Category Archives: Classic era

by | January 14, 2016 · 6:00 am

Schenker on Beethoven

beethoven-schenker

Beethoven’s last piano sonatas: An edition with elucidation (Oxford University Press, 2015) is the first English-language edition and translation of Heinrich Schenker’s landmark editions of Beethoven’s opp. 109, 110, 111, and 101 (Wien: Universal Edition, 1913).

heinrich schenkerEach of the four volumes incorporates references to corrections and other remarks entered by Schenker in his personal copies of the sonatas, many of which have not been presented in any of the previous German editions of the works.

Also included are supplements to the original text with explanations of certain points in the commentary and graphic presentations of several passages.

Below, Svâtoslav Rihter performs the op. 101 sonata.

More posts about Beethoven are here.

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by | January 4, 2015 · 6:00 am

Mozart: New documents

mozartnewdocs

 

Mozart: New documents is a collaborative project for the digital publication of new Mozart documents discovered since 1997, the date of the second supplement (the Neue Folge) to Otto Erich Deutsch’s  Mozart: Die Dokumente seines Lebens (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1961). This website is intended as an open working draft, and the editors welcome contributions and feedback from readers, who will receive explicit credit and acknowledgment.

Digital publication allows rolling out the content of the site over a period of months; it initially included 37 documents with commentaries, and at least 70 were scheduled to be added over the ensuing months. By the time the site is completed, it will include well over 100 new documents and addenda, and research is still ongoing.

When the site has reached a point of relative stability, it will be moved to a more permanent home with an institutional base; options for the print publication of some or all of the documents and commentaries on this site are under consideration.

Below, a recent contribution to Mozart documentation.

More articles about Mozart are here.

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by | December 18, 2014 · 6:00 am

The contrapuntal tradition

nicolai

Wayne Leupold Editions launched the series The contrapuntal tradition in 2013 with Organ works by David Traugott Nicolai, edited by William A. Little.

An organist and composer, Nicolai (1733–99) studied music under his father, who had been a pupil of Bach. From 1758 he assisted his father and in 1764 succeeded him as organist of the Pfarrkirche St. Peter und Paul in Görlitz; in 1775 he became electoral court organist. In his time he was considered one of the greatest living organ players, and was respected as an improviser as well as an expert in organ building.

Below, Brink Bush plays the Fantasie in G, one of the works included in the edition.

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by | November 8, 2014 · 6:00 am

Le vie dei suoni

Le vie...

In 2014 Cafagna Editore launched the series Le vie dei suoni with Vincenzo Pucitta: Il tumulto del gran mondo, edited by Annamaria Bonsante. The book includes an introduction by Philip Gossett.

Below, Marilyn Hill Smith and Della Jones sing Un palpito mi sento, a duet from Pucitta’s La Caccia di Enrico IV (1809).

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by | November 3, 2014 · 6:00 am

W.A. Mozart, cartoonist

mozart sketch1

Mozart’s wittiness is famously illuminated through many of his letters. Less known are his small humorous sketches, which appear here and there throughout his correspondence.

The sketches range from mysterious stick figures to bizarre caricatures; some are still riddles to scholars.

This according to “Mozart, der Zeichner” by Gabriele Ramsauer, an essay included in Mozart-Bilder–Bilder Mozarts: Ein Porträt zwischen Wunsch und Wirklichkeit (Salzburg: Pustet, 2013, pp. 25–28).

Above, a drawing at the top of a letter from Mozart to his cousin Maria Anna Thekla Mozart, known as Bäsle, dated 10 May 1780, titled Engel (Angel), with labels fig. I Kopf (head), fig. II Frißur (hairdo), fig. III Nasn (nose), fig. IV Brust (breast), fig. V Hals (throat), fig. VI Aug (eye); inscribed below VI: Hier ißt leer (Here is empty).

The full text of the letter (untranslated) is here; below, the finale of Mozart’s Ein musikalischer Spaß, which ends with his celebrated foray into polytonality.

More articles about Mozart are here.

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by | October 9, 2014 · 6:00 am

A rediscovered Mozart manuscript!

Kutatók éjszakája - Mozart-szonáta kéziratának egy töred

Balázs Mikusi, the chair of RILM’s Hungarian committee and the head of the music collection at the Országos Széchényi Könyvtár in Budapest, was recently leafing through one of the library’s folders of unidentified manuscripts when he encountered four pages of what looked to him like Mozart’s handwriting.

He soon realized that he had stumbled upon the original score of the piano sonata in A, K.331—one of Mozart’s most beloved sonatas, with the famous “alla turca” finale! The finding has additional significance because the score clears up long-standing questions regarding certain passages.

Congratulations to RILM’s own Balázs Mikusi! Below, Olga Jegunova performs the work in 2012.

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by | April 10, 2014 · 1:00 am

Miroirs

Rosenblum

Libreria Musicale Italiana launched the series Miroirs in early 2014 with Prassi esecutive nella musica pianistica dell´epoca classica: Principi teorici ed applicazioni pratiche, a translation of Sandra P. Rosenblum’s Performance practices in Classic piano music: Their principles and applications (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).

The book discusses the principles of performing the piano music of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and their contemporaries as revealed in such sources as their autographs and letters, early editions of their music, original instruments, and contemporary tutors and treatises. Rosenblum’s findings are then applied to dynamics, accentuation, pedaling, articulation and touch, technique and fingering, ornaments and embellishments, choice of tempo, and tempo flexibility.

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by | March 8, 2014 · 1:00 am

C.P.E. Bach’s Empfindsamer Stil

CPEBach-1773

Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s Heilig (W.217) is closely akin to his keyboard writing in that the presence of many different, not necessarily closely related, musical ideas drives the piece more than a specific form. Seemingly random choices of key, texture, voicing, and text placement all have a purpose: to make the listener feel something, not just hear it.

The choral sections illustrate the quick tonal shifts and changing of harmonic rhythm that are a large part of C.P.E. Bach’s Empfindsamer Stil, which is customarily thought of in terms of his keyboard writing. Heilig is a part of that tradition which would later become the Sturm und Drang of Haydn and the inspiration for the Romantic generation. This according to “Elements of Empfindsamkeit in the Heilig Wq. 217 (H.778) of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach” by Brian E. Burns (Choral journal XLVI/9 [March 2006] pp. 10–23).

Today is C.P.E. Bach’s 300th birthday! Above, a pastel portrait of the composer from 1773 drawn by his godson Johann Philipp Bach (click to enlarge); below, a performance of Heilig by the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and the RIAS Kammerchor.

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by | February 19, 2013 · 1:00 am

Boccherini and embodiment

boccherini

Boccherini’s posthumous reputation has suffered because his works do not emphasize the structural coherence and teleology emblematic of 18th-century Classicism; but regarded through the lens of performance—the sensations and images involved in its bodily presentation—his works evoke those aspects of the era characterized by urgent, even volatile, inquiries into the nature of the self.

Contemporaneous theories of embodiment illuminate the heart of Boccherini’s oeuvre, the chamber music for strings, which presents sensibilité through repetitiveness, a hyperattention to details of dynamics and articulation, the grotesque and bizarre timbres and registral excesses, and Newtonian mechanistic philosophy through gestural enactments of rapidity and rigidity.

These works often distance and ironize the performer, particularly in regard to virtuosity. They thereby make a sophisticated contribution to the central Enlightenment tension between subjectivity and appearance so memorably articulated in Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien.

This according to “‘One says that one weeps, but one does not weep’: Sensibile, grotesque, and mechanical embodiments in Boccherini’s chamber music” by Elisabeth Le Guin (Journal of the American Musicological Society LV/2 [summer 2002] pp. 207–54).

Today is Boccherini’s 270th birthday! Below, a work cited by Le Guin as an example.

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by | November 9, 2012 · 1:00 am

The symphonic repertoire

Indiana University Press launched the series The symphonic repertoire in 2002, with volume 2. Subsequently production was stalled following the death of the founder of the series, A. Peter Brown; it was revived in 2012.

For Volume 1, The Eighteenth-Century Symphony, 22 of Brown’s former students and colleagues collaborated to complete the work that he began on this critical period of development in symphonic history. The book follows Brown’s outline, is organized by country, and focuses on major composers.

Contributors address issues of historiography, the status of research, and questions of attribution and stylistic traits, and provide background material on the musical context of composition and early performances. The volume features a CD of recordings from the Bloomington Early Music Festival Orchestra, highlighting the largely unavailable repertoire discussed in the book.

Below, the Amadeus Orchestra performs a symphony by the little-known Czech composer Johann Baptist Vanhal (1739–1813).

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