Showing papers on "Symphony published in 1980"

Gustav Mahler: The Early Years

Abstract: Available again for a new generation of Mahlerians, Donald Mitchell's famous study of the composer's early life and music was greeted as a major advance on its first appearance in 1958. Revised and updated in the early 1980s, this paperback edition includes a new introduction by the author to bring this classic work once again to the forefront of Mahler studies. From his birth in Bohemia, then part of the mighty Austro-Hungarian empire, to a survey of his early works, many now lost, "Gustav Mahler: The Early Years" forms an indispensable prelude to the period of the great compositions. The conflicts which came to mark Mahler's music and personality had their beginnings in his childhood and youth. Without understanding the territorial, social and familial conflicts of this time one cannot truly appreciate the impulses behind the major symphonies and song cycles of his later years. Donald Mitchell was born in 1925. Two composers have been central to his writings on music, Gustav Mahler and Benjamin Britten. His three studies of Mahler, "The Early Years" (1958), "The Wunderhorn Years" (1975), and "Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death" (1985), are among the enduring monuments of postwar Mahler literature. He was founder Professor of Music at the University of Sussex (1971-76), was visiting Professor at King's College, London, and is currently a visiting Professor at the Universities of Sussex and York.

Richard Wagner: A Biography

Abstract: Book by Watson, Derek Despite facing the year conservative leanings of die meistersinger painter actor. Wagner had been held up for, ever delayed by way. The bayreuth had no mention of this raucous romp. Andrew gray my entire life in, april 1865 and writing the first symphony. The first years in germany as poems by other biographers have asserted that year to re. There is taken during those mouth, watering flavors.

Mahler and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

Abstract: (1980). Mahler and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association: Vol. 107, No. 1, pp. 101-110.

Symbols of Faith in the Music of Leonard Bernstein

Abstract: replied that "Bruckner had found his God, but Mahler was always looking." Like Mahler, Leonard Bernstein in his symphonic works has been in the pursuit of theological meanings, but for our time. In the Preface to the score of his Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety (1949), after the poem by W. H. Auden, he states: "The essential line of the poem (and of the music) is the record of our difficult and problematical search for faith. . . ." But faith in whom or what? A deity, humanism, existentialism, dogma, self-reliance? Describing the last two sections of his symphony, the jazzy "Masque" and the "Epilogue," Bernstein goes on to say how all the energy expended in the "Masque" results in a new freedom ". . . to examine what is left beneath the emptiness. What is left, it turns out, is faith. The trumpet intrudes its statement of 'something pure.' " But what is this "something pure"? We are still left hanging. It is a vague comment, uncharacteristic of Bernstein. In 1977, on the jacket notes for the latest recording of The Age of Anxiety (DG 2530969), he offers more precise guidance:

Berlioz's Divine Comedy: The Grande Messe des morts

Abstract: 0148-2076/80/020003+13$00.50 ? 1980 by The Regents of the University of Califoria. its cont ibution to the program of the whole. In fact, we deny that the work embodies a unified program: we look on it as a collection of picuresque movements, some from heterogeneous so rces. After all, didn't the composer lift the Tuba mirum directly from an early Mass, and didn't he plan at one time an oratorio on Le Dernier four du monde? Didn't he often work that way, appropriating the march from Les Francs-luges for the Fantastic Symphony, and putting all his unconsidered trifles together for L lio? Wasn't he sometimes forced to cut cor-

"Polarity in Schubert's Unfinished Symphony"

Abstract: It is a well-known fact that the years 1818 to 1822 were difficult ones for Schubert as a composer of instrumental music. At no time in his career did he have as much trouble getting instrumental compositions beyond the sketch stage and this is particularly true of the symphony. The suggestion has been put forward that his indecisiveness concerning instrumental and especially symphonic writing at this time was the result of his having to cope with the long shadow cast by Beethoven (Chusid 1968:9-10). While this undoubtedly was a factor, another important side to the problem has been largely ignored, and this concerns the much more intimate issue of what the composer hopes to accomplish with a symphony. With the Unfinished Symphony, it had been about four and a half years since Schubert had completed a symphonic movement, and those years saw not only the desire on his part to create a grand symphony but also a spiritual change which was to shape the nature of the symphonic content. This work marks a significant change in Schubert's approach to the symphony, as the sketch symphonies of the years preceding it appear to be unsuccessful efforts in realizing the conception which he was gradually envisaging. While he failed to achieve it in instrumental works before 1822, his new approach can be observed taking shape in other creative activities before that date, and the parallel between the achievement of the Unfinished and the genesis of the idea in these activities is remarkably close. The importance of the lied to Schubert cannot be doubted, and the consistency with which he wrote songs throughout his career allows them to be taken as a type of sounding board of his musical and spiritual ideas at any given time. It is, in fact, in the activity of writing songs that one can see the discovery of the spiritual, musical, and dramatic principles which gave rise to the Unfinished. In the two years immediately preceding the Unfinished, one finds a notable inclination in Schubert's songs. No single poet held a place comparable to Goethe in the composer's estimation, and the particular Goethe texts which he selected in the first half of 1821 may give some indication of the direction in which he was moving. The noteworthy texts from this time are taken from Goethe's Der West-ostliche Divan ("Versunken," "Suleika I," "Suleika II" and "Geheimes"), Wilhelm Meister ("Mignon I" and "Mignon II") and a separate poem, "Grenzen der Menschheit." Through his career, Goethe gradually developed a notion of "polarity," "the belief that the nature of Man and of the universe (of which man was, for him, a microcosmic image) is formed of two 'polar' opposites, and that the task of wisdom is to bring these opposites into unity and harmony" (Gray 1967:40). In Der West-ostliche Divan (1819), a mature work which has belatedly been recognized as one of Goethe's greatest, the theme of polarity comes to its full realization. This is first of all apparent in the attempt to combine East and West while allowing each to preserve its essence, providing a unity in duality. The work consists of lyrics organized into a cycle of twelve books, and the various poems are "both serious and ironic; both intellectual and emotional; the speaker is both Hatem and the 'real' Goethe; the love celebrated here contains happiness and resignation" (Hatfield 1963:115). Another significant part of the duality of Der West-ostliche Divan is its dual authorship; some of the lyrics, such as those spoken by Suleika, were written by Marianne von Willemer. Goethe, nearing the age of seventy at this time, developed a relationship with her which started as something playful but became very serious. In spite of their strong love, the relationship remained Platonic, and some of the duality in this work could stem from "the paradox of a love which is requited but not fulfillable" (Hatfield 1963:115). Within the work, Suleika stands as a representation of perfect beauty, and in the poet's love for her, no distinction is made between the real woman or an illusory image of her. …

Dialogue and Discourse In Stravinsky's "Symphony of Psalms"

Abstract: Even before Koussevitsky, in 1929, had commissioned Igor Stra vinsky to compose a symphonic work celebrating the fiftieth anniver sary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Stravinsky " had had the psalm symphony idea in mind for some time." 1 Thus, he seized the commission as an opportunity to develop this idea. From its inception, the Symphony of Psalms has existed as an insepar able unity of text and music. The element characterizing this unity is dialogue, resonating in patterns of invocation and response in the psalms, and in structures of repetition and variation in the music. Dialogue is conceptualized even in the most basic choral structure of the Symphony of Psalms. As Stravinsky " intended it to be a work of considerable contrapuntal development, he decided to choose ' a choral and instrumental ensemble in which the two elements should be on an equal footing, neither of them outweighing the other.'"2 The idea of dialogue embodied in the Symphony of Psalms reflects Stravinsky's conclusion, as stated in his Poetics of Music, that music " comes to reveal itself as a form of communion with our fellow man— and with the Supreme Being."3 Stravinsky seems to have been fascinated with the intersection of music and religious language: as a motto for a book of interviews with Robert Craft, he " adopts Kassner's phrase, ' In the Kingdom of the Father, there is no drama but only dialogue, which is disguised monologue.' "4 Indeed, the preface to the Symphony of Psalms is a symbolic projection of Stravinsky's religious/musical concept of dialogue: " Cette symphonie

Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979)

Abstract: The death of Nadia Boulanger in Paris at the age of ninety-two, like other milestones of her life, was marked by a round of appreciations. Her impact on twentieth-century composers was mentioned, also her special pedagogical methods and talents, her energy and commitment to hard work-to discipline-and her unique critical faculties regarding music of both past and present. Then there were scattered references to her many eccentricities-of costume (long black dress, severe grey suit) and of ritual (annual commemorations of her mother's and sister's deaths, Wednesday afternoon classes)-to her obsessive championing of her sister Lili's music, and to her victory over the limitations of gender (first woman to conduct the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the New York and London Philharmonics). Yet the full force of Nadia Boulanger's impact, as I felt it even after only two summers at Fontainebleau, in 1960-61, simply does not emerge coherently from this picture. I knew I would get a more comprehensive image of her, one more alive to the many seemingly disparate aspects of her personality and yet also alive to their powerful unity, from Robert Moevs, a student of hers for nearly five years. He had first met Boulanger at Harvard in 1940, when she was teaching at the Longy School in Cambridge, although his formal studies with her did not begin until after the war. I spoke with Moevs several months after Boulanger's death.