Charles Widor - Toccata from Organ - Symphony No. 5
The Symphony for Organ No. 5 in F minor, Op. 42, No. 1, was composed by Charles-Marie Widor in 1879, with numerous revisions published by the composer in later years. The full symphony lasts for about 35 minutes.
The fifth movement, in F major, is often referred to as just Widor's Toccata because it is his most famous piece. It lasts around six minutes. Its fame in part comes from its frequent use as recessional music at festive Christmas and wedding ceremonies.
The melody of Widor's Toccata is based upon an arrangement of rapid staccato arpeggios which form phrases, initially in F, moving in fifths through to C major, G major, etc. Each phrase consists of one bar. The melody is complemented by syncopated chords, forming an accented rhythm against the perpetual arpeggio motif. The phrases are contextualised by a descending bass line, often beginning with the 7th tone of each phrase key. For example, where the phrase consists of an arpeggio in C major, the bass line begins with a B-flat. The arpeggios eventually modulate through all twelve keys, until Widor brings the symphony to a close with fff block chords in the final three bars.
Following Widor's example, other composers adopted this style of toccata as a popular genre in French Romantic organ music, including notable examples from Eugène Gigout, Léon Boëllmann, Louis Vierne, Henri Mulet, and Marcel Dupré.
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Henri Duparc - Elegie
Eugène Marie Henri Fouques Duparc (21 January 1848 – 12 February 1933) was a French composer of the late Romantic period.
Son of Charles Fouques-Duparc and Amélie de Guaita. Henri Fouques-Duparc was born in Paris. He studied piano with César Franck at the Jesuit College in the Vaugirard district and became one of his first composition pupils. Following military service in the Franco-Prussian War, he married Ellen MacSwinney, from Scotland, on 9 November 1871. In the same year, he joined Saint-Saëns and Romain Bussine to found the Société Nationale de Musique.
Duparc is best known for his 17 mélodies ("art songs"), with texts by poets such as Baudelaire, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle and Goethe.
A mental illness, diagnosed at the time as "neurasthenia", caused him abruptly to cease composing at age 37, in 1885. He devoted himself to his family and his other passions, drawing and painting. But increasing vision loss after the turn of the century eventually led to total blindness. He destroyed most of his music, leaving fewer than 40 works to posterity. In a poignant letter about the destruction of his incomplete opera, dated 19 January 1922, to the composer Jean Cras, his close friend, Duparc wrote:
Après avoir vécu 25 ans dans un splendide rêve, toute idée de représentation m'était – je vous le répète – devenue odieuse. L'autre motif de cette destruction, que je ne regrette pas, c'est la complète transformation morale que Dieu a opéré en moi il y a 20 ans et qui en une seule minute a abolie toute ma vie passée. Dès lors, la Roussalka n'ayant aucun rapport avec ma vie nouvelle ne devait plus exister.
(Having lived for 25 years in a splendid dream, the whole idea of [musical] representation has become – I repeat to you – repugnant. The other reason for this destruction, which I do not regret, was the complete moral transformation that God imposed on me 20 years ago and which, in a single minute, obliterated all of my past life. Since then, [my opera] Roussalka, not having any connection with my new life, should no longer exist.)
He spent most of the rest of his life in La Tour-de-Peilz, near Vevey, Switzerland, and died in Mont-de-Marsan, in southwestern France, at age 85.
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Claude Debussy - Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (L. 86), known in English as Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, is a symphonic poem for orchestra by Claude Debussy, approximately 10 minutes in duration. It was composed in 1894 and first performed in Paris on 22 December 1894, conducted by Gustave Doret. The flute solo was played by Georges Barrère.
The composition was inspired by the poem L'après-midi d'un faune by Stéphane Mallarmé. It is one of Debussy's most famous works and is considered a turning point in the history of music. Pierre Boulez considered the score to be the beginning of modern music, observing that "the flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of music."
Debussy's work later provided the basis for the ballet Afternoon of a Faun choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky and a later version by Jerome Robbins.
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Alexander Siloti - Symphony, from Cantata BWV 29
Alexander Ilyich Siloti (also Ziloti, Russian: Алекса́ндр Ильи́ч Зило́ти, Aleksandr Iljič Ziloti, Ukrainian: Олександр Ілліч Зілоті; 9 October 1863 – 8 December 1945) was a Russian pianist, conductor and composer. His daughter, Kyriena Siloti, was also a noted pianist and teacher in New York and Boston until her death in 1989, aged 94.
Alexander Siloti was born on his father's estate near Kharkiv, Ukraine (then part of Imperial Russia). He studied piano at the Moscow Conservatory with Nikolai Zverev from 1871, then from 1875 under Nikolai Rubinstein, brother of the more famous Anton Rubinstein; from that year he also studied counterpoint under Sergei Taneyev, harmony under Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and theory under Nikolai Hubert.[3] He graduated with the Gold Medal in Piano in 1881. Siloti went to Weimar, Germany to further his studies with Franz Liszt, co-founding the Liszt-Verein in Leipzig, and making his professional debut on 19 November 1883. Returning to Russia in 1887, Siloti taught at the Moscow Conservatory, where his students included Alexander Goldenweiser, Leonid Maximov, and his first cousin Sergei Rachmaninoff. During this period he also began work as editor for Tchaikovsky, particularly on the First and Second piano concertos.
Siloti married Vera Tretyakova, herself a pianist and the daughter of wealthy industrialist and art collector Pavel Tretyakov. He left his post at the Conservatory in May 1891, and from 1892-1900 lived and toured in Europe with his wife and young children. He also toured New York City, Boston, Cincinnati and Chicago in 1898. As a conductor Siloti gave the world premiere of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 with the composer as soloist in 1901. From 1901–1903, he led the Moscow Philharmonic; from 1903–1917, he organized, financed, and conducted the influential Siloti Concerts in St Petersburg, collaborating with the critic and musicologist Alexander Ossovsky. He presented Leopold Auer, Pablo Casals, Feodor Chaliapin, George Enescu, Josef Hofmann, Wanda Landowska, Willem Mengelberg, Felix Mottl, Arthur Nikisch, Arnold Schoenberg and Felix Weingartner, and local and world premieres by Debussy, Elgar, Glazunov, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin, Sibelius, Stravinsky and others. Ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev first heard Stravinsky's music at one of the Siloti Concerts.
In the generation prior to 1917, Siloti was one of Russia's most important artists, with music by Arensky, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky dedicated to him. In 1918, Siloti was appointed Intendant of the Mariinsky Theatre, but late the following year fled what had become Soviet Russia for England, finally settling in New York City in December 1921. From 1925-1942 he taught at the Juilliard School, performing occasionally in recital, and in November 1930 gave a legendary all-Liszt concert with Arturo Toscanini. His many students included Bertha Melnik, Marc Blitzstein, Gladys Ewart, and Eugene Istomin.
Siloti, who was one of the great practitioners of the art of transcription, wrote over 200 of these arrangements, as well as orchestral editions of the music of Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, Tchaikovsky and Vivaldi. Possibly his most famous transcription is the Prelude in B minor, based on a keyboard prelude by J. S. Bach. As a pianist Siloti made 8 piano rolls and 26 minutes of home-recorded discs. Carl Fischer has published a large anthology of his piano transcriptions, and Rowman and Littlefield has published the first full-scale Alexander Siloti biography. In 2014, the Alexander Siloti Archive at Stanford University was donated by author and alumnus Charles Barber. In six linear feet, it contains all of the correspondence, documentation, music and manuscripts acquired for the writing of the Siloti biography called Lost in the Stars, and for publication of the 'Alexander Siloti Collection' of piano music.
Alexander Siloti is buried at the Russian Orthodox Convent Novo-Diveevo Cemetery, Nanuet, New York.
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Richard Storrs Willis - It came upon the Midnight Clear
Richard Storrs Willis (February 10, 1819 – May 10, 1900) was an American composer, mainly of hymn music. His best known melody is probably the one called, simply, Carol. This is the standard tune, in the United States, though not in Great Britain, of the much-loved hymn "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear" (1850), with lyrics by Edmund Sears. He was also a music critic and journal editor.
Willis, whose siblings included Nathaniel Parker Willis and Fanny Fern, was born on February 10, 1819, in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Chauncey Hall, the Boston Latin School, and Yale College where he was a member of Skull and Bones in 1841.
Willis then went to Germany, where he studied six years under Xavier Schnyder and Moritz Hauptmann. After returning to America, Willis served as music critic for the New York Tribune, The Albion, and The Musical Times, for which he served as editor for a time. He joined the New-York American-Music Association, an organization which promoted the work native of naturalized American composers. He reviewed the organization's first concert for their second season, held December 30, 1856, in the Musical World, as a "creditable affair, all things considered".
Willis began his own journal, Once a Month: A Paper of Society, Belles-Lettres and Art, and published its first issue in January 1862.
Willis died on May 7, 1900. His interment was located at Woodlawn Cemetery, in Detroit.
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Charles Valentin Alkan - Alleluia
Charles-Valentin Alkan (30 November 1813 – 29 March 1888) was a French-Jewish composer and virtuoso pianist. At the height of his fame in the 1830s and 1840s he was, alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, among the leading pianists in Paris, a city in which he spent virtually his entire life.
Alkan earned many awards at the Conservatoire de Paris, which he entered before he was six. His career in the salons and concert halls of Paris was marked by his occasional long withdrawals from public performance, for personal reasons. Although he had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the Parisian artistic world, including Eugène Delacroix and George Sand, from 1848 he began to adopt a reclusive life style, while continuing with his compositions – virtually all of which are for the keyboard. During this period he published, among other works, his collections of large-scale studies in all the major keys (Op. 35) and all the minor keys (Op. 39). The latter includes his Symphony for Solo Piano (Op. 39, nos. 4–7) and Concerto for Solo Piano (Op. 39, nos. 8–10), which are often considered among his masterpieces and are of great musical and technical complexity. Alkan emerged from self-imposed retirement in the 1870s to give a series of recitals that were attended by a new generation of French musicians.
Alkan's attachment to his Jewish origins is displayed both in his life and his work. He was the first composer to incorporate Jewish melodies in art music. Fluent in Hebrew and Greek, he devoted much time to a complete new translation of the Bible into French. This work, like many of his musical compositions, is now lost. Alkan never married, but his presumed son Élie-Miriam Delaborde was, like Alkan, a virtuoso performer on both the piano and the pedal piano, and edited a number of the elder composer's works.
Following his death (which according to persistent but unfounded legend was caused by a falling bookcase) Alkan's music became neglected, supported by only a few musicians including Ferruccio Busoni, Egon Petri and Kaikhosru Sorabji. From the late 1960s onwards, led by Raymond Lewenthal and Ronald Smith, many pianists have recorded his music and brought it back into the repertoire.
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Georg Friedrich Händel - Sarabande
The dance may have been of Guatemalan and Mexican origin evolved from a Spanish dance with Arab influences, danced with a lively double line of couples with castanets. A dance called zarabanda is first mentioned in 1539 in Central America in the poem Vida y tiempo de Maricastaña, written in Panama by Fernando de Guzmán Mejía. The dance seems to have been especially popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, initially in the Spanish colonies, before moving across the Atlantic to Spain.
The Jesuit priest Juan de Mariana thought it indecent, describing it in his Tratato contra los juegos públicos (Treatise Against Public Amusements, 1609) as "a dance and song so loose in its words and so ugly in its motions that it is enough to excite bad emotions in even very decent people". A character in an entremés by Cervantes alluded to the dance's notoriety by saying that hell was its "birthplace and breeding place" (in Spanish: origen y principio). It was banned in Spain in 1583 but was nevertheless still performed and frequently cited in literature of the period (for instance, by Lope de Vega).
It spread to Italy in the 17th century, and to France, where it became a slow court dance.
Baroque musicians of the 18th century wrote suites of dance music written in binary form that typically included a sarabande as the third of four movements. It was often paired with and followed by a jig or gigue. J.S. Bach sometimes gave the sarabande a privileged place in his music, even outside the context of dance suites; in particular, the theme and climactic 25th variation from his Goldberg Variations are both sarabandes.
The anonymous harmonic sequence known as La Folia appears in pieces of various types, mainly dances, by dozens of composers from the time of Mudarra (1546) and Corelli through to the present day. The theme of the fourth-movement Sarabande of Handel's Keyboard suite in D minor (HWV 437) for harpsichord, one of these many pieces, appears prominently in the film Barry Lyndon.
The sarabande was revived in the 19th and early 20th centuries by the German composer Louis Spohr (in his Salonstücke, Op. 135 of 1847), Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg (in his Holberg Suite of 1884), French composers such as Debussy and Satie, and in England, in different styles, Vaughan Williams (in Job: A Masque for Dancing), Benjamin Britten (in the Simple Symphony), Herbert Howells (in Six Pieces for Organ: Saraband for the Morning of Easter), and Carlos Chávez in the ballet La hija de Cólquide.
The sarabande inspired the title of Ingmar Bergman's last film Saraband (2003). The film uses the sarabande from J. S. Bach's Fifth Cello Suite, which Bergman also used in Cries and Whispers (1971).
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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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