Volodos - Franz Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 13

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi - His Music and Life

Born on January 4, 1710 in Ancona/Italy, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi passed away in Pozzuoli/Italy on March 16, 1736.

He became pupil of Francesco Durante (1648-1755) in Naples. Pergolesi's intermezzi did impress much. Only the intermezzo "La Serva Padrona" (1736) became his most famous work. This comic opera ("The maid as mistress") has been performed up to today. It became the oldest and alive as well as vivid opera.

Still six concertinos can be found on rare available records. Pergolesi's instrumental music pleases us especially because of its "Singing Allegros" - by the way, it impressed also and especially Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791).

Pergolesi's last work has been a "Stabat Mater", a sequence of catholic liturgy. It became one of the best church music works from Naples. Pergolesi's talent to change simple folksongs into artistic musical objects let became his works fresh, mellowness, graceful and spicy.

At the very young age of only 26, Pergolesi died in a monastery in Naples without knowing anything about his later success.

Stabat Mater ( Giovanni Pergolesi) - the great Emma Kirkby

Giacomo Meyerbeer - His Music and Life

Giacomo Meyerbeer was born on September 5, 1791 in Berlin and passed away on May 2, 1864 in Paris. His real name was Jakob Liebermann Beer. "Meyer" has been added to his family name to take possession of a big inheritance. Meyerbeer, a rich banker's son, was a really music genius. Muzio Clementi (1752-1832) and Karl-Friedrich Zelter (1758-1832) have been his well-known teachers. Meyerbeers first opera (when he celebrated his 22nd birthday!) became a flop
. He tried to survive as a pianist. Fox six years, he wasn't able to compose ven a single piece. Only after moving to Paris and adopting the French opera-style, Meyerbeer held the field. His operas consisted of emotive and sometimes histrionic terms together with big choirs and acts: "Robert, the devil" (1831), "The Hugenots" (1836), "The Prophet" (1849) and "The African" (1838). Meyerbeer seems to be forgotten up tp now because many attempts to restore his compistions have been without success. it's really a great pitey. But, you can enjoy his music in one of my radioshows...

Mozart : Violin Concerto No. 3 (Hilary Hahn)

Franz Lehar - His Music and Life

Born: April 30, 1870 Komarom Hungary

Died: October 24, 1948 (aged 78) Bad Ischl Austria

Notable Works: “The Merry Widow”

Franz Lehár, (born April 30, 1870, Komárom, Hung., Austria-Hungary—died Oct. 24, 1948, Bad Ischl, Austria), Hungarian composer of operettas who achieved worldwide success with Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow).

He studied at the Prague Conservatory. Encouraged by Antonín Dvořák to follow a musical career, Lehár traveled in Austria as a bandmaster from 1890. In 1896 he produced his operetta Kukuschka. In The Merry Widow (1905), with libretto by Viktor Léon and Leo Stein, Lehár created a new style of Viennese operetta, introducing waltz tunes and imitations of the Parisian cancan dances as well as a certain satirical element. Its success was such that two years later it was played at Buenos Aires at five theatres simultaneously. Many other operettas by Lehár followed and became well known in England and the United States under their English titles. Among them were The Man with Three Wives (1908), The Count of Luxembourg (1909), Gypsy Love (1910), and The Land of Smiles (1923). Several of his works were filmed, including The Merry Widow and The Land of Smiles. He wrote a single grand opera, Giuditta (1934), which was less successful.

Franz Lehár - Das Land des Lächelns - 'Dein ist mein ganzes Herz' - LAND OF SMILE

Johannes Brahms - His Music and Life

Johannes Brahms was born on May 7, 1833 in Hamburg/Germany and passed away on April 3, 1897 in Vienna/Austria.

Brahms became a contra-bass-player and respected horn player. As a young boy Brahms earned his livings by performing in different sailor saloons and dives.

After wretched and puny school years he did try to build up a higher education through self-confidence and self-study. Brahms surprisingly drew people's attention to his impressing piano playing, especially when he accompanied the Hungarian violinist Eduard Remeny on virtuoso touring.

In 1858, Brahms became Musical Director in Detmold/Germany. In 1863, Brahms has been in charge of the Vienna Academy of Music. As freelance artist Brahms lived a carefree life. Schubert had been forced to it, Beethoven succeeded in doing at the beginning.

The Piano was Brahms' source of composing work. He could fulfill a sonata's gigantic measurements and extents. Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms have been the "Children of Romanticism", but only Brahms has lacked the pathos of theatrical language and expressionism. But, Brahms' compositions have become a world power - equal to Beethoven and Wagner.

This space doesn't allow mentioning the whole life's work of an incredible German classical composer named Johannes Brahms.

More in my next post about him.

(To be continued!)

Johannes Brahms - Symphony No.3 - Poco Allegretto

Maurice Ravel - His Music and Life

Maurice Ravel was born on March 7, 1875 in Ciboure-Biarritz/France and passed away on December 28, 1937 in Paris. His father was a Swiss engineer automotive pioneer while his mother had been a Basque housewife.

Ravel joined the Conservatoire de Paris for an unbelievable period of 16 years. His professors were the well-known Andre Gedalge (1856-1926) and Gabriel Faure (1845-1924).

Nothing fascinated Maurice Ravel more than translating piano music into the language of the virtuoso orchestra. The time was ripe, for by 1900, Rimsky-Korsakov and Richard Strauss had brought a new opulence to symphonic scoring. Ravel was a born transcriber who prided himself on the precision of his orchestral craft as he stretched the instruments to the limits what they could do.

Like Claude Debussy ("Claire de Lune"), Ravel was trained primarily as a pianist, and most of what he wrote originated at the keyboard. But everything was fair game for his brilliant metarphormoses, not only his own piano works which were given dual lives.

Paradoxically, though he was a master of the orchestra, only three of Ravel's own symphonic works were originally scored for orchestra, beginning with the wonderful Rapsodie Espagnol from 1907, when he was akready 32 and quite famous in Europe.

Once you have heard the pizzicato strings in the role of guitars and a colorfully large orchestra glinting with percussion from Alborada del gracioso, is it hard to believe that this wonderful show piece was initially conceived to the keyboard.

Ravel's "Bolero" from 1928 is also an outstanding representative of Spanish sensuality in the form of classical music.

Ravel remained unmarried. He loved exotic cats and Japanese ornamental plants. Even experiencing a luxury life the agonizing feelings of loneliness let become Ravel mentally deranged.

“The only love affair I have ever had was with music.”

Maurice Ravel

The history of classical music, however, is full of fabulously gifted individuals with slightly more earthy ambitions. Love stories of classical composers are frequently retold within a romanticized narrative of sugarcoated fairy tales. To be sure, happily-ever-after stories do on rare occasions take place, but it is much more likely that classical romances lead to some rather unhappy endings. Johannes Brahms had an overriding fear of commitment, Claude Debussy drove his wife into an attempt at suicide, Francis Poulenc severely struggled with his sexual identity, and Percy Grainger was heavily into whips and bondage. And that’s only the beginning! The love life of classical composers will sometimes make you weep, or alternately shout out with joy or anguish. You might even cringe with embarrassment as we try to go beyond the usual headlines and niceties to discover the psychological makeup and the societal and cultural pressures driving these relationships. Classical composer’s love stories are not for the faint hearted; they are heightened reflections of humanity at its best and worst. Accompanying these stories of love and lust with the compositions they inspired, we are able to see composers and their relationships in a completely new light.

Just in Between again Mozart - Requiem/Nochmals Mozart zwischendurch

Maurice Ravel - Bolero

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Jean Sibelius - His Music and Life

Jean Sibelius was born on December 8, 1865 in Tawastehus/Finland and passed away September 9, 1957 in Helsinki.

Many of his in-laws and forefathers were well-known doctors, artists and clergy members. Sibelius began to study law at first. But unsatisfied, he changed his mind soon and shifted courses to music.

In 1890, his real composition works started. The first decade had been the most fruitful and successful period of Sibelius' whole career and life.

Finland's history and its wonderful ferry tales and legends had been inexhaustible source for symphonies and incredible orchestral suites such as "En Saga" (1892, revised in 1901), "Karelia" (1893), "Four Legends for Orchestra" (1895) and "Finlandia" (1900). Sibelius took most of his musical ideas from his native land Finland with Finnish longing and melancholy.

One might ask, whether Sibelius' "Violin Concert" was the composer's carefully planed revenge on the deities of this instrument.

In his childhood, Sibelius had first played the piano, but after a few years he switched to the violin. He later confessed: "The violin took me over completely. From then on for the next ten years or so my profoundest wish, the loftiest aspiration of my ambitions, was to become a great violin virtuoso." But Sibelius never quit managed to reach these goals. 

As I mentioned earlier: Sibelius took most of his musical ideas from his native land Finland. In this respect, the music that he wrote in 1906 for Hjalmar Procope's play "Belshazar's Feast" represents a rare excursion for the composer into the exotic and the oriental.

Swan Lake: Waltz, Schwanensee Walzer: Peter I. Tschaikowsky

Niccolo Paganini - His Life and Music

Niccolo Paganini was born in October 27, 1782 in Genoa/Italy and passed away in Nice/France on May 27, 1840. His strict father, a sales manager, expected him a daily eight-hours-training on a violin and mandolin.

In 1798, the father escaped because of the begotten mother. It's difficult to decide, while reading different encyclopedias and a published biography of Paganini, which are reality and legend regarding his life. 

The decline of the tradition of instrumental music in Italy during the 19th century, the first signs of which had appeared late in the previous century, resulted from a number of related and complex events: the dispersion of Italy's leading composers throughout Europe, the gradual and unrelenting decline of Italian orchestras and, most importantly, the evolution and spread of the operatic style. 

Whereas instrumental music on German Romanticism assumed a completely autonomous and dominant position, Italian composers felt more and more captive to the wiles of opera, gradually abandoning  thematic elaboration and a classical sense of form for a dramatic stage style.

The nature of the 19th century concerto is inseparable from the idea of virtuosity. The new audiences and institutions that promoted popular concerts contributed to the transformation of the musician into an actor. It is within the framework that one must consider the violin concertos by Niccolo Paganini, the violin virtuoso who mesmerized such as Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms.

Paganini elevated the dying tradition of improvisation to a transcendental level with his dazzling performances,a and, he gave rise to a star worship comparable to that which vocalists enjoyed, colored, however, by a "demonic" aspect unique to instrumental music. In fact, Paganini's concertos for violin show strong ties to operatic tradition in the form of numerous Rossini-like cadenzas - something in common to most Italian instrumental music of that time.

The "Concerto or Violin in d-major", composed in 1817-18 (an earlier concerto was dated 1815), gives wonderful expression to the musical charm of this epoch. From a convential and rather superficial point of view, it anticipates the 19th century tradition. The central "Adagio espressivo" transforms operatic elements of an aria to a moving and personal romance, modest, yet dignified. 

The "Concerto for Violin No. 4 in d-minor", composed in 1829-30 and first performed in Frankfurt/Main on the 16th April 1830 (and revived by Gallini in Paris in 1954!), displays a pronounced balance between melody and virtuosity.

Pagaini's play, many times, was described as "devil's play". He composed many pieces for the g-string, maybe, because during many performances his violin strings have been cut because of this "devil's play"... .

His sonatas and compositions for guitars have been forgotten since long, even wonderful to be listening. I am glad, I still have some pieces in my music library... .