(On-re’ Poo-ser’) 1929–2009 Belgian composer During the 1950s and early 60s, Pousseur was at the forefront of the avant-garde, teaching at Darmstadt and working at the Studio di fonologia, Milan, with Berio and Maderna. Influenced, like many of his generation, by Webern, he nonetheless saw the composer’s importance as lying not in his serial ...
(Shärl On-re’ Va-lon-tan’ Al-kan’) 1813–88 French pianist and composer One of the only virtuosos before whom Liszt, a contemporary, was believed to be anxious about playing, Alkan extended the technical challenges of piano repertory to astonishing new peaks. A child prodigy and young virtuoso, he performed alongside Frédéric François Chopin (1810–49), but thereafter became an eccentric recluse, ...
(On-re’ Düpärk’) 1848–1933 French composer Duparc’s small but exquisite output influenced the development of French ‘mélodie’ through Fauré and Debussy. Duparc studied with Franck, whose circle he joined alongside Chausson, Chabrier and D’Indy, absorbing the Wagnerian style through visits to Bayreuth and Munich. From 1868 to 1884 Duparc produced the 13 songs upon which his reputation is founded: each ...
(Hen’-ri Ven-yov’-ske) 1835–80 Polish composer Wieniawski was a child prodigy; after studies with Massart at the Paris Conservatoire, he was the youngest at 11 years old to graduate with the Gold Medal. He was also influenced by the Belgian School of Charles-Auguste de Bériot and Henri Vieuxtemps, whom he succeeded as professor at the Brussels Conservatory, following a post ...
1806–54, German The German soprano Henriette Sontag made her debut in 1821 as the princess in Boieldieu’s Jean de Paris (1812). In 1823, in Vienna, Weber asked Sontag to create the title role in his Euryanthe (1822–23) after seeing her in Rossini’s La donna del lago. He was justified when her appearance in Berlin in 1825 caused an ...
1831–97, French Henri Meilhac, the French dramatist and librettist, wrote most of his texts for operas in collaboration with other writers. Meilhac’s most renowned partnership, which began after a chance meeting outside a Paris theatre in 1860, was with Ludovic Halévy. They produced libretti for Bizet, Léo Delibes (1836–91) and most famously for Offenbach. Meilhac ...
(On-re’ Dü-te-yö’) 1916–2013 French composer Despite success as a young composer, Dutilleux disowned almost his entire oeuvre before the Piano Sonata (1946–48). He followed a very different path from his compatriot Boulez, and his two symphonies (1950–51 and 1955–59) exhibit strong links with the traditional Germanic form. Variation was a key feature of Dutilleux’s music, but he tended ...
(K’zhesh’-tôf Pen-de-ret’-ske) b. 1933 Polish composer Following the early influence of Stravinsky and Webern, Penderecki joined the forefront of the avant-garde with Tern ofiarom Hiroszimy (‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’, 1960), which uses tone-clusters, quarter-tones and graphic notation. His music of this time is searingly intense and passionate. His music softened during the late 1970s, becoming more ...
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 ...
The word ‘Baroque’ is derived from the Portuguese barrocco, a term for a misshapen pearl, and it was still with this sense of something twisted that it was first applied – to the period between about 1600 and 1750 – in the nineteenth century. In 1768, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote: ‘a Baroque music is that in which the harmony ...
The early nineteenth century was a period of insurgence in Europe, from the French Revolution in 1789 to the uprisings of around 1848. The Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain before spreading south to the rest of Europe, was also making its mark. These two strands of revolution transformed society, with a growing awareness of national identity ...
The word ‘lute’ is the collective term for a category of instruments defined as ‘any chordophone having a neck that serves as string bearer, with the plane of the strings running parallel to that of the soundboard’. In other words, the lute is a soundbox with a neck sticking out. The strings of some are plucked, some are ...
Although two-keyed oboes continued to be made as late as 1820, it was around 1825 that a Viennese oboist of the court orchestra developed a 13-keyed instrument. Joseph Sellner’s development continued to be used in Germany throughout the nineteenth century, and is the basis of the modern Viennese instrument. In France, instrument-makers pursued a different path. Henri Brod ...
Of the woodwind instruments, the oboe has experienced perhaps the most organic development. There is no single, revolutionary moment at which the oboe became a modern instrument, and it retains strong links with the past both in sound and design. Shawm The modern oboe is a direct descendant of the shawm and the hautboy. The shawm was a ...
In 1905, and probably for several decades before that, there were more pianos in the United States than there were bathtubs. In Europe, throughout the nineteenth century, piano sales increased at a greater rate than the population. English, French and German makers dispatched veritable armies of pianos to every corner of the Earth. It was the ...
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