Music Weblog

Maurice Ravel [1875–1937], whose given name was actually Joseph-Maurice, was a native of the Basque region of France and grew into one of the most revered French composers of the early- to mid-20th century.  His popularity has never waned, and his works remain collectively one of the most heavily recorded catalogues of any modern composer.

Ravel’s studies began at the Paris Conservatory, where he took first place in a piano competition there in 1891.  His early proficiency at the keyboard was one of the motivating factors behind his interest in composition, and some of Ravel’s most acclaimed pieces—even more so today—are his works for piano.  His early mentors in composing were Erik Satie and Gabriel Fauré, both of whose unique stylistics can be found in much of Ravel’s music.

The first significant composition to come from Ravel’s pen was Habanera [1895], a piece for two pianos.  Many of the themes he used were later incorporated into an early orchestral work, Rapsodie espagnole [1908], which continues to be highly popular with lovers of classical music.  Shortly after 1900, while still in his twenties, Ravel became a member of an avant-garde assemblage of artists and musicians known collectively as The Apaches (“apaches” being a slang French term for hooligans).  While a number of his colleagues were, at the time, quite popular with in-the-know Parisians—the group included painter Édouard Bénédictus, poet Tristan Klingsor, and fellow composer Florent Schmitt, plus perhaps a dozen others—Ravel is the only member to have enjoyed lasting fame.

His Basque heritage spurred Ravel to write several pieces with a decided Spanish flavor.  In addition to the aforementioned Rapsodie espagnole, he also composed the one-act opera L’heure espagnol [“The Spanish Hour; 1904] as well as Don Quichotte à Dulcinée [1933], a three-song series that proved to be the final composition of his life.  His most adventurous work is considered to be Daphnis et Chloé [1912], a ballet commissioned by Sergei Diaghilev to show off the talents of another Russian émigré, Vaslav Nijinsky.

Maurice Ravel made a much-publicized tour of the United States and Canada in 1928.  He visited more than two-dozen cities, conducting his compositions with most of the top orchestras in North America.  During his stops in New York and New Orleans, Ravel received his first exposure to American jazz—the former involved a visit to the clubs of Harlem in the company of one George Gershwin—and the experience was sufficiently enlightening that he included a number of jazz-like themes in his later compositions, notably his two piano concertos.  He died shortly after undergoing brain surgery to correct the effects of a head injury suffered five years earlier, struck by a taxi on the streets of Paris.

Pianist Martha Argerich performs the first movement of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G  with the Hannover Radio Orchestra, conducted by Aldo Ceccato [1985]:

Robert Schumann [1810–1856] was a German composer firmly entrenched in the Romantic period.  Although encouraged by his family to become an attorney, his itinerant piano studies soon captured his full attention, and he twice withdrew from his law classes—first at Leipzig University and later at Heidelberg University—until abandoning them forever at the age of 20.  He eventually married Clara Wieck, the daughter of his piano teacher and herself an accomplished pianist.  She became his muse over the course of his career as a composer, although there was considerable tension as well since she out-earned him during much of their life together.  His original plans to become a concert pianist were thwarted by a finger injury that caused his right hand irreparable damage.

A great deal of Schumann’s early output (from 1832 through 1839) was for the piano, but the year 1840 saw the beginning of his interest in composing songs; he wrote more than 160 that year alone.  Many of his song cycles involved music set to the works of well-known poets, among them Heine, Goethe, Burns and Byron (translated into German, of course), and these remain among his most popular works today.  The following year, Schumann composed his first two symphonies—there were four in all—while 1842 was a year primarily devoted to the creation of various chamber pieces, including one of his best-known works, the Piano Quintet in E flat.

In the mid-1840s, Schumann’s health—never especially robust to begin with—became a serious issue and greatly affected his music.  After returning home to Germany in late 1844 after touring Russia with Clara, symptoms of nervous exhaustion and the fear of even the most benign everyday items and scenarios seeped into his music.  This sense of unease is clearly heard in his Symphony in C, which he published in 1845.  Feeling somewhat recovered a year later, he visited Prague and Vienna with the hope of increasing awareness of his music beyond the narrow scope of Dresden and Leipzig.

Schumann wrote his only opera in 1848.  Based on a medieval legend, Genoveva premiered in 1850 but was so poorly received that it was performed only three times during its initial run before disappearing for close to 70 years.  Sufficiently discouraged and thus vowing never to compose another opera, Schumann’s groundbreaking methodology of writing virtually nonstop music (in other words, a total lack of recitatives) was soon adopted by Richard Wagner and thoroughly exploited in the latter’s operatic Ring Cycle.

In 1853, Schumann was introduced to Johannes Brahms, at the time a 20-year-old music student, and the younger man quickly became the elder’s protégé.  However, it was during this time that Schumann’s ills made a sharp return, combining hallucinogenic sensations—he is reported to have heard a near-continuous string of musical notes as well as disembodied voices—with actual physical symptoms thanks to what was most likely late-stage syphilis.  Schumann died in a sanatorium, slightly more than two years after he had attempted suicide by leaping from a bridge over the Rhine.

Baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sings “Mondnacht” by Robert Schumann [1974]:

Ralph Vaughan Williams [1872–1958] has gained a reputation, alongside Benjamin Britten, as one of the two most influential British classical composers of the twentieth century.  Much of his early musical career involved playing the violin and also conducting.  He began his training at London’s Royal College of Music (RCM) and followed that with studies at Trinity College, Cambridge.  During a second stint at RCM, Vaughan Williams forged two friendships that would serve him well throughout his career.  Leopold Stokowski would go on to introduce half a dozen Vaughan Williams symphonies—he wrote nine in all—to audiences in the United States, and fellow composer Gustav Holst (he of The Planets fame) became a lifelong musical influence.  Vaughan Williams would later be named as professor of composition at RCM.

Ralph Vaughan Williams was strongly devoted to English folk songs, and their tunes can be found sprinkled throughout his compositions.  His first published work [1901] was a piece for voice and piano, set to the poem Linden Lea by William Barnes.  Other songs followed, with text by such poets as Tennyson and Rossetti.  His first great orchestral work, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, had its premiere in September 1910, and A Sea Symphony (later known as Symphony No. 1) was first performed in Leeds a month later.  His next major piece was A London Symphony, which received its premiere in March 1914.  The Lark Ascending, written for violin and orchestra, followed later that year.

At the outbreak of World War I, Vaughan Williams enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and he served with an ambulance unit in France for much of the conflict.  He resumed his compositional career in postwar England with pieces that included Mass in G minor for double chorus plus orchestra, as well as Pastoral Symphony and a musical setting of a small portion of John Bunyan’s seminal work, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” that evolved into one scene of a full-length opera, one that would not be completed until 1950!  The 1920s came to an end with the premiere of the Vaughan Williams opera Sir John in Love, based on the Shakespeare play “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”

Due in great part to the fact that his father had been a vicar (and although the young Vaughan Williams lost him at age 3, he was surrounded by relatives whose careers were church-related), the composer wrote a considerable amount of liturgical choral music.  Most notable among these are the oratorios Sancta Civitas [1925] and Hodie [1954], plus a great many hymns and Christmas songs.  His chamber music includes three string quartets plus a quintet, as well as several organ preludes.  Throughout the 1940s he was popular as a composer of film and radio play scores.

Violinist Eleonora Turovsky plays the first part of The Lark Ascending:

Francis Poulenc [1899–1963] was one of the most prominent French composers of the twentieth century, whose individualistic musical style is oftentimes ascribed to the fact that he was mostly self-taught in areas of harmony and orchestration.  His membership in the loosely formed 1920s compositional group “Les Six”—Darius Milhaud and Arthur Honegger were, with Poulenc, the most prominent participants—helped raise public awareness of his early compositions.  These six composers, aligned with modernist French painters and writers of the era, collectively believed in creating French art, music and literature that was free of foreign influence.

Poulenc was greatly influenced by Erik Satie, Igor Stravinsky and Claude Debussy, and many of his pieces are infused with elements of jazz, and even a touch of surrealism.  Harmonically, Poulenc enjoyed stretching the bounds of basic chord structure, challenging his listeners even though most of his music is quite melodious.  Throughout his life he wrote a great deal of music for solo piano, as well as chamber pieces with the piano as primary accompaniment.  These include a sextet for piano and wind instruments, and sonatas for flute and piano, clarinet and piano, and cello and piano.  In 1932 he wrote a concerto for two pianos and orchestra.

His Catholic faith was one factor that propelled him into consideration as one of the most acclaimed composers of church music during his era.  Among his choral pieces set to a religious text are Mass in G [1937], Exultate Deo and Salve regina [both 1941], Stabat mater [1950], and Ave verum corpus [1952].  His choral masterpiece, Gloria [1959], is best known for its widespread use of augmented harmonies and a very lively orchestration.  Poulenc also wrote several pieces for the organ, including an organ concerto that many music historians consider the finest of the century.

Francis Poulenc composed several works for the stage, including the ballet Les biches, commissioned in 1924by Serge Diaghilev for the Ballets Russes.  It is one of the few French ballets to also employ a chorus.  His three operas include the surrealistic two-act comic opera Les mamelles de Tirésias [1947], the single-act La voix humaine (“The Human Voice”) [1959], written for a single soprano, and the full-length tragic drama Dialogues of the Carmelites [1957], which relates the story of a group of nuns martyred at a monastery in Compiègne during the French Revolution.  The final scene is renown throughout opera for its musical depiction of the nuns’ executions.  The guillotine is heard repeatedly as, offstage, the voices of the nuns singing a hymn is reduced, one by one with each descent of the blade, until there is only silence.

University of Utah Singers (with Utah Philharmonic) perform the opening section to Poulenc’s Gloria [2007]:

Johann Sebastian Bach [1685–1750] was the driving force behind the maturity of the Baroque movement in classical music.  In addition to his skills as a composer, Bach was also a noted organist and keyboard player, a choir director, and a violinist.  He was born in Eisenach, Germany, to a family of professional musicians.  His father led a group of local players, and assorted uncles on his father’s side held various posts such as church organist or court orchestral musician.  Bach became orphaned at the age of 10, but not before learning to play the violin and the harpsichord from his father.  Four years later he received a scholarship to attend a prestigious music school near Hamburg.  After graduation, he was hired as a court musician for a minor royal in Weimar.  This led him to a string of musician and organist posts throughout Northern Germany.  A move to Leipzig in 1723 was his final relocation—he remained a resident of that city until his death.  It was here that he composed the vast majority of his major pieces while officially serving as the music director of St. Thomas’s Lutheran Church.

Bach’s musical style combines elements of counterpoint and fluidity, and his material is highly melodic.  His influences involved exposure to the early Baroque masters from the German, French and Italian schools—Pachelbel, Lully, Marchand, and Frescobaldi predominate—along with liturgical music from the Lutheran Church.  He composed in a wide variety of formats and was incredibly prolific.  His organ works include a setting of 21 chorale preludes plus the “Little Organ Book.”  His best-known harpsichord works include The Well Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations.  His top orchestral works—primarily for strings—include the Brandenburg concertos and The Art of the Fugue.  He composed a number of vocal works including cantatas and some massive choral pieces, among them the St. Matthew Passion, the Christmas Oratorio, and Mass in B-minor.

Bach sired seven children with his first wife, four of whom survived to adulthood, and an additional 13 children with his second wife; six of them survived to adulthood.  Four of his children became well-known composers in their own right: Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Wilhelm Friedrich Bach, Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, and Johann Christian Bach.  His last known descendent—a great-granddaughter—died in 1871.

Johann Strauss II [1825–1899] was a Viennese composer who wrote primarily dance music and has subsequently earned the unofficial title of “The Waltz King.”  He was the son of another famous composer—a man with the same name occasionally known as Johann Strauss the Elder—and studied the violin in defiance of his musical parent, who would have preferred to see his son join the banking business.  The antagonism between the two never truly abated—albeit more of a political than a musical conflict—and one that was only resolved when the elder Strauss died from scarlet fever when his son was 23 years old.

Strauss toured much of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with his orchestra, performing for royals and commoners alike in private salons as well as in theaters.  His waltz compositions were all the rage throughout Central Europe, but this constant touring took a toll on the composer.  He convinced his younger brother, Josef, to abandon his engineering career and instead take over as the leader of the Strauss orchestra.  This allowed Johann to concentrate on composition, although he did acquiesce to taking his ensemble on tour to the United States during the 1870s.

In addition to the stand-alone waltz pieces Strauss wrote, he was also known for a number of operettas.  The most famous of these—one of the few to enjoy regular performance today—is Die Fledermaus (The Bat), an 1874 composition that offers a humorous commentary on Vienna’s political and socio-economic scene at the time.  As is the case with nearly all of Strauss’s operettas, the story lines are somewhat sparse and exist mostly to connect one tuneful melody to another.  Die Fledermaus was his third such composition out of a total of 15.  While most of the others have rarely been performed in the intervening years, some lasting popularity exists for a song or two extracted from one score or another.

Strauss contracted pneumonia in spring 1899 and died from that affliction in June of that year.  His music is considered to be one of the signature elements of his home town, and the Vienna Philharmonic traditionally performs an all-Strauss program every New Year’s Eve.  It should be noted that Johann Strauss II is not at all related to the German composer with the same surname, Richard Strauss.