fable's Q&A on classical music

[fable]

Originally posted by C Elegans
I love Francesca da Rimini, it was however composed by Tchaikovsky

And also by Rachmaninoff, Maurice, Zandonai, and others. Or did you think a popular romantic story like that, made still more popular by Dante, would result in only one musical version?

My favorite is Rachmaninoff's opera. It's too bad he's dead, or I could have told him he didn't write it.

[C Elegans]

Originally posted by fable
And also by Rachmaninoff, Maurice, Zandonai, and others. Or did you think a popular romantic story like that, made still more popular by Dante, would result in only one musical version?

My favorite is Rachmaninoff's opera. It's too bad he's dead, or I could have told him he didn't write it.

I know Zandonai wrote one, and I'm not surprised there are many of these popular story, but I never knew Rachmaninov wrote one, and I thought I had a pretty good overview of Rachmaninov's works So what does it sound like?

[fable]

Originally posted by C Elegans
I know Zandonai wrote one, and I'm not surprised there are many of these popular story, but I never knew Rachmaninov wrote one, and I thought I had a pretty good overview of Rachmaninov's works So what does it sound like?

It's quite good, particularly in the lengthy, last act love duet, and in Francesca's beautiful aria. They're very much what you'd expect of Rachmaninoff under full Romantic sail: hauntingly lyrical, with an undertoe of melancholy. It's unrepresented currently on CD, though a poor version circulated for quite a while. A somewhat better one (still only fair) existed on LP back in the 1970s. Francesca's aria has received a number of fine recordings intermittently. (My favorite to date features Elvira Uzunian.) A shame the work isn't performed more in the West. Today's lyric tenors could handle the male lead without problems, and a good, healthy young soprano with a free top should be able to draw an ovation or two.

[fable]

Incidentally, the Kremerata Baltica have out a fine recording of Enescu's wonderful Octet, on Nonesuch. It's unfortunately the full string orchestra arrangement rather than the original, but still, it's a lot better than any other currently available.

[KidD01]

I'm running into lots of mood swings lately and in slump mode. hence I'm back to listen to classic music. Any good recommendation ?

[fable]

@Kid, could you be a bit more specific? What kinds of classical things do you enjoy? What sort of mood are you looking to enhance?

EDIT: Just re-read your post. You mean that you're depressed, de-energized, and looking for classical music to help pull you out of it? Have I got that correct?

[KidD01]

in short, everything went out of rythm. I think i need something a bit fast paced - anything on Mozart or Vivaldi ?

[fable]

You're pretty much guaranteed a pair of relatively quick movements sandwiching a slow one in Vivaldi's 700+ surviving concertos. But if you want something upbeat, consider doing what a friend of mine did: he liked upbeat, fast-paced classical driving music, so he excerpted the first and last movements of a bunch of Haydn symphonies and put them all on a cassette tape.

In Mozart, I'd suggest the overtures to Le Nozze di Figaro (Marriage of Figaro) and Cosi Fan Tutte, a pair of his operas. The finales of many of his piano concertos and symphonies would also suit your requirements.

If you enjoy the sound of the harpsichord, check out the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. (They're also frequently recorded on the piano.) Handel wrote some upbeat harpsichord suites, too. And speaking of Handel, you may want to look for his Water Music and Royal Fireworks Music.

[fable]

Reviving this, since I'm still getting queries via PMs. Put your questions up, here.

[fable]

A poster of some renown with a one-track mind has asked a question, but refuses to put it out in the open. So to speak. The question is: "What about pornography in classical music?" Well, yes: what about it?

We do know that some of the music to Attic Greek comedies accompanied suitably scatalogical and pornographic material, because the lyrics (by people like Aristophanes) have survived. It would be nice to say this was a theme that continued up to the present time, given humanity's nature. But we can't do that, because many cultures had different, and stricter, rules than our own concerning what sort of written content could be set to music or placed on stage.

We first begin seeing sexual content filtering back into Western European classical music in the 14th century, thanks to several Florentine carnival songs that have survived. These were not the equivalent of our modern carnivals, but more like the Mardi Gras: nominally religious festivals that temporarily exploded the fabric of society. Imagine, if you will, an intricate, sweetly sung four-part madrigal about the artichoke, which goes, in part, as follows:

First, ladies, you must hoe all around,
take the leaves in hand and then bind it,
cover it, and sow it absolutely straight:
there are some who plant it lying face down.
The artichoke should be in size
a span or a little more, for nature
cannot digest anything so big and hard,
even though we always like the big mouthfuls...

Alas, although we have the music and the text, there's nothing that reproduces the gestures that we're certain accompanied this dulcet piece.

The late Renaissance English were also fond of this kind of thing, and there are many popular songs and classical transcriptions that survive of similar material. In fact, there's a fair amount of raunchy, euphemistic material along these lines, and some that actually gets a lot more hardcore over the next couple of centuries, before Protestantism set in and outlawed the stuff. Huge bonfires of plays, books, and musical compositions were burnt in cities throughout Central and Western Europe by militant Protestants who felt it was an afront to Christianity.

You have to jump forward to Mozart, then, to encounter our next stop in classical smut. The guy was nothing like the figure portrayed in Amadeus, but he did enjoy dirty jokes. One of his amusements was to create canons on the first tone--several different melodies in the same key, which overlapped naturally and without causing disonance. He would set each melody to an innocent lyric which, combined with the others, would at some point in the number, give rise to a line that was completely lewd. Mozart used to meet with several friends, all of whom were among the shining lights in classical performance in Vienna, high a meal, drink heartily, and then try these out. Fortunately, they have survived, to the embarassment of many generations of music appreciation teachers, everywhere.

The late 19th and all of the 20th century witnessed a level of tolerance for the open disclosure of sexually related materials in Western urban culture that hasn't been seen since the Renaissance. There have been attempts to reimpose controls--the 1950s in the United States, British Prime Minister John Major's "campaign for decency," de Gaulle's attempt to reinstitute censorship on a national level in France. Thus far, these have been passing moments, and classical composers, like everybody else, have taken advantage of this greater openness. Texts set to classical music have become increasingly frank, even obscene by many standards. When text wasn't used, it was still possible to get across a lot in music--such as Paul Dukas' sensual ballet, La Peri. (Dukas also possessed one of the largest collections of French porn in existence. It's now in the National Library in Paris. Think about this fact the next time you listen to The Sorcerer's Apprentice.)

If you want more information, you'll just have to read up on the stuff. Try Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, for a start. The volumes are big enough to fit around a Playboy or Playgirl issue, too.

[fable]

Yes, it's back, again. I received another question, this time in passing along with some other stuff, in PMs. I figured I'd answer it here, thus giving everyone an equal shot at falling asleep from my scholarship. The question? "Who were the troubadours, and why did they vanish?"

The troubadours were actually one manifestation of culture shock that hit Europe during and after the wave of costly Crusades, around 1200 ACE, launched to retake Jerusalem and punish the Ottoman Empire. At the time, the Ottomans (modern Turkey) were part of one of the most sophisticated civilizations in the world, worthy to stand alongside China and the Incas. The Europeans? Nice people to visit, but you'd hardly want to live there, and you'd probably want to take a bath after visiting. The Ottomans were far superior in all the arts, sciences (theoretical and practical), economics, mathematics, history and statecraft. In most areas Europeans gained nothing from the contact, due in large part to prejudice, but the more artistically inclined nobles of various European courts--trained in aesthetics with a strong sensitivity to form--came away extremely impressed.

The results were felt immediately at the various courts of Europe, were these nobles, fresh from the Holy Lands, playing the new instruments they'd acquired there, using the musical modes they'd learned and (for the first time in a long time in Europe) sang personal, secular poetry. It proved enormously popular, despite the great disapproval of various Church prelates who had tried to stamp out all written or oral literature that wasn't religiously based.

There were three main geographical groups of these nobles, along with various small ones. The large ones included the troubadours, from what is now Southern France and western Italy (at the time, Provence), the trouveres, from Northern France and England, and the minnesangers, from the German states. It's difficult to ascertain why the troubadours caught the public imagination of the last couple of centuries, since they were identical to just about all respects to the other groups, save for language (Provencal). By the time of the second generation, all three groups had ceased to be nobles only, with some well-placed burghers mingling among them. Best known for singing of courtly love, they also dealt with the pains of joys of daily life. They certainly didn't live in the clouds; some of them are known to have also told many of the stories in the collections of truly filthy tales that have survived in French manuscripts from that period. (And yes, a couple of these actually present earlier versions of the famed traveling salesmen jokes most of us have heard over the years.) Regardless, the age of these poet/singers lasted about 150 years, until roughly 1350 ACE when the increasing persecution of the Church ended their preoccuption with secular entertainments. The secular arts continued to flourish, but the lead was relinquished to commonfolk until the Italian Renaissance states once again took the lead.

Quite a bit of the music of the trouveres survive, but very little of the troubadours. Provencal was invaded at the request of the Church, during the Albigensian Crusade--the Albigensians being an extremely strict Christian sect that had refused all approaches by the RCC, even going so far as to killing Rome's representatives. The resultant wholesale, chaotic slaughter in Provencal destroyed most records of the period, including all but four small collections of troubadour works. What's more, at least one of these collections through comparison with the others shows that its anonymous monkish transcriber did not like complexity, and deliberated, drastically simplified the music he copied; while another plainly knew next to nothing about music, and made frequent errors which lend an air of disbelief to quite a few of the pieces he "wrote." In all, there are roughly 1000 pieces of music and poetry from the trouveres that survive, and roughly 100 from the troubadours.

Complicating matters is the fact that the transcriptions were made using a notational system that leaves a lot to be desired. Instead of employing staves and notes--our modern method, developed several hundred years later--the troubadours and their contemporaries used noumenes. These accurately depicted pitch, but not length of note or phrasing. Nor did the transcribed pieces contain more than a single melodic line. There is still a controversy raging over whether these noble bards were accompanied by instruments, other singers, or merely sang solo.

There you have it. Any other questions of classical music? Direct 'em here.

[JazzyAnna]

Who was the composer who thought that if he composed more symphonies than Beethoven that he would be killed? Than, he began one more, and died. Something like that happened, I'm not sure. Also, have you listened to anything by Dmitri Shostakovich? At a concert band camp I went to, we (tried) to play something by him (I forget what). It was insane. We ended up not playing it for the concert since it was so difficult and we only had a week to learn it. But I really liked that song and I was wondering if you could suggest any CDs with songs by him on it. Thanks.
-anna

[fable]

Who was the composer who thought that if he composed more symphonies than Beethoven that he would be killed? Than, he began one more, and died.

Urban legend. Never happened. It started in part because of the reverence some later 19th century composers had for Beethoven, and the rather silly way they had of claiming hubris (egotism) whenever one of the fraternity dared to write many symphonies: "Oh, you think you've got more to say than Beethoven, hmm?"

But Shostakovich wrote 15 symphonies, Miaskovsky wrote 25, and Havergal Brian wrote 32. All of 'em lived into old age--Brian, in fact, died at the age of 97.

Bruckner, by the way, did die while writing a ninth symphony, but it was subsequently discovered that he'd written two which were never published--so in fact, it was his eleventh that he was writing at the time of his death. And his death has nothing to do with Beethoven, and everything to do with his advanced age.

Also, have you listened to anything by Dmitri Shostakovich? At a concert band camp I went to, we (tried) to play something by him (I forget what). It was insane. We ended up not playing it for the concert since it was so difficult and we only had a week to learn it. But I really liked that song and I was wondering if you could suggest any CDs with songs by him on it. Thanks.
-anna

Yes, I'm pretty familiar with Shostakovich's works. He's probably my favorite 20th century composer. Unlike some music of that period which sounds either cold or written as though in code, Shostakovich always seems to make an emotionally committed statement. We now know, thanks to plenty of post-Soviet interviews with people who knew him, that his music (especially the satirical stuff) was frequently subversive, his blaring trumpets and snarling, military snare drum rolls were meant to stand for the Soviet aparachiks and Stalin, whom he hated. His was a tragic life: a man who was raised in the Soviet, truly believed in the ideals of Communism, and loathed the corruption of the people who abused the system and hurt others in the process. If you want to learn more, one very good, non-partisan book is Elizabeth Wilson's Shostakovich A Life Remembered.

But I'm getting off the subject. For a good idea of Shostakovich at his most engaging, with plenty of off-the-wall humor, check out his first and ninth symphonies. The best current version I know of features Bernard Haitink and the London Philharmonic (Decca 2DM 425066). The fifth symphony is perhaps his most easily accessible among the "serious" symphonies, but his seventh, eighth, and tenth have been praised more highly in recent years. His thirteenth and fourteenth symphonies unusually feature a vocal soloist, and most movements are settings of poetry--works of protest and great sorrow at the inhumanity of humankind. The Brezhnev regime tried to stifle them, without success.

You might also want to check out his two piano concertos (wonderfully funny works, especially the first), and his string quartets, which range from charming to horrifically despairing. Good luck, and hope you enjoy the results.

[JazzyAnna]

Thanks for the info. I read that you were into jazz too. Who are some of your favorite jazz musicians? Just wondering.
-anna

[fable]

Originally Posted by JazzyAnna

Thanks for the info. I read that you were into jazz too. Who are some of your favorite jazz musicians? Just wondering.
-anna

Although it's off-subject, here's a brief list:

Charlie Parker
Gil Evans
Bud Powell
Stan Getz
Tad Dameron
Paul Desmond (yes, it's true!)
Woody Herman
Claude Thornhill
Duke Ellington
Billie Holiday
Bill Evans
Gerry Mulligan
Roy Eldridge...

and many, many more. These are only those that come to mind, right now.