This Week in Classical Music: October 16, 2023.Short notes.It could’ve been a pretty good week, considering the talent we could celebrate, but the horrendous events of October 7th and their aftermath overwhelmed everything else.So, we’ll go over our list very briefly.The Italian composer Luca Marenzio was born onOctober 18th, 1553 (or 1554) in Coccaglio, near Brescia.Marenzio was one of the most prolific (and famous) composers of madrigals of the second half of the 16th century. Marenzio was lucky in finding great benefactors. For many years he had served at the court of Cardinal Luigi d’Este, son of Ercole II d'Este, Duke of Modena and Ferrara.After the cardinal’s death, Marenzio found employment with Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII, and later, with Ferdinando I de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany.We can assume that while in Florence, he met the three Florentine composers whose lives we had followed closely in our recent posts – Giulio Caccini, Jacopo Peri, and Emilio de' Cavalieri, but while he inhabited the same intellectual circles as the three, Marenzio never got interested in their ideas about monody and opera.He did, nevertheless, write music for two out of six intermedi to the play La Pellegrina, composed for the wedding of the Grand Duke Ferdinando to Christina of Lorraine in 1589 (Cavalieri oversaw the production and composed one of the intermedi, Caccini composed another one, Peri was both composer and a singer).That same year Marenzio returned to Rome and went on an adventurous trip to Poland, to the court of King Sigismund III Vasa in Warsaw.He stayed in Poland for a year, got seriously ill there, and returned to Rome, where he died in 1599.
Franz Liszt was also born this week, on October 22nd of 1811 in a small Hungarian village next to the border with Austria. One interesting snippet about Liszt that we were not aware of till recently: he didn’t speak Hungarian.Two fine Soviet pianists, Emil Gilels and Yakov Flier, both excellent interpreters of Liszt’s music, also have their anniversaries this week: Gilels was born on October 19th, 1916 in Odesa, Flier – on October 21st, 1912 – in a small town of Orekhovo-Zuyevo not far from Moscow.
Baldassare Galuppi and Georg Solti were also born this week, but as with so much else, we’ll leave them for better days.
Short Notes I, October 2023
This Week in Classical Music: October 16, 2023. Short notes. It could’ve been a pretty good week, considering the talent we could celebrate, but the horrendous events of October 7th and their
aftermath overwhelmed everything else. So, we’ll go over our list very briefly. The Italian composer Luca Marenzio was born on October 18th, 1553 (or 1554) in Coccaglio, near Brescia. Marenzio was one of the most prolific (and famous) composers of madrigals of the second half of the 16th century. Marenzio was lucky in finding great benefactors. For many years he had served at the court of Cardinal Luigi d’Este, son of Ercole II d'Este, Duke of Modena and Ferrara. After the cardinal’s death, Marenzio found employment with Cardinal Cinzio Aldobrandini, nephew of Pope Clement VIII, and later, with Ferdinando I de' Medici, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. We can assume that while in Florence, he met the three Florentine composers whose lives we had followed closely in our recent posts – Giulio Caccini, Jacopo Peri, and Emilio de' Cavalieri, but while he inhabited the same intellectual circles as the three, Marenzio never got interested in their ideas about monody and opera. He did, nevertheless, write music for two out of six intermedi to the play La Pellegrina, composed for the wedding of the Grand Duke Ferdinando to Christina of Lorraine in 1589 (Cavalieri oversaw the production and composed one of the intermedi, Caccini composed another one, Peri was both composer and a singer). That same year Marenzio returned to Rome and went on an adventurous trip to Poland, to the court of King Sigismund III Vasa in Warsaw. He stayed in Poland for a year, got seriously ill there, and returned to Rome, where he died in 1599.
Franz Liszt was also born this week, on October 22nd of 1811 in a small Hungarian village next to the border with Austria. One interesting snippet about Liszt that we were not aware of till recently: he didn’t speak Hungarian. Two fine Soviet pianists, Emil Gilels and Yakov Flier, both excellent interpreters of Liszt’s music, also have their anniversaries this week: Gilels was born on October 19th, 1916 in Odesa, Flier – on October 21st, 1912 – in a small town of Orekhovo-Zuyevo not far from Moscow.
Baldassare Galuppi and Georg Solti were also born this week, but as with so much else, we’ll leave them for better days.