Bach held the position of music director at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen early in his career. The Prince had a small orchestra of very good musicians and Bach created some of his best work during his five years there. The Prince sent Bach on a trip to Berlin to finalize the purchase of a new two-manual harpsichord and it was during this trip that Bach met the Margrave of Brandenburg, Christian Ludwig.
Bach played for the Margrave, who enjoyed Bach's music. Bach offered to send some of his compositions to the Margrave upon his return to Cöthen. For various reasons (including the death of his wife) Bach put off sending anything to the Margrave until two years later. What prompted Bach to remember was the fact that Prince Leopold was engaged to a woman who did not care for music as much as the Prince did, and the rumor was that as soon as she was married she was going to use her influence on the Prince and have him disband his orchestra and release his musicians.
So Bach had six of his finest concertos bound together and he wrote a syrupy, pandering and overly-flattering dedication in French to the Margrave. He was basically sucking up to the Margrave looking for a job. There's no evidence that the Margrave ever had them performed, musical historians doubt that the Margrave's court had enough fine musicians to play the concertos. As for Bach, he moved on to Leipzig and spent the rest of his life there.
Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 is a Concerto Grosso as the rest in the set. The soloists (concertino section) of the work are harpsichord, transverse flute and violin. The rest of the orchestra (or ripieno section) consists of violins, violas, violone and harpsichord. This work is unique in that the harpsichord participates in both sections of the orchestra, and it eventually plays a florid and highly decorated solo cadenza in the first movement. It is thought that this concerto may have been written for the two-manual harpsichord Bach was sent to Berlin to purchase for Prince Leopold, and played by Bach as the soloist.
The first movement sees the three soloist dialogue with each other, with the harpsichord gradually garnering more of the spotlight with its music becoming more and more complex and decorated. The harpsichord becomes more and more demanding until the rest of the instruments give in and turn silent while the harpsichord gives us one of the best examples of Bach's prowess and improvising skills at the keyboard. The second movement is a gentle song played by the soloists only. The third movement is a lively gigue that rounds out the work.
This concerto is one of the first examples of a keyboard instrument having a solo part that was originally written for it, which paved the way for the classical piano concertos of Mozart and others.
Arnold Schoenberg wrote this work as a string sextet at the turn of the 20th century in 1899, and it was so modern that the Vienna Music Society refused to perform it. It was premiered in 1902 by the Rose Quartet (augmented by an extra cello and viola) at the Vienna Musikverein.Between the highly chromatic music and its subject matter, the piece stirred up a lot of controversy.
This was Schoenberg's first important work and it showed the influence that Wagner and Brahms (whom Schoenberg always thought of as a modern composer) had on the young composer. It is not so much a revolutionary piece of music as it is an evolutionary piece of music, a product of what the masters had done before Schoenberg and his desire to continue the evolution. It was written before Schoenberg developed his twelve tone technique and while Transfigured Night does go far afield in its harmonies it is still a work based on tonality. It is a rare example of a chamber music work that is also program music. It is based on a poem written by Richard Dehmel called Transfigured Night. The synopsis of the poem:
A woman and man are walking through the woods on a moonlit night. In love, but ashamed, she reveals that she is pregnant with another man’s child, a man she never loved. The man responds with loving acceptance of her and the child as though it were his own. The unborn child, the man, the woman and the night itself are transfigured from darkness into light.
Schoenberg composed the piece in one movement and followed the poem closely in music that is rich, complex, and emotional. Frequent time signature changes and key changes charge the music with an intensity that finally resolves into a shimmering 'transfiguration' at the end. The music was arranged by the composer for full string orchestra in 1917 and revised it in 1943. It is this version that is heard on the video.
Schoenberg's first compositions written within his twelve tone system are over a hundred years old, and they still sound rather sour to many ears. Anyone that has not heard Transfigured Night before hearing any of his twelve tone works may wonder if Schoenberg wasn't more of a theorist than a feeling, emotional composer. Transfigured Night has glimpses in it of where Schoenberg was headed, but to my mind it is a late romantic composition and shows that Schoenberg was much more than a theorist. He was a composer of the first rank.
The complete poem by Dehmel:
Two people walk through a bare, cold grove;
The moon races along with them, they look into it.
The moon races over tall oaks,
No cloud obscures the light from the sky,
Into which the black points of the boughs reach,
A woman’s voice speaks:
I’m carrying a child, and not yours,
I walk in sin beside you.
I have committed a great offense against myself.
I no longer believed I could be happy
And yet I had a strong yearning
For something to fill my life, for the joys of motherhood
And for duty; so I committed an effrontery,
So, shuddering, I allowed my sex
To be embraced by a strange man,
And, on top of that, I blessed myself for it.
Now life has taken its revenge:
Now I have met you, oh you.
She walks with a clumsy gait,
She looks up; the moon is racing along.
Her dark gaze is drowned in light.
A man’s voice speaks:
May the child you conceived
Be no burden to your soul;
Just see how brightly the universe is gleaming!
There’s a glow around everything;
You are floating with me on a cold ocean,
But a special warmth flickers
From you into me, from me into you.
It will transfigure the strange man’s child.
You will bear the child for me, as if it were mine;
You have brought the glow into me,
You have made me like a child myself.
He grasps her around her ample hips.
Their breath kisses in the breeze.
Two people walk through the lofty, bright night.
Sergei Rachmaninoff was a world-renowned Russian concert pianist, conductor and composer. He left his native Russia after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Most of his compositions are for solo piano, piano with orchestra and orchestra alone, along with some songs and chamber music. He was regarded as one of the best pianists of his generation with a virtuoso technique and phenomenal memory.
The Symphonic Poem "Isle Of The Dead" Opus 29 was written in 1908 and was inspired by a painting titled Isle Of The Dead by the Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin that he saw exhibited in Paris in 1907. The painting depicts the ancient Greek myth of the newly dead on their way across the river Styx that separates the land of the living from the land of the dead.
The opening of the work begins softly in the low strings, with a time signature of 5/8. The resultant rhythm of this quintuple meter may represent the rhythm of the rowing of oars as Charon, the boatsman of the myth, rows the boat to the land of the dead. In the beginning, Rachmaninoff beats this 5/8 time signature as 1-2-3-4-5, with emphasis on the first beat and the third beat. This breaks it down into essentially alternating bars of 2/8 and 3/8 time. He then shifts the beats into 1-2-3-4-5, and further along he has a section that shifts the beat to 1-2-3-4-5.
This shifting within the beats of the 5/8 time signature is very subtle and it is one of the many details of this master work that helps give the impression of bleakness, loneliness and tension that leads to the climax of the composition, and its denouement. To add to the effect, Rachmaninoff includes variants of the ancient Latin hymn Dies Irae (day of wrath), a hymn thought to have been written in the 12th century and was part of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass. This hymn was something of a fixation for Rachmaninoff, as it appears in many of his works.
As human beings are creatures that tend to have a hard-wired necessity to categorize things, musical historians have followed this predilection by breaking down the long history of music into eras. This has been useful in helping not only musicians to perform a work in as authentic a manner as possible, but it has aided the listener in their understanding of the work. That is not to say that all music lovers need an exhaustive education in music history and performance practice, but a little insight on the time in which the composer lived and how music was performed in that era can lead to increased enjoyment.
Johann Sebastian Bach is a composer that falls into the Baroque era (late Baroque era to be precise), but he did compose some works in the new gallant style, for example the Six Sonatas For Violin And Harpsichord. That Bach was a master of the so-called old style is true, but he was far more than that. He was a culmination of the late Baroque, and within that culmination were the seeds of the newer style, a style he was well aware of and more than capable of composing in.
While Bach is not thought of as being an innovator, he was quite creative in every facet of music and composition. The art of instrumentation for many years was thought to have been quite primitive in Bach's time, but the opposite has been found to be the case. With a wide variety of instruments and timbres, the Baroque composers and Bach in particular took every advantage of the differences in musical instruments to create tonal color, nuance and expression. One of Bach's many experiments in instrumentation is the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 In B-flat. The concerto is scored for two violas, two violas da gamba (already considered an old instrument when this concerto was written in 1721), one cello, one violone (bass fiddle) and harpsichord. No soprano instruments save for the upper register of the keyboard. The resulting tonal color in the hands of a lesser composer would perhaps have become too dull and monotonous, but Bach writes music of great beauty in a joyful bluish purple color. The concerto is in three movements:
I. No tempo designation -Usually played in allegro tempo, this music has the two violas playfully chasing each other in canon interspersed with dialogue for the other instruments. While the violas chase each other the accompaniment of short repeated notes give a sense of movement to the music while the alternating sections go through key changes that add interest. Bach was said to have enjoyed playing the viola, so perhaps he took special delight in this movement. The violas da gamba play an accompaniment throughout and add movement and color to the overall tone of the movement.
II. Adagio ma non tanto - The violas da gamba are silent in this movement as the violas play a melancholy aria in duet. The cello and continuo alternate accompanying and playing sections of the aria. The movement ends with a whole note chord that gives a sense of suspended movement.
III. Allegro -In the style of a gigue, the violas begin in unison and soon chase each other even faster than in the first movement. The violas da gamba add to the texture and tone color while the cello has a few things to say of its own. The music for violas keeps moving in alternate moderate and fast note values until it reaches a point when the beginning section of the movement is repeated until a full close is reached.
Johann Sebastian Bach in 1721 gave the Margrave of Brandenburg a gift of 6 Concerti for different instrument groups. It is believed that the concerti were not expressly written for the Margrave but were written earlier. That Bach may have offered these up as a kind of resume to become employed by the Margrave is also a possibility. In any event, Bach was not hired on and it isn't known if the Margrave ever had them performed as the forces needed to do that were beyond what the Margrave had at his court. The concertos languished in the archives of Brandenburg until they were rediscovered and given the nickname 'Brandenburg'.
Each one of the Brandenburg Concertos is different from the other. Number 3 in G major is for 3 violins, 3 violas, 3 cellos, harpsichord and double bass. The style of this concerto harks back to the concerto grosso style, that is when a small group of instruments (the concertino) within the ensemble pass musical material back and forth while the full orchestra (tutti) accompanies. Number 3 is unique in that the two groups are integrated into a whole. Bach makes but eleven instruments sound like much more because each group of three alternates between being the concertino and being part of the tutti.
The first and third movements of the concerto are written in ritornello form while the middle movement consists of a two chord cadence. Some performers play these two chords, others improvise a short cadenza, sometimes a movement from a different work of Bach's is used. Evidently there was no set rule on which route to take. Composers of the Baroque era left a lot to the performers discretion.
The Spanish master guitarist Andrés Segovia, a musician that was responsible for much of the Renaissance of the classical guitar in the 20th century, had this to say about his instrument:
The guitar is a small orchestra. It is polyphonic. Every string is a different color, a different voice.
Segovia's quote underlines the uniqueness of the instrument and well as one of the difficulties in writing music for it. Most music for the classical guitar is either written or transcribed by a musician that can play the instrument. Unlike other instruments where a working knowledge will suffice, the guitar is capable of playing the same note at the same pitch on different strings and in different positions, something that may not be readily ascertainable to a non-playing composer. Add to that the tonal quality of the same note played on a different string, and the problems multiply.
It may be a difficult proposition for a non-guitar playing composer to write for the instrument, but it is not impossible. With the increased popularity of the classical guitar in the 20th century, more non-playing composers wrote works for it. One of the most successful non-playing composers of a work for guitar was the Spanish composer and pianist Joaquín Rodrigo.
His most popular work for guitar was Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra, written in 1939 while he was in exile in Paris. He had been writing music for guitar since 1926, and the concerto was his first piece for guitar and orchestra. The work was inspired by the Palacio Real de Aranjuez, a residence of Spanish kings located in the town of Aranjuez and built in the 16th and 18th centuries. The palace is known for its beautiful gardens, and it was these gardens that inspired Rodrigo. As Rodrigo had been almost totally blind since the age of three, it was the sounds of the gardens that inspired the work, as Rodrigo explains:
[The music] should sound like the hidden breeze that stirs the treetops in the parks...depict the fragrance of magnolias, the singing of birds and the gushing of fountains.
The work premiered in 1940 at Barcelona. It is in three movements:
I. Allegro con spirito -There are few works for guitar and orchestra with one of the reasons being a problem of balance. An orchestra can easily overpower a solo guitar, but Rodrigo deftly keeps both entities on equal sonic terms. The work begins with the first theme played by the guitar with a very subtle underpinning by the low strings. The theme is in the style of flamenco and the fandango, a Spanish dance in triple time, and in this case with a few measures of duple time thrown in for rhythmic interest. This theme goes through various guises in the movement. A second theme is also involved and is put through the same development style. The movement ends with a final flourish from the guitar.
One of the gardens of the Palacio Real de Aranjuez
II. Adagio - The guitar begins by strumming chords and the cor anglaise enters with a melancholy theme. The guitar takes up the theme and embellishes it. The haunting themes and harmonies continue until the guitar plays a solo section of the theme spiced with some occasional dissonant accompaniment. The orchestra and guitar have a section of dialog before the guitar plays solo again in music of quiet agitation. The guitar plays arpeggios and strums flamenco style until the orchestra takes over and plays a short climax. The guitar returns, and the music grows quiet as the guitar rises in pitch and plays a gentle ending.
III. Allegro gentile -A theme is played by guitar with a tripping rhythm. This theme is repeated throughout the finale and is varied as it goes. The guitarist plays a descending figure and the music gently ends.
An Hungarian author by the name of Menyhért Lengyel wrote a piece in 1916 called The Miraculous Mandarin which was published in a Hungarian literary magazine in 1917. Shortly after it was published, rumors began to float around that the work, called a pantomime grotesque by the author, was going to be set to music by a Hungarian composer who was not mentioned by name. Whether or not the composer referred to in the article was indeed Béla Bartók is a matter of some debate among historians.
Bartók read Lengyel's piece and immediately wrote down some music inspired by the content of the work. Bartók played his musical ideas to Lengyel, and the author was delighted with it. The two had not met before then, but became friends and collaborators. While Bartók worked on the score for the ballet, he wrote to his wife about the music:
It will be hellish music. The prelude before the curtain goes up will be very short and sound like pandemonium... the audience will be introduced to the den of thieves at the height of the hurly-burly of the metropolis.
The First World War delayed the completion of the score until 1919 with the orchestration taking yet another three years, and the first staging of the ballet had to wait until 1926. The premiere of what was now being called a dance pantomime occurred in Cologne, Germany. A short synopsis of the lurid story of the work in Bartók's own words:
Menyhért Lengyel
Just listen to how beautiful the story is. Three thugs force a beautiful young girl to seduce men and lure them into their den, where they will be robbed. The first turns out to be poor, the second likewise, but the third is a Chinese, a good catch, as it turns out. The girl entertains him with her dance. The Mandarin’s desire is aroused. His love flares up, but the girl recoils from him. The thugs attack the Mandarin, rob him, smother him with pillows, stab him with a sword, all in vain, because the Mandarin continues watching the girl with eyes full of yearning... the girl complies with the Mandarin’s wish, whereupon he drops dead.
Not many who heard the premiere agreed with Bartók's beautiful story opinion, as the performance caused a huge scandal as reported in a German music journal:
Cologne, a city of churches, monasteries and chapels... has lived to see its first true scandal. Catcalls, whistling, stamping, and booing... which did not subside even after the composer’s personal appearance, nor even after the safety curtain went down... The press, with the exception of the left, protests, the clergy of both denominations hold meetings, the mayor of the city intervenes dictatorially and bans the pantomime from the repertoire... Waves of moral outrage engulf the city...
Bartók prepared the suite of the ballet that uses roughly two-thirds of the music. The suite was first performed in Hungary in 1928.
The suite begins with a depiction of the chaos and noise of the city. Three tramps are in a room. They have no money so they enlist the help of a girl to dance seductively in front of their window to try and lure men into the room so they can rob them. The girl's seductive dance is portrayed by the clarinet. The first man that is lured into the room is an old man. He pursues the girl, but once the tramps discover he has no money he is thrown out of the room. The clarinet again depicts the seductive dance of the girl and this time a young man enters the room. He begins to dance with the girl, and his passion grows. But he also does not have any money so the tramps throw him out. Again the girl dances, and this time she attracts a wealthy Chinese man, a Mandarin (portrayed by trombone glissandos) The tramps hide as they hear the Mandarin's footsteps up the stairs to the room. The Mandarin stands in the doorway and the tramps encourage the girl to keep dancing. The Mandarin makes a lunge for the girl and embraces her. She escapes and the Mandarin begins to chase her with the tramps close behind. The suite ends with the chase that takes the form of a fugue, and brash chords for full orchestra. The full ballet continues with the repeated efforts of the tramps to kill the Mandarin. They try to smother him with pillows and stab him three times with a rusty sword, but he still grabs the girl. They hang him from a light pole, but the pole falls and the Mandarin's body begins to glow eerily. The girl finally submits to the Mandarin, and after his passion has been satisfied his wounds begin to bleed and he dies.
Bach played for the Margrave, who enjoyed Bach's music. Bach offered to send some of his compositions to the Margrave upon his return to Cöthen. For various reasons (including the death of his wife) Bach put off sending anything to the Margrave until two years later. What prompted Bach to remember was the fact that Prince Leopold was engaged to a woman who did not care for music as much as the Prince did, and the rumor was that as soon as she was married she was going to use her influence on the Prince and have him disband his orchestra and release his musicians. 
