(Fa’-leks Men’-del-son) 1809–47 German composer Mendelssohn was born into a cultured banking family, who in 1816 converted from Judaism to Christianity, adding ‘Bartholdy’ to their name. Felix studied the piano, theory and composition, and showed early talent, writing his first piece at the age of 11. There were also important non-musical inspirations for his composing at this ...
(Fa’-ne [Men’-del-son] Hen’-zel) 1805–47 German composer Fanny was the sister of Mendelssohn. They received identical musical education, but their conservative father expected Fanny to display her undoubted musical talents only within the semi-public world of the family’s renowned Sunday concerts, which she organized and performed in as pianist and conductor. Encouraged by her husband, Hensel started to publish her ...
1863–1942 Austrian conductor Weingartner conducted opera and concerts in Berlin and, in 1908, succeeded Mahler as head of the Vienna Court Opera. During World War I, he was conductor at Darmstadt, and director of the Vienna Volksoper 1919–24. In 1927 he moved to Switzerland, returning briefly to the Vienna State Opera as director in 1935. He ...
The violin family is a group of fretless bowed stringed instruments that has its roots in Italy. Four instruments make up the family: the violin, the viola, the violoncello (commonly abbreviated to cello), and the double bass. The characteristic body shape is one of the most recognizable in music; the particular acoustic properties this shape imparts have made the ...
The classical period saw the rise of the ‘Harmonie’, a small wind band of up to a dozen instruments. Usually this consisted of a mixture of brass and reeds, such as horns, clarinets, oboes and bassoons: Beethoven’s octet op. 103 (1792) is written for two of each of these (the 1796 op. 71 sextet leaves out the oboes). ...
In the history of musical instruments, the keyboard is something of a Johnny-come-lately, having first appeared some 2,250 years ago. The earliest instrument of all is the human voice, and some form of rudimentary percussion probably came next. The plucked string – ancestor of the harpsichord family – is likely to have arrived with the firing of ...
Wagner’s Ring cycle is made up of four works – Das Rheingold (‘The Rhinegold’, 1851–54), Die Walküre (‘The Valkyrie’, 1851–56), Siegfried (1851–57; 1864–71) and Götterdämmerung (‘Twilight of the Gods’, 1848–52; 1869–74). Although there have been other, even more ambitious projects in the history of opera – Rutland Boughton’s cycle of choral dramas based on the Arthurian legends and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s ...
Franz Liszt, the great Hungarian composer whose daughter Cosima married Wagner in 1870, conducted the first performance of the three-act opera Lohengrin at the Court Theatre, Weimar on 28 August 1850. Wagner provided a blueprint for productions of Lohengrin, just as he did for Tannhäuser, and emphasized the duty of the stage manager not to leave ...
(A-tyen’ Ne-ko-las’ Ma-ül’) 1763–1817 French composer Méhul is known primarily for his many opéras comiques and for his symphonies. Between 1778 and 1779 he moved to Paris, where he studied with the composer Jean-Frédéric Edelmann. When the Paris Conservatoire was founded in 1795, Méhul was made one of its inspectors. Although heavily influenced by Gluck, he was one of ...
Beethoven’s shadow looms large over the Early Romantic period. Many of the age’s most remarkable composers – Schubert, Berlioz, Wagner, Brahms – revered him above all. He had stretched the logic of tonal harmony, weakening its tonic-dominant foundations. In the process, the dramaturgy of the Classical sonata had been altered. Schubert’s Lieder The Romantic imagination was ...
Following the social and political upheaval of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Europe enjoyed a short period of relative stability with Napoleon’s exile, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France and the establishment of the Vienna Peace Settlement in 1815. However, in the early 1820s a number of minor revolts broke out in Naples and ...
The 1860s saw a number of major reorganizations in European politics. Italy became a united country under the king of (former) Piedmont-Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II, in 1861 and its new national government tried to retain the kingdom’s liberal ideals, such as removing instances of operatic and intellectual censorship. However, Italy’s liberalism was not aspired to by other ...
The years 1826–28 saw the deaths of the three greatest composers of their respective generations, Weber, Beethoven and Schubert. Only in the years that followed could early Romanticism really forge its own identity. The 1830s saw the flowering of a new generation of great composers, including Chopin, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt and Mendelssohn, and for ...
At a time when expression was more important than maintaining classical forms, freer structures that enabled the communication of a single mood or idea became particularly popular with pianists as an alternative to sonatas. Schubert, for example, is best revealed in his short lyric pieces in which his melodic expansiveness is not constrained. His Moments Musicaux (‘Musical Moments’, ...
Although the terms ‘fortepiano’ and ‘pianoforte’ were used indiscriminately by musicians of the time, for the sake of clarity the former term is now specifically used to indicate keyboard instruments of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the latter to mean the modern instrument. The piano displaced the harpsichord musically and socially, taking over the latter’s ...
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