Mozart: Così fan tutte - "Soave sia il vento"

Two young officers, sitting in a cafe, are boasting about how faithful their respective fiancees, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, are. A friend experienced in love affairs, Don Alfonso, joins them and, faced with what he believes to be an act of extreme naivety on the part of the young men, proposes a game. They will make their girlfriends believe that they have been called off to war. Soon thereafter they will return in disguise and each attempt to seduce the other's lover. Don Alfonso assures that in less than twenty-four hours Fiordiligi and Dorabella will be seduced by the friend of their true boyfriend.

Così fan tute, opera bufa
Thus begins the first act of the comic opera Così fan Tutte, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, composed in 1789 and premiered in January 1790, a year before the composer's death (although he will still have time to compose his masterpiece in the field of the opera: The Magic Flute). The work was the right one to enchant the Viennese, both the most refined and the most frivolous. For that reason, it was very well received, but unfortunately, following the death of Emperor Joseph II a month after the premiere, its performances had to be suspended. According to custom, national mourning implied the closing of all theaters.

The play managed to be performed five times and when it returned to the stage, in June of that year, other works were on the billboard and the public had already begun to forget it. During the rest of the year, the opera was performed only five times. 

Maria Teresa, again
Mozart died the following year, without him ever seeing his work performed on the Vienna stage again. Maybe Leopold II ― Joseph's brother and successor ― had something to do with it. He never had a special liking for Wolfgang, probably influenced by the animosity that his late mother, Maria Teresa of Austria, had towards the family of "homeless musicians", as she once called the Mozarts.

Fortunately, Leopold left this world in 1792 ― likely poisoned ―, without ever learning that the next year some French rioters were going to cut off the head of his sister, Marie Antoinette.

Trio Soave Sia il Vento. Don Alfonso announces the bad news to the women: their lovers have been called off to war; they must leave today. The officers say goodbye, heartbroken. While watching the boat moving away with them, the girls, along with jester Alfonso, bid them farewell, wishing them safe travel: "may the wind be gentle."

Glyndebourne Festival, 2006. The girls: Fiordiligi, the Swedish soprano Miah Persson; Dorabella, the German mezzo-soprano Anke Vondung. Don Alfonso: Nicolas Rivenq.

La Fenice Theater, 2011. Non-traditional staging. The girls: Maria Bengtsson and José Maria Lo Monaco. Don Alfonso: Andrea Concetti.

Ignacio Cervantes, Danzas Cubanas

 
While he was a student at the Paris Conservatory between 1866 and 1870, in contrast to Debussy, Bizet or Gounod, the Cuban composer Ignacio Cervantes could not access the Prix de Rome, due to his status as a foreigner. However, the first year of his stay he was awarded the First Prize in piano performance. Two years later, he would obtain the First Prize in harmony.

From Havana to Paris
Born in Havana in 1847, he took the first steps in music from the hand of his father, a pianist, and continue his studies later with other tutors. The visit to Cuba in those years of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who until then was the only internationally recognized American pianist, was providential for the family to decide that the nineteen-year-old Ignacio should finish his training in Europe, more precisely, at the Paris Conservatory.

A pianist trained in Paris
After a four-year stay at the prestigious institution, he returned to Havana in 1870 covered with honors because, in addition to the aforementioned awards, he had achieved an important recognition among renowned colleagues of such standing as Rossini, Liszt and Gounod. The promising Cuban student was returning trained as Ignacio Fernández, a Paris-educated concert pianist.

Ignacio Cervantes (1847 - 1905)

Concerts to benefit ... the revolution
On his return, he found that his homeland had already been involved in the first war of independence with Spain for two years. So, he decided to make his revolutionary contribution from the trench of art, offering concertos throughout the Island, whose benefits would go to the hands of the rioters.

It wasn't long before the Spanish authorities became aware of the ruse. Fernández, along with a renowned violinist, were expelled from Cuba in 1876.
(The insurrection failed and Cuban independence had to wait more than twenty years, until in 1898, with the help of the United States (!), Cuban-American troops achieved the unconditional surrender of the Spanish army.)

Five Cuban dances
Fernández composed an opera, Maledetto, and several chamber and zarzuelas works, but today he is remembered mainly for his piano works, in which his popular 45 Cuban Dances stand out.
Five of them are offered here by the graceful Cuban-Canadian pianist Beatriz Boizán, who, like Japan's Mitsuko Uchida, also makes faces, but charmingly.

0:07 Invitación / 2:05 Ilusiones perdidas / 3:26 La encantadora / 4:44 Adiós a Cuba /
6:42 Improvisada

Schubert / Dorfman, Death and the Maiden

More than a century and a half after the death of Franz Schubert, the Chilean writer and playwright Ariel Dorfman wrote in 1991 a play about the torture and abuses of the Chilean dictatorship, which he titled Death and the Maiden. The play tells the story of Paulina, a woman tortured by a doctor who happens to be in her own house as a guest. She recognizes him, kidnaps him and manages to put him in the situation of the tortured. The background music is the second movement of the Schubert Quartet of the same name, a piece that the doctor made his victims listen to during torture sessions. With the doctor now as a victim, Dorfman's work relives the trauma but not to cure it but to recall it because redemption is not possible.

The work received immediate international recognition. On March 17, 1992, it had its US premiere at the Brooks Atkinson Theater in New York, directed by Mike Nichols, and with Glenn Close, Richard Dreyfuss and Gene Hackman in the leading roles.

In 1994, the play was adapted for the screen with the direction of Roman Polanski and the actors Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley and Stuart Wilson. A capital scene of this film is the one that heads this article.

Schubert, Goethe and the lieder
In 1816, by the first time, and through a friend, little Franz Schubert sent the poet Goethe the lieder inspired by his poems. As we know, Goethe turned a deaf ear and did not acknowledge receipt of the nineteen-year-old musician's work. Sometime later, Franz will make another attempt to obtain the recognition of the poet, this time on his own initiative although with similar results: the German poet didn't take the hint.

Death and the maiden - the lied
So, little Franz chose another poet to compose in 1817 perhaps his most celebrated lied, precisely the one entitled Death and the Maiden. The chosen poet was Matthias Claudius, an author of simple and popular verses, and the poem, one whose central theme addresses the musings of a dying young woman before the imminence of her own end.

Death and the Maiden - the Quartet
Such was the success of the composition that Schubert decided to use the theme with slight modifications to build the 2nd movement of the string quartet No. 14 in D minor, composed in 1824-26, and which took its name from the original lied. Like most of Schubert's work, Death and the Maiden quartet will be released posthumously, in 1832, four years after the author's death at age 31.

In the rendition by the Spanish group Cuarteto Stradivari, we listen to the second of the four movements of the quartet – the one that delighted the torturer –, performed in Tokyo in December 2012.

Vivaldi, "Spring", from The Four Seasons

Despite being the most popular Baroque author today, most of the compositions of the prete rosso Antonio Vivaldi remained ignored until the first quarter of the twentieth century. It was not until the years 1927-1930 that a laborious compilation of autograph manuscripts by the Venetian composer was made. As a result of this search, 300 concerts were recognized, plus nine operas and a beautiful oratorio.

A colossal work
A few years later, the French musicologist Marc Pincherle – who had devoted his doctoral thesis in 1913 to the life and work of Vivaldi – stated in 1948 that the number of concertos for solo instrument and string orchestra composed by Il Prete Rosso was 461. But another scholar named Gallois didn't agree, accepting only 446 as authentic. Another one, Negri, reached the same conclusion a bit later. Finally, in 1955, Pincherle went back to it again by proposing the final number of 454 concerts, which is the one generally accepted today.

And if you want to inquire about the complete work, the RV catalog (Ryom Verzeichnis - Ryom Catalog), prepared by the Danish musicologist Peter Ryom and published in 1973, quotes as more than 750 pieces the total number of works composed by Vivaldi.

Antonio Vivaldi (1678 - 1741)

The Four Seasons
Written between 1723 and 1725, and published this last year by an Amsterdam editor, Vivaldi will resort for the first time to the imitation of nature – one of the basic tendencies of the Enlightenment culture. At least, so he did in seven of the twelve concertos, but above all in the very famous first four, known as The Four Seasons. Aware of their importance, il prete rosso did not miss an opportunity to perform them throughout his life.

Only three years after their publication, they achieved stunning success at the famed Concerts Spirituels in Paris, which opened only in 1725. It was not long before that they became a true best-seller of 18th-century instrumental music, a recognition that, surprisingly, it continues to this day. In the opinion of several musicologists, if Vivaldi's work ever falls into oblivion, there will be a title that will withstand the onslaught of time: The Four Seasons.

Concerto No 1 "The Spring"
In a superb rendition by the charming German violinist Julia Fischer accompanied by the chamber group Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, we are offering here the concerto N ° 1 in E major RV 269, The Spring, in a beautiful video recorded in the National Botanical Garden of Wales.

The movements are:
00:00  Allegro
03:25  Largo e pianissimo semper
06:00  Allegro pastorale

Debussy, Arabesque No 1

 

Marie-Blanche Vasnier (1848 - 1923)

After finally winning the Prix de Rome in 1884, twenty-two-year-old Claude Debussy moved to Rome, where he spent three years studying and writing music, in the comfort of the Villa Medici
and its generous surroundings. But the following year he was back in Paris, due to his frail health,
on the one hand, and the sense of nostalgia
caused by living so far from the loved one, on the other.

Madame Vasnier
Some years before, he had met in Paris a beautiful soprano with luminous green eyes, Marie-Blanche Vasnier, who had enthralled him with her
nightingale voice, her beauty, elegance and vast knowledge of the world. The charming woman was 30 years old, the mother of two young children, and had been married for thirteen years to an expert in legal matters, eleven years her senior. The couple used to welcome artists and musicians at their home in Ville d'Avray, where young Claude-Achille came on more than one occasion to play the piano and accompany Madame Vasnier in her flourishes. Between that and falling at her feet, there was only a single step.

Unfortunately for him, the idea of ​​abandoning her legal expert never occurred to Marie-Blanche. So the quick visit the musician made to Paris in 1885 with the veiled intention of being received again that summer at the Vasniers', did not result as Claude-Achille expected.

(It was not the first time that the musician fell in love improperly. It had happened before with a daughter of Nadezhda von Meck, the patroness of Tchaikovski. At the time – he was twenty years old – he went a little further and with unexpected audacity asked Mrs. von Meck for the hand of her daughter Sonia, her seasonal student, who, in communion with her siblings, had been taking piano lessons with the young master for three summers. That was the last, of course.)

Arabesque No 1

Until 1884, Debussy wrote more than twenty songs for Madame Vasnier. Then relations weakened and the maestro composed less and less music for song and piano, focusing his creative vigor on compositions for solo piano, which culminated in 1890 with the novel piano language shown in the Bergamasque Suite (which includes the famous Claire de Lune). It is also around this time that he composed the charming Deux Arabesques, the first of which is presented here, in the rendition of the amateur pianist (according to him) Ricker Choi, born in Hong Kong and graduated in Canada as a finance analyst.

The work, structured in two sections, begins in the key of E major making use of compositional techniques typical of what would later be called "musical impressionism". Section B, gentler and more reflective, is on the subdominant key (A major), starting at minute 1:31. Recap of the first section: 3:01.

Beethoven and Perez Prado... a mix...

One hundred and forty years after the premiere of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, at the house door of Cuban pianist and composer Dámaso Pérez Prado knocked not fate but the muse who inspired him to compose his Mambo No. 5.

Pérez Prado, a composer of mambos and danzones
In 1948, the thirty-two-year-old Cuban arranger was at the peak of his fame and had already composed such a number of mambos and danzones that, tired of inventing titles (Patricia, for example) had decided, "four mambos ago", identify them with just a number, from thereon. For this reason, the 78-rpm disc that went on sale the following year had on one side a piece titled with its latest witticism, Qué rico el mambo, and on the other – with the same number as the Fifth – the popular Mambo No. 5.

Dámaso Pérez-Prado
(1916 - 1989)

Akira Miyagawa, popularizer of "serious music"
Cubans and people from all the world danced for twenty years to the rhythm of that mambo and others, either with opus number as without it, until the enthusiasm for the mambo began to wane to give way to other rhythms, such as salsa, for example. in the late seventies. Precisely around those years, the future Japanese director and pianist Akira Miyagawa, also an arranger, was taking his first steps on the other side of the globe. With the aim of divulging classical music, he began to devise impressive arrangements of classical pieces, making them friendly to those who do not show a natural disposition towards "serious music".

Akira Miyagawa (1961 - )

An unexpected mix
Recently, together with an orchestra of very young musicians, Akira decided to borrow from Beethoven and Pérez Prado some bars of their respective masterpieces to "compose" a surprising hybrid.

The result of this unique undertaking is shown in a video in which Akira invites us to walk without a break from the ominous opening motif of four notes of the Fifth Symphony allegro ("the fate that knocks at your door") to the joy and enjoyment of life that Caribbean music (more precisely, Cuban music) represents: the hundred time mentioned – in movies and television – Mambo N ° 5.

To all this, we have hardly named Beethoven. I don't know how he would have reacted. I want to believe he had smiled, despite how grumpy and irritable he was in his later years.