(Frants List) 1811–86 Hungarian composer and pianist Liszt was one of the leading and most adventurous composers of the nineteenth century. His vast output is unusually complicated: many works exist in more than one version, and he was constantly revising and redrafting. His body of work may be somewhat uneven, but it should hardly be surprising if a composer at ...
more and more volume and stronger, iron-framed grand pianos were developed accordingly. These improved designs subsequently aided the rise of piano virtuosos such as Frédéric François Chopin (1810–49) and Franz Liszt (1811–86), who gained celebrity status, dazzling audiences with their dexterity, power, sensitivity and stamina, and writing increasingly challenging music. The instrument became a required accessory in ...
, the symphony orchestra developed from the expansion of the chamber orchestra in the 1820s and 1830s, when composers such as Beethoven and Louis-Hector Berlioz (1803–69), and later Franz Liszt (1811–86) and Richard Wagner (1813–83), added more instruments to increase the volume of sound and the number of available tone colours. The main difference from the chamber orchestra is its ...
A range of metal percussion instruments are found in the western orchestra, many of which have ancient and global origins. Triangle The triangle comprises a slim steel bar, circular in cross-section, bent into an equilateral triangle (18 cm/7 in each side) with one corner open. It is played with a metal rod, and is suspended from a ...
, Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778–1837), Chopin and Liszt. Of the great composer-pianists before 1850, only Mozart, Hummel and Chopin were content to work with what they had. Beethoven and Liszt, above all, regularly wrote and played beyond what the available instruments could accommodate – and caused serious injury to many pianos in the process. If Hummel and his ...
they can be regarded as role models for the life of a pianist-composer. But the piano is central to Robert Schumann’s work, and in the case of Chopin and Liszt, so central that without the piano their lives and music would have been utterly different. Both had careers as pianists that were closely tied to their composing. In Schumann’s ...
incomparably nourished by the works of Mozart, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), Joseph Haydn (1732–1809), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), Franz Schubert (1797–1828), Robert Schumann (1810–56), Frédéric François Chopin (1810–49), Franz Liszt (1811–86), Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47), Johannes Brahms (1833–97), Claude Debussy (1862–1918), Maurice Ravel (1875–1937), George Gershwin (1898–1937) and many more. Its foremost practitioners, from Liszt to Ignacy Paderewski (1860–1941) and ...
Ring Wagner first became interested in the subject of the Ring in the mid-1840s, at a time when several other composers, including Felix Mendelssohn (1809–47), Robert Schumann (1810–56), Liszt and Niels Gade (1817–1890), were similarly drawn to the theme. All of them were responding to the operatic potential of the early thirteenth-century Nibelungenlied (‘Lay of the Nibelungs’), which had ...
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 ...
b. 1953 Hungarian-British pianist Schiff studied at the Franz Liszt Academy, Budapest, before winning prizes at both the Moscow Tchaikovsky (1974) and Leeds (1975) piano competitions. Having appeared with most of the world’s major orchestras, he has focused increasingly on chamber and solo repertoire, recording the keyboard works of Bach (on the piano), the Mozart and Schubert ...
and Psalm 150 (1892) crown his liturgical output: triumphant hymns of praise, each with climactic double fugues. Bruckner’s symphonies, though not ‘programmatic’ in the sense of Berlioz or Liszt, express a transcendent vision that is similar to the religious works, several of which are quoted. The influence of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is strongly evident, particularly at ...
(An’-ton Roo’-ben-stin) 1829–94 Russian pianist and composer Rubinstein’s younger brother Nikolai (1835–81) founded the Moscow Conservatory. As a child prodigy Anton played to Liszt. His legendary virtuosity was acclaimed across Europe and the US, where he toured with Wieniawski in 1872. He espoused German Romanticism and thus, as founder-director of the St Petersburg Conservatory (1862), represented the ‘conservative’ opposition to ...
Provisional Theatre orchestra until 1871. He lived in great poverty in these years, but acquired a range of musical experiences, including the music of Wagner, Smetana, Liszt and Verdi, and soon began to find his own voice. A decisive moment for his reputation in Prague came with the successful premiere of his cantata The Heirs of ...
a close friendship with Haydn. In 1808 he went to Paris, where he spent the rest of his life, teaching at the Conservatoire from 1818; his pupils included Liszt, Berlioz and César Franck (1822–90). He composed 17 operas, choral and solo vocal works, symphonies, concertos, chamber music and piano pieces. Many works combined theoretical ...
(Ba’-la Bar’-tok) 1881–1945 Hungarian composer and pianist Bartók’s earliest works were influenced by Johannes Brahms (1833–97), by Hungary’s famous Liszt and by Richard Strauss, then regarded as the last word in modernism. Bartók’s personal style, though, was formed by his discovery of Debussy and of Hungarian folk music. The strongly rhythmic, percussive, sharply dissonant music that ...
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