tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-37147/articlesDecoding the music masterpieces – The Conversation2021-09-20T20:06:58Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1615822021-09-20T20:06:58Z2021-09-20T20:06:58ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Stravinsky’s The Firebird<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/409436/original/file-20210702-22-1nttlld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C2525%2C2445&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Kent G Becker/flickr</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>On June 25 1910, Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird opened to acclaim at the Paris Opéra. The success propelled its composer, then aged 28, to international prominence, a position of influence he would retain for six decades.</p>
<p>The ballet’s myth-like storyline features a magical Firebird, who helps a young prince rescue a coterie of princesses from Kashchey, an evil sorcerer.</p>
<p>Based on the eponymous bird of Russian folklore, it has ultimately propagated some myths of its own - relating to the artistic ideals of the team who created it, and the narrative’s historical accuracy.</p>
<p>Most crucial, though, is the composer himself who, through successive elaborations of his own biography, engaged in myth-making on an extensive scale. Notable for what Stravinsky expert Richard Taruskin terms his “celebrated mendacity”, questions have lingered as to whether certain of the composer’s early musical ideas were as original as they seemed. </p>
<h2>Conservative ‘modernists’</h2>
<p>After The Firebird, Stravinsky’s early career was bolstered by the triumph of his next two works: Petrushka and The Rite of Spring. Given the impact of the last work in particular, it is customary to note Stravinsky’s pivotal influence on the development of musical modernism. </p>
<p>Yet in 1910, he was a largely untested novice. The Firebird was a production of the Ballets Russes, newly formed by its director, the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. For over a decade, Diaghilev had been a leading member of a group known as “Mir iskusstva” (World of Art), the title of their short-lived magazine.</p>
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<span class="caption">Tamara Karsavina as the Firebird in the 1910 Ballets Russes production.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">WIkimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Their artistic ideals, however, were far from modern. A collection of conservatives, many were from aristocratic backgrounds with a tendency toward romantic nationalism. They were aligned against both the “realist” modernism of the previous generation, and the evolving spiritual modernism of fellow Russian composers like Scriabin. Their principles were those against which socialists would soon react. </p>
<p>In a series of ventures for Parisian audiences from 1906, Diaghilev looked to Russia’s past for his sources. After discovering how expensive opera was to produce, he settled exclusively on ballet from 1910. Again, however, his musical choices were initially conservative.</p>
<h2>Repurposed myths</h2>
<p>Magical birds are not without precedent in folklore, having featured in the childhood tales of many countries, such as Germany, where a similar creature appears in Grimm’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Bird">The Golden Bird</a>.</p>
<p>Yet in Russia, the Firebird had a special significance, emerging as a nationalist symbol over the latter decades of the 19th century. Characterised as a bird of great beauty, it brought peril to those who tried to catch it or steal its glowing feathers. </p>
<p>In the Ballets Russes production, however, far from causing misfortune, when the young prince catches the Firebird it actually helps him. </p>
<p>Historians have noted the story is similar to lines from Russian poet Yakov Polonsky’s children’s poem, Winter Journey (1844). Yet the synopsis evidently is a conflation of two separate folk tales, developed by Mir iskusstva members as an export vehicle for foreign audiences.</p>
<p>Led by the choreographer Mikhail Fokine, the stories were repurposed by Alexandre Benois and Alexander Golovin, both important contributors to Ballets Russes design, and Nikolai Tcherepnin, the composer originally selected to write the Firebird’s music. </p>
<p>In short, the popular folk tale of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Tsarevich">Ivan-Tsarevich</a>, and his quest for a beautiful princess (in which the Firebird features tangentially), was blended with a separate folk tale about the evil, immortal <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koschei">Kashchey</a>, who dies at the hand of a prince who possesses a magical egg. </p>
<h2>‘New’ music</h2>
<p>Fokine, who by typical accounts was a difficult choreographer to work with, likely caused three composers to exit or decline the project. Hence, the fortuitous opening for Stravinsky, a student of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, the elder statesman of Russian music whose most progressive works were little known in the West.</p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Stravinsky (second from left) and Fokine (leaning against the piano) at a rehearsal of The Firebird, 1909.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Flickr</span></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>According to <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29954332-fokine">Fokine’s autobiography</a>, Stravinsky sat at the piano, improvising and accompanying as the choreographer first developed his ideas for the work. If this account is accurate, never again would the composer allow himself to appear so ancillary to the creative process. </p>
<p>The most noticeable element of Stravinsky’s score is the way harmonious, tonal music is given to the mortal characters – Ivan-Tsarevich and the princesses – while chromatic, non-tonal music underscores the supernatural others. </p>
<p>This clever device is, in fact, a Russian tradition. The source can be traced as far back as Mikhail Glinka’s opera <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruslan_and_Lyudmila_(opera)">Ruslan and Lyudmila</a> (1842), where a strikingly non-tonal descending scale depicts the supernatural abduction of a bride from her traditional (and tonal) wedding feast. </p>
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<p>Stravinsky, an observant student, had closely scrutinised the innovative, and increasingly non-tonal, musical works of Rimsky-Korsakov, where the device was also prevalent. </p>
<p>He elaborated on one of Rimsky’s theories to create what has been called a “ladder of thirds”. Analysis from recent decades by musicologist Taruskin, has detected this schematic underpinning large portions of The Firebird. </p>
<p>The weirdly alternating pattern of thirds generates the supernatural music of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo9L9H--t3k">the introduction</a>, the Firebird’s <a href="https://youtu.be/Yo9L9H--t3k?t=412">chromatic “swirls”</a> and <a href="https://youtu.be/Yo9L9H--t3k?t=1940">Kashchey’s motifs</a>.</p>
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<span class="caption">The piano score of Daybreak section, from Stravinsky’s Firebird.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Screenshot/Stravinsky</span></span>
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<p>Most beautifully, it also provides the hushed musical transition from the underworld to the final tableau, where Ivan-Tsarevich and the princesses celebrate victory. </p>
<p>Yet for the mortal, tonal characters, Stravinsky, in places, incorporates folk melodies, another popular tradition among Russian composers.</p>
<p>Contrast Stravinsky’s setting of a folk-tune in the <a href="https://youtu.be/Yo9L9H--t3k?t=1428">Khorovod of the Princesses</a> from The Firebird, with Rimsky-Korsakov’s setting of the same melody in his <a href="https://youtu.be/yEwZfGz_tIk?t=528">Sinfonietta</a>.</p>
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<p>Stravinsky was always squeamish when questioned about his use of folk melodies, even flatly denying it. Yet as later analysis has shown, other works of this period, such as The Rite of Spring, feature them in abundance.</p>
<p>The influence of Rimsky-Korsakov can be noted in other ways, too, not least in his own opera about the very same Kashchey (1902), and his final opera, The Golden Cockerel (1908), also, tellingly, about a magical bird. </p>
<p>Indeed, if one wanted to really push the point, mention could be made of the notorious similarity of the Mt Triglav episode from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera-ballet <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YneXLIfcf-4">Mlada</a> to Stravinsky’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmRU6cJeVDs">Danse infernal</a>
in The Firebird where, in short, the plagiarism seems breathtaking. </p>
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<h2>The ‘hit’</h2>
<p>But that would miss the most important point: for audiences in the West, The Firebird was a hit. These fantastical tales of Russia’s past were woven, almost accidentally it seems, with a musical work that on foreign soil appeared unexpectedly modern.</p>
<p>The belated development of Russian music had for a century remained relatively hidden to the rest of the world. And after a long gestation, it was Stravinsky who revealed many of its treasures. </p>
<p>It was as if a baton had passed from one generation to the next, through the smallest of steps. The real genius of Stravinsky is that he was to run so far with it, and so quickly.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/161582/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Scott Davie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A ballet about a mythical bird, Igor Stravinsky’s composition has gone on to make myths of its own.Scott Davie, Lecturer in Piano, School of Music, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1597022021-07-05T20:08:12Z2021-07-05T20:08:12ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Liszt’s Consolation in D flat — serene sweetness and melancholy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/409582/original/file-20210705-35826-1kfuguv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=14%2C19%2C613%2C576&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Henri Lehmann, portrait of Franz Liszt, 1839.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Dreamy, slow-moving and gentle, the D flat Consolation is far from our accepted picture of Liszt, which is often taken from <a href="https://www.alamy.com/stock-image-franz-liszt-caricature-published-in-the-borsszem-janko-6-march-1873-164626754.html">caricatures of his solo recitals</a>: wild hair and eyes, hands flying off the keyboard. </p>
<p>It was written at a crucial turning point for the composer. Liszt’s colourful early life was chronicled, in a one-sided way, by his first mistress, and mother of his three children, Marie d’Agoult, under her <em>nom de plume</em>, Daniel Stern, in a <a href="https://www.sunypress.edu/p-3852-nelida.aspx">novella</a> later used as a basis for the 1975 film, <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073298/">Lisztomania</a>.</p>
<p>His extraordinary life to this point, breaking class barriers and performing and composing with the status of a superstar, was stranger than fiction. So it is perhaps unsurprising that in mid-life, Liszt took a new direction towards privacy, orchestral conducting and composition. Later, he freely gave of his experience as a teacher to an international audience of young, aspiring pianists. </p>
<p>Born in Hungary in 1811, Liszt developed from being a child prodigy to building a legendary touring career as a virtuoso pianist based in Paris. Still aged in his 30s, internationally famous and revered, he left this behind, settling with his later partner Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, to a quiet life in Weimar in 1848. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-liszts-piano-sonata-in-b-minor-74243">Decoding the music masterpieces: Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor</a>
</strong>
</em>
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<p>There, he embarked on an incredibly prolific decade of composition. He produced many piano works: both large, like <a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-liszts-piano-sonata-in-b-minor-74243">the great B Minor sonata of 1853</a>, and small, like the piece which is our topic today, <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/1Y2Ytma70odPNxPuwKwMZs?highlight=spotify:track:2JnAD1iDKT8cc6RuiKtTSh">Consolation No.3 in D flat</a>.</p>
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<p>Novelist George Eliot mentions in her letters that Liszt was “the first really inspired man I ever saw.” </p>
<p>She visited him in 1854 and wrote: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Genius, benevolence and tenderness beam from his whole countenance, and his manners are in perfect harmony with it. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>A poetic source?</h2>
<p>The title, Consolations, was unusual for a suite of piano pieces and is more often connected with poetry. The philosopher and composer Jean-Jaques Rousseau had published a set of songs with chamber accompaniment called <em>Les Consolations</em> in 1781 but otherwise there seems no precedent in music.</p>
<p>Still, poetry and religious contemplation inspired Liszt’s composition <em>Harmonies Poétiques et Religieuses</em> as well as the Consolations. The poetic source for the Consolations may have been an 1830 poetry collection of the same name by Sainte-Beuve. It has also been suggested the title may have the same source as the inspiration for <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Harmonies-poetiques-et-religieuses">another of Liszt’s pieces, <em>Andante lagrimoso</em></a>: a poem by Lamartine called A Tear (or Consolation). </p>
<blockquote>
<p>We feel that your tender word <br>
to others cannot be absorbed, <br>
Lord! and that it consoles <br> only those who have otherwise been unconsolable.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>One wonders if this poem was in the mind of Kazuo Ishiguro when he wrote his strange, dreamlike novel about a concert pianist, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40117.The_Unconsoled">The Unconsoled</a> (1995).</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-debussys-clair-de-lune-79765">Decoding the Music Masterpieces: Debussy's Clair de Lune</a>
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<span class="caption">Franz Liszt at the piano, circa 1869.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>The six Consolations were composed between 1849 and 1850 and the ten pieces of <em>Harmonies</em> were worked on from 1847 to 1852, the two sets linked by similar expressive content and literary inspiration. Like Beethoven, Liszt reworked and revised constantly.</p>
<p>For his piano compositions, he often simplified or refined their textures. The 1850 <a href="https://www.breitkopf.com/work/4009/consolations">Breitkopf & Härtel</a> edition of the Consolations was preceded by an earlier version composed between 1844 and 1849 (published by Henle in 1992). The most famous element of the set, the D flat Consolation No.3 <em>Lento placido</em> (slowly, placidly) was not yet present in the earlier one.</p>
<p>The six pieces of the Consolations sandwich two D flat major pieces between pairs of pieces in E major:</p>
<ol>
<li><em>Andante con moto</em> in E major<br></li>
<li><em>Un poco più mosso</em> in E major<br></li>
<li><em>Lento placido</em> in D♭ major<br></li>
<li><em>Quasi Adagio</em> in D♭ major (based on a theme by the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Weimar).<br></li>
<li><em>Andantino</em> in E major<br></li>
<li><em>Allegretto sempre cantabile</em> in E major<br></li>
</ol>
<p>After Chopin’s death in 1849 Liszt worked on a book about him over several years. This preoccupation spilled over into his writing several piano pieces with similar titles to Chopin though all of them were in Liszt’s individual style.</p>
<p>Chopin was famous for his Nocturnes and it has often been noted that in Liszt’s D flat Consolation No.3, the opening texture and first singing note, as well as the key, recall Chopin’s Nocturne Op 27 No.2. </p>
<p>Its composition coincides with Chopin’s death so, consciously or subconsciously, it is possibly a tribute to him.</p>
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<h2>Song-like narrative</h2>
<p>Liszt’s Consolation No.3 opens with repeating, long, low D flats held in the pedal. More than 20 years later, Steinway piano manufacturers presented Liszt with a new piano with a third or middle pedal (or <em>sostenuto</em>) capable of allowing one or more strings to vibrate while other strings were stopped from vibrating by the damper mechanism. (Dampers bring down a piece of felt on the string.)</p>
<p>Liszt noted that this pedal could assist in the opening bars and peaceful passages of this piece. He wrote in 1883:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In relation to the use of your welcome tone-sustaining pedal I inclose (sic) two examples: <em>Danse des Sylphes</em>, by Berlioz, and No. 3 of my Consolations. I have today noted down only the introductory bars of both pieces, with this proviso, that, if you desire it, I shall gladly complete the whole transcription, with exact adaptation of your tone-sustaining pedal.</p>
</blockquote>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/409584/original/file-20210705-35872-1lwaroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/409584/original/file-20210705-35872-1lwaroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409584/original/file-20210705-35872-1lwaroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409584/original/file-20210705-35872-1lwaroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409584/original/file-20210705-35872-1lwaroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409584/original/file-20210705-35872-1lwaroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/409584/original/file-20210705-35872-1lwaroj.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">One of Liszt’s pianos.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The piece however was certainly composed with the normal two pedals in mind. Both would be applied in the opening, marked <em>pianississimo</em> (as soft as possible) and <em>sempre legatissimo</em> (always as smoothly linked as possible).</p>
<p>For the pianist, as harmonies change above the low D flat, it is necessary to silently retake the low note as the pedal is changed, or else try a “half pedal” where lower reverberative notes survive a partial manipulation of the pedal while light upper notes do not. </p>
<p>This type of pedal use is necessary in much of Liszt’s piano writing where many decorative notes are spun above a low, pedal-held bass note. The indication, <em>cantando</em> (singing), in the third bar marks the beginning of the eloquent solo line or songlike narrative. </p>
<p>One of the charming characteristics here is the way each phrase fades out with an ornamental upward broken chord. While the accompanying harmonies are in groups of three notes (or triplets), the melodic line uses groups of two and sometimes four notes in each beat, giving a freely fluid quality, independent of the accompaniment.</p>
<p>When the lower accompanying harmonies sometimes briefly cease, the melody is left alone, creating an expressive soliloquy that seems to be almost speaking rather than singing.</p>
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<p>The texture then changes to the lightness of the higher register of the piano and the phrase endings reach further upwards creating more complex patterns of rhythm. </p>
<p>The long bass notes shift, taking us to a new, more melancholy key.</p>
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<p>With our new key, the texture is louder, enriched with more notes, and gives a series of magical alternations between serene sweetness and melancholy.</p>
<p>A final crescendo leads us to a strong return of our opening with its long D flat bass note.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/eVT-0nWQrGk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>We now hear the opening melody again but subtly transformed, lower down the keyboard.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-P5caumw9PI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>An ethereal moment is captured by an unexpected chord which sparks a floating shimmer of notes. As quietly as we began, we depart and are left suspended, freely descending. </p>
<p>The enigmatic quality of this final gesture contributes to our sense of having glimpsed a fleeting, special moment.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/tz7y_IyLwkw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>This beautiful and sophisticated work is well within reach of the amateur pianist. Its simplicity of structure, along with the charm and depth of its musical thoughts have made it a well-loved and enduring piece in piano repertoire.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/159702/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephanie McCallum is an Associate Professor in Piano at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney</span></em></p>This beautiful and sophisticated work is one of the best-loved, most enduring pieces in piano repertoire.Stephanie Mccallum, Associate Professor Piano Division, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1590572021-05-20T02:48:38Z2021-05-20T02:48:38ZDecoding the music masterpieces: how Carmina Burana, based on Benedictine poems, travelled from Bavaria to a beer ad<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/401769/original/file-20210520-21-18nrun2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Carl Orff’s <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/composers/orff/guides/story-behind-orffs-carmina-burana/">Carmina Burana</a> is one of only a handful of 20th century classical concert pieces that can claim to have become embedded in <a href="https://www.rwb.org/news/article/top-10-places-youve-heard-carmina-burana/">popular culture</a>. Its opening movement in particular has featured in epic film battle scenes, <a href="https://www.audionetwork.com/content/the-edit/inspiration/classical-music-in-ads#:%7E:text=Carl%20Orff's%20boomingly%20dramatic%20'O,for%20Carlton%20Draught%20Pale%20lager.">coffee, beer and cologne commercials</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/Tibk_QIfncQ?t=50">dancefloor hits</a> and even inspired an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIwrgAnx6Q8&t=0s">internet meme about misheard lyrics</a>. </p>
<p>Both the origins of the work and its composer are, however, much less known. Born in Munich in 1895, Orff’s lasting musical contribution outside composition was in the field of music education.</p>
<p>What we know today as <a href="https://www.ancos.org.au/pages/about-us/what-is-orff-schulwerk">Orff Schulwerk</a> is an approach to teaching music that encourages children to explore and develop their musical creativity through singing, improvisation, movement, and rhythmic play. </p>
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<p>Orff Schulwerk became influential across the West in the years after the second world war (and helped make percussion instruments in particular part of the standard kit of the school music room) but Carmina Burana — the sound of which reflects some of the vocal and percussive interests of the Schulwerk approach — dates from just before the onset of that war. </p>
<p>Premiering in June 1937 at the Frankfurt Opera, its compositional history therefore also intersects with aspects of the racial, cultural and aesthetic cultural policies the Nazi Party introduced across Germany after its rise to power in 1933.</p>
<h2>An earthy manuscript</h2>
<p>The title simply means “Songs from Beuern” in Latin. Beuern is a variant of the German word for Bavaria, Bayern, but here it specifically refers to a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benediktbeuern">village south of Munich</a> at the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. </p>
<p>The village was home to a Benedictine monastery founded in 733. When it was dissolved in 1803, its library was transferred to the Court Library at Munich. </p>
<p>There, in 1847, a modern edition was made of perhaps the most remarkable work in the collection: a beautifully illuminated manuscript of secular poems in both Latin and Middle High German. These “Carmina Burana” soon became well-known across Europe.</p>
<p>In the mid 1930s Orff asked the German poet and jurist Michel Hofmann to organise 24 of those poems into a libretto for what he envisioned as a kind of secular oratorio with staging elements. The original poems had been preserved with their own melodies, but Orff was not aware of their existence when composing his own settings.</p>
<p>The full title — Songs of Beuern: Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magical images — reminds us the original performances were more than concerts. They were envisioned as theatrical events. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400927/original/file-20210517-17-94cch1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Ancient illuminated manuscript." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400927/original/file-20210517-17-94cch1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/400927/original/file-20210517-17-94cch1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=872&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400927/original/file-20210517-17-94cch1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=872&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400927/original/file-20210517-17-94cch1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=872&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400927/original/file-20210517-17-94cch1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1096&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400927/original/file-20210517-17-94cch1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1096&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/400927/original/file-20210517-17-94cch1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1096&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Codex Buranus (Carmina Burana) with the Wheel of Fortune, Bavarian State Library, Munich. Circa 1230.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CarminaBurana_wheel.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The famous opening chorus, <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAMgFhi4-AI">O Fortuna, velut Luna</a></em> (O Fortune, like the moon) refers to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rota_Fortunae">Wheel of Fortune</a> and the vagaries of fate. Returning in full at the end, the chorus gives the work a dramatic and musical frame. </p>
<p>Inside that frame, Orff and his librettist placed three groups of poems that deal with, respectively, the transient joys of springtime (<em>Primo Vera</em>), the tavern (<em>In Taberna</em>), and erotic love (<em>Cour d’amours</em>). </p>
<p>Much of the pleasure I suspect we receive from Carmina Burana comes not just from the high literary quality of these poems but also from the fact they concern themselves with topics far from what we might imagine were the usual interests of a benedictine monastery. They can be punchy, earthy, funny — and sometimes surprisingly confronting. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A Roasting Swan laments its fate to those who are about to consume it.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I would challenge any carnivore to hear the extraordinary twelfth movement <em>Olim Lacus Colueram</em> (“Once I lived on lakes”) which gives voice to a roasting swan, and not be drawn to contemplate - if only for a moment - vegetarianism. </p>
<h2>But is it fascist?</h2>
<p>In his book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1199008.The_Twisted_Muse">The Twisted Muse</a> (1997), musicologist Michael Kater asserts that Orff was a central figure in what he describes as a “School of Nazi modernism” which also included composers Werner Egk, Boris Blacher, Gottfried von Einem and Rudolf Wagner-Régeny. </p>
<p>A popular and critical success from its first performance, Carmina Burana was performed regularly in Germany throughout the second world war. The subject matter certainly appealed to Nazi sensibilities that sought to legitimise the Third Reich through association with past empires, particularly the Germany of the medieval era. </p>
<p>But what about the music?</p>
<p>Being approved by a fascist regime does not in and of itself make something fascist. And, in any case, it is notoriously difficult to try and define what a fascist music might be as we are more wont to do in the case of, say, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascist_architecture">architecture</a>.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14735789909391488?journalCode=rctc19">I have suggested elsewhere</a>, we could be forgiven in fact for concluding that Nazism (and fascism more generally) is something which happens <em>to</em> music and musicians, and not something with which a musical work can be complicit in a uniquely musical way. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-nazis-used-music-to-celebrate-and-facilitate-murder-155704">How the Nazis used music to celebrate and facilitate murder</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>Yet I do think it is possible to explore such a possibility — albeit with due caution. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt">Hannah Arendt</a>, who spent a great deal of her later life trying understand how Germany had descended into fascism, described in her book <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-origins-of-totalitarianism-9780241316757">The Origins of Totalitarianism</a> one tell-tale characteristic of fascism as being the “emancipation of thought from experience”: a kind of willed stupidity.</p>
<p>Can a piece of music encourage or mimic such thinking? Can it foster a kind of of “stupid” listening? Well, as far as Carmina Burana is concerned, we might note its heavy reliance on the repetition of small musical motives does lend the work a sense of unquestioned (or, at worst, unquestionable) ritualistic force which might lead us to think something similar.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">André Rieu conducts the opening chorus O Fortuna.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A visual parallel might be Albert Speer’s infamous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Light">Cathedrals of Light</a>, the array of spotlights he used to monumentalise the Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg around the same time as Orff was composing Carmina Burana. Here we are certainly presented with an effect without just cause - the awe-inspiring vista (also achieved in no small part by the sheer blunt force of repetition) overwhelms us without encouraging us to reflect on whether that response is actually merited by what the spotlights accompany.</p>
<p>The deployment of artistic effects without legitimate justification is, however, not just a property of fascist aesthetics. It is also a commonly asserted property of <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/art-and-architecture/art-general/kitsch">kitsch</a>. Should we be surprised, then, to find that the opening chorus of Carmina Burana also now pops up in concerts by the so-called King of Classical kitsch, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJC-_j3SnXk">André Rieu</a>?</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/andre-rieu-gives-his-audience-exactly-what-they-want-entertainment-107694">André Rieu gives his audience exactly what they want: entertainment</a>
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<p>The frequent use of this opening chorus as an advertising jingle is also, I think, revealing. A famous Carlton and United advertisement for draught beer declared to its audience that they were watching, simply, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pw_twlhaUgE">a big ad</a>.” </p>
<p>Here, the ad-makers themselves seem to have recognised, named, and exploited the empty grandiosity some would say indeed lies at the heart of the music. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A Big Ad, indeed.</span></figcaption>
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<p>That opening chorus has also made an appearance in the soundtracks of numerous feature films, most notably 1981’s Excalibur, where the shared medieval fantasy elements no doubt made some dramatic sense. But it has also been <a href="https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0649758/">frequently applied</a> to subject matter far removed from medieval topics; and often for comic and ironic effect.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/06/arts/music-orff-s-musical-and-moral-failings.html">a 2001 essay</a> for the New York Times the renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin went as far as to suggest that Orff’s music “can channel any diabolical message that text or context may suggest, and no music does it better”.</p>
<p>He continued “it is just because we like it that we ought to resist it”.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/0JNlOTccdck?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Behold Excalibur!’ Carmina Burana adds oomph to an already powerful narrative.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Nevertheless, as <a href="https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/springtime-for-a-hitler-lackey/article4115552/">another commentator subsequently noted</a>, Taruskin’s description of the work’s effect is also “almost the definition of a guilty pleasure.” </p>
<p>Maybe that’s the best place for us to start our engagement with the work today. Let’s continue to enjoy and be impressed by Carmina Burana — but also let’s not forget to ask ourselves why we might find it so enjoyable and impressive in the first place.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>The <a href="https://sydneyphilharmonia.com.au/concerts/2021-season/carmina-burana/">Sydney Philharmonia Choir</a> performs Carmina Burana this weekend and <a href="https://mso.com.au/performance/carmina-burana">Melbourne Symphony Orchestra</a> will perform it in July</em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/159057/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Tregear does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Premiering in 1937 in Frankfurt during the Third Reich, there is a ritualistic force to Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. This makes it a guilty pleasure for some and perfect fodder for ad jingles.Peter Tregear, Principal Fellow, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1495282021-02-02T19:03:08Z2021-02-02T19:03:08ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Ravel’s Bolero — a sinuous and sexy composition with ‘no music in it’<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374373/original/file-20201211-15-1uv2d2p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=557%2C236%2C3970%2C2824&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dancer Ida Rubenstein performs in the original production of Boléro, 1928.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b2/Rubinst_%26_male_lead_table_1928.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It seems safe to assume a musical “masterpiece” would show compositional magnificence and garner universal acclaim — yet <a href="https://www.classicfm.com/composers/ravel/guides/story-maurice-ravels-bolero/">Maurice Ravel’s Boléro</a> (1928) is conspicuously lacking in the first.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374372/original/file-20201211-21-1jqiszq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Young man in black and white photo, 1912" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374372/original/file-20201211-21-1jqiszq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374372/original/file-20201211-21-1jqiszq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374372/original/file-20201211-21-1jqiszq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374372/original/file-20201211-21-1jqiszq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374372/original/file-20201211-21-1jqiszq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1003&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374372/original/file-20201211-21-1jqiszq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1003&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/374372/original/file-20201211-21-1jqiszq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1003&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Maurice Ravel in 1912.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/84/Maurice_Ravel_1912.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Writing to a friend shortly after finishing the work, Ravel described it as having “no form in the true sense of the word, no development, and hardly any modulation”. And to the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, he <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303552104577436853116452924">confided</a>, “I’ve written only one masterpiece – Boléro. Unfortunately, there’s no music in it”. </p>
<p>Despite these misgivings, Boléro’s instant success was a delightful surprise for the composer. A few years later, on entering the casino at Monte Carlo, he was asked if he would like to gamble. He declined by <a href="https://www.wpr.org/infamous-bolero">saying</a>, “I wrote Boléro and won — I’ll let it go at that”. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/new-music-composers-face-the-age-old-question-do-they-write-for-themselves-or-for-mass-appeal-46040">New music composers face the age-old question: do they write for themselves or for mass appeal?</a>
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<h2>Ballet beginnings</h2>
<p>The piece arose out of a commission for a new ballet from <a href="https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rubinstein-ida">Ida Rubinstein</a>, a prominent dancer formerly with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Originally, Ravel had planned to respond with an orchestration of Spanish composer Isaac Albeniz’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMnLUTKiZj0">Iberia</a> (1905–1908), but when copyright issues proved insurmountable, he decided to write his own Spanish-themed work. </p>
<p>The Spanish influence is not surprising in a work by France’s then-most-famous composer, as his mother was Basques. Nor are the obvious inflections of jazz, as the style was popular in many of the bars of Paris frequented by Ravel, and his four-month tour of the United States early in 1928 had heightened the attraction.</p>
<p>What is truly surprising is the singular premise on which Boléro is based: an experimental orchestral <em>crescendo</em> lasting a quarter of an hour, based exclusively on a two-bar rhythm repeated a staggering 169 times. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A rat-a-tat drum percussion begins.</span></figcaption>
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<p>There are but two melodic ideas in the piece, each heard twice before alternating, and always given to a new instrument or group of instruments. </p>
<p>Indeed, for a composer famous for his orchestration — both in his own compositions and in his arrangement of works by others — it is a marvel of orchestral assignment, writing for each instrument (and instrumental group) in ways that highlight particular aspects unique to them. </p>
<p>It is amusing to imagine Ravel, a self-confessed “dandy”, who once played the melody on piano for a friend, dressed in a yellow dressing gown and scarlet head cap. “Don’t you think this theme has an insistent quality?” he <a href="https://www.mso.com.au/media-centre/news/2015/01/a-listeners-guide-to-bolero/">reportedly</a> asked. </p>
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<p>The second melody contrasts with evocative repeated notes that have a flattened quality to them, these blue-note intonations no doubt contributing to what Ravel’s friend, Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, <a href="https://www.chandos.net/chanimages/Booklets/DA5055.pdf">believed</a> were “obsessive, musico-sexual” underpinnings in the work. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The second melody contributes to Ravel’s ‘musico-sexual’ score.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>The gamble pays off</h2>
<p>Almost immediately, the work found success in the concert hall, with recordings by luminary conductors like <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Serge-Koussevitzky">Sergei Koussevitzky</a> and <a href="https://nyphil.org/about-us/artists/willem-mengelberg">Willem Mengelberg</a>. The popularity of the work in the United States was aided through performances led by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/27/books/review/toscanini-biography-harvey-sachs.html">Arturo Toscanini</a>. Ravel, however, did not hide his scorn for the conductor’s interpretation: at around 13 minutes long, Ravel believed that it was played too fast. The composer’s own recording lasts over 16 minutes. </p>
<p>Toscanini believed that the work needed “saving”, yet it is arguable that, at the slower speed requested by the composer, audiences are beguiled into a state of complete enthralment. The more moderate tempo also fits better with our understanding of the composer, who had a lifelong fascination with mechanical devices. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/performing-beethoven-what-it-feels-like-to-embody-a-master-on-todays-stage-129184">Performing Beethoven - what it feels like to embody a master on today's stage</a>
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<p>Indeed, Ravel’s original scenario for the ballet built on this mechanistic idea, with the action to have taken place within a factory. In Alexandre Benois’s designs for the first production, however, the ballet was set in a Spanish tavern. </p>
<p>The combination of sinuous melody, mesmeric rhythm, and slowly building orchestral crescendo has inspired the imagination of Hollywood. In 1934, a film starring George Raft and Carole Lombard titled <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024903/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_3">Bolero</a> made much of the simmering tension underpinning the work. </p>
<p>In 1979, the music was similarly used to illustrate Dudley Moore’s attraction to Bo Derek in <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078721/mediaindex?ref_=tt_mv_close">10</a>. </p>
<p>And to universal acclaim, gold medal-winning ice-skating duo, Torvill and Dean, danced to a (considerably shortened) recording of the piece at the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNCSij0hUp8">1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics</a>. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">For many, the score immediately brings champion ice skaters Torvil and Dean to mind.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Detractors</h2>
<p>Yet there is no escaping that the singular premise of Boléro fuels the claim it is a composition with little content. According to the composer’s brother Edouard, this criticism was evident at a first performance, where an old lady <a href="https://www.wpr.org/infamous-bolero">was heard shouting</a> “Rubbish! Rubbish!” above the applause. On being informed of this, the composer responded sagely, saying, “That old lady got the message”. </p>
<p>Sarcastic remarks on Ravel’s works were made by the British composer, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/02/arts/dance-a-british-bad-boy-finds-his-way-back-into-the-light.html">Constant Lambert</a>. He claimed that in some of the composer’s pieces the repeated rhythms eventually grew tiresome. This was even more of a problem with Boléro, he stated, as it occurs “shortly after the beginning”. </p>
<p>Perhaps the funniest response to the work is Patrice Leconte’s short film, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCex9IjPNCo">Le batteur do Boléro</a>, first shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1992. After the conductor walks to the stage and the orchestra begins, the camera pans to the back of the stage, the focus landing on the percussionist tasked with playing the incessantly repetitive rhythm. The facial movements of the drummer as he endures this undertaking amount to a farcical study of the difficulties of maintaining attention, and is endlessly amusing. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">A study in concentration.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>The ending</h2>
<p>Sadly, the work was one of the composer’s last, an accident in a Paris taxi exacerbating what was possibly a latent neurological condition which drew his life to an end within a decade, incapacitated mentally and in pain. </p>
<p>While the work has proven easy to criticise, there is an element that nevertheless marks Boléro as deserving of lasting attention. Given the repetitive rhythm and the restricted melodic material, it would have been foremost in Ravel’s mind that monotony would be an issue, even with his carefully expanding orchestration. Especially in terms of its harmony, the piece is utterly welded to the key of C major. </p>
<p>Yet with a master’s understanding of the intricacies of timing, Ravel rachets the ending in two ways. </p>
<p>Firstly, he curtails the double statements of the two themes to single playings. And then, without warning, he moves the entire piece to the key of E major, a harmonically “distant” key with little relation to the home key of C major. And then, after eight glorious bars of pealing forth in this previously unimaginable harmonic region, he just as suddenly moves the music back again. </p>
<p>Given the unceasing momentum of all that has gone before, the momentary harmonic shift serves to satisfy our need for change, seemingly in an instant. And with this simple roll of the dice, Ravel likely guaranteed the lasting success of this masterpiece “without any music in it”. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The key change that brings the piece home.</span></figcaption>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-rachmaninoffs-symphonic-dances-83312">Decoding the music masterpieces: Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/149528/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Scott Davie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s repetitive — playing the same drum rhythm like a heartbeat — with two simple melodies entwined. But this masterful composition shifts just when it needs to.Scott Davie, Lecturer in Piano, School of Music, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1510922020-12-14T19:04:35Z2020-12-14T19:04:35ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Handel’s Messiah oratorio, composed in just 24 days<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/374546/original/file-20201211-21-1oxswyq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Duccio di Buoninsegna The Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, 1308-1311</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The tradition of performing George Frideric Handel’s Messiah is as inseparable from festivities preceding Christmas as the oversweet carol arrangements oozing through loudspeakers at shopping centres.</p>
<p>It’s a tradition worth noticing, as the Messiah was originally composed as an Easter offering, first performed in Dublin on April 13, 1742. With lines such as, “He was despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”, this is understandable.</p>
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<p>It is curious why this masterpiece, structured in three parts and performed for hundreds of years at Easter, gradually became a ubiquitous element of the Christmas traditions. After all, once Part I finishes, the narrative focuses on the life, suffering, death and eventual resurrection of Jesus. But over the past 70 or so years, it has become a Christmas staple, almost guaranteeing sell-out performances.</p>
<p>Messiah performances come in all sizes. The original one featured the voices of 16 men and 16 boys, accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble (most likely one player per part). </p>
<p>For many an amateur choir, this work is a recurring highlight of their repertoire. Before coronavirus destroyed so many plans, festive presentations of the oratorio included full orchestras and a large choir. </p>
<p>Though not for the purist, there have been even mightier performances in the past, where certain numbers (including the celebrated Hallelujah chorus) were sung by up to 600 non-professional, but enthusiastic singers, supported by a large orchestra and a grand organ.</p>
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<h2>A remarkable talent</h2>
<p>Handel was not an Englishman, notwithstanding the fact he spent a large part of his life in London: from 1710 until his death 49 years later. He was born in Halle, Germany, in 1685, the same year as his compatriot, Johann Sebastian Bach.</p>
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<span class="caption">Portrait of George Frideric Handel composing next to a manual harpsichord, circa 1730.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
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<p>Unfortunately, the two giants of Baroque music never met — what a conversation that could have been.</p>
<p>From his adolescence, the young Händel exhibited a remarkable talent composing, and playing organ and keyboard. He composed his first opera, Almira, at the age of 18. </p>
<p>He travelled extensively in Italy, mastering the local language and the traditions of writing opera before moving to London in 1712. He adapted to the English lifestyle well. </p>
<p>His reputation as an exceptional opera composer was such that, due to the constant demand, he composed 40 operas during the next three decades. He developed his own, idiomatic style of writing opera in Italian to such heights that he was able to write his brilliant Rinaldo in merely two weeks.</p>
<p>Some of Rinaldo’ s arias, such as <em>Lascia ch'io pianga</em>, became so famous they are regularly performed in concert performances on their own.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-rossinis-opera-otello-104760">Decoding the music masterpieces: Rossini's opera, Otello</a>
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<h2>From operas to oratorios</h2>
<p>The much-celebrated composer was also known for his astute business acumen. His investments brought him an excellent return, and he was even active on the London share market. The same shrewd sense of recognising how his artistic investments would best work helped him to change his central interest gradually from operas in Italian to oratorios in English. </p>
<p>An oratorio is somewhat similar to an opera: it is performed by solo singers, a chorus and an orchestra. Unlike an opera, however, its narrative is always based on a religious topic and it is unstaged. </p>
<p>Due to the lack of scenery, costumes and visible interaction between the singers on stage, the action in an oratorio has to be described, rather than played out.</p>
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<span class="caption">The chorus plays an important role in an oratorio.</span>
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<p>The role of the chorus is also more important, reminiscent of the traditions of ancient Greek dramas. On the practical side, putting on an oratorio was less expensive, as its success did not depend on hiring foreign (mostly Italian) star singers.</p>
<h2>A lightening pace</h2>
<p>From the early 1730s, Handel recognised a change in the taste of his audience and turned more towards writing oratorios. Messiah is his sixth work in this genre, (he wrote 25 oratorios in total).</p>
<p>As if in a frenzy, he composed the complete work in 24 days, taking about a week for each of its three parts. To assist this pace, he did recycle some of his earlier composed music, a common practice at the time.</p>
<p>The text of the oratorio is the work of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Jennens">Charles Jennens</a>. It is based mostly on the Old Testament, as it celebrates the arrival of the Messiah, the saviour of mankind, also called Jesus Christ. Unusually, there is no dialogue in it.</p>
<p>The oratorio vaguely follows the events of the liturgical year, from the virgin birth prophesied at the beginning of Part I, through the life, suffering and death of Christ in Part II, to the promise of redemption in Part III.</p>
<p>Almost all movements are vocal, with only the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnTmWTvBLWw">Pifa</a> (the sound of bagpipes, representing the shepherds arriving to Bethlehem) and the opening movement being fully instrumental. The Ouverture sets the mood of the work with a slow and majestic beginning, continuing with a lively <a href="https://courses.lumenlearning.com/musicappreciation_with_theory/chapter/fugue/">fugue</a>. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-bachs-the-art-of-fugue-73522">Decoding the music masterpieces: Bach's The Art of Fugue</a>
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<p>Most of the movements are either chorus or solo numbers, the solos being a combination of arias and recitativos. The arias usually express emotions, whereas the narrative is typically transmitted through the recitativos.</p>
<p>The latter are either accompanied by all the string players, a method called <em>recitativo accompagnato</em> (as in “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people”), or by a few bass instruments, in which case they are called <em>recitativo secco</em> (for example, “Behold, a virgin shall conceive”).</p>
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<p>There are an unusually high number of chorus movements in Messiah. No wonder it is such an eternal favourite for choirs, amateur or professional. Best loved among them is the Hallelujah chorus, ending Part II. </p>
<p>There is an endearing tradition of the audience rising from their seats as one upon hearing the opening sound. The reason for this is a mystery. The commonly cited explanation is that King George II stood up at this point at the 1743 London premiere of the work. </p>
<p>However, this seems unlikely, as His Majesty could not possibly have known what glorious piece of music was about to begin. Could the explanation for such a magisterial gesture be simply a severe case of pins and needles or some other trivial cause? </p>
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<h2>Re-orchestrated by Mozart</h2>
<p>Messiah conquered in England and on the continent. In 1776, Baron Gottfried van Swieten, an Austrian diplomat, librarian, connoisseur of music and patron and friend of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, brought the newly published score of the Messiah from London to Vienna. He wanted to hear it in a full-scale performance and commissioned Mozart to re-orchestrate the oratorio to appeal to contemporary tastes.</p>
<p>Mozart decided to use a German text based on <a href="https://www.museeprotestant.org/en/notice/martin-luther-translator-of-the-bible/">Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible</a> and added new parts for woodwind and brass instruments. He also cut a few movements and rearranged the order of others. Undoubtedly, this version sounds more powerful with the enlarged orchestral powers; there are, for example, three trombones added to the opening of the oratorio.</p>
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<p>On the sixth day of April 1759, George Frideric Handel, in poor health, bedridden and almost completely blind, made an unusual request. He wanted to go to the Theatre Royal in London’s Covent Garden, to attend a Messiah performance. </p>
<p>Very possibly, this was the last music he ever heard; barely a week later, the 74-year-old composer was dead.</p>
<p><em>A COVID-safe performance of Handel’s Messiah was performed last week in Sydney and streamed via Melbourne Digital Concert Hall. You can <a href="https://the.song.company/clear-blue-sky-2020/c/0/i/48965704/messiah-part-i">listen to it here</a>. The Messiah will also be performed at <a href="https://www.perthconcerthall.com.au/events/event/Handels-Messiah-2020">Perth Concert Hall</a> on December 19.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/151092/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Zoltan Szabo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From ‘Comfort ye’ to the Hallelujah chorus, the music of the Messiah is a much-loved Christmas tradition. Yet it was originally written as an Easter offering.Zoltan Szabo, Cellist and musicologist, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1078962019-01-23T19:04:12Z2019-01-23T19:04:12ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, an apocalyptic descent into madness<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254876/original/file-20190122-100282-ztx7is.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">John Longmuir as The Captain, Michael Honeyman as Wozzeck and Richard Anderson as The Doctor in Opera Australia's production of Wozzeck.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Keith Saunders</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Alban Berg’s Wozzeck is arguably the most important opera composed in the first half of the 20th century. It is certainly one of the most powerful, and its emotional impact remains as strong today as when it was first performed in 1925.</p>
<p>The text for the opera is drawn from Woyzeck, a play by German playwright <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_B%C3%BCchner">Georg Büchner</a> that is one of the most extraordinary dramas ever written. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-rossinis-opera-otello-104760">Decoding the music masterpieces: Rossini's opera, Otello</a>
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<p>Büchner died at the age of 23 in 1837. He left several works behind, including fragmentary drafts of his masterpiece – Woyzeck. The play was not published in the posthumous 1850 edition of Büchner’s works, whether because of its occasional obscenity, its incompleteness, or the difficulty involved in deciphering the author’s cramped handwriting.</p>
<p>It eventually appeared in print in 1876. The drama had an enormous influence on the development of modern playwriting (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertolt_Brecht">Brecht</a> was one of its warmest admirers), but it was not staged until 1913. The composer Alban Berg attended the first Vienna performances in 1914, and at once decided to make it into an opera, which became Wozzeck. (It was only discovered that the correct name of the hero was Woyzeck after Berg had composed most of the opera from an edition which printed it as Wozzeck).</p>
<h2>The torment of the humble fusilier</h2>
<p>Woyzeck is the first significant tragedy of “low” life, written in prose and with a common man as the hero. The titular Woyzeck is a fusilier in the army of his city-state (unnamed in the opera). </p>
<p>Nature plays a dominant role in Büchner’s drama. For Büchner, there is only a fragile boundary between the underlying animal aspects of human nature and morality and reasoning. These are only a veneer, easily broken down by passion into a reversion to nature. In Woyzeck, this happens when Marie, Woyzeck’s common-law wife and the mother of his child, allows the army’s Drum Major to take her to bed.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Wozzeck and the Captain (Act I scene 1). Franz Grundheber and Graham Clark in Patrice Chéreau’s production, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. From EuroArts.</span></figcaption>
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<p>A doctor’s research, which involves placing Woyzeck on a diet of only peas, and Marie’s infidelity, push Woyzeck over the thin line between moral reasoning and instinctive, natural action; between sanity and insanity. Woyzeck goes mad. But Woyzeck’s “madness” gives him an insight into the workings of nature which is superior to that of the paranoid Captain whose <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(military)">Batman </a>he is and the megalomaniac Doctor. Woyzeck can see into the abyss. </p>
<p>Having studied medicine and philosophy and lectured in natural history, Büchner possessed a unique combination of a compassionate human vision and scientific detachment. He viewed life as consisting of a sequence of separate pictures, apparently disconnected fragments. So each one of the play’s 27 short scenes presents one episode relevant to the drama of Woyzeck’s relationship with Marie. </p>
<p>This technique, which was revolutionary in the theatre – and indeed rendered Woyzeck unstageable before the 20th century – is reminiscent of German expressionist films created immediately after the first world war, particularly <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0010323/">The Cabinet of Dr Caligari</a>.</p>
<p>Büchner depicts Woyzeck’s descent into madness as the inevitable consequence of his existential terror. He imbues Woyzeck, his tormented, humble Fusilier and the victim of sexual betrayal and the Doctor’s medical experiment, with an extraordinary nobility. The text deploys language of vivid intensity, as Woyzeck struggles to express the visions which drive him to murder and madness.</p>
<h2>Visions of terror</h2>
<p>These visions are almost beyond expression in words – but not in music. In Act I, scene 2 of Berg’s opera, where Wozzeck is tormented by the apocalyptic power of Nature, the orchestra illuminates and makes real for the audience the terrors which in Büchner’s scene the audience can only imagine.</p>
<p>In the opera, the audience is forced to experience the visions from inside, from the point of view of Wozzeck. Creating that music required a creative leap by the composer, one which is still astonishing even today.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Wozzeck murders Marie (Act III scene 2). Franz Grundheber as Wozzeck, Waltraud Meyer as Marie. Directed by Patrice Chéreau, conducted by Daniel Barenboim. From EuroArts.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The Viennese composer Alban Berg (1885-1935) saw Wozzeck at exactly the right moment in his own compositional development. Berg’s composition teacher Arnold Schoenberg had begun around 1905 to write short pieces within an idiom which abandons the system of keys and key-relations, known as tonality, which is the fundamental basis of 19th-century classical music. Instead, he favoured atonality, a style in which all sounds, even piercing dissonances, are permitted. </p>
<p>In his Three Pieces for Orchestra (1914) Berg was the first composer working in this style to incorporate structural devices that enabled him to compose atonal pieces on a larger scale. </p>
<p>The final March of the Three Pieces, which Berg wrote (prophetically) just before and after the assassination of the Archduke at Sarajevo, begins quietly enough, but rapidly becomes grotesque, terrifying and brutal. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The March from Alban Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra. Live recording from the Munich Philharmonie.</span></figcaption>
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<p>This apocalyptic intensity and musical structure paved the way for Wozzeck. This opera required both extreme emotional intensity, as Berg responded with all his eloquence to the compassion and social protest of Büchner’s text – and a firm musical structure, to create unity among the diverse characters and episodes of the play.</p>
<p>Berg selected 15 of Büchner’s 27 scenes, and divided them into three Acts, each of five scenes. He then chose a musical form for each Act – Five Character Studies (Act 1), a Symphony in five movements (Act 2), and a set of six Inventions (Act 3). Within this overall design, each scene also has its own musical form. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-rossinis-opera-otello-104760">Decoding the music masterpieces: Rossini's opera, Otello</a>
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<p>Whether individual audience members consciously apprehend them or not, Berg’s chosen forms bring familiar resonances from classical music, and each one has been chosen to illuminate the dramatic and psychological essence of its scene.</p>
<p>The creative tension between overt emotional power and concealed but rigorous control is clear not only in the opera’s formal design, but also in the range of modes of vocal delivery, which extend far beyond those of classical opera. Once again, the pressure towards incoherence is counterbalanced by a minute attendance to volume and phrasing, together with precise notation of every grade of sound, from ordinary speech via pitched but half declaimed words, to full song and on to florid <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/ornamentation-music">ornamentation</a>.</p>
<p>Nearly a century after Wozzeck was first performed, it maintains a central place in the international repertory today, despite the challenges it presents to designers, directors and performers. Berg’s ability to use his extraordinary music to chart Wozzeck’s descent into madness, and the compassion with which he views his character’s suffering, have ensured its continuing acclaim. </p>
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<p><em>Wozzeck is being staged by Opera Australia in Sydney from January 25 - February 15 2019.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107896/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Ewans has written program notes for several productions by Opera Australia. </span></em></p>Based on a play by Georg Büchner, Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck brings visions of a tormented fusilier’s terror to life through music.Michael Ewans, Conjoint Professor, School of Humanities and Social Science, University of NewcastleLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1047602018-10-22T04:27:14Z2018-10-22T04:27:14ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Rossini’s opera, Otello<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/241557/original/file-20181022-105776-sqqshw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Othello and Desdemona, Henri Jean-Baptiste Victoire Fradelle, circa 1827.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Othello_and_Desdemona_(Fradelle,_c.1827).jpg">Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you attend Rossini’s opera Otello (1813) expecting something close to the structure and poetry of Shakepeare’s original – as Lord Byron did when he went to a performance in Venice in 1818 – you will be disappointed. “They have been crucifying Othello into an opera,” Byron later wrote despairingly to a friend. </p>
<p>Even before examining Rossini’s Otello on its own terms, however, it is worth remembering that Shakespeare’s play was itself an adaptation based on a short story by Giraldo Cinthio (1504–1573), first published in 1565. </p>
<p>Set in Venice and on the Venetian colony of Cyprus, Shakespeare’s play centres on the titular Othello, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moors">Moor</a> and general in the Venetian army. Othello has secretly married Desdemona, the daughter of a senator. He is ultimately undone by the plotting of a vengeful soldier, Iago, when they all travel to Cyprus, who plays on Othello’s jelousy with deadly effect.</p>
<p>Rossini’s opera follows this broad plot outline. Rossini’s librettist, Francesco Berio di Salsa (1765–1820), a minor Italian nobleman and author, chose, however, to place the opera entirely in Venice. He also makes the role of Rodrigo, the hapless suitor for Desdemona, much bigger, Jago [Iago] much smaller, and eliminates Cassio (a lieutenant) altogether.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-debussys-only-opera-pelleas-and-melisande-104691">Decoding the music masterpieces: Debussy’s only opera, Pelléas and Mélisande</a>
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<p>We should not be put off by these changes. For one thing, there is a good deal of truth in George Bernard Shaw’s witty observation that “instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of an Italian opera”. Shaw noted in particular that the character of Desdemona was already “a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prima_donna">prima donna</a>, with handkerchief, confidante, and vocal solo [the "Willow Song” in the play], all complete".</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Desdemona’s ‘Willow Song’ from Rossini’s Otello, sung by Frederica von Stade.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Rossini’s setting proved in any case to be a tremendous success, only being overshadowed by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otello">Verdi’s setting</a> of 1886. But its modern revival has been hampered by a prejudice against Rossini himself as a composer capable of truly serious intent. Indeed, when Rossini met Beethoven in 1822 the latter congratulated him on his latest triumph, <em>Il barbiere di Siviglia</em> (1816), with the, well, barbed remark: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Never try to write anything but opera buffa [a comedic opera]; any attempt to succeed in another style would endanger your nature.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Beethoven’s remark suggests an attitude that has proved hard for us subsequently to shake, one that would seek a divide between music that is venerated and that which entertains.</p>
<h2>Foregrounding race</h2>
<p>Rossini’s Otello, however, well deserves to be taken seriously. The composer’s sonically thrilling decision to exploit the vocal resources of the Teatro del Fondo Naples, where it received its first performances in 1816, and make Otello, Rodrigo and Jago all high tenors, for instance, has the effect of focusing our attention on that perennially relevant aspect of the work, racial prejudice. </p>
<p>So does the libretto. When we first encounter him, Otello appeals to the Doge (and, by extension, the people of Republican Venice) for equality as a good citizen of the city-state:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am a stranger, and a proud son of Africa
<br>
But if you find this heart worthy of you
<br>
Since I have shown my respect for your country, admire it, and love it
<br>
All I ask is acceptance as a son of Adria.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Otello then asks:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But can you really respect me? I was raised under an ungrateful sky.
<br>
My customs and my appearance must seem so strange to you.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For the people of Venice, the answer is straightforward. They love Otello for his heroic deeds and noble demeanour, and this love conquers any and all prejudice. They go on to note that it is our failure to love generously that we should fear most of all, not the presence of an outsider per se.</p>
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<p>Without ardour love may sour,
<br>
Tyranny may start to grow
<br>Without love then ardour’s power
<br> May turn pleasure into woe.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In early 19th-century Italy, such a politics of inclusion based in sentimental love was the logical consequence of Enlightenment humanism. If love can exist across political, racial and religious divides, then so must the rights and protections that a state affords its citizens. Mirroring traditional Christian doctrine, the answer to the question “Who is our neighbour?”, then must be: “Everyone!”</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-rossinis-william-tell-and-its-famous-overture-99854">Decoding the music masterpieces: Rossini’s William Tell, and its famous overture</a>
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<p>Otello’s eventual self-destruction as a result of Jago’s scheming, aided and abetted by a lovelorn Rodrigo and a Machiavellian father-of-the-bride (Elmiro), is thus all the more shocking. While it was the staging of a suicide that most likely first attracted the ire of the censors in Rome when it was performed there in 1820, the tragic ending also contained an implicit political critique. </p>
<p>That year had also witnessed an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1820">attempted revolution in Naples</a>, which sought the establishment of liberal constitutional rule across the whole of Italy. In any case, Rossini was obliged to compose an alternative “happy ending” in which all plots are revealed in the nick of time and all wrongdoers forgiven — an ending now itself consigned to history.</p>
<h2>Musical innovation</h2>
<p>Many of the particular musical innovations in Otello, however, proved much more lasting and influential. New approaches to operatic form are evident from the moment the curtain rises after the overture. </p>
<p>A lengthy <em>Introduzione</em>, involving both the chorus and a number of principals, is used to establish not only the core interpersonal conflicts but also a broader, political context for them. In so doing, Rossini provided a model for what was later to become known as “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_opera">Grand Opera</a>”. A delicious parody of this type of theatrical set piece, also set in Venice, can be found in the opening of Gilbert and Sullivan’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gondoliers">The Gondoliers</a> (1889).</p>
<p>Another innovative device that Rossini liberally deployed in Otello is the ensemble dramatic freeze, where the protagonists seem to take “time out” to reflect upon a particular conflict that has arisen. This is arguably opera at its purest and not one, but two, extended sections of such a “freeze” occur in the Act I finale of Otello, evoking similar instances in later operas by Donizetti and Verdi, among others.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Act I finale (except) from Rossini’s Otello (Blake, Cuberli, Merritt & Runey)</span></figcaption>
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<p>Perhaps the most extraordinary musical feature of Otello, however, is Rossini’s musical treatment of Desdemona. She is of course the play’s other great victim, maybe even more so given that she becomes a blameless victim of domestic violence. Rossini created a famously virtuosic soprano role (the premiere in Paris on June 5 1821 notably cast the great 19th-century diva <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuditta_Pasta">Giuditta Pasta</a>), but it is no mere “show pony” part. Indeed, Rossini gives Desdemona no formal “entrance aria” in the first act, nor any grand “love duet” with Otello. Her musical characterisation, instead, is conveyed via much more supple and original musical means.</p>
<p>Her bedroom scene in the third act, for instance, incorporates an orchestral representation of a storm, which, in the words of the Rossini expert Philip Gossett, makes Otello “the watershed between opera of the 18th century and that of the 19th”. </p>
<p>And, just before it, Rossini draws on a contemporary Venetian tradition by including an off-stage gondolier singing lines of poetry. In this case his words are taken from the fifth canto of Danto’s Inferno: “There is no greater sorrow/Than to remember happiness In time of grief.” </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Gondolier’s Song (“<em>Nessun maggior dolore</em>”)</span></figcaption>
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<p>In the estimation of that great master of Grand Opera, Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), it was this third act that established Otello’s reputation so firmly that a thousand errors could not shake it. He declared it to be: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>… really godlike, and what is so extraordinary is that its beauties are quite un-Rossini-like. First-rate declamation, continuously impassioned recitative, mysterious accompaniments full of local colour … brought to highest perfection.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Like Beethoven’s before him, however, Meyerbeer’s ever-so-slightly caustic comment ultimately reveals a bigger truth: Otello actually represents Rossini the music dramatist at his finest.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104760/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Tregear is covering the role of Elmiro for Melbourne Opera.</span></em></p>“They have been crucifying Othello into an opera,” Lord Byron later wrote after watching Rossini’s opera. But the performance does much to highlight the play’s racial politics.Peter Tregear, Honorary Principal Fellow, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1046912018-10-11T03:56:44Z2018-10-11T03:56:44ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Debussy’s only opera, Pelléas and Mélisande<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/240176/original/file-20181011-72130-zjww2r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Samuel Dundas and Siobhan Stagg in Victorian Opera's production of Pelléas and Mélisande</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Busby</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Claude Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande holds a unique place in the repertoire of turn-of-the-century France. For his only completed opera, Debussy rejected the musical and dramatic conventions of the genre, crafting a work that is as captivating as it is perplexing.</p>
<p>For years, Debussy had searched for the perfect text upon which to set his first opera. In 1899, he described his ideal librettist (the person who writes the words for an opera) as “a poet who deals in hints”, and his ideal characters as those “whose story belongs to no time or place, who submit to life and fate, and who do not argue”. It was in <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maurice-Maeterlinck">Maurice Maeterlinck</a>’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolism_(arts)">Symbolist</a> play Pelleas and Melisande (1892) that he found his ideal libretto.</p>
<p>Pelléas and Mélisande was scheduled to premiere at the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique in April 1902. Despite his initial blessings, Maeterlinck boycotted the production, and reportedly challenged Debussy to a duel over the decision to not cast his lover, Georgette Leblanc, in the leading role. A week before the premiere, Maeterlinck published a note in the newspaper Le Figaro, in which he distanced himself from the production, and wished for “its immediate and resounding failure”.</p>
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<a href="https://theconversation.com/pistols-at-dawn-why-theres-more-to-duelling-than-whats-seen-on-our-screens-101665">Pistols at dawn: why there's more to duelling than what's seen on our screens</a>
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<p>Pelléas and Mélisande tells a story of forbidden love between its title characters. Set in the fictitious kingdom of Allemonde, Prince Golaud discovers the lost and frightened Mélisande while hunting in the forest. Without learning anything about the mysterious young woman, he decides to make her his wife, and takes Mélisande back to his family’s castle. Here, she meets his half-brother, Pelléas.</p>
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<p>Pelléas and Mélisande develop a special bond that causes Golaud to become increasingly jealous and suspicious. When the pair finally confess their love for one another, Golaud suddenly arrives and kills Pelléas with his sword.</p>
<p>Soon after, the seemingly uninjured Mélisande is struck with an unknown illness. Filled with remorse, Golaud begs his wife to tell him “the truth” about her affair with Pelléas, but Mélisande’s responses are meaningless, and she dies without answering him.</p>
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<h2>An ideal libretto</h2>
<p>Debussy received permission to set Maeterlinck’s text to music in 1893, and he completed the vocal score within two years. Although opera libretti are generally adapted from existing texts, Pelléas and Mélisande fit the composer’s brief so well that he barely changed a word, cutting only four of Maeterlinck’s original 19 scenes.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-debussys-clair-de-lune-79765">Decoding the Music Masterpieces: Debussy's Clair de Lune</a>
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<p>Debussy also went further than a simple rejection of the conventional aria and recitative forms (where the singers alternate between sung speech and accompanied vocal pieces). In Pelléas and Mélisande, the rhythm and pitch of the vocal parts are aligned as closely as possible to Maeterlinck’s original French prose, leaving no room for the singers to interpret them with their own emotional inflections.</p>
<p>The result is a quintessentially French work that is impossible to translate accurately into any other language. For example, an eloquent English translation of Mélisande’s opening phrase “<em>Ne me touchez pas ou je me jette à l’eau</em>” (“Don’t touch me or I’ll throw myself into the water”) compromises the rhythmic integrity and intonation of Debussy’s original line. </p>
<p>On the other hand, G. Schirmer’s 1902 English translation is akin to spoken French, but the phrase “No, no touch me not or I shall throw me in” is both awkward and disruptive of the plain, child-like speech patterns that characterise the entire opera.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Golaud finds Mélisande: ‘<em>Ne me touchez pas</em>’</span></figcaption>
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<h2>A Symbolist score</h2>
<p>When the production company Opéra-Comique accepted Pelléas and Mélisande in 1898, Debussy finished the orchestration, adding several interludes to enable complex scene changes. While his score calls for an extended array of instruments, Debussy opts for colour rather than volume, and scarcely directs the ensemble to play in unison. </p>
<p>To mirror the suggestive hints and gestures of the original Symbolist text, Debussy weaves fleeting contributions from across the orchestra to create a subtle and allusive body of sound.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Act 1 interlude.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Pelléas and Mélisande also breaks from tradition in that it does not begin with an overture: the standard orchestral introduction. In fact, Debussy never directs the orchestra to accompany in the traditional sense. He envisioned that it would “take over what the voices are powerless to express”, and instead he tasks the instrumentalists with evoking the eerie, dream-like character of the Kingdom of Allemonde.</p>
<p>Debussy’s declaration that Pelléas was “an opera after Wagner, not inspired by Wagner” can be understood not only in the important role given to orchestra, but also in the musical motifs (particular phrases or sounds) used to represent Pelléas, Mélisande, and Golaud. </p>
<p>These frequently elicit critical comparison to Wagner’s recurring “leitmotifs”; however, Debussy’s themes are distinct in that they transform according to the emotional state of their corresponding characters, rather than simply announcing their entrance.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-wagners-ring-cycle-der-ring-des-nibelungen-20475">Explainer: Wagner's Ring Cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen</a>
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<h2>The premiere</h2>
<p>After a disastrous public dress rehearsal, during which loyal Opéra-Comique subscribers expressed their distaste for the work, Pelléas and Mélisande enjoyed a lukewarm reception on opening night. </p>
<p>Fortunately, a collective of forward-thinking Paris Conservatoire students attended the premiere and were able to counteract the hostility of Debussy’s many opponents. The opera’s director, André Messager, described the first performance as “certainly not a triumph, but no longer the disaster of two days before”.</p>
<p>With time, the opera developed a cult following, and within ten years it had become a staple of the Opéra-Comique repertoire. In an interview in 1908, Debussy reflected on the subject matter and length of Pelléas and Mélisande, and explained why it remained his only completed opera:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am not quite sure that people want any more long works … In view of modern intellectual processes, operas in five acts are tedious. I don’t mind owning that I think my own Pelléas and Mélisande far too long. In which act? Oh, it is generally too diffuse. But that is the fault of the story. </p>
</blockquote>
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<p><em><a href="https://www.victorianopera.com.au/season/pelleas-and-melisande">Pélleas and Mélisande</a> is being staged by Victorian Opera until October 13 2018.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/104691/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Madeline Roycroft does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Pelléas and Mélisande tells a story of forbidden love between its title characters, set in the fictitious kingdom of Allemonde. However the action offstage before the opera’s 1902 premiere was just as dramatic.Madeline Roycroft, PhD candidate and tutor in music history, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/998542018-07-17T20:05:13Z2018-07-17T20:05:13ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Rossini’s William Tell, and its famous overture<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/227924/original/file-20180717-44100-1k8twxn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The cast of Victorian Opera's staging of William Tell. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Victorian Opera</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Although it boasts one of the most famous sequences of music in existence, Gioachino Rossini’s William Tell is hardly a staple of the operatic repertoire. At five hours long in its original composition, and with a challengingly high male singing part, it is rarely heard in its entirety. Victorian Opera’s current production of William Tell, a three-hour abridged version, is the first in Australia in over 140 years. </p>
<p>The opera is certainly most famous for its 12-minute Overture, the piece that sets the scene for it. Few excerpts of classical music have been used (and indeed, parodied) in popular media as frequently. Now widely recognised as the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XSwVNBeNFw">theme to The Lone Ranger</a>, the tune also appeared in Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZjk-CC044s">A Clockwork Orange</a> (in an electronic arrangement by American composer Wendy Carlos). <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlcAgY-AlMk">Mickey Mouse</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj6fkrYr_ts">Bugs Bunny</a> and The Flintstones can all be credited for the Overture’s presence in popular cartoons. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The Flintstones take on Rossini’s William Tell Overture.</span></figcaption>
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<p>The work premiered at the Paris Opéra in 1829, not long after Rossini settled in France following successful tours of Vienna, Bologna, Venice and London. Yet, after only three performances, sections of the score were already being cut for the comfort of the audience. </p>
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<span class="caption">Rossini in 1829.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gioachino_Rossini#/media/File:ROSSINI-1829-Litho_Charlet_Ory.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
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<p>In 1830, the Vienna Court Opera staged their 1830 German-language version over two consecutive evenings. Accommodations like these inspired Rossini to prepare an “official” abridgement in 1831, but it was too late: a myriad of translations, adaptations and truncations had already appeared. Consequently, there are many versions of William Tell for present-day opera companies to consider.</p>
<h2>A ‘grand’ opera</h2>
<p>William Tell was the first serious opera the Italian-born Rossini authored in Paris. Upon granting his residency in 1824, the French government contracted him to produce a work for the Paris Opéra: an institution that demanded grandiose music with noble storylines, often based on heroic historical events. These productions were sung-through (dialogue detracted from the “seriousness” of the music), and the stage designs, effects and costumes were all suitably lavish. Throughout the 1830s, this style became known as “grand opera”.</p>
<p>As the composer responsible for the Italian opera craze that had swept Paris in earlier decades, it is no surprise that Rossini rose to the challenges of this elite new genre. For what would become a masterwork of the 19th century, Rossini borrowed the plot of a German play: Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (1804). </p>
<p>Appropriately grand in subject matter, the storyline follows the legendary Swiss marksman who inspired rebellion in 14th-century, Austrian-occupied Switzerland. The popularity of William Tell gave way to a golden age of Parisian grand opera. </p>
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<span class="caption">An 1860s French staging of William Tell.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stereokort,_Guillaume_Tell_1,_Arriv%C3%A9e_de_Guillaume_-_SMV_-_S150b.tif">Wikimedia</a></span>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-beethovens-mistake-became-one-of-our-most-famous-tunes-93055">How Beethoven's 'mistake' became one of our most famous tunes</a>
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<p>In addition to its use of fable, William Tell explores themes of paternal relations, and the conflicts of an occupied nation seeking independence and peace. </p>
<p>Tired of Switzerland’s continued oppression, the plot sees William Tell convince a young Austrian soldier, Arnold, to assist in a rebellion. Yet, Tell is arrested when he and his son Jemmy do not pay their respects on the hundredth anniversary of Austrian rule. </p>
<p>The Austrian governor Gesler orders Tell to shoot an apple off Jemmy’s head: if he refuses, both of them will die. In the poignant solo “Sois immobile” (“Be motionless”), Tell urges Jemmy to stand completely still and think of his mother. Despite being a male character, Rossini intended Jemmy to be performed by the higher-pitched voice of a female soprano, in line with the bizarre operatic tradition known as the “trouser role”.</p>
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<p>Although Tell successfully shoots the apple, Gesler only releases Jemmy. Upon learning of Tell’s imprisonment, Arnold becomes set on revenge, and with a rousing call “Amis, amis, secondez ma vengeance” (“Friends, friends, second my revenge”), he inspires a group of Swiss confederates to storm the capital. The repeated and sustained high notes make this one of the most demanding tenor arias in the repertoire. </p>
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<h2>An iconic overture</h2>
<p>The overture’s popularity in isolation from the larger work began with Austrian composer Johann Strauss Snr’s Wilhelm Tell Galop (premiered in 1829, mere months after the original opera). Hungarian composer Franz Liszt’s 1838 transcription for solo piano also contributed to the appeal; it was standard practice in the 1830s for touring pianists to show off with virtuosic arrangements of opera highlights, and William Tell was at the core of Liszt’s repertoire. </p>
<p>While the Finale is undoubtedly the most recognisable, the Overture is actually structured in four contrasting sections. It tells a story within itself, making it structurally distinct from anything Rossini had composed before. </p>
<p>Representing daybreak and functioning as a prelude to the upcoming three parts, the Overture opens with a gentle passage in the lower strings. A solo cello presents the melody, which then enters into dialogue with the remaining players in the section. </p>
<p>Double basses gradually thicken the texture; meanwhile, two distant timpani rolls hint at an incoming storm. For the French composer Hector Berlioz, the prelude evoked “the calm of profound solitude, the solemn silence of nature when the elements and human passions are at rest.” </p>
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<p>The upper strings (violins and violas) announce the transition to the Overture’s energetic second phase. Shimmering string phrases are punctuated by short interjections from the woodwinds, which build in intensity until dynamic brass and percussion announces the arrival of the storm. As the chaos subsides, sections of the orchestra fade away until only a solo flute remains. </p>
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<p><br></p>
<p>In the pastoral third movement, we meditate upon the plaintive tone of the cor anglais (a larger member of the oboe family). Rossini turns a <em>ranz des vaches</em> (a traditional Swiss herdsman’s melody) into a duet between cor anglais and flute, in what is now one of the most renowned orchestral woodwind solos.</p>
<p>Suddenly, the peaceful scene is interrupted by a fast-paced, high-intensity galop, which was a popular style of ballroom dance at the time. Titled “The March of the Swiss Soldiers”, it points toward the majestic final scenes of the opera, where the Swiss Armed Forces free their homeland from Austrian rule. (For the full impact of the abrupt transition, it’s best to listen to these two sections in sequence.) </p>
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<p>Despite living for another 40 years, William Tell was last opera Rossini would compose. In stark contrast to today’s circumstances, the financial viability of William Tell was such that Rossini was able to enter semi-retirement, composing only cantatas, sacred and secular vocal music until his death in 1868.</p>
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<p><em>William Tell is being staged by Victorian Opera until July 19.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99854/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Madeline Roycroft does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In its original form, Rossini’s William Tell went for five hours. Yet soon after its 1829 debut it was being cut for the comfort of its audience. Its Overture - a mere 12 minutes - has become one of the most famous pieces of classical music.Madeline Roycroft, PhD candidate and tutor in music history, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/930552018-04-11T20:06:19Z2018-04-11T20:06:19ZHow Beethoven’s ‘mistake’ became one of our most famous tunes<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210242/original/file-20180314-113465-128xcq4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C0%2C2982%2C767&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Beethoven monument on the Beethovenplatz square in Vienna, Austria. The monument was unveiled in 1880.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/beethoven-monument-on-beethovenplatz-square-vienna-541262710?src=OyPppHflWLARgUNigqV-lw-1-0">Shutterstock</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In our series <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-37147">Decoding the music masterpieces</a>, music experts explain key works of classical music.</em></p>
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<p>Without question, the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony contains one of the most famous tunes ever written. Since its first performance in 1824, the “Ode to Joy” has been repurposed in endless ways, both reverential and exploitative, from performances at the Berlin Wall to its use in tawdry advertising.</p>
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<p>This final movement, which combines voices and orchestra, is based on Friedrich Schiller’s 1786 poem extolling a humanist theme of universal joy. Beethoven started sketching ideas for a musical setting of the text in his late 20s, and, given an initial admiration for Napoleon, he was likely attracted to the poem’s revolutionary undertones. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-bachs-six-solo-cello-suites-83797">Decoding the music masterpieces: Bach’s Six Solo Cello Suites</a>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210494/original/file-20180315-104663-1mk4n7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210494/original/file-20180315-104663-1mk4n7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=721&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210494/original/file-20180315-104663-1mk4n7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=721&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210494/original/file-20180315-104663-1mk4n7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=721&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210494/original/file-20180315-104663-1mk4n7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210494/original/file-20180315-104663-1mk4n7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210494/original/file-20180315-104663-1mk4n7k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=907&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven when composing the Missa Solemnis.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Beethoven.jpg">Joseph Karl Stieler [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>Yet the Ninth Symphony is not a work from Beethoven’s rebellious youth. Rather, it is a “late” work. Premiering 12 years after his Seventh and Eighth Symphonies (and three years before his death), it followed a period in which he appears to have struggled with life. His output had dropped, certain works were of dubious merit, and he had endured a humiliating legal wrangle to gain custody of his nephew. In short, he suspected his time as Vienna’s most popular composer had ended. </p>
<p>So, why did Beethoven choose to set this text? Is it an expression of decisive optimism, a sign of deeper reconciliation, or an attempt to convey a message which would otherwise fail through music alone?</p>
<h2>‘Obstreperous roarings’</h2>
<p>Given the powerful questions the final movement of this symphony poses, and the enduring popularity of the famous tune, it is paradoxical that Beethoven thought he had made a mistake. </p>
<p>Following its first performance, he briefly canvassed plans for an instrumental replacement for the Ode to Joy. The symphonic form, as it was then understood, was not only purely instrumental but had also come to signify elemental purity. Arguably, it was a class of music that should rise above matters expressible merely in words.</p>
<p>Yet perhaps a bigger “mistake” was yet to be recognised. In the late days of the so-called “classical” period, a symphony was typically around 30 minutes long. However Beethoven challenged audiences to remain attentive here for over an hour. Similarly, orchestras were not yet as accomplished as later professional ensembles, and the taxing writing for wind and brass players – not to mention the stratospheric vocal lines – were beyond the scope of many. </p>
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<span class="caption">How the most famous bars of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, ‘Ode to Joy’, look in musical notation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Scott Davie</span></span>
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<p>Despite its commission by the London Philharmonic Society (for a fee of £50), the first performance occurred in Vienna on 7 May, 1824. It followed a petition insisting that the city be the first to hear the new work, circulated by notable supporters. Even with many fans in attendance, however, some negative views were privately expressed.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-shostakovichs-babi-yar-82819">Decoding the music masterpieces: Shostakovich's Babi Yar</a>
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<p>In London the following year, the Ninth Symphony was greeted by a hostile and conservative press, who suspected the composer’s deafness and old age had led him astray. Influential London music publication the Harmonicon described the performance as a “fearful period indeed”, which put “the patience of the audience to a severe trial”. </p>
<p>While that reviewer believed the work could be saved through massive cuts, the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review was entirely dismissive, carping about the “obstreperous roarings of modern frenzy” in art. </p>
<h2>More than a finale</h2>
<p>Within a decade, however, views about the symphony began to change. Professional orchestras and dedicated conductors – such as Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Wagner – brought order to performances, its substantial length became less remarkable, and it became a universal favourite. Yet the Ninth Symphony, which comprises of four varied movements, is about more than its culminating finale.</p>
<p>The opening of the symphony is famous for the way its powerful principal theme emerges, as if from nebulous obscurity.</p>
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<p>When this theme later returns, fury is unleashed, with pitches given to the lower instruments of the orchestra fundamentally clashing with the overall tonality of the movement.</p>
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<p>As was typical in Beethoven’s music, the closing coda section of the first movement is long, accounting for almost a quarter of its length. One passage has been thought to resemble a funeral march.</p>
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<p>A slow movement would normally follow in a traditional symphony, but Beethoven instead provides us with the humorous Scherzo (literally meaning “joke” in Italian). At first, the broader beats appear to be counted in groups of four… </p>
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<p>…yet as the movement progresses Beethoven plays a little trick, and the beats now appear in vigorous “threes”. </p>
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<p>The slow movement that follows takes the form of “double variations”, where two musical themes interplay in constantly varied form. In it, Beethoven provides a “tease” of one of the tonal shifts that will underpin a significant and revelatory moment in the final movement. </p>
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<p>The structure of the final movement is unique, to the extent that a satisfactory analysis still eludes scholarly consensus. It begins with a powerful dissonance (which Wagner described as a “horror fanfare”), which leads to a kind of double introduction, played first by the orchestra and then with chorus.</p>
<p>The baritone singer’s solo, on lines written by the composer, provides the reason for this, his statement “O Friends, not these tones!” appearing to comment on the reprise of earlier themes just presented by the orchestra. </p>
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<p>Subsequently, the “joy” theme is shared among the chorus and soloists, its treatment increasingly varied. Perhaps the most surprising variation is given a Turkish styling, the percussion instruments reminiscent of an Ottoman military band.</p>
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<p>Some have contended that this slightly farcical music is an ironic comment on the text’s earnest celebration of joy. What, then, might the non-pious Beethoven have had in mind when setting the words “Beyond the stars he surely must dwell”, words that evoke the deity? </p>
<p>It is a moment of radiant timelessness, but is it a statement or a question? The starry skies of a loving Father or, as music scholar <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/beethoven/B41EFA54A79AE247E49476ADA80BE45B">Nicholas Cook</a> has pondered, a reflection on “cosmic emptiness”?</p>
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<p>As with Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis - the magnificent large-scale work that preceded the Ninth Symphony - a comparison of the text and how the music frames it can reveal glimpses of the composer’s human face. Yet what is perhaps greatest about music (and this music in particular) is the sublimely “unprovable” nature of the medium. </p>
<p>In one sense, this is just another symphony. At the same time, however, Beethoven has created an entity, one that continues to develop in context and meaning as future generations discover it. </p>
<p>Whatever message it encloses – whatever the poem’s “this kiss for the entire world” might mean – it advances always further from its creator, while never losing its ineffable truth. </p>
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<p><em>Are you a music academic with an idea for a music masterpiece? Please <a href="mailto:%20james.whitmore@theconversation.edu.au">get in touch</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/93055/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Scott Davie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony gave us ‘Ode to Joy’, one of the most famous tunes of all time. But the composer initially thought he’d made a grave mistake with it.Scott Davie, Piano tutor and Lecturer, Sydney Conservatorium Music, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/837972017-11-26T19:09:07Z2017-11-26T19:09:07ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Bach’s Six Solo Cello Suites<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/196250/original/file-20171124-21853-fpx2mh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">shutterstock</span> </figcaption></figure><p>Johann Sebastian Bach’s Six Solo Cello Suites are some of the most iconic classical music works. They have inspired not only cellists and audiences but other artforms as well, and they have been featured in ballet and theatre productions, even in films.</p>
<p>In Peter Weir’s Master and Commander (2003), Jack Aubrey’s (Russell Crowe) first sighting of the Galapagos Islands is accompanied by the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6Ji-KDLG8Y">Prelude from Suite I</a>. </p>
<p>It is intriguing to consider what might have turned Bach’s interest towards an instrument he was not known to have played. After all, in the first three decades of his life (he was born in 1685), his artistic interest focused almost without exception on pieces that he would have either performed from a keyboard or directed, as court organist, concertmaster and trusted <em>cammer musicus</em> (chamber musician).</p>
<h2>New job, new inspirations</h2>
<p>His life and work changed considerably when he gained prestigious employment as <em>Capellmeister</em> (being in charge of music) in the court of Leopold, prince and ruler of Anhalt-Cöthen in what is now Germany. </p>
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<span class="caption">The castle at Cöthen today.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia/Matthias Alfa</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Leopold and his principality followed the Calvinist faith, a fact that had a major influence on Johann Sebastian’s life. The Calvinist liturgy allowed little if any instrumental music to be performed in the churches of the town, and for six years, between 1717 and 1723, Bach composed mostly instrumental (but not organ) and secular compositions. Bach’s six Brandenburg Concertos, the four Orchestral Suites and inexhaustible supplies of keyboard music, such as the first volume of his famous Well-Tempered Clavier, are all products of these fruitful years. </p>
<p>He also became interested in a genre that was not only new to him but also had little past history that he could rely on, and composed two sets of pieces for solo string instruments: one for violin and the other for cello.</p>
<p>The boldness of this project is hard to appreciate from our 21st-century perspective, but is nonetheless remarkable. By composing for a single string instrument, Bach entered practically uncharted waters. </p>
<p>While there was some existing repertoire written for solo violin, hardly any composer had the temerity to write solo works for a bass instrument, such as the cello. Until the first decades of the 18th century, the cello was seen as an accompanying instrument, providing harmonic foundation and accompaniment to the melody along with a number of other instruments. This was an important and functional role, but without any of the implied glory, virtuosity or elegance of a well-written work for recorder or violin.</p>
<p>A few inquisitive Italian composers experimented with promoting the cello in a soloistic role, but even the best-known of these pieces, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfYNDnfnlr8">Domenico Gabrielli’s solo Ricercari</a>, sounded quirky and innovative, rather than memorably beautiful. </p>
<p>We do not know if Bach was familiar with any of these works. When he decided to compose for solo cello, he chose a different path and turned towards a well-known if by then somewhat old-fashioned genre, the suite. This term refers to a series of dance movements in the same or related keys. </p>
<h2>The structure of the suite</h2>
<p>Each of Bach’s Cello Suites follows a similar structure. They begin – as was common practice – with a prélude, an introductory movement, which served a dual practical purpose of settling both the unstable gut strings of the cello and the all-too-frequently noisy audience. The prélude is usually the longest movement; its character can be whimsical and improvisatory. </p>
<p>Interestingly, there are no tempo markings for any of the movements given by the composer. Therefore, it is up to the performer to choose the suitable pulse for their interpretation. This can lead to significant differences, as demonstrated by the following two outstanding, but very different recordings of the first, G major Suite’s Prélude. </p>
<p>Here first is Anner Bylsma’s refined and stately performance, as a great example of historically informed performance:</p>
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<p>And here is the same movement, played almost twice as fast by the flamboyant German cellist, Heinrich Schiff:</p>
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<p>The dance movements, coming after the Prélude, always follow the same sequence, originating from different countries: first comes the Allemande from German lands, then the Courante (French), and then the Sarabande (Spanish). The fourth dance is a pair of so-called Gallantries: Minuets, Bourrées or Gavottes vary between the suites. The final dance is an English Gigue. </p>
<p>Although we have no evidence to suggest the actual order in which the suites were composed, all published versions start with the easiest (Suite I in G major) and move to the hardest.</p>
<p>For Suite V in C minor, following the composer’s instructions, the cellist has to tune the top A string down to G, a process referred to as <em>scordatura</em>. The use of this ingenious technique (common in Baroque times, much less so in our days) changes the cello’s sound considerably. Somewhat confusingly, this means that the performer will play exactly what is in the written music, but will hear different notes from what he or she sees. </p>
<p>The instrument needed for Suite VI in D major is, in fact, a different cello altogether: one with five strings instead of the customary four, again significantly changing the sonority of the instrument. While for the performer the extra string can take some time to get used to, it permits new, otherwise impossible chord combinations to be written and performed. </p>
<p>The Belgian cellist, Roel Dieltiens, maximises this opportunity by deliberately omitting all chords at the beginning of his wonderful performance of the Sarabande of Suite VI, but adding them in their full glory upon the written repetition of the section.</p>
<h2>The mystery of the Bach Cello Suites</h2>
<p>For such a popular set of works, it is amazing how little we know about the genesis of the Cello Suites. Bach’s autograph manuscript of them is lost, with little chance it will ever be found. However, Anna Magdalena Bach, his second wife, copied a large amount of her husband’s works and a copy in her hand of both the Violin and the Cello Solos survives. The two manuscript sets were combined into one volume with the following cover page:</p>
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<span class="caption">The title page of Anna Magdalena’s copy of the String Solos.</span>
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<p>The description is rather long-winded, sprinkled liberally with words in four languages, but it gives the essential information about the two sets, the composer and his copyist wife.</p>
<p>Apart from this manuscript, three other handmade copies survive from the 18th century. While it might be hoped that these copies could help nail down the origin of the suites, they do quite the opposite. All of the four surviving copies contain numerous mistakes and, to increase the confusion, they are vastly different from each other. For these reasons, none of them can be nominated as a truly dependable copy of Bach’s autograph.</p>
<p>This curious circumstance is the main reason for the amazingly large number of published editions of the suites. To date, over 100 musicians (mostly cellists and musicologists) have offered their solution to the problems of divergent notes, rhythms, slurs and other markings between the four manuscript sources. All these editions were prepared with honest musicality and the intent to shine light on obscure details, yet, as a result of the scarcity of reliable sources and the numerous methods to interpret them, they can provide a truly misleading mix of scholarship and speculation.</p>
<p>Although the Cello Suites have not been published for over 100 years after their composition, in our times they are an integral part of the cello repertoire. Most well-known cellists regard performing and recording the whole set as a milestone in their career. </p>
<p>The eminent French cellist, Jean-Guihen Queyras, recently performed the whole cycle (without an interval!) in the Great Hall of the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, sharing the stage with five ballet dancers, who presented Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s choreography for Bach’s music.</p>
<p>One of the most moving performance comes from the French cellist, Pierre Fournier. His interpretation of the Suites even inspired Ingmar Bergman. The brilliant Swedish film director created a mesmerising wordless scene in his masterpiece Cries and Whispers (1972), in which the terminally ill, exhausted and suffering protagonist, Agnes, feeling abandoned by her sisters, finds solace at the bosom of her maid in a Madonna-like image, accompanied by Fournier’s performance of the Sarabande of Suite V.</p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Zoltan Szabo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Johann Sebastian Bach was 30 when he became head of music in Anhalt-Cöthen, in what is now Germany. Here he started an uncharted experiment in classical music: solo works for string instruments.Zoltan Szabo, Cellist and musicologist, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/833122017-10-16T18:47:45Z2017-10-16T18:47:45ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190322/original/file-20171016-27711-1twmblv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Boris Kustodiev, The Bolshevik, 1920</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The 1917 Russian Revolution was, to many, a calamitous social and ideological experiment on an unprecedented scale. As the <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-putin-memory-wars-and-the-100th-anniversary-of-the-russian-revolution-72477">centenary of the event</a> is marked this year, it is perhaps revealing to note its effects on a personal level. At the time, Sergei Rachmaninoff was in his mid-forties, a successful composer whose works had been acclaimed through much of the Western world. He had also achieved significant renown as a conductor both in Russia and abroad, although as a pianist he tended to limit his appearances.</p>
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<span class="caption">Sergei Rachmaninoff, 1920.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
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<p>The revolution changed everything. Sensing the impending civil war and with little sympathy for the new politics, Rachmaninoff managed to leave Russia on the pretext of concert engagements in the West. Crossing the border into Finland at Christmas, he was intensely aware of the need to provide for his wife and two young daughters. Biding his time in Scandinavia, he resolved that his best chance of financial and artistic success was through attempting a new career: as a touring concert pianist.</p>
<p>Rachmaninoff arrived in New York in November 1918. Over the next two-and-a-half decades he came to be regarded as one of the finest pianists of the 20th century. Given the passage of time, that he eventually returned to writing music may seem surprising. That he produced perhaps his greatest work in 1940, the Symphonic Dances, could be miraculous.</p>
<h2>The three dances</h2>
<p>Each of the three “dances” is in a threefold ABA form, where the outer parts enclose a contrasting central episode. While the work represents a modernisation of Rachmaninoff’s musical style, numerous references to his earlier works are blended throughout. </p>
<p>In the short introduction to the first dance, an arresting passage precedes the establishment of the bold and driving rhythm. A sketch of these four bars of spiky chords was discovered in the 1970s in material donated by the composer to the Library of Congress, appearing in a notebook he carried with him during 1920-21.</p>
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<span class="caption">Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances, I ‘Non allegro’, bars 10-13.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>The contrasting middle section of the first dance features Rachmaninoff’s hallmark lyricism, in a melody first given to alto saxophone but later played by the violins. The transition to this section is a direct reference to a motif from Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony, composed in 1936. </p>
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<p>At the close of the first dance, the music retreats from its frenzied pace. Here, both the texture and the overall effect evoke the close of the first movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Suite for Two Pianos, first performed in 1901.</p>
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<p>More significantly, the subsequent melody has drawn the attention of astute listeners, as it bears a striking similarity to the principal theme of Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony, composed in 1895. </p>
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<p>That work had led to a long crisis after its disastrous premiere in 1897 and was presumed lost (a score was restored from orchestral parts after the composer’s death). While the melody is transformed from the dark minor key of the symphony to its luminous restatement here, its overall shape is undeniably similar.</p>
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<p>In the second dance we can hear in the gentle and evocative waltz rhythms an overall similarity with Rachmaninoff’s perennial concert favourite for solo piano, his youthful Serenade (1892).</p>
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<p>The final dance is more revealing. Common to many works by Rachmaninoff are references to an ancient chant from the Catholic liturgy, the <em>Dies irae</em>, a musical relic also quoted by composers such as Liszt, Berlioz and Tchaikovsky. It is identifiable through its downward melodic shape.</p>
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<p>It surfaces in Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Sonata (1908), the Isle of the Dead (1909) and the Paganini Rhapsody (a work composed in 1934 based on a theme by the Italian violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini), to name just a few. In the dances, it is implied in the main theme, but becomes more explicit as the music progresses.</p>
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<p>Rachmaninoff’s setting of the Russian liturgy, his All-Night Vigil (1915), is much-loved by audiences. Yet in 1940 the work was unknown in the West and, given the Soviet prohibition on religion, it was effectively banned in Russia. Accordingly, Rachmaninoff’s decision to quote a large passage from the ninth section of the Vigil, called “Blessed be the Lord”, could be seen as ensuring a place for music that might otherwise be lost. </p>
<p>Yet the quotation of this affirmative music can also be seen as a counterbalance to the foreboding <em>Dies irae</em> (translated as “Day of Wrath”). Moreover, it marks a significant close in this last great work, a fitting juxtaposition both of the composer’s innate optimism and the pragmatism born of difficult experiences. Its placement in the final dance perhaps further represents Rachmaninoff’s gratitude at being able to link these disparate spheres of his life together.</p>
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<h2>A difficult birth</h2>
<p>The path to Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances was not an easy one. Settled and financially secure by 1925, Rachmaninoff allowed himself a “sabbatical” year to return to composition, working on a new piano concerto, his fourth. Various sources suggest he had started the piece as early as 1913, yet after its delayed completion it was savaged at its American premiere. It was by then the age of Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg and fellow Russian émigré Igor Stravinsky, who created works in dissonant and challenging styles; producing a work using more traditional harmony was, to many, passé.</p>
<p>Somewhat defeated, Rachmaninoff nevertheless toyed with composition in two works in so-called “theme and variation” format (where a borrowed theme is subjected to numerous modifications and developments). The first was in 1931 with a melody he assumed to be by the 17th-century Italian composer Arcangelo Corelli (but which was in fact <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folia">La folía</a>, one of the oldest tunes in European music). The second was in 1934 with the hugely successful Paganini Rhapsody. Buoyed by the latter’s unexpected popularity, he worked in earnest on a new symphony, his third, yet this was once more maligned by critics and, worse, met with indifference by audiences.</p>
<p>But, surprising as it is, Rachmaninoff did again return to composition. Recent scholarship suggests that he had been developing ideas for a ballet around 1914 on the subject of the ancient <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-truth-about-the-amazons-the-real-wonder-women-78248">Scythian race</a>. While the ballet never came to fruition, it is believed that a number of its musical ideas similarly found their way into the Symphonic Dances, his last major work.</p>
<p>Yet the composition is far more than a final resting place for earlier inspirations. As leading researcher on Rachmaninoff, the late Robert Threlfall, noted, the work is a “totalling of the sum”, a musical reflection on a long and eventful life, rich in its quotations and references. It is also a powerhouse of orchestral virtuosity, by turns pulsing with vital energy and lingering over tender melodies. In short, a work celebrated by audiences around the world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83312/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Scott Davie does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Sergei Rachmaninoff fled the Russian revolution 100 years ago. Spending the remainder of his life in the US, he composed what is perhaps his greatest work in 1940, the Symphonic Dances.Scott Davie, Lecturer in Piano, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/828192017-09-13T19:35:16Z2017-09-13T19:35:16ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Shostakovich’s Babi Yar<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/185762/original/file-20170913-5947-j0o0l7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The 1976 memorial at the Babi Yar massacre site only recognised Soviet victims, despite the killing of more than 30,000 Jewish people. In 1991 a Jewish memorial was installed nearby. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/jenniferboyer/5968360138">Jennifer Boyer/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>September 29 and 30 mark the anniversary of one the greatest atrocities ever carried out on Soviet soil: Babi Yar. In a ravine outside of Kiev in 1941, occupying Nazi forces murdered over 33,000 Jews in less than 24 hours in an attempt to exterminate the city’s Jewish population. </p>
<p>Nazi Sonderkommando troops carried out the mass murder of men, women, and children with the support of local police officers. This would go on to be one of the single largest instances of mass murder carried out during the Holocaust. </p>
<p>Commemorating the Holocaust was often discouraged in the Cold War-era Soviet Union. This might strike modern-day readers as callous, but there was a twisted logic to this attitude. The Soviet Union had endured by far the worst losses of any side during World War II (with more than 20 million deaths), and Soviet authorities viewed Holocaust commemorations as “neglecting” the wider tragedy of Soviet casualties. </p>
<p>Dmitri Shostakovich, Russia’s most prominent composer, would critique this lack of commemoration in his 13th Symphony, completed in 1962. But he would also go much further, criticising the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, who had died in 1953. The symphony is one of the most persistent condemnations of Stalinism, interspersed with frequent allusions to the continuing failures of the post-Stalin Soviet state. </p>
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<span class="caption">Shostakovich, pictured in 1950.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
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<p>Made up of five movements, the symphony sets several of the noted poet <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Yevgeny-Yevtushenko">Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s</a> works to music. When Yevtushenko published a poem on Babi Yar in the newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta in 1961, eyebrows were quickly raised. Shostakovich, the Soviet Union’s most prominent composer, was struck by the work’s tone of solemn protest; it opens with the powerful line:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is no monument above Babi Yar. </p>
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<p>Shostakovich quickly went about setting Yevtushenko’s poem as a single-movement cantata (a stand-alone piece of choral music) and was particularly pleased with the result. He then selected several more of Yevtushenko’s published poems and put together plans for a multi-movement work with solo bass and male chorus. Thus began the 13th Symphony.</p>
<p>Babi Yar forms the symphony’s first movement, a funereal elegy dedicated to Jewish suffering, including “vignettes” from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair">Dreyfus affair</a> (an anti-Semitic scandal in France) and the life of Anne Frank. It opens with a solemn chime, as the chorus intones the damning opening line. </p>
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<h2>A condemnation</h2>
<p>Musically speaking, the 13th Symphony shows the influence of 19th-Century Russian composer Modest Musorgsky, particularly in the use of bass singers performing solo and male chorus, as well as frequent use of chimes and bell-like textures. </p>
<p>The remaining poems that Shostakovich chose were even more contemptuous than the first in their condemnation of Stalinist Russia. The second movement, Humour, details how the Russian Tsars could not command or restrict humour (citizens making fun of them), and ends with “three cheers for humour – he’s a brave fellow!”.</p>
<p>Shostakovich quotes from one of his own earlier compositions, a setting of a Robert Burns poem, Macpherson before his execution, to illustrate how humour is constantly “executed” and resurrected anew. The quotation can be first heard in the low strings about halfway through the movement.</p>
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<p>The third movement is an ode to Soviet women, In the Store. Yevtushenko details how Soviet women endured incredibly long queues just to collect bread, despite working every bit as hard as men in their own jobs: “These are the women of Russia; they honour us and they judge us”. </p>
<p>After this paean to Soviet women, In the Store ends with a quasi-religious motive, a plagal cadence (think of the “Amen” at the end of Church music), following the words “their pious hands, weary from carrying their shopping bags”. </p>
<p>The fourth movement is the most chilling of all: it opens with the line, “Fears are dying out in Russia”. With no vagueness of expression, Yevtushenko depicts the oppressive culture of Stalin’s political crackdown, the Great Terror of the late 1930s, when ordinary people lived through “the secret fear of an anonymous denunciation, the secret fear of a knock at the door”. This was the only poem that had not been published before the symphony’s premiere, since Shostakovich had actually commissioned it from Yevtushenko himself. Shostakovich creates a suitably menacing atmosphere, with a highly chromatic tuba solo at the opening that anticipates his experiments with dissonant “12-note” music in his later works: </p>
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<p>The final movement, Careers, condemns those who remain silent in order to preserve their career, beginning with the example of Galileo, who dared to speak out against scientific censorship, and is now remembered as a genius.</p>
<p>In its lopsided opening waltz, this finale recalls the musical textures of fellow Russian Igor Stravinsky, with long passages of woodwind solos. The symphony ends overall with a chilling Celeste solo (like an eerie keyboard-operated glockenspiel), before a final strike of the chime that opened the piece:</p>
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<h2>‘I cannot not write it’</h2>
<p>Shostakovich was not Jewish himself, but had previously written works on Jewish themes, including his 1948 song cycle <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Jewish_Folk_Poetry">From Jewish Folk Poetry</a>, as well as completing the opera Rothschild’s Violin, begun by his Jewish student Veniamin Fleishman, who had been killed during World War II. </p>
<p>Shostakovich was attracted to Jewish themes partly through “their ability to build a jolly melody on sad intonations”, reinforced through the influence of composer-friends like Fleishman and the Polish-Jewish composer Mieczysław Weinberg. </p>
<p>After finishing the symphony in the summer of 1962, Shostakovich wrote to his friend Isaak Glikman: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am not expecting this work to be fully understood, but I cannot not write it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Shostakovich had fallen foul of Soviet authorities several times during his career, with withdrawn works and humiliating public “apologies” forced upon him for failing to portray an ideologically-correct portrait of life in the Soviet Union. After having vague threats published about him in major newspapers at the height of the Great Terror, Shostakovich’s subsequent rehabilitation by the cultural establishment elevated him to the status of the country’s leading composer. </p>
<p>As such, all of his new works were carefully scrutinised for their ideological content, both by Soviet authorities and audiences, who were keen for meaningful artistic expression that could evoke some of the suffering endured under everyday Soviet life. </p>
<p>Nikita Khrushchev, who came to power after Stalin’s death, condemned Stalin’s cultural purges and his “cult of personality”, heralding a new period of acceptance that historians refer to as “The Thaw”. Unfortunately for Shostakovich, The Thaw was to be short-lived, cut short right on the eve of the 13th Symphony’s premiere. Khrushchev began another period of cultural censorship, but The Thaw meant that artists had already started taking more experimental directions in their work.</p>
<h2>‘One of us’</h2>
<p>The risky subject matter made arrangements for the 13th Symphony’s premiere performance problematic. One of Shostakovich’s closest friends and long-time collaborators, Yevgeny Mravinsky, refused to conduct it, giving only vague excuses.</p>
<p>Shostakovich instead turned to a young conductor, Kiril Kondrashin (the videos featured in this article are from Kondrashin’s own recording of the symphony). Similarly, several of the bass singers that Shostakovich had invited to sing the key solo role also withdrew from performance – including Victor Nechipailo, who pulled out on the morning of the premiere. </p>
<p>Kondrashin later recalled “strange faces” appearing in the hall during rehearsals for the premiere – government agents monitoring preparations. On the evening before the performance, Kondrashin had a sinister phonecall from the Culture Minister Georgi Popov, who asked slowly, “How is your health?” </p>
<p>The premiere was a huge success, with massive praise for Shostakovich and Yevtushenko. The first movement’s condemnation of anti-Semitism drew continued criticism, however. Shostakovich responded: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>No, there is, there is anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union! It is an outrageous thing, and we must fight it. We must shout about it from the rooftops! </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Such was the level of criticism that Yevtushenko actually edited several lines of his poem to be more “international” in outlook. Accordingly, the lyrics “I feel myself a Jew/ … Here I die, nailed to the cross/And even now I bear the scars of it” were changed to “Here Russians lie, and Ukrainians/Together with Jews in the same ground”. </p>
<p>This was despite the fact that Babi Yar was an atrocity carried out specifically against the Jewish population of Kiev. Shostakovich’s music itself was not judged to be offensive or inflammatory, but Yevtushenko’s text was considered to be insufficiently international in its depiction of “war losses”. </p>
<p>The 13th Symphony was the last in a trilogy of “Russian” symphonies for Shostakovich. His 11th and 12th symphonies depicted the 1905 and 1917 revolutions respectively. To 21st-century audiences, the work is a powerful statement of moralistic outcry. </p>
<p>It struck a particularly poignant note with long-suffering contemporary Russian audiences, who had seen the earlier two symphonies as “conforming” to the authorities’ view of history. Such an immediate and powerful resonance is difficult to imagine in the present day. The famous pianist and critic Mariya Yudina put it heart-achingly simply when she wrote “Shostakovich has become <em>‘one of us’</em> again with his Thirteenth”. </p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="http://zelmansymphony.org.au/Concerts/Concerts">Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony</a> will be performed in Melbourne on September 17.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82819/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Elphick does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>On September 29 1941, Nazis murdered more than 30,000 Jews in a ravine outside Kiev. Dmitri Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony, Babi Yar, is a damning critique of the Soviet Union’s lack of recognition of the massacre, and a condemnation of Stalinism.Daniel Elphick, Teaching Fellow in Music, Royal Holloway University of LondonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/815532017-08-28T20:09:59Z2017-08-28T20:09:59ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Schubert’s Winterreise<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/183539/original/file-20170828-27573-1q0itmz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">In Franz Schubert's Winterreise (winter's journey), a man steps out on a mid-winter night to rid himself of his lost love.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Image from www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, completed in 1827, is a set of 24 songs for voice and piano composed almost entirely using minor keys, which unlike the warm sounds of major keys often sound sad to our ears. Its mournful character reflects some of the personal trauma that Schubert himself was experiencing at the time. After years of a rather debauched life Schubert had contracted syphilis. The disease (or perhaps the treatment of it), was ultimately responsible for his death in 1828 at the age of 31.</p>
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<span class="caption">Franz Schubert in 1825, painted from watercolour by Wilhelm August Rieder 1875.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
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<p>Schubert described Winterreise as being “truly terrible, songs which have affected me more than any others”. The songs take the audience on a journey that it is clear, by the very nature of the opening song, will end fatefully. Even the title, meaning “winter’s journey”, conjures up a visual image of a cold and dark landscape. </p>
<p>The lyrics are poems by Wilhelm Müller and tell the story of a lonely traveller who ventures out into the snow on a journey to rid himself of his lost love. Along the way he experiences a turmoil of different emotions, mostly ranging from despair to greater despair.</p>
<p>During his short life Schubert wrote over 600 art songs, 20 sonatas for piano, six major works for violin and piano, nine symphonies for orchestra and an impressive amount of chamber music for other groups of instruments. </p>
<p>His art song output consists of the three main cycles – Die Schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Miller’s Daughter), Winterreise, and Schwanengesang (Swan Song), which was published after his death. Die Schöne Müllerin, written in 1823 with poems also by Müller is - despite the hopelessness of unrequited love and the protagonist’s probable death at the end - a positive sounding cycle. Winterreise would prove to be a much darker journey. </p>
<p>Schubert set both collections of Müller’s poems to music to be performed with his friend and baritone Johann Michael Vogl. A literary and philosophical man, Vogl came to regard Schubert’s songs as “divine inspirations, the utterance of a musical clairvoyance”. </p>
<h2>A ‘truly terrible’ journey</h2>
<p>The first song in Winterreise, Gute Nacht (Good Night) begins enigmatically, as our protoganist ventures out into the snow, accompanied by trudging and relentless short notes on the piano. He reflects on a woman who “spoke of love, the mother of marriage”. Why is the traveller embarking on this journey? Surely this is about unrequited love. He finishes by singing that he wrote “good night” on the gate of his lover showing that despite the fact he is the one who is leaving, his thoughts were still of her. </p>
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<p>By the third song, Gefrorne Tränen (Frozen Tears), we realise the depth of his despair, amplified in the fourth song, Erstarrung (Numbness) when he talks of his “heart as if frozen”. His love is not merely missing but truly dead and gone. These first four songs are all in a minor keys, albeit the first does have a moment where hope can be felt in those few bars in a major key. </p>
<p>The fifth song, Der Lindenbaum (The Linden Tree), speaks of the sense of security and comfort experienced when reclining and dreaming under the branches of the Linden tree, a feeling which still comes to him when he has departed that safe haven.</p>
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<p>The journey continues with many references to snow, ice, loneliness and tears. Although none of the songs offer any positive outcomes for our traveller, Frühlingstraum (Dreaming of Spring) and Die Post (The Post) are in major keys. </p>
<p>In Frühlingstraum he dreams of springs gone by, of colourful flowers and green meadows. From this dream he is awakened by the cock crowing and realises that around him is not the spring of his dreams but the cold, misty darkness of his present place. “Die Post” tells of his desire to receive a letter from his beloved when he hears the jolly horn of the post man. Alas, his hopes are again shattered – as there is no letter for him.</p>
<p>The final song, Der Leiermann (The Hurdy Gurdy man), describes not only his final despair but the absolute and unequivocal deterioration of his mental state. The piano plays the most forlorn repetitive melody and under the sung text is only a bare fifth chord. The desolation and despair are complete. </p>
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<h2>The colour of despair</h2>
<p>Schubert composed countless other songs where the text (poems) are placed into a musical context, written for voice and the equal partnership of a piano, with the piano writing suggesting strong visual imagery tied to the meaning of the poem. </p>
<p>The romantic composers such as Schubert, and later Robert Schumann, treated musical settings of poems very differently. Unlike Schubert, Schumann rarely introduced the singer with an introduction played by the piano. The right hand of the pianist often played the vocal melody – though sometimes with embellishments.</p>
<p>Schumann relied on harmony, rather than a motive, to create the visual images associated with the poem. There was often a protracted coda (the concluding passage) played by the piano at the end of the song which seemed to make a comment or reinforce the emotive content in the text. </p>
<p>Schubert, on the other hand, predominantly used rhythm or melody in the piano writing which served to illustrate the setting of the text. In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XP5RP6OEJI">Der Erlkönig (The Earl King)</a>, based on the poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, continuous triplets (three notes played evenly over two beats) illustrate a horse galloping through the night.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeKgNMKcUng">Gretchen am Spinnrade (Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel)</a> a sextuplet figure (six notes played over four beats), winding round and round, illustrates the spinning wheel. And the falling semiquavers with their repeated notes illustrate the flowing water in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiqS73wn3ps">Auf dem Wasser zu Singen (To sing on the water)</a>. </p>
<p>Schubert also made use of <a href="http://pitchfork.com/thepitch/229-what-the-hell-is-synesthesia-and-why-does-every-musician-seem-to-have-it/">synaesthesia</a> (the colour of certain musical keys) to create a definite atmosphere. For example, he used the dramatic G minor for Der Erlkönig; the despairing D minor for Gretchen am Spinnrade; the resolute, yet exhultant, A-flat major for Auf dem Wasser zu Singe; and the happy and restful key of F major for Fruhlingsglaube (Belief in Spring).</p>
<p>Winterreise requires the performers to immerse themselves totally in the atmosphere of cold, dark, forlorn despair. They need to create that atmosphere by the tonal colour of the voice and of the possibilities of the instrument. Rarely does an audience leave a performance of this work unmoved, and the experiencing this masterpiece first hand will be remembered.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81553/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jeanell Carrigan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A year before his death at 31 Franz Schubert published ‘Winterreise’ or ‘winter’s journey’, a series of 24 poems set to music exploring unrequited love. Schubert described them as ‘truly terrible’.Jeanell Carrigan, Associate professor, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/797652017-07-26T20:15:23Z2017-07-26T20:15:23ZDecoding the Music Masterpieces: Debussy’s Clair de Lune<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179548/original/file-20170725-21564-v5f8kf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Debussy's Clair de Lune belongs to the Impressionist movement, which included visual artists like Claude Monet. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>French composer Claude Debussy’s best-loved piano piece, Clair de Lune, has entered popular consciousness thanks to its regular performance. Its origins are complex and fascinating, combining influences from poetry, the music of the Baroque period (from around 1600 to 1750), and Impressionism, a style in music following on from that in visual arts. </p>
<p>The piece’s title, meaning “moonlight”, was added shortly before its publication in 1905 as the third movement of a four-part work called Suite Bergamasque. It was the same year Debussy’s beloved daughter, Claude-Emma, known as Chouxchoux, was born.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179549/original/file-20170725-26586-1buv7ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179549/original/file-20170725-26586-1buv7ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179549/original/file-20170725-26586-1buv7ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=808&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179549/original/file-20170725-26586-1buv7ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=808&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179549/original/file-20170725-26586-1buv7ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=808&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179549/original/file-20170725-26586-1buv7ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179549/original/file-20170725-26586-1buv7ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179549/original/file-20170725-26586-1buv7ny.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1015&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Claude Debussy circa 1908.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>The title comes from a poem of the same name, published in 1869, by the Symbolist poet Paul Verlaine. Debussy had already set this poem for voice and piano twice before, along with 18 other Verlaine poems. The poem speaks of “au calme clair de lune triste et beau” (the still moonlight sad and lovely). </p>
<p>It also describes “charmante masques et bergamasques”, which may have inspired the name of the whole suite. “Bergamasques” refers to masked festivals in the ancient <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commedia_dell%27arte">Italian theatre tradition</a>, common also through France, using archetypal peasant characters such as Harlequin, Columbine and Scaramouche from the town of Bergamo. </p>
<p>Debussy’s music was a turning point from the Romantic music that had dominated the 19th century to the music of the 20th century. When asked what rule he followed, he scandalised his harmony teachers by answering: “Mon plaisir” (My pleasure). </p>
<p>With fellow composer Maurice Ravel, Debussy is regarded as a leader of French Impressionism. Although Debussy disliked this term as applied to music, it is accepted now to refer to the composers’ use of harmony and texture in a way that recalls the light and colour of Impressionist painting. </p>
<p>Debussy’s iconic orchestral piece <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlR9rDJMEiQ">La mer</a>, also published 1905, used <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-from-the-great-wave-to-starry-night-how-a-blue-pigment-changed-the-world-81031">Hokusai’s Great Wave</a> on the cover, an artwork that directly inspired painters like Van Gogh. Another piece, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnnKmQ-wXZw">Reflets dans l’eau</a> (Reflections in the Water), seems to embody Impressionist qualities of glinting light and detached observation of nature rather than human participation, much as in Monet’s paintings of water lilies.</p>
<h2>Poetry in music</h2>
<p>The original title of Clair de Lune was actually Promenade sentimentale (Sentimental stroll), after a different Verlaine poem from an 1866 collection called Paysages tristes (Sad Landscapes). This poem is more likely to have been the inspiration for the music. The poem begins: “Le couchant dardait ses rayons suprêmes Et le vent berçait les nénuphars blêmes” (The setting sun cast its final rays And the breeze rocked the pale water lilies).</p>
<p>The stillness and meditative calm of these lines are evoked with great beauty at the opening of the piece: </p>
<p>The vagaries of the breeze waft gently in the following passage with the instruction “tempo rubato”, a musical term allowing the performer to speed up and slow down the music at their discretion. This builds to an intense moment perhaps recalling a later passage in the poem:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Where the vague mist conjured up some vast
</p>
Despairing milky ghost
<p></p>
With the voice of teals crying
<p></p>
As they called to each other, beating their wings.<p></p>
</blockquote>
<p>That simplicity, even sparseness of texture, surrounds a central section of gently undulating passages marked to be played a little faster (“Un poco mosso”).</p>
<p>The passage subtly transforms meditative melancholy to a moment of exaltation by lifting the melodic material higher in the piano’s range, where, like the teals beating their wings, it seems to take flight.</p>
<p>Following on from this, the opening ideas reappear, entering more softly this time and descending gradually to more lush and subtly darker harmonies, coloured by added notes.</p>
<h2>Ancient style</h2>
<p>Suite Bergamasque is one of a number of works by Debussy and his French contemporaries that paid homage to the “style ancien” (old style), which referred to the French Baroque period in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Referencing this style was popular after the mid-19th century. </p>
<p>It celebrated what was seen as the golden age of French music, and pushed back against what the French saw as the grandiosity of Wagner and declared French identity during a time of increasing militarisation in Germany. Two of the most noted composers of this golden age are Jean-Phillipe Rameau (1683-1764) and François Couperin (1668-1733), both of whom wrote suites for the keyboard instrument of the time, the harpsichord.</p>
<p>These suites had similar dance movements to Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque, which includes, along with Clair de Lune, a Prélude, a Menuet and a Passepied. In this context the original title makes more sense as a break between the Menuet and Passepied dances. Other works by Debussy making reference to this period include his Hommage à Rameau and his suite, Pour le Piano. </p>
<p>Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin (1919) exploits the same idea. Touchingly, each movement is dedicated to his friends recently fallen in the first world war. </p>
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<h2>A sense of mystery</h2>
<p>Despite this context and initial inspiration, Clair de Lune has no hint of actual Baroque style. It is unclear when this particular movement was completed but its sensual textures and poetic references to nature are closer to what we think of as musical Impressionism than the other movements of the Suite Bergamasque. Most of the suite was composed around 1890, but Debussy made substantial revisions in the year before its eventual publication in 1905. These included the name change from Promenade sentimentale to Clair de Lune. </p>
<p>Clair de Lune is treasured for its ethereal beauty and sense of mystery, so let’s not forget that we were forbidden by Debussy’s alter ego, <a href="http://www.cengage.com/music/book_content/049557273X_wrightSimms/assets/ITOW/7273X_63_%20ITOW.pdf">Monsieur Croche</a>, to pull our “jumping jacks to pieces”. Instead, perhaps we should heed Debussy’s more serious words:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We should be constantly reminding ourselves that the beauty of a work of art is something that will always remain mysterious; that is to say one can never find out exactly “how it is done”. At all costs let us preserve this element of magic peculiar to music. By its very nature music is more likely to contain something of the magical than any other art.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79765/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stephanie Mccallum does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Debussy’s Clair de Lune, meaning ‘moonlight’, is one of the most easily recognised pieces of music, but its origins are complex. The piece was influenced by poetry, Baroque music and the Impressionist movement.Stephanie Mccallum, Associate Professor Piano Division, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/752232017-05-21T20:10:46Z2017-05-21T20:10:46ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/164230/original/image-20170406-16614-1kes7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Composing a symphonic landscape: Caspar David Friedrich's 1818 oil painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“He who climbs upon the highest mountains laughs at all tragic plays and tragic reality”, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/293954-he-who-climbs-upon-the-highest-mountains-laughs-at-all">said</a> the prophetic protagonist in the German philosopher Nietzsche’s <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51893.Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra">Thus Spoke Zarathustra</a>. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1187&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1187&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165828/original/image-20170419-6367-18xmzae.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1187&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Richard Strauss in 1918.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>Richard Strauss, who had already produced an orchestral work inspired by that book, seemingly took this injunction to heart when composing An Alpine Symphony (1915), which despite the title is better considered as the last of his “tone poems”. </p>
<p>The eight earlier tone poems, single-movement orchestral pieces with titles and prefaces linking the music to literature or other subject matter, had made Strauss one of the most celebrated (and controversial) composers of his day. However, although he continued composing until his death in 1949, he concentrated thereafter on opera rather than orchestral music. </p>
<p>Consequently, An Alpine Symphony marks the end of an era, both for the composer and for German symphonic music more generally, because after the First World War big romantic works like this went severely out of fashion. Though this tone poem was completed while the horrors of war dominated the news, it does not suggest any awareness of its larger political or historical situation. Rather, An Alpine Symphony remained focused on the representation of a landscape through music.</p>
<h2>Tragic inspirations</h2>
<p>Strauss first began working on what would become An Alpine Symphony in 1900, under the title “Tragedy of an artist” - a reference to the suicide of Swiss-born painter <a href="http://spartacus-educational.com/ARTstauffer.htm">Karl Stauffer-Bern</a>. In the following decade he set the project aside and seemingly swapped orchestral composition for opera, achieving enormous success on stage with the scandalous <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViLcRFqtTpk">Salome</a>, and the still darker <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqWbxitsIvM">Elektra</a>, before he turned back to more accessible musical fare with the waltz-filled <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi810zB3L04">Rosenkavalier</a>. </p>
<p>The immediate impulse for Strauss’s return to An Alpine Symphony was the premature death in 1911 of his friend, the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler too had bid farewell to the German symphonic tradition in his Ninth Symphony, which expires exquisitely into nothingness at the end of the fourth movement. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No.9.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Even when Strauss took up work on the project again, its name was still in flux. He envisaged calling it “The Antichrist” (after <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18304.The_Anti_Christ">Nietzsche’s book</a> of the same title), since it “represents moral purification through one’s own strength, liberation through work, [and] worship of eternal, magnificent nature”, as Strauss wrote on <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=ijEp8a7FawEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA93#v=onepage&q&f=false">his diary</a> in May 1911. But when this title was dropped in favour of An Alpine Symphony, the link to Nietzsche was obscured. </p>
<h2>Man vs. wild</h2>
<p>On the surface then, the final form of An Alpine Symphony is a sonic portrait of an unidentified protagonist successfully conquering a mountain. By this point in his career, Strauss was living at least part of the year in the southern Bavarian town of Garmisch (today Garmisch-Partenkirchen), within sight of Zugspitze, Germany’s highest peak. Strauss loved to go rambling in the alps. </p>
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<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Strauss in Garmisch, Germany in 1938.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Strauss_1938.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The unbroken 50 minute tone poem contains 22 parts describing a variety of landscape features on the route to and from the mountain summit: the climber passes through the woods, by a stream, near a waterfall, across flowery meadows and pastureland, through thickets, and onto the glacier before reaching the top, each of these suggested by some sonic analogue. </p>
<p>Nature’s temporal and climatic changes are also prominent: the events of the day are bordered by sunrise and sunset, and the hiker encounters mist and a storm. </p>
<p>The composer’s customary skill at representing non-musical entities through music is on full display here: the waterfall is a particular highlight in its imaginative rendition of the water’s spray.</p>
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<p><br></p>
<p>To suggest the sound of Bavarian mountain pastures, Strauss used cowbells – an instrument which had been memorably featured by Gustav Mahler in his Sixth Symphony.</p>
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<p><br></p>
<p>Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6 (known as the Pastoral symphony) is in some ways a precedent for Strauss’s work. Both compositions feature a brook, and later a violent storm followed by a beatific calm. <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Dictionary_of_Music_and_Musicians/Pastoral_Symphony,_The_(Beethoven)">Beethoven</a>, however, claimed that his Symphony contained “more expression of feeling than painting”, and the title of his first movement (“Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country”) bears out its focus on the emotional journey of experiencing the landscape, rather than on painting the landscape itself. </p>
<p>Strauss, on the other hand, wanted to represent nature in sound, but also to show the human protagonist who experiences it. In this sense, he goes beyond Beethoven in the boldness of his depictions.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165024/original/image-20170412-25898-1exw4sk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Strauss conducting in 1917.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_orchestra_and_its_instruments_(1917)_(14780185164).jpg">Esther Singleton, Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The climber is introduced in the third section in a bold striding theme, which confidently traces a jagged ascending course – until it pulls up briefly a few bars later, as the climber runs out of breath. </p>
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<p><br></p>
<p>This theme was actually modelled on an idea from the finale of Beethoven’s <a href="https://youtu.be/hsuwwzthcA8?t=9m22s">Fifth Symphony</a>, although scholars only discovered this much later. Ingeniously, Strauss later flips his theme upside down as the mountaineer descends in haste through the storm.</p>
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<p><br></p>
<p>In between, the climber manages to <a href="https://youtu.be/DJYMdiB6fME?t=23m0s">attain the summit</a>. Here Strauss swaps landscape painting for evoking feelings of triumph that he himself would have experienced many times in his mountain wanderings. </p>
<p>Yet again, the opening of this new theme is a borrowing, this time from the <a href="https://youtu.be/RxJJYdG1_E8?t=6m30s">second movement</a> of German composer Max Bruch’s beloved Violin Concerto no. 1. Strauss freely reshapes this idea into a passage of sublime magnificence – symphonic music at its most monumental.</p>
<h2>Playing with history</h2>
<p>There are other, looser connections to earlier music. The opening of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJYMdiB6fME">Strauss’s tone poem</a> recalls the Prelude of Richard Wagner’s opera, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1zsSaLiD7Q">Das Rheingold</a>, the opening drama of his <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/the-ring-cycle-7999">four-part Ring Cycle</a>. </p>
<p>Both works start out from a place of quiet stillness, from which the music gradually grows in loudness and liveliness. The two composers were trying to represent nature in its most primal form, and the burgeoning of life that arises from it. Interestingly, when a teenage Strauss was caught out a storm in the mountains, he channelled the experience into an improvised piano composition: “naturally huge tone painting and smarminess à la Wagner”, the precocious 15-year-old wrote, being no fan of Wagner’s music at the time. </p>
<p>But by the time he wrote An Alpine Symphony, Strauss had been a card-carrying Wagnerian for many years. It is likely that this was a deliberate homage to the effect Wagner created – although the actual themes in both passages are quite different.</p>
<p>Yet another sort of allusion is found in the <a href="https://youtu.be/DJYMdiB6fME?t=14m39s">flowery meadows passage</a>, where the accompanying plucked strings (“pizzicato”) and mellifluous string writing strongly recall a texture typical of German composer Johannes Brahms. </p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Brahms’ Academic Festival Overture conducted by American composer Leonard Bernstein.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Even Strauss’s earlier works are revisited: the explosion into life at the “<a href="https://youtu.be/DJYMdiB6fME?t=3m12s">Sunrise</a>” in An Alpine Symphony is akin to one of his previous, and more famous, openings: the start of <a href="https://youtu.be/ETveS23djXM?t=56s">Also Sprach Zarathustra</a> – where the prophet greets the sun. This passage has become iconic, thanks to its use in Stanley Kubrick’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/">2001: A Space Odyssey</a>.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra makes for a memorable intro in 2001: A Space Odyssey.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>And finally, the opening of An Alpine Symphony, with its slow descending scales, directly quotes from the start of Strauss’s much earlier <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fO22oE7jZ4c">F minor Symphony</a>. Here, Strauss returns to his beginnings for what turned out to be his last major orchestral tone poem.</p>
<h2>Down to earth</h2>
<p>So what do all these borrowings and allusions signify? First, they cement the picture of Strauss as heir to the German music traditions. Before he decisively transferred his allegiance to Wagner, Strauss had undergone a brief Brahms infatuation, and this, too, had left its mark. Nonetheless, Strauss did not reproduce earlier ideas in a passive fashion in his Alpine Symphony. Rather, he transformed and reworked a wide range of source materials. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=832&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1045&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1045&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165026/original/image-20170412-25894-y2r0hj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1045&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Strauss in 1922.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ferdinand_Schmutzer_-_Richard_Strauss,_1922.jpg">Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More radical still was Strauss’s larger agenda, where he parts company from his symphonic precursors. Since at least the time of Beethoven, the symphony had been treated as a semi-sacred genre. It was perceived to have metaphysical significance. The writer and <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=UmYZzMF1oiUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA96#v=onepage&q&f=false">critic E.T.A. Hoffmann</a> expressed it thus in a famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in 1810: “Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him.”</p>
<p>In recent decades, musicologists such as <a href="http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?products_id=21904">Charles Youmans have recognised</a> that Strauss’s agenda in his orchestral compositions was deliberately at odds with this. He rejected these metaphysical pretensions, and his explicit tone-painting in works like An Alpine Symphony expresses a more grounded, earthly agenda. Nietzsche <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/563547-i-beseech-you-my-brothers-remain-faithful-to-the-earth">called in Also sprach Zarathustra</a> for mankind to “remain true to the earth; do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes”. In nature, Strauss had found an earthly object that was worthy of worship. </p>
<p>A few decades later, Strauss envisaged writing one more tone poem called Der Donau (the Danube), a tribute to the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. But he never got further than the preliminary sketches. </p>
<p>An Alpine Symphony therefore remains his last substantial output within this arena. There are many ways to approach this work: we can rejoice in the sonic gorgeousness of its surface, or admire how cleverly Strauss has re-imagined of nature in musical terms, or hear in it a farewell to a tradition Strauss himself had subtly subverted. </p>
<p>It’s a more complex composition than it appears to be. And as it fades away enigmatically into <a href="https://youtu.be/DJYMdiB6fME?t=47m2s">nocturnal darkness</a>, so too did a glorious chapter in German symphonic music pass with this work into history.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75223/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Larkin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>With An Alpine Symphony, Richard Strauss achieved something remarkable: the painting of the German alps, complete with cow meadows and waterfalls, in sound.David Larkin, Senior Lecturer in Musicology, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/767842017-05-09T14:16:28Z2017-05-09T14:16:28ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/168035/original/file-20170505-15005-1e7n25s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Brahms' piano quartet in G minor was composed for a piano, a violin, a viola and a cello. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/29946195@N07/9018484719/in/photolist-eJW6iR-6vULoZ/">kkmarais/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Today’s composers would love to discover the elusive formula for artistic permanence. But it was probably always so. Even German composer <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Johannes-Brahms">Johannes Brahms</a> (1833-1897) did not instantly achieve the honoured status he still holds today.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167655/original/file-20170503-4133-17sx7k3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167655/original/file-20170503-4133-17sx7k3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167655/original/file-20170503-4133-17sx7k3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167655/original/file-20170503-4133-17sx7k3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167655/original/file-20170503-4133-17sx7k3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=799&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167655/original/file-20170503-4133-17sx7k3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167655/original/file-20170503-4133-17sx7k3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167655/original/file-20170503-4133-17sx7k3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1004&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Violinist Ede Remenyi and Johannes Brahms (standing) in 1853.</span>
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<p>Just before he turned 30, Brahms, perhaps most famous for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t894eGoymio">his lullaby</a>, relocated from Hamburg to Vienna, then the musical centre of the German-speaking world. In the 1790s, the twenty-something Beethoven had also moved permanently from provincial Germany to Vienna. Brahms, the emerging composer, was therefore keenly aware of inheriting a heavy mantle from his idols, particularly Beethoven. </p>
<p>This perhaps explains why Brahms delayed publishing either a symphony or string quartet, genres where Beethoven excelled. Brahms’ early chamber music was mostly written for combinations that also avoid direct comparison with established models and precursors. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167654/original/file-20170503-4135-1dswl77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167654/original/file-20170503-4135-1dswl77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167654/original/file-20170503-4135-1dswl77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167654/original/file-20170503-4135-1dswl77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167654/original/file-20170503-4135-1dswl77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167654/original/file-20170503-4135-1dswl77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167654/original/file-20170503-4135-1dswl77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167654/original/file-20170503-4135-1dswl77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1090&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Clara Schumann circa 1850.</span>
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<p>This was the case with his Piano Quartet in G minor Opus 25. A quartet is a piece of music composed for a piano and three other instruments. Brahms used the unusual combination of piano, violin, viola and cello. </p>
<p>Brahms made his Viennese debut as composer and performer on piano on November 16 1862 with this piece. It was exactly one year after the quartet had its world premiere in Hamburg, featuring the preeminent pianist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Clara-Schumann">Clara Schumann</a>. </p>
<p>Since their first meeting a decade prior, Brahms had come to rely upon her artistic guidance, frequently submitting draft compositions for comment. In the case of the quartet, Schumann gave mixed criticisms.</p>
<h2>Secrets in the movements</h2>
<p>As well as using four performers and instruments, a quartet is composed of four movements. Schumann disliked the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WswtwksvEH0">first movement’s</a> sprawling expansiveness and the unconventional way Brahms handled some musical principles. The quartet is set in the musical key of G minor, and this is where it starts in the first movement, which is a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/sonata-form">sonata</a>. </p>
<p>Sonatas were the favoured form for a lot of music from the 18th to mid-19th century, and were generally structured around three parts. Sonatas change between musical keys to develop contrasting sounds and create tension. In Schumann’s view though, Brahms’s shifts in key were unbalanced.</p>
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<p>However she strongly approved of the second movement of the quartet (see clip below). Brahms initially called it a “scherzo”, but because of its comparatively moderate tempo, Schumann suggested it be renamed an “intermezzo”. (Both of these titles simply refer to the speed, range and mood of the movement.) Brahms did so, and thereafter would frequently use this genre title in his large output of short piano solo compositions. </p>
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<p>Two other aspects of the quartet’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-I133L5ZONQ">second movement</a> would have also pleased Schumann. She was known to enjoy “pedal point” technique, whereby a single note is sustained in one part alongside changing harmonies in the other instruments. Here, the cello plays middle C more than 50 times while the other strings move around with great melodic freedom. </p>
<p>The opening melody in C minor by the violin and viola is undoubtedly a direct personal reference to Schumann. Borrowing a device from her beloved but recently deceased husband Robert, Brahms spells her first name within the melody. In its original form and key, the musical notes C and A are retained, with B and G substituted for the letters L and R in her name respectively: (C-B-A-G-A). </p>
<p>Since Brahms had chosen to place the quicker inner movement second, his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z74kcpBexUA">third movement</a> needed to be more melodic and sonorous. Here the strings shine with long-breathed phrases, supported by a wide ranging piano part in the bass register.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z74kcpBexUA?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>As the tension builds within this slow movement, a taut march-like rhythm emerges, which eventually builds into a massive climax. It is not too far-fetched to suggest that Brahms is here emulating Beethoven. For example, there is a close similarity with the triumphant fanfares that erupt at several points in the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbaFvUcFPjA">slow movement of Beethoven’s 5th symphony</a>.</p>
<p>Despite these numerous highlights, it was the work’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPXPeHe6XTs">finale</a> that ensured its instant success and early acceptance into the canon of western classical music. Drawing on his early experience of concert tours with the Hungarian violinist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Eduard-Remenyi">Ede Reményi</a>, Brahms designated this movement as a “Rondo alla Zingarese”, that is “in the gypsy style” as then commonly understood in the Austro-Hungarian states. </p>
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<p>Austrian composer Joseph Haydn had famously also composed a “gyspy finale” for his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnkeRMRjJBE">piano trio</a>, so Brahms was not without precedent here. His setting is however closer to contemporary styles. Brahms’s pervasive use of strumming effects, for instance, represents the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mR0_nFTato">cimbalon</a>, the popular percussive string instrument used by bands playing music from eastern Europe.</p>
<p>Another quirky feature of the quartet’s finale is the frequent use of phrases of music made up of three bars (the basic building blocks of a musical composition). This rather undermines one’s expectation of the symmetrical balance that a classical work demonstrates. The <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/rondo">rondo</a> structure, whereby the opening section returns regularly but interspersed with contrasting passages, however ensures that Brahms’ catchy tune is instantly memorable.</p>
<h2>Innovation and appeal</h2>
<p>Viennese audiences were naturally captivated by this quartet thanks to its finale. Its other qualities were also widely recognised by his musical colleagues. Brahms’s lifelong friend the Hungarian violinist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Joachim">Joseph Joachim</a>, who had recently <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN0C-IyOOcg">composed a concerto</a> “in the Hungarian manner”, claimed Brahms had beat him “<a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Ms0dDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA96&lpg=PA96&dq=joachim+brahms+quartet+on+own+turf&source=bl&ots=HoqZzpKrgF&sig=TMLQqbnz-Jf3pklCovyCLUqh6gM&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwixmJXvjMvTAhWGHZQKHatSAR0Q6AEILTAB#v=onepage&q=joachim%20brahms%20quartet%20on%20own%20turf&f=false">on his own turf</a>!”</p>
<p>Brahms’s younger Viennese contemporary Arnold Schoenberg was also impressed. He recognised the quartet’s remarkable qualities such as the “perpetual variation” approach, whereby the large first movement emerges from a simple one-bar idea. Schoenberg later also arranged the quartet for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OF2BB_6dNWs">full orchestra</a>.</p>
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</figure>
<p>A combination of artistic innovation with popular appeal gave Brahms his first major public success.</p>
<p>Brahms and Clara Schumann remained close friends and artistic colleagues for the rest of their lives. When she died in 1896 he was grief stricken and outlived her by only a year. Brahms continued to compose in all major genres, other than opera. For many music lovers his major legacy is his large chamber music output, which features across his entire career. Though Clara was also a gifted composer, after her husband’s death she devoted herself to performing and teaching. </p>
<p>In Australia, Brahms’s music was slow to be adopted, but this piano quartet was the <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/queensland-review/article/music-by-the-few-for-the-many-chamber-music-in-colonial-queensland/97F5ED4C26B3FA35970131C83B38B44C">first to gain currency here</a>. More than 150 years after its premiere, Australians are still finding it an inspirational piece of chamber music.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167808/original/file-20170504-20192-1c55otk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167808/original/file-20170504-20192-1c55otk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167808/original/file-20170504-20192-1c55otk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=616&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167808/original/file-20170504-20192-1c55otk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=616&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167808/original/file-20170504-20192-1c55otk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=616&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167808/original/file-20170504-20192-1c55otk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167808/original/file-20170504-20192-1c55otk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167808/original/file-20170504-20192-1c55otk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=774&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The author’s 1843 Streicher piano, the same model that Brahms would have played on.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">David Roennfeldt.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Sydney’s Ironwood ensemble including pianist Neal Peres Da Costa recently recorded the Brahms G Minor Piano Quartet for ABC Classics, to <a href="http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/content/brahms-piano-quartet-no-1-piano-quintet-ironwood">critical acclaim</a>. Of particular interest is their use of a modern replica <a href="http://music.sydney.edu.au/new-old-streicher-piano-strikes-historical-chord-conservatorium/">Streicher piano</a>. Brahms received one of these instruments from its Viennese manufacturer soon after settling there, so it is an ideal vehicle for this repertoire. Brahms and his G Minor Piano Quartet are here to stay. </p>
<p><em>Peter Roennfeldt will be performing the quartet on his own Streicher piano, an original from 1843, on <a href="http://queenslandconservatorium.com.au/northern-passion/">Friday 12 May in Brisbane</a>.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76784/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Roennfeldt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The 29-year old Johannes Brahms had his first major public success with his piano quartet in G minor, but not everyone gave it glowing praise.Peter Roennfeldt, Professor of Music, Griffith UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/742432017-04-18T19:46:27Z2017-04-18T19:46:27ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165154/original/image-20170412-25870-wo5mpn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Franz Liszt in his home in Weimar, 1884.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/bergen_public_library/4007692985">Bergen Public Library Norway/Flickr</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara-Schumann">Clara Schumann</a>, the wife of the great composer Robert Schumann, <a href="http://www.henle.de/blog/en/2015/11/23/what%E2%80%99s-new-with-liszt%E2%80%99s-b-minor-sonata/">wrote in her diary</a> on 25 May 1854:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Liszt sent Robert today a sonata dedicated to him and several other things with a friendly letter to me. But the things are dreadful! [Johannes] Brahms played them for me, but they made me utterly wretched … This is nothing but sheer racket – not a single healthy idea, everything confused, no longer a clear harmonic sequence to be detected there! And now I still have to thank him – it’s really awful. </p>
</blockquote>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165156/original/image-20170412-25894-oxfnnl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165156/original/image-20170412-25894-oxfnnl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165156/original/image-20170412-25894-oxfnnl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=764&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165156/original/image-20170412-25894-oxfnnl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=764&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165156/original/image-20170412-25894-oxfnnl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=764&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165156/original/image-20170412-25894-oxfnnl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165156/original/image-20170412-25894-oxfnnl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165156/original/image-20170412-25894-oxfnnl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Clara Schumann circa 1850.</span>
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<p>She was referring, of course, to Franz Liszt, the Hungarian composer, and his Piano Sonata in B minor, which soon became one of the most popular and influential works of the piano repertoire. </p>
<p>Proof of this is that, despite its mammoth technical difficulties, there are over 50 recordings of the Sonata listed in the catalogues. As a somewhat odd measure of success in our times, the Sonata is even featured in an <a href="http://lisztsonata.touchpress.com/">award-winning iPad app</a>.</p>
<p>A “sonata” in the 19th-century sense would generally refer to a three or four movement composition. Unlike most traditional piano sonatas, Liszt’s work consists of one giant arch of a single movement, lasting almost half an hour. While this was unusual in the middle of the Romantic era, it was not without precedent. </p>
<p>Liszt knew Austrian composer Franz Schubert’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnvkhyvg2o">Wanderer Fantasie in C major</a> well. Although Schubert’s themes in the Wanderer Fantasy run through four movements in varied forms, these four movements are played without a break – the parallels with Liszt’s later Sonata are obvious. </p>
<p>Robert Schumann’s own <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5cmBah0F20">Fantasie in C major</a>, was also written to be played through, more or less hiding its three individual movements. Schumann dedicated this work to Liszt. Thus Liszt’s dedication of the B minor Sonata was a reciprocal gesture, which Schumann, sadly, could no longer appreciate.</p>
<p>Nor could Schumann play the Sonata as, by 1854, he was rather tragically committed to an asylum for the insane.</p>
<h2>‘Nothing but sheer racket’</h2>
<p>Liszt’s Sonata was publicly played for the first time a few years later in 1857, by one of his students, Hans von Bülow. The two of them grew even closer in the same year, when Bülow married Liszt’s daughter, Cosima. (Bülow was a great champion of compositions said to be unplayable. He also premiered Tschaikovsky’s famous first Piano Concerto in B flat minor in Boston.)</p>
<p>How Liszt, or for that matter, Bülow would have played the Sonata, we do not know. Fortunately though, two of Liszt’s students recorded the Sonata late in their lives and their performances survive on <a href="http://www.pianola.co.nz/public/index.php/web/about_piano_rolls">piano rolls</a> (a form of music storage commonly used in the first part of the 20th century).</p>
<p>We can gain a wealth of information about late 19th century performance practice, intriguing technical solutions, tempos, dynamics and other musical ideas through the recordings of these Liszt students, Arthur Friedheim and Eugene d’Albert. </p>
<p>Friedheim’s 1905 recording is the first complete one of the Sonata; his deeply musical, if often unusual playing of the first few minutes of this work is well worth listening to:</p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="241" data-image="" data-title="Excerpt 1 - Sonata in B" data-size="2837756" data-source="Liszt ~ Piano Sonata in B Minor ~ Premier recording by Arthur Friedheim ~ Leipzig 1905" data-source-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=0HMEt2x_zLQ" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/678/example-1-freidheim.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<div class="audio-player-caption">
Excerpt 1 - Sonata in B.
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=0HMEt2x_zLQ">Liszt ~ Piano Sonata in B Minor ~ Premier recording by Arthur Friedheim ~ Leipzig 1905</a><span class="download"><span>2.71 MB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/678/example-1-freidheim.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
</div></p>
<figure><figcaption><span class="caption">Source: [Liszt ~ Piano Sonata in B Minor ~ Premier recording by Arthur Friedheim ~ Leipzig 1905](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=0HMEt2x_zLQ) </span></figcaption></figure>
<p>Still, like Clara Schumann, others also had difficulties comprehending the astonishing musical journey of Liszt’s Sonata. </p>
<p>Upon hearing it for the first time, the enormously influential Viennese critic, <a href="http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/?GCOI=80140100668140&fa=author&person_id=349%20p.148">Eduard Hanslick, opined</a> </p>
<blockquote>
<p>whoever has heard that, and finds it beautiful, is beyond help. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fortunately, such sentiments did not prevail for long.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165155/original/image-20170412-25878-1cu70xr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165155/original/image-20170412-25878-1cu70xr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165155/original/image-20170412-25878-1cu70xr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=761&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165155/original/image-20170412-25878-1cu70xr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=761&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165155/original/image-20170412-25878-1cu70xr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=761&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165155/original/image-20170412-25878-1cu70xr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165155/original/image-20170412-25878-1cu70xr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165155/original/image-20170412-25878-1cu70xr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Liszt as painted by Henri Lehmann in 1839.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Sonata conquered, yet kept some of its secrets, despite numerous attempts to explain its enigmatic meaning. Among other theories, it has been suggested that it presents a musical portrait of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faust">Faust legend</a>; or that it is, in fact, autobiographical, and the musical contrasts within spring from the conflicts of Liszt’s own personality. </p>
<p>Others propose that it is about the divine and the diabolical, as depicted in the Bible and, specifically, in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, or that it is merely an allegory, set in the Garden of Eden, dealing with the Fall of Man and contains individual themes for “God”, “Lucifer”, “Serpent”, “Adam” and “Eve”. </p>
<p>On a simpler scale, it has also been said that the Sonata has no programmatic allusions at all and it is a piece of “expressive form” with no meaning beyond itself. </p>
<p>Any of these may appeal; whether they are true or not we’ll never know, as Liszt himself never offered an opinion.</p>
<h2>Stirring emotions</h2>
<p>Whatever its meaning, the Sonata is an incredibly powerful work, inspiring some performers to excessively emotional performances. One of the most vehement of them was recorded by the German Ludwig Hoffmann in 1977. </p>
<p>Here is his playing beginning from the same D major theme where we left off in the previous example, all the way to a tumultuous section that some analysts call the development section of the Sonata. (The main themes of a sonata movement are elaborated in various ways and keys in its middle section, called “development”)</p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="460" data-image="" data-title="Excerpt 2 - Sonata in B Minor" data-size="10015229" data-source="FRANZ LISZT - SONATA IN B MINOR - LUDWIG HOFFMANN" data-source-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfQrwn88a1w" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/679/example-2-hoffmann.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<div class="audio-player-caption">
Excerpt 2 - Sonata in B Minor.
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfQrwn88a1w">FRANZ LISZT - SONATA IN B MINOR - LUDWIG HOFFMANN</a><span class="download"><span>9.55 MB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/679/example-2-hoffmann.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
</div></p>
<figure><figcaption><span class="caption">Source: [FRANZ LISZT - SONATA IN B MINOR - LUDWIG HOFFMANN](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfQrwn88a1w)</span></figcaption></figure>
<p>Hoffmann’s is one of the fastest recordings, clocking just under 24 minutes. </p>
<p>In absolute contrast to that, the Croatian enfant terrible of piano stars, Ivo Pogorelich, played the same work a few years ago at a bewilderingly slow speed, taking almost exactly twice as long – an astonishing feat.</p>
<p>Some might call this performance a parody. Others admire it, and often for the very same reasons! The next example shows the same segment already heard on Hoffmann’s recording:</p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="500" data-image="" data-title="Excerpt 3 - Sonata in B Minor" data-size="11989810" data-source="Ivo Pogorelich plays Liszt Sonata - live 2012" data-source-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FHc84dsPKs" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/684/excerpt-3-reedit.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<div class="audio-player-caption">
Excerpt 3 - Sonata in B Minor.
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FHc84dsPKs">Ivo Pogorelich plays Liszt Sonata - live 2012</a><span class="download"><span>11.4 MB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/684/excerpt-3-reedit.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
</div></p>
<figure><figcaption><span class="caption">Source: [Ivo Pogorelich plays Liszt Sonata - live 2012](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FHc84dsPKs)</span></figcaption></figure>
<p>Whatever our opinion, time seems to stand still at times in this recording, while Pogorelich’s extreme attention to minutiae brings out harmonic clashes, hidden internal melodies and many other particulars seldom audible in other recordings. Whether the listener needs to be conscious of these details is another question altogether.</p>
<h2>Four movements or one?</h2>
<p>One of the most fascinating aspects of Liszt’s Sonata is that, depending on how we look at the score (and more importantly, listen to the music), it can be convincingly argued that it abides by two completely different structures – and does so simultaneously! </p>
<p>Viewed from one angle, it can be explained as one giant movement in traditional “sonata form”, containing the three traditional sections of exposition, development and return (or recapitulation) of the themes. </p>
<p>But looking at it from a different perspective, some listeners can discover the hallmarks of a four-movement composition, albeit played without a break. The beginning and end are the usual movements of a sonata, which bookend a conventional slow movement and a scherzo - a fast, light movement.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165171/original/image-20170413-25888-f2q0en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165171/original/image-20170413-25888-f2q0en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/165171/original/image-20170413-25888-f2q0en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165171/original/image-20170413-25888-f2q0en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165171/original/image-20170413-25888-f2q0en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165171/original/image-20170413-25888-f2q0en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165171/original/image-20170413-25888-f2q0en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/165171/original/image-20170413-25888-f2q0en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">One of Liszt’s pianos from his apartment in Budapest.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/FranzLisztPiano.jpg">Tamcgath/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Does a non-expert music lover have to know about this conundrum? Probably not. Yet listening to such details can be as mesmerising as the discussions they may provoke after the performance. </p>
<p>The intriguing problem of a two-dimensional form surfaces in other compositions of the Romantic period (lasting for most of the 19th century) and it is symptomatic with that era’s growing fascination with ambiguity in musical form.</p>
<p>The surviving manuscript of the Sonata reveals that Liszt originally composed a mighty, almost pretentious finish to it. Fortunately, at a later stage, he changed his mind and after a triumphant climax in B major, he returned to the melody of the “slow movement” and the Sonata not so much finishes but seems to evaporate through the last three ethereal chords.</p>
<p>One of the most moving performances of this final section (called a “coda”) was recorded by the Russian pianist, Sviatoslav Richter:</p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="328" data-image="" data-title="Excerpt 4 - Sonata in B Minor" data-size="7094631" data-source="Liszt: Sonata in B minor - Sviatoslav Richter" data-source-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1438&v=Wc4hJtKm278" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/681/example-4-richter.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<div class="audio-player-caption">
Excerpt 4 - Sonata in B Minor.
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1438&v=Wc4hJtKm278">Liszt: Sonata in B minor - Sviatoslav Richter</a><span class="download"><span>6.77 MB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/681/example-4-richter.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
</div></p>
<figure><figcaption><span class="caption">Source: [Liszt: Sonata in B minor - Sviatoslav Richter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1438&v=Wc4hJtKm278)</span></figcaption></figure>
<p>Nowadays, it is possible to follow the music of Liszt’s Sonata in B minor with the score, for example, on the following recording with Alfred Brendel as the pianist. This will also provide a chance to listen to the whole Sonata without interruption.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lRhU-R0RE-M?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-bachs-the-art-of-fugue-73522">Read more here</a> in our series on classical music.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/74243/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Zoltan Szabo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Whoever finds it beautiful is beyond help, quipped critic Eduard Hanslick upon hearing Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B minor for the first time. Fortunately, posterity did not agree with him.Zoltan Szabo, Phd candidate and lecturer, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/735222017-03-24T03:08:23Z2017-03-24T03:08:23ZDecoding the music masterpieces: Bach’s The Art of Fugue<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162102/original/image-20170322-25768-16lyhas.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Carl Seffner's 1908 statue of J.S. Bach in front of St. Thomas Church, Leipzig, Germany.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">pixy/shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the last decade of his life, from 1740 to 1750, Johann Sebastian Bach abandoned the furious pace of composition he had maintained for over 30 years and concentrated his creative energies largely on the composition of just six works.</p>
<p>They were the second volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier, the Goldberg Variations, the Canonic Variations on Vom Himmel Hoch, The Musical Offering, the B Minor Mass and finally, The Art of Fugue.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162283/original/image-20170323-4974-1ow2hoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162283/original/image-20170323-4974-1ow2hoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162283/original/image-20170323-4974-1ow2hoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162283/original/image-20170323-4974-1ow2hoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162283/original/image-20170323-4974-1ow2hoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162283/original/image-20170323-4974-1ow2hoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162283/original/image-20170323-4974-1ow2hoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162283/original/image-20170323-4974-1ow2hoo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=928&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Johann Sebastian Bach (aged 61) in a portrait by Elias Gottlob Haussmann, 1746.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In these six works he not only encapsulated all the discoveries and achievements of the previous 40 years, but extended to the outermost reaches of what was possible, the musical language bequeathed to him – which he had already done so much to develop.</p>
<p>The Australian composer Felix Werder once drily remarked that we cannot fully understand a work of art unless we know who paid for it. Remarkably, however, Bach was not paid for any of the above works, and indeed barely made any profit by personally financing the publication of four of them. </p>
<p>Thus about 30 copies of the Art of Fugue were bought, and later the copper plates used in the printing process were sold by his sons as scrap, in the hope of recouping some of the costs. So clearly Bach was driven by fierce personal inner necessity to compose these late works.</p>
<p>He seems to have begun working on The Art of the Fugue in 1742 and, with many interruptions, continued working on it until 1749. It was published posthumously in 1751, and in that first edition, the editors added Bach’s final composition, his short Chorale Prelude Before The Throne I Stand as compensation for the missing ending of the final fugue.</p>
<p>It is easy to forget that the purpose of Bach’s keyboard output was primarily pedagogical. Similarly, his three Passions (one now lost) and around 200 church cantatas were also intended pedagogically, but naturally in a profoundly more meaningful way. With this work, his primary purpose was to demonstrate all the myriad possibilities of fugal composition.</p>
<h2>What is a fugue?</h2>
<p>The Oxford Dictionary’s definition of a fugue is: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a polyphonic composition in which a short melodic theme, the subject, is introduced by one part or voice, and successively taken up by the others and developed by their interweaving. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bach brought the fugue to the peak of its development in the hundreds that he composed, and this work represents the apotheosis of the form.</p>
<p>The entire work is based on a theme which consists of the two building blocks of Western tonal music: the three notes of a D minor chord and a scale. </p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="12" data-image="" data-title="Excerpt 1 - Contrapunctus 1" data-size="296821" data-source="J.S. Bach" data-source-url="" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/659/contrapunctus-1.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<div class="audio-player-caption">
Excerpt 1 - Contrapunctus 1.
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">J.S. Bach</span><span class="download"><span>290 KB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/659/contrapunctus-1.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
</div></p>
<figure><figcaption><span class="caption">Source: [J.S.Bach: The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 (Fretwork) I. Contrapunctus 1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZusfVyit3s) </span></figcaption></figure>
<p>Nothing could be simpler, and it strains credulity that Bach could erect such a monumental edifice with seemingly unpromising material. </p>
<p>But this simple theme undergoes many permutations throughout the 14 fugues and four canons (in baroque terminology, fugues also) which constitute this work. Thus in the third fugue he turns it upside down, that is, where the original melody descends it now ascends and vice versa.</p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="11" data-image="" data-title="Excerpt 2 - Contrapunctus 3" data-size="269838" data-source="J.S. Bach" data-source-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uH0CZ77Y7w" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/668/contrapunctus-3.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<div class="audio-player-caption">
Excerpt 2 - Contrapunctus 3.
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uH0CZ77Y7w">J.S. Bach</a><span class="download"><span>264 KB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/668/contrapunctus-3.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
</div></p>
<figure><figcaption><span class="caption">Source: [J.S.Bach: The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 (Fretwork) II. Contrapunctus 3](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uH0CZ77Y7w) </span></figcaption></figure>
<p>In the fifth fugue, we hear it with some intervals filled in with rather jazzy, dotted rhythms.</p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="10" data-image="" data-title="Excerpt 3 - Contrapunctus 5" data-size="236034" data-source="J.S. Bach" data-source-url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2Oheu8Gruc" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/669/contrapunctus-5.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<div class="audio-player-caption">
Excerpt 3 - Contrapunctus 5.
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2Oheu8Gruc">J.S. Bach</a><span class="download"><span>231 KB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/669/contrapunctus-5.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
</div></p>
<figure><figcaption><span class="caption">Source: [J.S.Bach: The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 (Fretwork) VI. Contrapunctus 5](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2Oheu8Gruc) </span></figcaption></figure>
<p>Later still, we hear it syncopated and in triple time. Starting with the eighth fugue, new themes are introduced, but they are all in fact derived from this original theme.</p>
<p><audio preload="metadata" controls="controls" data-duration="9" data-image="" data-title="Excerpt 4 - Contrapunctus 11" data-size="226644" data-source="J.S. Bach" data-source-url="" data-license="" data-license-url="">
<source src="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/662/contrapunctus-11.mp3" type="audio/mpeg">
</audio>
<div class="audio-player-caption">
Excerpt 4 - Contrapunctus 11.
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">J.S. Bach</span><span class="download"><span>221 KB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/662/contrapunctus-11.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
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<figure><figcaption><span class="caption">Source: [J.S.Bach: The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 (Fretwork) XIV. Contrapunctus 11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyiAdK0dD-w) </span></figcaption></figure>
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Excerpt 5 - Contrapunctus 12.
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEYZJNkYhxM">J.S. Bach</a><span class="download"><span>246 KB</span> <a target="_blank" href="https://cdn.theconversation.com/audio/670/contrapunctus-12.mp3">(download)</a></span></span>
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<figure><figcaption><span class="caption">Source: [J.S.Bach: The Art of Fugue BWV 1080 (Fretwork) XVI. Contrapunctus 12, Inversus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEYZJNkYhxM) </span></figcaption></figure>
<p>The final fugue was the last he was ever to write, and also his longest. Although he had often hidden the BACH motif in his music (in German nomenclature it consists of the notes B flat, A, C and B) here – for the first and only time – he overtly introduces it as the third main theme of this massive fugue. It is this fugue which has come down to us incomplete, and the reasons for this are disputed.</p>
<p>We can now be certain that it was not due to Bach’s final illness, which was probably late stage diabetes, although we cannot be certain. </p>
<p>So the question remains open whether after his death, a final page went missing, or whether he had indeed composed it but not yet written it down, or even deliberately left it incomplete. </p>
<p>What we do know is that there are almost certainly 47 bars missing and that here Bach would have combined the main theme of the entire work with the other three themes of this mighty fugue.</p>
<h2>A quandary for performers</h2>
<p>Its incomplete state creates a musical, aesthetic, philosophical and even moral quandary for the performer. Most allow the work to trail off at the point where Bach’s manuscript ceases Others conclude with the chorale prelude mentioned above (a chorale prelude being a short contrapuntal elaboration of a traditional hymn tune). This means that after almost 80 minutes of D minor, the work ends with a four-minute chorale prelude in G major. </p>
<p>As one critic remarked, this makes no musical sense whatsoever, but it does make enormous non-musical sense. To the extent that music ultimately deals with existential questions of human existence, to conclude thus is perfectly valid. This writer, however, prefers to play one of the many attempted completions, in this case that by the renowned British harpsichordist <a href="http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Bio/Moroney-Davitt.htm">Davitt Moroney</a>.</p>
<p>A further contentious issue is for what instruments Bach composed this work. It is written in open score, that is, one stave for each polyphonic voice and, unlike almost every other work by Bach, no instrumentation is specified.</p>
<p>Already in 1751 it was advertised as being arranged in such a way as to be playable by two hands on a keyboard instrument, and this has led nearly all scholars to conclude it was conceived for the harpsichord. However, to assert that it is playable on the harpsichord is very different from saying that it was conceived for that instrument. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162111/original/image-20170323-25768-m7zkqp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162111/original/image-20170323-25768-m7zkqp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/162111/original/image-20170323-25768-m7zkqp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162111/original/image-20170323-25768-m7zkqp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162111/original/image-20170323-25768-m7zkqp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=427&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162111/original/image-20170323-25768-m7zkqp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162111/original/image-20170323-25768-m7zkqp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/162111/original/image-20170323-25768-m7zkqp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=537&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">The Fugue is playable on the harpsichord but that does not mean it has been conceived for that instrument.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">shutterstock</span></span>
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<p>The American pianist and writer Charles Rosen has tellingly pointed out that the question of what instrument the work was composed for would not have occurred to a musician of Bach’s time. For the few fortunate purchasers of the original print, it would have been played on whatever instruments they could play and had available at home.</p>
<p>The fact that the first complete performance of this work did not occur until 1922 has often been the subject of scandalised comment. But Bach would never have envisaged a public rendition of any of these fugues, much less a performance of the complete work, which in any case was unthinkable in the context of the performance practice of the time. </p>
<p>As the Hungarian musicologist Paul Henry Lang has said: </p>
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<p>each component of this work was to be painstakingly studied and slowly absorbed at home.</p>
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<p>To drag it into the glare of the concert hall is akin to displaying mediaeval altar triptychs in modern art museums. In both cases, however, these are among the few avenues we now have to experience these marvels of Western civilisation.</p>
<p>As usual Bach gives us almost no performance indications whatsoever, so it is each performer’s obligation to impart to each component of this work its own distinct character. So although Die Kunst der Fuga is a work of high art of the utmost seriousness, this does not mean that each individual fugue must be played seriously.</p>
<p>Thus after the solemn opening fugue, the second fugue might almost be felt as a parody. The fifth, sixth and seventh fugues, all featuring prominent dotted rhythms, can be felt as, by turns, skittish, pompous and melancholy, while the 12th fugue borders on the tragic. </p>
<p>This is in keeping with the late works of such diverse artists as Shakespeare, Beethoven and Goya, which exemplify how pathos, humour, gravity, exuberance and tragedy are inextricably enmeshed in the deepest recesses of the human psyche.</p>
<p><em>This article is appears in conjunction with upcoming performances by Daniel Herscovitch of The Art of Fugue at Brisbane Conservatorium at 7.30 pm on April 5, Canberra ANU School of Music at 6.30 pm on April 21 and Melbourne at Monash University Clayton Campus Music Auditoriumon at 2 pm on April 28.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/73522/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Herscovitch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of Fugue is a work of high art. But in keeping with the late works of artists such as Shakespeare, Beethoven and Goya, it contains elements of pathos, humour, gravity, exuberance and tragedy.Daniel Herscovitch, Associate Professor in Piano, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.