On this Columbus Day let’s look back to 1892, when the Milan publisher Francesco Vallardi celebrated the quadricentennial of the explorer’s first voyage with Albo di onoranze internazionali a Cristoforo Colombo, a lavish 406-page volume that presented reproductions of handwritten tributes by diplomats, scholars, and other luminaries.
When the call went out for contributions Verdi’s Otello had recently premiered to great critical acclaim. For his offering he penned a short excerpt from the opera (below).
Ricordi’s Disposizioni sceniche (1856–93) reflect the nineteenth-century concept of definitive operatic stagings. These manuals describe the scenery of each opera through plans and diagrams, and outline the entrances, exits, gestures, movements, and positions of the characters; they also provide a list of stage accessories. In most cases, the date and location of the described performance are indicated on the title page.
This practice was continued by the Casa Musicale Sonzogno, which issued seven Messe in scena manuals between 1894 and 1922; the Italian market for them dried up in the 1920s, when the concept of an ideal performance as a reproducible model waned and directorial creativity was increasingly valued.
This according to “The Messa in scena of the Casa Musicale Sonzogno: An iconography of stage direction at the end of the nineteenth century” by Laura Citti (Music in art XXXIV/1–2, pp. 245–253). Above, a sketch made for the Società degli Scenografi della Scala e del Teatro Lirico Internazionale for the Café Momus scene in Leoncavallo’s La bohème; inset, a page from Sonzogno’s Messa in scena for Massenet’s Manon (click to enlarge).
In 1833 Sophy Horsley, a well-heeled British teenager, wrote to her aunt “Mendelssohn took my album with him the night of our glee-party, but you have no idea how many names he has got me.” Over the following years Horsley and Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who was a family friend, collected musical works, illustrations, and autographs in a 144-page album measuring 1⅞ by 1¼ inches.
This according to “Sophy’s album” by Anne C. Bromer and Julian I. Edison, an article included in Miniature books: 4,000 years of tiny treasures (New York: Abrams, 2007); the book was published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Grolier Club, New York City, from 15 May through 28 July 2007. Many thanks to James Melo for bringing it to our attention!
Below, Rahmaninov plays his transcription of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s “Scherzo” from his incidental music for A midsummer night’s dream, written when the composer was a teenager himself.
In opera, eating and drinking function largely as they do in society—they define social relationships. The antisocial act of refusing to share food or drink with merry people carries a negative connotation and implies an unfortunate result. Further gastromusicological laws may be deduced from Verdi’s operas:
A meal is never sad.
Hunger is never happy.
A shared meal or drink is a socially cohesive event.
The presence of food or drink precludes immediate catastrophe (unless poison is involved).
The act of feasting is a morally neutral event, but a feasting group or individual is morally negative when contrasted with a positive hungry group or individual.
The hero is a sober individual.
Music and text may lie, but the gastronomic sign never does.
The interaction between these gastronomic codes and other interweaving codes is often complex.
This according to “Feasting and fasting in Verdi’s operas” by Pierpaolo Polzonetti (Studi verdiani XIV [1999] pp. 69–106).
In response to a heightened anxiety regarding the preservation of a pure, authentic French identity and spirit as contacts with exotic cultures increased, the collection and dissemination of French traditional songs blossomed during the 1890s and the 1900s.
With harmonizations employing modal inflections, ambiguous tonalities, and unconventional voice leading, these collections presented traditional songs as historical evidence of a clear progression from provincial folk tunes to the sophisticated musical language of the fin de siècle. These harmonizations offer unique insights into the ways in which the French consciously manipulated how they wanted to be heard and understood during this period.
Above, a page from the original edition of d’Indy’s Chansons populairesdu Vivarais, op. 52 (Paris: A. Durand & Fils, 1900) illustrates his approach to modal harmonization.
According to “Changing the musical object: Approaches to performance analysis” by Nicholas Cook, broad cultural developments associated with poststructuralism and postmodernism have placed an emphasis on reception—on performance rather than on inherent meaning—but the reflection of these developments in musicology has been skewed by that discipline’s retention of the concept of music as written text.
Cook argues that just as writings about music influence performances, so performance style has an impact on musicology, creating the prospect of a historiography predicated not on compositional innovation but on music as it is experienced in everyday life.
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson further explores the process wherein developments in performance precede changes in verbal interpretation in “Musicology and performance”; his examples are drawn from Schubert’s lieder and Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître. Both essays are included in our recently-published Music’s intellectual history.
Below, a performance of the final section of the Boulez work by the Montreal-based group Codes d’Accès.
During the 1890s the Royal College of Music’s first Professor of Composition, Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924), had a stellar roster of students that included Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; but Stanford considered William Yeates Hurlstone (1876–1906) to have been his best pupil. Hurlstone’s name is now largely forgotten; his promising career was cut short by bronchial asthma when he was 30.
The Royal College of Music Library, in conjunction with RCM’s Centre for Performance History, has sought to rectify this situation with a new online resource. Launched in May 2010, William Yeates Hurlstone includes a biography of the composer, a catalogue of his works, recordings made as part of RCM’s Hurlstone Centenary day in 2006 featuring performances by RCM staff and students, and reproductions of documents and concert programs from the collections of the two sponsoring institutions.
Above, the composer with the mezzo-soprano Frieda Zerny, possibly holding a letter from him (see Wolf and Zerny, Briefe an Frieda Zerny [Wien: Musikwissenschaftlicher Verlag , 1978]).
Throughout the nineteenth century, parallels between the forms and contents of individual compositions and a variety of poems and prose tales were discussed. Liszt, Strauss, and other composers cited literary classics in the titles of their works and even published excerpts in their scores. As a consequence, certain critics came out in favor of musical programmism, while others advocated musical absolutism.
More recently, such discussions have been amplified by suggestions that certain works of fiction themselves employ musical structural principles, particularly sonata form. Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann (above) can be viewed in relation to Beethoven’s piano sonata op. 111, and several of Jane Austen’s novels can be compared with Mozart concerto movements. This approach suggests new ways in which musicologists might acquire a deeper understanding of such issues as musical representations of gender, the ways in which instrumental compositions may be said to embody character, and the problem of music and narrativity.
The main entrance to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts’s exhibition Lou Reed: Caught between the twisted stars opens up on Lincoln Plaza, directly adjacent to the The Metropolitan Opera house. On a sunny day, the Met’s … Continue reading →
Seven strings/Сім струн (dedicated to Uncle Michael)* For thee, O Ukraine, O our mother unfortunate, bound, The first string I touch is for thee. The string will vibrate with a quiet yet deep solemn sound, The song from my heart … Continue reading →
Introduction: Dr. Philip Ewell, Associate Professor of Music at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, posted a series of daily tweets during Black History Month (February 2021) providing information on some under-researched Black … Continue reading →
For it [the Walkman] permits the possibility…of imposing your soundscape on the surrounding aural environment and thereby domesticating the external world: for a moment, it can all be brought under the STOP/START, FAST FOWARD, PAUSE and REWIND buttons. –Iain Chambers, “The … Continue reading →
