Twentieth Century

Hanson’s “Romantic” Second Symphony: A Cinematic, Cyclic Journey

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The American composer, Howard Hanson, was born in 1896 in the small Nebraska prairie town of Wahoo. Hanson served as the director of the Eastman School of Music for 40 years, beginning in 1924. In the middle of the twentieth century, his influence was so great that he was hailed as the “Dean of American Composers and spokesman for music in America.” At a time when formalism and atonality ruled, Hanson’s warmly melodic, Neo-romanticism …

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Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia”: A Prayerful Fanfare

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The American composer Randall Thompson (1899–1984) composed his famous Alleluia over the course of five days at the beginning of July, 1940. The work for a cappella chorus was first performed on July 8th of that year for the formal opening of the Berkshire Music Center (now the Tanglewood Music Center). Serge Koussevitsky, the festival’s founder and the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, asked Thompson to write a celebratory “fanfare” for voices. …

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Korngold’s Five Songs, Op. 38: From Film Music to Lied

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Erich Wolfgang Korngold was one of the twentieth century’s great composers of melody. We hear this in the dramatic music of Korngold’s 1920 opera, Die tote Stadt (“The Dead City), as well as in the soaring Hollywood film scores which followed. Additionally, Korngold was a clever musical recycler. Rich melodies, which were scattered throughout the film scores, formed the basis of Korngold’s 5 Lieder, Op. 38, completed in 1947. The first song, Glückwunsch …

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Prokofiev’s Cello Sonata in C Major: Triumph Over Censorship

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In the years following the Second World War, Stalin’s “propagandist-in-chief,” Andrei Zhdanov, drafted a series of resolutions that were designed to censor Soviet art, literature, film, and music. All art had to adhere to the ideals of Soviet “socialist realism.” The Zhdanov Doctrine proclaimed that “The only conflict that is possible in Soviet culture is the conflict between good and best.” First, Zhdanov banned the works of Anna Akhmatova, arguably Russia’s greatest living …

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Stravinsky’s “Mavra”: A Neoclassical Comic Opera in One Act

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Igor Stravinsky’s one act comic opera, Mavra, is delightfully intimate, colorful, and whimsical. Unfolding in a mere 30 minutes, the opera features two arias, a duet, and a quartet, performed by a cast of four characters. Based on Alexander Pushkin’s poem, The Little House in Kolomna, it has been described as a “satire of petit-bourgeois manners.” The libretto was written by Boris Kochno, a young assistant to the dance impresario, Serge Diaghilev. Set in …

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Prokofiev’s “Summer Night” Suite: Music from “Betrothal in a Monastery”

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Sergei Prokofiev’s 1946 comic opera, Betrothal in a Monastery, involves trickery, bribery, disguises, an averted arranged marriage, and (in the final act) monks engaged in alcoholic revelry. A twentieth century homage to Italian opera buffa, it is far removed from the cultural and political landscape of Stalin’s Soviet Union. In 1950, Prokofiev used music from the opera as the basis for the five movement orchestral suite, Summer Night, Op. 123. The boisterous, larger-than-life music which …

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Ingram Marshall’s “Fog Tropes”: A Haunting Soundscape

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The American composer, Ingram Marshall, passed away on May 31 due to complications from Parkinson’s disease. He was 80. Blending elements of minimalism and electronic music, Marshall revealed magical new soundscapes. Disparate influences emerge throughout his music which include the Javanese gamelan, Balinese bamboo flute, and references to the works of J.S. Bach, Beethoven, Sibelius, and Stravinsky, among others. As a composer, Marshall was in search of what he called “the dark and the beautiful …

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