Peter Schickele’s “Last Tango in Bayreuth”: An Awful Lot of Bassoons

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Last Wednesday, May 22, marked the 211th anniversary of Wagner’s birth. During his lifetime, the German Romanticist became a cult-like figure, revealing magical new orchestral colors and pushing tonality and formal scale to their ecstatic limits. In contrast with Brahms the traditionalist, Wagner appeared to offer a radical new vision. Looking back on Wagner’s work, Claude Debussy more accurately described it as “a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn.” The …

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Verdi’s Requiem at 150

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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 …

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Arvo Pärt’s “Silouan’s Song”: “My Soul Yearns After the Lord”

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Arvo Pärt’s Silouan’s Song, composed in 1991 for string orchestra, reveals the sacred quality of both sound and silence. Inhabiting a meditative space which taps into cosmic expanses, it unfolds with the mystical bell tones of the Estonian composer’s tintinnabulation style. Pärt’s inspiration for the piece came from a text by the Russian poet and monk, St. Silouan (1866–1938), who spent much of his life at St Panteleimon on Mount Athos. Each phrase …

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Alec Wilder’s “Blackberry Winter”: Marlene VerPlanck and Keith Jarrett

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American composer Alec Wilder (1907-1980) was a maverick and an eccentric whose music defied categorization. Born in Rochester, New York to a prominent family, Wilder was largely self-taught. For a few years, he studied composition and counterpoint privately at the Eastman School of Music, but he felt confined and stifled by the rules of the academy. As a young man, he moved into the Algonquin Hotel in New York City, an enclave …

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Brahms’ Violin Sonata No. 3 in D Minor: Tempestuous and Dramatic

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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 …

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Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night”: At the Tonal Precipice

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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, …

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Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus”: Sublime Simplicity

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Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel insisted that Mozart’s Ave verum corpus, K. 618 is “too simple for children, and too difficult for adults.” Indeed, this simple choral, unfolding over 46 measures, imparts a cosmic “rightness.” It says all that needs to be said. The score is inscribed with a single interpretive marking—sotto voce, which implies a hushed, reverent tone. This motet was composed in the final six months of Mozart’s life, concurrently with The …

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