MUSIC
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Josef Haydn
Johann Strauss, Jr.
Johannes Brahms
Fritz Kreisler
Franz von Suppé
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Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, K.525 - II. Romance, Andante performed by the Columbia Symphony Orchestra - Bruno Walter, conductor
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart displayed musical talent at a very young age, composing when he was only five. At age six, he performed for the Austrian royals at the Hall of Mirrors and impressed Empress Maria Theresia and her family with his talent and liveliness. While touring through Europe, it became evident that Mozart was not only an excellent performer, but he was also interested in composing music. He went on to write some of the most important masterpieces of the Classical era, including symphonies, operas, string quartets and piano pieces.
Mozart excelled in every form in which he composed. His contemporaries found the restless ambivalence and complicated emotional content of his music difficult to understand. Accustomed to the light and superficial style of rococo music, his aristocratic audiences could not accept his music's complexity and depth. Yet, with Josef Haydn, Mozart perfected the grand forms of symphony, opera, string quartet, and concerto that marked the classical period in music. In his operas, Mozart's uncanny psychological insight was unique to musical history. His music informed the work of the later Haydn and of the next generation of composers, most notably Beethoven. The brilliance of his work continued until the end, although darker themes of poignancy and isolation grew more marked in his last years. His compositions continue to exert a particular fascination for musicians and music lovers.
Serenade from String Quartet in F Major, Op. 2, No. 5 performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra - Eugene Ormandy, conductor
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Josef Haydn showed early musical ability and possessed a fine singing voice at an early age. He was trained as a choirboy at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna from 1740 to 1750. For the next eight years, he scraped a living in Vienna by composing and teaching and became acquainted with several prominent figures in Viennese music circles. His 108 symphonies, written between 1759 and 1795, range from works written for the relatively modest local court orchestra of two oboes, two horns and strings, to the greater complexity of his larger scale London Symphonies.
Haydn is traditionally considered the father of the symphony and string quartet writing the first well-known works in both genres. His early work is almost Baroque in style, later developing into early classicism. His works of the late 1760s and early 1770s are particularly interesting as they are in a style called "Sturm und Drang" (storm and stress), full of jagged chords, abrupt transitions and odd minor-key harmonies.
The Blue Danube Waltz, Op. 314 performed by André Kostelanetz and His Orchestra
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Johann Strauss Jr. was born in Vienna, and was the first son of Johann Strauss Sr., who was one of the most popular conductors and composers of dance music of his time. Even though his father discouraged his musical ambitions, at age 19, Johann conducted a program which included his own compositions, as well as his father's.
Strauss earned the title "The Waltz King" because of his prolific output and frequent international tours with his own orchestra. He revolutionized the waltz, elevating it from a lowly peasant dance to entertainment fit for royality. His best known work The Blue Danube was written in 1867.
Most of his better known dances and polkas were composed during the 1860s and early 1870s. He brought the Viennese waltz to its highest form with his gifts for melody, interesting harmonic structures, and clever orchestrations. By the 1870s, however, Strauss began to turn his attention to the stage, and subsequently wrote Die Fledermaus, which remains the quintessential Viennese operetta. It contains some of the most sparkling and inspired melodies of Strauss' career, as well as an
excellent libretto.
The son of a musician father and seamstress mother, Brahms studied the piano, theory and composition from an early age, gaining experience as an arranger for his father's orchestra.
He earned a position of influence in 1863-4, as director of the Vienna Singers’ Academy, concentrating on historical and modern a cappella works. In addition to giving concerts of his own music, he toured extensively throughout Europe and began teaching the piano. In 1868, he settled permanently in Vienna.
Brahms's greatest and most internationally renown work was the German Requiem, which combined mixed chorus, solo voices and a full orchestra. At this time, having written only chamber works, concertos, piano music, and choral pieces, Brahms finally turned to the symphony. The Symphony no. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 was dubbed "Beethoven's Tenth" because of its intense tone. It also contains in its fourth movement - one of Brahms' best loved melodies, which many compared to the famous theme of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth symphony.
It is the accessibility of Brahms's music that has firmly placed him in the canon of great composers. He was a true man of the people, using popular folk melodies and gypsy tunes. His music is about love, uniquely suffused with a melancholy romanticism.
Noted for his sweet tone and expressive phrasing, the Austrian-born American violinist and composer was one of the most famous of his day. Although he was a violinist of the Franco-Belgian school, his style is nonetheless reminiscent of the gemütlich (cozy) lifestyle of pre-war Vienna. Kreisler studied at the Vienna conservatory and in Paris, where his teachers included Léo Delibes, Joseph Hellmesberger, Jr., Joseph Massart and Jules Massenet. He made his United States debut at Steinway Hall in New York on November 10, 1888 and had his first tour of the United States in 1888/1889 with Moriz Rosenthal, then returned to Austria and applied for a position in the Vienna Philharmonic - but was turned down by concertmaster Arnold Rose. Rose was sparing in his use of vibrato and Kreisler would not have blended successfully with the orchestra's violin section. As a result, he left music to study medicine. He spent a brief time in the army before returning to the violin in 1899, giving a concert with the Berlin Philharmonic. It was this concert and a series of American tours from 1901 to 1903 that brought him real acclaim. In 1910, Kreisler performed the premiere of Edward Elgar's Violin Concerto - a work dedicated to him. Kreisler briefly served in the Austrian Army in World War I before he was honorably discharged after being wounded and spent the remaining years of the war in America. He returned to Europe in 1924, living first in Berlin, then moving to France in 1938. Shortly thereafter, at the outbreak of World War II, he settled once again in the United States, became a naturalized citizen in 1943 and lived there for the rest of his life. He gave his last public concert in 1947 and gave his final broadcast performances a few years later. Towards the end of his life, he was in an auto accident and spent his last days blind and deaf and died in New York City in 1962. Kreisler wrote a number of pieces for the violin, including solos for encores such as "Liebesleid" and "Liebesfreud." He also wrote operettas including Apple Blossoms in 1919 and Sissy in 1932; a string quartet; and cadenzas including ones for the Brahms D major violin concerto, the Paganini D major violin concerto and the Beethoven D major violin concerto. His cadenza for the Beethoven concerto is the one most often employed by violinists today.
Born in 1819 in Dalmatia, Croatia, a descendent from a Belgian family that probably emigrated there in the 18th century, Franz von Suppé spent his childhood in Zadar, Croatia, where he had his first music lesson and began to compose at an early age. He spent his teenage years in Cremona, Italy where he studied flute and harmony. In 1832, Suppé premiered his first extant composition - a Roman Catholic Mass in a Franciscan church in Zadar. Later he moved to Padua, Italy to study law but continued to study music. Suppé also made his singing debut in the role of Dulcamara in Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore at the Sopron Theater in 1842. He was invited to Vienna by Franz Pokorny, the director of the Theater in der Josefstadt, where he conducted without pay at first in exchange for the opportunity to present his own operas there. Eventually, Suppé wrote music for over one hundred productions at the Theater in der Josefstadt, as well as, the Carltheater in Leopoldstadt, at the Theater an der Wien and a theater at Baden. Suppé also produced landmark opera productions such as the 1846 production of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots with Jenny Lind. He died in Vienna in 1895.