Twentieth Century

Fauré’s Piano Trio in D Minor: A Revelatory Farewell

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The Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 120 is the revelatory penultimate work of Gabriel Fauré. Fauré composed it amid declining health, shortly after his 1920 retirement as director of the Paris Conservatory. Completely deaf and nearly blind, the composer wrote in a poignant letter to his son, “and so one says goodbye, little by little.” The Piano Trio is a musical goodbye. Filled with tender nostalgia and childlike innocence, it inhabits …

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Paul Dukas’ Fanfare from “La Péri”: Prelude to a Mythical Ballet

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Paul Dukas’ 1912 ballet in one act, La Péri, is based on a Persian folktale. Iskender, an aged king, steals the magic Flower of Immortality from the hands of the sleeping Péri, a beautiful winged fairylike creature. Immediately, Iskender is filled with the vitality of youth, and consumed with earthly material desires. He falls in love with Péri. Performing a dance which brings her gradually closer, Péri is able to take back …

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Percy Grainger’s “Lincolnshire Posy”: Portraits from the English Countryside

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Lincolnshire Posy, a folk song suite for band by Australian-born composer Percy Grainger (1882-1961), reveals ancient sounds from the English countryside. In 1905, Grainger, who adapted England as his homeland, traveled to remote villages with pencil, notebook, and phonograph in hand. His efforts to preserve the raw, exotic sounds of the isolated countryside mirrored the work of other composers at the time, including Ralph Vaughan Williams (in England) and Zoltán Kodály and …

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Korngold’s “Die tote Stadt” Finale: Torsten Kerl

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Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s 1920 opera, Die tote Stadt (“The Dead City”) is “a psychological drama about grief, obsession, and acceptance.” (English National Opera) The opera’s synopsis is nearly identical to the plot of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film, Vertigo. Haunted by the memory of his late wife, Paul obsessively pursues a dancer who closely resembles her. Amid Paul’s psychological descent, reality blurs with hallucination. He believes that he has strangled the dancer, Marietta, with a lock …

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Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from “Peter Grimes”: Atmospheric Portraits

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Set in a small English coastal village, Benjamin Britten’s 1945 opera, Peter Grimes, tells the dark story of an alienated individual who falls victim to mob rule. This human struggle, with its focus on morality and punishment, plays out against the backdrop of the sea, a vast eternal presence. Throughout the opera, the action is interrupted by four orchestral interludes. Howard Posner describes them as scene changes by a master of the …

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Ligeti’s Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano: Hommage à Brahms

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Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006) described his Trio for Horn, Violin, and Piano as an Hommage à Brahms.  It was Brahms who, with his own 1865 Horn Trio, pioneered this unique combination of instruments. Brahms was a composer who built on tradition. Composed in 1982, a year before the 150th anniversary celebrations of Brahms’ birth, Ligeti’s Trio similarly embraces a synthesis of old and new. For the composer, it marked a stylistic turning …

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Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 in D Major, “Classical”: Musical Time Travel

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If Haydn had traveled 100 years into the future, what kind of music might he have written? The 25-year-old Sergei Prokofiev provided a compelling answer with his Symphony No. 1 in D Major, Op. 25, widely known as the “Classical” Symphony. Filled with grace, elegance, exuberance, and humor, it is compact music, scored for the pared-down classical orchestra. Bold 20th century harmony meets traditional sonata form. In his autobiography, Prokofiev wrote, “It …

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