‘Orpheus in the Underworld’ Composed: 1858; rev. 1874 Premiered: 1874, Paris Libretto by Crémieux and Halévy Act I Eurydice cannot abide her violin virtuoso husband Orphée. She would rather die than be bored to death. Jealous that she is seeing too much of the beekeeper Aristée, he tells her about the snakes in Aristée’s cornfield. She goes to warn ...
(Songwriters, 1940s–80s) Husband-and-wife songwriting team Boudleaux (1920–87) and Felice (1925–2003) Bryant composed many country classics, including ‘Bye Bye Love’ (popularized by The Everly Brothers), ‘Rocky Top’ (first popularized by The Osborne Brothers and covered by dozens of others) and ‘Let’s Think About Living’ (Bob Luman). Styles & Forms | Nashville & Beyond | Country Personalities | Johnny Cash | ...
1921–86 Belgian violinist Grumiaux made his debut in Brussels with the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, but his career was immediately interrupted by the war. He made his British debut in 1945. Noted for his fastidious playing, he made many recordings, including the unaccompanied Bach sonatas and the sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven. Introduction | Modern Era | Classical Personalities ...
1819–80, French Jacques Offenbach had an acute sense of theatre and an incisive understanding of how to cater for French tastes. He was 14 when his father sent him to Paris, where Jews were freer than they were in Germany. Offenbach became a cellist, performing in fashionable salons, and finally, in 1855, became famous. He ...
(Zhak Of’-fen-bakh) 1819–80 French composer Offenbach’s tuneful, witty and often outrageous satires on Greek mythology and the Second Empire enthralled the French public, including the Emperor Louis-Napoleon. After only one year at the Paris Conservatoire, he joined the Opéra-Comique orchestra, studying with Halévy, and toured as a virtuoso cellist. After conducting at the Théâtre Français, he ...
1834–1908, French Ludovic Halévy was the nephew of the French composer Fromental Halévy (1799–1862) and first made his name as a novelist and playwright. Halévy worked as a civil servant until 1865, when he retired to write full time. By then he had already become friendly with Jacques Offenbach and in 1858, together with Hector Crémieux (1828–92), he ...
(Märk An-twan’ Shar-pont-ya’) 1643–1704 French composer Charpentier studied in Italy during the 1660s. There he familiarized himself with the instrumental and vocal forms of Carissimi and, above all, that of the oratorio. When he returned to Paris he joined the musicians of the Duchess of Guise and in 1673 became associated with Molière’s Comédie Française. In 1687, Charpentier composed ...
The tape recorder, invented in 1935, had been used early on to record concerts by the Berlin Philharmonic, but it was not until 1948 that Pierre Schaeffer, a technician at the Radiodiffusion Française studio in Paris, conceived his Etude aux chemins de fer. This was the first piece of musique concrète, an experimental technique that ...
Musique concrète (‘concrete music’) was the term coined by Pierre Schaeffer (1910–95) in 1948 to describe his new approach to composition, based on tape recordings of natural and industrial sounds. The term was chosen to distinguish the new genre from pure, abstract music (musique abstrait). Schaeffer was a radio engineer and broadcaster. Having gained a qualification from L’École Polytechnique ...
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 ...
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 Fallen Woman’ La dame aux camélias (‘The Lady of the Camellias’) by Alexandre Dumas had barely been staged in 1852 before Verdi took it up for La traviata, one of the great operas from his middle period. It premiered at Teatro La Fenice, Venice on 6 March 1853, and the first performance was disastrous. Verdi blamed the ...
(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 ...
(Joo’-sep-pa Ver’-de) 1813–1901 Italian composer Verdi composed 28 operas over a period of 54 years. In his native Italy he became immensely popular early in his career, and by the time he died he was idolized as the greatest Italian composer of the nineteenth century. In other musical centres of Europe it took a little longer for Verdi’s genius to be ...
(O-lev-ya’ Mes-se-an’) 1908–92 French composer Messiaen’s music is unmistakably personal, drawn from a wide range of interests rather than influences. A church organist from his twenties, he was aware of the ‘church modes’ (scales used in Western music before the development of the key system) and investigated other modes, including rhythmic ones. He studied Asian and ancient Greek ...
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