Franz Schmidt - Notre Dame Intermezzo
Franz Schmidt (22 December 1874 – 11 February 1939) was an Austro-Hungarian composer, cellist and pianist.
Schmidt was born in Pozsony (known in German as Pressburg), in the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the city is now Bratislava, capital of Slovakia). His father was half Hungarian and his mother entirely Hungarian. He was a Roman Catholic.
His earliest teacher was his mother, Mária Ravasz, an accomplished pianist, who gave him a systematic instruction in the keyboard works of J. S. Bach. He received a foundation in theory from Brother Felizian Moczik, the organist at the Franciscan church in Pressburg.[3] He studied piano briefly with Theodor Leschetizky, with whom he clashed. He moved to Vienna with his family in 1888, and studied at the Vienna Conservatory (composition with Robert Fuchs, cello with Ferdinand Hellmesberger and counterpoint with Anton Bruckner), graduating "with excellence" in 1896.
He obtained a post as cellist with the Vienna Court Opera Orchestra, where he played until 1914, often under Gustav Mahler. Mahler habitually had Schmidt play all the cello solos, even though Friedrich Buxbaum was the principal cellist. Schmidt was also in demand as a chamber musician. Schmidt and Arnold Schoenberg maintained cordial relations despite their vast differences in style. Also a brilliant pianist, in 1914 Schmidt took up a professorship in piano at the Vienna Conservatory, which had been recently renamed Imperial Academy of Music and the Performing Arts. (Apparently, when asked who the greatest living pianist was, Leopold Godowsky replied, "The other one is Franz Schmidt.") In 1925 he became Director of the Academy, and from 1927 to 1931 its Rector.
As teacher of piano, cello and counterpoint and composition at the Academy, Schmidt trained numerous instrumentalists, conductors, and composers who later achieved fame. Among his best-known students were the pianist Friedrich Wührer and Alfred Rosé (son of Arnold Rosé, the founder of the Rosé Quartet, Konzertmeister of the Vienna Philharmonic and brother-in-law of Gustav Mahler). Among the composers were Walter Bricht (his favourite student), Theodor Berger, Marcel Rubin, Alfred Uhl and Ľudovít Rajter. He received many tokens of the high esteem in which he was held, notably the Franz-Josef Order, and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Vienna.
Schmidt's private life was in stark contrast to the success of his distinguished professional career, and was overshadowed by tragedy. His first wife, Karoline Perssin (c. 1880–1943), was confined in the Vienna mental hospital Am Steinhof in 1919, and three years after his death was murdered under the Nazi euthanasia program. Their daughter Emma Schmidt Holzschuh (1902–1932, married 1929) died unexpectedly after the birth of her first child. Schmidt experienced a spiritual and physical breakdown after this, and achieved an artistic revival and resolution in his Fourth Symphony of 1933 (which he inscribed as "Requiem for my Daughter") and, especially, in his oratorio The Book with Seven Seals. His second marriage in 1923, to a successful young piano student Margarethe Jirasek (1891–1964), for the first time brought some desperately needed stability into the private life of the artist, who was plagued by many serious health problems.
Schmidt's worsening health forced his retirement from the Academy in early 1937. In the last year of his life Austria was brought into the German Reich by the Anschluss, and Schmidt was feted by the Nazi authorities as the greatest living composer of the so-called Ostmark. He was given a commission to write a cantata entitled The German Resurrection, which, after 1945, was taken by many as a reason to brand him as having been tainted by Nazi sympathy. However, Schmidt left this composition unfinished, and in the summer and autumn of 1938, a few months before his death, set it aside to devote himself to two other commissioned works for the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein: the Quintet in A major for piano left-hand, clarinet, and string trio; and the Toccata in D minor for solo piano. Schmidt died on 11 February 1939.
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Erik Satie
Éric Alfred Leslie Satie (17 May 1866 – 1 July 1925), who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist. Satie was an influential artist in the late 19th- and early 20th-century Parisian avant-garde. His work was a precursor to later artistic movements such as minimalism, repetitive music, and the Theatre of the Absurd.
An eccentric, Satie was introduced as a "gymnopedist" in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopédies. Later, he also referred to himself as a "phonometrician" (meaning "someone who measures sounds"), preferring this designation to that of "musician", after having been called "a clumsy but subtle technician" in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911.
In addition to his body of music, Satie left a set of writings, having contributed work for a range of publications from the dadaist 391 to the American culture chronicle Vanity Fair. Although in later life he prided himself on publishing his work under his own name, in the late 19th century he appears to have used pseudonyms such as Virginie Lebeau and François de Paule in some of his published writings.
Gymnopedie 1
Gymnopedie 2
Gymnopedie 3
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Mykola Leontovych - Carol of the Bells
Mykola Dmytrovych Leontovych (13 December 1 1877 – 23 January 1921) was a Ukrainian composer, choral conductor, and teacher of international renown. His music was inspired by Mykola Lysenko and the Ukrainian National Music School. Leontovych specialised in a cappella choral music, ranging from original compositions, to church music, to elaborate arrangements of folk music.
Leontovych was born and raised in the Podolia province of the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine). He was educated as a priest in the Kamianets-Podilskyi Theological Seminary and later furthered his musical education at the Saint Petersburg Court Capella and private lessons with Boleslav Yavorsky. With the independence of the Ukrainian state in the 1917 revolution, Leontovych moved to Kyiv where he worked at the Kyiv Conservatory and the Mykola Lysenko Institute of Music and Drama. He is recognised for composing Shchedryk in 1904 (which premiered in 1916), known to the English-speaking world as Carol of the Bells or Ring, Christmas Bells. He is known as a martyr in the Eastern Orthodox Ukrainian Church, where he is also remembered for his liturgy, the first liturgy composed in the vernacular, specifically in the modern Ukrainian language. He was assassinated by a Soviet agent in 1921.
During his lifetime, Leontovych's compositions and arrangements became popular with professional and amateur groups alike across the Ukrainian region of the Russian Empire. Performances of his works in western Europe and North America earned him the nickname "the Ukrainian Bach" in France. Apart from his very popular Shchedryk, Leontovych's music is performed primarily in Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora.
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Muzio Clementi - Sonatina No. 6 (1° Mov)
Muzio Filippo Vincenzo Francesco Saverio Clementi (23 January 1752 – 10 March 1832) was an Italian-born English composer, pianist, pedagogue, conductor, music publisher, editor, and piano manufacturer.
Encouraged to study music by his father, he was sponsored as a young composer by Sir Peter Beckford who took him to England to advance his studies. Later, he toured Europe numerous times from his long-standing base in London. It was on one of these occasions, in 1781, that he engaged in a piano competition with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Influenced by Domenico Scarlatti's harpsichord school and Haydn's classical school and by the stile Galante of Johann Christian Bach and Ignazio Cirri, Clementi developed a fluent and technical legato style, which he passed on to a generation of pianists, including John Field, Johann Baptist Cramer, Ignaz Moscheles, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Carl Czerny. He was a notable influence on Ludwig van Beethoven and Frédéric Chopin.
Clementi also produced and promoted his own brand of pianos and was a notable music publisher. Because of this activity, many compositions by Clementi's contemporaries and earlier artists have stayed in the repertoire. Though the reputation of Clementi was exceeded only by Haydn, Beethoven and Rossini in his day, his popularity languished for much of the 19th and 20th centuries.
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Lester Trimble - Four Fragments from the Canterbury Tales, I Prologue
Lester Albert Trimble (August 29, 1923 Bangor, Wisconsin – December 31, 1986 New York City) was an American music critic and composer of contemporary classical music.
Encouraged by Schoenberg, who had seen some of his scores, Trimble entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University). While there he studied with Nikolai Lopatnikoff and Frederick Dorian and wrote music criticism for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in violin and composition from Carnegie in 1948, followed by a Masters in composition. During this time he also spent summers at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood where he studied with Darius Milhaud and Aaron Copland. In 1950, Trimble went to Paris where he continued studies with Nadia Boulanger and Arthur Honegger. He returned from Paris in 1952 and settled in New York, where he was engaged by Virgil Thomson as a critic for the New York Herald Tribune, a post he held for ten years. Trimble was also the music critic for The Nation (1957–62), the Washington Evening Star (1963–8) and Stereo Review (1968–74). He became the managing editor of Musical America from 1960 to 1961 and executive director of the American Music Center from 1961 to 1963. In 1963 he was appointed professor of composition at the University of Maryland, a position he held for five years. In 1967 he was appointed composer-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic by Leonard Bernstein. In 1971 he joined the faculty of the Juilliard School and in 1973 he became the first composer-in-residence at Wolf Trap Farm Park.
Trimble's numerous compositions include symphonic works, chamber music pieces, choral works, vocal art songs, film scores, solo instrumental works, and an opera. His music is published by ACA, Belwin-Mills, Duchess, Leeds, C. F. Peters, and Presser.
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Luigi Boccherini
Ridolfo Luigi Boccherini (February 19, 1743 – May 28, 1805) was an Italian composer and cellist of the Classical era whose music retained a courtly and galante style even while he matured somewhat apart from the major European musical centers. He is best known for a minuet from his String Quintet in E, Op. 11, No. 5 (G 275), and the Cello Concerto in B flat major (G 482). The latter work was long known in the heavily altered version by German cellist and prolific arranger Friedrich Grützmacher, but has recently been restored to its original version.
Boccherini also composed several guitar quintets, including the "Fandango", which was influenced by Spanish music. His biographer Elisabeth Le Guin noted among Boccherini's musical qualities "an astonishing repetitiveness, an affection for extended passages with fascinating textures but virtually no melodic line, an obsession with soft dynamics, a unique ear for sonority, and an unusually rich palette of introverted and mournful affects." Many of his other biographers and admirers see his music quite differently and in a much more appreciated light.
Concerto for Cello and Orchestra In B flat Major
I. Allegro moderato
II. Agagio non troppo
III. Rondo (Allegro)
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Christoph Willibald Gluck - Orfeo ed Euridice - Dance of the Blessed Spirits
Christoph Willibald (Ritter von) Gluck (15 November 1787) was a composer of Italian and French opera in the early classical period. Born in the Upper Palatinate and raised in Bohemia,[4] both part of the Holy Roman Empire, he gained prominence at the Habsburg court at Vienna. There he brought about the practical reform of opera's dramaturgical practices for which many intellectuals had been campaigning. With a series of radical new works in the 1760s, among them Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, he broke the stranglehold that Metastasian opera seria had enjoyed for much of the century. Gluck introduced more drama by using simpler recitative and cutting the usually long da capo aria. His later operas have half the length of a typical baroque opera.
The strong influence of French opera encouraged Gluck to move to Paris in November 1773. Fusing the traditions of Italian opera and the French (with rich chorus) into a unique synthesis, Gluck wrote eight operas for the Parisian stage. Iphigénie en Tauride (1779) was a great success and is generally acknowledged to be his finest work. Though he was extremely popular and widely credited with bringing about a revolution in French opera, Gluck's mastery of the Parisian operatic scene was never absolute, and after the poor reception of his Echo et Narcisse (1779), he left Paris in disgust and returned to Vienna to live out the remainder of his life.
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Pandora Selfridge
Three Dramatic Études
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Christoph Willibald Gluck - Sgambati Melody from Orfeo ed Euridice
Christoph Willibald (Ritter von) Gluck (born 2 July, baptized 4 July 1714 – 15 November 1787) was a composer of Italian and French opera in the early classical period. Born in the Upper Palatinate and raised in Bohemia, both part of the Holy Roman Empire, he gained prominence at the Habsburg court at Vienna. There he brought about the practical reform of opera's dramaturgical practices for which many intellectuals had been campaigning. With a series of radical new works in the 1760s, among them Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, he broke the stranglehold that Metastasian opera seria had enjoyed for much of the century. Gluck introduced more drama by using simpler recitative and cutting the usually long da capo aria. His later operas have half the length of a typical baroque opera.
The strong influence of French opera encouraged Gluck to move to Paris in November 1773. Fusing the traditions of Italian opera and the French (with rich chorus) into a unique synthesis, Gluck wrote eight operas for the Parisian stage. Iphigénie en Tauride (1779) was a great success and is generally acknowledged to be his finest work. Though he was extremely popular and widely credited with bringing about a revolution in French opera, Gluck's mastery of the Parisian operatic scene was never absolute, and after the poor reception of his Echo et Narcisse (1779), he left Paris in disgust and returned to Vienna to live out the remainder of his life.
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Angelo Ragazzi (12. Oktober 1750 in Wien) war ein italienischer Komponist und Violinist.
Ragazzi erhielt seine Ausbildung in Neapel am Conservatorio S.Maria di Loreto bei Gian Carlo Cailò. Ab 1704 war er Violinist in der königlichen Kapelle von Neapel. 1707 war er ebenfalls Violinist in der Kapelle von Erzherzog Karl von Habsburg in Barcelona. Nach dessen Krönung zum Kaiser wurde er 1713 Mitglied der Wiener Hofmusikkapelle. 1722 war er wieder in Neapel in der Capella reale di palazzo. Erst nach dem Tod des Konzertmeisters Pietro Marchitelli erhielt Ragazzi eine feste Anstellung. Nach der Vereinnahmung Neapels durch die Bourbonen 1734 verließ Ragazzi seine Heimat und ließ sich endgültig in Wien nieder, um wieder Mitglied der Hofkapelle zu werden.
Ragazzi gehörte zu den führenden Instrumentalkomponisten Neapels. In seinem Kompositionsstil findet man den Einfluss der Violinkonzerte Vivaldis, aber auch Elemente seines Wiener Lehrers Johann Joseph Fux wieder.
Angelo Ragazzi
Sonata No.1 in G major
I. Allegro
II. Grave
III. Allegro
Sonata No.2 in C minor
I. Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Allegro
Sonata No.3 in B-flat major
I. Vivace
II. Adagio
III. Allegro
Sonata No.4 "Imitatio in Salve Regina" in F minor
I. Andante
II. Adagio
III. Allegro
Sonata No.5 in A major
I. Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Allegro
Sonata No.6 in G minor
I. Allegro
II. Aria (Un poco andante)
III. Vivace
Sonata No.7 in A major
I. Allegro
II. Aria (Adagio)
III. Allegro
Sonata No.8 in G major
I. Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Allegro
Sonata No.9 in A minor
I. Preludio (Adagio)
II. Allegro
III. Adagio - Un poco andante - Adagio
IV. Allegro
Sonata No.10 "Ecce sacerdos magnus" in D major
I. Allegro
II. Adagio
III. Allegro
Sonata No.11 in E-flat major
I. Adagio - Allegro - Adagio
II. Allegro
III. Grave
IV. Allegro
Sonata No.12 "Pastorale" in G major
I. Apparizione (Recitativo)
II. Andata (Allegro)
III. Adorazione (Vivace)
IV. Vivace
V. Ritornata (Allegro)
VI. Allegro
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