difficult person, a terrible egocentric. He was also very talented. His music, once he got away from copying Chopin, was highly original and fascinating – as much today as when it was written. He attempted to expand the experience of listening to music by combining sound with light; this may not have worked as he expected, but the experiments were intriguing (the philosophy and poetics, with which he tried to imbue his music, were much less successful). And he had tremendous support from Tatiana, whose exalted adoration sustained him for many difficult years in Russia and abroad.
Scriabin was also a part of Russian culture at a historical high point; he knew many key people and was admired by many, from the contemporary composers, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, and even Stravinsky, grudgingly, to poets like Balmont, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva. His life was short (he died at the age of 43 after a furuncle led to blood poisoning) and so was the life of some of his children, two of whom, from his “official” wife, died at the age of seven, while musically gifted Julian, his and Tatiana’s son, drowned at the age of 12. Their daughter Ariadna, a poet and active member of the Russian post-Revolutionary diaspora, became a Zionist, converted to Judaism, founded a French Resistance group Armée Juive during the occupation, and was killed by a French Nazi collaborator shortly before France was liberated. Tatiana Schloezer died in Moscow in 1922 at the age of 39.
So, while we attended to all these happenings, we missed two big birthdays. The first one, on January 27th, was that of Mozart. And then, on the 31st of January, was Franz Schubert’s birthday. Fortunately, we covered both of them many times and have hundreds of pieces of their music in the library. Both composers were tremendously prolific, even though both had tragically short lives (Mozart died at the age of 35, Schubert – at 31), both created numerous masterpieces. We’ll celebrate them with two vocal pieces: the trio Soave sia il vento, from the first act of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte (here), and the song An die Music by Schubert (here). Nothing can be better than this.
This Week in Classical Music: January 27, 2025. Scriabin and Schloezer, Part IV, the last one. Last week, we ended our story of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin and his muse, Tatiana Schloezer, in 1908, with the composer completing the Poem of Ecstasy, his most innovative (and, looking back, the most significant and popular) piece, and living in Lausanne. Their son Julian, was also born in February of the same year. And it was in Lausanne that Scriabin met Serge Koussevitzky, a bass player and conductor, who, by marrying a daughter of a rich trader acquired a considerable fortune and was ready to become Scriabin’s benefactor. Koussevitzky, who would later become a beloved conductor of the Boston Symphony, organized a publishing house and promoted Scriabin’s works (and also published the music of Rachmaninov, Prokofiev and Medtner), and concerts, where Scriabin’s music was often performed. He also paid him 5,000 rubles a year, a considerable sum. For the first time in many years, Sciabin wasn’t poor. Koussevitzky was also instrumental in bringing Scriabin back to Russia, first as a trial, for a series of concerts in Moscow and St-Petersburg, and two years later, in 1910, permanently. Unfortunately, the visit to Moscow resulted in a breakup between Scriabin and his longtime benefactor, Margarita Morozova. Vera Scriabina, still formally Scriabin’s wife, attended one of the rehearsals of the Poem of Ecstasy; Morozova joined her in the hall, which was noticed by Schloezer who later created a scene. Scriabin joined in and demanded that Morozova choose between Vera and Tatiana. Morozova refused, and that was the end of her relationship with Scriabin. An interesting coincidence: Scriabin benefactors’ mansions stand practically next to each other. The distance between Koussevitzky’s mansion where Scriabin stayed during his visit to Moscow, and Morozova’s mansion is less than 100 yards. Morozova’s mansion is now occupied by Putin’s retired spies: it houses the so-called Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. Koussevitzky’s mansion was given to a Russian regional administration.
The year the Scriabins moved to Russia, his tone poem Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, was finished. It was premiered by Koussevitzky in 1911 and became as scandalous as the Poem of Ecstasy. Prometheus was the first of Scriabin’s compositions to call for colored light to be part of the performance. Scriabin strongly associated sounds and colors, a fascinating aspect of his creative work which we’ll address separately.
Life in Russia was not without problems, mostly because of Scriabin’s difficult character and Tatiana Schloezer’s influence. He broke up with Koussevitzky and lost his financial support. To earn money, he composed smaller pieces, mostly for the piano: sonatas Six through Ten were written between 1912 and 1913. Still, things were looking up. In 1912 the Scriabins moved to a new, larger apartment, next to Arbat Street (it’s now Scriabin’s Museum); the apartment became a gathering place for artists and musicians, especially theosophically inclined. All three of their children attended the Gnessin Music school, just around the corner on the Sobach’ya Ploshchadka (Dog’s Square). Scriabin’s music, the Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus in particular, was played around the world, and his fame was growing. Things changed in August of 1914, as Russia entered the Great War. Scriabin’s piano recitals became the only source of income, and the family’s ties with Europe, where they spent so many years, were broken. Scriabin started working on the Preparatory Act of the Mysterium, a hugely ambitious composition in which he intended, in addition to sound, to involve light, touch and smell (when finished, it was supposed to be performed in the foothills of the Himalayas). In early April of 1915, he noticed a pimple on his upper lip, which developed into a furuncle, and on 14th of April (27th in the new style calendar) he died of blood poisoning.
Here is Vers la flamme (Toward the flame), the last piano piece written by Scriabin in 1914. It was recorded by Vladimir Horowitz in 1972. The portrait of Tatiana Schloezer, above, was made by Nikolai Vysheslavtsev in 1921, one year before her death at 39. In most photos Schloezer doesn’t look attractive; it seems the painter managed to capture something the camera couldn’t.
This Week in Classical Music: January 20, 2025. Scriabin and Schloezer, Part III. Last week, we ended our story in 1905 with Alexander Scriabin and Tatiana Schloezer moving to Bogliasco, Italy, while Vera Scriabin, the composer’s legal wife, remained in Vésenaz, Switzerland, with the children. A tragedy struck when the eldest daughter, age seven, died later that year. The heartbroken Scriabin rushed to Vésenaz, staying there for several weeks, while Tatiana was going mad with jealousy in Bogliasco. She should not have worried, as Scriabin returned to her; and that was the last time he and Vera would meet.
Soon after, Vasily Safonov, the director of the Moscow Conservatory and a friend of the Scriabins, invited Vera to return to Moscow and join the faculty. Safonov, an influential cultural figure in Russia, was Scriabin’s teacher and mentor; they fell apart over Scriabin’s affair with Schloezer, Safonov taking Vera’s side. Vera followed Safonov’s advice, bringing the three children with her (one of them, Lev, would die in 1910, also at the age of seven). An accomplished pianist, Vera continued to perform, playing, almost exclusively and by all accounts very well, her husband's music.
In the meantime, Scriabin and Tatiana were living in Bogliasco; Tatiana was pregnant with their first child while Scriabin was working, feverishly, on the Poem of Extasy (Scriabin’s original title was more shocking, Poéme Orgiaque). Penniless but in good spirits, they often shared one dinner between them. Some financial help came when Scriabin received an invitation to tour the US. Safonov was then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, and the relationship between him and Scriabin had improved. Scriabin arrived in New York in December of 1906. In the following months, his music was featured in several concerts, with Scriabin soloing his own Piano Concerto and the Philharmonic performing his First and Third Symphonies. Some pieces were performed by the Russian Symphony Orchestra of New York, founded in 1903 by Scriabin’s friend Modest Altschuler.
Scriabin’s problems in the US started when Tatiana arrived incognito in New York, though he pleaded with her not to come. For some time, they lived in separate hotels, but that became expensive, and she moved in with him. The United States back then was a rather puritanical country: just several months earlier another famous Russian, the writer Maxim Gorky, was kicked out of the same hotel when it became known that his travel companion, the actress Maria Andreeva, was his mistress, not the wife. Once Tatiana started appearing with Scriabin in public, rumors spread (most likely initiated by the local Russians) that Scriabin was married to another woman. One March 1907 night, Altschuler came running to their room with the news that in the morning a crowd of reporters was expected at their hotel. The scandal was imminent as they intended to seek information about Scriabin’s marital status. The couple fled that very night, borrowing the money for the fare to Europe from Altschuler.
Soon after arriving in Italy, Scriabin and Tatiana moved to Paris, where he worked on finishing The Poem of Ecstasy, and then to Lausanne. The Poem was premiered by Altschuler in New York in 1908; in Europe, it received the Glinka Prize, a prestigious award instituted by Mitrofan Belyaev, an industrialist and patron of arts, and named after the famous Russian composer.
Here is The Poem of Ecstasy, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Pierre Boulez.
This Week in Classical Music: January 13, 2025. v. Last week, we ended our story in 1902, with Tatiana Schloezer coming to Moscow to meet Scriabin, who was married, by then rather unhappily, to Vera Isakovich, and with whom he already had four children.Scriabin was taken by Tatiana, who seemed to understand his music in an exalted, spiritual way, as opposed to Vera, who, in Scriabin’s opinion, didn’t appreciate his talent enough.Tatiana started taking piano lessons at Scriabin’s house, much to Vera’s displeasure.The Schloezer siblings, Boris and Tatiana, spent much time with the Scriabins, Alexander playing his music while Tatiana praised it extravagantly and rapturously, often standing on her knees.
Scriabin, who had just finished his Second Symphony, was working on the Third, “The Divine Poem,” the most important (and eventually successful) piece to date.In 1904, with the family situation in trouble, Scriabin suffered another blow: his good friend, benefactor and publisher, Mitrofan Belyaev, died, which drastically changed Scriabin’s financial situation.With few prospects in Russia, the ambitious Scriabin, who always wanted to “conquer Europe,” left for Geneva, alone, without the family.A month later, he asked Vera to join him.With very little money, living in the expensive Geneva was impossible, so they moved to the much cheaper Vésenaz, a village close by.In the meantime, Scriabin continued writing to Schloezer, eventually asking her to come to Switzerland, which she did without delay, settling in Geneva.
The relationship between Tatiana and Scriabin was an open secret in Russia, and very soon the rumors reached poor Vera.Scriabin was ready for a divorce, but to Vera the idea was abhorrent.With everything in the open, however uncomfortable and embarrassing the situation was, Tatiana used it to resume her musical lessons with Scriabin, coming to the house and staying there for hours, to Vera’s chagrin.That didn’t last long: Tatiana, who also had little money, had to move to Brussels and stay with her relatives.With the whole family situation in tatters, Scriabin went to Paris to oversee the premiere of his Third Symphony, which was to be led by Arthur Nikisch, then the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic.Occasionally he’d visit Tatiana in Brussels.
The long-awaited premiere took place on May 29th of 1905; it was successful, but not without scandals, musical and social.Tatiana, on Scriabin’s invitation, came from Brussels, while Vera, unbeknown to the composer, traveled from Switzerland and announced herself after the concert, infuriating Tatiana and compromising Scriabin, who was called, by a local wit, a bigamist.The critics were divided: some thought the symphony was the new word in contemporary music, others, like Rimsky-Korsakov, hated it.Financially, however, the symphony brought very little money.
Tatiana moved to Paris with Scriabin while he embarked on a new project, a symphony that would become the “Poem of Extasy.”Absorbed in composing, he wasn’t earning any money.Tatiana was pregnant with their first child.His benefactors couldn’t help much, so the couple decided to move to Italy where life was cheaper.In June of 1905, they settled in Bogliasco, next to Genoa.One month later, Alexander and Vera’s elder daughter Rimma died in Vésenaz at the age of seven, and Vera, with three children, returned to Moscow.
We’ll finish the Scriabin-Schloezer story next week.The Third Symphony (“The Divine Poem”) runs for about 45 minutes.It’s in three movements.You can listen to the first movement, Luttes ("Struggles"), here, the second, Voluptés ("Delights"), here, and the third, Jeu divin ("Divine Play"), here.Or you could listen to the whole thing here. Michail Pletnev conducts the Russian National Orchestra.
This Week in Classical Music: February 17, 2025. Handel and Kurtág. The great
was born on February 23rd of 1685. In one year, between 1724 and 1725, while Handel was the “Master of the orchestra” at the Royal Academy of Music in London, he created three very successful operas, Rodelinda, Giulio Cesare, and Tamerlano. Each of these operas had his favorite singers in leading roles: the castrato Senesino, and the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni. The aria Dove sei, amato bene? (Where are you, my dear?), from Act I of Rodelinda was written for Senesino and is performed here by the wonderful countertenor Andreas Scholl. The supporting Accademia Bizantina is led by Ottavio Dantone.
Last week we celebrated the 98th birthday of Leontyne Price; this week it’s György Kurtág’s turn: in two days he will be 99! György Kurtág (his first name is pronounced closer to Dyerd rather than George) was born on February 19th of 1926 in Lugoj, Banat. Most of the historical Banat now belongs to Romania, but before the dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918, Banat was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the majority of its inhabitants were Hungarian speakers. It also had a large Jewish population; Kurtág himself is half-Jewish. He spoke Hungarian at home and Romanian at school. As a child, he studied the piano on and off, first with his mother and then with professional teachers. After WWII, in 1946, the 20-year-old Kurtág moved to Budapest and continued taking piano lessons, eventually entering the Franz Liszt Music Academy. There he met György Ligeti and they became friends for life (Ligeti, who died in 2006, was also of Hungarian-Jewish descent, and also born in a part of Austria-Hungary that now lies in Romania; he rivals Kurtág as one of the most important classical composers of the second half of the 20th century). After the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Kurtág moved to Paris. There he studied with Olivier Messiaen and Darius Milhaud. He returned to Hungary in 1959 and stayed there for the duration of the Communist regime – the only Hungarian composer of international renown to do so (Ligeti, for example, fled to Vienna right after the failed revolution and stayed in the West for the rest of his life). At that time Kurtág became influential as a teacher. Surprisingly, he didn’t teach composition but rather interpretation: pianists Zoltán Kocsis and András Schiff, and the first Takács String Quartet were among his pupils. Kurtág resumed traveling only after the fall of communism in 1989, moving first to Berlin (he was the composer in residence for the Berlin Philharmonic in the mid-90s), then Vienna, the Netherlands and Paris, where he worked with Boulez’s Ensemble Intercontemporain. In 2002, the Kurtágs settled in Bordeaux but in 2015 he and his wife returned to Budapest (Kurtág’s wife Márta, a pianist, died in 2019).
Last week, when we played Luigi Nono’s Con Luigi Dallapiccola, we marveled at how a piece of interesting music could be created by limited means, in Nono’s case, an ensemble of percussion instruments. Here is another example, a piece by Kurtág titled...quasi una fantasia... (Kurtág likes ellipses in his titles). It was written in 1988. Very different from Nono’s, it is also very economical in how Kurtág uses different instruments. The piano, for example, works more as a percussion, rather than the Romantic instrument capable of creating a wall of sound. In this recording, Bahar Dördüncü is the pianist. We don’t know the name of the ensemble.
We should mention Arcangello Corelli, who was born on this day in 1653. And Luigi Boccherini was also born this week, on February 19th of 1743.
PermalinkThis Week in Classical Music: February 10, 2025. Still Catching Up. We’ve missed several important anniversaries during the last month and would like to acknowledge some of them now.
But first, today is the birthday of Leontyne Price, one of the greatest sopranos of the 20th century. She’s with us and turned 98 today!
But back to the missed anniversaries. The Italians constitute the largest group. First, two important 20th-century composers: Luigi Dallapiccola, born on February 3rd of 1904, and Luigi Nono, born January 29th of 1924. We posted two entries on Dallapiccola last year (here and here). Last year was Nono’s 100th anniversary but we failed to commemorate the event appropriately. So, here's a short outline of Nono’s life and work.
Luigi Nono was born on January 29th of 1924 in Venice.
He studied at the Liceo Musicale with the noted composer Gian Francesco Malipiero. In 1946 he met Bruno Maderna, one of the first avant-garde Italian composers. Maderna was only four years older but more established; as he and Nono were working in Venice, and a small community of musicians organized themselves around them. Dallapiccola, of an older generation but a friend of both, had a significant influence on their development.
Several early works by Nono were presented at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, the most important gathering of new composers. Soon after he became an active participant and, together with Boulez and Stockhausen, one of the leaders of the new music movement. In 1955 he married Nuria Schoenberg, daughter of Arnold Schoenberg. Nono was a leftist, as were many of his fellow composers. A principled anti-fascist, he went much further to the left than many. For example, his opera Al gran sole carico d'amore, (the libretto for which he co-wrote with Yuri Lyubimov, the director of the original production and also the director of the famous Moscow Taganka theater), was loosely based on plays by Bertolt Brecht and contained excerpts of speeches by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Karl Marx and Lenin. Some of his music composed during the 60s was extremely political and dogmatic. For example, his Non Consumiamo Marx consists of sounds recorded during the 1968 student uprising in Paris and a voice reading the messages left on the walls during that period. A much more interesting piece was his Prometeo, tragedia dell’ascolto composed over several years in the early 1980s, the period when his work became less political. Prometeo is called “opera,” although the word should be taken in its original Italian sense, “work” – it is a composition for five singers, two speakers, a chorus, and a small orchestra, with sounds being electronically manipulated. To celebrate both Nono and Dallapiccola, here is Luigi Nono’s piece from 1979, Con Luigi Dallapiccola, performed by the ensemble Percussions de Strasbourg. It’s about 12 minutes of different sound effects created by the different percussion instruments; we think there’s more music here, however unusual it is, than in many established compositions.
And then there is another Italian, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance. He was born between February 3rd of 1525 and February 2nd of 1526. We don’t play him often enough, so no matter when his actual birthday was, here is Palestrina’s late motet, Peccantem me quotidie (I sin every day). Ensemble The Sixteen is led by their founder, Harry Christophers.
PermalinkThis Week in Classical Music: February 3, 2025. Post-Scriabin, catching up. For the whole month of January, we were preoccupied with Scriabin and his common-law wife, Tatiana
Schloezer. We concede that we may have overdone it a bit, but many aspects of Scriabin’s story are fascinating. He was a complicated, difficult person, a terrible egocentric. He was also very talented. His music, once he got away from copying Chopin, was highly original and fascinating – as much today as when it was written. He attempted to expand the experience of listening to music by combining sound with light; this may not have worked as he expected, but the experiments were intriguing (the philosophy and poetics, with which he tried to imbue his music, were much less successful). And he had tremendous support from Tatiana, whose exalted adoration sustained him for many difficult years in Russia and abroad.
Scriabin was also a part of Russian culture at a historical
high point; he knew many key people and was admired by many, from the contemporary composers, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, and even Stravinsky, grudgingly, to poets like Balmont, Mandelstam and Tsvetaeva. His life was short (he died at the age of 43 after a furuncle led to blood poisoning) and so was the life of some of his children, two of whom, from his “official” wife, died at the age of seven, while musically gifted Julian, his and Tatiana’s son, drowned at the age of 12. Their daughter Ariadna, a poet and active member of the Russian post-Revolutionary diaspora, became a Zionist, converted to Judaism, founded a French Resistance group Armée Juive during the occupation, and was killed by a French Nazi collaborator shortly before France was liberated. Tatiana Schloezer died in Moscow in 1922 at the age of 39.
So, while we attended to all these happenings, we missed two big birthdays. The first one, on January 27th, was that of Mozart. And then, on the 31st of January, was Franz Schubert’s birthday. Fortunately, we covered both of them many times and have hundreds of pieces of their music in the library. Both composers were tremendously prolific, even though both had tragically short lives (Mozart died at the age of 35, Schubert – at 31), both created numerous masterpieces. We’ll celebrate them with two vocal pieces: the trio Soave sia il vento, from the first act of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte (here), and the song An die Music by Schubert (here). Nothing can be better than this.
PermalinkThis Week in Classical Music: January 27, 2025. Scriabin and Schloezer, Part IV, the last one. Last week, we ended our story of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin and his muse,
Tatiana Schloezer, in 1908, with the composer completing the Poem of Ecstasy, his most innovative (and, looking back, the most significant and popular) piece, and living in Lausanne. Their son Julian, was also born in February of the same year. And it was in Lausanne that Scriabin met Serge Koussevitzky, a bass player and conductor, who, by marrying a daughter of a rich trader acquired a considerable fortune and was ready to become Scriabin’s benefactor. Koussevitzky, who would later become a beloved conductor of the Boston Symphony, organized a publishing house and promoted Scriabin’s works (and also published the music of Rachmaninov, Prokofiev and Medtner), and concerts, where Scriabin’s music was often performed. He also paid him 5,000 rubles a year, a considerable sum. For the first time in many years, Sciabin wasn’t poor. Koussevitzky was also instrumental in bringing Scriabin back to Russia, first as a trial,
for a series of concerts in Moscow and St-Petersburg, and two years later, in 1910, permanently. Unfortunately, the visit to Moscow resulted in a breakup between Scriabin and his longtime benefactor, Margarita Morozova. Vera Scriabina, still formally Scriabin’s wife, attended one of the rehearsals of the Poem of Ecstasy; Morozova joined her in the hall, which was noticed by Schloezer who later created a scene. Scriabin joined in and demanded that Morozova choose between Vera and Tatiana. Morozova refused, and that was the end of her relationship with Scriabin. An interesting coincidence: Scriabin benefactors’ mansions stand practically next to each other. The distance between Koussevitzky’s mansion where Scriabin stayed during his visit to Moscow, and Morozova’s mansion is less than 100 yards. Morozova’s mansion is now occupied by Putin’s retired spies: it houses the so-called Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. Koussevitzky’s mansion was given to a Russian regional administration.
The year the Scriabins moved to Russia, his tone poem Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, was finished. It was premiered by Koussevitzky in 1911 and became as scandalous as the Poem of Ecstasy. Prometheus was the first of Scriabin’s compositions to call for colored light to be part of the performance. Scriabin strongly associated sounds and colors, a fascinating aspect of his creative work which we’ll address separately.
Life in Russia was not without problems, mostly because of Scriabin’s difficult character and Tatiana Schloezer’s influence. He broke up with Koussevitzky and lost his financial support. To earn money, he composed smaller pieces, mostly for the piano: sonatas Six through Ten were written between 1912 and 1913. Still, things were looking up. In 1912 the Scriabins moved to a new, larger apartment, next to Arbat Street (it’s now Scriabin’s Museum); the apartment became a gathering place for artists and musicians, especially theosophically inclined. All three of their children attended the Gnessin Music school, just around the corner on the Sobach’ya Ploshchadka (Dog’s Square). Scriabin’s music, the Poem of Ecstasy and Prometheus in particular, was played around the world, and his fame was growing. Things changed in August of 1914, as Russia entered the Great War. Scriabin’s piano recitals became the only source of income, and the family’s ties with Europe, where they spent so many years, were broken. Scriabin started working on the Preparatory Act of the Mysterium, a hugely ambitious composition in which he intended, in addition to sound, to involve light, touch and smell (when finished, it was supposed to be performed in the foothills of the Himalayas). In early April of 1915, he noticed a pimple on his upper lip, which developed into a furuncle, and on 14th of April (27th in the new style calendar) he died of blood poisoning.
Here is Vers la flamme (Toward the flame), the last piano piece written by Scriabin in 1914. It was recorded by Vladimir Horowitz in 1972. The portrait of Tatiana Schloezer, above, was made by Nikolai Vysheslavtsev in 1921, one year before her death at 39. In most photos Schloezer doesn’t look attractive; it seems the painter managed to capture something the camera couldn’t.
PermalinkThis Week in Classical Music: January 20, 2025. Scriabin and Schloezer, Part III. Last week, we ended our story in 1905 with Alexander Scriabin and Tatiana Schloezer moving to
Bogliasco, Italy, while Vera Scriabin, the composer’s legal wife, remained in Vésenaz, Switzerland, with the children. A tragedy struck when the eldest daughter, age seven, died later that year. The heartbroken Scriabin rushed to Vésenaz, staying there for several weeks, while Tatiana was going mad with jealousy in Bogliasco. She should not have worried, as Scriabin returned to her; and that was the last time he and Vera would meet.
Soon after, Vasily Safonov, the director of the Moscow Conservatory and a friend of the Scriabins, invited Vera to return to Moscow and join the faculty. Safonov, an influential cultural figure in Russia, was Scriabin’s teacher and mentor; they fell apart over Scriabin’s affair with Schloezer, Safonov taking Vera’s side. Vera followed Safonov’s advice, bringing the three children with her (one of them, Lev, would die in 1910, also at the age of seven). An accomplished pianist, Vera continued to perform, playing, almost exclusively and by all accounts very well, her husband's music.
In the meantime, Scriabin and Tatiana were living in Bogliasco; Tatiana was pregnant with their first child while Scriabin was working, feverishly, on the Poem of Extasy (Scriabin’s original title was more shocking, Poéme Orgiaque). Penniless but in good spirits, they often shared one dinner between them. Some financial help came when Scriabin received an invitation to tour the US. Safonov was then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, and the relationship between him and Scriabin had improved. Scriabin arrived in New York in December of 1906. In the following months, his music was featured in several concerts, with Scriabin soloing his own Piano Concerto and the Philharmonic performing his First and Third Symphonies. Some pieces were performed by the Russian Symphony Orchestra of New York, founded in 1903 by Scriabin’s friend Modest Altschuler.
Scriabin’s problems in the US started when Tatiana arrived incognito in New York, though he pleaded with her not to come. For some time, they lived in separate hotels, but that became expensive, and she moved in with him. The United States back then was a rather puritanical country: just several months earlier another famous Russian, the writer Maxim Gorky, was kicked out of the same hotel when it became known that his travel companion, the actress Maria Andreeva, was his mistress, not the wife. Once Tatiana started appearing with Scriabin in public, rumors spread (most likely initiated by the local Russians) that Scriabin was married to another woman. One March 1907 night, Altschuler came running to their room with the news that in the morning a crowd of reporters was expected at their hotel. The scandal was imminent as they intended to seek information about Scriabin’s marital status. The couple fled that very night, borrowing the money for the fare to Europe from Altschuler.
Soon after arriving in Italy, Scriabin and Tatiana moved to Paris, where he worked on finishing The Poem of Ecstasy, and then to Lausanne. The Poem was premiered by Altschuler in New York in 1908; in Europe, it received the Glinka Prize, a prestigious award instituted by Mitrofan Belyaev, an industrialist and patron of arts, and named after the famous Russian composer.
Here is The Poem of Ecstasy, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Pierre Boulez.
PermalinkThis Week in Classical Music: January 13, 2025. v. Last week, we ended our story in 1902, with Tatiana Schloezer coming to Moscow to meet Scriabin, who was married, by then rather
unhappily, to Vera Isakovich, and with whom he already had four children. Scriabin was taken by Tatiana, who seemed to understand his music in an exalted, spiritual way, as opposed to Vera, who, in Scriabin’s opinion, didn’t appreciate his talent enough. Tatiana started taking piano lessons at Scriabin’s house, much to Vera’s displeasure. The Schloezer siblings, Boris and Tatiana, spent much time with the Scriabins, Alexander playing his music while Tatiana praised it extravagantly and rapturously, often standing on her knees.
Scriabin, who had just finished his Second Symphony, was working on the Third, “The Divine Poem,” the most important (and eventually successful) piece to date. In 1904, with the family situation in trouble, Scriabin suffered another blow: his good friend, benefactor and publisher, Mitrofan Belyaev, died, which drastically changed Scriabin’s financial situation. With few prospects in Russia, the ambitious Scriabin, who always wanted to “conquer Europe,” left for Geneva, alone, without the family. A month later, he asked Vera to join him. With very little money, living in the expensive Geneva was impossible, so they moved to the much cheaper Vésenaz, a village close by. In the meantime, Scriabin continued writing to Schloezer, eventually asking her to come to Switzerland, which she did without delay, settling in Geneva.
The relationship between Tatiana and Scriabin was an open secret in Russia, and very soon the rumors reached poor Vera. Scriabin was ready for a divorce, but to Vera the idea was abhorrent. With everything in the open, however uncomfortable and embarrassing the situation was, Tatiana used it to resume her musical lessons with Scriabin, coming to the house and staying there for hours, to Vera’s chagrin. That didn’t last long: Tatiana, who also had little money, had to move to Brussels and stay with her relatives. With the whole family situation in tatters, Scriabin went to Paris to oversee the premiere of his Third Symphony, which was to be led by Arthur Nikisch, then the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. Occasionally he’d visit Tatiana in Brussels.
The long-awaited premiere took place on May 29th of 1905; it was successful, but not without scandals, musical and social. Tatiana, on Scriabin’s invitation, came from Brussels, while Vera, unbeknown to the composer, traveled from Switzerland and announced herself after the concert, infuriating Tatiana and compromising Scriabin, who was called, by a local wit, a bigamist. The critics were divided: some thought the symphony was the new word in contemporary music, others, like Rimsky-Korsakov, hated it. Financially, however, the symphony brought very little money.
Tatiana moved to Paris with Scriabin while he embarked on a new project, a symphony that would become the “Poem of Extasy.” Absorbed in composing, he wasn’t earning any money. Tatiana was pregnant with their first child. His benefactors couldn’t help much, so the couple decided to move to Italy where life was cheaper. In June of 1905, they settled in Bogliasco, next to Genoa. One month later, Alexander and Vera’s elder daughter Rimma died in Vésenaz at the age of seven, and Vera, with three children, returned to Moscow.
We’ll finish the Scriabin-Schloezer story next week. The Third Symphony (“The Divine Poem”) runs for about 45 minutes. It’s in three movements. You can listen to the first movement, Luttes ("Struggles"), here, the second, Voluptés ("Delights"), here, and the third, Jeu divin ("Divine Play"), here. Or you could listen to the whole thing here. Michail Pletnev conducts the Russian National Orchestra.
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