Following the completion of his Piano Trio No. 2 in C Major, the often self-critical Johannes Brahms wrote to his publisher, “You have not yet had such a beautiful trio from me and very likely have not published its equal in the last ten years.” By the time Brahms started work on the Trio in 1880, he had become a well-established, mature composer. For two years, he set the score aside to …
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 …
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 …
Dmitri Shostakovich composed fifteen symphonies and fifteen string quartets. The symphonies deliver drama on a grand, public scale. Many, such as Symphony No. 7, “Leningrad,” and Symphony No. 11, “The Year 1905,” have programmatic associations. They are filled with irony, double meaning, and coded messages. They are the music of a composer who lived continuously under mortal threat of displeasing Stalin and his Soviet cultural censors. At times equally haunting, melancholy, and …
In the music of Felix Mendelssohn, two aesthetic worlds meet. The mystery and pathos of Romanticism blend with the pristine formal constructs of Classicism. Robert Schumann summarized this unique synthesis when he called Mendelssohn “the Mozart of the nineteenth century, the most illuminating of musicians, who sees more clearly than others through the contradictions of our era and is the first to reconcile them.” This remarkable synthesis can be heard in Mendelssohn’s …
Lars Vogt, the renowned German pianist and conductor, passed away on Monday, September 5. He was 51. In March of 2021, Vogt was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer in his throat and liver. Born in the town of Düren in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, Vogt rose to prominence after winning second prize at the 1990 Leeds International Piano Competition. He went on to perform as a soloist with the world’s greatest orchestras. He …
The word, bagatelle, translates as “a trifle, or something of little importance.” In music, the bagatelle refers to a piece which is brief, light, and unpretentious. Some of the most famous examples spring from the keyboard works of Couperin and Beethoven. Between 1951 and 1953, the Hungarian-Austrian composer, György Ligeti, composed a set of 11 bagatelles for piano, titled Musica ricercata. Each intricately constructed miniature centers around a specific pitch class (or …