November 18, 2013.  Wilhelm Friedemann Bach.  Too many wonderful composers were born this week for us to do each of them justice.  Here’s an abridged list: Carl Maria von Weber, whose operas influenced the development of the Romantic school, was born on this day in 1786; Francisco Tárrega, the Spanish composer and guitarist – on November 21, 1852; Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Johann Sebastian’s eldest son, was born on November 22, 1710; November 22 is also the birthday of Joaquin Rodrigo, another Spanish composer, whose Concierto de Aranjuez is still one of the most popular music written in the 20^th century; Rodrigo was born in 1901.  Exactly twelve years later, in 1913, Benjamin Britten, probably the first really great English composer since Henry Purcell, was born; November 23^rd is the birthday of another Spaniard, Manuel de Falla (1876), and finally, Alfred Schnittke, one of the most interesting Russian composers of the second half of the 20^th century, was born on November 24, 1934.  We’ve paid tribute to all of them except Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, so today is his turn.

Wilhelm Friedemann was born on November 22, 1710 in Weimar, were his father was the music director (Konzertmeister) and court organist for Prince Johann Ernst of Saxe-Weimar.  Johann Sebastian was intimately involved in the music education of his eldest son; he even wrote Klavierbüchlein für Wilhelm Friedemann (Little keyboard book for Wilhelm Friedemann), many pieces of which ended up in the Well-Tempered Clavier, Inventions and Sinfonias.  In 1723 Johann Sebastian took the position of cantor at St. Thomas church in Leipzig and Friedemann enrolled in St. Thomas School (many students were members of Thomanerchor or St. Thomas Choir of Leipzig, of which Bach Sr. was the director).  When Friedemann was 16 and already a harpsichord and organ virtuoso, he started taking violin lessons.  Music was not his only interest: after graduating from St. Thomas School, Friedemann went to the Leipzig University to study law and then moved to Halle to study mathematics.  In 1733 he was appointed  the organist at the Church of St. Sophia in Dresden.  (The history of the church is interesting: built in 1331, it was the only gothic church in Dresden.  Johann Sebastian Bach’s Kyrie and Gloria, which were later included in the Mass in B Minor, were presented in the church soon after Friedemann took the position there.  The church was severely damaged during the Allied raid in 1945 but could’ve been restored, except that the GDR chief Walter Ulbricht decided that “a socialist city does not need Gothic churches,” after which it was demolished).

In 1746 Friedemann moved to Halle as the organist at Liebfrauenkirche (or the Market church).  This was an important position: the church was prominent as a center of Pietism and Johann Sebastian was offered the same post years earlier.  It was also the church where George Frideric Handel was baptized and later received organ lessons.   Friedemann stayed there for the next eighteen, most of them unhappy, years.  Many times he tried to find a different position but was never successful.  He was despondent and drinking a lot.  In 1764 he quit without securing a position elsewhere.  For the rest of his life (he died on July 1, 1784) he couldn’t find a permanent position and earned meager income by teaching and giving recitals.

A major talent, Friedemann composed all his life.  He wrote for the keyboard but also chamber pieces (many of them for flute) and orchestral works: symphonies and Harpsichord concertos.  He also wrote a number of liturgical works, among them two Masses and a number of cantatas.  Here’s his Fantasia for Harpsichord in C minor, F 15.  It’s performed by the French harpsichordist Christophe Rousset.  And here is Friedemann’s  Concerto for two harpsichords in E-flat major. Harpsichordists are Andreas Staier and Robert Hill, Reinhard Goebel conducts Musica Antiqua Köln.

November 11, 2013.  Couperin and Copland.  François Couperin was born on November 10, 1668.  He was called Le Grand, the great, because for one, he was a composer of genius, but also because had to be distinguished from other member of his musically talented family.  The Couperins came from the town of Brie, just east of Paris, famous for its cheese.  The first Couperin to come to Paris was Louis: as the story goes, the famous harpsichordist of the time, Jacques Champion de Chambonnières, was celebrating his birthday outside of Brie, and the Couperin brothers serenaded him with a song composed by Lois.  The delighted Chambonnières invited him to Paris.  In 1653 Louis became the organist at the church of St-Gervais in the Marais, just across the Seine from the cathedral of Notre-Dame.  For several generations Couperins would occupy this position, and live in a house adjacent to the church.  The last member of the family, Gervais-François, played the organ till 1826, 173 years after Lois’ arrival in Paris.  Lois was a talented composer and harpsichordist; a collection of his work for the organ was discovered only in 1960, and together with his compositions for the harpsichord they represent a major body of work.  Lois died at the age of 35; had he lived longer he probably would’ve developed into one of the greatest French composers of the 17^th century.  Two younger brothers followed Lois to Paris, both musicians but not as accomplished.  Charles became the organist at St-Gervais and in 1668 had a child, François Le Grand.  Charles died when François was only eleven, but church officials reserved the position of organist for François, waiting for him to turn 18.  He studied music with the best teachers and assumed the position at St-Gervais before he reached the designated age.  He became famous both as the organist and as a composer (his two mass settings were published in1690), and in 1693 he became an organist in the Chapelle Royale as a King Louis XIV musician.  He also taught the harpsichord to the King’s children.  It’s that instrument that Couperin loved and composed for the most.  Four books of music for the harpsichord were published during his life, from 1713 to 1730.  Instead of organizing them into suites, as was customary at the time, he set them in Orders, from five to eight to a book.  He didn’t use dances, the usual components of suites (Bach’s are the supreme example), very often; instead he wrote pièces de caractère (character pieces), some with evocative names: Le rossignol-en-amour (Nightingale in Love), Le croc-en-jambe, which means to trip somebody, or Les graces incomparables, ou La Conti (in reference to a princess of Conti).  In 1723 his passed the position at St-Gervais to his nephew Nicolas.  Though in poor health in his later years, he continued to compose and edit his music.  In 1725 he wrote Apothéose de Lully, a concert in memory of Jean-Baptiste Lully.  The concert “describes” the meeting of Lully and Corelli, two founders of rival Baroques styles, the French and Italian, on Parnassus.  Apollo attempts to reconcile them.  (Couperin also wrote a separate concert for Corelli, Le Parnasse ou L'Apothéose de Corelli).  Originally composed for two harpsichords, these days Apothéose de Lully is usually performed by chamber orchestras.  Here it is, recorded in 1963 by the Toulouse chamber orchestra, Louis Auriacombe conducting.  François Couperin died in Paris on September 11^th, 1733.

Aaron Copland was born this week, on November 14^th, in 1900.  We’ll write about him later, but to celebrate, here’s his Fanfare for the Common Man as performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, also in 1963.

November 4, 2013.  Vincenzo Bellini.  We missed Vincenzo Bellini’s birthday by one day (he was born on November 3^rd of 1801), but did mention him in our previous post.  Here’s some more about this great bel canto composer.  Bellini was born in Catania, Sicily into a musical family: his father was an organist and grandfather – his first music teacher.  Legend has it that Vincenzo began learning music at a very young age: he took his first lessons in music theory at the age of two and started playing piano at three (considering Bellini’s talents, it all may be true).  In 1819 he went to Naples to study at the conservatory; his first opera was presented at the Conservatory’s theater while Bellini was still a student.  His next opera, Bianca e Gernando, was presented at Teatro di San Carlo, one of the most important (and the oldest) opera houses in Italy.  In 1827 Bellini moved to Milan and that same year wrote Il Pirata, which was successfully staged at La Scala and brought Bellini international recognition.  In 1830 he was commissioned to write an opera for Teatro La Fenice in Venice, the third (with La Scala and San Carlo) major opera house in Italy.  The opera, I Capuleti e i Montecchi, a reworking of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, was completed in a month and a half (Bellini reused some music from his previous, and unsuccessful opera, Zaira).

The following years were tremendously productive.  In 1831 Bellini wrote La sonnambula (The Sleepwalker), on the libretto by his constant collaborator, the poet Felice Romani.  The main female role of this bel canto opera was written for the famous soprano Guiditta Pasta, who had a huge vocal diapason covering both the soprano and the mezzo registers; Maria Malibran, a mezzo-soprano as famous as Giuditta Pasta, sung the role of Amina the next several years.  (Malibran also had an exceptional voice: she sung the roles from contralto to soprano.  She died at the age of 28 on the same day as Bellini, September 23, following him by one year).  In the 20^th century Amina’s role was sung mostly by sopranos (last week’s sample featured Anna Netrebko).  The first mezzo to record this role was Cecilia Bartoli.  La sonnambula premiered in Teatro Carcano in Milan and was a huge success.  That same year, 1831, Bellini followed with an opera that reached an even higher level, exceeding everything Bellini has written thus far, and probably any opera to date.  Norma was written with Guiditta Pasta in mind: the main role, that of a Druid priestess, is one of the most difficult in the entire opera repertoire.  In the 20^th century it became a touchstone for any soprano.  Maria Callas was a great Norma, and several years later Joan Sutherland created a role which, if not as dramatic, was technically probably even better.  Montserrat Caballé was another famous Norma.  Casta diva from Act I remains one of the most popular arias, and so is the duet Mira, o Norma from Act II (it was a specialty of Sutherland and Marilyn Horne, here, for example, from a live 1970 performance).

In 1833 Bellini moved to London and then to Paris, where Gioachino Rossini secured him a commission from the Théâtre-Italien.  That resulted in I Puritani, Bellini’s last opera.  Nine months after the premier he died; Bellini was just 33.  Here is the aria A Te, O Cara from Act I of I Puritani. Arturo is Luciano Pavarotti.  In this 1973 recording you can also hear Joan Sutherland.  Richard Bonynge conducts the London Symphony Orchestra.

We planned to write about François Couperin, who was born this week on November 10^th of 1668.  We’ll do it in our next post.

October 28, 2013.  Paganini and Bellini.  We should’ve written about Niccolò Paganini last week, as his birthday was October 27th, but we had Liszt, Bizet, and Domenico Scarlatti to celebrate and just ran out of space.  Paganini was born in 1782 in Genoa.  At the age of five he started studying the mandolin with his father, who was in the shipping business but played mandolin on the side.  Two years later Niccolò switch to the violin. He went to several local violin teachers, but it became clear that his abilities far outstriped theirs.  His father took Niccolò to Parma, to play for the famous violinist, teacher and composer Alessandro Rolla, who in turn referred him to other violin teachers.  When the French invaded Italy, Paganini left the occupied Genoa and settled in Lucca, then a republic. Napoleon gave Lucca to his sister Elisa, and eventually made her the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, and Paganini for a while became part of her entourage.  All along, Paganini was mostly interested in concretizing.  In 1797, accompanied by his father, he went on a highly successful tour of Lombardy.  He also became quite popular with the public in Parma and his native Genoa.  Gaining financial independence, he indulged in gambling and numerous love affairs.  At some point he had to pawn his violin to cover debts; a French merchant loaned him a Guarneri violin to play a concert, and upon hearing him was so impressed that he refused to take it back.  It became his favorite instrument.

Between 1801 and 1805 Paganini composed 24 Capricci for unaccompanied violin, which, with his violin concertos, remain his most popular compositions.  In the following years he often performed his own music, which was beyond the technical abilities of most violinists of the time.  That was also the period when he competed for fame with the French violinist Charles Philippe Lafont and the German Louis Spohr.  His 1813 concerts in Milan’s La Scala were sensational; still, for the next following years he played mostly in Italy.  In 1828 he went on a tour to Vienna and had  tremendous success.  The concerts in Paris and London followed and were equally successful.  He became a wealthy man and settled in Paris in 1833.  There, he commissioned Hector Berlioz a symphony, Harold in Italy, with extended viola solos (he never thought much of them technically and never played the symphony).  He also invested in a gambling house, which went bust soon after, ruining Paganini financially: he had to sell his violins and personal belongings.  The legends surrounding him grew to a fantastic degree: he was rumored to have been imprisoned for murder and to be in a league with the devil (the only thing really devilish was the difficulty of his compositions).  Paganini, who stopped performing in 1834, died in 1840.  Some years earlier he was treated for syphilis and tuberculosis but it seems that the cause of his death was internal hemorrhaging.  He died suddenly, without receiving last rights; because of this and his rumored association with dark forces (but also because of the innate backwardness of the 19^th century Italian church), he was denied a Catholic burial.  His remains were transported to Genoa but not interred.  Only in 1876 was he laid to rest, not in Genoa but in Parma.

During his life, Paganini owned a number of violins made by the great masters: several Guarneris, a Nicolò Amati and several Stradivari instruments.  All of them are highly sought after; the Tokyo String Quartet plays four of his instruments.  Paganini’s favorite violin, Il Cannone (The Cannon), was made in 1742 by Giuseppe Antonio Guarneri del Gesù and is now considered an Italian national treasure.  The winner of the Paganini violin competition is allowed to play it- a great honor.  Here is Itzhak Perlman playing Paganini's Caprice for solo violin no. 1, op.1 No.1 in E Major, L'Arpeggio.  It was recorded in 1972.

We’ll write about Vincenzo Bellini, another Italian and a contemporary of Paganini’s, next week.  For now, here’s the aria Care compaggne followed by Come per me sereno from La Sonnambula.  It’s sung, beautifully, by the Russian soprano Anna Netrebko.

October 21, 2013.  Liszt, Bizet, Scarlatti.  October 22^nd marks the 202^nd birthday of the great Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt.  Liszt, who lived a long life (he died in 1886, at almost 75 years of age), went through many phases during the years.  He started as a brilliant piano virtuoso traveling all across Europe, but eventually stopped performing to concentrate on composition.  In his youth he was an idol and lover of many brilliant women (including George Sand) but in later years he joined the Order of St. Francis.  In the last 20 years of his life, Liszt’s compositional style also changed dramatically.  It became more reflective, economic, and often experimental: he used atonality and unusual harmonies years before Viennese composers introduced such techniques in the first decade of the 20^th century.  Compare, for example, the brilliant showmanship of his Transcendental Etudes, which Liszt started composing in his youth and completed in 1852 (here is Etude No.5 in B-flat major, "Feux Follets," performed by Boris Berezovsky), to such impressionistic, introverted composition as Nuages gris, a piano piece he wrote in 1881 (Carlos Gallardo on the piano).  No wonder Claude Debussy admired this piece.

A generous man, Liszt was a benefactor of many composers; first and foremost of Richard Wagner, a friend and, later, his son-in-law (interestingly, Wagner was just two years younger than Liszt and 24 years older than his daughter Cosima).  He also promoted the music of Hector Berlioz, Edvard Grieg, Alexander Borodin and many others.  He wrote a prodigious number of transcriptions, often popularizing the music of composers he admired.  An unusual transcription was written in 1879, Sarabande and Chaconne from Handel's opera Almira, S. 181.  In his earlier period Liszt wrote many transcriptions of Bach’s organ works, but this Handel is the only baroque piece transcription from his later years.  Handel changed the sequence of dances and wrote some additional music; in this respect it’s more of an original work than a transcription.  Sarabande is performed by the Danish-American pianist and composer, Gunnar Johansen.  Johansen, who died in 1991, was one of the first pianists who attempted to record all of Liszt’s music.  He didn’t record all of it but 51 LPs is a prodigious effort (Leslie Howard, the Australian-American virtuoso, did record all of Liszt on 97 CDs).  You can listen this 1948 recording of Sarabande here.

Domenico Scarlatti was born on October 26, 1685 in Naples.  He composed 555 keyboard sonatas, and many of them are absolutely brilliant.  During his lifetime "keyboard" usually meant the harpsichord, but these days they are often performed on modern piano.  Some of the greatest pianists of the 20^th century were great admirers of Scarlatti and performed his music: Vladimir Horowitz, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Emil Gilels all played and recorded Scarlatti’s sonatas.  These days the Canadian pianist Marc-André Hamelin excels as a foremost interpreter.  Here’s Sonata in b minor, K. 27, played (live, in March of 1955) by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (the great technician Emil Gilels takes almost twice as long to play it: 5 minutes instead of Michelangeli’s 2:45).

Finally, Georges Bizet was also born this week, on October 25^th of 1838.  We dedicated an entry to him a year ago, so this time we’ll just listen to one of his most popular duets.  Bizet wrote the opera Les pêcheurs de perles (The Pearl Fishers) when he was just 25.  It had one run at the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris and was not revived during Bizet’s lifetime.  These days the duet from the opera is one of the most famous and often performed numbers.  Here is the 1950 recording with one of the greatest tenors of the 20th century, Jussi Björling, and the wonderful American baritone Robert Merrill. Renato Cellini conducts the RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra.

October 14, 2013.  Alexander von Zemlinsky and Camille Saint-Saëns.  The Austrian composer Alexander von Zemlinsky was born on this day in 1871.  Zemlinsky’s music, tonal in its core, was influenced by Brahms and, to an extent, by Mahler.  Quite influential in the first half of the 20^th century, Zemlinsky lost some of his appeal in the era of the atonal and twelve-tonal music popularized by the followers of the Second Viennese school.  Lately, however, he’s experienced a minor comeback and is being played more often.  Zemlinsky was born in Vienna into an unusual family: his father was a Roman Catholic; his mother was born in Sarajevo to a Sephardic Jewish father and a Bosnian Muslim mother.  Eventually the whole family converted to Judaism, and Alexander was raised Jewish.  The noble “von” addition to the family name was his father’s invention and not bestowed by the Emperor.  Zemlinsky studied piano as a child, played organ in a synagogue, and went to the Vienna Conservatory at the age of 13.  Johannes Brahms, upon hearing his Symphony in D, became a supporter and introduced the young composer to his publisher, Simrock, as he did 20 years earlier with the young Dvořák.   In 1895 Zemlinsky met Arnold Schoenberg and they became fast friends (some years later Schoenberg married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde).  Zemlinsky was just three years older than Schoenberg, but he was a natural teacher and gave him several lessons in counterpoint, the only music lessons Schoenberg ever received.  In 1900 Zemlinsky fell in love with his student, 21 year-old Alma Schindler.  For two years they conducted a passionate (but apparently unconsummated) affair, until Alma decided to break up with Zemlinsky and marry Gustav Mahler, who was then 42 but famous.  The fact that Zemlinsky was Jewish also played a role; Mahler, born Jewish, had converted to Catholicism five years earlier.  In 1905 Zemlinsky wrote the symphonic poem Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid); the musicologist Antony Beaumont writes that it was an attempt to heal the trauma caused by the break-up.  This being Vienna, it had an unusual psychological twist: Zemlinksy saw himself as a mermaid and Alma as the Prince.  You can listen to Die Seejungfrau in the performance by the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Ricardo Chailly conducting.

The portrait of Zemlinsky, above, was made in the summer of 1907 by one Richard Gerstl, a young Austrian painter.   Gerstl joined Zemlinksy and the Schoenbergs on vacation in Gmunden on lake Traunsee.  He made several portraits of the Schoenbergs and one of Zemlinsky and even taught Arnold to paint.  At some point during the summer Gerstl became Mathilde Schoenberg’s lover.  One year later, all of them were back in Gmunden, with the love affair in full swing.  One day Arnold found them in a compromising situation, and Mathilde and Gerstl escaped to Vienna.  Anton Webern, Schoenberg’s pupil and friend of the family, convinced Mathilde to return to Arnold.  Gerstl found himself ostracized and completely isolated.  On October 4th of 1908 he set his studio on fire and hanged himself in front of a mirror.

Camille Saint-Saëns was born last week (his birthday is October 9, 1835) but we were too busy celebrating Verdi’s 200^th anniversary.  Saint-Saëns lived a long life: he died in 1921.  To put it into perspective: in 1849, when Chopin died, Saint-Saëns was 14 and had already written several pieces; by the time of Saint-Saëns’s death in 1921 Stravinsky and Schoenberg had already written some of their most important, transformative compositions.  No wonder that Saint-Saëns, who started as a pioneer, embracing the music of Wagner and Liszt, ended up being an arch-conservative, fighting even Debussy and Ravel (he stormed out of the first concert performance of The Right of Spring and declared Stravinsky “mad”).  Saint-Saëns’s music was never very deep, but he wrote wonderful melodies and often managed to create coherently developed musical structures.  Quite a number of his compositions remain popular, for example The Carnival of the Animals, the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso for violin and orchestra, some of his piano concertos (he wrote five), and his opera Samson.  You can hear Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, Op. 28 in the performance by the great violinist Jascha Heifetz, with RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, William Steinberg conducting.