Robert Schumann - Fantasy Pieces: Des Abends (In the Evening)
Robert Schumann (8 June 1810 – 29 July 1856) was a German composer, pianist, and influential music critic. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest composers of the Romantic era. Schumann left the study of law, intending to pursue a career as a virtuoso pianist. His teacher, Friedrich Wieck, a German pianist, had assured him that he could become the finest pianist in Europe, but a hand injury ended this dream. Schumann then focused his musical energies on composing.
In 1840, after a long and acrimonious legal battle with Wieck, who opposed the marriage, Schumann married Wieck's daughter Clara. A lifelong partnership in music began, as Clara herself was an established pianist and music prodigy. Clara and Robert also maintained a close relationship with German composer Johannes Brahms.
Until 1840, Schumann wrote exclusively for the piano. Later, he composed piano and orchestral works, and many Lieder (songs for voice and piano). He composed four symphonies, one opera, and other orchestral, choral, and chamber works. His best-known works include Carnaval, Symphonic Studies, Kinderszenen, Kreisleriana, and the Fantasie in C. Schumann was known for infusing his music with characters through motifs, as well as references to works of literature. These characters bled into his editorial writing in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music), a Leipzig-based publication that he co-founded.
Schumann suffered from a mental disorder that first manifested in 1833 as a severe melancholic depressive episode—which recurred several times alternating with phases of "exaltation" and increasingly also delusional ideas of being poisoned or threatened with metallic items. What is now thought to have been a combination of bipolar disorder and perhaps mercury poisoning led to "manic" and "depressive" periods in Schumann's compositional productivity. After a suicide attempt in 1854, Schumann was admitted at his own request to a mental asylum in Endenich near Bonn. Diagnosed with psychotic melancholia, he died of pneumonia two years later at the age of 46, without recovering from his mental illness.
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Antonio Vivaldi - La Tempesta Di Mare: Presto II
La tempesta di mare ("The Storm at Sea"), a flute concerto in F Major (RV 433; P. 261), is the first of Six Flute Concertos, Op. 10 by Antonio Vivaldi, published in the late 1720s. La tempesta di mare may also refer to two earlier versions of the same concerto, RV 98, a concerto da camera (chamber concerto) featuring the flute, from which Vivaldi derived the concerto grosso RV 570.
La tempesta di mare may also refer to the violin concerto with the same name published in the same 1725 edition as the Four Seasons: this is however a different composition than the three flute concerto variants.
Vivaldi helped to bring the concerto to a mainstream form, not only by expanding on ritornello form, but by emphasizing the slow movements of concertos, which were in a two part binary form. Solo instruments that Vivaldi wrote concertos for include violin, bassoon, cello, oboe, viola d'amore, flute and mandolin. He also wrote ensemble concertos (concerto grosso and/or chamber concerto), where three or more soloists participate, which number over 30 written. Vivaldi had an extensive influence on the concerto genre, helping to pioneer the structure, expanding the boundaries of the genre, and showing that any instrument could have a concerto.
Vivaldi's contemporaries and predecessors such as Purcell, Bach and Handel featured the flute (traverso and/or recorder) significantly in their works.[2] RV 433 was conceived as a concerto for transverse flute in D. The first publication of the concerto, included as No. 1 in Vivaldi's Op. 10, VI Concerti a Flauto Traverso, was around 1728 in Amsterdam, by Michel-Charles Le Cène. The La tempesta di mare name for the concerto is given in the score.
Giving a musical impression of a storm was a popular theme in baroque music. For instance operas like Marin Marais' Alcyone contained famous storm scenes. Telemann wrote a secular cantata La Tempesta (The Storm), TWV 20:42, after an Italian libretto by Metastasio. Vivaldi wrote several tempesta di mare concertos. Two variants of RV 433, RV 98 and RV 570, are in the chamber concerto and concerto grosso format respectively. RV 98 is scored for flute, oboe, violin, bassoon, and continuo, from which Vivaldi created the RV 570 concerto grosso by adding orchestral violins to reinforce the solo oboe and violin, and a viola part doubling the bass at the upper octave. An unrelated tempesta di mare concerto, a violin concerto in E♭ major, RV 253, is included as No. 5 in Vivaldi's Op. 8 Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione. The Four Seasons, the first four concertos of that collection, also include a few musical depictions of stormy weather.
According to Federico Maria Sardelli the chamber concerto version of La tempesta di mare, RV 98, was possibly written for Ignazio Sieber, during the time in which he worked with the composer at the Ospedale della Pietà from 1713 to 1716. This means that this version of the concerto may have been the earliest flute concerto ever composed, and also the first flute piece to include the problematic high F6. Sardelli's conclusions, if correct, would overturn "the received scholarly view that, rather than writing for the recorder in the first two or three decades of the eighteenth century, then switching over to the flute, Vivaldi already preferred the flute in the 1710s and did not start writing for the recorder until the early 1720s"
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Richard Wagner - Tannhauser: Overture
Tannhäuser is an 1845 opera in three acts, music and text by Richard Wagner, (WWV 70 in the catalogue of the composer's works) based on two German legends: Tannhäuser, the mythologized medieval German Minnesänger and poet, and the tale of the Wartburg Song Contest. The story centers on the struggle between sacred and profane love, and redemption through love, a theme running through much of Wagner's mature work.
The opera remains a staple of major opera house repertoire in the 21st century.
Wagner began composing the music during a vacation in Teplitz in the summer of 1843 and completed the full score on 13 April 1845; the opera's famous overture, often played separately as a concert piece, was written last. While composing the music for the Venusberg grotto, Wagner grew so impassioned that he made himself ill; in his autobiography, he wrote, "With much pain and toil I sketched the first outlines of my music for the Venusberg.... Meanwhile I was very much troubled by excitability and rushes of blood to the brain. I imagined I was ill and lay for whole days in bed...." The instrumentation also shows signs of borrowing from French operatic style. The score includes parts for on-stage brass; however, rather than using French brass instruments, Wagner uses twelve German waldhorns. Wagner also makes use of the harp, another commonplace of French opera. Wagner made a number of revisions of the opera throughout his life, and was still unsatisfied with its format when he died. The most significant revision was made for the opera's premiere in Paris in 1861.
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Franz Schubert - Symphony No 3: Presto Vivace
Franz Schubert's Symphony No. 3 in D major, D 200, was written between 24 May and 19 July 1815, a few months after his eighteenth birthday. Like the other early symphonies (the six written before the "Unfinished" Symphony of 1822), it was not published during Schubert's lifetime. It appeared many years later, in the first Schubert complete works edition in 1884. It is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani and strings.
The length of this symphony is approximately 21–23 minutes. It is in four movements:
I. Adagio maestoso – Allegro con brio (222 bars)
II. Allegretto in G major (124 bars)
III. Menuetto. Vivace (56 bars + Trio 28 bars)
IV. Presto vivace (410 bars)
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Richard Wagner - Lohengrin: Prelude to Act III
Lohengrin, WWV 75, is a Romantic opera in three acts composed and written by Richard Wagner, first performed in 1850. The story of the eponymous character is taken from medieval German romance, notably the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach and its sequel Lohengrin, itself inspired by the epic of Garin le Loherain. It is part of the Knight of the Swan legend.
The opera has inspired other works of art. King Ludwig II of Bavaria named his castle Neuschwanstein Castle after the Swan Knight. It was King Ludwig's patronage that later gave Wagner the means and opportunity to compose, build a theatre for, and stage his epic cycle The Ring of the Nibelung.
The most popular and recognizable part of the opera is the Bridal Chorus, better known as "Here Comes the Bride", often played as a processional at weddings in the West. The orchestral preludes to acts 1 and 3 are also frequently performed separately as concert pieces.
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Antonio Vivaldi - La Tempesta Di Mare: Presto
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi (4 March 1678 – 28 July 1741) was an Italian Baroque musical composer, virtuoso violinist, teacher, and Roman Catholic priest. Born in Venice, the capital of the Venetian Republic, he is regarded as one of the greatest Baroque composers, and his influence during his lifetime was widespread across Europe. He composed many instrumental concertos, for the violin and a variety of other musical instruments, as well as sacred choral works and more than forty operas. His best-known work is a series of violin concertos known as the Four Seasons.
Many of his compositions were written for the all-female music ensemble of the Ospedale della Pietà, a home for abandoned children. Vivaldi had worked there as a Catholic priest for 1 1/2 years and was employed there from 1703 to 1715 and from 1723 to 1740. Vivaldi also had some success with expensive stagings of his operas in Venice, Mantua and Vienna. After meeting the Emperor Charles VI, Vivaldi moved to Vienna, hoping for royal support. However, the Emperor died soon after Vivaldi's arrival, and Vivaldi himself died in poverty less than a year later.
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