Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” Overture: A Wild and Exhilarating Ride

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Mozart’s 1786 comic opera in four acts, The Marriage of Figaro, K. 492, is filled with trickery, deception, overheard conversations, cunning disguises, and crazy schemes. Unfolding over the course of a single “day of madness,” it tells the story of two servants, Figaro and Susanna, who succeed in getting married despite the efforts of their lecherous employer, Count Almaviva. The play by Pierre Beaumarchais, on which the opera was based, faced censorship because …

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Bach’s Sinfonia from Cantata, BWV 21 (“Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis”): A Portrait of Greif

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J.S. Bach composed the Cantata, Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis, BWV 21 (“I had much grief”) in 1713 during his tenure as director of music at the court of Weimar. It was first performed a year later on the third Sunday after Trinity. Themes of suffering, grief, and mourning dominate the opening section of the Cantata, which, as conductor John Eliot Gardiner observes, is “set almost obsessively in C minor.” It is a …

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Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: Herbert Blomstedt and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

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Last Thursday, July 11, renowned Swedish conductor Herbert Blomstedt celebrated his 97th birthday. Sidelined by a serious fall in December of 2023, Blomstedt resumed his conducting schedule last April; and with numerous upcoming engagements, centered in Leipzig, Dresden, and Paris, he shows no signs of slowing down. This year, in celebration of Blomstedt’s birthday, the Bamberg Symphony played I denna ljuva sommartid, a Swedish summer psalm which holds significance for the conductor. …

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Schubert’s Impromptu No. 3 in G-Flat Major: Krystian Zimerman

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Franz Schubert composed a set of eight solo piano Impromptus (D. 899 and D. 935) in the summer and autumn of 1827, months before the creation of his Winterreise song cycle, and a year before his death at the age of 31. The title, suggesting an improvisatory character piece in three-part form (A-B-A) was chosen by Schubert’s Viennese publisher, Tobias Haslinger. Long before recordings, at a time when pianos were becoming increasingly inexpensive …

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Steve Reich’s Quartet: Music for Two Vibraphones and Two Pianos

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In his 1968 essay, Music as a Gradual Process, Steve Reich (b. 1936) wrote, “I am interested in perceptible processes. I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.” An American composer at the forefront of minimalism, Reich’s early process music involved repeated fragments of recorded conversation played on tape loops, one of which gradually moved out of sync in a phasing technique. Later came instrumental phase …

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“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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