Music Weblog

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.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky [1840–1893] was one of the most prominent Russian composers of the Romantic era, and his music continues to be performed more often than nearly any of the orchestral or operatic works of his contemporaries.  In addition to symphonies and chamber music, he also composed a number of notable ballets.

Tchaikovsky abandoned his parents’ wishes for a career as a civil servant to pursue one in music, a personal interest of his that began with piano lessons at the age of five.  Graduating at 19 from a school long considered a clear path to government service, Tchaikovsky spent only three years as a low-level functionary before attending the St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music.  There he studied elements of composition and ultimately became the institution’s professor of music theory.  Tchaikovsky originally believed in following the methods and themes popular in Westernized classical music, while a group of influential composers known collectively as The Five—Balakirev, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov—had a more nationalistic view of the sort of classical music Russians should be writing; their compositions favored folk-tune harmonies and rhythms, plus other Eastern influences.  Tchaikovsky’s first symphony, written upon his graduation as a music student, was quite Western in outlook, but his initial major musical triumph—a fantasy-overture titled Romeo and Juliet—was sufficiently Russian in character to receive The Five’s unqualified appreciation.

During the years 1867–1878, Tchaikovsky wrote some of his most enduring music.  Major pieces from this period include Piano Concerto No. 1, the ballet Swan Lake, and the opera Eugene Onegin.  His violin concerto [1878] is one of the best known in all of classical music, as well as perhaps the most difficult technically.  Its debut marked an end to a period of mental stability for Tchaikovsky; his emotional health, while never great, seems to have taken a severe turn as exemplified by the composer’s seclusion from public appearances.  Much of this may have been driven by his homosexuality and the disdain for which that lifestyle was held at the time—even though he never admitted publicly that he was attracted to men.

Tchaikovsky composed a number of works that remain extremely popular with the public today.  In addition to the pieces named above, these include the ballets The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty, the opera The Queen of Spades, an assortment of string quartets and piano pieces, and the iconic 1812 Overture.  Tchaikovsky died under somewhat mysterious circumstances.  While his official cause of death was listed as cholera, some scholars claim that his passing was a suicide.  Given his clearly bipolar condition and melancholy outlook, this possibility can hardly be ruled out.