Sergei Rachmaninoff and his Piano Concerto #2

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff (April 1, 1873–March 28, 1943) was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor who is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music. The Rachmaninoff family, of Russian and distant Moldovan descent, was a part of an “old aristocracy,” having been in the service of the Russian tsars since the 16th century, with strong musical and military leanings. The composer’s father, Vasily Arkadyevich (1841–1916), an amateur pianist and army officer, married Lyubov Petrovna Butakova (1853–1929). Sergei was born on April 1, 1873, at the estate of Semyonovo, near the administrative city of Great Novgorod in north-western Russia. When he was four, his mother gave him casual piano lessons, but it was his paternal grandfather, Arkady Alexandrovich, who brought Anna Ornatskaya, a teacher from Saint Petersburg, to teach Sergei in 1882. Ornatskaya remained for “two or three years”, until Vasily had to auction off their home and they moved to a small flat in Saint Petersburg.

Ornatskaya arranged for Sergei to study at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, which he entered in 1883, at age ten and studied with Vladimir Delyansky. That year his sister Sofia died of diphtheria, and his father left for Moscow, so Sergei’s maternal grandmother stepped in to help raise the children, especially focusing on their spiritual life. She regularly took Sergei to Russian Orthodox services, where he was first exposed to the liturgical chants and the church bells of the city, which would later permeate many of his compositions. Another important musical influence was his sister Yelena’s involvement in the Bolshoi Theater. She was just about to join the company, being offered coaching and private lessons, but she fell ill and died of pernicious anemia at the age of 18. As a respite from this tragedy, grandmother Butakova brought him to a farm retreat on the Volkhov River, where he had a boat and developed a love for rowing. In 1885, back at the Conservatory, Sergei played at events often attended by Grand Duke Konstantin and other important people. His mother consulted with her nephew by marriage Alexander Siloti, already an accomplished pianist studying under Franz Liszt, who recommended that Sergei attend the Moscow Conservatory to study with his own original teacher and disciplinarian, Nikolai Zverev. Besides piano lessons from Zverev, Rachmaninoff studied theory under such men as Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev; amongst Rachmaninoff’s classmates was Alexander Scriabin.

While in Moscow Rachmaninoff lived with the Satins, a family of cousins. He would marry his cousin Natalia Satina. In the spring of 1891, he took his final piano examination at the Moscow Conservatory and passed with honors. He moved to Ivanovka with Siloti, and composed some songs and began what would become his Piano Concerto No. 1 (Op. 1). During his final studies at the Conservatory he completed Youth Symphony, a one-movement symphonic piece, Prince Rostislav, a symphonic poem, and The Rock (Op. 7), a fantasia for orchestra. He gave his first independent concert on February 11, 1892, premiering his Trio élégiaque No. 1, with violinist David Kreyn and cellist Anatoliy Brandukov. He performed the first movement of his first piano concerto on March 29, 1892 in an over-long concert consisting of entire works of most of the composition students at the Conservatory. His final composition for the Conservatory was Aleko, a one-act opera based on the poem The Gypsies by Alexander Pushkin, which Rachmaninoff completed while staying with his father in Moscow. It was first performed on May 19, 1892 and gained him the Great Gold Medal. The Conservatory issued him a diploma on May 29, 1892, at the age of 19.

Rachmaninoff continued to compose, publishing at this time his Six Songs (Op. 4) and Two Pieces (Op. 2). He spent the summer of 1892 on the estate of Ivan Konavalov, a rich landowner in the Kostroma Oblast, then moved back with the Satins in the Arbat District. He took an engagement at the Moscow Electrical Exhibition, where he premiered his landmark Prelude in C-sharp minor (Op. 3, No. 2). This small piece was part of a set of five pieces called Morceaux de fantaisie. He spent the summer of 1893 in Lebedyn with some friends, where he composed Fantaisie-Tableaux (Suite No. 1, Op. 5) and his Morceaux de salon (Op. 10). At the summer’s end, he moved back to Moscow, and at Sergei Taneyev’s house discussed with Tchaikovsky the possibility of his conducting The Rock at its premiere. However, because it had to be premiered in Moscow, not Europe, where Tchaikovsky was touring, Vasily Safonov conducted it instead, and the two met soon after for Zverev’s funeral. Rachmaninoff had a short excursion to conduct Aleko in Kiev, and on his return, received the news about Tchaikovsky’s unexpected death on November 6, 1893. Almost immediately, on the same day, he began work on his Trio élégiaque No. 2, just as Tchaikovsky had quickly written his Trio in A minor after Nikolai Rubinstein’s death.

The sudden death of Tchaikovsky was a great blow to young Rachmaninoff that he immediately began writing a second Trio élégiaque in his memory. His First Symphony (Op. 13) was premiered on March 28,1897, in one of a long-running series of “Russian Symphony Concerts”, but was brutally panned. After the poor reception of his First Symphony, Rachmaninoff fell into a period of deep depression that lasted three years, during which he wrote almost nothing. Savva Mamontov, a famous Russian industrialist and patron of the arts, who two years earlier had founded the Moscow Private Russian Opera Company, offered Rachmaninoff the post of assistant conductor for the 1897–8 season. During this period he became engaged to fellow pianist Natalia Satina whom he had known since childhood and who was his first cousin.

In 1900, Rachmaninoff began a course of autosuggestive therapy with psychologist Nikolai Dahl, who was himself an excellent though amateur musician. The composer began to recover his confidence and eventually he was able to overcome his writer’s block. In 1901 he completed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18, arguably the most beloved concerto in western music, and dedicated it to Dr. Dahl. In that same year, his Cello Sonata was also composed. The little-heard cantata Spring followed in 1902. He and Natalia were wed in a suburb of Moscow by an army priest on April 29 of that year. The marriage was a happy one, producing two daughters: Irina, later Princess Wolkonsky (1903-1969) and Tatiana Conus (1907-1961). His and Natalia’s union lasted until the composer’s death. Natalia Rachmaninova died in 1951. After several successful appearances as a conductor, Rachmaninoff was offered a job as conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1904, although political reasons led to his resignation in March 1906, after which he stayed in Italy until July. He spent the following three winters in Dresden, Germany, intensively composing such works as The Miserly Knight (Op. 24, 1904) and Francesca da Rimini (Op. 25, 1905), and returning to the family estate of Ivanovka every summer. Other works during this time included the Fifteen Songs (1906) for voice and piano, Symphony No. 2 (1908), and Piano Sonata No. 1 (1908).

Rachmaninoff made his first tour of the United States as a pianist in 1909, an event for which he composed the Piano Concerto No. 3 (Op. 30, 1909) as a calling card. These successful concerts made him a popular figure in America. However, he declined requests for future American concerts until after he emigrated from Russia in 1917, including an offer to become permanent conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The early death in 1915 of Alexander Scriabin, who had been his good friend and fellow student at the Moscow Conservatory, affected Rachmaninoff so deeply that he went on a tour giving concerts entirely devoted to Scriabin’s music. The 1917 Russian Revolution meant the end of Russia as the composer had known it. Rachmaninoff was a member of the Russian bourgeoisie, and the Revolution led to the loss of his estate, his way of life, and his livelihood. On December 22, 1917, he left Petrograd for Helsinki with his wife and two daughters on an open sled, having only a few notebooks with sketches of his own compositions and two orchestral scores, his unfinished opera Monna Vanna and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel. He was 44 years old. He spent a year giving concerts in Scandinavia while laboring to widen his concert repertoire.

Near the end of 1918, Rachmaninoff received three offers of lucrative American contracts. Although he declined all three, he decided the United States might offer a solution to his financial concerns. He departed Kristiania (Oslo) for New York on November 1, 1918. Once there, Rachmaninoff quickly chose an agent, Charles Ellis, and accepted the gift of a piano from Steinway before playing 40 concerts in a four-month period. At the end of the 1919–20 season, he also signed a contract with the Victor Talking Machine Company. In 1921, the Rachmaninoffs bought a house in the United States, where they consciously recreated the atmosphere of Ivanovka, entertaining Russian guests, employing Russian servants, and observing old Russian customs. Due to his busy concert career, Rachmaninoff’s output as composer slowed tremendously. Between 1918 and his death in 1943, while living in the U.S. and Europe, he completed only six compositions. Aside from the need to constantly tour and perform to support himself and his family, the main reason was homesickness. It was during these years that he toured the United States as a concert pianist.

When Rachmaninoff left Russia, it was as if he had left behind his inspiration. His revival as a composer became possible only after he had built himself a new home, Villa Senar on Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, where he spent summers from 1932 to 1939. There, in the comfort of his own villa, which reminded him of his old family estate, Rachmaninoff composed the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, one of his best known works, in 1934. He went on to compose his Symphony No. 3 (Op. 44, 1935–36) and the Symphonic Dances (Op. 45, 1940), his last completed work. Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered the Symphonic Dances in 1941 in the Academy of Music. In December 1939 he conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra. This was the first time he had stood on a conductor’s podium since January 1917, his last appearance as a conductor in Russia.

In late 1940 or 1941 he was approached by the makers of the British film Dangerous Moonlight to write a short concerto-like piece for use in the film, but he declined. The job went to Richard Addinsell and the orchestrator Roy Douglas, who came up with the Warsaw Concerto. Sergei Rachmaninoff was also on the Board of Directors for the Tolstoy Foundation Center in Valley Cottage, New York. In 1940, with the composer’s consent, pianist Vladimir Horowitz created a fusion of the 1913 original and 1931 revised versions of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Sonata. Horowitz remained a champion of Rachmaninoff’s solo works and his Third Concerto which received an August 7, 1942, Hollywood Bowl performance. The two men continued to support each other’s work, each making a point of attending concerts given by the other.They regularly gave two-piano recitals at the composer’s home in Beverly Hills. The recitals, never recorded, are known to have included Rachmaninoff’s Second Suite and the two-piano reduction of the Symphonic Dances.

Rachmaninoff fell ill during a concert tour in late 1942 and was subsequently diagnosed with advanced melanoma. On February 1, 1943 he and his wife became American citizens. His last recital, given on 17 February 1943 at the Alumni Gymnasium of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, included Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2, which contains the famous Marche funèbre (Funeral March). A statue called “Rachmaninoff: The Last Concert”, designed and sculpted by Victor Bokarev, now stands in World Fair Park in Knoxville as a permanent tribute to Rachmaninoff. He became so ill after this recital that he had to return to his home near Los Angeles, and he died of melanoma on March 28, 1943, in Beverly Hills, CA, just four days before his 70th birthday. A choir sang his All Night Vigil at his funeral.

Rachmaninoff’s compositions are limited in number, but their lush sonorities and grandeur have made them standards of classical music. Rachmaninoff wrote five works for piano and orchestra: four concertos, plus the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Of the concertos, the Second and Third are the most popular. He also composed a number of works for orchestra alone, including the three symphonies, works for piano solo, two major a cappella choral works, other choral, three operas, some chamber music, and many songs for voice and piano such as the wordless Vocalise. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and other Russian composers gave way to a personal style notable for its song-like melodicism, expressiveness and his use of rich orchestral colors.

The following works by Sergei Rachmaninoff are contained in my collection:

Caprice Bohemien, op. 12 (1894).
(Piano) Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in f#m, op. 1 (1891).
(Piano) Concerto No. 2 in cm, op. 18 (1901).
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 3 in dm, op. 39 (1909).
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 4 in gm, op. 40 (1927).
The Isle of the Dead, Symphonic Poem, op. 29 (1907).
Prince Rostislav, Symphonic Poem after Alexei Tolstoy (1891).
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.
The Rock, Fantasy for Orchestra, op. 7 (1893).
Scherzo in FM (1887).
Spring, Cantata for Baritone, Chrous, and Orchestra, op. 20 (1902).
Symphonic Dances, op. 45 (1940).
Symphony in dm, Youth (1891).
Symphony No. 1 in dm, op. 13 (1895).
Symphony No. 2 in em, op. 27 (1908).
Symphony No. 3 in am, op. 44 (1940).
Symphony “The Bells” for Soprano, Tenor, Baritone, Chorus and Orchestra, op. 35 (1913).
Three Russian Songs for Chorus and Orchestra, op. 41 (1927).
Vocalise for Orchestra, op. 34, no. 14 (1912).

—material selected, adapted, and edited from several different sources

Henry Purcell and Abdelzar

Henry Purcell (September 10, 1659–November 21, 1695), was an English composer who incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, but left a legacy that was a uniquely English form of Baroque music. He is generally considered to be one of the greatest English composers, and no other native-born English composer approached his fame until Edward Elgar. Purcell was born to Henry Purcell and his wife Elizabeth in St Ann’s, Westminster, the area of London later known as Devil’s Acre, on September 10, 1659. Henry Purcell Senior, whose older brother Thomas Purcell (d. 1682) was also a musician, was a gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and sang at the coronation of King Charles II of England. Henry the elder had three sons, Edward, Henry and Daniel. Henry Purcell’s family lived just a few hundred yards west of Westminster Abbey from the year 1659 onwards.

After his father’s death in 1664, Purcell was placed under the guardianship of his uncle Thomas who showed him great affection and kindness. Thomas arranged for Henry to be admitted as a chorister of His Majesty’s Chapel. Henry studied first under Captain Henry Cooke (d. 1672), Master of the Children, and afterwards under Pelham Humfrey (d. 1674), Cooke’s successor. He also took keyboard lessons from Christopher Gibbons, son of the composer Orlando Gibbons, and it is likely that he studied with Matthew Locke. Henry was a chorister in the Chapel Royal until his voice broke in 1673, when he became assistant to the organ-builder John Hingston, who held the post of keeper of wind instruments to the King. From time to time, he was also paid for copying out music by other composers, and he would have learnt much from this, as well as from the formal music training he received as a choir-boy. Purcell is said to have been composing at nine years old, It is assumed that the three-part song Sweet tyranness, I now resign was written by him as a child, but the earliest work that can be certainly identified as his is an ode for the King’s birthday, written in 1670. The dates for his compositions are often uncertain, despite considerable research.

After Humfrey’s death, Purcell continued his studies under Dr John Blow. He attended Westminster School and in 1676 was appointed copyist at Westminster Abbey. On September 10, 1677, Purcell was given the Court position of composer-in-ordinary for the 27 violins. Purcell’s earliest anthem Lord, who can tell was composed in 1678. In 1679, he wrote songs for John Playford’s Choice Ayres, Songs and Dialogues and an anthem, the name of which is unknown, for the Chapel Royal. From an extant letter written by Thomas Purcell we learn that this anthem was composed for the exceptionally fine voice of John Gostling, then at Canterbury, but afterwards a gentleman of His Majesty’s Chapel. Purcell wrote several anthems at different times for Gostling’s extraordinary basso profondo voice. The dates of very few of these sacred compositions are known. Perhaps the most notable example is the anthem They that go down to the sea in ships.

In 1679, Blow, who had been appointed organist of Westminster Abbey in 1669, resigned his office in favor of his pupil, a great keyboard virtuoso by his late teens. Purcell now devoted himself almost entirely to the composition of sacred music, and for six years severed his connection with the theatre. However, during the early part of the year, probably before taking up his new office, he had produced two important works for the stage, the music for Nathaniel Lee’s Theodosius, and Thomas d’Urfey’s Virtuous Wife. Between 1680 and 1688 Purcell wrote music for seven plays. The composition of his chamber opera Dido and Aeneas, which forms a very important landmark in the history of English dramatic music, has been attributed to this period, and its earliest production may well have predated the documented one of 1689. A short work supposedly designed for a girls’ school, it was written to a libretto furnished by Nahum Tate, and performed in 1689 in cooperation with Josias Priest, a dancing master and the choreographer for the Dorset Garden Theatre. It is sometimes considered the first genuine English opera, though that title is also given to Blow’s Venus and Adonis.

Soon after Purcell’s marriage in 1682 to his wife Frances Peters, with whom he would have at least six children, though only two survived to adulthood, he was appointed on the death of Edward Lowe as organist of the Chapel Royal, an office which he was able to hold simultaneously with his position at Westminster Abbey. His eldest son was born in this same year, but his life was short lived. Purcell’s first printed composition, Twelve Sonatas, was published in 1683. Also in 1683 a group of gentlemen amateurs and professional musicians started a “Musical Society” in London to celebrate the “Festival of St. Cecilia, a great patroness of music” yearly on November 22nd. They asked Henry Purcell, then only 24, to be the first to write an Ode for their festivals; Purcell was to compose two more such Odes for the Society. The following month, upon Hingeston’s death, he was named royal instrument keeper while retaining his other posts. For some years after this, he was busy in the production of sacred music, odes addressed to the king and royal family, and other similar works.

In 1685, Purcell wrote two of his finest anthems, I was glad and My heart is inditing, for the coronation of King James II. The new King introduced many changes at Court, one of which was to make Purcell the Court harpsichordist and Blow the Court composer. In 1687, Purcell resumed his connection with the theatre by furnishing the music for Dryden’s tragedy, Tyrannick Love. In this year, Purcell also composed a march and quick-step, which became so popular that Lord Wharton adapted the latter to the fatal verses of Lillibullero. Near the end of 1687, Queen Mary’s pregnancy was announced and in or before January 1688, Purcell was commissioned to compose an anthem for Psalm 128, Blessed are they that fear the Lord by express command of the King. A few months later, he wrote the music for D’Urfey’s play, The Fool’s Preferment. Many other of his anthems appeared in 1688, as did one of his more famous ones for church use, O sing unto the Lord. In 1690 Purcell composed a setting of the birthday ode for Queen Mary, Arise, my muse and four years later wrote one of his most elaborate, important and magnificent works – a setting for another birthday ode for the Queen, written by Nahum Tate, entitled Come Ye Sons of Art.

With the ascension of William and Mary to the throne on April 11, 1689, Purcell retained his post as royal instrument keeper, and he, along with Blow and Alexander Damazene, shared the duties of Court composers. With his royal duties reduced, he was able to pursue other opportunities, including teaching and writing for other organizations. In 1690, he composed the music for Betterton’s adaptation of Fletcher and Massinger’s Prophetess (afterwards called Dioclesian and Dryden’s Amphitryon. During the first ten years of his mastership, Purcell composed much, precisely how much can only be guessed. In 1691, he wrote the music for what is sometimes considered his dramatic masterpiece, King Arthur, or The British Worthy. In 1692, he composed The Fairy-Queen, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and his longest score for theatre.

In 1693, Purcell composed music for two comedies: The Old Bachelor, and The Double Dealer. Purcell also composed for five other plays within the same year. Purcell’s Te Deum and Jubilate Deo were written for Saint Cecilia’s Day, 1694, the first English Te Deum ever composed with orchestral accompaniment. He composed an anthem and two elegies for Queen Mary II’s funeral, which took place in March 1695. Besides the operas and semi-operas already mentioned, Purcell wrote the music and songs for Thomas d’Urfey’s The Comical History of Don Quixote, Bonduca, , a vast quantity of sacred music, and numerous odes, cantatas, and other miscellaneous pieces. The quantity of his instrumental chamber music is minimal after his early career, and his keyboard music consists of an even more minimal number of harpsichord suites and organ pieces.

In July 1695, Purcell composed an ode for the Duke of Gloucester for his sixth birthday. The ode is titled Who can from joy refrain? That year he also wrote songs for Dryden and Davenant’s version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, probably including “Full fathom five” and “Come unto these yellow sands”. The Indian Queen, which was adapted from a tragedy by Dryden and Sir Robert Howard, followed . In the final six years of his life, Purcell wrote music for forty-two plays, including Aphra Behn’s Abdelazar or The Moor’s Revenge, a rondeau from which provides the theme for Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. In the final year of his life Purcell remained exceedingly busy, writing much for the stage, including The Indian Queen, left incomplete at his death. Purcell died on November 21, 1695, at his home in Westminster, at the height of his career. He is believed to have been 35 or 36 years old at the time. The cause of his death is unclear. One theory is that he caught a chill after returning home late from the theatre one night. Another is that he succumbed to tuberculosis. The youngest of his brothers, Daniel Purcell (d. 1717), was also a prolific composer and wrote the music for much of the final act of The Indian Queen after Henry Purcell’s death.

There is hardly an area of music known in his day to which Purcell did not contribute with true distinction. His anthems were long since accorded their place in the great music of the church. There are enough fine orchestral movements in his works for the theatre to establish him in this field. His fantasies and sonatas entitle him to honor in the history of chamber music. His keyboard works, if less significant in themselves, hold their place in the repertory. His one true opera, Dido and Aeneas, is an enduring masterpiece. And his other dramatic works, sometimes called operas, are full of musical riches. And, most especially, Purcell’s songs themselves would be sufficient to insure his immortality. His sensitivity to his texts has been matched by few masters in musical history, and when he had worthy poetry to set, he could hardly fail to produce a masterpiece.

My collection includes the following works by Henry Purcell:

Abdelzar (1695): Overture, and Rondeau.
Ampitryon (1690): Hornpipe, and Scotch Tune.
Bess of Bedlam.
Birthday Ode for Queen Mary (1694): Come Ye Sons of Art, and Sound the Trumpet.
Birthday Song for Queen Mary (1693).
Bonduca (1691): 3 selections.
Dido and Aeneas: Thy hand Belinda, and When I am laid in earth.
The Double Dealer (1693): Overture, and Hornpipe.
The Fairy Queen (1692): The Plaint (O, O Let Me Weep).
King Arthur (1691): Fairest Isle.
The Married Beau (1694): 3 selections.
Oedipus (1692): Music for a while.
The Old Bachelor (1693): 5 selections.
Sonata No. 9 in FM (from 10 Sonatas in Four Parts).
Trumpet Tune and Bell Symphony.
Voluntary on the Doxology, Old 100th.

—material selected, adapted, and edited from several different sources

Sergei Prokofiev and his Symphony No. 1 “Classical”

Sergei (or Sergey) Sergeyevich Prokofiev (April 23, 1891–March 5, 1953) was a Russian composer, pianist and conductor. Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891, in Sontsovka (now Krasne, Krasnoarmiisk Raion, Donetsk Oblast, eastern Ukraine), an isolated rural estate in the Yekaterinoslav Governorate of the Russian Empire. His father, originally from Moscow, was an agronomist. Prokofiev’s mother, Maria (née Zhitkova), came from a family of serfs owned by the Sheremetev family, where serf-children were taught theatre and arts from an early age. Having lost two daughters, she devoted her life to music and spent two months a year in Moscow or St. Petersburg taking piano lessons. Sergei was inspired by hearing his mother practicing the piano in the evenings – mostly works by Chopin and Beethoven – and composed his first piano composition at the age of five, an ‘Indian Gallop’, which was written down by his mother. At the age of nine he was composing his first opera, The Giant, as well as an overture and various other pieces.

In 1902, Prokofiev’s mother met Sergei Taneyev, director of the Moscow Conservatory, who initially suggested that Prokofiev should start lessons in piano and composition with Alexander Goldenweiser. When Taneyev was unable to arrange this, he instead arranged for composer and pianist Reinhold Glière to spend the summer of 1902 in Sontsovka teaching Prokofiev. This first series of lessons culminated, at the 11-year-old Prokofiev’s insistence, with the budding composer making his first attempt to write a symphony. Glière subsequently revisited Sontsovka the following summer to give further teaching. Equipped with the necessary theoretical tools, Prokofiev started experimenting with dissonant harmonies and unusual time signatures in a series of short piano pieces which he called “ditties,” laying the basis for his own musical style. Despite his growing talent, Prokofiev’s parents hesitated over starting their son on a musical career at such an early age, and initially considered the possibility of his attending a quality high school in Moscow.

By 1904, Prokofiev’s mother had decided instead on Saint Petersburg, and she and Prokofiev visited the capital to explore the possibility of their moving there for his education. They were introduced to composer Alexander Glazunov, a professor at the Conservatory, who asked to see Prokofiev and his music; Glazunov was so impressed that he urged Prokofiev’s mother that her son apply to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. By this point, Prokofiev had composed two more operas, Desert Islands and The Feast during the Plague, and was working on his fourth, Undina. He passed the introductory tests and entered the Conservatory that same year. During this period, he studied under, among others, Alexander Winkler for piano, Anatoly Lyadov for harmony and counterpoint, Nikolai Tcherepnin for conducting, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for orchestration. He also shared classes with the composers Boris Asafyev and Nikolai Myaskovsky, the latter becoming a relatively close and lifelong friend. As a member of the Saint Petersburg music scene, Prokofiev developed a reputation as a musical rebel. In 1909, he graduated from his class in composition but continued at the Conservatory, studying piano under Anna Yesipova and continuing his conducting lessons under Tcherepnin.

In 1910, Prokofiev’s father died and Sergei’s financial support ceased. Fortunately he had started making a name for himself as a composer and pianist outside the Conservatory, making appearances at the St Petersburg Evenings of Contemporary Music. There he performed several of his more adventurous piano works, such as his highly chromatic and dissonant Etudes, Op. 2 (1909). In 1911, the renowned Russian musicologist and critic Alexander Ossovsky wrote a supportive letter to music publisher Boris P. Jurgenson, and a contract was offered to the composer. Prokofiev’s harmonic experimentation continued with Sarcasms for piano, Op. 17 (1912), which makes extensive use of polytonality, and Visions fugitives, Op. 22 (1915-1917). He composed his first two piano concertos around this time. Prokofiev made his first foreign trip in 1913, travelling to Paris and London where he first encountered Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

In 1914, Prokofiev finished his career at the Conservatory by entering the so-called ‘battle of the pianos’, a competition open to the five best piano students for which the prize was a Schreder grand piano: Prokofiev won. Soon afterwards, he journeyed to London where he made contact with the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Diaghilev commissioned Prokofiev’s first ballet, Ala and Lolli. Diaghilev then commissioned the ballet Chout (The Fool or “The Tale of the Buffoon who Outwits Seven Other Buffoons”). During World War I, Prokofiev returned to the Conservatory and studied organ in order to avoid conscription. He composed The Gambler based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel of the same name, but rehearsals were plagued by problems and the scheduled 1917 première had to be canceled because of the February Revolution. In the summer of that year, Prokofiev composed his first symphony, the Classical. This was his own name for the symphony. This symphony was also an exact contemporary of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major, Op. 19, which was scheduled to premiere in November 1917. The first performances of both works had to wait.

After completing the score of Seven, They Are Seven, a “Chaldean invocation” for chorus and orchestra, Prokofiev decided to try his fortunes in America until the turmoil in his homeland had passed and set out in 1918. Arriving in San Francisco, CA, he was soon compared to other famous Russian exiles, such as Sergei Rachmaninoff. His debut solo concert in New York led to several further engagements. He also received a contract from the music director of the Chicago Opera Association, Cleofonte Campanini, for the production of his new opera The Love for Three Oranges. In April 1920, he left for Paris, not wanting to return to Russia just yet. In Paris Prokofiev reaffirmed his contacts with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes and also completed some of his older, unfinished works, such as the Third Piano Concerto. The premiere of Chout in Paris on May 17, 1921, was a huge success and was greeted with great admiration by an audience that included Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinsky, and Maurice Ravel.

In March 1922, Prokofiev moved with his mother to the town of Ettal in the Bavarian Alps, where for over a year he concentrated on an opera project, The Fiery Angel, based on the novel by Valery Bryusov. By this time his later music had acquired a following in Russia, and he received invitations to return there, but he decided to stay in Europe. In 1923, Prokofiev married the Spanish singer Carolina Codina (1897–1989) whose stage name was Lina Llubera, before moving back to Paris where several of his works were performed. Diaghilev commissioned Le pas d’acier (The Steel Step), a ‘modernist’ ballet score intended to portray the industrialization of the Soviet Union. It was enthusiastically received by Parisian audiences and critics. Around 1924, Prokofiev was introduced to Christian Science. He began to practice its teachings, which he believed to be beneficial to his health and to his fiery temperament, and remained faithful for the rest of his life.

In 1927, Prokofiev made his first concert tour in the Soviet Union. Over the course of more than two months, he spent time in Moscow and Leningrad (as Saint Petersburg had been renamed. In 1928, he completed his Third Symphony, which was broadly based on his unperformed opera The Fiery Angel. During 1928–29, Prokofiev composed what was to be the last ballet for Diaghilev, The Prodigal Son. That summer, Prokofiev completed the Divertimento, Op. 43 (which he had started in 1925) and revised his Sinfonietta, Op. 5/48, a work started in his days at the Conservatory. In October that year, he had a car crash while driving his family back to Paris from their holiday. As the car turned over, Prokofiev pulled some muscles on his left hand and was therefore unable to perform in Moscow during his tour shortly after the accident, but he was able to enjoy watching performances of his music from the audience. With his left hand healed, Prokofiev toured the United States successfully at the start of 1930, propped up by his recent European success. That year Prokofiev began his first non-Diaghilev ballet On the Dnieper, Op. 51, a work commissioned by Serge Lifar, who had been appointed maitre de ballet at the Paris Opéra. In 1931 and 1932, he completed his fourth and fifth piano concertos. The following year saw the completion of the Symphonic Song, Op. 57.

By the early 1930s, both Europe and America were suffering from the Great Depression, which inhibited both new opera and ballet productions, though audiences for Prokofiev’s appearances as a pianist were, at least in Europe at least, undiminished. Having been homesick for some time, Prokofiev began to build substantial bridges with the Soviet Union. His premieres and commissions were increasingly under the auspices of the Soviet Union. One such was Lieutenant Kijé, which was commissioned as the score to a Soviet film. Another commission, from the Kirov Theatre was the ballet Romeo and Juliet, composed to a scenario created by Adrian Piotrovsky and Sergei Radlov. In 1936, Prokofiev and his family settled permanently in Moscow. In that year he composed one of his most famous works, Peter and the Wolf, for Natalya Sats’s Central Children’s Theatre.

Sats also persuaded Prokofiev to write two songs for children – “Sweet Song”, and “Chatterbox” which were eventually joined by “The Little Pigs”, published as Three Children’s Songs, Op. 68. Prokofiev also composed the gigantic Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution, originally intended for performance during the anniversary year. Forced to adapt to the new circumstances, whatever misgivings he had about them in private, Prokofiev wrote a series of “mass songs” (Opp. 66, 79, 89), using the lyrics of officially approved Soviet poets. In 1938, Prokofiev collaborated with Eisenstein on the historical epic Alexander Nevsky for which he composed some of his most inventive and dramatic music. Although the film had a very poor sound recording, Prokofiev adapted much of his score into a large-scale cantata for mezzo-soprano, orchestra and chorus, which was extensively performed and recorded. In the wake of Alexander Nevsky’s success, Prokofiev composed his first Soviet opera Semyon Kotko, which was intended to be produced by the director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Prokofiev was also ‘invited’ to compose Zdravitsa (literally translated ‘Cheers!’, but more often given the English title Hail to Stalin) (Op. 85) to celebrate Joseph Stalin’s 60th birthday.

Later in 1939, Prokofiev composed his Piano Sonatas Nos. 6, 7, and 8, Opp. 82–84, widely known today as the “War Sonatas.” In 1941, Prokofiev suffered the first of several heart attacks, resulting in a gradual decline in health. Prokofiev had been considering making an opera out of Leo Tolstoy’s epic novel War and Peace, when news of the German invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941 made the subject seem all the more timely. Prokofiev took two years to compose his original version of War and Peace. Because of the war he was evacuated together with a large number of other artists, initially to the Caucasus where he composed his Second String Quartet. During the war years, restrictions on style and the demand that composers should write in a ‘socialist realist’ style were slackened, and Prokofiev was generally able to compose in his own way. The Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 80; The Year 1941, Op. 90; and the Ballade for the Boy Who Remained Unknown, Op. 93 all came from this period. In 1943 Prokofiev joined Eisenstein in Alma-Ata, the largest city in Kazakhstan, to compose more film music (Ivan the Terrible), and the ballet Cinderella (Op. 87), one of his most melodious and celebrated compositions. The underrated ballet The Stone Flower also dates from 1943. His Eighth Piano Sonata had a triumphant premiere on December 30, 1944.

In 1944, Prokofiev spent time at a composer’s colony outside Moscow in order to compose his Fifth Symphony (Op. 100). Prokofiev conducted its first performance on January 13, 1945. Shortly afterwards, he suffered a concussion after a fall due to chronic high blood pressure. He never fully recovered from this injury, and was forced on medical advice to restrict his composing activity. The composer’s last creative efforts were directed largely toward the production of “patriotic” and “national” works, typified by the cantata Flourish, Mighty Homeland (1947). Prokofiev had time to write his postwar Sixth Symphony and his Ninth Piano Sonata (for Sviatoslav Richter) before the so-called “Zhdanov Decree”. In early 1948, following a meeting of Soviet composers convened by Andrei Zhdanov, the Politburo issued a resolution denouncing Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Myaskovsky, and Khachaturian of the crime of “formalism.” Prokofiev’s latest opera projects, among them his desperate attempt to appease the cultural authorities, The Story of a Real Man, were quickly cancelled by the Kirov Theatre. By August 1948, Prokofiev was in severe financial straits, his personal debt amounting to 180,000 rubles.

This snub, in combination with his declining health, caused Prokofiev progressively to withdraw from public life and from various activities, and increasingly he devoted himself exclusively to his own work. After a serious relapse in 1949, his doctors ordered him to limit his activities, limiting him to composing for only an hour a day. In spring 1949 he wrote his Cello Sonata in C, Op. 119, for the 22-year old Mstislav Rostropovich, who gave the first performance in 1950, with Sviatoslav Richter. For Rostropovich, Prokofiev also extensively recomposed his Cello Concerto, transforming it into a Symphony-Concerto, his last major masterpiece and a landmark in the cello and orchestra repertory today. The last public performance he attended was the première of the Seventh Symphony in 1952. Prokofiev died at the age of 61 on March 5, 1953, the same day Joseph Stalin’s death was announced. In breathing new life into the symphony, sonata, and concerto, Sergei Prokofiev emerged as one of the truly original musical voices of the twentieth century. Though regarded as impossibly dissonant and avant-garde in his youth, Prokofiev can now be seen as in the direct line of Russian composers, embodying the bold and colorful strokes of 19th-century nationalists into a 20th-century style strongly marked by its brittle wit and capacity for pungent dramatic characterization.

The following works by Sergei Prokofiev are contained in my collection:

Ala and Lolly (ballet, 1914): Scythian Suite, op. 20 (1920).
(Piano) Concerto No. 1 in DbM, op. 19 (1911).
(Piano) Concerto No. 2 in gm, op. 16 (1913).
(Piano) Concerto No. 3 in CM, op. 26 (1921).
Lieutenant Kije (film, 1933): Symphonic Suite, op. 60.
The Love for Three Oranges (1919): Symphonic Suite, op. 33b (1924).
Overture on Hebrew Themes, op. 34b (1919/1934).
Peter and the Wolf, A Symphonic Musical Fairy Tale for Children, op. 67 (1936).
Romeo and Juliet ballet, op. 64 (1938): Excerpts.
Russian Overture, op. 72 (1936).
Symphony No. 1 in DM, op. 25, Classical (1917).
Symphony No. 4, op. 47 (1930).
Symphony No. 5, op. 100 (1944).
Symphony No. 7, op. 131 (1952).

—material selected, adapted, and edited from several different sources

Francis Poulenc and “Les Biches” (The Does)

Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc (January 7, 1899–January 30, 1963) was a French composer and pianist, associated with the French group Les Six who composed art songs, solo piano music, chamber music, oratorios, choral music, operas, ballet music, and orchestral music. Poulenc was born into a wealthy family of musicians at Paris, France, on January 7, 1899. His father Émile Poulenc was a second-generation director of the Poulenc, and later Rhône-Poulenc, chemical corporation. His mother, an amateur pianist, gave him his first lessons on the instrument. Later he studied with a niece of César Franck. In 1914 he was introduced to the Spanish virtuoso pianist Ricardo Viñes, a champion of the music of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. Poulenc became his pupil shortly afterwards and developed into a capable pianist whose early compositions were dominated by the keyboard. In 1916 a childhood friend, Raymonde Linossier (1897–1930), introduced Poulenc to Adrienne Monnier’s bookshop, the Maison des Amis des Livres. There he met avant-garde poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Paul Éluard and Louis Aragon. He later set many of their poems to music. He had his first major successes as an 18-year-old composer without a single composition lesson.

Poulenc’s first surviving composition, Rapsodie Nègre (1917), caught the attention of the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky who was later instrumental in having the work published in London. Le bestiaire, ou Le cortège d’Orphée (1917) is a cycle of mélodies on poems by Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1918, Poulenc performed the premiere of his Sonata for Piano Four Hands with a fellow Viñes pupil, Marcelle Meyer. The young composer served in the military during the years 1918-1921, during which time he gave first performances of several of his new pieces, the Sonata for Two Clarinets, the Sonata for Piano Four Hands, a Sonata for Violin and Piano, and Trois mouvements perpétuels, at a series of concerts held from 1917 to 1920 in the studio of the painter Émile Lejeune in Montparnasse. There Poulenc met other young composers, and together they formed Erik Satie’s Les nouveaux jeunes, followed by Jean Cocteau’s Les Six, a loose-knit group of young French and French-Swiss composers made up of Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, and Germaine Tailleferre. Poulenc composed his Valse en ut for L’Album des Six (1920). He contributed to Les mariés de la tour Eiffel (1921) with Discours du Général and La Baigneuse de Trouville.

During the 1920s, Poulenc’s most immediate influences were Chabrier, Debussy, Satie, and Stravinsky. He generally followed the irreverent, flippant aesthetic stance of Les Six with melodies influenced by Parisian music halls. Between 1921 and 1925, Poulenc received his first formal training in composition when he studied with Charles Koechlin (1921–25). He remained a mostly self-taught composer. Sergei Diaghilev commissioned ballet music from Poulenc for Les biches. This was performed by the Ballets Russes in January 1924, with settings by Marie Laurencin. In 1926 Poulenc met the baritone Pierre Bernac, who became a very close friend. A great many of the chansons and melodies Poulenc wrote were composed for Bernac. They gave recitals throughout the world together from 1935 until 1959. In 1927, Poulenc bought Le grand coteau, a house close to Noizay in the Touraine, where he enjoyed the quiet atmosphere he needed to work.

In 1928 Poulenc composed the Concert champêtre, a piece for harpsichord and orchestra commissioned by Wanda Landowska. Also in 1928, Poulenc recorded his Trois mouvements perpétuels and the Trio for piano, oboe and bassoon, and then Le bestiaire. He also started publishing musical reviews in Les arts phoniques. He first performed his Concerto for two pianos and orchestra with Jacques Février in 1932. Also in 1932 Le Bal Masqué, a lighter piece, was performed privately at the home of Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles. In 1936 Poulenc came to a religious reawakening of his Catholic faith after the deaths of several friends, such as Raymonde Linossier in 1930, a woman to whom he had proposed a marriage in 1928, and the fellow composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud, followed by a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Black Virgin of Rocamadour in 1935. Here, before the statue of the Madonna with a young child on her lap, Poulenc experienced a life-changing transformation. Thereafter, he produced a sizeable amount of liturgical music or compositions based on religious themes. Poulenc continued to compose light music, such as the Quatre chansons pour enfants (1934) on texts by Jean Nohain. However, some of his works were more somber and austere. This is exemplified by his first sacred pieces, Litanies à la vierge noire (“Litanies to the Black Madonna,” 1936) and the Mass in G (1937). The trend toward “new dimensions and greater depth” in the composer’s style was continued by the song cycle Tel jour, telle nuit (1937) and Concerto in G minor for organ, strings, and timpani (1938).

One of Poulenc’s most popular songs is “Les chemins de l’amour.” It was originally written as part of the incidental music for Jean Anouilh’s play Léocadia (1940), but it achieved fame outside that context. The remainder of the Léocadia music is lost. During World War II Poulenc, Durey and Auric joined the Comité de Front National des Musiciens, created in May 1941, and led by Elsa Barraine and Roger Désormière. He also composed film music, including La Duchesse de Langeais (1942) and Jean Anouilh’s Le voyageur sans bagage. In his humorous ballet, Les animaux modèles (1942, with Serge Lifar), Poulenc used the theme of a French patriotic song performed without the German officers noticing. In 1943, he set to music Deux poèmes de Louis Aragon, although the poet was a member of the French Resistance. This piece was given at the salle Gaveau in December 1943. The cantata Figure humaine was finished in 1943, but it was not publicly performed until 1945, in London. It set to music poems by Paul Éluard, notably Liberté, thousands of copies of which had been dropped over French territory in 1942 by the Royal Air Force.

It was also in 1945 that Poulenc composed L’histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant (The Story of Babar the Elephant, based on a popular children’s book). Although the score of Poulenc’s only opera bouffe, Les mamelles de Tirésias after Guillaume Apollinaire’s surrealist drama, was completed in 1945, it was not performed until 1947, after Poulenc met soprano Denise Duval. Between 1947 and 1949, he became a radio host for À bâtons rompus. His choice of music was very diverse, including many pieces from the French repertoire. Poulenc’s compositions continued, including chansons accompanied on the piano, choral music, secular pieces such as Huit chansons françaises (1945), religious works like Stabat Mater (1950) works, orchestral pieces such as Sinfonietta (1947), chamber music particularly for wind instruments, works for one or two pianos such as L’embarquement pour Cythère, a valse musette (1951).

Poulenc gave the first of his many concerts in the United States in 1948 with Pierre Bernac. During his time in the US, he met the American soprano Leontyne Price, who sang his chansons, and the composer Samuel Barber. His Mélodies passagères were performed in Paris in February 1952 by Bernac and Poulenc. In 1952,Poulenc started working on what was to become the opera Dialogues of the Carmelites, based on a play by Georges Bernanos. Poulenc soon became obsessed with this work. Poulenc adapted Bernanos’ text for the libretto. The opera was first performed at La Scala in Italian, in January 1957 with Virginia Zeani singing the principal soprano role of Blanche. In June 1957, it was produced at the Paris Opera with Denise Duval as Blanche and Régine Crespin as Madame Lidoine. In September of that year, it was produced in San Francisco in English starring Leontyne Price as Mme Lidoine; this was her first stage opera. Denise Duval also sang the role Elle in La voix humaine (1958), a lyric tragedy based on Jean Cocteau’s play which was Poulenc’s last opera. Poulenc wrote the song cycle La courte paille for her (and her child) in 1960, and La dame de Monte Carlo in 1961.

Poulenc travelled to the U.S. in 1960–61 for the American premieres of Les mamelles de Tirésias and La voix humaine. Commissioned by the Koussevitsky Foundation, his Gloria (1961) for soprano solo, choir and orchestra was premiered in both Boston, conducted by Charles Munch, and in Paris, conducted by Georges Prêtre. Poulenc published a book on Emmanuel Chabrier in 1961. He composed Sept répons des ténèbres in 1962. Poulenc died suddenly of heart failure in Paris on January 30, 1963, and is buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery. His last two works were premiered posthumously, in April and June 1963: the Sonata for Oboe and Piano, dedicated to the memory of Prokofiev, was given by Pierre Pierlot and Jacques Février and the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano by Benny Goodman and Leonard Bernstein. Poulenc was particularly fond of woodwind instruments: having planned a set of sonatas for all of them, he lived to complete only four, for flute, oboe, clarinet, and the Elégie for French horn.

One of the great melodists of the twentieth century, Poulenc created some very “French” music which was at the same time natural, light, graceful, solemn and subtle. He never really cottoned to the symphony and wrote few orchestral works not tied to the theater. His best orchestra pieces include the ballets Les Biches and the profound Model Animals (based on La Fontaine) of 1942. He wrote in a direct and tuneful manner, often juxtaposing the witty and ironic with the sentimental or melancholy. He heavily favored diatonic and modal textures over chromatic writing. His music also shows many elements of pandiatonicism, introduced around 1920 by Stravinsky, whose influence can be heard in some of Poulenc’s compositions, such as the religious choral work, Gloria. Poulenc is regarded as one of the most important twentieth century composers of religious music, and in the realm of the French art song he is also a major voice of his time. Poulenc was also a pianist of considerable ability. He was particularly fond of woodwinds, and planned a set of sonatas for all of them, yet only lived to complete four: sonatas for flute, oboe, clarinet, and the Elegie for horn. Among his last series of major works is a series of works for wind instruments and piano.

My collection includes the following works by Francis Poulenc:

Concert Champetre in DM for harpsichord and Orchestra (1929).
(Organ) Concerto in gm for Organ, String Orchestra, and Timpani (1936).
Concerto in dm for Two Pianos and Orchestra (1932).
Les Biches (1924).
Suite Francaise.

—material selected, adapted, and edited from several different sources

Otto Nicolai and “The Merry Wives of Windsor”

Carl Otto Ehrenfried Nicolai (June 9, 1810 –May 11, 1849) was a German composer, conductor, and founder of the Vienna Philharmonic who is best known for his operatic version of Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor as Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor but also composed four other operas, lieder, and works for orchestra, chorus, ensemble, and solo instruments. Nicolai, a child prodigy, was born in Königsberg, Prussia, now Kaliningrad, Russia. He received his first musical education from his father, himself a composer and musical director, Carl Ernst Daniel Nicolai. During his childhood his parents divorced, and while still a youth, early in June 1826, Nicolai ran away from his parents’ “loveless” home, taking refuge in Stargard with a senior legal official called August Adler who treated the musical prodigy like a son and, when Nicolai was seventeen, sent him to Berlin where he took singing lessons at the Zum Grauen Kloster school and studied music with Goethe’s favorite, Carl Friedrich Zelter.

In 1830, following two years further study at the Royal Institute for Church Music, Nicolai began teaching music and singing in concerts, but still struggled in poverty. He had already published his earliest compositions, including his Op. 4 choral work, Preussens Stimme and the Six Lieder, Op. 6. After some initial successes in Germany, including his Symphony No. 1 in C of 1831 and public concerts, Nicolai became musician and organist to the Prussian embassy chapel in Rome from 1833 to 1836, where he studied with Giuseppe Baini. Contact with the theatre led him to drop contrapuntal studies and turn to composing opera. When Giuseppe Verdi declined the libretto of Il proscritto by the proprietors of La Scala in Milan, it was offered instead to Nicolai. Later, Nicolai refused a libretto by the same author, and it went to Verdi, whose Nabucco was his first early success.

After returning to Vienna to serve as Kapellmeister at the Hoftheater for a year, Nicolai returned to Italy in 1838 and began working on his first operas. Enrico II, originally entitled Rosmonda d’Inghilterra (1839), and Il templario (1840), after Scott’s Ivanhoe, were successes at their premieres, though his subsequent Italian operas, much influenced by Bellini, received lukewarm receptions. He became enamored of Italian culture and spoke of its great influence on him, not only in the realm of music but also in literature and painting. All of Nicolai’s operas were originally written in Italian, the sole exception being his last and best known opera, The Merry Wives of Windsor, written in German. At one time he was more popular in Italy than Verdi himself was.

Nicolai made a reputation in Trieste and Turin before becoming principal conductor at the Vienna Hofoper in 1841. His uncompromising standards, and energy in founding the Vienna Philharmonic Concerts in 1842 for the purpose of presenting adequate performances of Beethoven’s music made a great impact. During the early 1840s, Nicolai established himself as a major figure in the concert life of Vienna. In 1844 he was offered the position, vacated by Felix Mendelssohn, of Kapellmeister at the Berlin Cathedral; but he did not reestablish himself in Berlin until the last year of his life. In 1848 he returned to Berlin as opera Kapellmeister and cathedral choir director. On May 11, 1849, two months after the premiere of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and only two days after his appointment as Hofkapellmeister at the Berlin Staatsoper, he collapsed and died from a stroke in Berlin. On the very same day of his death, he was elected a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Arts.

Nicolai has come to be viewed by many as a one-work composer, and his masterpiece was the comic opera Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor or The Merry Wives of Windsor (1849). It brought to a peak the bourgeois Romantic comic opera and his own creativity, reconciling his conflicting imaginative and intellectual impulses. His church and orchestral music is conventional, while his partsongs and choruses show his penchant for felicitous melodies. Nicolai was artistically bound by a certain perfectionism and caution that hampered his productivity. However, The Merry Wives of Windsor occupies an important position in German Romantic operatic repertoire and remains one of the most popular comic operas of the 19th century.

The following work by Otto Nicolai is contained in my collection:

The Merry Wives of Windsor (1849): Overture.

—material selected, adapted, and edited from several different sources

Ignace Pleyel and his symphonies

Ignace Joseph (or Ignaz Josef) Pleyel (June 18, 1757–November 14, 1831) was a highly talented Austrian-born French composer, music publisher, and piano builder of the Classical period, born on June 18,1757, at Ruppersthal in Lower Austria, the son of the village schoolmaster named Martin Pleyel and his wife Anna Theresia. He was the 24th of 38 children in the family. While still young, the support of a patron enabled him to study with Johann Baptist Vanhal, and from 1772 he became the pupil of Joseph Haydn in Eisenstadt. Pleyel benefited in his study from the sponsorship of aristocracy, in this case Count Ladislaus Erdődy (1746–1786) in Pressburg (present-day Bratislava). Pleyel dedicated his String Quartets Op 1 to Count Erdödy in appreciation of his generosity, paternal solicitude, and encouragement. Pleyel evidently had a close relationship with Haydn, who considered him to be a superb student. Among Pleyel’s apprentice work from this time was a puppet opera Die Fee Urgele, (1776) performed in the marionette theater at the palace of Eszterháza and in Vienna. Pleyel apparently also wrote at least part of the overture of Haydn’s opera Das abgebrannte Haus, from about the same time.

Pleyel’s first professional position may have been as Kapellmeister for Count Erdődy, although this is not known for certain. Among his early publications was a set of six string quartets, his Opus 1. In the early 1780s, Pleyel visited Italy, where he composed an opera (Ifigenia in Aulide) and hurdy-gurdy works commissioned by the King of Naples. Attracted to the benefits associated with an organist position, Pleyel moved to Strasbourg, France in 1783 to work alongside Franz Xaver Richter the maître de chapelle at the Strasbourg Cathedral. The Cathedral was extremely appealing to Pleyel as it possessed a full orchestra, a choir, and a large budget devoted to performances. After establishing himself in France, Pleyel voluntarily called himself by the French version of his name, Ignace. Beginning in 1786, at the cathedral he organized and conducted a series of public concerts that featured his symphonies concertantes and liturgical music in collaboration with the Kapellmeister of the Strasbourg Temple Neuf, J. P. Schönfeld..

After Richter’s death in 1789, Pleyel assumed the function of full maître de chapelle. In 1788 Pleyel married Françoise-Gabrielle Lefebvre, the daughter of a Strasbourg carpet weaver. The couple had four children, the eldest being their son Camille. In 1791, the French Revolution abolished musical performances in churches as well as public concerts. Seeking alternative employment, Pleyel traveled to London, where he led the “Professional Concerts” organized by Wilhelm Cramer. In this capacity Pleyel inadvertently played the role of his teacher’s rival, as Haydn was at the same time leading the concert series organized by Johann Peter Salomon. Although the two composers were rivals professionally, they remained on good terms personally. Just like Haydn, Pleyel made a fortune from his London visit. On his return to Strasbourg, he bought a large house, the Château d’Ittenwiller in nearby St. Pierre.

With the onset of the Reign of Terror in 1793 and 1794, life in France became dangerous for many, not excluding Pleyel, who was brought before the Committee of Public Safety a total of seven times due to his foreign status, his recent purchase of a château, and his ties with the Strasbourg Cathedral. He was subsequently labeled a Royalist collaborator. The outcome of the Committee’s attentions could easily have been imprisonment or even execution. With prudent opportunism, Pleyel preserved his future by writing compositions in honor of the new republic including La Prise de Toulon, Hymne chanté au Temple de la Raison, Hymne à l’Être Suprême, and La Révolution du 10 août. All were written in Strasbourg and debuted at the Strasbourg Cathedral, known during the Terror when churches were outlawed as the Temple de l’Être Suprême (Temple of the Supreme Being).

Pleyel became a naturalized French citizen and thus came to be known as Citoyen (citizen) Pleyel. With his involvement in artistic propaganda and loyalty to the new regime, Pleyel can be seen as the ultimate musical champion of Strasbourg republicanism. In addition to composing these works for the Strasbourg public, Pleyel also contributed to the Parisian music scene during the Revolution. One example is Le Jugement de Pâris, a pantomime-ballet by Citoyen (Citizen) Gardel and performed with Pleyel’s music, along with that of Haydn, and Étienne Méhul, on March 5, 1793. There is no documentation for the often-told tale that he was arrested and released only after composing a revolutionary hymn under guard.

Pleyel moved to Paris in 1795. In 1797 he set up a business as a music publisher (“Maison Pleyel”), which among other works produced a complete edition of Haydn’s string quartets (1801), as well as the first miniature scores for study (the Bibliothèque Musicale, “musical library”). The publishing business lasted for 39 years and published about 4000 works during this time, including compositions by Adolphe Adam, Luigi Boccherini, Ludwig van Beethoven, Muzio Clementi, Johann Baptist Cramer, Johann Ladislaus Dussek, Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Georges Onslow. Pleyel visited Vienna on business in 1805, meeting his now elderly mentor Haydn for a final time and hearing Beethoven play. In 1807, Pleyel founded the piano firm Pleyel et Cie and became a manufacturer of pianos. The firm was continued by Pleyel’s son Camille (1788–1855), a piano virtuoso who became his father’s business partner as of 1815. Pleyel retired in 1824 and moved to the countryside outside of Paris. He died on November 14, 1831, aged 74, and was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Pleyel was prolific, composing 41 symphonies, a Requiem, 6 Symphonies Concertantes, 8 Concertos, 70 string quartets, 17 string quintets, 48 Trios, 64 Duets, and several operas, plus songs and church music. Many of these works date from the Strasbourg period; Pleyel’s production tailed off after he had become a businessman. Pleyel is an instance of the phenomenon of a composer, such as Cherubini, Meyerbeer, and Thalberg, who was very famous in his own time but presently obscure. Pleyel’s fame even reached the then-remote musical regions of America. There was a Pleyel Society on the island of Nantucket off the coast of Massachusetts, and tunes by Pleyel made their way into the then-popular shape note hymnals. Pleyel’s work is twice represented in the principal modern descendant of these books, The Sacred Harp. Pleyel continues to be known today as a composer of didactic music: generations of beginning violin and flute students, for example, learn to play the numerous duets he wrote for those instruments.

My collection includes the following works by Ignace Pleyel:

Symphony in cm, B. 121 (1778).
Symphony in CM, B. 128 (1786).
Symphony in fm, B. 138 (1786).

—material selected, adapted, and edited from several different sources

Walter Piston and “The Incredible Flautist”

Walter Hamor Piston Jr, (January 20, 1894 – November 12, 1976), was an American composer, music theorist, and professor of music at Harvard University who is best known for his ballet The Incredible Flutist, his two violin concertos, eight symphonies, and numerous wonderful chamber works. Piston was born in Rockland, ME, on January 20, 1894. His paternal grandfather, a sailor named Antonio Pistone, changed his name to Anthony Piston when he came to America from Genoa, Italy. In 1905, when the boy was ten, the composer’s father, Walter Piston Sr, moved with his family to Boston. Walter Jr first trained as an engineer at the Mechanical Arts High School in Boston, but was artistically inclined. In his teens, Piston’s musical education commenced with piano and violin lessons, but painting was his main interest. After graduating in 1912, he enrolled in the Massachusetts Normal Arts School, where he completed a draftsmanship course in 1916.

During the 1910s, Piston made a living playing piano and violin in dance bands and later playing violin in orchestras led by Georges Longy. During World War I, he joined the U.S. Navy as a band musician after rapidly teaching himself to play saxophone. While playing in a service band, he taught himself to play most wind instruments. After the war, Piston was admitted to Harvard College in 1920, where he studied counterpoint with Archibald Davison, canon and fugue with Clifford Heilman, advanced harmony with Edward Ballantine, and composition and music history with Edward Burlingame Hill. He often worked as an assistant for various music professors there, and conducted the student orchestra. In 1920, Piston married artist Kathryn Nason (1892–1976), who had been a fellow student at the Normal Arts School. Their marriage lasted until her death in February 1976, a few months before his own.

On graduating summa cum laude from Harvard, Piston was awarded a John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship and chose to go to Paris, living there from 1924 to 1926. At the Ecole Nationale de Musique in Paris, he studied composition and counterpoint with Nadia Boulanger, composition with Paul Dukas, and violin with George Enescu. His Three Pieces for Flute, Clarinet and Bassoon of 1925 was his first published score. Upon his return to the U.S., he taught at Harvard from 1926 until his retirement in 1960 appointed in 1951 as Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music. His students include Samuel Adler, Leroy Anderson, Arthur Berger, Leonard Bernstein, Gordon Binkerd, Elliott Carter, John Davison, Irving Fine, John Harbison, Karl Kohn, Ellis B. Kohs, Gail Kubik, Billy Jim Layton, Noël Lee, Robert Middleton, Robert Moevs, Conlon Nancarrow, William P. Perry, Daniel Pinkham, Frederic Rzewski, Allen Sapp, Harold Shapero, and Claudio Spies. In 1928 the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky performed Piston’s Symphonic Piece.

Piston studied the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg and wrote works using aspects of it as early as the Sonata for Flute and Piano (1930). In 1936, the Columbia Broadcasting System commissioned six American composers, Aaron Copland, Louis Gruenberg, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, William Grant Still, and Piston, to write works for broadcast on CBS radio. The following year, Piston wrote his Symphony No. 1 and conducted its premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on April 8, 1938. Piston’s only dance work, The Incredible Flutist, was a ballet written for the Boston Pops Orchestra, which premiered it with Arthur Fiedler conducting on May 30, 1938. His first fully twelve-tone work was the Chromatic Study on the Name of Bach for organ (1940), which nonetheless retains a vague feeling of key. Also, Piston arranged an Incredible Flautist concert suite including a selection of the best parts of the ballet. This version was premiered by Fritz Reiner and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on November 22, 1940.

In 1943, the Alice M. Ditson fund of Columbia University commissioned Piston’s Symphony No. 2, which was premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra on March 5, 1944, and was awarded a prize by the New York Music Critics’ Circle. His next symphony, the Third, earned a Pulitzer Prize in 1948, as did his Symphony No. 7 in 1961. His Viola Concerto and String Quartet No. 5 also later received Critics’ Circle awards. Although he employed twelve-tone elements sporadically throughout his career, these become much more pervasive in the Eighth Symphony (1965) and many of the works following it, such as the Variations for Cello and Orchestra (1966), Clarinet Concerto (1967), Ricercare for Orchestra, Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra (1970), and Flute Concerto (1971). Piston wrote four books on the technical aspects of music theory which are considered to be classics in their respective fields, Principles of Harmonic Analysis, Counterpoint, Orchestration, and Harmony. He died at his home in Belmont, MA, on November 12, 1976.

As a composer, Walter Piston remained an enlightened conservative. Taking the neo-Classic mode of expression and infusing it into larger Romantic forms with flawless craftsmanship, he was one of the great bearers of the symphonic tradition in the twentieth century. Piston was a leading light among those mid-twentieth century American composers who opted to explore traditional musical forms and language. Although he was perhaps better known as a teacher and the author of a widely used book on harmony than as a composer, Piston’s music displays superb craftsmanship within his selected neo-Classic-Romantic idiom, though in his last decades his works also explore more complex harmonies and aspects of serialism within a tonal context.

The following works by Walter Piston are contained in my collection:

Concerto No. 1 for Violin and Orchestra (1939).
Concerto No. 2 for Violin and Orchestra (1960).
Fantasia for Violin and Orchestra (1970).
The Incredible Flutist Ballet Suite.

—material selected, adapted, and edited from several different sources

monthly meditation

Monthly Meditation
7, THE CONTEMPT OF THE PROUD
by Wayne S. Walker

“Our soul is exceedingly filled with the scorn of those who are at ease, with the contempt of the proud” (Psalm 123:4). God’s people have always experienced the contempt of those in this world who are filled with pride. Righteous Abel was killed by wicked Cain because Abel’s sacrifice was acceptable and Cain’s was not (Genesis 4:1-8). While we are not given the details, we can imagine that faithful Noah was the subject of much ridicule and mocking as he built the ark while also serving as a preacher of righteousness (Hebrews 11:7, 2 Peter 2:5). The Israelites, God’s chosen people, were made slaves in Egypt (Exodus 1:8-14). And, of course, early Christians were persecuted for their faith (Acts 11:19).

Today it is no different. Atheists charge those who believe in God with using a mere fairy tale as a crutch. Infidels accuse those who accept the Bible with relying on a book of myths and lies. Evolutionists do everything that they can to silence creationists. Humanists laugh at those who follow the traditional Judaeo-Christian moral standard, saying that we hold to an outdated ethical standard. Homosexual activists label those who object to their behavior as prejudiced, bigoted, hate-filled homophobes. There are places on earth where just claiming to be a follower of Christ could land you in jail or even lead to your death. Those of us who plead for pure, undenominational Christianity are often accused of being narrow-minded because we do not accept instrumental music in worship or are called “water dogs” because we teach that “He who believes and is baptized will be saved…” (Mark 16:16).

Is this surprising? Jesus warned us, “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you…” (John 15:18-20). How did early Christians react to the contempt heaped upon them? They were “rejoicing that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for His name” (Acts 5:41). And what does God’s word tell us to do? “Yet if anyone suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but let him glorify God in this matter” (1 Peter 4:16). That is what we should think about the contempt of the proud, and we have always tried to emphasize such truth in our homeschool.

Astor Piazzolla and La Calle 92

Ástor Pantaleón Piazzolla (March 11, 1921 – July 4, 1992) was an Argentine tango composer, virtuoso bandoneon player, and music arranger whose work revolutionized the traditional tango into a new style termed nuevo tango, incorporating elements from jazz and classical music. Piazzolla was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, on Mar. 11, 1921, the only child of Italian immigrant parents, Vicente “Nonino” Piazzolla and Asunta Manetti. His grandfather, a sailor and fisherman named Pantaleón Piazzolla, had immigrated to Mar del Plata from Trani, a seaport in the southeastern Italian region of Apulia, at the end of the 19th century. During his childhood, Astor faced several operations on his right leg due to polio.In 1925 and walked with a limp the rest of his life. Piazzolla moved with his family to Greenwich Village in New York City. His parents worked long hours and Piazzolla would listen at home to his father’s records of the tango orchestras of Carlos Gardel and Julio de Caro. Also he was exposed to jazz and classical music, including Bach, from an early age. He began to play the bandoneon, a kind of accordion, after his father spotted one in a New York pawn shop in 1929 for nineteen dollars when Astor was eight. Astor studied the bandoneon for one year with Andrés DÁquila.

After their return to New York City from a brief visit to Mar del Plata in 1930, the Piazzollas went to live in Little Italy in lower Manhattan. Piazzolla made his first record, Marionette Spagnol, a non commercial phonograph disk at the Radio Recording Studio in New York in 1931, and in 1932 composed his first tango La catinga. The following year he took music lessons with the Hungarian classical pianist Bela Wilda, a student of Rachmaninoff, who taught him to play Bach on his bandoneon. In 1934 he met Carlos Gardel, one of the most important figures in the history of tango, and played a cameo role as a young paper boy in his movie El día que me quieras. Gardel invited the young bandoneon player to join him on his current tour. Much to Piazzolla’s dismay, his father decided that he was not old enough to go along. This early disappointment of not being allowed to join the tour proved to be a blessing in disguise, as it was on this tour that Gardel and his entire orchestra perished in a plane crash in 1935.

In 1936, during the height of the Great Depression, Vicente Piazzolla decided it was about time to go back to Argentina. Astor returned with his family to Mar del Plata, where he began to play in a variety of tango orchestras and around this time discovered the music of Elvino Vardaro’s sextet on the radio. Vardaro’s novel interpretation of tango made a great impression on Piazzolla and years later he would become Piazzolla’s violinist in his Orquesta de Cuerdas and his First Quintet. Inspired by Vardaro’s style of tango, and still only 17 years old, Piazzolla moved to Buenos Aires in 1938 where, the following year, he realized a dream when he joined the orchestra of the bandoneonist Anibal Troilo, which would become one of the greatest tango orchestras of that time. Piazzolla was employed as a temporary replacement for Toto Rodríguez who was ill, but when Rodríguez returned to work Troilo decided to retain Piazzolla as a fourth bandoneonist. Apart from playing the bandoneon, Piazzolla also became Troilo’s arranger and would occasionally play the piano for him. By 1941 he was earning a good wage, enough to pay for music lessons with Alberto Ginastera, an eminent Argentine composer of classical music. It was the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, then living in Buenos Aires, who had advised him to study with Ginastera and delving into scores of Stravinsky, Bartók, Ravel, and others, Piazzolla rose early each morning to hear the Teatro Colón orchestra rehearse while continuing a gruelling performing schedule in the tango clubs at night.

During his five years of study with Ginastera, Piazzolla mastered orchestration, which he later considered to be one of his strong points. In 1943 he started piano lessons with the Argentine classical pianist Raúl Spivak, which would continue for the next five years, and wrote his first classical works, Preludio No. 1 for Violin and Piano and Suite for Strings and Harps. That same year he married Dedé Wolff, an artist, with whom he had two children, Diana and Daniel. As time went by Troilo began to fear that the advanced musical ideas of the young bandoneonist might undermine the style of his orchestra and make it less appealing to dancers of tango. Tensions mounted between the two bandoneonists until, in 1944, Piazzolla announced his intention to leave Troilo and join the orchestra of the tango singer and bandoneonist Francisco Fiorentino. Piazzolla would lead Fiorentino’s orchestra until 1946 and make many recordings with him, including his first two instrumental tangos, La chiflada and Color de rosa.

In 1946 Piazzolla formed his own Orquesta Típica, which although having a similar formation to other tango orchestras of the day, gave him his first opportunity to experiment with his own approach to the orchestration and musical content of tango. That same year he composed, El Desbande, which he considered to be his first formal tango, and then began to compose musical scores for films, starting with Con los mismos colores in 1949 and Bólidos de acero in 1950, both films directed by Carlos Torres Ríos. Having disbanded his orchestra in 1950, he almost abandoned tango altogether as he continued to study Bartok and Stravinsky, and orchestra conducting with Herman Scherchen. He spent a lot of time listening to jazz and searching for a musical style of his own beyond the realms of tango. He decided to drop the bandoneon and to dedicate himself to writing and to studying music. Between 1950 and 1954 he composed a series of works that began to develop his unique style: Para lucirse, Tanguango, Prepárense, Contrabajeando, Triunfal and Lo que vendrá.

At Ginastera’s urging, Piazzolla entered his classical composition Buenos Aires Symphony, in three movements, for the Fabian Sevitzky Award on August 16, 1953. The performance took place at the Law School in Buenos Aires with the symphony orchestra of Radio del Estado under the direction of Sevitzky himself. Piazzolla’s composition won a grant from the French government to study in Paris with the legendary French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger at the Fontainebleau conservatory. In 1954 he and his wife left their two children (Diana aged 11 and Daniel aged 10) behind with Piazzolla’s parents and travelled to Paris. At this stage in his life Piazzolla was tired of tango and at first tried to hide his tanguero past and his bandoneon compositions from Boulanger, thinking that his destiny lay in classical music. By way of introduction to his work, Piazzolla played her a number of his classically-inspired compositions but it was not until he finally played his tango Triunfal that she immediately congratulated him and encouraged him to pursue his career in tango, recognizing that this was where his true musical talent lay. This was to prove a historic encounter and a cross-road in Piazzolla’s career.

During his time with Boulanger he studied classical composition including counterpoint which was to play a key role in his later tango compositions. Before leaving Paris he heard, and was deeply impressed by, the octet of the American jazz saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, which was to give him the idea of forming his own octet on his return to Buenos Aires. At this time he composed and recorded a series of tangos with the String Orchestra of the Paris Opera and began to play the bandoneon while standing up, putting his right foot on a chair and the bellows of the instrument across his right thigh. Back in Argentina, Piazzolla formed his Orquesta de Cuerdas (String Orchestra), which performed with the singer Jorge Sobral, and his Octeto Buenos Aires in 1955. With two bandoneons (Piazzolla and Leopoldo Federico, his Octeto effectively broke the mould of the traditional orquesta típica and created a new sound akin to chamber music, without a singer and with jazz-like improvisations. This was to be a turning point in his career and a watershed in the history of tango.

In 1958 he disbanded both the Octeto and the String Orchestra and returned to New York City with his family where he struggled to make a living as a musician and arranger. Briefly forming his own group, the Jazz Tango Quintet with whom he made just two recordings, his attempts to blend jazz and tango were not successful. He received the news of the death of his father in October 1959 whilst performing with Juan Carlos Copes and María Nieves in Puerto Rico and on his return to New York City a few days later, he asked to be left alone in his apartment and in less than an hour wrote his famous tango, Adiós Nonino, in homage to his father. Copes and Nieves packed out Club Flamboyan in San Juan with “Companina Argentina Tangolandia”. Piazzolla was serving as the musical director. The tour continued in New York, Chicago and then Washington. The last show that the three of them did together was an appearance on CBS the only colour TV channel in the USA on the Arthur Murray Show in April 1960.

Back in Buenos Aires later that year he put together the first, and perhaps most famous, of his quintets, the first Quinteto. Of the many ensembles that Piazzolla set up during his career it was the quintet formation which best expressed his approach to tango. In 1963 he set up his Nuevo Octeto and the same year premiered his Tres Tangos Sinfónicos, under the direction of Paul Klecky, for which he was awarded the Hirsch Prize. In 1965 he released El Tango, an album for which he collaborated with the Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges. The recording featured his Quinteto together with an orchestra, the singer Edmundo Rivero and Luis Medina Castro reciting texts. In 1967 Piazzolla signed a five-year contract with the poet Horacio Ferrer with whom he composed the operetta María de Buenos Aires, with lyrics by Ferrer. The work was premiered in May 1968 with the singer Amelita Baltar in the title role and introduced a new style of tango, Tango Canción (in English: Tango Song). The following year he wrote Balada para un loco with lyrics by Ferrer which was premiered at the First Iberoamerican Music Festival with Amelita Baltar and Piazzolla himself conducting the orchestra. Piazzolla was awarded second prize and the composition would prove to be his first popular success.

In 1970 Piazzolla returned to Paris where with Ferrer he wrote the oratorio El pueblo joven later premiered in Saarbrücken, Germany in 1971. On May 19, 1970, he gave a concert with his Quinteto at the Teatro Regina in Buenos Aires in which he premiered his composition Cuatro Estaciones Portenos. Back in Buenos Aires he founded his Conjunto 9 (aka Nonet), for which he composed some of his most sophisticated music. He now put aside his first Quinteto and made several recordings with his new ensemble in Italy. Within a year the Conjunto 9 was dissolved and in 1972 he participated in his first concert at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, sharing the bill with other Tango orchestras. After a period of great productivity as a composer, he suffered a heart attack in 1973 and that same year he moved to Italy where he began a series of recordings which would span a period of five years. The music publisher Aldo Pagani, a partner in Curci-Pagani Music, had offered Piazzolla a 15-year contract in Rome to record anything he could write. His famous album Libertango was recorded in Milan in May 1974 and later in September recorded the album Summit (Reunión Cumbre) with the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and an Italian orchestra, including jazz musicians such as bassist Pino Presti and drummer Tullio De Piscopo, in Milan. The album includes the composition Aire de Buenos Aires by Mulligan.

In 1975 Piazzolla set up his Electronic Octet made up of bandoneon, electric piano and/or acoustic piano, organ, guitar, electric bass, drums, synthesizer and violin, which was later replaced by a flute or saxophone. Later that year Aníbal Troilo died and Piazzolla composed the Suite Troileana in his memory, a work in four parts, which he recorded with the Conjunto Electronico. At this time Piazzolla started a collaboration with the singer Jose A. Trelles with whom he made a number of recordings. In December 1976 he played at a concert at the Teatro Gran Rex in Buenos Aires, where he presented his work, “500 motivaciones”, written especially for the Conjunto Electronico, and in 1977 he played another memorable concert at the Olympia in Paris, with a new formation of the Conjunto Electronico. In 1978 he formed his second Quintet, with which he would tour the world for 11 years, and would make him world renowned. He also returned to writing chamber music and symphonic works.

In 1982 Piazzolla recorded the album Oblivion with an orchestra in Italy for the film Enrico IV, directed by Marco Bellocchio, and in May 1982 played in a concert at the Teatro Regina, Buenos Aires with the second Quinteto and the singer Roberto Goyeneche. That same year he wrote Le Grand Tango for cello and piano, dedicated to Russian cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich. In June 1983 he put on one of the best concerts of his life when he played a program of his music at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. For the occasion he regrouped the Conjunto 9 and played solo with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, directed by Pedro Ignacio Calderón. The programme included his 3 movement Concierto para bandoneón y orquesta and his 3 movement Concierto de Nacar. In July 1984 Piazzolla appeared with his Quinteto at the Montreal International Jazz Festival, the world’s largest jazz festival, and in September that same year they appeared with the Italian singer Milva at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris. His concert in October 1984 at the Teatro Nazionale in Milan was recorded and released as the album Suite Punte del Este.

In 1985 Piazzolla was named Illustrious Citizen of Buenos Aires and premiered his Concerto for Bandoneon and Guitar (aka Tribute to Liège and written in 1979), at the Fifth International Liège Guitar Festival in March, with the Liège Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leo Brouwer and Cacho Tirao on guitar. Piazzolla made his London debut with his second Quinteto at the Almeida Theatre in London at the end of June, With the film score for El exilio de Gardel he won the French critics Cesar Award in Paris for best film music in 1986. He appeared at the Montreux Jazz Festival, Montreux, Switzerland, with vibraphonist Gary Burton in July 1986 and in September 1987 gave a concert in New York’s Central Park, in the city where he spent his childhood. In September 1987 he recorded his Concierto para bandoneón y orquesta and Tres tangos para bandoneón y orquesta with Lalo Schifrin conducting the St. Luke’s Orchestra, in the Richardson Auditorium at Princeton University.

In 1988 Piazzolla wrote music for the film Sur. In May that year he recorded his album La Camorra in New York, a suite of three pieces, the last time he would record with the second Quinteto. During a tour of Japan with Milva he played at a concert at the Nakano Sun Plaza Hall in Tokyo on 26 June 1988 and that same year underwent a quadruple by-pass operation. Early in 1989 he formed his Sexteto Nuevo Tango, his last ensemble, with two bandoneons, piano, electric guitar, bass and cello. Together they gave a concert at the Club Italiano in Buenos Aires in April, a recording of which was issued under the title of Tres minutos con la realidad. Later he appeared with them at the Teatro Opera in Buenos Aires in the presence of the newly elected Argentine President Carlos Menem in June. This would be Piazzolla’s last concert in Argentina.

Piazzolla followed with a concert of his Sexteto and Osvaldo Pugliese’s Orquesta in June 1989 at the Royal Carre Theatre in Amsterdam, a live recording at the BBC Bristol Studios in June 1989 between concerts in Berlin and Rome, and a concert at the Wembley Conference Centre in June 1989. In November 1989 he gave a concert in Lausanne, Switzerland, at the Moulin a Danses and later that month he recorded his composition Five Tango Sensations, with the Kronos Quartet in the US on an album of the same name. This would be his last studio recording and was his second composition for the Kronos Quartet. Towards the end of the year he dissolved his sexteto and continued playing solo with classical string quartets and symphonic orchestras. He joined Anahi Carfi’s Mantova String Quartet and toured Italy and Finland with them. His composition, Le grand tango, for cello and piano was premiered in New Orleans by the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the pianist Igor Uriash in 1990 and in July he gave his last concert in Athens, Greece, with the Athens Orchestra of Colours, conducted by Manos Hatzidakis. Piazzolla suffered a cerebral haemorrhage in Paris on August 4, 1990, which left him in a coma, and died in Buenos Aires, just under two years later on July 4, 1992, without regaining consciousness.

My collection includes the following works by Astor Piazzolla:

Chiquilin de Bachin.
La Calle 92.
Milonga sin Palabras.
Rio Sena.
Tango-Etudes.

—material selected, adapted, and edited from several different sources

Giacomo Puccini and “La Boheme”

Giacomo Antonio Domenico Michele Secondo Maria Puccini (December 22, 1858–November 29, 1924) was an Italian composer, called “the greatest composer of Italian opera after Verdi,” whose operas are among the important operas played as standards. While his early work was rooted in traditional late-19th-century romantic Italian opera, he successfully developed his work in the realistic verismo style, of which he became one of the leading exponents. Born at Lucca in Tuscany, Italy, on December 22, 1858, he was one of seven children of Michele Puccini and Albina Magi. The Puccini family was established in the 1730s at Lucca as a local musical dynasty by Puccini’s great-great grandfather – also named Giacomo (1712–1781) who was maestro di cappella of the Cattedrale di San Martino in Lucca. He was succeeded in this position by his son, Antonio Puccini, and then by Antonio’s son Domenico, and Domenico’s son Michele, father of theopera composer. Each of these men studied music at Bologna, and some took additional musical studies elsewhere. Puccini’s father Michele composed one opera and enjoyed a reputation throughout northern Italy.

It was anticipated that Michele’s son Giacomo would occupy that position as well when he was old enough. However, when Michele Puccini died in 1864, his son Giacomo was only six years old, and thus not capable of taking over his father’s job. His mother procured him a tutor at the Conservatorio Musici, and as a child, he participated in the musical life of the Cattedrale di San Martino, as a member of the boys’ choir and later as a substitute organist. Puccini was given a general education at the seminary of San Michele in Lucca, and then at the seminary of the cathedral. One of Puccini’s uncles, Fortunato Magi, supervised his musical education. Puccini got a diploma from the Pacini School of Music in Lucca in 1880, having studied there with his uncle Fortunato, and later with Carlo Angeloni, who had also instructed Alfredo Catalani. A grant from the Italian Queen Margherita, and assistance from another uncle, Nicholas Cerù, provided the funds necessary for Puccini to continue his studies at the Milan Conservatory, where he studied composition with Stefano Ronchetti-Monteviti, Amilcare Ponchielli, and Antonio Bazzini. Puccini studied at the conservatory for three years. By his seventeenth year he had begun writing small compositions. In 1880, at the age of 21, Puccini composed his Mass, later called Messa di Gloria, which marks the culmination of his family’s long association with church music in his native Lucca.

Puccini wrote an orchestral piece called the Capriccio sinfonica as a thesis composition for the Milan Conservatory. Puccini’s teachers Ponchielli and Bazzini were impressed by the work, and it was performed at a student concert at the conservatory. Puccini’s work was favorably reviewed in the Milanese publication Perseveranza, and thus Puccini began to build a reputation as a young composer of promise in Milanese music circles. After the premiere of the Capriccio sinfonica, Ponchielli and Puccini discussed the possibility that Puccini’s next work might be an opera. Ponchielli invited Puccini to stay at his villa, where Puccini was introduced to another young man named Fernando Fontana. Puccini and Fontana agreed to collaborate on an opera, for which Fontana would provide the libretto. The work, Le Villi, was entered into a competition sponsored by the Sozogno music publishing company in 1883. Although it did not win, Le Villi was later staged at the Teatro Dal Verme, premiering on May 31, 1884. Ricordi & Co. music publishers assisted with the premier by printing the libretto without charge. Giulio Ricordi, head of G. Ricordi & Co. music publishers, was sufficiently impressed with Le Villi and its young composer that he commissioned a second opera, which would result in Edgar which premiered at La Scala on April 21, 1889, to a lukewarm response.

On commencing his next opera, Manon Lescaut, Puccini announced that he would write his own libretto, but two men, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, came together to complete the opera. Manon Lescaut premiered at the Teatro Regio in Turin on February 2, 1893. Illica and Giacosa returned as librettists for Puccini for his next three operas, probably his greatest successes: La bohème which premiered at Turin in 1896, Tosca which premiered at Turin in 1900, and Madama Butterfly which premiered at La Scala in 1904. Meanwhile, on February 25, 1903, Puccini was seriously injured in a car accident during a nighttime journey on the road from Lucca to Torre del Lago. The car was driven by Puccini’s chauffeur and was carrying Puccini, his wife Elvira, and their son Antonio. Puccini was pinned under the vehicle, with a severe fracture of his right leg and with a portion of the car pressing down on his chest. The injury did not heal well, and Puccini remained under treatment for months and slowed the work on Madama Butterfly.

After 1904, Puccini’s compositions were less frequent. Puccini completed La fanciulla del West, based on a play by David Belasco, in 1910. The premiere of took place at the Metropolitan in New York City on December 10. Puccini completed the score of La rondine, to a libretto by Giuseppe Adami in 1916 after two years of work, and it was premiered at the Grand Théâtre de Monte Carlo on March 27, 1917. Always interested in contemporary operatic compositions, Puccini studied the works of Claude Debussy, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky. From this study emerged Il trittico, composed of three one-act operas, a horrific episode (Il tabarro) in the style of the Parisian Grand Guignol, a sentimental tragedy (Suor Angelica), and a comedy (Gianni Schicchi), which premiered at New York in 1918.

In 1919, Puccini was commissioned to write music to an ode by Fausto Salvatori honoring Italy’s victories in World War I. The work, Inno a Roma (Hymn to Rome), premiered on June 1, 1919, when it was played at the opening of a gymnastics competition. Turandot, Puccini’s final opera, was left unfinished, and the last two scenes were completed by Franco Alfano based on the composer’s sketches. Puccini began to complain of chronic sore throats towards the end of 1923. A diagnosis of throat cancer led his doctors to recommend a new and experimental radiation therapy treatment, which was being offered in Brussels, Belgium. Puccini died in Brussels on November 29, 1924, from complications after the treatment in which uncontrolled bleeding led to a heart attack the day after surgery. Turandot was performed posthumously at La Scala on April 25, 1926.

The following works by Giacomo Puccini are contained in my collection:

La Boheme: Non Sono In Vena, and Che Gelida Manina.

—material selected, adapted, and edited from several different sources