AUTHORITATIVE | CURATED | First 500 words Free

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

Composed: 1919 Premiered: 1921, Chicago Libretto by the composer, after Carlo Gozzi’s L’amore delle tre melarance Background Factions in the audience demand Tragedy, Romance, Comedy and Farce. The Cranks take control. Act I The prince is ill. If he dies, the heir to the King of Clubs would be Clarice. This must be avoided. It has ...

• Major Operas
• Modern Era
• Opera

Composed: 1941–42; 1946–47; rev. up to 1953 Final version (13 scenes) premiered: 1959, Moscow Libretto by the composer and Mira Mendelson after Tolstoy’s novel Part One 1806: Andrey Bolkonsky is weary of life. He overhears Natasha Rostova talking to her cousin Sonya about the beauty of life. Her words renew his belief in happiness. 1810, St Petersburg: Andrey meets ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Syir’-ga Pru-kôf’-yef) 1891–1953 Russian composer Prokofiev’s music oscillates between motor rhythm and lyricism, and between irony and expressive sincerity. This gives his compositions extreme variety: works composed closely in time, even adjacent movements in the same work, are of quite different characters. He began composing as a child, and had his first success (with his First Piano ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

1891–1953, Russian One of the most accessible and well known of twentieth-century Russian composers, Prokofiev merged an experimental approach with melodic conventionality to create music that was distinct in its national style. A fine pianist and impetuous personality who studied orchestration at the St Petersburg Academy with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1909), Prokofiev wrote three childhood operas by the age of ...

• Instruments
• Ensembles

A musical ensemble is a group of two or more musicians who have come together to play music. In theory, an ensemble could contain any number of instruments in any combination, but in practice, certain combinations just don’t work very well, either for musical reasons or because of the sheer practicality of getting particular instruments and players ...

• Instruments
• Keyboards
• Percussion

Keyboard percussion instruments include the western xylophone, marimba, vibraphone and glockenspiel, the log xylophones and marimbas of Africa and Central America, and the barred instruments played in the Indonesian gamelan. The orchestral xylophone, marimba and glockenspiel have thin wooden or metal rectangular bars laid out like a chromatic piano keyboard. The back row of bars – ...

• Instruments
• Percussion

Bass Drum The dominant feature of every military band is its big bass drum. Throughout the history of percussion instruments, this drum has been the mainstay of time-keeping, whether it is used for a marching army or in a late-twentieth century heavy metal band. Early versions of the bass drum (it was certainly known in Asia around 3500 BC) ...

• Personalities
• Classical
• Composer
• Modern Era

(Fran-ses Poo-lank’) 1899–1963 French composer Poulenc was the youngest member of the group of composers known as ‘Les Six’; his urbanity and humour and his many masterly songs have given him a reputation as a light-hearted miniaturist. His range, however, is better indicated by his three operas: Les mamelles de Tirésias (‘Tiresias’ Breasts’, 1947), a joyously Gallic and absurd ...

• Personalities
• Modern Era
• Opera

b. 1927, American From the Mississippi to the concert stages of Europe, Price helped to pave the way for black American singers. Assisted by Paul Robeson and an affluent white family in her hometown, she gained entry to Juilliard, where she appeared in George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts. When ...

• Styles & Forms
• Film Music & Soundtracks
• Soundtracks & Theatre

Originating as a device to mask the sound of a whirring projector, film music has become so much more than ‘music from the movies’. Before the advent of video and DVD, the soundtrack was the most accessible way to return to a favourite movie. It has since evolved into a multi-million dollar industry and one of the most thriving ...

• Classical
• Contemporary Classical

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 ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

The Modern Age was characterized by rapid and radical change and political turmoil. By 1918 the Russian tsar, the Habsburg emperor and the German kaiser had lost their thrones. The two Russian revolutions of 1917 resulted in a Communist government led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was fragmented to allow self-determination to the newly formed countries of Czechoslovakia ...

• Opera
• Modern Era

The opera house and, more specifically, opera audiences, were among the last to be receptive to the new musical language that developed during the twentieth century. Slow, as well as reluctant to vary their traditional musical tastes, perceptions and expectations, many viewed the opera house with nostalgia; as a symbol of the establishment, holding ...

• Classical
• Modern Era

There is no escaping the crucial importance of World War I (1914–18) in the formation of the Modern Age (as the first half of the twentieth century has come to be known). The war changed irrevocably the development and directions of almost all pre-war innovations in politics, society, the arts and ideas in general. Declining economic conditions also altered ...

• Instruments
• Keyboards

Like its close relation the concertina, the accordion is a glorified mouth organ, in which the ‘reeds’ (now generally made of tempered steel) are set in vibration by a rectangular bellows. The bellows are operated by the left hand, which also – as in all keyboard instruments – manipulates the so-called bass keyboard, in this case a ...