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 …
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 …
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, …
In 1892, Antonín Dvořák composed three concert overtures (In Nature’s Realm, Carnival, and Othello) inspired by poetic visions of “Nature, Life, and Love.” After examining the composer’s notes, the biographer, Otakar Šourek, wrote, Dvořák wished in this cycle to draw in overture-form musical pictures of three of the most powerful impressions to which the human soul is subjected: the impression of the solitary, wrapped about by the exalted stillness of the summer night; …
In May of 1865, following the death of his beloved mother Christiane three months earlier, Johannes Brahms retreated to the picturesque seclusion of Baden-Baden in Germany’s Black Forest. It was here that Brahms composed his Trio in E-flat Major for Horn, Violin, and Piano, Op. 40. He worked in a room which, in his words, “looks out on three sides at the dark, wooded mountains, the roads winding up and down them, …
In 1879, the University of Breslau in Prussia (now Wrocław, Poland) awarded Johannes Brahms an honorary doctorate in philosophy. The acclaimed composer, who never attended college, had little use for academic titles. When Cambridge University attempted to bestow a similar honor three years earlier, Brahms declined, forgoing lionization and sea travel—both of which he despised—for the quiet comfort of his home. His postcard response to the faculty in Breslau was met with …
Maurizio Pollini, the acclaimed Italian pianist whose career spanned more than six decades, passed away on March 23 in a clinic in his native Milan. He was 82. La Scala, the opera house where Pollini frequently performed, hailed the Grammy-winning pianist as “one of the great musicians of our time and a fundamental reference in the artistic life of the theater for over 50 years.” Pollini began performing publicly at age 11, …