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Tag: Mozart

Salieri: More Than Mozart’s Rival?

He was a generous teacher, who fostered Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and even the son of the genius he was rumored to have poisoned.

His first act, when he was appointed Austrian Imperial Kapellmeister in 1788, was to revive Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” He was responsible for arranging first performances of his alleged nemesis’ Piano Concerto No. 22, the Clarinet Quintet, and the Symphony No. 40, and he had nothing but praise for “The Magic Flute.” He even took it upon himself to educate Franz Xaver Mozart, the composer’s son, who was born four months after his father’s alleged murder.

Already during the latter years of his life, Antonio Salieri’s enormous compositional output (37 operas, in addition to orchestral works, concertos, chamber music, and sacred pieces) gradually faded from public memory. Ironically, it is the scandalmongers who kept his name alive.

Rumors of Salieri’s involvement in Mozart’s death were codified by Alexander Pushkin in 1831 in the tragedy “Mozart and Salieri,” which appeared a few years after Salieri himself had passed. This was later set as an opera in 1898 by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Was this any way to treat such a generous, hard-working composer? While he was certainly no Mozart – who was? – his music is finely crafted and often quite enjoyable, certainly no worse than that of a majority of his contemporaries.

But, as the saying goes, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. In a way, Peter Schaffer’s “Amadeus” was the best thing to happen to Salieri in nearly 200 years. How many people remember Mozart’s quartet partners (with Haydn), Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf and Jan Křtitel Vaňhal, both also talented and prolific composers?

By coincidence (?), Rimsky-Korsakov’s chamber opera is being performed today at Bard College, on the second half of a 1:30 p.m. program titled “Domestic Music Making in Russia,” as part of the 29th Annual Bard Music Festival: Rimsky-Korsakov and His World.

In another context, it would be a peculiar way to mark a composer’s birthday – but as I’m sure Dittersdorf and Vaňhal would agree, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

Happy birthday, Antonio Salieri, Patron Saint of Mediocrity!

Russian film version of Rimsky’s “Mozart and Salieri” (without subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilw7oIkrDj4

In English, if a bit fuzzy:

Salieri’s Concerto for Flute, Oboe and Orchestra:

“I absolve you.”

August 18, 2018
Sara Buechner Plays Mozart & More on The Classical Network

Sara Davis Buechner offers 88 keys to enjoyment on today’s Noontime Concert on The Classical Network.

On the program will be Mozart’s Fantasy in C minor, K.475, and Sonata No. 14 in C minor, K. 457; Chopin’s Introduction and Rondo in E flat major, Op. 16; Anton Arensky’s “Four Salon Pieces,” and Gershwin’s “Second Rhapsody,” in Davis’ own arrangement for solo piano.

Buechner, a top prize winner at the Queen Elisabeth (Brussels), Leeds, Mozart (Salzburg), Beethoven (Vienna), and Sydney International Piano Competitions, is currently on the faculty of Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance. She was a Bronze Medalist at the 1986 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow and a Gold Medalist at the 1984 Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition.

Among her recordings are rarely-heard works of Rudolf Friml, Joseph Lamb, Joaquin Turina, Miklós Rózsa, and Ferruccio Busoni, including the world premiere recording of Busoni’s arrangement of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.” Stereophile magazine selected her Gershwin CD as “Recording of the Month.” Her album of Hollywood piano concertos was the recipient of Germany’s Deutsches Schauplatten Preis.

The concert was originally presented as part of last season’s Silberman Recital Series at New York’s Baruch Performing Arts Center. Ted Altschuler, the center’s director, will offer an overview of the upcoming season’s offerings at the conclusion of today’s program.

Then stay tuned for the complete ballet “The Arabian Nights” by Azerbaijani composer Fikret Amirov. The ballet, given its premiere in 1979, is one of the rare adaptations to emerge from a region which gave us the original stories that make up “A Thousand and One Nights.” The world famous adventures of Sinbad, Ali Baba and Aladdin are enshrined in these tales, and each of them make an appearance in the ballet’s second act. Scheherazade will captivate with 90 minutes of her storytelling genius, beginning around 2:00.

You’ll discover days and nights of musical enchantments, from 12 to 4 p.m. EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

July 31, 2018
Schoenberg Mozart Decadence Regeneration Marlboro

You might say that Arnold Schoenberg was a man of contradictions. In him, the radical and conservative existed in perpetual tension. He may have started out by preaching revolution, but he ended up insisting he was a traditionalist. He labeled Brahms a progressive, and claimed he owed very much to Mozart.

On this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” a chamber symphony by one of music’s least charismatic figures will be heard side-by-side with one of the 18th century’s most congenial works.

Mozart and Schoenberg, two seemingly disparate composers, pushed boundaries at the opposite ends of a grand tradition. Mozart conveyed his understanding of the complexities of human nature through the all-pervasive beauty of an artist formed during the Enlightenment. Schoenberg, divided from Mozart by more than a century, was the product of a world slipping into chaos. The Romantic Era raised music to the heights of ecstasy, even as it plunged it into the depths of highly subjective darkness. Tonality dissolved right alongside the decay of balance and moderation. Schoenberg’s development of a dodecaphonic or twelve-tone method in the early 1920s might be viewed as an aftershock of the First World War. More accurately, both – the music and the war – were likely symptoms of an overall downward trajectory.

In Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 of 1906, harmony is pushed to the brink. We’ll hear Leon Kirchner direct an ensemble of fifteen players at the 1982 Marlboro Music Festival.

Then we’ll unwind with Mozart’s gentle giant, the Clarinet Quintet in A major of 1789. The 1968 performance will feature clarinetist Harold Wright, violinists Alexander Schneider and Isadore Cohen, violist Samuel Rhodes, and cellist Leslie Parnas.

I hope you’ll join me for music of decadence and regeneration, on the next “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

June 20, 2018
Mozart’s Gran Partita Marlboro Festival

“This was no composition by a performing monkey. This was a music I’d never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.”

In Peter Schaffer’s “Amadeus,” it is the work that threw Antonio Salieri into ecstasies. “On the page it looked nothing – just a pulse, bassoons and basset-horns, like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly, high above it, an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, until a clarinet took it over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight!”

Salieri (the character) had difficulty reconciling such sublime music with its composer’s vulgar personality. By extension, it’s easy to imagine Salieri smiling ruefully at the incongruity of a work of such sustained beauty being identified by the equivalent of an 18th century typo – the “Gran Partita.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s seven-movement tour de force will be featured on this week’s “Music from Marlboro.” We’ll hear it performed by an all-star cast of twelve wind players – and a double bassist – under the direction of Marcel Moyse, from the 1975 Marlboro Music Festival.

Moyse was Marlboro royalty. Alongside Rudolf Serkin and Adolf Busch, the legendary flutist cofounded the Marlboro Music School and Festival in 1951. A veteran of Paris’ Opéra Comique, he would instruct his wind players to emulate the phrasings of the human voice in song. Learn more about this remarkable musician, who worked with some of the greatest artists of his time, in this generous biographical sketch by Marlboro Senior Administrator Frank Salomon:

https://www.marlboromusic.org/from-the-archive/blog/archives-marcel-moyse/

Then tune in and have a gran’ ol’ time with Mozart’s “Gran Partita,” on “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

May 2, 2018
Handel The Greatest Composer Ever?

Beethoven is remembered to have praised Handel on numerous occasions. “Handel is the greatest composer who ever lived,” he said. “I would uncover my head and kneel down on his tomb.” On his deathbed, he indicated an edition of Handel’s works and said, “There is the truth.”

Upon hearing the “Hallelujah Chorus,” Haydn wept and declared, “He is the master of us all.”

Mozart said, “He understands effect better than any of us – when he chooses, he strikes like a thunderbolt.”

Berlioz? Berlioz called him “a tub of pork and beer.” Knowing what I do of Handel, he probably would have enjoyed that best of all.

Happy birthday, George Frideric Handel (1685-1759).

“Ariodante” was the opera I hated most when I first heard it in 1990. Now I hold it dear. Funny how things change.

“Scherza infida”

“Dopo notte”

February 23, 2018

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