Know Your Composer
The common image of the struggling artist started with Mr. Ludwig van B. We all know the story of him overcoming his disability to create some of the most uplifting and inspirational masterpieces in music. But we don’t have to be necessarily rich and famous to struggle with adversity;
Know Your Composer
It’s not an exaggeration to declare that the Mason family decidedly and uniquely contributed to American music during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The patriarch Lowell Mason (1792-1872) was a significant composer of church music, including many original hymns. As a strong advocate and educator of classical music,
Know Your Composer
Happy 250th birthday this Wednesday, 16 December 2020, Ludwig! The world had such great plans to celebrate this milestone, but a minuscule virus put paid to all that. My reading marathon on Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) in his birth sestercentennial year continues to throw up the most fascinating trivia about
Know Your Composer
A tribute on Beethoven’s 250th birth anniversary “Whoever gets to know and understand my music, will be freed from all the misery the world has to offer.” – Ludwig van Beethoven What caused Beethoven’s deafness? Unfortunately, his autopsy report was destroyed. Notes made by Dr. Johann Wagner, the pathologist,
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When a professional musician from Helsinki toured the Finnish countryside in the last years of the 19th century, a member of the audience asked him, “Are there other great composers in Helsinki besides Merikanto?” This delightful anecdote certainly tells us something about the enormous popularity of Oskar Merikanto (1868–1924)
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A tribute during Beethoven’s 250th birth anniversary “An artist must never stand still.” – Ludwig van Beethoven In December 1770, a child was born in Bonn, Germany, who would go on to make such a powerful impact in music, an impact that would endure down the centuries. We celebrate his
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When families migrate across linguistic borders, their names frequently undergo a number of significant changes. Just take the Stamitz family, an extended and highly active Bohemian group of musicians, as an example. The spelling of their family name in contemporary sources was extraordinarily erratic, with the most common variants being
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Alfred Brendel describes Schubert as “a sleepwalker”, yet in his final three sonatas, we see Schubert’s innate sense of musical geometry and his bold treatment of traditional sonata form. These are tightly-organised woks with almost perfectly-balanced structures, perhaps most obviously in the middle sonata of the triptych, the D959
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Ignored for years, their composer regarded as Beethoven‘s poor relation, Schubert‘s last three piano sonatas now enjoy a special place in the piano repertoire, ranking alongside Beethoven’s final three piano sonatas, and they hold a particular fascination for pianists, audiences, critics and musicologists. The final year of
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The Scarlatti family name—in various spellings—was common in Sicily, with several branches of additional Scarlatti families residing in Rome and northern Italy. Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725) was the musical bedrock of the family, and he became the most important opera composer of his generation in Italy. Besides roughly 100
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Background: Augsburg and Vienna Maria Anna (Nannette) Streicher (1769-1838) was a piano maker, composer, teacher, and writer who is perhaps best known for her Viennese pianos and for her friendship with Beethoven. She was born in Augsburg in 1769 into a family of musicians, and her father – Johann Andreas Stein
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Historically, the works of many women composers did not quite make it into the canon. It is perhaps why the female sensibility continues to be viewed through a celebratory lens – like a rare event, so to say. We take a look at some of these prolific composers who did not