AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Vikh’-tor Uhl’-man) 1898–c. 1944 Czech composer Ullmann studied in Vienna with Schoenberg and also in his native Prague with the pioneer of microtonal music, Alois Hába. In his own music their influence is joined by those of Mahler, Zemlinsky (with whom he studied conducting), Debussy and Weill, among others. His powerful opera Der Sturz des Antichrists (‘The Rise ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1898–1944, Austrian Among the most heart-breaking of musicians’ stories is the brutally curtailed life and career of Viktor Ullmann. A Jewish victim of the Nazi genocide, he reached his creative zenith during two harrowing years inside Terezín (known as Theresienstadt by the Nazis). As he noted about himself and other musician prisoners before their death in the concentration camp ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Hwa-keen’ Too-re’-na) 1882–1949 Spanish composer A friend of Falla, Turina was, like him, a composer of nationalist music, but his style was also affected by his eight years of study in Paris. His orchestral music is full of Spanish local colour, and is often richly, sometimes heavily scored. His best-known orchestral works are La procesion ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

b. 1960, English One of the most important talents on the contemporary British opera scene, Turnage produces work that expertly captures the times and culture within which he lives. A jazz enthusiast who has served as Composer in Association with both the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and English National Opera, he often attempts to combine numerous genres in his ...

• Opera
• Modern Era

The opera house and, more specifically, opera audiences, were among the last to be receptive to the new musical language that developed during the twentieth century. Slow, as well as reluctant to vary their traditional musical tastes, perceptions and expectations, many viewed the opera house with nostalgia; as a symbol of the establishment, holding ...

• Performance
• Modern Era
• Opera

‘The only thing worth emphasizing is that Theresienstadt has not hampered my musical activity, but actually encouraged it and supported it.’ The final entry in Viktor Ullmann’s journal referred to ‘Theresienstadt’, the town of Terezín, 60 kilometres northeast of Prague, which was remote enough for the Nazis to pursue their barbarism in relative seclusion. Yet within the ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

After the devastation wrought in Europe by World War II, the urgent task of rebuilding the continent’s war-torn urban fabric demanded radical solutions. These were found in the centralized urban planning advocated before the war by architects such as Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Writing in 1953, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007) created an explicit analogy ...

• Major Operas
• High Romantic
• Opera

Boris Godunov, the only project out of nine that Mussorgsky completed himself, has been cited as the great masterpiece of nineteenth-century Russian opera – with its thrilling crowd scenes, historic panorama and the chilling power of its principal character. Boris was unusual in having its chief male role written for a bass voice and for the ‘sung prose’ ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Late Romantic

(Mod-yest’ Moo-zôrk’-ske) 1839–81 Russian composer Mussorgsky was the most radical of the Russian composers known as ‘The Five’. Born to a land-owning family, he joined the army in 1856, where he encountered Borodin, then a military doctor, and Cui, who introduced him to Balakirev, with whom he studied. In 1858 he resigned to pursue a ...