Dakota Beacon

As summer drifts along, we must pause to note the lives of some of our great composers who were born in August.  They hail from all parts of Europe - Russia, Romania, Austria, Italy and France.

Let’s begin with the younger brother of Johann Strauss II - Josef Strauss, known to his closest friends and family as “Pepi”.  I always wondered if this was due to his mother’s partially Spanish heritage.   In any case, Josef was a truly gifted man.  He was born on August 20, 1827.  His famous father, Johann I, had hoped to keep all of his children out of the world of music and intended that his namesake, Johann II, would become a banker, Josef would have a brilliant military career and youngest son, Eduard, would perhaps go into the diplomatic corps.  It didn’t work out that way, a fact for which we should all be grateful.  The pull of their musical genes was just too powerful and they all became famous composers and musicians. Josef was multi-talented.  A gifted artist and poet, a mathematician (he wrote two textbooks on math) and engineer, he designed bridges.  Sadly, his life ended all too soon, in 1870, at age 43, from unknown causes.  He had always been in frail health and suffered intense headaches and fainting spells.  Apparently he died of the proximate cause of falling from the conductor’s podium while on tour in Warsaw.  He left behind a wife and one child, a daughter, and a wealth of beautiful music.  Here is his “Music of the Spheres” Walz, Opus 235:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGznlISvRTQ

And here’s one more,as a bonus, named with reference, perhaps, to his paintings - the Aquarellen:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRCO64IYJRg - very evocative of 19th Century Vienna, right?

Next we travel to Romania.  Romanians generally think of George Enescu as their national composer and the greatest Romanian musician.  Born August 7, 1881, to a landholder and the daughter of an Orthodox priest, George Enescu was a brilliant child prodigy.  At age 7, he was the youngest student ever admitted to the Vienna Conservatory which had never allowed anyone under age 14 to study there, graduating at age 12.  He gave a concert at age 10, at the ly court of Vienna, before Emperor Franz Josef.  At 16 his first “mature” work was performed in Paris, his Poema Románá.  He played piano, violin, composed and conducted.  He was also known as a teacher - one of his pupils was Yehudi Menhuin.  Enescu was known for drawing inspiration from folk traditions, including oriental music, as Ravi Shankar noted.  Enescu died in May of 1955.  Here is a rare performance - Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody . . . conducted by George Enescu:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZUsvQbTn_o

From Romania to Italy!   Amilcare Ponchielli was born near Cremona on August 31, 1834.  Musically gifted from early childhood, he won a scholarship to study at the famed Milan Conservatory at age nine.  At ten, he composed his first symphony.  His first opera was I Promessi Sposi (“The Betrothed”), in 1856.  He concentrated most of his career on composition of opera.  He had won a professorship at his conservatory but through some nefarious manipulation lost it and spent several years knocking about small-town Italy, writing and conducting.  Roughly a contemporary of Verdi, he shared Verdi’s enthusiasm for the newly unified Italy of Garibaldi.  His best-known work is La Gioconda, a melodramatic story of love and treachery in Venice.  (Many will recall the ballet, “Dance of the Hours” from that opera from Disney’s Fantasia and Allen Sherman’s “Hello Mudduh, hello Fadduh”.)  Ponchielli finally became a professor at the Milan Conservatory, where he was the teacher of some of Italy’s greatest composers, including Puccini and Mascagni.  He died January 16, 1886, in Milan, of pneumonia.  Here is an excerpt from La Gioconda:  The blind woman presents a precious gift, her rosary, in gratitude, to Laura, who has just protected her in the square:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjeoHb1ANqc

And something to watch - the Dance of the Hours  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SulJeBKmfk

Let’s linger in Italy just a bit longer - and celebrate the life and works of another great operatic composer, Umberto Giordano.  Born August 26, 1867 in the south of Italy, he studied at the Conservatoire of Naples.  He wrote his first opera, Marina, in about 1890-91, a work which, although it did not win (first prize went to Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana), was impressive enough to win him a commission.  His work was to focus on Italian “verismo” genre, generally describing the difficulties of everyday life, in all its brutal reality.  One of Giordano’s best-known works is based on the tragic life of the French poet, Andrea Chenier, executed during the French Revolution.  If you listen to this recording by the amazing Franco Corelli, in the title rôle, you might think of “E luchevan le stelle”, Mario Cavaradossi’s aria from Puccini’s Tosca.  It should be no surprise that Giordano and Puccini were contemporaries and both known for “verismo” opera.  A personal note - when I was very young (true- I was once!) I was working in Memphis on my first job, when the Metropolitan Opera toured there.  They had a three-performance schedule which included, if memory serves, La Boheme, Andrea Chenier and Rigoletto.  The only night I had off was the night of Rigoletto and I surely don’t regret seeing that performance - one of the last of Richard Tucker’s career, as the Duke (not his best year, but a legend anyway) and the astounding performance of Cornell Macneill as Rigoletto! (unforgettable!) - but I had longed to see one of my operatic heroes - the dashing Franco Corelli - in one of his greatest rôles!  Well, all we can do now is listen to his recording of the great aria from Andrea Chenier - “Un di, all'azzurro spazio”.  Here goes:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yCALtS6PH0

Meanwhile, back in Russia, Alexander Glazunov, was born August 10, 1865, in time to get in on the late Romantic era in Russian music.  His father was a wealthy publisher in St. Petersburg.  At nine he began learning the piano and produced his first composition at age eleven.  The famous Russian composer, Mily Balakirev, noticed his talent and introduced him to Rimsky-Korsakov, who presented this work.  It won the approval of other major figures in Russian music at the time, Borodin among them.  Subsequently, as Rimsky-Korsakov’s pupil, he made astonishingly rapid progress.  As a guest and travelling companion of a wealthy Russian connoisseur of music, Belyayev, Glazunov toured Europe and met Franz Liszt, in Weimar, where Glazunov’s First Symphony was performed.  The 1890s were his most productive era, and he wrote three more symphonies, a ballet and two string quartets.  Before and during the Russian Revolution, Glazunov was a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory - among needy musicians he helped were Dmitri Shostakovich and violinist Nathan Milstien.  Although he managed to navigate his way through the revolution (his leadership at the Conservatory resulted in the emphasis the Bolsheviks placed on the arts and music) he was not in tune with students’ demands for more freedom, academically.  Weary of the Conservatory life, he began to “tour” extensively, in Europe and America in 1928.  He took up residence in Paris, where he remained “for his health”.  He never returned to Russia.  His remains are interred in St. Petersburg.  Here is his composition, The Seasons:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pByceAzSjqw

Our final stop is France.  Claude Debussy was born August 22, 1862.  At age ten he began to study piano at the Conservatoire de Paris, but soon turned his attention to highly original composition.  He, among all composers, was known for marching to his own personal inner drum.  Although he had been inspired by Liszt and admired Wagner, he was to forge his own style of composition, even his own forms.  His tumultuous and often scandalous lifestyle alienated many other figures in music at the time.  He died during World War I, of cancer.  (At some future date I hope to post a guest article specifically about Debussy).  Although most people refer to his music as “impressionist”, he never liked the term and refused to call his music “impressionist”.  His best-known works were “L'après-midi d’un faune”, the opera, Pelleas et Melissande, “La Mer”, “Réverie”, “Arabesque” and the lovely “Claire de Lune”.  His music is characterized by its often exotic and evocative harmonies and highly original musical ideas.

I found this recording by Claude Debussy of his “Claire de Lune”, recorded in 1913:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yri2JNhyG4k

I hope this brief musical interlude made its way into your Sunday!  Until next time!

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