Monday, June 30, 2014

Emil Waldteufel - His Music and His Life

Emil Waldteufel was born in Strasbourg/France on December 9, 1837 and became a ball conductor at the court of Napoleon III and a chamber pianist of the Emperor Eugenie, married to Napoleon III in 1853.

Waldteufel "transplanted" the Vienna Waltz to Paris. He composed pretty much as the King of Waltz Johann Strauss, but Waldteufel never reached the same melody volume and profoundation.

Among his famous workds which are still on air from time to time are the waltzes "Schlittschuhlaeufer" (The Skater) and "Sirenenzauber" (Siren's Magic) as well as "Espana".

Emil Waldteufel passed away in Paris on February 16, 1915.

Incredible Classic Music Decor for your Home

Piano bookcase

Struggling to find a use for all the pianos you have lying around the house? (Of course you are.) Why not cut the strings, varnish the shell, and hang a grand piano on the wall as a set of musical shelves? Picture: Tina Baine

(C) by Classic FM


Monday, June 23, 2014

Carl Maria von Weber - His Music and His Life

Carl Maria (Friedrich Ernst Freiherr) von Weber (November 18, 1786 in Eutin/Germany - June 5, 1826 in London) was a German composer and key figure in the early Romantic period. He is considered to be the founder of German Romantic opera. He experienced a restless and fidgety youth. Mozart's youth traveled pale against that. 

Von Weber started with piano lessons in 1792, and, in 1797, musical theory with the great Joseph Haydn (1732-1809). The first composition Six Fughetten has been published in 1798.

Invitation to a dance (1819) and the Concert for piano and orchestra (1821) became concessions of arising "program music", the difference to "absolute music".

A child prodigy, and touring piano virtuoso as a boy, Weber grew up in a musical family. From an early age, he had a fascination for opera. His major operas are Der Freischütz (1821), Euryanthe (1823), and Oberon (1826). Weber died in London of consumption less than two months after the premiere of Oberon. When his body was finally returned to Germany for burial, the eulogy was delivered by Richard Wagner.


Anton von Webern - His Music and His Life

The Austrian Anton von Webern was born in Vienna on December 3, 1883, and studied music science with Guido Adler (1855-1941) and doctorated with thesis about Heinrich Isaac (1450? - 1517).

Von Webern became a very close friend of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), taught music theory, and conducted different choirs.

Von Webern composed especially beautiful chamber music, such as his Opus 1 "Passacaglia" from 1908. Also as very popular remaind the "Concerto for violin, piano and viola" from 1934. Von Webern used the "12-Tone-Music"-compositions technique, which has been invented by Arnold Schoenberg. Sometimes concentrating and breathless interval jumps allow only seconds- or minutes-long compositions. Von Webern's influence to young composers has been incredible strong.

Anton von Webern passed away because of a security guard's bullet in Mittersill, Austria on September 15, 1945.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Kurt Weill - His Music and His Life


Kurt Weill

One of the most versatile and influential composers of the musical theatre in the twentieth century, Kurt Weill (b. Dessau, Germany, March 2, 1900; d. New York, April 3, 1950), had two important careers, one in Germany in the 1920s, the other from his emigration to the United States in 1935 until his death. The style of his second period is sharply distinct from that of the first. Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera 1928) is by far his best known stage piece; its famous "Mack the Knife" ("Die Moritat von Mackie Messer") has been recorded countless times by an unbelievably wide range of artists (Bobby Darin, Louis Armstrong, Lotte Lenya). Weill also composed a number of "serious" works for the concert hall.

The third of four children born to a cantor in the Jewish quarter of Dessau, Weill began piano lessons at the age of twelve and soon began to write songs, mostly to the verse of serious poets. He studied piano, composition, theory, and conducting from 1915 with Albert Bing, Kapellmeister at Dessau's "Court Theatre," and occasionally performed as Bing's stand-in. At eighteen he went to Berlin to the Hochschule für Musik, and wrote his first string quartet under the tutelage of Engelbert Humperdinck (composer of Hansel and Gretel). That eminent Wagnerian apparently had little time for him, and when Weill learned that his family had fallen on hard times, he returned to Dessau.

He joined the staff of the Friedrich-Theater as a rehearsal pianist, and in 1919 obtained a post at the Stadttheater in Lüdenscheid, where he directed light opera for a few months. He returned to Berlin in late 1920 to study composition with Ferruccio Busoni, eking out a living playing the piano in a beer-hall.

Most of Kurt Weill's compositions of this period were those of a young man with high aspirations: a symphony, a choral fantasy, a psalm. The first of them to find its way to the public stage was a children's pantomime Die Zaubernacht (The Magic Night), premiered in late 1922. Soon thereafter, the Berlin Philharmonic performed his Divertimento for Orchestra and the Hindemith-Amar Quartet played his String Quartet Op. 8. In late 1923 Weill concluded his studies with Busoni and was well on his way to being seen as one of the leading composers of his generation.

In 1926, Weill's first opera, Der Protagonist, in one act, had a sensational debut in Dresden. Its librettist was Georg Kaiser, the most prominent playwright during the years of the Weimar Republic. Kaiser's expressionist style avoided characterization and psychology, relying on archetypes to focus on society's ills; his influence was strong upon the dramatists Iwan Goll and Bertolt Brecht, who would also work closely with Weill. Kaiser collaborated on two more stage works, the comic opera Der Zar lässt sich photographieren (The Czar Has His Picture Taken 1928) and a play with music, Der Silbersee (The Silver Lake 1933).

Through Kaiser, Weill met actress and singer Lotte Lenya in the summer of 1924. They would be married in 1926, divorced in 1933, and married again in the United States in 1937. Theirs was an "open" marriage that lasted until Weill's death in 1950. Lenya subsequently established the Kurt Weill Foundation for the management and promotion of his legacy.

Weill first sought a collaboration with Bertolt Brecht in 1927, in the creation of a cabaret-scaled "Songspiel," Mahagonny. Its scandalous success encouraged them to expand the work to opera length, and as Der Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), it premiered in Leipzig in March 1930. In the three years between, Brecht and Weill worked together on numerous theatrical projects, among them the wildly popular Threepenny Opera and Happy End (1929). All this time, workaholic Weill was writing critical reviews by the hundreds for the German Radio's program guide. The last collaboration with Brecht was the sung ballet Die sieben Todsünden (The Seven Deadly Sins 1933), produced in Paris (and starring Lotte Lenya) after both Brecht and Weill had fled the Nazis' rise to power.

In September 1935 Weill and Lenya (now divorced) traveled to New York. Max Reinhardt was producing an epic stage-piece by Franz Werfel, Der Weg der Verheissung (The Promised [later "Eternal"] Road 1937), for which Weill had written an ambitious score. Though this project was delayed, the Group Theatre was putting together a musical play on Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik, and finding Weill close at hand, engaged him to write Johnny Johnson. Thus for a time in 1937 two successful Weill works were running on Broadway simultaneously.
Weill pursued the foremost playwrights of the day as his collaborators: Maxwell Anderson (Knickerbocker Holiday 1938, with Weill's first standard hit "September Song"; Lost in the Stars 1949), Moss Hart (Lady in the Dark 1940, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin), and S.J. Perelman (One Touch of Venus 1943, with another timeless hit, "Speak Low," lyrics by Ogden Nash). In 1947 the Playwrights Producing Company, to which he had been elected as its only musician, brought Weill's opera Street Scene, with a libretto based on Elmer Rice's Pulitzer Prize-winning play and lyrics by the Harlem poet Langston Hughes, to Broadway.

The temperament of Street Scene (which won the first Tony Award® for Best Original Score) is a far cry from that of Mahagonny; one would hardly guess it was by the same composer. Weill had become a US citizen in 1943, and avoided using the German language again, except to write to his parents who had escaped to Israel. He had also traded the brittle, dissonant, confrontational style of his Weimar compositions for a more lyrical, pacific approach when he turned to the American theatre – indeed Weill believed his German works had been destroyed.

Shortly after his fiftieth birthday, still working overtime, Weill died of a heart attack. His death immediately stimulated a resurgence of interest in his earlier work: Der Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny is now firmly entrenched in the operatic repertory; The Threepenny Opera continues to be performed and known by heart all over the world.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Gerhart von Westerman - His Music and His Life


  Gerhart von Westerman Photo: © Ilse Buhs

He was born in Latvia's capital Riga on September 19, 1894 and passed away in Berlin on February 14, 1963.


Gerhart von Westerman was initially influenced by Strauss and the impressionist composers (as heard in his Two Ballads for baritone and orchestra), and later began to include modernist elements in his compositions, such as in the Intermezzi for orchestra Devoted a large part of his work to journalism, radio, the writing of books, the direction of the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra and the Berlin festival weeks The Divertimento, a free, abundantly expressive suite for orchestra, was performed for the first time by the Berlin Philharmonic under Furtwängler in October 1944 His melodic patterns are of a characteristic, personal kind, sometimes with a Slavic ring Von Westerman's originality, though rooted in late Romanticism, are shown by his original, refined treatment of harmony and his surprising sense of colour His great opera Promethean Fantasy, to which he himself wrote the libretto, shifts between classical antiquity and the present to unfold its theme of hubris that has brought both suffering and love to mankind.