Two years before his death, Chopin was in Paris, alone. But Paris was on fire. There was only one year left for the "bourgeois king" Louis Philippe to flee to England after the popular uprising in February 1848. But already in June 1847, as a result of the rise in the price of bread, in an Alsacian city there were serious clashes of workers, peasants and the petty bourgeoisie against the troops, which would be strongly repressed with a balance of several deaths. Between August 31 and September 7, it was Paris's turn: a week of barricades and clashes on rue Saint-Honoré marked the soon end of the "July Monarchy", installed in 1830.
George Sand. The farewell A few blocks away, Chopin, who is not precisely a revolutionary and lives only for his music, tries to work at his residence at 9 Place d'Orléans. This summer there is no getaway to Nohant because a month ago he received the last letter from George Sand, who from his rest estate writes him saying goodbye forever with these words:
"Farewell, my friend, be cured soon of all ailments and I will thank God for this strange denouement of nine years of exclusive friendship. Let me hear from you sometime."
So, coldly, the summers free of financial worries and the peaceful afternoons composing in the countryside are over. Therefore, he has to double the number of lessons, get more pupils. But he coughs a lot and has a fever, so everything becomes a little more difficult. In spite of everything, he has the strength to finish three simple waltzes that will make up opus 64.
At the home of friends
That convulsed Parisian summer, Chopin takes refuge at times in the house of some friends and, in opposition to the historical reality that surrounds him, he will compose an elegant and aristocratic waltz, as well as perfect: the today popular Waltz in C sharp minor, which will be dedicated to Mrs Rothschild, in whose house he escaped from loneliness for some days.
Waltz opus 64 N° 2, in C sharp minor
A sort of refrain (0:43) accompanies the main theme which, repeated four times, is broken by an interlude as a third theme, calmer and more lyrical, at 1:13. The piece concludes cleanly with the refrain, without the slightest stridency, as if it were fading away.
The rendition, flawless, is by the extraordinary Chinese pianist Yuja Wang, when she was twenty-five-year-old.
Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies were premiered together on December 22, 1808, at the recently opened Theater an der Wien, in Vienna, the city occupied by Napoleonic troops, between pacts and ruptures, since 1805. The performance – only with works of his own and for his benefit – it had been organized by Beethoven himself in order to ensure a positive balance for that year. Shortly after his fortieth birthday and beset by the progressing deafness, Beethoven conducted all the works and also played the piano.
The program The extremely long concert lasted just over four hours and began with the Sixth Symphony heard for the first time, followed by the aria, Ah, perfido. Then came the Gloria from the Mass in C major, closing this first part with Concerto No. 4 for piano and orchestra, with Beethoven at the piano. The second part opened with the premiere of the Fifth Symphony, then came the Sanctus and Benedictus from the aforementioned mass. Next, Ludwig performed an improvisation for solo piano and, finally, the Fantasia for piano, choir and orchestra was heard.
This monumental program, very poorly executed by an orchestra that had only one rehearsal, had to be listened to in an icy auditorium, which ended up annoying the audience.
A witness to the concert Johann Friedrich Reichardt, also a composer, has left us his impressions of that evening, which he attended at the invitation of Prince von Lobkowitz, Beethoven's patron:
"There we sat, in the most bitter cold, from half-past six until half-past ten, and confirmed for ourselves the maxim that one may easily have too much of a good thing, still more of a powerful one. Neither I nor the good-natured prince... could leave the hall until the concert was over, although some of the really wretched performances pushed us to the edge of our patience. ...The singers and orchestra had been assembled almost at random, and some of the pieces (all bristling with difficulties) had not even had a rehearsal by that mob. ...First came a pastoral symphony, or reminiscence of country life.... Each movement was a long, perfectly constructed piece, full of vivid description and brilliant ideas; the only trouble is that this pastoral symphony was longer than the time we could afford for a full concert..... There followed an extended Italian Scena [the aria Ah, perfidious one] sung by Mademoiselle Killitzi, the lovely-voiced young Bohemian. With the terrible cold in the hall, one cannot blame this beautiful girl for the fact that on such an occasion her voice trembled more than she sang; we, in our box, were also shivering, sheathed in scarves and coats, prisoners of the unbearable cold... Next came a Gloria for soloists and choir, which was very badly sung, to our disgrace. Then a piano concerto, new and tremendously difficult [it had been privately premiered at Lobkowitz's house a year earlier], which Beethoven played impressively at great speed..."
Abstract from J.F. Reichardt. Personal Letters Written on a Trip to Vienna
Theater an der Wien, at early 19th century
Symphony No. 6, in F major, opus 68 The Sixth Symphony, called "Pastoral" by Beethoven himself, is one of his few "programmatic" or "descriptive" works, and is, historically speaking, halfway between Vivaldi's brilliant Four Seasons and the later symphonic poems of Liszt and, later, Richard Strauss. However, the composer pointed out that rather than describing naturalistic pictures or mere imitation of sounds of nature, with this work he intended nothing more than to evoke feelings: there is "more emotion than description" in it, he said, and it is perhaps for this reason that he subtitled the first movement as we point bellow.
The work, quite extensive, lasts approximately forty minutes. The rendition is by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, on the occasion of the complete cycle of Beethoven's Symphonies conducted by Daniel Barenboim during the summer of 2012 at the Royal Albert Hall, London.
Movements
The symphony is in five movements, although from the third movement onwards they lead straight into the next. Along with the obligatory tempo indication, Beethoven added a "description" for each of them, which, however, he warned, should not be taken literally:
00Allegro ma non troppo "Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside".
10:53Andante molto mosso "Scene by the brook" (the only overtly descriptive moment in the work: at 21:27 the nightingale, cuckoo and quail sing, represented respectively by the flute, clarinet and oboe, as Beethoven noted in the same score).
22:43Allegro "Merry gathering of country folk". At the end, after resuming the initial theme, after a "presto" passage, it comes the allegro, the storm, in:
28:33Allegro "Thunder. Storm." Here, too, the finale links directly to the allegretto, at:
32:30Allegretto "Shepherd's song. Cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm", The work ends when, after a suggestive passage that resembles a prayer, marked "pianissimo, sotto voce" (40:36) and after a few brief resplendent measures (41:01), it resolves with restrained verve into two chords in F major.
Just over a hundred years ago, on May 29, 1913, was premiered a classical music work that for the first time unleashed in the audience little less than a pitched battle between admirers and detractors. Among the attendants were artists and composers. Maurice Ravel found it great and the playwright and future filmmaker Jean Cocteau reacted in the same way, but the old Countess of Pourtales, according to a witness, broke her fan while exclaiming, blind with rage: "This is the first time I´ve been made fun of". Forty people were evicted from the newly opened Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, presumably after calling the police.
It all was dealing with a new, aggressive and revolutionary work: the ballet The Sacre du Printemps, with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by the Polish-born Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky.
That May 29 The mocking laughter of the audience was heard as soon as the Introduction began, soon giving way to the goofs and the whistle. Next, according to conductor Pierre Monteaux, "everything that was at hand was thrown into the orchestra even though we continued to play." The evening had begun with Le Sylphides (with music by Chopin, we know), followed by The Rite of Spring so the outrage was somehow understandable. Despite everything, the last scene was listened to in a restrained silence. After all, in a few more minutes you could enjoy Weber's The Spirit of the Rose, to end up pleasing every people with Borodin's Polovetsian Dances. That was the full program, and you just had to be patient. Thus, the evening came to an end, and with applause, despite the disturbances caused by the irreverent music of the thirty-year-old Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky.
Another commission from Diaghilev Like The Firebird and Petrushka, the score had been commissioned in 1911 to Stravinsky by the impresario Sergei Diaghilev, founder of the Russian Ballet Company that was all the rage in Paris at the beginning of the last century. After a series of interruptions due to his professional activity, when Stravinsky finally settled on the shores of Lake Leman to escape the Russian winter, in the autumn of 1912, he had pretty much finished the final score, subtitled Pictures of Pagan Russia in two parts.
Concepts design for Act I, for 1913 production
A pagan rite And yes, Diaghilev's idea was to stage a pagan ceremony. Indeed, the play stages a rite of ancient Russia where its primitive inhabitants make a human sacrifice to end winter and help bring the light and warmth of nature back. As Stravinsky recounts in his autobiography of 1936, the idea had already arisen early in his imagination: "One day [in 1910], while working on the last pages of The Firebird in Saint Petersburg I had a fleeting vision ... I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan rite: sage elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of Spring. Such was the theme of the Sacre du Printemps".
Igor Stravinsky (1882 - 1971)
The musical revolution Leaving aside the highly novel staging, with almost no specific plot and that one scholar describes rather as a "succession of choreographic episodes", The Riteof Spring completely revolutionized the musical language in vogue, subverting the three basic components of music: melody, rhythm and harmony.
The melody is simple in appearance and its motifs "seem" of folk origin, although it is a renewed folklore, in the Bartók style. But its workmanship, its "form", is new and so is the insistence with which Stravinsky repeats the themes relentlessly, without any intention of leading them to their traditional "development".
Added to this are bitonal exercises, that is, the superposition of two or more tones, with the addition of removing or suppressing certain notes to create ruptures of balance and exacerbate tensions in order to achieve a barbaric primitivism.
On the rhythmic level, in addition to the important role assigned to percussion, the listener has a permanent feeling of unpredictability, or brutality and disorder, because the rhythms become irregular by the constant change of time signature or by their highly complex application.
The "weird part" of music More than a hundred years have passed and to lay listeners or not even so this music still seems "weird" to us. A comment on YouTube is surprised to be "on the weird part of YouTube again" but is glad about it, and thanks Stravinski for having "invented the weird part" of the video host when the Internet did not yet exist. Anyway, with The Rite of Spring, Stravinsky achieved the immortal masterpiece, perhaps the greatest score of the 20th century, with an enormous influence on all subsequent composers and so far one of the most represented and recorded works of all classical music.
The original choreography Although the work is heard today mostly in an orchestral version, we have preferred to offer here the complete performance, the music together with the choreography, as this makes it easier to approach this new, highly intoxicating and revolutionary experience. The choreography is Nijinski's original, recovered and rebuilt by the Chicago Joffrey Ballet Company in 1980 after been believed lost for almost seventy years. During the Introduction, the curtains are not lifted, and the authors of the video have mounted the credits there. The first scene starts at 2:43.
Sergéi Sergéievich Prokofiev was early warned that if he intended to become the best representative of the Soviet school of music composition of the 20th century first half, he was going to have some issues with authority and the established order. At the age of eight, the composer who was later to combine tradition and modernity in an exemplary manner had already composed his first opera, entitled "Giant". The opera ends with the giant defeating a very powerful king, a plot solution that did not please his father, who recommended removing that part because it did not suit a clearly monarchical era. According to the composer's mother, Sergéi did not pay attention to such suggestions and the work was premiered at an uncle's house, with no changes to the original libretto.
Early years - The Conservatory Born in 1891 in the small Ukrainian village of Sonsovka, the little Sergéi early showed a unique talent for music. So, shortly before Sergéi turned fourteen, his parents, an agronomist engineer and a pianist mother decided his entering to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Among his teachers was Rimsky-Korsakov, the star of the Conservatory at that time but from whose lessons Prokofiev did not get any benefit, barely passing the exams. He found the courses unbearable and boring. Consequently, Prokofiev abandoned formal studies at the age of eighteen after receiving the unique diploma of "free artist", due, on the one hand, to his compositional audacity and, on the other hand, to a permanent mutual incomprehension with his teachers.
Private lessons However, two teachers from the same Conservatory will later provide him with a solid musical background, the fruit of five years of uninterrupted lessons. He was no longer unknown in St. Petersburg. He was now recognized as a revolutionary for his musical ideas, coupled with a certain intransigence because of his youth. However, his musical predilections would not yet lead him down the path of modernism. Asked in those years for his favourite authors, Prokofiev would name Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Grieg.
Sergéi Prokófiev (1891 - 1953)
Tour through Europe and the US
During the years prior to the October Revolution, Sergéi was not particularly concerned about the course of events, and before the outbreak of the revolution, he responded with a small cantata for tenor, choir and orchestra entitled Seven, they are seven. In 1918 he left Russia, first and foremost because he understood that a country in a full revolution was not the most propitious environment for composing. The end of his long journey through the US and Europe was due to similar reasons. In 1927 he had heard that the Soviet artist, free from material concerns, could devote all his time to creation. Nine years later he settled permanently in Moscow... he married a Spanish singer, became a father of two children, and turned into a renowned author of a vast instrumental and orchestral work, including chamber, opera and ballet music.
1936, the return He arrived at a good time because in spite of his flirtations with polytonality and violently dissonant harmonies picked up in his passage through the West, the Soviet authorities had identified his art with the musical conceptions of the revolution. Prokofiev would abandon violent orchestrations and give way to lyricism, also willingly accepting some impositions such as a cantata in homage to the October Revolution with texts by Marx, Lenin and Stalin. Around the same years -1936- his popular symphonic tale Peter and the Wolf was unveiled.
But as nothing lasts forever, ten years later his opera The Story of a Real Man will receive the rejection of the Central Committee, warning in it a certain "formalist and anti-popular orientation" that would be wreaking havoc on Soviet artists, including Shostakovich and Kachaturian, both authors of a work that "reveals in a particularly evident way formalist deviations and antidemocratic musical tendencies foreign to the Soviet people and their artistic tastes."
The end Not many years of life remained for Prokofiev. Neither did Stalin. But no one expected them both to die on the same day, March 5, 1953. As a result of this ominous coincidence, for three days, as the throngs gathered to mourn Stalin, it was impossible to carry Prokofiev's body out of his home for burial. Furthermore, the newspapers only reported his death several days later.
Concerto for piano and orchestra No. 3, opus 26, in C major (Use of headphones is recommended)
Of the five piano concertos written by Prokofiev between 1911 and 1932, No. 3, composed between 1917 and 1921, is the one that has garnered the greatest popularity, mainly due to its exceptional melodic and rhythmic innovations.
The concerto was premiered in Chicago on December 16, 1921, with Prokofiev performing as a soloist. In the rendition presented here, the extraordinary Chinese pianist Yuja Wang is accompanied by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by the Italian maestro Daniele Gati. Recording of October 3, 2010, at the Concertgebouw Hall in Amsterdam.
The concerto is in three movements, about ten minutes each:
Andante - Allegro It opens with a clarinet solo that the orchestra will later take for its development. After a couple of measures, the lyricism of the melody is interrupted at 1:25 by the exuberant entrance of the piano introducing the allegro. The dialogue between orchestra and soloist begins. They will end in unison in an awesome manner. ["Intermezzo" 10:00 At the reproachful or perhaps furtively lascivious look of the conductor, Yuja stretches her skirt, aware that she is showing off a lot of leg.]
Tema con variazioni (10:10) The central theme, in E minor, is followed by five variations. The movement ends in absolute stillness. (Inexplicably, in the beginning, the video puts the legend "Richard Strauss, Don Juan Op 20", a symphonic poem that obviously does not call for a piano, and even less as a soloist).
Allegro ma non-tropo (19:53) Notwithstanding the slow theme of 22:27, which at times seems to pay homage to the exiled Rachmaninov, this is the most overtly virtuous movement in the work. After a novel bitonal passage (the orchestra in G major and the piano in D major), the coda explodes in a hard battle between orchestra and soloist to finally converge in C major, the initial key, in a dramatic fortissimo.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, opera staged in the main European cities had for some time been oriented almost exclusively towards bringing to the stage, using elaborate productions, the great passions and memorable events of classical antiquity. This was accompanied by the emergence of certain idolatry for tenors and castrati, as well as an incipient divismo practiced by the prima donnas.
Intermezzi But, apparently, the public had begun to tire of so much artifice, and of course, also of the tragic theme. Therefore, it was necessary to begin to include, in the middle of the "serious" operas, some brief pieces, called intermezzi, with a deliberately cheerful and even carefree character, destined to distract of so much tragedy to a public also new, the bourgeoisie.
Simple heroes These intermissions were a respite from the mythological themes, the preening heroes and sublime sacrifices, showing completely opposite characters, born of the simplest of human vices and defects. Then, flirtatious females, jealous husbands, the cunning of young lovers and, by the way, the rages and outbursts of deceived tutors enter the scene.
Pergolesi and "La Serva Padrona"
Giovanni Batista Pergolesi (1710-1736)
Some of these intermezzi were transformed over time into true masterpieces. The best example of this is the two-act work La Serva Padrona (The Maid Turned Mistress) which, according to scholars, implanted the germ of the new opera or comic opera. The new work was born from the inventiveness of the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Draghi, also surnamed Pergolesi as his family came from the city of Pergola.
An autonomous work, until today The piece, written in 1733 as an intermezzo to another "serious" work by the same composer, was so successful as a refreshing interlude that a few years later it was performed as an autonomous work, becoming a comic opera in its own right. Although with modest periodicity, it continues to be performed to this day, and its author is still remembered for it, as well as for his notable contribution in the field of sacred music, where a famous Stabat Mater stands out.
Unfortunately, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi did not live long. He died in the city of Pozzuoli at the age of 26, probably from tuberculosis.
The characters There are only three: Uberto, an old bachelor, his maid Serpina who has ruled over the patron's house, and a mute actor, Uberto's servant. In the scene of Act I presented here, the arrogant Serpina informs her employer, Uberto, that he is forbidden to leave the house and that from now on she will be the one giving orders.
After the usual entanglements, Uberto discovers that he has always been in love with Serpina, so he ends up marrying her. Thus, Serpina truly becomes the mistress of the house, the padrona.
