Chopin, Nocturne No 20, Op posth

 
The pianist of the Warsaw ghetto
In Polanski's film The Pianist, it appears that the Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman spent a few months in the destroyed Warsaw trying to survive. Actually, his ordeal lasted two years, according to his memoirs collected in the book The Death of a City, published in 1945 in reduced circulation. However, it was not an obstacle for the authorities at the time to condemn and censure it. The book didn´t agree with their vision of the war, as if Szpilman's torments did not count for history.

It was not until 1998 that the memoirs, with the collaboration of a Polish author, were republished, first in German, and then in English under the title The Pianist. Two years later, they were published in Spain under the title El pianista del ghetto de Varsovia.

The movie
In 2002, the Polish director Roman Polanski adapted these memoirs for the cinema, resulting in the ultra-award-winning film The Pianist, starring the brilliant actor Adrien Brody in the role of Wladyslaw Szpilman.
The film begins with Szpilman, on a Polish radio station, performing a posthumous opus by Chopin, a piece from his youth that Frédérik did not want to be published in his lifetime. Perhaps because of this, a renowned biographer has described it as a mediocre work. It didn't seem that way to Polanski, or to the audience.

The piece is Nocturno N° 20 in C sharp minor. The rendition is by the Polish pianist Janus Olejniczak, who recorded the entire piano for the soundtrack.

It is the year 1939, September, and the German invasion has begun. The bombings interrupt the performing of Szpilman.

Following, the whole piece by Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki.

Haydn, "Farewell" Symphony

An unconventional labor protest 

The contract signed by Joseph Haydn with Prince Paul Anton Esterházy on May 1, 1761, contains fourteen articles. A cursory review of some of them reveals the social appreciation that the Old Regime had of musicians.

Article 2 committed Haydn to "behave as befits an honorable official of the princely house," as well as to "avoid all brutality against his subordinates," and to "ensure that his subordinates, and himself, always wear his work uniform." Article 3 demanded "to avoid all vulgarity by eating, drinking and in any other circumstance." Article 4 (which fortunately never applied to Haydn) required that his music could not cross the limits of the prince's domain. Article 5 obliged Haydn "to appear twice a day in the antechamber to find out whether His Highness is ready for a musical audition or not." And so it goes on.

Despite all this, the maestro born in the vicinity of Vienna on March 31, 1732, did not hesitate for a moment to sign the contract and thus ended up joining the Esterházy family, gratefully serving Prince Paul Anton and later Prince Nikolas, a brother of the former, for almost thirty years.

But not always everything went wonderfully. The summer of 1772 was long and with a generous climate, so the prince extended his stay in the palace. Much of the musicians at his court came from Eisenstadt, where they had left their families. They wanted to go back, but how to tell Nikolas? Not even Haydn himself could have requested it — at least not in words —, so he decided to do it through music, devising an ad-hoc piece: Symphony No. 45 in F sharp minor, later known as Farewell Symphony.

To achieve his goal, the final movement of the work necessarily had to be slow, so in the fourth and last movement, suddenly, after a coda that seemed to lead to the conclusion, Haydn added an unusual adagio, a deliberate anticlimax.

The full story is told by actor Peter Ustinov in the superb video below.

I'm just adding here the sequence of withdrawal of the instrumentalists:
Second file violins - First oboe and second horn - bassoon - second oboe and first horn - double basses - cellos - violins (except those in the first row) - viola. The violins of the first rank remain until the end because they are in charge of finishing the work. As they retire, the musicians play a brief solo, although there are some who leave without saying goodbye: the bassoon and the cellos.

Rossini, Il Barbieri - Ecco ridente in cielo

For the Italian public at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, opera — and especially opera buffa — was a true passion, affecting all social classes. It was a dedicated audience that used to demand new shows each season, so composers and librettist had to work hard to finish the next work in record time, being usually not well paid for it. Because of this, it was common for composers to use overtures — or full arias — from previous works and, with some modification or without it, transfer them to the new production.

Despite his expertise, that led him to compose up to four operas in a year, the writing of Il Barbieri di Siviglia complicated Gioachino Rossini more than usual. He had only two months to fulfil the commission. So, in addition to the overture he should have taken from previous work, he did not manage to compose all the arias either. Consequently, the serenade that the Count of Almaviva had to sing for Rosina in the first act had to be improvised by the tenor, who made use of a piece of his authorship that was not to the liking of the audience.

Rossini (1792 - 1868)

Ecco, ridente in cielo
And as tradition pointed out that the author of the work should conduct the premiere, that February 20, 1816, the failed aria surprised Rossini in the front line, joining to the failure that, incidentally, affected the entire work. But Gioachino had the solution at hand.

For the next performance, he borrowed the melody of the opening chorus of his opera Aureliano in Palmira, from 1813, which in turn came from Ciro in Babylon, from 1812, and with that material he wrote one of the most beautiful arias for a tenor of the bel canto period, the cavatina (short aria without repetition) Ecco, ridente in cielo, sung by the Count of Almaviva at the beginning of Act I, under Rosina's balcony.

The aria has two parts, a lyrical and expressive one, and another of greater liveliness (minute 3:04) that entails a higher degree of technical difficulties, which the Spanish tenor Alfredo Kraus addresses here with great ease to finish off with a spectacular ending.

Tchaikovsky, Marche Slave

In 1866, the region of Europe that we now know as the Republic of Serbia declared itself in a "state of war" with the Turks, and in June of that year, the Serbians began to fight valiantly against the Ottoman Empire that had annexed the region a long time ago: in the middle of the XVI century. But the Serbs were not alone in their fight. The Russian Empire came to their aid, openly supporting them by sending volunteers to the battlefields and receiving back the wounded and maimed. Despite the effort, Serbia lost the war.

The newly created Red Cross Society was then forced to request help from the Russian Musical Society to programme a concert for the benefit of both the organization and Serbian veterans. Promptly, the director of the musical society scheduled a concert for November of that year, commissioning the professor of the Moscow Conservatory, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovski, to compose a work to enhance the event.

Despite being going through one of his accustomed creative drought periods, Pyotr Ilyich got down to work. The piece, which he called "Serbo-Russian March" while he was working on it, was premiered on November 17 of that year with the definitive French title Marche Slave (Slavic March).

On the occasion, the conductor was his friend, pianist and director of the Moscow Conservatory, Nicolai Rubinstein, who the following month would intensely disrupt the life of Pyotr Ilyich by getting him the patronage of a wealthy Russian lady, Nadezhda von Meck. But that is another story.

The work was well received by the audience and satisfied Pyotr Ilyich. This is how he told his sister:

"Last Saturday my Serbo-Russian march was played here for the first time, resulting in a real storm of patriotic enthusiasm."

Marche Slave, op 31
The work belongs quite properly to the genre known as programmatic music. Hand in hand with Serbian folk songs, there are distinguishable passages about the oppression suffered by the Serbs, their cry for help, the Russian response on the way, and even a hopeful song of future triumph, through the invocation of the Russian national anthem.
The work shares some passages with the 1812 Overture, which Piotr would compose four years later.

The rendition is by the Orquesta Sinfónica Juvenil de Caracas, conducted by César Iván Lara.

Maurice Jarré, "Lawrence of Arabia" - soundtrack

The French composer Maurice Jarre was far from being a child prodigy as his interest in music came to him a little late. Shortly before turning 20, he discovered that he did like music and that he could pursue a career on it. And like any self-respecting composer, child prodigy or not, he had to face and overcome the opposition of his family to enter the Paris Conservatory, where he studied composition, harmony and percussion after abandoning engineering studies at La Sorbonne.

He made his debut as a musician at 22 in the company of the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. 
Pierre was at the piano and Maurice on the "Martenot waves", an electronic instrument invented in 1928 by the French composer and engineer Maurice Martenot. Five years later, he was asked by film director Georges Franju to compose the soundtrack for a 23-minute documentary, Hotel des Invalides. The work did not launch him to fame but helped him to forge a name as a composer of film music. It will be followed by two more films in communion with Franju, the last one in 1960 for his most memorable film, Les yeux sans visage (Eyes without a face).

Maurice Jarre (1924 - 2009)

The next year, Maurice's career would take a spectacular turn. The Polish producer Sam Spiegel engaged him to compose the soundtrack for a David Lean film that turned out to be nothing more and nothing less than Lawrence of Arabia, an epic film telling the story of a quirky English hero, Thomas Edward Lawrence, who from his position as an intelligence officer, led the Arab revolt against the Turks during the First World War. Maurice Jarre (1924 - 2009)

His involvement in the movie earned him an Oscar. Then a second job with Lean emerged, Doctor Zhivago. From then on, Maurice would compose the soundtrack for all David Lean films, being awarded two more Oscar.

Until his death in 2009, Maurice Jarre collaborated as a soundtrack composer in countless films, among which, to name a few, stand out The Collector, by William Wilder, Jesus of Nazareth, by Zefirelli, and The Tin Drum. In the eighties, using electronic means he wrote the complete score for the movie The Year of Living Dangerously.

In the opinion of the American composer Aaron Copland, music composed for films constitutes a new musical medium capable of exerting a fascination of its own. It is not opposed to concert, symphonic or chamber music, but rather constitutes a new form of dramatic music, as traditionally was, and still is, that written for opera, ballet or theater. Copland closes the corresponding chapter of his remarkable outreach work "What to listen for in music" with this striking suggestion to the reader:

"Next time you go to the movies, don't stop siding with the composer."

An abstract of the complete Lawrence of Arabia soundtrack is presented here (don't forget the film lasts almost four hours) in the rendition of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of its author, Maurice Jarré.