Charles Strouse, the American composer of such Broadway musicals as Bye Bye Birdie (1960), Applause (1970), and Annie (1977), passed away last Thursday, May 15, at his home in Manhattan. He was 96. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, Strouse studied composition with Arthur Berger, David Diamond, Aaron Copland, and Nadia Boulanger. It was Boulanger who urged Strouse to cultivate his talent as a composer for the musical theater. At …
Sergei Prokofiev’s Waltz Suite, Op. 110 for orchestra is a magical musical potpourri. Composed and compiled in 1946 in the wake of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War, it is a collection of six waltz excerpts from three of Prokofiev’s dramatic works. At times, the music is hauntingly atmospheric. It is filled with quirky, sardonic harmonic turns, dreamy tonal colors, and the graceful airborne motion inherent …
Beatrice and Benedict, the principal characters of Hector Berlioz’s 1862 comic opera of the same name, quarrel, hurl taunts and insults at one other, and then fall in love. Berlioz described the two-act opera, based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, as “a caprice written with the point of a needle.” It was his final completed work. Biographer David Cairns observes that “listening to the score’s exuberant gaiety, only momentarily touched by sadness, …
It was during his youthful tenure in Weimar (1708-1713) that J.S. Bach composed the “Great” Prelude and Fugue in A minor, BWV 543. Only a few years earlier, the 20-year-old Bach walked north 200 miles to Lübeck to hear the celebrated organist, Dieterich Buxtehude, and “to comprehend one thing and another about his art.” The influence of Buxtehude’s style, along with the Italian music of Corelli, can be heard in BWV 543, …
Friedrich Schiller’s 1788 poem, Die Götter Griechenlands (“The Gods of Greece”), is filled with nostalgia and longing for the long-vanished world of Greek antiquity. Rebelling against mechanical philosophy, it idealizes man’s harmonious interaction with the Greek gods and nature. Schubert’s 1819 song, Die Götter Griechenlands, D. 677 sets only a fragment of the lengthy poem. It begins with a faltering three note motif (E-D-E), repeated by the piano, followed by the despairing opening …
Although they lived in Vienna as contemporaries, it is unclear if Schubert and Beethoven ever met. The two composers shared a mutual respect, but in many ways they were polar opposites. While Beethoven dazzled audiences as a revolutionary giant of the symphony, during his lifetime, Schubert was known almost exclusively for his songs. Publishers failed to take interest in Schubert’s instrumental works, and many, such as the “Great” C Major Symphony No. …
Composed in Weimar, circa 1713, J.S. Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in A minor, BWV 944 amounts to a warmup, followed by a herculean feat of athleticism. The warmup, for our ears, the players fingers, and the instrument alike, comes with the brief ten-bar Fantasia. Bach notated this opening as chords, with the instruction, “arpeggio.” The player is free to improvise on a harmonic progression which is at once melancholy, mysterious, and sensuous. …