Ein Heldenleben might be the most egotistical piece in the orchestral repertoire—a musical depiction of one Richard Strauss battling villainous music critics, romancing a lady, reminiscing over past triumphs, and settling into a happy ending.
“You are to imagine, then, an American, visiting Paris, swinging down the Champs-Elysees on a mild, sunny morning in May or June.”
At the 1961 New York Philharmonic gala, probably the entire Carnegie Hall audience had seen West Side Story, owned the LP, and could hum its tunes. But Bernstein wanted to do more than a medley of hits for this special concert.
The style of the early 18th century would soon seem antiquated, and nearly irrelevant to the modern orchestra of the mid-19th century and beyond. But none of it would have been possible without the innovations of the Baroque era.
In 1885 the New York philanthropist Jeannette Thurber founded the National Conservatory of Music of America, and in 1892 recruited Dvořák to be its director. In the words of H. L. Mencken, he was hired to “introduce Americans to their own music.”
The longest gap in Dmitri Shostakovich’s symphonic output was the eight years between his Symphony No. 9, in 1945, and No. 10, in 1953. In between, he was denounced by Soviet authorities for a second time, accused of “formalism”—writing music without a proper social purpose.
Both Sergei Rachmaninoff and Niccolò Paganini were virtuosos of their eras. There the similarities seem to end.
Bacewicz wrote her Overture (Uwertura in Polish) in Warsaw in 1943 under German occupation. It was not premiered until September 1945, in a very different world.
In about nine weeks over the summer of 1788, Mozart wrote three symphonies that embraced an idiosyncratic personal vision.
The opera Cavalleria rusticana is musically gorgeous, dramatically gripping, slyly inventive, and historically significant. “It was like a door that suddenly blew open onto a sealed room. A fresh, cool wind from the country blew away the faint smell of mildew,” remembered one Italian critic.