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• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

1862–1949, Belgian Maeterlinck is best known for his play Pelléas et Mélisande set verbatim but with cuts by Debussy. It has become one of the pinnacles of French opera. Maeterlinck was one of the main founders of symbolist theatre. Thoroughly Belgian in his dark mysticism, he took Paris by storm in the early 1890s and was suddenly proclaimed the ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1875–1937, French A meticulous craftsman whose constant reworking and rewriting may have accounted for his relatively small body of work, Ravel composed music that consciously moved away from the influence of Richard Wagner. Along with Claude Debussy, he invented a highly personalized French style. Ravel also imbued his music with his love for Spanish culture (perhaps because his ...

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

Composed: 1907–09 Premiered: 1911, Paris Libretto by Franc-Nohain, after his own play Ramiro, a muleteer, brings a watch for repair to Torquemada’s workshop in Toledo. Concepcion reminds her husband that it is Thursday, when he has to wind all the municipal clocks. He asks Ramiro to wait until he gets back. Concepcion, however, is ...

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

Composed: 1920–25 Premiered: 1925, Monte Carlo Libretto by Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) The child has been naughty. His mother does not think he deserves more than tea without sugar and dry bread. He must think about how sad he has made her. He shouts after her, ‘I don’t love anybody! I’m naughty!’ He starts smashing and ill-treating everything ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Mo-res’ Ra-vel’) 1875–1937 French composer Ravel is often described (like Debussy, but still more misleadingly) as an ‘Impressionist’, but Ravel’s music is in fact precisely and delicately crafted, subtly perfect in its artifice (in the best sense of the word). Influenced by Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–94), Satie and his close friend Stravinsky, attracted to Spain temperamentally (he never visited ...

• Major Operas
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

Pelléas survives because it challenges its interpreters to peel away layers and discover new depths. Its story can be written on the back of a postage stamp: brother marries girl; other brother falls in love with her; brother kills brother; girl dies. But of what ? Her wound would not have killed a sparrow, we are told. It is the ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1881–1945, Hungarian Widely recognized as one of the twentieth century’s most important composers, Bartók was a complete original in terms of his musical language, creating a national style that merged folk melodies with the asymmetric patterns of Hungarian speech. His vocal lines, often punctuated by a heavy chordal style, are evident in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Klod De’-bu-se) 1862–1918 French composer Debussy was one of the father figures of twentieth-century music, often associated with the Impressionist movement. He was not only influential on subsequent French composers such as Ravel and Messiaen, but also on other major European figures, including Stravinsky and Bartók. His early songs experimented with an intimate kind of word-setting, while ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

1862–1918, French Debussy wrote only one opera that has entered the repertoire, but there were many other compositions without which this masterpiece among masterpieces may never have come into being. His lover, the singer Marie-Blanche Vasnier, some years his elder, had deepened his understanding of literature in his early twenties, and his interest in poetry ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1865–1935, French A contemporary of Debussy and Ravel who joined the French Wagnerian movement, Dukas is primarily known for his orchestral fantasy L’apprenti sorcier (‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’, 1897), memorably featured in Disney’s animated feature Fantasia. He was a perfectionist who spent years rewriting his partially written works. Two of Dukas’ operas remained unfinished: the Wagner-inspired Horn et Riemenhild (1892) ...

• Personalities
• Opera
• Turn of the Century

1857–1919, Italian Leoncavallo was born and studied in Naples. His first opera, Chatterton (1876), written to a libretto by himself, did not initially procure any performances and, in spite of encouragement from his family, Leoncavallo did not appear to be going far in the world of opera. However, with the support of the baritone Victor ...

• Arts & Culture
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) is said to have written the first film score with L’assassinat du duc de Guise (‘The Assassination of the Duke of Guise’, c. 1908). Many composers in the US and Europe followed suit, although few wished to make a career in films. A famous exception was Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957), whose scores include the Academy Award-winning The ...

• Inside the Music
• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

The synthesizer has become hugely influential since the 1960s, but it had many antecedents in twentieth-century electronic instruments. The theremin, invented in 1920 by the Russian Lev Theremin, consists of a box containing thermionic valves producing ethereal oscillations which were modified by moving a hand around an attached antenna. The ondes martenot was first demonstrated in 1928 by ...

• Instruments
• Electric & Electronic

The ondes martenot (‘martenot waves’) was invented in 1928 by French inventor and cellist, Maurice Martenot. Martenot had met his Russian counterpart, Leon Theremin, in 1923 and the two of them had discussed possible improvements to Theremin’s eponymous instrument. In fact, Martenot’s instrument was patented under the name Perfectionnements aux instruments de musique électriques (‘improvements to electronic ...

• Instruments
• Classical
• Modern Era

Invented by Maurice Martenot in 1928, the ondes martenot or ‘martenot waves’ possesses a keyboard for separate notes, a sliding mechanism for glissando, and a range of seven octaves. It is probably best known for its appearance in Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie and Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine. Honegger, who wrote for it in Jeanne d’Arc au ...