Re: Classical Composers
Posted: Mon Apr 23, 2018 3:55 pm
TIER 4
Fourteen composers in, there are still plenty of names to consider. In my opinion, however, four further names stand out for their significance. Each of these composers was at one time arguably the pre-eminent, or at least most influential, composer in the world...
ANTONIO VIVALDI, 1678-1741
The narcissistic priest to a school of orphan girls was also Europe’s most eccentric composer; Vivaldi’s strange, passionate work exploded into the stately music of the early 18th century, forcing the continent to imitate him, often against its will (he was disparaged as “wild and irregular”, and as “having too much mercury in his constitution”). He is effectively the father of the concerto, and he wrote around 500 of them, mostly for his own instrument, the violin. For fifty years, his influence was ubiquitous (he was evidently one of Bach’s most admired composers); but soon after his death, he was scrubbed from history, almost completely unheard of even by musicians for almost three hundred years, until his rediscovery in the middle of the 20th century. The qualities that have brought him legions of fans in the last fifty years are the same that caused him to be rejected in the previous 300: a gift for melody, a personal quality, an emotional clarity, and a pervading oddness in his tunes, his rhythms, and particularly his harmonies that the mainstream musical culture never quite emulated – Vivaldi is, as it were, an image of a future that was never taken up, until it had already become the past. He’s most famous today for the four short, programmatic violin concertos collectively known as the Four Seasons, which range from the ebulliently Baroque through the presciently Romantic to the wholly its own thing. And there’s plenty more where that came from – here’s a random violin concerto, here’s a weird little concerto for cello and bassoon (Vivaldi was the first to write a cello concerto), and here’s a Gloria that seems to prefigure Handel. As you can see, he mostly wrote music for people who drank a lot of coffee.
ROBERT SCHUMANN, 1810-1856
To get a sense of what inspired the Romantic era, go to Beethoven; but for the platonic ideal of Romanticism in practice, go to the works of Robert Schumann. Best known until the final years of his life as a music critic, in his last years and following his death he became the figure that united all strands of music. Brahms was his protégé, and followed Schumann’s classical restraint; Liszt saw in Schumann a guiding light in returning music to closer union with literary models through diverse and flexible structures; Mahler saw a forebear in Schumann’s at times almost Beethovinian sentiment and powerful emotional breakthroughs; the Impressionists sought to imitate his gentle richness and his miniaturist impulses. When Russians like Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky spoke of imitating or avoiding imitating the West, they were talking above all of Schumann. His chamber works, particularly for piano, became the international language of sophisticated salons. Perhaps his most famous work is the delicate little piano piece, Träumerei (one of thirteen ‘childhood scenes’), showing his characteristic melodious softness; a piece like the slow movement of his first trio shows something similar (while the finale shows a little more passion and at times oddity). Larger-scale works include his highly influential second symphony, and his concertos for violin, cello (the first of the great Romantic concertos for that instrument), and – a work that, even just in the opening bars, seems to directly link Beethoven with (wait 50 seconds!) Rachmaninov... finally, I’ll end with his own final (surviving) piece, the Geistervariationen. Dragged from his bed one night by supernatural beings (who often distracted him in his later years with their chattering and their music for wind bands), he jotted down one of their angelic songs (coincidentally, a tune he himself had written years before, though he did not recognise it at the time). As the angels were replaced by harshly screaming hyaenas and tigers over the next few days, he attempted to distract himself by composing a series of variations on the divine melody, but his efforts were impeded by his attempt to kill himself by jumping from a bridge (bouts of severe depression often accompanied his periods of delusion and hallucination). He demanded to be institutionalised, and completed the [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8Mrl07JVMU] variations, dedicating them to his wife, while waiting for the carriage to come to take him away. He spent the last two years of his life in an asylum.
Over the years, Schumann’s works have been played less often, though he remains a mainstay of chamber concerts.
Fourteen composers in, there are still plenty of names to consider. In my opinion, however, four further names stand out for their significance. Each of these composers was at one time arguably the pre-eminent, or at least most influential, composer in the world...
ANTONIO VIVALDI, 1678-1741
The narcissistic priest to a school of orphan girls was also Europe’s most eccentric composer; Vivaldi’s strange, passionate work exploded into the stately music of the early 18th century, forcing the continent to imitate him, often against its will (he was disparaged as “wild and irregular”, and as “having too much mercury in his constitution”). He is effectively the father of the concerto, and he wrote around 500 of them, mostly for his own instrument, the violin. For fifty years, his influence was ubiquitous (he was evidently one of Bach’s most admired composers); but soon after his death, he was scrubbed from history, almost completely unheard of even by musicians for almost three hundred years, until his rediscovery in the middle of the 20th century. The qualities that have brought him legions of fans in the last fifty years are the same that caused him to be rejected in the previous 300: a gift for melody, a personal quality, an emotional clarity, and a pervading oddness in his tunes, his rhythms, and particularly his harmonies that the mainstream musical culture never quite emulated – Vivaldi is, as it were, an image of a future that was never taken up, until it had already become the past. He’s most famous today for the four short, programmatic violin concertos collectively known as the Four Seasons, which range from the ebulliently Baroque through the presciently Romantic to the wholly its own thing. And there’s plenty more where that came from – here’s a random violin concerto, here’s a weird little concerto for cello and bassoon (Vivaldi was the first to write a cello concerto), and here’s a Gloria that seems to prefigure Handel. As you can see, he mostly wrote music for people who drank a lot of coffee.
ROBERT SCHUMANN, 1810-1856
To get a sense of what inspired the Romantic era, go to Beethoven; but for the platonic ideal of Romanticism in practice, go to the works of Robert Schumann. Best known until the final years of his life as a music critic, in his last years and following his death he became the figure that united all strands of music. Brahms was his protégé, and followed Schumann’s classical restraint; Liszt saw in Schumann a guiding light in returning music to closer union with literary models through diverse and flexible structures; Mahler saw a forebear in Schumann’s at times almost Beethovinian sentiment and powerful emotional breakthroughs; the Impressionists sought to imitate his gentle richness and his miniaturist impulses. When Russians like Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky spoke of imitating or avoiding imitating the West, they were talking above all of Schumann. His chamber works, particularly for piano, became the international language of sophisticated salons. Perhaps his most famous work is the delicate little piano piece, Träumerei (one of thirteen ‘childhood scenes’), showing his characteristic melodious softness; a piece like the slow movement of his first trio shows something similar (while the finale shows a little more passion and at times oddity). Larger-scale works include his highly influential second symphony, and his concertos for violin, cello (the first of the great Romantic concertos for that instrument), and – a work that, even just in the opening bars, seems to directly link Beethoven with (wait 50 seconds!) Rachmaninov... finally, I’ll end with his own final (surviving) piece, the Geistervariationen. Dragged from his bed one night by supernatural beings (who often distracted him in his later years with their chattering and their music for wind bands), he jotted down one of their angelic songs (coincidentally, a tune he himself had written years before, though he did not recognise it at the time). As the angels were replaced by harshly screaming hyaenas and tigers over the next few days, he attempted to distract himself by composing a series of variations on the divine melody, but his efforts were impeded by his attempt to kill himself by jumping from a bridge (bouts of severe depression often accompanied his periods of delusion and hallucination). He demanded to be institutionalised, and completed the [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8Mrl07JVMU] variations, dedicating them to his wife, while waiting for the carriage to come to take him away. He spent the last two years of his life in an asylum.
Over the years, Schumann’s works have been played less often, though he remains a mainstay of chamber concerts.