Romantic Period

“Songs My Mother Taught Me”: From Dvořák to Ives

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Songs My Mother Taught Me is the fourth and most famous of Antonín Dvořák’s seven-song cycle, Gypsy Songs, Op. 55. Composed in 1880 at the request of the Viennese tenor, Gustav Walter, the texts are from a collection of poems by Adolf Heyduk. Songs My Mother Taught Me highlights the timelessness of music, and enduring truths, passed lovingly through generations: Songs my mother taught me in the days long vanished, Seldom from her eyelids were …

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Dvořák’s String Quartet No. 12 in F Major: The “American”

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During the summer of 1893, Antonín Dvořák took his habitual morning walks, not through the meadows of his native Bohemia, but into the vast, rolling prairie of northeastern Iowa. It was here, in the small Czech immigrant enclave of Spillville, that Dvořák completed the “New World” Symphony, and then, in just over two weeks, wrote his String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96. Having relocated from Prague the previous September …

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Borodin’s “Polovtsian Dances” from “Prince Igor”: A Spirited Performance by Russian Youth

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Alexander Borodin’s four-act opera, Prince Igor, is based on the medieval Russian nationalistic epic, The Tale of Igor’s Campaign. It tells the story of a 12th century military campaign, launched by the Prince of Novgorod-Seversk against the Polovtsians, an invading nomadic Tartar tribe. Quickly, the campaign takes a disastrous turn, and Igor and his son, Vladimir, are taken prisoner. In the opera’s second act, the Polovtsian leader, Khan Konchak, entertains his captives …

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Khatia Buniatishvili Plays Chopin: Ballade No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 52

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Frédéric Chopin’s Ballade No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 52 inhabits the world of dreams. It unfolds as a hazy musical hallucination, at once melancholy, sensuous, and volcanic. The English pianist John Ogdon called it, “the most exalted, intense and sublimely powerful of all Chopin’s compositions…It is unbelievable that it lasts only twelve minutes, for it contains the experience of a lifetime.” Composed in Paris in 1842, this was Chopin’s final solo …

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Verdi’s Requiem at 150

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Today marks the 150th anniversary of the first performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem. The premiere, led by the composer, took place on May 22, 1874 at the Church of San Marco in Milan, and was followed by subsequent performances at La Scala and in Paris. Powerfully dramatic, Verdi’s Requiem is liturgy through the lens of opera. Scored for four vocal soloists (soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and bass), double chorus, and orchestra, it is …

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Brahms’ Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor: Tempestuous and Dramatic

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With the symphonies and other large-scale works behind him, Johannes Brahms was at the height of his artistic maturity when, during the summer of 1886, he composed the Violin Sonata No. 3 in D minor, Op. 108. The last of Brahms’ violin sonatas, Op. 108 is also the most tempestuous and dramatic. Unfolding in four movements rather than three, it is set in the turbulent key of Beethoven’s monumental Ninth Symphony and …

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Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night”: At the Tonal Precipice

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Famously, in the early years of the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg plunged over the precipice into the world of atonality. A natural outgrowth of late Romantic chromaticism, the new music gave equality to all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, and abolished the kind of hierarchy that allowed for a tonal center of gravity. Schoenberg adapted the system of Serialism to manipulate the resulting twelve tone rows. Standing at the tonal precipice, …

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