The Czech composer, Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959), was living in Paris when, in 1927, he composed the score for the zany ballet in one act, La Revue de Cuisine (“The Kitchen Review”). The plot of the ballet centers around the romantic entanglements of a menagerie of kitchen utensils which have come to life. The happy marriage of the Pot and the Lid is threatened by the seductive Twirling Stick. While the Pot is …
Listen to the music of Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826), and you will hear the seeds of Wagner. A contemporary of Beethoven and Schubert, Weber was one of the great innovators at the dawn of the Romantic period. In contrast to the prevailing Italian bel canto operas of Donizetti and Rossini, he developed a style of opera which was distinctly German. As music director in the opera houses of Prague and Dresden, Weber was …
Following the completion of his Piano Trio No. 2 in C Major, the often self-critical Johannes Brahms wrote to his publisher, “You have not yet had such a beautiful trio from me and very likely have not published its equal in the last ten years.” By the time Brahms started work on the Trio in 1880, he had become a well-established, mature composer. For two years, he set the score aside to …
In 1908, the young Béla Bartók, along with his compatriot, Zoltán Kodály, traveled to remote corners of the Hungarian countryside to document the peasant folk music of the Magyars. This is the ethnic group which occupied the region between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains between the eighth and fifth centuries B.C. before migrating west to form present-day Hungary. The colorful inflections of this music, as well as the jagged, irregular …
Béla Bartók’s symbolist opera in one act, Bluebeard’s Castle, begins with a spoken prologue which asks, “Where is the stage, outside us or within us?” What follows is a chilling psychological horror story, based on an account of a French fairy tale by Charles Perrault. The Gothic drama, set in a gloomy castle with seven locked doors, involves only two characters, the mysterious Duke Bluebeard and his young wife, Judith. Here is …
Four hundred years after it was written, the music of the Italian late Renaissance composer, Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613), still sounds shockingly avant-garde. Gesualdo’s madrigals and sacred works are filled with rule-bending harmonic innovations which, in the words of Aldous Huxley, add up to “a kind of musical no-man’s land.” In the final years of his turbulent life, Gesualdo wrote a twenty-seven part setting of the Responsoria, liturgical texts for Catholic evening services for …
Tōru Takemitsu’s ephemeral 1977 orchestral piece, A Flock Descends Into the Pentagonal Garden, grew out of a dream. The Japanese composer attributed his vision of a flock of birds descending into a five-sided garden to an iconic photograph he viewed earlier in the day, which showed the artist, Marcel Duchamp, posing with the back of his head shaved in the “form of a star-shaped garden.” Takemitsu described the resulting piece as a “shifting panorama of …