Klaus Döring's Classical Music/Klaus Döring's Klassische Musik

  by Georg Predota , Interlude Bettina Brentano © Wikipedia She aroused the curiosity of Napoleon Bonaparte and went for intimate walks with Karl Marx. She entertained a significant passion for Goethe, who deflected her craving into an extended correspondence and companionship, and she was  Beethoven ’s muse. Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms dedicated songs to her, and the Grimm brothers devoted an edition of their fairy tales to her. Who was this incredible woman? Her name was Elisabeth Brentano, better known as Bettina. She was the sister of the famous poet Clemens Brentano, and the wife to another, Achim von Arnim, whom she bore 11 children. She never wrote poetry but her writings outraged and fascinated people, and she also composed music. Her first two songs appeared under the pseudonym “Beans Beor” (blessing, I am blessed). Approaching composition from a literary viewpoint, a number of her songs were published during her lifetime. Yo...

by Doug Thomas , Interlude Is the writer’s block (or composer’s block) avoidable? © Goalcast Being stuck in front of an empty page is quite a common phenomenon for artists, regardless of the medium or format of the art. The writer’s block is the result of the creator not being able to produce new works, and unfortunately it can last for years. It is not only measured by the time elapsed without creating, but also by the productivity over time. A disease that all artists avoid like a plague, yet as much as one can try to steer away from being left with no inspiration, it is at times unavoidable. Some composers have made it a strength, an opportunity to reset, while some have suffered from it forever. Is the writer’s block — or in this case, the composer’s block — avoidable? If so, how does one avoid the blank page as it is also known? Sergei Rachmaninoff © euroarts.com One of the most famous composers who has suffered from the blank page is of course well-knowingly Rachmaninoff, who...

Camille Saint-Saëns - Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 17 (1858) {Pascal Rogé} by  Georg Predota , Interlude  Camille Saint-Saëns in 1900 Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921) was one of the leaders of the French musical renaissance during the later part of the 19th century. He was a scholar of music history and tolerant of a wide range of musical issues and directions. He tellingly wrote: “I am an eclectic spirit. It may be a great defect, but I cannot change it; one cannot make over one’s personality.” His views on expression and passion in art conflicted with a prevailing Romantic aesthetic that was engulfed by Wagnerian influences. Camille Saint-Saëns, 1846 In his memoirs he wrote, “Music is something besides a source of sensuous pleasure and keen emotion, and this resource, precious as it is, is only a chance corner in the wide realm of musical art. He who does not get absolute pleasure from a simple series of well-constructed chords, beautiful only in their arrangement, is not r...

 by Georg Predota , Interlude Albert Einstein in 1947 © biography4u.com The German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1925 for his work in quantum mechanics, suggested “The space in which a person developed as an intellectual/spiritual being has more dimensions than the space which he occupied physically.” In a personal sense, Heisenberg might reasonably have referenced his own personal development. In a cultural sense, however, we are hard pressed to ignore the connection of Heisenberg’s statement to the multidimensional phenomenon associated with his colleague  Albert Einstein . His general theory of relativity revolutionized the field of physics, his work on the photoelectric effect won him the Nobel Prize in 1921, and his mass-energy equivalence formula “E=mc 2 ” is almost universally recognized. Yet he also exists in banal advertisements and in the fantasies of people whose daily struggles with physics center on proper...

by Georg Predota, Interlude The young Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart loved billiards, his pet starling, and food! Food was plentiful in Vienna during Mozart’s time, and a cheap and common meal would have consisted of two large meat dishes with soup, vegetables, bread, and a quarter liter of local wine.  With Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and numerous other composers hanging around, Vienna was clearly a musical center. Concurrently, it was an epicurean center that created and established the Viennese cuisine we still enjoy today. Recipes for such fabled dishes as “Wiener Schnitzel, Tafelspitz, Kaiserschmarrn, and Sacher and Linzer Torte,” became formalized and circulated in a variety of cookbooks. And Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a good and happy eater. From a journey to Milan, his father  Leopold  writes to his wife, “We are in God’s hands wherever we are. Wolfgang will not ruin his health by eating and drinking. He is fat and in good health, and is mer...

by  Frances Wilson , Interlude Yuja Wang (without score!) It’s one of the great romantic images, isn’t it? The solo performer, alone on an empty stage, faced with that huge black beast of a full-size concert grand piano, armed with nothing but his or her memory and willing, well-trained fingers. There’s a lot of snobbery surrounding memorisation, and yet it’s one of the most absurd things pianists put themselves through. We have  Clara Schumann  and  Franz Liszt  to thank (or blame!) for the tradition of the pianist playing from memory, and both were significant in turning the piano recital into the formal spectacle it is today. Before the mid-nineteenth century, pianists were not expected to play from memory and playing without the score was often considered a sign of casualness, or even arrogance: Beethoven disapproved of the practice, feeling it would make the performer lazy about the detailed markings on the score; and Chopin is repo...