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June 10, 2019. Richard Strauss. Last week we wrote about George Szell, the famous German conductor. This week we celebrate the birthday of his friend and mentor, the German composer
Richard Strauss. Strauss was born on June 11th of 1864 in Munich. Strauss lived a long live and was productive for an extraordinary long time, more than 70 years: his earliest “serious” compositions date from 1877 (just to put it into perspective, Brahms’s Fourth Symphony was premiered in 1884); his Four Last Songs were composed in 1948, when Strauss was 84; by then, Stravinsky and Schoenberg were part of the musical mainstream. Strauss’s father was a virtuoso horn player, the principal horn at the Munich Hofoper; his mother, née Pschorr was from the family of famous Bavarian brewers (Hacker-Pschorr, which belongs for the Pschorr family, is known worldwide for its Oktoberfest beer). Strauss’s father, conservative in his musical tastes, didn’t like either Wagner or Brahms and didn’t want his son, who was completely taken by Lohengrin and Tannhäuser after hearing them at the very opera house where his father was working, to study Wagner scores. That didn’t prevent Wagner’s music from becoming a major influence in Strauss’s life.
Another influence was the famous pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow (Bülow, a student of Liszt, was a major proponent of the music of Wagner and Brahms; he married Liszt’s daughter Cosima, who later left him for Wagner). Bülow met Strauss, then 19, in 1883 in Berlin; Bülow was then the conductor of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, which under his direction became one of the best orchestras in Europe. Eventually Bülow brought Strauss to Meiningen as his assistant; he also premiered some of the young composer’s music. During that period Strauss wrote several “tone poems,” which became very popular, especially Don Juan, composed in 1888, and Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), written a year later. Here’s Death and Transfiguration, performed by the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra under the direction of David Zinman.
In 1894 Strauss was appointed Kapellmeister in Munich, a very significant position. Soon after, feeling more confident in his future, he proposed to the soprano the Pauline de Ahna; they married later that year. His popularity growing, Strauss was receiving invitations from major musical venues: from Bayreuth to conduct Tannhäuser, the opera which affected him so much in his youth to; Berlin to conduct the Philharmonic orchestra; and from many European countries. In 1898 he was offered a conducting position at the Berlin Hofoper (now, The Berlin State Opera), the most important opera house in Germany, and he left for Berlin. In his first season there he conducted 25 operas, including the complete Ring cycle. In Berlin his activities extended well beyond conducting and composing: Strauss helped establish the society protecting the copyrights of German composers; he was elected President of Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, the German music association; he also took over the orchestra of the Tonkünstlerverband, another German professional music organization and toured with it in Europe. Very much like Mahler, he was too busy to compose during the musical seasons and did it mostly during the summers. Mahler found refuge in several spots in Austria: from 1893 to 1896 in Steinbach on the Atter See in Upper Austria, then, briefly in Bad Aussee, from 1901 to 1907 in Maiernigg on the Worther See in Carinthia, and for the last three summers of his life – in Toblach in Tyrol. Strauss’s life was more organized: from 1890 to 1908 he spent every summer in a mountain villa of Pauline's parents in Marquartstein, Bavaria. This is where he turned to opera, opening another chapter of his creative life.Permalink
Last year we also mentioned that the great Russian conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky was born that week. He’s not the only conductor to be celebrated: George Szell and Klaus Tennstedt were also born around this date. George Szell was the oldest of the three: he was born in Budapest on June 7th of 1897 into a Jewish family; when he was six, the family converted to Catholicism before moving to the antisemitic Vienna. Szell was a child prodigy – not as conductor, of course, but as a pianist and budding composer. At the age of 11 he was giving concerts all over Europe. Even so, his interest was clearly in conducting, not the piano. At the age of 16 he filled in for an ailing conductor at a concert of the Vienna Symphony, and his conducting career was launched. He found positions at the German opera in Prague, and, at the age of 18, with Berlin's Royal Court Opera (now, Staatsoper). In Berlin Szell met Richard Strauss who was very impressed with the young man’s musical talents. In the following years Szell conducted many orchestras in Europe; in 1930 he made his American debut. Szell moved to the US at the outbreak of WWII. He settled in New York, taught at the Mannes school and frequently conducted different orchestras, including the Boston Symphony and the Metropolitan. In 1946 he was invited to the Cleveland Orchestra, then a good but second-tier ensemble. He stayed there as the music director for the following 24 years, building it into a world-class orchestra. The Cleveland made scores of recordings under Szell, many of them of the German Classical and Romantic repertoire. Szell was an autocrat, a difficult person and a perfectionist. When he left the Cleveland, the orchestra was at its best; it never achieved the same level with the excellent conductors that followed Szell – Lorin Maazel, Christoph von Dohnányi and Franz Welser-Möst. Szell died several months after relinquishing his position, on July 30the of 1970. Here Szell conducts his friend Richard Strauss’s tone poem Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks).
June 3, 2018. Schumann and more. This week a year ago we celebrated Robert Schumann and Martha Argerich, here. Schumann of course is one of the greatest Romantic composers, while Argerich – one of the most popular pianists of her generation. We love Schumann (no surprise there) but are somewhat more circumspect about Argerich, though we’re happy to admit that some of her interpretations, for example of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, are superb. (Martha Argerich was 26 when she recorded this concerto in 1967, here; in 2009 another female pianist, who was then 22, performed the same concerto with the same conductor, Claudio Abbado, and took exactly the same 27 minutes, give or take a couple of seconds, to dispatch the Prokofiev. The name of the younger pianist is Yuja Wang; her live recording, unfortunately technically of lower quality, is here, for you to compare).
Yevgeny Mravinsky was six years younger than Szell: he was born on June 4th of 1903 in St.-Petersburg. If we associate Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra, Mravinsky will be forever%20by%20Lev%20Russov.jpg "Evgeny Mravinsky")
connected with the Leningrad Philharmonic. Mravinsky started his studies in biology but then entered the conservatory, majoring in composition and conducting (his teacher was the noted conductor Alexander Gauk). His first conducting position was at the Leningrad Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre (now the Mariinsky). He became a guest conductor at the Leningrad Philharmonic in 1934 and conductor in 1938. Under Mravinsky, the Leningrad Philharmonic became the best orchestra in the Soviet Union. His recordings of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich were especially noteworthy. He premiered six symphonies of Shostakovich: nos. 5 (in 1937), 6, 8, 9, 10 and 12, in 1961. Mravinsky was known for his intensity, lack of sentimentality and the fast tempos of his performances; in this respect he reminds us of Toscanini. He led the orchestra for the rest of his life; Mravinsky died on January 19th of 1988. Here are the last three movements, Allegro Non Troppo, Largo and Allegretto of Shostakovich’s Symphony no 8, dedicated to Mravinsky.Permalink
May 27, 2019. An “unknown” Italian. Well, we know that Marin Marais was born this week (on May 31st of 1656), but despite the popularity brought by the film Tous les matins du monde
we find his music repetitive and not very interesting. If somebody disagrees, please send us a reference to a good piece. We’re not big fans of Sir Edward Elgar either (he was born on June 2nd of 1857) and will postpone, yet again, a more elaborate entry on this popular British composer. Erich Wolfgang Korngold, born on May 29th of 1897, started brilliantly, and in his early years was considered the greatest child prodigy since Mozart. He did write several pieces that remain in the contemporary repertoire, the Violin concerto being probably the best known (and the most interesting) but his life was changed by the rise of the Nazis; he moved to the US and became a Hollywood composer. His film scores were wonderful but not in the same league as what his youthful talent had promised. Then there was Mikhail Glinka (born on June 1st of 1804): he was extremely important as one of the founders of the Russian musical tradition, but it’s hard to compare his relatively minor talent with that of several composer born within a decade surrounding his birth: Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Wagner. We love the music of Isaac Albéniz, but we’ve written about him numerous times. And then there are two interesting pianists, Grigory Ginzburg and Zoltán Kocsis, but we did already mention them last year. All composers that we cited above are very well known. This is not the case with Giovanni de Macque. Not only do we not know his date of birth, even the spelling of his name is inconsistent: some spell it as Giovanni de Maque, or even Jean de Macque, in a Frenchified manner. Macque was born in Valenciennes, a Flemish town now in France, sometime between 1548 and 1550 (Valenciennes is about 20 miles from Mons, where Gilles Binchois and Orlando Lasso were born). As a boy he sung in Vienna, and later moved to Rome; he lived in Italy for the rest of his life. In Rome he met Luca Marenzio; some of Macque’s madrigals show Marenzio’s influence (here is Macque’s madrigal Cantan gl'augelli, performed by the Gesualdo Consort Amsterdam under the direction of Henry van de Kamp). For a while Macque worked as the organist at the church of San Luigi dei Francesi; he was a founding member of the Compagnia dei Musici di Roma. In 1585 he moved to Naples where he was employed in the household of Prince Carlo Gesualdo. It seems that Macque left the Gesualdo employ before the prince murdered his wife and her lover. Macque had a successful career in Naples, eventually reaching the position of maestro di cappella of the Spanish Viceroy. Gesualdo, to whom Macque dedicated several works, influenced his harpsichord compositions. Here are three short keyboard pieces by Giovanni de Macque: Gagliarda Prima, and Gagliarda Seconda. Rinaldo Alessandrini plays a 1678 Franciscus Debbonis harpsichord.
PermalinkMay 20, 2019. Wagner, Alicia de Larrocha. Richard Wagner was born on May 22nd of 1813. For some years we’ve been following Wagner’s life thru his operas; two years ago we arrived at 1848, the year Wagner started working on the monumental Der Ring des Nibelungen. It is
hard to imagine, but during the years leading up to the Revolution of 1848 Wagner was involved in left-wing politics. He was living in Dresden and active among the local socilaists; he knew Mikhail Bakunin, the famous anarchist, and read Ludwig Feuerbach, a philosopher important in Marxist thought. Wagner participated in the May 1848 uprising and had to flee Germany to avoid arrest. He settled in Zurich, lonely and poor, existing mostly on small funds provided by his friends. While he did finish Lohengrin, very little music was composed in the next several years. What Wagner was writing were articles: some on the art of opera, but also the dreadful Judaism in Music, the first of his many antisemitic pieces. An influential Opera and Drama expounded the concept of music drama and “total work of art,” which he subsequently used in Der Ring. Wagner wrote librettos to all of his operas; first he would create a rough sketch, then a draft in prose, for the Ring he would also versify it in alliterative form, the style of old German legends. Sometime around 1848 Wagner started working on a libretto about the mythical German hero, Siegfried, which he planned to call Siegfried's Death. He read many ancient German and Norse sagas (he had some knowledge of Old Norse and Middle German) and commentaries written by the Grimm brothers. Eventually he decided to expand the project to two or three operas; but ultimately it became four: Siegfried's Death turned into the last opera in the tetralogy, Götterdämmerung, or Twilight of the Gods. The preceding three librettos were finished and named in 1852; they were Das Rheingold (The Rhine Gold), which serves as the prologue; Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), and Siegfried. The librettos were written in reverse chronological order, Das Rheingold coming in last. The music, on the other hand, was composed more or less in the order the operas are presented: even though some music for Die Walküre was composed earlier, Das Rheingold was the first one to be finished, in January of 1854 (Die Walküre was completed two years later). It was premiered in Munich in September of 1869 against the wishes of Wagner, who preferred to stage the complete tetralogy (Götterdämmerung was finished only in 1874). The Bayreuth premier took place in August of 1876, in the newly built theater, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. We have a sample of the Prelude to Act I (here); about two and a half hours later, in the final scene, Wotan leads the gods into his newly built castle-fortress, Valhalla (Zubin Mehta conducts the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in this 1983 recording).
The great Spanish pianist, Alicia de Larrocha was born on May 23rd of 1923 in Barcelona. She gave her first performance at the age of five and played a Mozart concerto with the Madrid Symphony Orchestra at 11. Alicia de Larrocha studied with Frank Marshall, a pupil of Granados, and later became the director of the Marshall Music Academy. She was an incomparable performer of the music of Spanish composers, especially Albéniz and Granados. She was short in stature (4’9”) and had small hands but played all the “big” concertos (her hands had good stretch). In the second half of her career she played Mozart more often. Here is Mozart’s Piano Sonata, K.570 in B-flat major.Permalink
May 13, 2019. Monteverdi, Satie, Klemperer. One of the most important composers in the history of European music, Claudio Monteverdi was born on May 15th of 1567 in Cremona.
Rarely can we associate historically significant musical or esthetic developments with just one person, but Monteverdi is one of them: early in his life he wrote wonderful madrigals in the style of late Renaissance, and then transitioned to what we now call Baroque. In the process, he practically invented a new art form, the opera. You can read about him here, here and here. As a musical excerpt, we have his Lament of Arianna. We know it as a madrigal from Book Six, published in Venice in 1614, but originally it was composed or his early opera Arianna, now lost. Here it is performed by the Concerto Italiano under the direction of Rinaldo Alessandrini.
In some sense, Erik Satie, born on May 17th of 1866 in Honfleur to a French father and Scottish mother, was the opposite of Monteverdi: his musical output was slim (he’s mostly remembered for his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes), his influence coming as much from his personality as his music. Satie was an eccentric (he ate only white-colored food, carried a hammer for protection and was involved in the occult). Still, he knew and was known to “everybody” of significance in the pre-WWI Paris. He had a long affair with Suzanne Valadon, a painter and mother of Morice Utrillo, was good friends with Ravel and Debussy and influenced Les Six. Later he got involved with the Dadaists and Surrealists. And, of course, he paved the way for the Minimalists. Here are three Gymnopédies, each about three and a half minutes long, performed by Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the Frenchman who recorded all piano works by Satie.
Otto Klemperer, one of the greatest conductors of his generation, was born on May 14th of
1885 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland). In 1905 he met Mahler, who helped Klemperer to get the conducting position at Neues Deutsches Theater in Prague, which launched Klemperer’s conducting career. He went on to conduct at several important opera houses; in 1927 he was appointed the music director of the Kroll Opera, a branch of the Berlin Staatsoper, created to promote contemporary music. There he conducted new operas by Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Hindemith and Janáček. Some of the Kroll Opera’s Wagner productions were so innovative that they affected the Bayreuth enactments half a century later. During that time, Klemperer also conducted the Kroll Concerts, where he performed significant contemporary pieces. In 1931 the Kroll Opera closed for lack of financing, but Klemperer remained at the Staatsoper. In 1933 the Nazis took over and Klemperer, who was Jewish, emigrated to the US. His first appointment was with the Los Angeles Philharmonic; his tenure there brought critical acclaim, but he wasn’t comfortable in Southern California, he preferred the East coast. He played several concerts with the New York Philharmonic, but when, in 1936, the position of Music Director opened with the departure of Arturo Toscanini, the orchestra board engaged John Barbirolli and, later, Artur Rodziński. Klemperer was hugely disappointed; he remained with the LA Phil till 1939 when a tumor was found in his brain. It was successfully removed but left Klemperer unable to conduct for several years. After the war he made several recordings with the newly created Philharmonia Orchestra in London and in 1959 was appointed its “Director for life.” He had a wonderful relationship with the musicians and made several remarkable recordings of Beethoven and Mahler’s symphonies. Klemperer died in Zurich on July 6th of 1973. Here’s the first movement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, recorded in 1957. Otto Klemperer conducts the Philharmonia Orchestra.Permalink
May 6, 2019. Neither Brahms nor Tchaikovsky. By an unfortunate coincidence for us, two great 19th century composers were born on the same date, March 7th: Johannes Brahms in 1833 and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1840. Both are important and influential: Brahms as the key developer of the Beethoven symphonic tradition, Tchaikovsky as the central figure in the new Russian music. Every year we contrive to write about both in one short entry, fully recognizing how different their music is, even if there are some curious formal similarities. This year we’ll skip both and write about (or at least mention) composers and performers admittedly not as consequential but who deserve our attention. And this is a large and colorful group. Jules Massenet and Gabriel Fauré, two well-known French composers were born on May 12th, the former in 1842, the latter three years later. Massenet, a conservative composer of the Belle Époque, is famous for two of his operas, Manon and Werther; a much more adventuresome Fauré influenced generations of French composers, from the Impressionists to Les Six. Another Frenchman, from an earlier era, Jean-Marie Leclair, is known as the father of the French violin school; he was also born this week, on May 10th of 1697. There are two Italians -- Giovanni Battista Viotti, who like Leclair, was famous for his violin concertos (he was born on May 12th of 1755) and Giovanni Paisiello, now almost forgotten but in the late 18th century famous for his operas that were staged all across Europe (he was born on May 9th of 1740). Then there was
another early-Classical composer, the German Carl Stamitz of the Stamitz family which also gave us Anton and Johan Stamitzs (Carl was born on May 8th of 1745). Jan Václav Voříšek was a very fine composer: born in Bohemia on May 11th of 1791, he spent the most productive years of his life in Vienna, where he met Beethoven and befriended Schubert. Voříšek died of tuberculosis in 1825, at just 34 years old. Here’s his Symphony in D Major, performed by the Chicago Sinfonietta, Paul Freeman conducting. Anatol Liadov was a minor but pleasant composer of short piano pieces. Were it not for his laziness and lack for self-assurance, he might’ve developed into a major talent (Liadov was born on May 12th of 1855). And let’s not forget Milton Babbitt, one of the most important American composers and teachers of the second half of the 20th century, influential not only in the US but in Europe as well; he was born on May 10th of 1916.
Several noted interpreters were also born this week, for example Vladimir Sofronitsky, on May 8th of 1901, a socially awkward but greatly talented Russian-Soviet pianist. He’s not well known in the West but was considered the supreme interpreter of the music of Scriabin and Chopin in the Soviet Union. Scriabin was his favorite composer; Sofronitsky’s first wife was Scriabin’s daughter, and by the end of his life he stopped giving concerts at the large Great Hall of Moscow Conservatory, and performed instead in one of the rooms of the Scriabin museum (the composer lived the three last years of his life, from 1921 to 1915 on the first floor of this lovely mansion on one of the side streets in the center of Moscow). Here’s Scriabin’s Poeme Op. 36 (Satanique), recorded live in 1960.
Two very important conductors also have their anniversaries this week: Jascha Horenstein, who was born in Kiev on May 6th of 1898, lived and performed in Vienna and Berlin, but in 1933, because of the growing antisemitism, left for Paris and then for the US. Horenstein was a renowned Mahlerian. Also, Carlo Maria Giulini, an Italian conductor with a major career both in Europe and the US; he was born on May 9th of 1914.Permalink