April 13, 2015.  Rebel and de Wert.  This week, just like the previous one, looks rather bare: only one composer of note was born during this period, and even he was much more popular during his lifetime than he is today.  His name is Jean-Féry Rebel, and he was born in Paris on April 18^th, 1666 (that makes him two years older than François Couperin).  His father was a singer at the King’s chapel (the King being Louis XIV), and apparently Jean-Féry began studying music at an early age.  He was noticed by Jean-Baptiste Lully, then the most famous composer in France, and became his pupil.  In 1705 Rebel was made one of the 24 musicians in Violons du Roi orchestra, and some years later – the Chamber composer, a very prestigious position.   His only opera, Télémaque, was not successful; on the other hand, his dance music was extremely popular with the court.  This is not surprising, considering how much Louis XIV liked to dance himself and later in his life, to watch ballet.  But Rebel was a serious and innovative composer; in 1737 he wrote a ballet called Les elemens, which he preceded by a short section called Le Cahos (Chaos).  You can listen to it and imagine how startled the listeners would’ve been (in this recording Musica Antiqua Köln is conducted by Reinhard Goebel).  And here is Rebel’s earlier piece, Le tombeau de M. Lully, written as a tribute to his teacher.  It’s performed by the violinist Amandine Beyer and the ensemble L'Assemblée des Honnestes Curieux.

Giaches de Wert is one of many Renaissance composers whose date of birth was either unrecorded or lost.  We’ve never written about him before, and this week is as good as any to rectify this omission.  Giaches, whose first name was spelled in many ways, including the frenchified Jacques, was born around 1535 somewhere in Flanders (his name suggests that he may have been born in Weert, not far from Antwerp).  One of the many Flemish composers who spent most of their productive years in Italy, he belonged to the same generation as Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso and Andrea Gabrieli.  Most of his life de Wert was associated with two very powerful (and related) Italian families: d’Este and Gonzagas.  As a youngster he sung at the chapel of Maria di Cardona, wife of Francesco d’Este (Francesco was a son of Lucrezia Borgia from her third marriage to Alfonso d’Este, Duke of Ferrara).  In 1550 Wert moved to the town of Novellara, when he washired as a musician for a branch of the Gonzaga family; he would live there for the following 15 years.  Mantua was the main seat of the Gonzagas, while d’Este ruled in Ferrara; Wert traveled to both cities.  (Just six years earlier, Ferrante Gonzaga had brought a 12 years old Orlando di Lasso to Mantua; some year later, Frescobaldi and Monteverdi would work there for the Gonzagas.  Ferrara, at least as much a musical center as Mantua, hosted Orlando, Frescobaldi and Gesualdo, among many others).  In 1565 Wert was appointed the Maestro di Capella of the newly built ducal chapel of Santa Barbara in Mantua and moved there from Novellara.  He got married (according to some sources, to one Lucrezia of a minor branch of Gonzaga,) but his wife cuckolded him with Bonvicino, a composer and Wert’s rival; when the affair became public, Lucrezia was expelled from Mantua.  Wert stayed behind, his reputation compromised.   Wert had his own share of scandals: he started an affair in Ferrara with one Tarquinia Molza, an accomplished musician of noble descent and a lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Ferrara.  That was considered inappropriate and when the Duke Alfonso d’Este learned about the affair, Tarquinia was banished from the court.

All along Wert was composing, mostly secular music.  He wrote about 230 madrigals, many of them on the verses by famous poets, Bembo, Petrarca, Ludovico Ariosto, and especially his contemporary, Torquato Tasso.  We’ll hear two of his madrigals, Ah dolente partite (here) and Io non son però morto (here).  The first one is performed by the ensemble La Venexiana, the second, by the Quink Vocal Quintet.  Also, one piece of sacred music by Giaches de Wert: his sublime motet Vox in Rama.  Ensemble Currende is directed by Erik van Nevel.

April 6, 2015.  Schumann’s Frauenliebe.  As far as composers’ birthdays go, several previous weeks were brimming with major talent but this one is pretty meager: Giuseppe Tartini of  Devil’s Trill fame being the most interesting of the bunch.  So we’ll use it to publish a little essay Joe DuBose wrote about Robert Schumann’s song cycle Frauenliebe und –leben.  To illustrate it, we’ll use the recording made by the great British contralto Kathleen Ferrier in 1950.  Ferrier, the favorite singer of Bruno Walter and Benjamin Britten, died of breast cancer in 1953, just 41 year old.  Fortunately, she left a number of recordings treasured by music lovers ever since.  John Newmark is at the piano. ♫

The year 1840 saw at least 138 songs flow from the pen of Robert Schumann, which has since become known as his Liederjahr, or “Year of Song.” Until that year, Schumann had composed virtually exclusively for the piano. Yet, neither the sudden shift to vocal music, nor the abundance of this creative outpouring, was purely coincidental. It marked the culmination of his courtship of Clara Wieck, and their long-awaited and hard-won marriage.

Schumann first met Clara in March 1828, when both were invited to a musical evening in the home of Dr. Ernst Carus. Impressed with Clara’s skill at the piano, Schumann soon after began taking piano lessons from Clara’s father, Friedrich, during which time he lived in the Wieck’s household. Schumann and Clara quickly formed a close bond that would eventually blossom into a romantic, though clandestine, relationship. In 1837, on her 18^th birthday, Schumann proposed, and Clara accepted. Friedrich, however, who had a rather unfavorable opinion of Schumann, refused to give the composer his permission to marry his daughter. The long courtship and Friedrich’s refusal was a great strain on the relationship. Clara and Schumann exchanged love letters, and were forced to meet in secret. Schumann would even wait for hours in a café just to catch a brief glimpse of Clara as she left one of her concerts. The couple sued Friedrich, and after a lengthy court battle, Clara was finally allowed to marry Schumann without her father’s consent. The wedding took place in 1840.

Frauenliebe und -leben (A Woman’s Love and Life) was one of the song cycles, along with the Liederkreis of Eichendorff and Heine’s Dichterliebe, composed during the intense creative episode surrounding Schumann’s marriage to Clara. The cycle of poems, written by the German poet and botanist Adelbert von Chamisso in 1830, describes events in the life of a woman—from her first meeting with her future husband, to their marriage, the birth of their child, and his seemingly untimely death. Adelbert’s cycle consists of nine poems. However, Schumann set only eight, omitting the poem, Traum der eignen Tage. His setting displays a departure from the Schubertian Lied, with the piano taking on an increasingly independent and important role in portraying the essence and mood of the text. Schumann’s sense of unity is also evident in the reprise of music from the first song as a postlude that concludes the last. While Schumann’s is the best known, two other notable settings of Adelbert’s cycle were composed by Carl Lowe and Franz Paul Lachner. (Continue)

March 30 2015.  Cabezón, Haydn, Rachmaninov and Stradella.  This is another week that brings together, even if fleetingly and tenuously, several major composers from very different eras.  The oldest in this group is Antonio de Cabezon, one of the most important keyboard composers of the Spanish Renaissance.  Cabezón was born on March 30^th of 1510, which makes him five years younger than Cristóbal de Morales and one generation older than Tomás Luis de Victoria, two greatest composers of the Spanish Renaissance.   Little is known about Cabezón: he was born in a small town in northern Spain not far from Burgos, and was blind from childhood.  In 1526 he entered the service of Queen Isabella, wife of Charles I, king of Spain, as an organist and clavichord player.  In 1538 he was appointed the chamber musician to Charles himself, who, as Charles V was the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire and the most powerful monarch in all of Europe.  Later on Cabezón was appointed the music teacher to Prince Felipe, the future king of Spain, and accompanied him on his travels to Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and London.   Cabezón’s music influenced many composers, especially the English ones, such as Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.  Here’s is a short piece by Cabezón called La dama le demanda, from his Works of keyboard music, harp and vihuela.  Fahmi Alqhai plays viola da gamba, Alberto Martínez Molina is on the organ.

Alessandro Stradella belonged to the next period, the Baroque.  He had quite an amazing life, full of mayhem and intrigue; of the composers of the time, only Carlo Gesualdo might have had a more adventurous life.  Stradella was born on April 3^rd of 1639 into an aristocratic Tuscan family.  During his short life (he was stabbed to death at the age of 42 in a plaza right in the middle of Genoa) he managed to create more than 300 works.  Here’s his Cantata per il santissimo natale, Schola Cantorum Basiliensis is conducted by August Wenzinger.

Franz Joseph Haydn, born on March 31^st of 1732, was one of the greatest, if sometimes underappreciated, composers ever.  We’ve written about him many times, and will write more.  Haydn was extremely prolific, writing in every musical genre known in his time.  He composed 104 symphonies, more than 60 quartets, trio, concertos, wonderful cantatas and even operas.   He also wrote 62 piano sonatas.  On the surface most of them are deceptively simple, but in reality they are highly sophisticated and carry a tremendous amount of material.  Some of them are as good as Mozart’s, if not better, and would not be surpassed till Beethoven’s mature years.  Murray Perahia, the American pianist of a great range and talent, has recently embarked on a tour playing a program that includes Haydn’s Sonata in A-flat Major, Hob. XVI: 46.  Perahia’s interpretation is immensely satisfying on all levels: technically flawless, it is musically probing, the sound is beautiful but without any exaggerations, the tempos are nimble and move the sonata along its way.  It’s probably one of the best interpretations we’ve heard in ages.  Unfortunately, there are no publicly available Perahia recordings of this sonata, so in its stead, we have one made by the Croatian pianist Ivo Pogorelich early in his uneven career, here.  Different and highly idiosyncratic, it’s still very interesting in its own right. 

The great Russian composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninov was born on April 1^st of 1873.  We’ve written about him before, so today we’ll combine his commemoration with the recent 100^th anniversary of Sviatoslav Richter.   We’ll hear several preludes, recorded live during the concert he gave in Manchester in 1969:  op. 32 no. 10, op.23 no.4 and op.23 no.5.

March 23, 2015.  Pierre Boulez.  On March 26^th we’ll celebrate the 90^th birthday of Pierre Boulez, one of the most distinguished musical figures of the 20^th century, a composer, conductor, writer, music entrepreneur and organizer, lecturer, professor – in short, a veritable one-man cultural phenomenon.  It’s difficult to overestimate his influence on the development of classical music during the last 70 years.  Boulez was born in 1925 in a small town of Montbrison in central France.  As a boy he was equally interested in music and mathematics.  He took courses in higher math in Lyon (his father, an industrialist, wanted Pierre to become an engineer) but a year later moved to the German-occupied Paris and, instead of going to Ecole Polytechnique, entered the Conservatory.  His teacher in the harmony class was Olivier Messiaen, who helped Boulez to discover the new world of 12-tone music.  Boulez’s first compositions, like Douze notations, which he wrote at the age of 20, were very much in the style of Anton Webern, though in the following years he developed a distinct, personal style.  Boulez’s large Second piano sonata (1948) made him known internationally; one of the champions of Boulez’s music was the pianist Yvonne Loriod, the second wife of Messiaen; she premiered the Second Sonata in Darmstadt, Germany.  After the war, the New Music Summer School in Darmstadt was a major center for innovative music.  Boulez taught there, and that’s where he met his peers: Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, György Ligeti and many other leading modernists.  With all this talent, Darmstadt served as an incubator for a new music style.  Some of the ideas that influenced this style were not esthetic but rather ideological; in the aftermath of the war, young composers abhorred all “romantic,” nationalist aspects of music that could be co-opted by the state, as the Nazis did with Wagner and Beethoven.  Instead, they developed a non-ideological, detached but not un-emotional, method called serialism, which expanded on the twelve-tone system created by Schoenberg and his pupils in Vienna some decades earlier.  A major serialist work by Boulez was Structures, Book I, written in 1952.  In 1961 he rewrote some of the material of the composition, creating Book II.  Another idea that could be traced to Darmstadt of the early 1950s was aleatoric, or chance music.  Boulez wrote several aleatoric pieces in the 60s and the 70s, one of them – Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna composed in memory of his friend, the Italian composer Bruno Maderna, also a regular visitor to Darmstadt, who died there at the age of 53 while rehearsing his opera, Satyricon.

In 1970, uponsuggestion by George Pompidou, the President of France, Boulez created IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), a major institution dedicated to research in electro-acoustical and modern music. Later, Boulez founded Ensemble InterContemporain, which is associated with IRCAM.  The ensemble is a foremost advocate of modernist music.

Boulez started conducting in the late 1950s.  Even though he never had formal training, he developed into one of the major conductors of the late-20^th century.  He served as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, the chief conductor of the BBC Symphony, the Principal Guest Conductor of the Chicago Symphony; he conducted all major orchestras of Europe and the US.  He’s especially well known for his interpretation of modernist composers; at the same time, he’s one of the foremost Mahlerians of our days.  He also conducted practically all of Wagner’s operas at Bayreuth, both of Berg’s operas – Wozzeck was one of his early triumphs, and Lulu, and many other operas.

Boulez’s music is often difficult, so we’ll confine ourselves to just two pieces, one for the piano, another – orchestral.  Here’s Multiple (1965) from Boulez’s “project” Eclat/Multiple (he revised the original pieces several times).  The composer conducts Ensemble InterContemporain.  And here’s Chapter I of Book II of Structures.  Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Florent Boffard are playing two pianos.

March 16, 2015.  Bach and Mussorgsky.  Johann Sebastian Bach was born on March 21^st of 1685 in Eisenach.  We’ve writtenabout him so many times (last year, for example) that this time we’ll just go ahead with his music and write a bit about some other composers that were also born this week but are often overshadowed by the German master.  So here’s Part II of The St. John Passion.  Bach wrote it during his first years in Leipzig, where, in 1723, he was appointed the Thomaskantor.  It was first performed on April 7th of the following year, during the Good Friday Vespers, at the St. Nicholas Church.  In this recording theperformers are: Concentus Musicus Wien, the Arnold Schoenberg Choir, Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting.

Modest Mussorgsky, a composer of tremendous but only partly fulfilled talent, was born on March 21^st of 1839.  Mussorgsky was born in the village of Karevo in the Northwestern Pskov region of Russia.  He belonged to an old, noble and quite wealthy family.  He started piano lessons with his mother at the age of six.  When he was ten, he and his brother were sent to St.-Petersburg to study at a German-language school where he was able to continue his piano lessons.  At the age of 12 he published (with his father’s help) his first composition.  A year later he entered the Cadet School in order to continue the family’s military tradition.  The discipline at the school was lax, carousing encouraged, and that’s, apparently, where his drinking problems began.  Upon graduating, he joined the elite Preobrazhensky regiment.  He soon met Alexander Borodin, then a young military doctor and a budding composer, and Alexander Dargomyzhsky, who is practically forgotten outside of Russia but back then was considered the most important composer since Mikhail Glinka.  Dargomyzhsky introduced Mussorgsky to Balakirev and Cui, the future members of the “Mighty Five.”   Soon after Mussorgsky quit the military and devoted himself to music fulltime.  The several following years were not very productive: he wrote some piano music, an incidental music to a play; he started working on Salammbô, an opera after Flaubert’s novel, but never finished it.  In 1865, at the age of 26, he had his first real bout with alcoholism, but got out of it intact.  One year later he finished the tone poem Night on Bald Mountain (Balakirev didn’t like it and it was never performed during Mussorgsky’s lifetime).  He started working on an opera based on a story by Gogol, The Marriage, but soon abandoned that as well.  Then, in 1868, an acquaintance, one Professor Nikolsky, an authority on Pushkin, suggested that Mussorgsky writes an opera based on Boris Godunov, Pushkin’s blank-verse play.  Mussorgsky responded with great enthusiasm: he wrote a libretto based on Pushkin’s play and available historical documents and completed the first version of what turned out to be a large opera in less than a year.  The opera, though, was rejected by major theaters, mostly because it lacked a leading female role.  Undeterred, Mussorgsky went on to create a revised and expanded version.  This version was accepted, and in 1872 parts of it were staged at the famed Mariinsky Theater in 1873.  A year later the complete opera was staged at the same theater.  Even though the public seemed to have liked it, it was poorly received by the critics and closed after just several performances.  Some years later it was taken out of the repertory completely.  In the meantime, Mussorgsy started working on Khovanshchina, a second large-scale opera project.   The opera, which, as so many of his projects, was never completed, was also based on an episode from Russian history, a rebellion of the Old Believers and the Streltsy guard against Peter the Great.  Around that time Mussorgsky’s descent into alcoholism started for real.  For a while he continued to compose: his famous piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition, was written in 1874, but eventually his productive output practically came to a halt.  There were periods of sobriety, during which he could write – his tremendous Songs and Dances of Death were written during one such period, and he sporadically continued to work on the Khovanshchina and another opera, The Fair at Sorochintsy.  Neither of them were ever completed, Mussorgsky’s descend being inexorable.  He lost his job and lived off his friends’ charity.  Several days before his death, when Mussorgsky was already in a hospital, Ilya Repin painted the famous portrait, above.  Mussorgsky died one week after his 42^nd birthday, on March 27^th of 1881.  Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, a close friend, was one of the composers who worked on the scores left after Mussorgsky’s death.  Rimsky-Korsakov’s birthday is also this week: he was born on March 18^th of 1844.  We’ll write about him another time.

Here, in a scene from Boris Godunov worthy of the best of Verdi, we’ll hear the great Russian tenor Ivan Kozlovsky singing the role of yurodivy (the holy fool) who is accusing the Tsar of murdering a child, Tzarevich Dmitry.  Alexander Pirogov is Tzar Boris.  Nikolay Golovanov leads the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theater.  The recording was made in 1948.