A break from the Christmas music! Here we have the Welsh Rhapsody by Sir Edward German, a composer who lived from 1862 to 1936. He is most well-known for several of his light operas, as he was seen during his career as something of a successor to Sir Arthur Sullivan. German lived a long enough life to see the musical style that he favored fall out of fashion, and like many fine composers, his work fell into neglect and obscurity. This piece does not deserve that fate, though — it is a thoroughly enjoyable work of late-Romantic orchestral writing, thrilling and lyrical and muscular. Enjoy!
Tone Poem Tuesday
I’ve been exploring with some fascination the American composers of the late Romantic era, the ones whose music is rarely heard these days because none of it really goes beyond the stylings of what was going on musically in Europe at the time. Everyone was basically writing European-style music in America, with no real nationalistic material to incorporate as a way of standing out. American music didn’t start to break out until the arrivals of Modernism and jazz, but there was still important and meaningful work being written, and a lot of it is undeserving of its obscurity.
Case in point: the tone poem Hero and Leander by Victor Herbert. Herbert was primarily known as a composer of operettas in the earliest days of the American musical theater (which, again, didn’t really start to catch fire until jazz showed up), and his name is still slightly familiar to audiences because of his work Babes in Toyland, which still shows up in excerpts around Christmas each year (especially the “March of the Toys”).
Hero and Leander is an impressive work, dreamy and Wagnerian, telling the story of two doomed lovers from Greek myth. Guided by a lamp she lit for him, Hero would swim to Leander’s island tower each night. But one day a storm arose, blowing out the lamp and leaving him at sea to drown. When Leander saw Hero’s body floating in the waves, she threw herself into the sea to be with him forever. Herbert composed this half-hour symphonic poem for his own Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, and hearing it now I’m struck by its skill even if the musical language is straight out of the Liszt-Wagner-Strauss lineage.
Here is Hero and Leander by Victor Herbert.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Urg.
It’s been a busy and hectic several days here, what with The Store ramping up for Thanksgiving and an annual visit from the people whose name is on the front of the building, to pounding out words for NaNoWriMo (I’m on track, yay me!), and having a cold the last few days. So I forgot to post anything at all.
It’s not a tone poem, it’s a waltz. But it is a tone poem. I’d explain, but I’ve had some rum and I’d rather just listen to the music. So here is the greatest waltz of all time, On the Beautiful Blue Danube, in the wonderful video from the New Years From Vienna a few years back when they intercut the performance with video taken from the Danube from source to where it empties into the Black Sea.
There’s not a single day of the year when I couldn’t listen to this piece and not feel better about the world.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
I heard this work a few weeks ago while driving home, and made sure to make note of it. Ernest Farrar was a British composer born in 1885, but his life and career were ended in September 1918, when he was killed in action in World War I, less than two months before the war ended. So many young people of promise, snuffed out in those trenches and on those fields.
This work, an orchestral rhapsody titled The Open Road, seems to be a musical portrayal of a walk through Scotland (or so I assume, from the bagpipe-like sound of the work’s open bars and a motif that recurs). It’s vigorous music in the Romantic mode, unsurprising and melodic and competent. In short, it’s a pleasurable work, maybe not a masterpiece but not everything needs to be.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Antonin Dvorak wrote this work, The Noon Witch, after his return to Europe from the United States. It is a musical telling of a horrible story:
A mother warns her son that if he does not behave she will summon the Noon Witch to take him away. He does not behave, and the witch arrives at the stroke of noon. The witch, described as a horrible creature, demands the child. The mother, terrified that the witch has actually come, grabs her son, and the witch begins chasing them. Finally the mother faints, grasping her child. Later that day, the father arrives home, and finds his wife passed out with the dead body of their son in her arms. The mother had accidentally smothered their son while protecting him from the witch. The story ends with the father’s lament over the terrible event.
Yikes!
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Tone Poem Tuesday
Tone Poem Tuesday
Here’s something I’ve never heard before: The Mask of the Red Death, a work for harp and string quartet by Andre Caplet. Caplet was a French composer and a contemporary of Claude Debussy, and in fact his most noted work seems to have been orchestrations of the great master’s works. Caplet’s work here is based on the famous story by Edgar Allan Poe, and it is an eerily effective piece of mood music, employing a number of sonic effects throughout in addition to tonal moods that suggest atonality.
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Tone Poem Tuesday
It’s October, which is usually my favorite month of the year. We’re off to a rocky start this year, aren’t we…but life still must go on.
I’m doing a theme to the Tone Poems for this entire month, starting today. Since we’re approaching Halloween, we’ll be doing spooky music, or music that meditates on life’s darker aspects. Here is one of my favorite works of all time, by one of my very favorite composers of all time: “The Isle of the Dead” by Sergei Rachmaninov.
(The performance and sound are terrific here, but the accompanying movie may or may not work, depending on personal taste.)