It was during his youthful tenure in Weimar (1708-1713) that J.S. Bach composed the “Great” Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543. Only a few years earlier, the 20-year-old Bach walked north 200 miles to Lübeck to hear the celebrated organist, Dieterich Buxtehude, and “to comprehend one thing and another about his art.” The influence of Buxtehude’s style, along with the Italian music of Corelli, can be heard in BWV 543, …
Composed in Weimar, circa 1713, J.S. Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in A minor, BWV 944 amounts to a warmup, followed by a herculean feat of athleticism. The warmup, for our ears, the players fingers, and the instrument alike, comes with the brief ten-bar Fantasia. Bach notated this opening as chords, with the instruction, “arpeggio.” The player is free to improvise on a harmonic progression which is at once melancholy, mysterious, and sensuous. …
The Prelude and Fugue No. 8 in E-flat minor, BWV 853 comes from Book 1 of J.S. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. Beginning with the purity of C major, the two-volume collection is made up of preludes and fugues in all 24 major and minor keys. The key of E-flat (or enharmonic D-sharp) was rarely used during the Baroque period. For BWV 853, Bach transposed a previously written D minor fugue into D-sharp minor. …
…Thy contrasted lake, With the wild world I dwell in, is a thing Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring. These lines from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage form the poetic caption for Franz Liszt’s Au lac de Wallenstadt (“At Lake Wallenstadt”). Following the exalted La chapelle de Guillaume Tell, with its distant Alpine horn calls, Au lac de Wallenstadt is the second movement of Liszt’s …
In the 19th century, writers such as Charles Dickens commonly published books in monthly installments which appeared in popular periodicals. Published on the first day of each month in 1876 in the St. Petersburg music journal, Nuvellist, Tchaikovsky’s piano cycle, The Seasons, Op. 37a reached listeners in a similar way. Subtitled “12 characteristic scenes,” the atmospheric works are miniature tone paintings. Tchaikovsky composed them concurrently with the ballet, Swan Lake. In this era before recordings, …
Niccolò Paganini’s 24th Caprice for solo violin has provided an irresistible blueprint for numerous composers. Most famously, its jaunty, infectious melody inspired the 24 variations of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43. Nearly seventy years before Rachmaninov, in 1863, Johannes Brahms composed his own Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 35. The work is organized in two books, each made up of fourteen blazingly athletic variations, and …
Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), who died 100 years ago last July, was a musical renaissance man. The Italian composer, pianist, conductor, teacher, writer, and editor has been called “the first truly modern composer.” He is also remembered for numerous enduring transcriptions of the music of J.S. Bach. Busoni associated with such a disparate group of contemporaries as Schoenberg, Sibelius, and Edgard Varèse. His small circle of students included Kurt Weill. The pianist Alfred …