February 13, 2017.  Through the ages and countries.  This week affords us an unusually broad view of the development of European music, from the late 16^th century to today.  Michael Praetorius was born in February 5^th of 1571 in Creuzburg, Thuringia (other sources state his birthday as February 15^th of that year).   At the time, Germany’s musical culture was rather underdeveloped.  There was a not a single significant German composer, whereas in Italy the late 16^th century was considered late Renaissance: Palestrina and Lasso were born half a century before Praetorius, while Giovanni Gabrieli and Carlo Gesualdo were a generation older.  Praetorius had a local musical education, and the only early encounter with a significant foreign composer that we are aware of was with John Dowland, who was invited by Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbütte to meet with his court composer.  In this sense Praetorius was a singularly German composer.  Extremely prolific (he composed twelve hundred chorales) Praetorius exerted much influence over many composers, starting with the young Heinrich Schütz and through him on a generation of  German musicians, including Johann Sebastian Bach.  Later in life, when he was living and working in the cosmopolitan Dresden, he became more familiar with and influenced by the contemporary Italians; some of Praetorius’s compositions of the time clearly anticipate the arrival of the Baroque.  In 1619, two years before his untimely death, Praetorius published a set of choral works called Polyhymnia Caduceatrix et Panegyrica.  Here’s a wonderful chorale from that set, Puer natus in Bethlehem.  It’s performed by the Gabrieli Consort.

Francesco Cavalli was born February 14^th

February 6, 2017.  Alban Berg.  The great Austrian modernist composer Alban Berg was born on February 9^th of 1885.  When we celebrated him the last time two years ago, we wrote about his first opera, Wozzeck, which was completed in 1922.  Wozzeck was a huge success, which speaks volumes of the Viennese musical sensibilities – almost 100 years later, it is still considered a “difficult” opera.  Vienna was full of contradictions: on the one hand, it was the city where Schoenberg, Webern and Berg were acknowledged as masters and accepted by the artistic community; at the same time, it was more conservative than probably any other European capital, anti-Semitic, clinging to the vestiges of the lost empire.   Greatly diminished in the aftermath of the Great war, Vienna was the capital of a small country, not an Empire.  Austria even wanted to join Germany as a province, but the Allies wouldn’t have it.  At the beginning of the 20^th century Vienna was one of the world centers of music, if not the center, but by mid-1920s many musicians started moving from Vienna to Berlin; back then, as now, Berlin was seen as a more open, exciting cosmopolitan city.  Composers Franz Schreker, whose operas were almost as famous as Richard Strauss’s, and Ernst Krenek left Vienna.  Alexander von Zemlinsky, the famous composer and an important figure in the Viennese musical cultural life, also moved to Berlin.  Even Schoenberg himself was spending more time in Berlin than in Vienna.  As Michael Haas, a music producer and writer points out, conductors Fritz Stiedry, who assisted Mahler in his youth, Georg Szell, and Erich Kleiber, all at some point active in Vienna, also left the city.  Still, even with these losses, the musical life of Vienna was vibrant.  The Vienna Philharmonic was still considered one of the best orchestras in the world and practically all prominent musicians performed there. 

January 30, 2017.  Schubert, Mendelssohn and Nono.  Two great German composers – and two prodigies – were born this week, Franz Schubert, on January 31^st of 1797, and Felix Mendelssohn, on February 3^rd of 1809.  We’ve written about Schubert, a supreme melodist and one of the most creative composers of the 19^th century, practically every year.  And last year, we wrote rather extensively about Mendelssohn.  So this year we’ll present some of their music and then turn to a lesser known talent.   Schubert is rightly famous for his songs.  He wrote several cycles, two of which, Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, are considered the pinnacle of the German “lied.”  He also wrote numerous individual songs, and Nacht und Träume (Night and Dreams) is one of them.  Very difficult because of its exceedingly long melodic lines, it’s beautifully sung here by Nicolai Gedda.  Gerald Moore is at the piano.  Mendelssohn also wrote songs, eight books of them, but his were "Songs without words."  Each book contains six short piano pieces, some very simple, some a bit more difficult, but all charming.  Here’s Op. 19 no. 4, played by almost everybody who ever studied the piano, but probably not as exquisitely as Daniel Barenboim does in this recording.  And slightly more challenging is Op.30 no. 2, here, also by Barenboim.

We just missed the birthday of Luigi Nono by one day – he was born January 29^th of 1924 in Venice.  He studied composition in his hometown with Gian Francesco Malipiero from 1941 to 1945.  In 1946 he met Bruno Maderna, a modernist composer four years his senior, and they became friends for life. 

January 23, 2017.  Mozart – and Clementi.  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on January 27^th of 1756.  Every year we consider different episodes from Mozart’s life, and last year we wrote about his final years in Salzburg in the Archbishop Colloredo’s employ, a bitter resignation and his move to Vienna.   It was 1781, Mozart was 25 years old, and the success of his new opera Idomeneo was still fresh in his memory.  That was very important, as opera was then the most prestigious form of art, recognized as such in courts and palaces; a composer could write many wonderful symphonies and sonatas (and Mozart had already written 34 symphonies and many sonatas), but an opera could make his name.  But Mozart was then a freelancer, without a permanent position or salary.  In Vienna, he found several students, some among the nobility and that helped to pay the bills.  He also continued to compose; several of his piano and violin sonatas were written during that period, many dedicated to his pupil, Josepha von Auernhammer, who was madly in love with him.  He was also performing in many public and private halls, and was considered the best keyboard player in town. 

January 16, 2017.  Tieleman Susato.  Last week we wrote about Metastasio, a poet and librettist who left an indelible mark on the history of opera; this week we turn to a publisher who was equally important in the development of Renaissance music.  Tielman Susato was born sometime between 1510 and 1515, but where - we are also not sure, probably not far from Cologne, as he referred to himself as “Susato Agrippinus”: Agrippina, the wife of the emperor Claudius, was born in a Roman settlement on the Rhine that later became Cologne, and the Romans renamed it in her honor.  We do know that by 1529 Susato was living in Antwerp and working as a calligrapher.  A musician, he also joined the town band.  He played different wind instruments: the sackbut (an early trombone), the trumpet, flute and recorder.  In 1541 he joined two prominent Antwerp printers and eventually acquired the firm.  Somewhere around 1542 the firm published its’ first book of music: it was the first not just for Antwerp but for all of Northern Europe – as before that, the Italians dominated the trade. 

The history of music printing starts with the invention of the metal movable print by Johannes Gutenberg; his famous Bible was printed in 1450.  Gutenberg didn’t print music, though.  It was Ottaviano Petrucci who, about half a century after Gutenberg’s great invention, printed the first book of music sheets.  Petrucci used what is called the triple-impression method: on every sheet he would first print the staff lines, then the words and then the notes.  This process created a high-quality page but was very time-consuming.   In 1520 the single-impression method was developed: all components were printed together, and even though the results were messier, the single-impression method won over as it was much simpler and faster in production.  It was this single-impression technique that Susato used to print his first music book, Quatuor vocum musicae modulations, a collection of four-part motets by a dozen different composers, one of whom was Susato himself.

January 9, 2017.  Pietro Metastasio.  This week is a bit short on talent (one exception is Morton Feldman, who was born on January 12^th of 1926;  we wrote about him two years ago).  On the other hand, the previous week was brimming with it.  Although we usually write about composers, a person who left a mark as significant as any of the greatest composers was a poet and librettist, Pietro Metastasio.  Metastasio wrote 27 librettos for opera seria, some of which were set many times by different composers (his La clemenza di Tito was used by 40 composers, from Antonio Caldara to Christoph Gluck, Josef Mysliveček and, finally, Mozart).  Altogether almost 400 composers had used Metastasio’s poetry to create musical pieces from operas and oratorios to cantatas and songs, among them, in addition to the ones mentioned above, Nicola Porpora, Baldassare Galuppi, George Frideric Handel, Johann Adolph Hasse (who set nearly all of Metastasio’s opera librettos), Paisiello and Meyerbeer.  Metastasio was born Pietro Trapassi in Rome on January 3^rd of 1698.  His godfather was the famous patron of music and arts, Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. As a child, Pietro developed an amazing ability to improvise in verse on any given subject.  During one of his public performances he was noticed by Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina, one of the founders of the Accademia degli Arcadi (the Academy of Arcadians), a famous literary and music society (Cardinal Ottoboni was also an Arcadian).  Gravin took young Pietro under his wing and later adopted him, changing his name to Metastasio, which was more or less a translation of his Italian name into Greek: as musicologist Richard Taruskin writes, “trapasso” means transit from one place to another, while “metastasis” means spread or transference.  Gravina sent Pietro to study Latin and law in Scalea,Calabria.  At the age of 12 Pietro translated the Illiad into Italian and at 14 he composed a tragedy.  He was 16 when Garvina died and left Metastasio 15,000 scudi, a considerable sum (translating values of 17^th century currency is a very inexact science, but 15,000 scudi could be worth as much as $400,000 in current dollars.  That didn’t stop Metastasio from spending it all in just  two years!).