Franz Liszt - Soneto Petrarca 104

The two years spent with the Countess Marie d'Agoult in the quiet peace around Geneva, and the work carried out there, made Franz Liszt the composer and brilliant pianist who would later dazzle entire Europe. In 1838, at the age of twenty-seven, he decided that it was time to embark on the proverbial pilgrimage to Italy and set out there with his inseparable Marie. In Milan he performed at La Scala with a repertoire made up entirely of Beethoven's sonatas, thus inaugurating the monographic recitals, dedicated to a single composer. But the Milanese public was not prepared. They would have listened delightfully to fantasies about Bellini or Donizetti, but not to the Bonn maestro yet. He had died eleven years ago but his music still did not arise admiration of a common audience.

Settled in Rome
So on this first visit to Italy, Liszt was far from provoking the enthusiasm in the audience that would soon be the norm. However, the trip in the company of Marie bore fruit in another sense: Italy, its landscapes and its culture exerted a great attraction on the couple, and at the beginning of 1839, with their two little daughters, Blandine and Cosima, they settled in Rome. They stayed there for ten months, soaking up Italian art and receiving the birth of their third child, a boy.

Marie d'Agoult (1805 - 1876)

The tours, and the breakup
Rome became the center of the musician's operations and from there he undertook tours to practically all European cities. When she was not traveling with him, Marie, a faithful lover, would wait for him longingly and upon his return she would lavish her love without measure, until she learned that there was no tour in which her beloved did not run into a love affair. Franz's indefatigable conduct, sustained for years, eventually led to the couple's breakup in 1844.

Years of pilgrimage
Années de Pelerinage is a set of three piano suites composed by Franz Liszt over a long period, approximately between 1837 and 1877. Franz captured in them the fascination that the landscapes and personal stories experienced in his continuous travels aroused in him. The second suite, entitled "Italia", incorporates revisions of the Tri sonetti del Petrarca, composed around 1839-1846, this time not inspired by landscapes but by reading the sonnets of the Italian poet.

The piece inspired by Sonnet 104 is presented here, performed by pianist Anna Fedorova, born in Kiev, Ukraine, just 23 years ago. (The quality of the video allows you to enjoy it in full screen.)

Cécile Chaminade, "Automme"

French pianist and composer Cécile Chaminade was born in Paris in 1857 to a wealthy arts-loving middle-class family. Her mother sang and played the piano, and naturally, Cécile received the first lessons from her. At an early age she showed her talent and could have entered the Paris Conservatory, but her father, although he was also a music fan, opposed such an adventure for considering it unseemly.

A prolific author
But as the family economic situation allowed it, Cécile took private classes with renowned teachers from the Paris of the time. The girl did not miss the opportunity and at 8 years old she was writing religious music. Ten years later, she would give her first concert, and at twenty she gave recitals performing her own pieces. Throughout her life, Cécile would produce nearly 400 works, including chamber music, piano pieces, an opera, and a ballet. Famous are her melodies, vocal works with piano accompaniment that would be all the rage in the Parisian salons of the time.

Cécile Chaminade (1857 - 1944)

In the U.S.A.
It will be these pieces that will give her the greatest satisfaction. With them, she became known throughout France, England and later in the United States, where she traveled in 1908 reaping overwhelming success and popularity, to the point that a firm whose activity consisted in the manufacture of soaps began to produce them packaged in glamorous boxes that carried her signature. But it is also around this time that the composer who had won Vincent d'Indy's admiration for her Orchestral Suite from 1881 began to waver and her music to be considered vulgar parlor entertainment.


It is alleged that, after her father died, Cécile should have played the role of family provider and, since her greatest successes came from parlor music, she is forced by her publishers to write music that could be sold easily and in "large volumes". Cécile began to write, then, for the consumers' taste.

The turn of the century
On the other hand, it is also true that the author failed to understand the turn of the century. At the beginning of the new century, Cécile continued composing as if romanticism was brimming with health and strength. Forty years after d'Indy's compliments, the songwriter had barely changed her style. And far from trying to adapt to the new century, she confesses to a friend in 1920:

"... I can no longer adapt to modern music, just as I cannot adapt to modern painting, architecture, literature, mentality or morality."

The rebirth of her music
The outbreak and consequences of the First World War had ended up burying Cécile's career as a concert player since her music reflected another time, a kinder one. During her last years, Cécile and her music were forgotten, although from 1994, after the fiftieth anniversary of her death, the composer has enjoyed a rebirth, by the hand of several pianists and chamber groups.

In Rina Cellini's rendition, we listen to the concerto studio "Automme", composed in 1886, performed by the Italian pianist in the privacy of her home.

Heitor Villa-Lobos, Choro No 1, for guitar

Choro ("cry" or "lament") is a Brazilian musical form that probably emerged in the mid-1870s in Rio de Janeiro. Despite its name, it is characterized by an agitated and happy rhythm, requiring great technique and instruments mastery. From the cycle of fifteen choros that the prolific Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote for several instruments, the only guitar composition is the first of all, Choro No. 1.

Like some great composers (Brahms, for example) Villa-Lobos made a living as a young man playing in taverns of his hometown, Rio de Janeiro, where he came into this world in 1887. The son of an amateur musician from whom he received his first lessons, Heitor delighted the parishioners with the cello, although, if circumstances required, he could also play the guitar, clarinet or piano.

The first steps in his musical training take place completely outside the official institutions, about which he did not have a good opinion, to the point of having once expressed: "set foot in the academy and you will change for the worse". According to some scholars, Heitor was the son of an indigenous mother, which would explain his everlasting interest in ethno-musical travel, occasions in which he delved deep into the jungle of the north-eastern states of Brazil to soak up the folk music of those territories.

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887 - 1959)

However, upon returning from the first of his trips, he enrolled at the National Institute of Music in Rio de Janeiro. But it would be the traditional songs of the Indians of the Amazon jungle that would exert a decisive influence in the conformation of his style, completely separated from academic conventions, and rather oriented to recreate with European-Western instruments the melodies and rhythms that he heard in the Amazon.

In 1915, at the age of 28, he decided to give a concert in Rio with just music of his own authorship, which was not much appreciated due, on the one hand, to the conservatism of the audience and, on the other, to the novelty of his compositions.

However, a few years later, the Brazilian government will award him with a professional improvement scholarship in Paris. Upon his return, he was entrusted with the formation of music education in Rio de Janeiro, with which a second stage in his musical life begins, that of a pedagogue. Together, his music began to receive international recognition. The world will later be amazed by vast work. Around two thousand compositions make up his catalog, among which Choros and Bachianas Brasileiras stand out, as well as concertos for various instruments, symphonies, chamber music, ballet, pieces for piano and many others.

Talented guitarist David Russell plays for us Choro No 1.

Dvorak, Slavonic Dances - No 1 Op 46

Music with a national character sparked on in the mid-19th century after the ideas of Rousseau and other thinkers managed to awaken in European countries a movement of intellectual renewal with a marked nationalism. In the case of the Czechs and Slovaks, the consciousness of national identity was strongly reflected in them when the 1848 Prague uprising broke out against the Habsburg empire, an uprising that was later crushed like most of the same year in not a few European capitals.

An elusive language
By the time, the boy Antonin Dvorak was seven years old and, of course, he still lived in the rural town that had seen him born, a few kilometers from Prague. Five years later, his father, a trader, would send him to a nearby city to learn German, given that the nationalist efforts had not come to fruition. Antonin spent two years trying German unsuccessfully. Finally, he returned without having learned anything, however, his tutor in the language turned out to be also a music teacher, who after appreciating his amazing performance in the dance orchestra he conducted encouraged him to study music seriously.

Antonin Dvorak (1841 - 1904)

Prague and the diploma
Having overcome his father's original rejection, Antonin went to Prague in the autumn of 1857 to enroll in the city's Organ School, where he had to overcome many difficulties, precisely due to his poor command of the German language. In spite of everything, when finishing his studies, the school principal was forced to recognize, when handing him his diploma, the "brilliant talent" that the one who was going to become one of the most outstanding representatives of the Czech nationalist school, had shown.

Slavonic Dances
The year 1878 finds Dvorak turned on an acclaimed composer, encouraged by musicians of the standing of Leos Janacek and Brahms. The latter introduced him to his own editor, who after publishing his successful Moravian Duets, suggested to Antonin to compose some dances of a similar style. The result was the Slavonic Dances, opus 46, to be followed years later by those of opus 72. Both works form a cycle of sixteen dances, among which melodies based on Czech and Slavic folk dances with vernacular names predominate.

Dance No. 1 of Opus 46, a "furiant", performed by the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by the Japanese maestro Zeiji Ozawa, shortly before going bald.

Verdi - La Traviata - "Addio del passato"

La Fenice Theater, in Venice, was the stage that hosted the premiere of the opera in three acts La Traviata, by Giuseppe Verdi, on March 6, 1853. The premiere was an absolute failure, mainly because the singer who embodied Violeta, the consumptive protagonist, was quite overweight, which provoked ridicule from the audience. In the last act, there was even laughter, because after the doctor announced that Violeta had only a few hours to live, she, audacious, continued singing, just like that.

Before the premiere, and knowing that the diva was also 38 years old, Giuseppe –for those years a celebrity in Italy– had commissioned his librettist, Francesco Piave, to notify the manager of the Theater that the role of Violeta demanded imperiously "a singer with an elegant figure who must sing passionately." The mission, unfortunately, was unsuccessful. Fortunately, the following year, with another diva in the leading role, the opera received the accolades it deserved, from the public and critics.

Addio del passato
The aria Addio del passato is sang, precisely, in the third act. Violeta is alone in her room, next to her sickbed and reads a letter that the father of her beloved Alfredo has sent her, announcing Alfredo's visit. But, as Violeta exclaims ... "e 'tardi". The aria ends with a prayer that asks God for mercy, a dramatic moment when Violeta refers to herself as "la traviata", the wayward one, an expression that ended up giving the opera its title.

The rendition is by Los Angeles Opera, 2006, with Renée Fleming in the role of Violeta. The aria begins at minute 1:40. Before, Violeta reads the letter while the orchestra quotes Violeta and Alfredo's duet from the first act, Croce e Delizia. We have chosen the rendition of the beautiful Renée because she is the only one of the current sopranos who undertake the last note of the aria with a tinny voice, which is, in the opinion of this humble narrator, the right approach.