When Chopin traveled from Paris to Majorca in 1838 in the company of George Sand and her children, he had finished only two preludes of the 26 he was going to compose. But the remaining ones were sketched out. He had worked on them for long periods, in 1836 and 1837, and his intention was to finish them there, in the peace and quiet offered by the "island of calm", as it was then called. We know that the Mallorca winter proved to be not very calm and that the stay was not entirely pleasant, but Frédérick still managed to finish his preludes.
Its fabulous construction ("I travel through strange spaces" wrote Chopin) was witnessed by Georges Sand:
"... In those moments he composed the most beautiful of those brief pages that he modestly called preludes. They are masterpieces. Several of them bring to mind [...] funeral songs.... Others are melancholy and soft [...] Others bear a mournful sadness and at the same time they enrapture the ear, they tear the heart."
Camille Pleyel, his friend and publisher in Paris, was handed the finished preludes in January 1839. For all of them, Chopin asked for four thousand francs, the approximate equivalent of about three months of teaching. Dedicated to Pleyel, the French edition appeared in September of that year. Shortly thereafter, they were published in Germany and England.
Prelude No. 6 in B minor
Unabashedly steeped in "a mournful sadness", the brief piece of fewer than two minutes length claims from the left hand the steady sustaining of an unremarked lament, a chant, an elegiac melody, while the right hand plucks simple chords with regularity.
The prelude was played for Chopin's funeral (also No. 4) by the organist of the Madeleine church. We have no doubt of the emotion that must have gripped the souls present on that October 30, 1849, at the last farewell to this other magnificent but complicated soul that Chopin was.
The rendition is by South Korean pianist Chi Ho Han, at the 2015 International Chopin Competition in Warsaw.
Robert Ley, a well-known and highly corrupt Nazi party leader who committed suicide in his cell during the Nuremberg trials, once asked Hitler why he had decided to open the annual party meeting with the overture to Richard Wagner's opera Rienzi. The dictator replied thus:
"...It's not just a musical question. At the age of twenty-four this man, an innkeeper's son, persuaded the Roman people to drive out the corrupt Senate by reminding them of the magnificent past of the Roman Empire. Listening to this blessed music as a young man in the theater at Linz, I had the vision that I too must someday succeed in uniting the German Empire and making it great once more."
Well. At the end of the war, Germany did not end up greater but rather reduced to rubble. The anecdote, however, serves to illustrate Hitler's curious fascination with Rienzi, the mythical hero of Wagner's work who will end his days trapped and defeated.
The play, whose full title is Rienzi, Last of the Roman Tribunes, is based on a novel of the same title, a 19th century best seller by an English author. It tells the story of Cola di Rienzi, a papal notary turned political leader, who lived in medieval Italy and managed to defeat the noble classes of Rome by handing over power to the people. His vicissitudes will end when he must face, with a few followers, his fatal destiny.
R. Wagner (1813 - 1893)
With texts and music by Wagner, the opera was written between July 1838 and November 1840. Its premiere, an apotheosis, took place in Dresden on October 20, 1842, and it represented the musical consecration of the composer at the age of twenty-nine. The Flying Dutchman (1841), Tannhäuser (1843), and Lohengrin(1845) were soon to follow.
The play is extensive. Originally it had five acts and its representation would take more than six hours. Wagner wrote shorter versions later, but it is still rarely performed today, although its Overture still enjoys wide public acclaim.
The Orchestra of the Franz Liszt University of Music, Weimar, conducted by Nicolas Pasquet, performs Rienzi Overture.
Around 1860, at the age of thirty-five, Johann Strauss Jr. envisioned that the Viennese waltz, the famous dance that captivated the Viennese at that time, could gain acceptance and recognition among an international audience. If, in addition, he managed to transfer to that new audience part of the spirit and charm of the land from which he came, so much the better. With this in mind, he set about composing music that would reflect the magic and enchantment of the forests surrounding 19th-century imperial Vienna.
Strauss Jr. (1825 - 1899)
Tales from the Vienna Woods And he was right. The waltz Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald is, indisputably, after the unsurpassed Blue Danube, one of Johann Strauss Jr.'s most recognized waltzes worldwide. It is a concert piece, no doubt. Its complete version lasts about fifteen minutes, although we usually hear reduced versions, with uneven results, as the conductor in charge omits the repetitions or even one or two complete pieces. Brazilian conductor and composer Fabio Costa is an exception. He is also an exception in a broader sense, as he usually addresses a few words to the audience at each concert.
Violins, in absence of a zither The work, composed in 1868 (one year after the Blue D...) originally included a virtuoso zither part. Since today, at least in the Western world, there are no "zitherists" or zither players around the corner, it is customary to replace it with a quartet of violins, or a couple of them if the orchestra is not very large. This is precisely the case with the version we present here. The sections originally commissioned to the zither correspond here to minutes 2:12 to 2:39, and 14:08 to 14:43. And the waltz proper begins at minute 3:01.
Fabio Costa conducts the Minas Gerais Philharmonic Orchestra.
Although his deafness had already begun to trouble him seriously, the thirty-year-old Beethoven entered the new century, the nineteenth, in high spirits. With his financial problems practically solved, he was encouraged to write to his friend and physician Franz Wegeler: "I can have six or seven publishers or more for every piece, if I choose; they no longer bargain with me—I demand, and they pay—so you see this is a very good thing". But in the same letter, later on, he comes clean about his health: "...my hearing during the last three years has become gradually worse... my ears are buzzing and ringing perpetually, day and night" ... "I lead a hermit's life".
1801, four sonatas All in all, it is a golden period and a highly fruitful one. If we only consider his sonata production, the year 1801 saw the birth of no less than four sonatas: the one from opus 26, the two "quasi una fantasia" sonatas from opus 27 (the popular "Moonlight", one of them) and the sonata from opus 28 in D major, called "Pastorale" not by Beethoven but by his publisher, as was customary. (It is still seven years before the symphony of the same name appears, which in this case, it seems, was so titled by Beethoven himself).
Beethoven in 1803
Sonata No 15 opus 28 in D major, called "Pastoral" - the return to the old canons Dedicated to Count Joseph von Sonnenfels, an "Illuminati" who was Mozart's friend and patron, the piece is usually received with some disdain by audiences and performers. With very little justice, indeed. A weak motivation may lie in its manifest return to the old canons in comparison with the sort of formal liberation that the three preceding sonatas represented.
It turns out that the maestro still had something left to tell us in the four-movement formal scheme of his early sonatas. He did not always have to be an iconoclast. He could also show himself as a creator of simple beauty, calm and quiet, except for the finale, the only truly "virtuosic" movement.
Movements: 00 Allegro: A pedal note on the tonic D will accompany the first 24 measures. And in one form or another, this sustained bass figure will be maintained throughout the piece. 11:51 Andante 19:57 Scherzo - Allegro vivace 22:39 Rondo - Allegro ma non troppo
The performance is by Daniel Barenboim. The cycle of the 32 sonatas, Berlin, 2005.
After slipping on the icy streets of Lüneburg in northern Germany, the future German composer and teacher Friedrich Kuhlau went blind in one eye when he was only seven years old. The family had only been there for a short time and was forced to move to a new place of residence from time to time because the father, a musician in a military band, had to follow his garrison when it was relocated.
A remarkable pianist
Born in 1786 in Uelzen, near Hanover, he finished his schooling in Brunswick at fourteen. But it was in Hamburg that he began to study piano and composition. There he composed his first works: some songs and chamber music.
And despite his early disability, by 1804 he had become a remarkable performer on the piano. Six years later, he would earn his living by giving recitals in Copenhagen, where he had fled from the Napoleonic troops that ravaged part of northern Germany in those years. He lived there until his early death in 1832.
Meeting Beethoven
Seven years earlier, in 1825, he had had the opportunity to meet Beethoven in Vienna. A great admirer of the master, after befriending him, he devoted himself to the task of making a good part of his work known in the musical circles of Copenhagen. The maestro must have been very grateful, presumably, first of all, because Beethoven was already old and had only two years left to live.
Friedrich Kuhlau (1786 - 1832)
Sonatinas, the pedagogical work
Kuhlau was a prolific composer, mainly of operas, chamber music and works for flute (the latter demanded by the economic contingency – in every house there would be a flute, we presume). Nevertheless, today he is mostly remembered for his piano works, which are highly pedagogical in value, including a concerto for the instrument. His sonatinas are the most recorded, and what we can most successfully listen to in encores. Not very demanding, they are an excellent ground for preparing the major challenge of the great sonatas, those of the maestro he admired, for example.
In a rendition by the Japanese pianist Mitsuro Nagai, the Sonatina No. 1 from opus 20, in C major, is presented here. Its eight minutes duration includes three sections: Allegro - Andante - Rondo (allegro).
