June 30, 2014.  Christoph Willibald Gluck at 300.  We’ve never written about Gluck before, even though he was one of the most important composers of the 18^th century: he composed mostly operas, and this genre is not well represented on Classical Connect.  That’s why it’s a special pleasure to do so on his 300^th birthday anniversary.  Gluck was born on July 2^nd of 1714 in Erasbach, now part of the town of Berching in Bavaria into a family of a forester.  When Christoph was three, they moved to Bohemia where his father found a job as the head forester to Prince Lobkowicz (Lobkowiczes were an old noble family and patrons of art: two generations later Prince Joseph Franz Maximilian Lobkowicz would become a patron first of Haydn and then Beethoven; Haydn’s “Lobkowicz” quartet and several of Beethoven’s symphonies and quartets are dedicated to him).  Christoph fell in love with music early and learned to play several instruments.  As a teenager he left home and went to Prague to study music; he also enrolled in the university there but never finished his studies.  In 1736 he went to Vienna.  There his talents were noticed by an Italian nobleman who brought Christoph to Milan.  He took musical lessons from Giovanni Battista Sammartini and wrote his first opera, Artaserse, which was premiered in 1741 at Teatro Ducal.  The libretto of the opera was by Metastasio, probably the greatest and most prolific librettist of the time.  Gluck stayed in Italy till 1745, writing several more operas, all to the texts of Metastasio.  In 1745, already a well-known opera composer, he went to London to challenge Handel’s dominance of the opera scene; he wasn’t very successful.  He left London a year later and for the next several years moved from one town to another, writing operas for theaters in Dresden, Vienna and Prague along the way.  One of them was the very successful La clemenza di Tito on the libretto of Metastasio; it was performed in the famous Teatro di San Carlo in Naples (Mozart’s opera of the same title, his last one, used the libretto that was a reworking of Metastasio’s original).

Gluck settled in Vienna in 1754, supporting himself as a Kapellmeister at the court of a wealthy patron.  Italian operas, seria (serious) and buffa (comic), were dominating the Viennese scene, and they were getting stale.  Many opera productions were turning into vehicles for singers who more interested in demonstrating their virtuosity than in music or drama.  Gluck attempted to reform the opera, putting the emphasis on the story and musical development, rather than the coloratura (Richard Wagner had a similar impulse a century later).  The first significant composition in this new style was Orfeo ed Euridice, which premiered in 1762.  Till this day, it remains his most popular creation.  The original Orfeo was the famous castrato Gaetano Guadagni; today this role is sometimes performed by mezzo-sopranos, high tenors (Juan Diego Flórez is a good example) or counter-tenors.  Here’s Marilyn Horn as Orfeo in the famous aria Che farò senza Euridice? (What will I do without Euridice?).  Georg Solti conducts the Covent Garden Orchestra.

One of Gluck’s pupils in Vienna was Princess Maria Antonia, who as Marie Antoinette would marry the future King of France Louis XVI in 1770.  Gluck moved to Paris in 1773 and Marie Antoinette became his patron, helping him to secure a contract for six operas with the Paris Opera company.  Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide, premiered in 1774, and the French remake of Orfeo were very successful.  Unfortunately, several other operas failed to impress the public.  Gluck was deeply hurt and left Paris for Vienna in May of 1776.  In Paris the opera world was split between two camps: the supporters of Gluck and those who preferred operas of Niccolò Piccinni, a practically forgotten Italian who in the 1770s was probably the most popular opera composer in Europe.  In Vienna Gluck was made a Court composer, but he would return to Paris on two more occasions, in 1777 and 1778.  On the last trip he brought with him two of his latest operas, Iphigénie en Tauride and Echo et Narcisse.  The former was a big success but the latter failed.  To make things worse, during the rehearsals of Echo Gluck suffered a stroke.  He left Paris for the last time in October of 1779.  In Vienna he continued revising his older creations but never wrote anything major.  He suffered two more strokes, the last of which killed him on November 15th, 1787.   Let’s listen to the overture to Iphigénie en Aulide; it’s played in its original form, how Gluck wrote it rather that the popular Wagner revision.  John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Lyon Opera Orchestra.

June 23, 2014.  Busnois and Gounod.  This week we’ll look back at the early years of modern Western music and commemorate a composer who made a very significant contribution to its development.  We’ve never writtenabout Antoine Busnois, even though he was one of the most famous composers of the generation following Guillaume Dufay.  Busnois was born around 1430, probably in or around the town of Béthune in what is now the northeastern corner of France, but back then part of the county of Artois.  In the first part of the 15^th century Artois, sandwiched between Picardy and Flandres, was a Burgundian possession.  Busnois may have come from an aristocratic family, which would explain why his name was mentioned at the French Royal court in 1550.  Ten years later he was employed in Tours, first at the cathedral, and later at the church of St. Martin.  Apparently he was a rather rambunctious fellow: a complaint filed against him and his five companions states that they beat up a priest “not once but five times.”  This was not his only brush with the law: he got excommunicated for celebrating the Mass without being an ordained priest.  The pope Pius II, himself an adventurer and author of erotic writings, later pardoned Busnois.  While at St. Martin’s he befriended another composer, Johannes Ockeghem, who at the time served as the church’s treasurer.  In 1465 Busnois went to Poitiers, where he became a choirmaster, but just a year later he moved to Burgundy were he was hired by the court of Charles the Bold as a singer and composer.  Charles fought many wars (and eventually was killed at the Battle of Nancy), and it seems Busnois accompanied him on many of his military campaigns.  After Charles’s death in 1477, Busnois stayed with the court for another five years and then retired.  Not much in known about the last 10 years of his life; he died in Bruges on November 6^th, 1492.

Busnois wrote a number of masses of which three survive, one being one of the earliest renditions of Missa L'homme armé.  He also wrote a number of motets.  Here’s his very short motet Alleluia, Verbum caro factum est, performed by the ensemble Capilla Flamenca.  But it was not church music that  Busnoise was mostly famous for; it was his chansons, of which more than 60 are extant.  Here’s a tune he made popular all over Europe – many composers reworked it either as chansons or used it as cantus firmus in their masses.  It’s called Fortuna desperata, and is sung by Musica Antiqua of London.  And here’s another chanson, called Amours nous traitte honnestement; it’s for four voices and is performed by the ensemble Capella Sancti Michaelis.

On a very different note, we missed a recent birthday of the French composer Charles Gounod, who was born on June 17^th of 1818, the same day as Igor Stravinksy, about whom we wrote last week.  Gounod’s success can be attributed to just one major composition, the opera Faust, and his Ave Maria, an instrumental piece based on Prelude no. 1 in C Major from Book I of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier.  Still, this is much more than many composers have ever achieved, and Gounod’s melodic gift was very influential during the second half of the 19^th century.   Faust was premiered in 1859 at the Théatre-Lyrique (the Paris Opera rejected it) and was not well received, but when revived at the Opera three years later, it became an immediate hit.  Here’s Maria Callas singing the famous Jewel Song from Act 3.  Georges Prêtre conducts the Orchestre de la Société Des Concerts du Conservatoire.  The recording was made in 1963, at the end of Callas’s career.

June 16, 2014.  Igor Stravinsky was born on June 17th, 1882, in Oranienbaum, outside of Saint Petersburg.  We celebrate his birthday every year (for example, here and here): he was one of the most influential composers of the 20^th century and so multi-faceted that during his life he managed to affect several very different styles in the development of classical music.  From the orchestral opulence, new sounds and rhythms of his Russian period, to the exquisite neoclassical reserve that followed, to the serialism of his later years – each of these periods didn’t just produce great masterpieces, they produced music that affected generations of composers.

Stravinsky turned to neoclassicism around 1920 (he actually didn’t like the term and thought it to be rather meaningless).  Neoclassicism was to a large extent a reaction to the late Romantic, programmatic music, an attempt to revert to the earlier, Baroque or even pre-Baroque sensibilities.  Stravinsky was not the first one to write in this style: Richard Strauss’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme Op. 60, which was written in 1911, and especially Prokofiev’s Symphony no. 1, composed in 1917, could be considered the precursors.  But for Strauss and Prokofiev these were interesting but fleeting experiments without much of a follow-up.  It was Stravinsky who molded this approach into a much more consistent paradigm.  It’s interesting that around the same time another artist who also worked in many different styles, the supremely talented Picasso, also entered into his neoclassical phase, together with many Italian artists who in the following years unfortunately veered toward fascism.

One of Stravinsky’s first neoclassical pieces was Pulcinella, which was also his first ballet created for Diagilev’s Ballets Russes since the Rite of Spring seven years earlier. Diagilev wanted to stage a ballet based on the Italian Commedia del’Arte.  Commedia developed in Italy as early as the 17^th century, as an improvisational theatrical performance, with a set of stock characters.  They were the roguish Arlecchino; his sidekick Brighella; Pantalone, a rich merchant; Pulcinella, who chased pretty girls; Pierrot and Pierrette, and many others.  Diagilev, very much a co-creator of his ballets, also wanted to use several old tunes; at the time they were attributed to Pergolesi but it turned out later that they might have been written by other composer.  Ernest Ansermet, the Ballets Russes’ chief conductor, wrote to Stravinsky about Pergolesi, a 17^th century Italian with a tragically short life who wrote several comic operas.  Stravinsky, not too familiar with Pergolesi’s music, had to study the scores.  He borrowed several themes, adopted the pseudo-Baroque mannerisms and tempos, and used them to create something new and highly original.  The one-act ballet was scored for a chamber orchestra and three singers; it premiered in the Paris Opera on May 15, 1920, Ernest Ansermet conducting.  The set designs were by Picasso.  Some years later Stravinsky created an orchestral suite based on the ballet with no singing parts.  He also wrote two different Suites Italienne based on the same music, one for the cello and piano, in collaboration with Gregor Piatigorsy, and another for the violin and piano that he worked on with Samuel Dushkin.  (Dushkin and Stravisnky had also worked together on the Violin concerto, which Dushkin premiered in 1931).  We have both of the instrumental versions in our library: here’s the one for the cello performed by Alexei Romanenko with Christine Yoshikawa on the piano; and here’s the one for the violin, with Janet Sung and Robert Koenig.  But what we’d like to hear today is the original version of the ballet, the one for the orchestra with singers.  This, in particular, is an interesting performance from a historical perspective: the conductor in the 1965 recording is the same Ernest Ansermet, 45 years after the premier (at the time of the recording he was 82 years old).  Marilyn Tyler is the soprano, Carlo Franzini the tenor, Boris Carmeli the baritone.  The orchestra is L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande.  To listen, click hear.  The photo of Stravisnky, above, was made one year after the premier of Pulcinella, in 1921.

June 9, 2014.  Richard Strauss at 150 and Edvard Grieg.  Richard Strauss was born this week, on June 11^th of 1864.  At the end of his life, in 1947 (he died two years later) he declared: "I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer."  It might have seemed that way in the middle of the 20^th century.  Strauss’ music, much of it in the late-romantic German tradition, sounded dated compared, for example, to Stravinsky or Schoenberg.  But these days Strauss’s judgment seems too harsh.  His music endures and is probably more popular these days than it was at the time of his death.  Strauss worked in many different genres.  He wrote large tone poems (Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Don Quixote, written in the years from 1895 to 1897, are the most popular), concertos (for the violin early in his career, in 1881, and a famous one for the oboe, at the end of it, in 1945).  He wrote a not very successful and long Burleske for piano and orchestra, practically a one-movement piano concerto.  He also wrote a number of wonderful songs.  But it’s probably his operas that have maintained Strauss’s reputation throughout the last several decades.  His first successful opera was the 1905 Salome, based on a play by Oscar Wilde (not everybody was impressed: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, after suffering through the opera, went to Café de la Paix next door and, according to Chaliapin, became literally sick).  The difficult and musically even more daring Elektra came four years later.  But it was his next opera,Der Rosenkavalier, that brought him the greatest success. Very well received at its premier in 1911, it has remained in the repertoire of all major opera houses till today.  Two main characters, the Marschallin (soprano) and her young lover Octavian (a mezzo trouser role) had an illustrious history.  One of the most famous Marschallins was the great German soprano Elisabeth Schwarzkopf.  Régine Crespin and Christa Ludwig were also very successful in this role.  At the end of the 20^th century Kiri Te Kanawa owned the role, and lately it has practically belonged to Renée Fleming.  Christa Ludwig, naturally a mezzo, also sung the role of Ottavian.  Tatiana Troyanos, Frederica von Stade and Anne Sofie von Otter were great Ottavians.  Here’s the 1992 concert recording of the final scene of Der Rosenkavalier. The Marschallin is Renee Fleming, Octavian – Frederica von Stade, and Sophie is sung by Kathleen Battle, all three in  great voices.  Claudio Abbado leads the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. We cut out about 5 minutes of applause.

Edvard Grieg was also born this week, on June 15^th of 1843.  He put Norway on the musical map of Europe (it’s safe to say that to this day he remains the only Norwegian composer of note).  His most popular compositions were the lyrical Piano concerto and the incidental music to Ibsen's play Peer Gynt (Grieg created two suites out of the incidental music, each containing four movements, and this is how it’s usually performed on the concert stage).  His Violin sonata no. 3 is played often (we have several recordings in our library, here is one with the violinists Gregory Maytan and Nicole Lee on the piano).  In 1882 he wrote a sonata for cello and piano.  Grieg, an excellent pianist, played the accompanying piano at the premiere.  We’ll hear it in a live recording made in 1964 by an even better pianist, Sviatoslav Richter, and one of the greatest cellists of the 20^th century, Mstislav Rostropovich.

June 2, 2014.  Schumann and Arcadelt.  Robert Schumann was born on June 8th, 1810 in Zwickau, Saxony.  We write about him every year, as Schumann remains one of the most important composers in the history of Western music.  Last year we wrote about his gift as a songwriter.  He wrote fours symphonies and quite a bit of chamber music.  Still, he was first and foremost a piano composer.  Starting with opus 1, Variations on the name "Abegg," written in 1830, for the following nine years this was the only instrument he wrote for.  And it’s for the piano that he wrote his greatest compositions.  One of them is Kreisleriana, Op. 16, written in 1838.  That was a difficult but at the same time tremendously productive period in Schumann’s life.  Robert was carrying on a romantic relationship with Clara Wieck, a daughter of his former piano teacher and a piano prodigy.  Robert’s infatuation with Clara dated to 1835, when she was just 15.  When Clara reached 18, he formally proposed to her.  Wieck-senior refused to consent, as he considered a mere composer not capable of providing for his daughter. They would marry only in 1840.  In the mean time Schumann was writing some of his most interesting work: Fantasiestücke, Symphonic Etudes, Fantasie in C major, and Kreisleriana.  Many of Schumann’s compositions are based on, or at least have an allusion to, literary sources, and so does Kreisleriana.  “Kreisler” in the title is Johannes Kreisler, the protagonist of a novel by the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, an eccentric composer of genius (Kreisler appeared in several other Hoffmann novels, including the great The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr).  Schumann called Kreisleriana a fantasy for piano and dedicated it to Frédéric Chopin.  It consists of eight movements, each in a different mood, like the temperamental, and probably manic-depressive, Kreisler – and of course Schumann himself.   In our library we have Kreisleriana in the performances by two young pianists, the German/Russian Elena Melnikova and the Chinese/American Jenny Q Chai.  This time we’d like to play it in the performance of a wonderful interpreter of the music of Schumann, the Georgian pianist Eliso Virsaladze.  This recording was made in 1965 when Eliso was 23 years old.  One year later she received the first prize at the Schumann Competition in Zwickau.  These days Ms. Virsaladze is still active as a professor at the Moscow Conservatory.  You can listen to it here.

From a composer who was popular for the last century and a half, and still is, we’d turn to a composer who was also very popular during his lifetime, except that he was practically forgotten for the last three hundred years – Jacob (or Jacques) Arcadelt.  Arcadelt was born around 1507.  This makes him a contemporary of the English composer Thomas Tallis, the Spaniard Cristóbal de Morales, and another Franco-Flemish composer, Jacob Clemens non Papa.  Born in what is now Belgium, he moved to Italy as a young man.  He sung in the choir of the St.-Peter’s Basilica and later in the Sistine Chapel, where he worked from about 1530 to 1551.  There he met Michelangelo, who was then painting the Last Judgment.  Arcadelt, at the time a very popular composer of madrigals, set two poems by Michelangelo to music.  Apparently Michelangelo wasn’t impressed.  Arcadelt’s music stayed popular even after his death in 1568: in Caravaggio’s Lute Player, painted in 1600, the sheet music is by Arcadelt!  (The androgynous singer is probably a castrato).  Arcadelt wrote several hundred madrigals and chansons, and also wrote church music – several masses and motets.  But it was the “sweet style” of his madrigals that he was famous for.  Here’s his chanson Robin Par Bois Et Compagnes ("Robin As He Goes Through The Woods And The Fields") set to a poem by the famous French poet Pierre de Ronsard.  It’s performed by the Egidius Kwartet.  And here is his madrigal Il bianco e dolce cigno, sung by the Hilliard Ensemble.

May 26, 2014.  Albeniz, Marais, Elgar.  And also Korngold, and Glinka – all were born this week, but we just don’t have enough space to celebrate them all.  Isaac Albéniz was born on May 29th, 1860.  A wonderful composer, the oldest of the trio that transformed Spanish classical music at the end of the 19^th century, he wrote mostly for the piano and guitar.  His music got more and more interesting toward the end of his short life – he composed his masterpiece, Iberia, between 1905 and 1909, and died that year, 10 days short of his 49^th birthday   We wrote about him extensively before (for example, here and here), so this time we’ll just play one of the pieces from Book I of Iberia, Fête-dieu à Seville, which is sometimes called “El Corpus Christi en Sevilla.”  It depicts, so to speak, a Catholic procession celebrating the real presence of body and blood of Jesus Christ.  Fête-dieu is performed by the great Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha.  The cubist picture of the feast is by the Portugese artist Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso.  It was painted in 1913.

Marin Marais was born on May 31st, 1656 in Paris.  He became better known since the release of the French film Tous les matins du monde (All the Mornings of the World) in 1991, than at any time since his death in 1728.  Marais studied composition with Jean-Baptiste Lully and the bass viol with the composer and viol virtuoso Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe, the subject of Tous les matins.  In 1685 Marais was appointed Ordinaire de la Musique de la Chambre du Roi, a member of King Louis XIV’s private orchestra.  He stayed in that position for many years, serving Louis XV after the Sun King’s death.  Most of his work was for the viol (viola-da-gamba): between 1686 and 1725 Marais wrote five books of music, around 550 pieces altogether.  He also wrote several operas but those are rarely performed these days.  Here’s a late composition, Sonnerie de Ste. Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris (The Bells of St. Genevieve); it was written in 1723.  Jordi Savall, probably the most famous viola da gamba player of late, is supported by Fabio Biondi on the violin and Pierre Hantaï on the harpsichord.  And here is Marais’s rendition of the famous La Folia or Les folies d'Espagne.  Again, Jordi Savall on viola da gamba, this time with Anne Gallet on the harpsichord and Hopkinson Smith on theorbo, a type of a lute.

Are we terribly amiss if we value the compositional talents of Edward Elgar not quite as highly as the British public seems to do?  Yes, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches are arousing and, in parts, unexpectedly witty.  The Enigma Variations, if perhaps not as enigmatic as the title would suggest, are very well crafted.  And the Cello concerto, especially when performed by Jacquelinedu Pré, is wonderful.  But one has to consider that Elgar’s active career covered the last decade of the 19^th and the first two decades of the 20^th centuries, a time of revolutionary changes in classical music, and in that perspective his contributions may appear somewhat limited.  Elgar was born on June 2nd, 1857 in a small village outside of Worcester in the West Midlands, England.  His father had a music shop and tuned pianos.  Elgar was mostly self-taught, studying music in his father’s shop.  He started composing at the age of 20, but it was not till 1890s that his work became noticed.  In 1899 he wrote the Variations on an Original Theme for Orchestra ("Enigma"), Op. 36, commonly called Enigma Variations.  It consists of a theme and 14 variations.  Each variation is dedicated to a friend or, in the case of the first variation, his wife.  Variation IX, dedicated to August Jaeger, a music publisher and close friend, was subtitled “Nimrod” (Jaeger is hunter in German, and the Biblical Nimrod was "a mighty hunter before the Lord").  This variation became especially popular, and for a good reason: it’s one of the best pieces of music ever written by Elgar.  We can hear all Variations in the performance by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Andrew Litton conducting.