It's all about the classical music composers and their works from the last 400 years and much more about music. Hier erfahren Sie alles über die klassischen Komponisten und ihre Meisterwerke der letzten vierhundert Jahre und vieles mehr über Klassische Musik.
This bespoke ‘La Traviata’ gown is a vision for the eyes and the ears…
A few years ago, Katy Perry rocked up on the Grammy Awards red carpet in a stunning gown, unusually featuring the score from Verdi’s La Traviata.
Here is the gown:
It’s pretty lovely, right?
The dress was designed by Valentino, and it took over 1,600 hours to embroider with Verdi’s score. It was named La Valse de Violetta Valéry, after the aria ‘Sempre libera degg'io’, also known as ‘Violetta’s waltz’ in the opera.
The aria brings Act I to a close, and is performed by lead soprano Violetta, a famed courtesan. After meeting Alfredo, a young bourgeois, she wonders if she could fall in love with him – but concludes she needs the freedom to live her life and sings the famed waltz.
Despite the title of the dress, music geeks noticed that the music on the score appears to be taken from earlier in Act I, from the aria ‘Dell’invito trascorsa è già l’ora’.
But heck, who cares! This is officially the most beautiful muso dress ever. Hats off to Katy Perry for bringing Verdi into the pop culture spotlight.
The history of music is steeped with unsolved, intriguing mysteries. Here are just some of the conundrums that still have us scratching our heads today.
1. What exactly is the Enigma in Elgar’s Enigma Variations?
Elgar’s famous Variations on an Original Theme is made up of a theme and 14 variations – the most well-known of which is ‘Nimrod’ (number 9).
But the theme itself has been a mystery – where did Elgar get the melody from? In a programme note the composer himself wrote:
“The Enigma I will not explain – its ‘dark saying’ must be left unguessed, and I warn you that the connexion between the Variations and the Theme is often of the slightest texture; further, through and over the whole set another and larger theme ‘goes’, but is not played…”
And that was all the incentive generations of cryptologists and music-lovers needed to try and solve the ‘enigma’ at the heart of the piece.
Many possible melodies have been put forward as the possible inspiration for the theme – the solution of the enigma – from Auld Lang Syne to a hymn by Martin Luther calledEin feste Burg (played backwards).
One music-lover, Bob Padgett, has been trying to crack the enigma since 2009 – you can read his suggested solution, including detailed cryptography, here.
But many scholars think that there is no enigma at all, that it’s all an elaborate practical joke by Elgar.
Either way, this remains one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in the history of music.
2. Who was Beethoven’s ‘immortal beloved’
Beethoven never married but one intriguing letter survives, in his hand, addressed to his ‘Immortal Beloved’.
It said: “My angel, my all, my own self… Can our love persist otherwise than through sacrifices, than by not demanding everything? Canst thou change it, that thou are not entirely mine, I not entirely thine?”
Later, he writes: “Even in bed my ideas yearn towards you, my Immortal Beloved, here and there joyfully, then again sadly, awaiting from Fate, whether it will listen to us.”
The letter was never sent and was found among the composer’s belongings after his death.
Beethoven didn’t even put a date or location on the letters – so it was only in the 1950s when an analysis of the paper’s watermark revealed that it was written in 1812.
Theories over who Beethoven was writing two have generally settled on two women – Antoine Brentano (a philanthropist and arts patron) and Josephine Brunsvik, a well-educated woman from an aristocratic family.
But the identity of Beethoven’s Immortal Beloved may be a secret he’s taken to the grave.
3. What happened to Sibelius’ Eighth Symphony?
The manuscript of Sibelius’ Eighth Symphony has mythic status in the music world. He worked on the piece from the mid-1920s until around 1938 but it was never published.
For the rest of his life he claimed he was still working on the piece, even after claims began circulating that it had been burned.
In 1945 he wrote in a letter: “I have finished my eighth symphony several times, but I am still not satisfied with it.”
He wrote almost no more music the rest of his life, and in 1957 his daughter announced that the legendary Symphony No.8 did not exist.
But then – in 1990 some fragments of the piece were discovered in one of his notebooks. So there’s a chance, a small chance, that the complete manuscript may be out there waiting to be found.
4. Where are the remains of Thomas Tallis?
In the early 18th century, clergyman John Strype is said to have came across an engraved plaque which said:
Entered here doth ly a worthy wyght, Who for long tyme in musick bore the bell: His name to shew, was THOMAS TALLYS hyght, In honest virtuous lyff he did excel.
That plaque marked the grave of the great English composer Thomas Tallis who died in 1585 and was buried at St Alfege’s Church, Greenwich.
But the church that currently goes by that name was built 200 years after Tallis died and no one know what happened to his remains. One theory is that they were simply discarded by labourers building the new church.
And that plaque? No trace remains…
5. The unsolved murder of Baroque composer Alessandro Stradella…
Alessandro Stradella’s music is among the most beautiful of the Baroque era. He wrote music for the Queen of Sweden and is perhaps best remembered for his chamber music.
But he later became the subject of an opera himself because of his colourful life and dramatic death.
From early on in his life Stradella began to make powerful enemies. He tried to embezzle money from the Church when he was living in Rome but was found out and had to flee the city. He is also known to have had high-profile affairs with women married to the most powerful men in the city.
So it can’t have been wholly surprising when an attempt was made on his life in October 1677. The assassin was hired by a man called Alvise Contarini, who had recently hired Stradella as music tutor to his mistress, Agnese Van Uffele. Inevitably, Stradella began an affair with her and the two of them ran away together. So Contarini had decided to take revenge.
Stradella survived that attempt but when he was stabbed by another assassin in Genoa in 1682 he wasn’t so lucky.
The killer was hired by a member of the noble Lomellini family, but the assassin’s identity is a mystery.
6. The mystery of the two skulls in the composer’s tomb…
Eight days after the funeral of Joseph Haydn in May 1809, two phrenologists stole his head hoping to see if the composer's genius was somehow reflected in the bumps and ridges of his skull.
Eleven years later, Haydn’s patron Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II wanted to have Haydn's remains transferred and was furious to find they had no skull (his wig was still in situ, however). The phrenologists gave him a different skull to bury with the rest of the body.
Many years later, in 1895, the real skull turned up again when it was willed to a music society in Vienna.
In 1954, it was finally reunited with the rest of Haydn’s body, but the substitute skull was never removed. So there are now two skulls in Haydn’s tomb, but no one knows which is Haydn’s – or who the other one belongs to…
7. How did Beethoven die?
Towards the end of his life Beethoven complained of a wide range of symptoms: abdominal pain, bronchitis, bad breath, poor digestion, not to mention his deafness.
But no one’s exactly sure what he died of. An autopsy revealed a catalogue of symptons including significant liver damage (which could have been caused by heavy alcohol consumption or a Hepitatis A infection), an excess of fluid in the skull, calcareous growths in the kidneys, a swollen spleen, a shrunken pancreas and a large amount of flued in his abdomen.
All of which means that historians and doctors can’t be sure what actually killed him.
One theory is lead poisoning – scientists recently conducted tests on strands of the composer’s hair and found signs of acute exposure to lead. In the 19th century lead was used to flavour cheap wine.
But, as of now, we don’t have a definitive answer.
8. Who really wrote Mozart’s Requiem?
This sounds like a trick question, but this is actually a mystery that has perplexed the musical world for centuries.
Mozart died before he could complete his Requiem – the final three sections don’t exist in Mozart’s original manuscript.
The work was completed by a composer called Franz Xaver Süssmayr, who may have used music by other composers to help complete the work.
Here’s our presenter John Suchet with more:
Mozart's Requiem – one of his greatest works… or was it?
Greensleeves is often cited as a piece of music by the famous British king, but actually it’s written in a style which only reached British shores after Henry’s death.
It was registered at the London Stationer’s Company (who held copyright records at the time) in 1580 under the title ‘A Newe Northern Dittye of ye Ladye Greene Sleves’ by one Richard Jones.
But he probably wasn’t the composer. And six more ballads were registered at the Stationer’s Company in the following months, including one called ‘Ye Ladie Greene Sleeves answere to Donkyn hir frende’.
So the original melodic genius behind one of the most famous tunes ever written has been lost in the sands of time, almost certainly forever.
10. Did the long-dead great composers return to us through a medium in the 1970s?
In the 1970s, Londoner Rosemary Brown caused a sensation when she claimed that dead composers were dictating new musical works to her. Debussy, Grieg, Liszt, Chopin, Stravinsky, Bach, Brahms, Beethoven, Schumann and Rachmaninov were all queuing up to get their compositions through to her, she said.
An obituary in The Guardian said: "While most mediums claiming to receive music extrasensorily from deceased composers do so through improvising at the piano, Rosemary's distinctive achievement lay in being able to write it down."
Reportedly a mediocre pianist herself, Brown even channelled a 40-page sonata from Schubert, as well as Beethoven's 10th and 11th Symphonies.
One Liszt expert, hearing a piece she claimed to be communicating from the composer himself, said: "We must be grateful to Mrs Brown for making it available to us."
Herbert Blomsted is a true icon of classical music. He celebrated his 90th birthday in July this year but he’s just recorded all nine of Beethoven’s symphonies, will be performing at the Barbican this month and isn’t thinking of retiring any time soon…
How did you decide to become a conductor?
Unlike some of my colleagues, I did not dream of becoming a conductor. I loved orchestra music – when I was at school I listened to two symphony concerts a week in Gothenburg. But I played the violin and I was more fascinated by playing the string quartets of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. My brother played the cello and tougher we dreamed of find a couple of lovely girls who played the viola and violin, and we’d find two houses by a lake and play string quartets every day.
Of course that didn’t happen. The real change in direction came when I studied at the conservatory in Stockholm and I was chosen to conduct Brahms’ Requiem one semester. That was the beginning of it.
What’s your advice for young musicians just starting out on their careers now?
Get a good musical training, whatever musical instrument you play. I was a violinist and then an organist also. But it doesn’t matter so much what instrument you play, but that you have to get a very good musical training and knowledge of theoretical subjects – harmony, counterpoint and so on. Only if a conductor starts out as a good musician does he stand any chance. To start too early to wave your hands in front of a professional orchestra doesn’t bring much. You might get some flashy emotional things if you conduct a Mahler piece, but conduct a minuet from Haydn and see if you can get some music out of that.
Herbert Blomstedt shows his… musical side in this video from the Berlin Philharmonic:
What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever been given?
My piano teacher at the conservatory gave me some great advice He was a pupil of Artur Schnabel. He said: you have to hear the tone in your head before you strike the key. Don’t just push down the key and then discover how it sounds, but have in your head already how you want it to sound, then try to transport it to your fingertips.
That’s very good advice for conductors too. You must never give the downbeat and then say to your self “now, how does that sound?”. You must know how you want it to sound before you even pick up the baton.
You’ve made a huge amount of recordings in your career. Is there one which stands out for you?
First, I must make a confession – I don’t listen very much to my own recordings. But I do especially remember when we recorded Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony in Dresdenwith the Staatskapelle. We had been on tour in Japan for three weeks and had played the symphony several times on tour. And when we came back to Dresden to record this piece, of course we didn’t need to rehearse at all. We just had three days to adjust to the time different and then we went into the studio and recorded this. And it’s a fantastic sound. When I listen to the end of the first movement, when you start the final crescendo, how the orchestra plays fills me with awe.
Is there a recording you’d like to go back and do it again?
Yes and no. I cannot mention a particular piece but we’ve just finished recording the Beethoven symphonies for the second time. I recorded them in Dresden 30 years ago and many things have changed since then – I have changed, the editions have changed, the orchestral seating has changed. At the time of the Dresden recordings we had the second violins sitting inside the first, but that’s not correct. In Beethoven’s time you have the second violins on the right, otherwise you cannot have the dialogue between the first and second violins.
So when I returned to these symphonies I wanted that sort of sound geography and now we also have the big advantage of using the new editions. We use the Bärenreiter editions edited by Jonathan del Mar which I think is the best edition you can have nowadays. That brings a lot of information you we didn’t have 30 years ago, particularly the metronome markings.
Why do you think audiences and musicians still love Beethoven’s music?
I think the most striking character of Beethoven’s symphonies is the will power – the resolute plan for every work. He takes us by the hand so to speak and leads us his way. It’s music that has a message, but you have to work to find that message. If you just play the notes, that does not mean that you’ve got the meaning of the music.
What role do you think music has in a politically divided world?
Music can certainly split people but it can certainly also bring people together. Music has a very big impact on the listener.
I know from many reactions I’ve had from the public how it can change people's minds and even change their whole lives by listening to a Beethoven symphony. I’ve been performing in Tokyo every year for about 40 years. Some 15 years ago I got a letter from a banker and he said he’d been thinking of committing suicide because he was so unhappy with what was happening in the world of banking – so much fraud. He was thinking, I’ve devoted my life to a business where so many bad things are happening, I cannot go on like this.
And he came to one of our concerts where we played a Beethoven symphony and it changed his life. He said, “if there’s a world where Beethoven could create this music, some 200 years ago, it must also be possible to give my work in the world a good purpose.” He was sensitive enough to understand the different moods in the music and was carried along with its sense of purpose. The music changed his life. And now every time I come back to Tokyo there’s a big box of fresh fruit waiting for me.
Finally, if you could go back in time and meet any of the composers from the past for a coffee, who would it be and why?
This is a difficult question, I would like to meet many of them! Since I was a violinist from the beginning, Bach was my musical god. The incredible talent and incredible mind – of course he was a very religious man. He was convinced that music was of divine origin and he had had divine purpose in his composing of music. The other one is Schubert. Schubert is a mystery to me – he is an incredible artist, every bar is so wonderful and fresh. Schubert composed as if he had some secret line to God himself. The second movement of his String Quintet always makes me cry. It’s so musically perfect and enigmatic that it brings me awe and wonder.
