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Dishcloth flirts with Lid, who is challenged to a duel by Broom. The music for this charming trifle was successful enough in Prague as a ballet, but it proved to be a sensation when performed as a concert suite with the title La Revue de Cuisine The Kitchen Revue early in The bassoon, violin, and cello were incursions from the classical tradition, but they enter wholeheartedly into the spirit of things.
At the time it was regarded as a noble failure when it closed after only 73 performances. Meanwhile, the original cast album became an underground classic, keeping the music alive, and showing that Bernstein had written in a rare profusion of musical styles, many of them witty parodies, in astonishing technical brilliance.
One of the most delicious of these was the great song in which Cunegonde laments her fate. In its opening section, in slow tempo, the singer mourns her lost hopes and the immorality of her present life.
Presently, as she begins to adorn herself with the jewels that surround her, she looks on the bright side of things, in a wickedly delicious parody of the coloratura cabaletta. His use of the term has created a meaning for the word—a lyrical, vaguely melancholy piece of pronounced melodic character. The most striking feature of the B-flat minor nocturne, Opus 9, No. The melody, gentle and pensive, sometimes streams sprays of notes—eleven against six early in the piece, twenty against six in the reprise, creating an air of utter freedom.
The story gradually transforms from the account of a crisis into a tale of music, friendship, and love. The main characters include Vice-president Iglesias, Mr. Hosokawa, a Japanese businessman, his translator, Gen, Roxanne Cass, the soprano who has been hired for the occasion, Simon Thibault, the French ambassador, the rebel generals, and two of the younger rebel soldiers: This string quartet uses four songs that Roxanne Cass might have sung in the concert she gives in the first chapter of the book.
Two songs are mentioned throughout the novel: I chose two other songs that an opera singer might choose at a small concert: Although I never present the songs exactly as they appear in the original, they are sometimes directly quoted and sometimes are used as more abstract source material to form all the music in the new quartet.
The rhythm is inspired by South American dance music. This movement tries to capture the character of people who remain calm in the face of trauma. The ostinato-like driving rhythm represents the carefully maintained anxiety of a roomful of people. Joachim is a hostage negotiator on vacation who is called in to help.
The melody is divided amongst the instruments. The various instruments represent voices in a chorus—including Roxanne soprano , the priest, Vice-president Iglesias, and Mr. Hosokawa—expressing the general sentiment of loss. Here, the harmony is derived from the famous Japanese folk song Sakura, and is combined with the rhythmic drive of South American dance music.
The cello acts as the voice of Fyodorov, a Russian ambassador and romantic, and also Mr.
Bonne Nuit (Sweet Good-Night), No. 1 from "Trois mélodies" eBook: Jules Emile Frédéric Massenet: www.farmersmarketmusic.com: Kindle Store. Digital Sheet Music for Bonne Nuit (Sweet Good-Night), No. 1 from "Trois mélodies" by C. Distel,Jules Emile Frédéric Massenet, scored for Voic.
Violin 1 is Roxanne, and at center stage, but subtly is the viola, playing the part of Gen, the translator. Carmen is a young rebel woman. She is a naturally gifted linguist and her love of language brings her to Gen, who illicitly studies grammar with her in a closet, late at night, after all the others are sleeping. As the piece progresses, Carmen becomes more and more certain of her skills, until she excels in such an astonishing way that Gen is visibly impressed. She is embarrassed and stops suddenly.
Throughout the novel, Gen arranges meetings: Hosokawa and Roxanne Cass, between himself and Carmen, and between the hostage negotiator and the rebel generals. Later Cesar runs into the garden, and eventually, all the hostages are released into the garden for some fresh air. Soon the rebels and hostages find themselves relaxing together: But the festivities soon come to their abrupt and inevitable conclusion.
And it is in another garden in Italy, months later, that several of the characters meet again to celebrate a wedding. His pianistic talent had been recognized early: And even then he had begun to compose little piano pieces. His teacher Elsner hoped that his gifted pupil would one day compose the great Polish national opera, but it was not to be. Eventually Elsner realized that the young man had such remarkable gifts that it was useless to impose an outside taste on them.
In , at the age of nineteen, Chopin went to Vienna and attracted a great deal of attention with his overtly Polish works. He became utterly enamored of the Italian opera in his day, especially the work of Bellini, whose ravishing bel canto melodic lines inspired Chopin greatly, especially in his later years. Though Chopin wrote the concerto with a full orchestral accompaniment, he was not then, or ever, a complete master of the orchestra. And just as Mozart arranged some of his early concertos with chamber-sized accompaniments of strings to allow them to played in private homes, the young Chopin very likely did the same for occasions when he could not afford or accommodate a full orchestra.
To make such performances possible today, the pianist Kevin Kenner, top prize winner of the 12 th International Chopin Competition made the arrangement of the orchestra part heard here. The finale is related to that Polish country dance, the mazurka, that Chopin made so wonderfully his own. The traditional mazurka was in triple time accompanied by strong accents on the second or third beat when danced, the accents are reinforced by a strong tap of the heel. This movement is a rondo with several sharply contrasting themes in mazurka style, closing with a dramatic coda.
Though his life line was torn asunder at the tragically early age of thirty-one, Franz Schubert left us an astonishing wealth of extraordinary music, filled with entrancing melody that he seemed to be able to draw instantly from sources all around in, and presented in harmonies that made his music deeply expressive—and that approached the developments of later romantic composers decades ahead of them. For most of his life he was known only to a small circle of congenial friends, making music mostly in private homes, less frequently in public spaces.
He composed large works like operas and symphonies, but the large part of his output consisted of hundreds of songs them in the year that he turned 18—one quarter of the total! And given that fact that almost everyone in his family played at least one musical instrument, Schubert wrote chamber music for the family circle from his early teens, and took part in performing it.
As a teenager—between his fourteenth and nineteenth years, to be precise—Schubert composed no fewer than seventeen string quartets, some of which are lost or incomplete. Still there are ten complete works from this early time. These were intended for use within the family circle, where string quartet playing was a favorite pastime, the composer himself taking the viola part.
Schubert left many works unfinished; he seems to have felt that if the composition as a whole was not going to his satisfaction, it was easier to begin entirely afresh than to try to salvage what he had. It is noteworthy, too, that the great majority of his unfinished works like the present Allegro assai are in minor keys.
We may reasonably speculate that he was concerned with the proper way of ending a quartet or symphony or piano sonata that began in the minor. He had to work through to some sense of victory after struggle. Schubert apparently did not see his way clear to writing a satisfactory finale in the present instance, and seems simply to have dropped the piece. And unfortunately he never even finished the slow movement, which had started out as an incredibly rich and tragic Andante.
But what he left—the completed first movement—is already light years ahead of anything else he had written for the medium. The character of the music is uncanny, suspenseful an effect created partly by the almost constant use of tremolo, either in the themes themselves or the accompaniment. The development grows largely out of the tremolo figure of the first theme. The recapitulation is quite extraordinary. We would expect to have the first theme again in C minor , then the secondary material, transposed to end in the tonic key, which would make it C major.
But Schubert is clearly not ready to yield to the major so early in the composition and this may have been at the heart of his compositional difficulty. Had Schubert seen his way clear to finishing a work built from such a premise, which was both striking and unusual for , we can scarcely doubt that the result would have been epoch-making. Sonata in A minor, D. One Vinzenz Schuster, who wrote an instruction manual for the instrument, asked Schubert to compose a piece for it.
He responded late in with the lavishly melodious sonata in A minor for arpeggione and piano. Schubert himself, though, wrote the manuscript quickly and carelessly, as if he suspected that few would ever hear the work he thus tossed off so prodigally. It is not rare to hear performances on instruments ranging from the top of the orchestral staff flute to the bottom double bass , though it is most frequently taken on the viola or the cello, the one lying just above the range of the original instrument, the other just below.
Still, it remains the only truly great composition for a string quintet with two cellos; it outclasses Boccherini by a long shot and remained so overwhelming an example that even those composers who might have used it as a model gave up in the end and wrote their quintets with a second viola. The first three chords are a good example: To an earlier composer, the diminished chord would have demanded harmonic movement, its tensions would have insisted on resolution.
Here, the chord simply is , a characteristic sound in its own right, possibly suggesting foreboding, or immensity, or mysticism—but not harmonic movement. Soon these three chords become a kind of motto embedded in the principal theme.
Conventional harmonic practice decreed that the secondary key must be G if the tonic is C. Schubert appears to accede to this practice with a vigorous modulation to G, but the moment he lands on it, he leaves the two cellos hanging on the note G without other accompaniment, and the second cello unexpectedly melts down the scale to E-flat, whereupon the cellos duet in a lush new theme in that key.
But there is another surprise: In the eighteenth century, such relationships occurred only briefly at the cadence to provide a colorful way of approaching the dominant. The slow movement begins in E major with an unearthly stasis of almost mystical quality; the middle section is a contrastingly nervous passage in F minor, the Neapolitan relationship to the main key of E.
Even more striking, perhaps, is the scherzo, which is as extroverted as one could wish for, only to have as its contrasting Trio a daringly imaginative slow section in D-flat Neapolitan to the home key of C , asking urgent questions for which no answers are forthcoming. And even the questions are brusquely swept away in the return to the scherzo proper.
The finale, though it is in many respects lighter in character and expressive depth than the middle two movements, continues to exploit these relationships with sudden changes of harmonic color, which underline the shifts of emotional intensity. The surprising last two notes—a unison appoggiatura D-flat falling to a solid C—encapsulate the essence of this harmonic relationship.
Program Notes by James Connelly.
His mother, Jeanne, was an accomplished pianist she had him take lessons in his youth. Scott Moncrieff Modern Library, Philip Kolb Plon, , 21 vols. Capet felt Proust had a deep understanding of Beethoven. Proust also shared his sense of physical suffering and his fear that mortality would cut short his vocation.
He consoled himself by trying to reproduce the song of the birds he could no longer hear. Allowing for the distance between his genius and my want of talent, I also compose pastoral symphonies in my own way by depicting what I can no longer see! In fact, both Proust and Franz Schubert sought solace from Beethoven in their final struggles to complete their work — Proust with the later titles of his novel and Schubert with the proofs of Winterreise. Months before he died, Proust wrote: Two centuries on, the Late Quartets retain a puzzling, aetherial quality.
Proust came late to Debussy. His ardor burned brightly at the start. The fire later subsided, but it never went out. Proust always kept a warm admiration for the composer. This is not surprising in someone whose catholic taste in music developed early and evolved throughout his life.
But all this was before his deepening immersion in the musical world of le monde during the Nineties: It is hard to say why it took Proust until to take active note of Debussy. Proust was also, by this time, a far more ardent devotee of Wagner, who, though he surely influenced Debussy, left the young French composer with reservations Debussy once likened Wagner to the evil magician Klingsor in Parsifal. Proust was avid for contemporary music. His enthusiasm soon boiled over in a letter to Hahn in early March: Yet, it seems unlikely that his albeit abated ardor for Debussy had diminished that much Corr.
More likely, Proust was flattering and manipulating the younger Cocteau.
Debussy remained a life-long source of pleasure to Proust. As late as June Proust also saw fit to memorialize Debussy in the later volumes of La Recherche , mentioning him a half-dozen or more times in Sodom and Gomorrah , published in his last year IV: Later, he debated about Wagner with a skeptical Reynaldo Hahn. He saw Parsifal in Tristan und Isolde informs the novel. After this stint, the piece returns to its tranquil state. However, the piece does end with the melody's tonic note and the piano's leading tone clashing for a stunning effect.
The phrase "Sachet toujours frais The text for the third piece in the set, "Barcarolle", was written by Marc Monnier. Throughout the song, the rhythmic figure, which consists of an eighth note tied to three triplet sixteenth notes , followed by another eighth note, is passed between the voice and the piano. Mon rideau le clair de lune.
The texts used in this article are public domain. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved 20 February Indiana University Press, Dolly —97 Piano music.