Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (7 May 1840 [O.S. 25 April] – 6 November [O.S. 25 October] 1893) was a Russian composer of the romantic period, whose works are among the most popular music in the classical repertoire. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally, bolstered by his appearances as a guest conductor in Europe and the United States. He was honored in 1884 by Emperor Alexander III, and awarded a lifetime pension.
Although musically precocious, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant. There was scant opportunity for a musical career in Russia at that time and no system of public music education. When an opportunity for such an education arose, he entered the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1865. The formal Western-oriented teaching he received there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five, with whom his professional relationship was mixed. Tchaikovsky's training set him on a path to reconcile what he had learned with the native musical practices to which he had been exposed from childhood. From this reconciliation he forged a personal but unmistakably Russian style—a task that did not prove easy. The principles that governed melody, harmony and other fundamentals of Russian music ran completely counter to those that governed Western European music; this seemed to defeat the potential for using Russian music in large-scale Western composition or for forming a composite style, and it caused personal antipathies that dented Tchaikovsky's self-confidence. Russian culture exhibited a split personality, with its native and adopted elements having drifted apart increasingly since the time of Peter the Great. This resulted in uncertainty among the intelligentsia about the country's national identity—an ambiguity mirrored in Tchaikovsky's career.
Despite his many popular successes, Tchaikovsky's life was punctuated by personal crises and depression. Contributory factors included his early separation from his mother for boarding school followed by his mother's early death, the death of his close friend and colleague Nikolai Rubinstein, and the collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, which was his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck who was his patron even though they never actually met each other. His homosexuality, which he kept private, has traditionally also been considered a major factor, though some musicologists now downplay its importance. Tchaikovsky's sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera; there is an ongoing debate as to whether cholera was indeed the cause of death, and whether his death was accidental or self-inflicted.
While his music has remained popular among audiences, critical opinions were initially mixed. Some Russians did not feel it was sufficiently representative of native musical values and expressed suspicion that Europeans accepted the music for its Western elements. In an apparent reinforcement of the latter claim, some Europeans lauded Tchaikovsky for offering music more substantive than base exoticism and said he transcended stereotypes of Russian classical music. Others dismissed Tchaikovsky's music as "lacking in elevated thought," according to longtime New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg, and derided its formal workings as deficient because they did not stringently follow Western principles.
Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 6 h moll Op. 74
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Symphony No. 4 in G major by Gustav Mahler was written in 1899 and 1900, though it incorporates a song originally written in 1892. The song, "Das himmlische Leben", presents a child's vision of Heaven. It is sung by a soprano in the work's fourth and final movement. Although typically described as being in the key of G major, the symphony employs a progressive tonal scheme ('(b)/G—E').
Mahler's first four symphonies are often referred to as the Wunderhorn symphonies because many of their themes originate in earlier songs by Mahler on texts from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn). The fourth symphony is built around a single song, "Das himmlische Leben" ("The Heavenly Life"). It is prefigured in various ways in the first three movements and sung in its entirety by a solo soprano in the fourth movement.
Mahler composed "Das himmlische Leben" as a freestanding piece in 1892. The title is Mahler's own: in the Wunderhorn collection the poem is called "Der Himmel hängt voll Geigen" (an idiomatic expression akin to "there's not a cloud in the sky"). Several years later Mahler considered using the song as the seventh and final movement of his Symphony No. 3. While motifs from "Das himmlische Leben" are found in the Symphony No. 3, Mahler eventually decided not to include it in that work and, instead, made the song the goal and source of his Symphony No. 4. This symphony thus presents a thematic fulfilment of the musical world of No. 3, which is part of the larger tetralogy of the first four symphonies, as Mahler described them to Natalie Bauer-Lechner. Early plans in which the Symphony was projected as a six-movement work included another Wunderhorn song, "Das irdische Leben" ("The Earthly Life") as a somber pendant to "Das himmlische Leben", offering a tableau of childhood starvation in juxtaposition to heavenly abundance, but Mahler later decided on a simpler structure for the score.
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 4 in G major
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The violin sonata no. 1 in A minor, opus 105 of Robert Schumann was written the week of September 12– 16 September 1851. Schumann was reported to have expressed displeasure with the work ("I did not like the first Sonata for Violin and Piano; so I wrote a second one, which I hope has turned out better"). This was also the year of the premiere of the Rhenish symphony , and among compositions the substantial revision of the fourth symphony, the third piano trio, the oratorio Der Rose Pilgerfahrt, a number of piano works and two of his concert overtures, Julius Caesar (after Shakespeare) and Hermann und Dorothea after Goethe.
It was given its official premiere by Clara Schumann and Ferdinand David in March 1852 .
The sonata has three movements:
1. Mit leidenschaftlichem Ausdruck (dotted quarter = 68, or, 68 dotted quarter notes in each minute), 6
8 time, 209 bars in A minor
2. Allegretto (eighth note = 96), 2
4 time, 79 bars in F major
3. Lebhaft (quarter note = 94), 2
4 time, 213 bars in A minor
Robert Schumann
Violin Sonata No. 1 Op. 105
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Ten Preludes, Op. 23, is a set of ten preludes for solo piano, composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1901 and 1903. This set includes the famous Prelude in G minor.
Together with the Prelude in C♯ minor, Op. 3/2 and the 13 Preludes, Op. 32, this set is part of a full suite of 24 preludes in all the major and minor keys.
Op. 23 is composed of ten preludes, ranging from two to five minutes in length. Combined, the pieces take around thirty minutes to perform. They are:
• No. 1 in F♯ minor (Largo)
• No. 2 in B♭ major (Maestoso)
• No. 3 in D minor (Tempo di minuetto)
• No. 4 in D major (Andante cantabile)
• No. 5 in G minor (Alla marcia)
• No. 6 in E♭ major (Andante)
• No. 7 in C minor (Allegro)
• No. 8 in A♭ major (Allegro vivace)
• No. 9 in E♭ minor (Presto)
• No. 10 in G♭ major (Largo)
Rachmaninoff completed Prelude No. 5 in 1901. The remaining preludes were completed after Rachmaninoff's marriage to his cousin Natalia Satina: Nos. 1, 4, and 10 premiered in Moscow on February 10, 1903, and the remaining seven were completed soon thereafter. 1900–1903 were difficult years for Rachmaninoff and his motivation for writing the Preludes was predominantly financial. Rachmaninoff composed the works in the Hotel America, financially dependent on his cousin Alexander Siloti, to whom the Preludes are dedicated.
Sergei Rachmaninoff
10 Preludes Op. 23
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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No. 1 in D major Op. 11 was the first of his three completed string quartets that were published during his lifetime. An earlier attempt had been abandoned after the first movement was completed.
Composed in February 1871, it was premiered in Moscow on 16/28 March 1871 by four members of the Russian Musical Society: Ferdinand Laub and Ludvig Minkus, violins; Pryanishnikov, viola; and Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, cello. Tchaikovsky arranged the second movement for cello and string orchestra in 1888.
The quartet has four movements:
I. Moderato e semplice (D major)
II. Andante cantabile (B♭ major)
III. Scherzo. Allegro non tanto e con fuoco – Trio (D minor)
IV. Finale. Allegro giusto – Allegro vivace (D major)
The melancholic second movement, which has become famous in its own right, was based on a folk song, likely the Song of the Volga Boatmen, the composer heard at his sister's house at Kamenka whistled by a house painter. When the quartet was performed at a tribute concert for Leo Tolstoy, the author was said to have been brought to tears by this movement: “…Tolstoy, sitting next to me and listening to the Andante of my First Quartet, burst into tears". When the Zoellner Quartet, at her request, performed the second movement for Helen Keller, who rested her fingertips on a resonant tabletop to sense the vibrations, she, too, reacted strongly. The melody from second theme of the Andante cantabile, in D♭ major, was also used as the basis for the popular song "On the Isle of May", popularized by Connee Boswell in 1940. This movement ends with plagal cadence.
Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovsky
String Quartet No. 1 Op. 11
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Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 47 in G major Hob. I:47 was probably written in 1772. It was nicknamed "The Palindrome".
Scored for 2 oboes, bassoon, 2 horns, and strings. It is in four movements:
1. Allegro, 4
4
2. Un poco adagio cantabile in D major, 2
4
3. Menuetto e Trio, 3
4
4. Presto assai, 2
2
The opening movement begins with a hammerstroke and a dotted-rhythm fanfare of repeated notes which serves as the first theme for the sonata-form movement. The line between the development and recapitulation is blurred by the reappearance of the dotted-rhythm in G minor (the home tonic but the wrong mode) followed by standard recapitulation of the second theme group. The first theme is finally resolved in the concluding coda.
The slow movement is a theme with four variations in invertible counterpoint. Through the third variation, each appearance of the ternary theme with winds appearing only in the middle section framed by muted strings in the outer sections. In the second outer section, the theme in two voices is inverted. Also, through each of the first three variations the surface rhythms are accelerating from eighth notes to sixteenth notes to triplet-sixteenths to thirty-seconds. The fourth variation varies from this pattern in that it is fully scored for the entire variation and serves as a recapitulation for the movement. What follows is a coda where the theme slowly dies away.
The "Minuetto al Roverso" is the reason this symphony is sometimes called "The Palindrome": the second part of the Minuet is the same as the first but backwards, and the Trio is also written in this way
Joseph Haydn
Symphony No. 47 in G
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Gabriel Urbain Fauré (French 12 May 1845 – 4 November 1924) was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Sicilienne, nocturnes for piano and the songs "Après un rêve" and "Clair de lune". Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style.
Fauré was born into a cultured but not especially musical family. His talent became clear when he was a small boy. At the age of nine, he was sent to the Ecole Niedermeyer music college in Paris, where he was trained to be a church organist and choirmaster. The Ecole Neidermeyer's pedagogy differed greatly from that of the Paris Conservatoire. Among his teachers was Camille Saint-Saëns, who became a lifelong friend. After graduating from the college in 1865, Fauré earned a modest living as an organist and teacher, leaving him little time for composition. When he became successful in his middle age, holding the important posts of organist of the Église de la Madeleine and director of the Paris Conservatoire, he still lacked time for composing; he retreated to the countryside in the summer holidays to concentrate on composition. By his last years, Fauré was recognised in France as the leading French composer of his day. An unprecedented national musical tribute was held for him in Paris in 1922, headed by the president of the French Republic. Outside France, Fauré's music took decades to become widely accepted, except in Britain, where he had many admirers during his lifetime.
Fauré's music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism with the modernism of the second quarter of the 20th century. When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and by the time of Fauré's death, jazz and the atonal music of the Second Viennese School were being heard. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which describes him as the most advanced composer of his generation in France, notes that his harmonic and melodic innovations influenced the teaching of harmony for later generations. During the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from increasing deafness. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.
Gabriel Faure
Violin Sonata No. 1 Op. 13
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Kreisleriana, Op. 16, is a composition in eight movements by Robert Schumann for solo piano, subtitled Phantasien für das Pianoforte. It was written in only four days in April 1838 and a revised version appeared in 1850. The work was dedicated to Frédéric Chopin, but when a copy was sent to the Polish composer, "he commented favorably only on the design of the title page".
Kreisleriana is a very dramatic work and is viewed by some critics as one of Schumann's finest compositions. In 1839, soon after publishing it, Schumann called it in a letter "my favourite work," remarking that "The title conveys nothing to any but Germans. Kreisler is one of E. T. A. Hoffmann's creations, an eccentric, wild, and witty conductor." In 1843, when he had moved from writing for solo piano to much larger works, in particular Paradise and the Peri, he still listed it as one of his best piano works.
The work's title was inspired by the character of Johannes Kreisler from works of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Like the kaleidoscopic Kreisler, each number has multiple contrasting sections, resembling the imaginary musician's manic depression, and recalling Schumann's own "Florestan" and "Eusebius," the two characters Schumann used to indicate his own contrasting impulsive and dreamy sides. Johannes Kreisler appears in several books by Hoffmann, including Kater Murr and most notably in the Kreisleriana section of Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, published in 1814.
In a letter to his wife Clara, Schumann reveals that she has figured largely in the composition of Kreisleriana:
I'm overflowing with music and beautiful melodies now – imagine, since my last letter I've finished another whole notebook of new pieces. I intend to call it Kreisleriana. You and one of your ideas play the main role in it, and I want to dedicate it to you – yes, to you and nobody else – and then you will smile so sweetly when you discover yourself in it.
Robert Schumann
Kreisleriana Op. 16
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La Damoiselle élue (The Blessed Damozel), L. 62, is a cantata for soprano soloist, 2-part children's choir, 2-part female (contralto) choir (with contralto solo), and orchestra, composed by Claude Debussy in 1887–1888 based on a text by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It premiered in Paris in 1893.
Claude Debussy was interested in the symbolist movement and later took inspiration from a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé for his Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894). Reading an anthology of English poetry translated by Gabriel Sarrazin, "Poètes modernes d’Angleterre" (1883) gave Debussy the idea of composing a cantata on the poem "The Blessed Damozel" (1850) by Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Debussy had probably not seen Rossetti's painting of the same title, but other pre-Raphaelite illustrations with a focus on "a new type of feminine beauty". He completed the piece in 1888. In a letter to André Poniatowski dated 9 September 1892, he confided that he had wanted to compose "a little oratorio in a little pagan mystical note". The work is dedicated to composer Paul Dukas. Debussy sent his music score to the Académie des beaux-arts as an entry for the Prix de Rome. It was published in 1892. Debussy revised his orchestration for the piece in 1902, and in 1906 made a piano reduction of the orchestral part.
La Damoiselle élue belongs to the same period of composition as the Cinq poèmes de Charles Baudelaire, when Debussy was influenced by the music of Richard Wagner. The composer chose to distance himself from this musical influence, while remaining faithful to symbolist literature, when composing his opera Pelléas et Mélisande in the 1890s. Patterns such as fleur-de-lys returned to his stage music for Le Martyre de saint Sébastien (1910–1911).
La Damoiselle élue premiered in Paris at the Salle Érard on 8 April 1893, sponsored by the Société Nationale de Musique, sung by Julia and Thérèse Robert, and conducted by Jean Gabriel-Marie. It was the first of Debussy's works for orchestra to be performed. The premiere was a success, and music critic Pierre Lalo wrote in Le Temps: "Such are the grace and delicacy of his taste that all his audacities are welcome" ("telles sont la grâce et la délicatesse de son goût que toutes ses audaces sont heureuses"). Some critics, however, reproached the work as being "very sensual and decadent" ("très sensuelle et décadente").
Claude Debussy
La damoiselle élue
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The Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129, by Robert Schumann was completed in a period of only two weeks, between 10 October and 24 October 1850, shortly after Schumann became the music director at Düsseldorf.
The concerto was never played in Schumann's lifetime. It was premiered on 23 April 1860, four years after his death, in Oldenburg, with Ludwig Ebert as soloist.
The length of a typical performance is about 25 minutes.
The piece is in three movements, which follow on from each other without a pause:
1. Nicht zu schnell (A minor – A major)
2. Langsam (F major)
3. Sehr lebhaft (A minor – A major)
The work is scored for solo cello, two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns, two trumpets, timpani, and strings.
Robert Schumann
Cello Concerto in Am Op. 129
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