Twentieth Century

Gershwin’s “An American in Paris”: A “Rhapsodic Ballet” Born in the Jazz Age

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In the spring of 1928, George and Ira Gershwin traveled to Europe for a three-month sojourn. The brothers, among the most celebrated composer-lyricist teams on Broadway, had just finished work on the musical, Rosalie, produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, and they relished the time off. It was during this trip that George Gershwin set to work on a commission he had received from the New York Philharmonic. The result was the vividly evocative …

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Scriabin’s Fantasie in B Minor: A Dramatic Tour de Force

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The story, recounted by the Russian musicologist, Leonid Sabaneyev, is so incredible that it may have been apocryphal. One day, while in Alexander Scriabin’s Moscow flat, Sabaneyev sat down at the piano and began to play a theme from Scriabin’s Fantasie in B minor, Op. 28. The composer called out from the next room, “Who wrote that? It sounds familiar.” “Your Fantasie,” was the response. “What Fantasie?” Composed in 1900 during Scriabin’s …

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Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 2 in A Major: Klezmer Strains

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Dmitri Shostakovich composed his String Quartet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 68 over the course of 19 days in September of 1944. He had just completed the haunting Second Piano Trio, and (a year earlier) the Eighth Symphony. While the Second World War still raged, the tide had turned, and a Soviet victory over the Nazis was all but assured. Shostakovich found refuge at a “house of rest and creativity,” a …

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Shostakovich’s “The Execution of Stepan Razin”: A Dramatic Cantata À La Russe

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In 1670, the Cossack leader, Stepan Razin, led an army of 7,000 oppressed peasants in an open rebellion in southern Russia against the Tsar’s government. The following year, after numerous bloody battles, he was captured, hoisted onto a scaffold in Moscow’s Red Square, and publicly executed by beheading. Razin’s gruesome demise is the subject of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1964 cantata, The Execution of Stepan Razin, Op. 119. The dramatic work is scored for …

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Michael Tippett’s “Fantasia on a Theme of Handel”: An Homage to the Baroque

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As one of music history’s greatest melodists, George Frideric Handel left behind ripe material for later composers. For example, consider the way allusions to the iconic Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah resurfaced in the music of composers such as Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Mahler. Brahms’ Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel is based on the Aria con variazioni which concludes Handel’s Suite in B-flat Major, HWV 434 for solo keyboard. With this monumental piece, the …

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Debussy’s “Danseuses de Delphes”: Homage to Ancient Caryatids

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In 1894, a team of French archeologists discovered the toppled ruins of elaborate caryatids which adorned the Acanthus Column near the Temple of Apollo in the Ancient Greek city of Delphi. As sculptures representing female figures, caryatids form pillars throughout Greek architecture. The graceful, flowing Dancers of Delphi, constructed around 330 BC and now forever free of their structural burden, remain frozen in motion. The first of Claude Debussy’s 24 Préludes for solo …

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Bartók’s Dance Suite: Celebrating the Sounds of the Countryside

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For several years, beginning in the summer of 1906, the young Béla Bartók traveled to remote corners of the Hungarian countryside to document age-old folk music with the aid of the phonograph. Eventually, his travels extended to villages in Slovakia, Transylvania, and Bulgaria, and resulted in the transcription of over a thousand folk songs. Throughout the project, Bartók was assisted by his compatriot, Zoltán Kodály. The pentatonic harmony which ran through ancient …

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