The Sonata for Viola and Piano, Op. 147, was Dmitri Shostakovich’s final work. The score was completed on July 5, 1975, a day before the composer entered the hospital where, just over a month later, he would succumb to the effects of terminal heart disease and lung cancer. Shostakovich seems to have considered the Viola Sonata to be a final farewell. All three of its movements conclude with the instruction, morendo, or “dying …
Polaris, a tone poem written in 2010 by the British composer Thomas Adès (b. 1971) evokes the vastness and majesty of the sea and the sky. A shifting kaleidoscope of color, it is music in which elemental forces are in play. Subtitled, “Voyage for Orchestra,” Polaris can give you the cinematic sensation of drifting over a gradually shifting landscape. The title is a reference to Polaris, the North Star, long a navigational tool for …
Gabriel Fauré’s Cello Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 109 inhabits a world of elegance and dreamy nostalgia. It is music characterized by soft edges, buoyant motion, and an effortless sense of melody. Composed in the summer of 1917, this is one of two cello sonatas Fauré completed in the final decade of his life. During these years, Fauré, who served as the head of the Paris Conservatoire until 1920, continued to compose despite …
John Field (1782-1837), the Irish composer, pianist, and teacher, is credited with developing the solo piano nocturne. His music and pianistic style influenced a later generation of composers, including Frédéric Chopin, Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann, and Franz Liszt. Born in Dublin, Field gave his first performance at the age of 9 and rose to prominence as a prodigy. In his writings, Haydn noted “Field a young boy, which plays the pianoforte Extremely well.” In 1802 he …
With his Symphony No. 2 in C minor, composed between 1888 and 1894, Gustav Mahler grappled with the most fundamental metaphysical questions. In a letter, he wrote, “Why have you lived? Why have you suffered? Is it all some huge, awful joke? – We have to answer these questions somehow if we are to go on living – indeed, even if we are only to go on dying!” The person in whose …
The Prelude and Fugue No. 11 in F Major, BWV 880 comes from the second book of J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. These sublime etudes traverse all twenty four major and minor keys, and in Bach’s words, were conceived “for the use and profit of musical youth desirous of learning, as well as for the pastime of those already skilled in this study.” They are pieces characterized by a divine sense of order. The …
The music of Dmitri Shostakovich falls into two categories. There are the faceless proletarian marches, patriotic hymns, propagandistic film scores, and other superficial works which were written to appease Stalin and his cultural censors. Then, there is the music that Shostakovich dared not release publicly until after Stalin’s death in 1953. Much of this music ended up hidden in the composer’s “desk drawer.” The Violin Concerto No. 1 in A minor was …