Emilie Mayer (1812 – 1883) is often called the “female Beethoven.” Her music was highly regarded in her own time, and is marked by inventive harmonies within the traditional Germanic forms. Over her career, Mayer composed eight symphonies, seven symphonic overtures, eight violin sonatas, twelve cello sonatas, seven string quartets, and six piano trios.
Mayer was born to a wealthy pharmacist in Friedland, Germany in May of 1812. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Mayer was encouraged to pursue music and composition by her family and male mentors, and not expected to solely be a wife and mother. Important regional composer Carl Loewe, said of Mayer that, “such a God-given talent as hers had not been bestowed upon any other person he knew,” and championed her work amongst his colleagues.
After relocating to Berlin in the 1850’s, Mayer became connected with influential musicians and patrons in the city’s concert scene. She traveled to Cologne, Munich, Leipzig, Halle, Brussels, Strasbourg, Dessau, and Lyon to oversee various performances.
The Overture D minor was written in 1850-55, after the premiere of her First and Second symphonies. It skews solidly romantic, beginning with a mysterious introduction in the lower strings. The following allegro section is marked by rhythmic sharpness, echo effects in the winds, and development of lyrical themes. Mayer’s compositional hallmarks of expressive harmonic shifts lead to surprises around every corner.
Claude Debussy composed the Children’s Corner suite between 1906 and 1908. He dedicated the suite to his daughter, Claude-Emma (known as “Chou-Chou”), who was born on October 30, 1905, in Paris. She is described as a lively and friendly child who was adored by her father.
She was three years old when he dedicated the suite to her in 1908. The dedication reads: “A ma chère petite Chouchou, avec les tendres excuses de son Père pour ce qui va suivre. C. D.” (To my dear little Chouchou, with tender apologies from her father for what follows).
Claude-Emma died in 1919 at only 13 years old, just a year after her father. The suite was published by Durand in 1908, and was given its world premiere in Paris by Harold Bauer on December 18 of that year. In 1911, an orchestration of the work by Debussy’s friend André Caplet received its premiere. The suite is in six movements, each with an English-language title.
Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum is a knowing reference used for many centuries for instructional books and music, literally translated as “steps to Parnassus.” It nods to the tedium of scale practice, transforming the mundane to his characteristic washes of sound and grand gestures.
In Jimbo’s Lullaby, a child’s stuffed elephant is lovingly brought to life, presumably mis-named after P. T. Barnum’s magnificent mammal Jumbo. The opening melody lumbers in the lower basses, representing our happy elephant.
Serenade for the Doll depicts the conversations of a Chinese porcelain doll, and of course, what musical element is more appropriate (clichéd?) than to use the five-note musical scale and frequent intervals of a fourth?
In The Snow Is Dancing, Debussy paints an icy landscape with shivering strings and floating winds.
Classical music fans will hear nods to Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun in The Little Shepherd, with an oboe leading the pastoral descent.
Golliwogg’s Cakewalk is the most famous and lively of the movements, and is emblematic of French society’s enthrallment with the new sound of jazz, which was emerging in the United States at that time. The cakewalk was a dance that was a mainstay of American minstrel shows, and characterized by syncopations and vigorous, strutting rhythm. “Golliwogg” was a black, stuffed doll, dressed in stereotypical minstrel show garb, and completely en vogue at the time; Chouchou may have owned one.
Debussy’s nod to jazz bookends a satirical reference to Wagner’s Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, barely masking the composer’s contempt for the German master.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 1875 – 1 September 1912) was a well-known British composer at the turn of the last century. The son of an Englishwoman and a father from Sierra Leone, he started violin lessons at age five, and quickly established himself as a composer and conductor.
He was particularly known for his three cantatas on the epic 1855 poem The Song of Hiawatha by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
In 1898 Coleridge-Taylor composed the “African Suite” for solo piano after meeting with the African-American poet Paul Dunbar, who encouraged him to explore his African heritage. Coleridge-Taylor arranged the last movement (“Danse Nègre”) for full orchestra, and it has since become a well-known showpiece. It features lively dance rhythms framed in a Victorian musical idiom, with contrasting lyrical sections featuring a late-romantic sensibility.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold was the son of Julius Korngold, the most influential music critic in early 20th-century Vienna. His parents, who came from a bourgeois Jewish background, gave their son his middle name in honor of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He grew up in turn-of-the-century Vienna, a world capital of music – the city of Brahms, Strauss and Mahler. Korngold was regarded as one of the most avant-garde Viennese composers of his day. A musical prodigy, he started composing at the age of six. When he was 10, his father took him to meet the great Gustav Mahler, who pronounced him “a genius.” His works, including piano pieces, a piano trio, and a ballet-pantomime, started being published in his early teens. Numerous other compositions followed, including operas (such as “Die tote Stadt”), piano sonatas, chamber music, songs, and other stage works.
He thrived up until the mid-1930s, when the threat of Hitler and Nazi Germany started to loom large. In 1934, Korngold was asked by Max Reinhardt, a prominent director with whom Korngold had collaborated in Europe, to travel to Hollywood to work on scoring music for motion pictures. His first film score in 1934 was for a film version of Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and was a success. Despite that, Korngold was not comfortable in Hollywood and went back to Vienna in 1937. As the Nazi threat to Austria loomed, Korngold fortunately was offered another Hollywood contract to score films and took it, leaving Vienna in early 1938 right before the Nazi takeover of Austria.
Once in Hollywood Korngold became the most celebrated film composer of cinema’s “golden age.” Drawing on his musical background in concert music, opera and operetta, he wrote scores for such celebrated films as “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” “Captain Blood,” Elizabeth and Essex,” “The Sea Hawk,” “Green Pastures,” and many others, winning two Oscars for film scoring. Through his film scores, Korngold created the “Hollywood style” of film music, which still influences film composers up to the present day.
During World War II, Korngold focused exclusively on his film scores. After 1945, he began once again to compose classical pieces – among them two concertos, a symphony and a string quartet. His violin concerto – with its soaring lyricism, virtuosic demands, and cinematic drama – quickly became a favorite of the solo violin repertoire. It was premiered by Jascha Heifetz in 1947 and was an artistic triumph, quickly becoming a staple of the violin concerto literature. Its style is hyper late-romantic, with Korngold’s lush tonal colors and typical instrumentation featuring vibraphone, harp, celesta, glockenspiel and bells.
The concerto is in three movements, each of which is based on themes taken from his 1930s film scores. The Moderato nobile is in a traditional format (exposition, second theme, development, recapitulation, and coda). Its opening soaring theme (in fourths and fifths) is taken from his film “Another Dawn.” Its second lyrical theme comes from “Juarez.” The meditative Romance is a prolonged meditation on a love theme (”Anthony Adverse”), and features a “mysterioso” section in the middle which pushes harmonic boundaries. The Finale is based on themes from “The Prince and the Pauper,” featuring a rollicking initial motif introduced by the soloist, and a dramatic second-theme climax leading to a triumphant ending.
Overture from the incidental music composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1909. It was written for the Cambridge Greek Play production of Aristophanes’ The Wasps at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was Vaughan Williams’ first of only three forays into incidental music. —Wikipedia
The seventh of the twelve London symphonies (Hoboken numbers 93–104) written by Joseph Haydn. This symphony was written in 1793 in Vienna in anticipation of his second trip to London.
The work was premiered on February 10, 1794 at the Hanover Square Rooms in London, with Haydn directing the orchestra seated at a fortepiano.
George Theophilus Walker (June 27, 1922 – August 23, 2018) was an American composer, pianist, and organist, and the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, which he received for his work Lilacs in 1996.
Originally titled Lament, the Lyric for Strings was first composed as the second movement of Walker’s String Quartet No. 1 in 1946 while he was a graduate student at the Curtis Institute of Music. The piece was given its world premiere later that year by the student orchestra of the Curtis Institute of Music conducted by Seymour Lipkin.
In 1990, Walker expanded the work for string orchestra, retitling it Lyric for Strings; this new arrangement subsequently became Walker’s most performed composition. The work is dedicated to Walker’s grandmother, Melvina King, a formerly enslaved person, who died shortly before its completion. —Wikipedia
The composer dedicated the concerto to Natalie Ouchkoff, his fiancé, whom he married the year of the composition’s premiere. The work’s production came at a time of little repertoire for the double bass, which was often considered as an instrument only for ensembles.
Some bassists argue that Koussevitzky did not write the entire concerto himself, instead receiving help from his friend, Reyngol’d Glière. But others argue that the concerto is tailored too closely to the double bass to have been written by someone who does not play the instrument.
The sole passacaglia of J.S. Bach (1685-1750) was first composed for a double-manual pedal harpsichord, and subsequently transcribed for organ. He worked on this masterpiece between 1708 and 1712 — when he was only in his 20’s! Borrowing from the solo chaconne form, this meditation in space opens with a solemn eight-bar ostinato theme in C minor. Eventually, the anchoring theme in the pedals moves to upper voices in twenty variations, and the theme transforms again when it concludes with a double fugue. This fugue is built on the first part of the passacaglia theme in combination with a countertheme in eighth notes. The work closes with a massive climax of suspended harmonies and full instrumental sonority, using all the colors of the orchestra. Robert Schumann described the variations of the passacaglia as “intertwined so ingeniously that one can never cease to be amazed.”
Leopold Stokowski, who created this symphonic transcription, said of this piece, “Bach’s passacaglia is in music, what a great Gothic cathedral is in architecture – the same vast conception – the same soaring mysticism given eternal form. He left us no orchestral compositions of this grandeur, probably because the orchestra was too little developed in his time. His Brandenburg Concerti and the Orchestral Suites are more intimate works written for the salon. The most free and sublime instrumental expressions of Bach are his greater organ works, and one of the greatest of these is the Passacaglia in C Minor. Many do not often enough have the opportunity to hear it, and so to bring it nearer to those who love Bach’s music, I have made this symphonic transcription.
“This passacaglia is one of those musical conceptions whose content is so full and significant, that its medium of expression is of relative unimportance. Whether played on the organ, or by the greatest of all instruments — the orchestra — it is one of the most divinely inspired creations ever conceived.”
Indian-American composer Reena Esmail (b. 1983) originally wrote Rosa De Sal for soprano and piano, using text from Chilean poet-diplomat Pablo Neurda’s Sonnet XVII. Esmail is known for interweaving raag with traditional Western orchestral colors. A raag is a melodic framework in Indian classical music, used for improvisation and evoking specific emotions in the listener. The word originates from the Sanskrit word for “color,” meaning it “colors the mind” with feelings like joy, sadness, devotion, or romance. Each raag has a unique set of rules and melodic structures, often associated with a particular time of day or season, and forms the basis for improvisation in the music. This version for trumpet and orchestra was commissioned by Mary Elizabeth Bowden, and premiered in 2023.
In Esmail’s own words, “The poetry of Neruda is at once so direct and so subtle. How better to capture the beautiful, intimate, subtle sensation of loving another person? The sensation of the poem led me to a setting based on the Hindustani raag of Puriya Dhanashree — which is also dark and longing, which reaches out past those quotidian comforts into the vast complexity of desire. I could say more — but the text says it better than I ever could:”
Sonnet XVII Pablo Neruda Translated by Stephen Taspcott
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way
that this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
