I heard this work on the radio just the other day and I found it captivating. It is Im Sommerwind — “In the Summer Wind” — by Anton Webern.

I am honestly not sure if I have ever heard anything by Webern before. Primarily an early-20th century composer, Webern is known for being one of the chief students and followers of Anton Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, in which the traditional systems of tonality in Western music were finally broken down completely. I’ve always found twelve-tone music difficult, and in truth I have honestly never much explored it (and yes, perhaps I should). This piece is an early work of Webern’s, written before he really took Schoenberg’s twelve-tone lessons to heart, but it is still easy to hear the way it straddles the line between Romanticism and Modernism. This work is deeply steeped in the late Wagnerian sound, the post-Tristan period when a lot of music felt like it was simultaneously grounded and at sea.

Webern apparently felt that Im Sommerwind was not representative of where, as a young man, he wanted to go as a composer, and he shelved the piece. It went unperformed until 1962, fifteen years after the composer’s death.

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Easter is coming, so in that vein, a concert overture by the great orchestral master Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His Russian Easter Festival Overture is a work that pays tribute to Easter and the Russian Orthodox liturgies. The composer actually uses a number of liturgical melodies and chants throughout the work, giving the piece a feel of being both older and newer than it actually is. Apparently in Russia Easter is called “the Bright Holiday”, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s overture teems with both a celebration of the Resurrection and a more pagan exultation in the coming of Spring.

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Like many a lover of classical music, I suspect, my knowledge of composer Paul Dukas can be summed up in one sentence: “He wrote The Sorceror’s Apprentice.”

Which he did.

The Sorceror’s Apprentice is pretty much the only work by Dukas to enter the standard repertoire, and I couldn’t begin to tell you without Googling what else he might have written. This is partly because apparently Dukas was extremely self-critical, and he actually destroyed a good number of his own works rather than let them be heard. A number of his works have survived, but as of this writing, Dukas remains to me entirely unknown outside of this one tremendously famous piece (which received an assist from Walt Disney when it was included in Fantasia).

Here is The Sorceror’s Apprentice.

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