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Gurre-Lieder
' is a large cantata for five vocal soloists, narrator, chorus and large orchestra, composed by Arnold Schoenberg, on poems by the Danish novelist Jens Peter Jacobsen (translated from Danish to German by ). The title means "songs of Gurre", referring to Gurre Castle in Denmark, scene of the medieval love-tragedy (related in Jacobsen's poems) revolving around the Danish national legend of the love of the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag (Valdemar IV, 1320–1375, spelled Waldemar by Schoenberg) for his mistress Tove, and her subsequent murder by Valdemar's jealous wife Queen Helvig (a legend which is historically more likely connected with his ancestor Valdemar I). Composition In 1900, Schoenberg began composing the work as a song cycle for soprano, tenor and piano for a competition run by the ''Wiener Tonkünstler-Verein'' (Vienna Composers' Association). It was written in a lush, late-romantic style heavily influenced by Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. According to Schoenberg, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gurre Castle
Gurre Castle ( da, Gurre Slot, link=no) was a royal castle situated in North Zealand, Denmark. Its ruins lie on the outskirts of Helsingør, close to the town of Tikøb on lake Gurre Sø at Gurre, Denmark, Gurre. The ruins have been excavated and are now restored. History The castle was built in the 12th century. Four towers and a perimeter wall were added in the 1350s. It was first mentioned in court chronicles in 1364, when Pope Urban V sent a gift of relics to its chapel. King Valdemar IV of Denmark, Valdemar Atterdag died in the castle in 1375. Many stories, ballads, and poems have been made about Valdemar. The castle is associated with a legend about King Valdemar, his love for his beautiful mistress Tove Lille, who according to tradition stayed for a long time at Gurre Castle, and the resulting jealousy of his Queen Helvig of Schleswig. Over the centuries, this core saga was enriched by other legends, eventually growing into a national myth of Denmark. The myth was put into ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Clark (conductor)
Thomas Edward Clark (10 May 188830 April 1962) was an English conductor and music producer for the BBC. Through his positions in leading new music organizations and his wide-ranging contacts with British and European composers, he had a major impact on making contemporary classical music available to the British public for over 30 years. He was a leading figure in the BBC's Concerts of Contemporary Music between 1926 and 1939, and he played a significant role in the founding and early development of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. He held prominent positions in the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) from its inception in 1922, and was its president from 1947 to 1952. He was responsible for producing a number of important world and British premieres (some of which he also conducted), and he was associated with most of the important European and British composers, such as Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, Ferruccio Busoni, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dirk Kaftan
Dirk Kaftan (born 1971) is a German opera and concert conductor. Career Born in Marburg, West Germany, Kaftan grew up in Wittlich and Canada. At the age of 18 he began employment as a repetiteur at the Theater Trier. Kaftan then studied sound engineering (''Tonmeister'') at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold. Kaftan was ''Erster Kapellmeister'' at the Graz Opera from 2006 to 2009. From 2009 to 2014 he was Generalmusikdirektor (GMD) in Augsburg. His contract with the Theater Augsburg was to have run till 2016; however he vacated the Augsburg post early to return to Graz Opera as their GMD. His debut in June 2013 was a performance of Schönberg's ''Gurre-Lieder'' with soloists, the expanded opera chorus, the Wiener Singverein and the Grazer Philharmonisches Orchester. Kaftan was GMD of Graz Opera from 2013 to 2017. In Graz, his repertoire included Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde'', Puccini's ''La Rondine'', Zemlinsky's ''Der Zwerg'', Dallapiccola's '' Der Gefangene'' and Bern ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leopold Stokowski
Leopold Anthony Stokowski (18 April 1882 – 13 September 1977) was a British conductor. One of the leading conductors of the early and mid-20th century, he is best known for his long association with the Philadelphia Orchestra and his appearance in the Disney film ''Fantasia'' with that orchestra. He was especially noted for his free-hand conducting style that spurned the traditional baton and for obtaining a characteristically sumptuous sound from the orchestras he directed. Stokowski was music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the NBC Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Symphony Orchestra, the Symphony of the Air and many others. He was also the founder of the All-American Youth Orchestra, the New York City Symphony, the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra and the American Symphony Orchestra. Stokowski conducted the music for and appeared in several Hollywood films, most notably Disney's ''Fant ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (, ; ; 13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being published. He immigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941. Schoenberg's approach, bοth in terms of harmony and development, has shaped much of 20th-century musical thought. Many composers from at least three generations have consciously extended his thinking, whereas others have passionately reacted against it. Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Valdemar IV Of Denmark
Valdemar IV Atterdag (the epithet meaning "Return of the Day"), or Waldemar (132024 October 1375) was King of Denmark from 1340 to 1375. He is mostly known for his reunion of Denmark after the bankruptcy and mortgaging of the country to finance wars under previous rulers. Accession He was the youngest son of King Christopher II of Denmark and Euphemia of Pomerania. He spent most of his childhood and youth in exile at the court of Emperor Louis IV in Bavaria, after the defeats of his father and the death and imprisonment, respectively, of his two older brothers, Eric and Otto, at the hand of the Holsteiners. Here he acted as a pretender, waiting for a comeback. Following the assassination of Gerhard III, Count of Holstein-Rendsburg, by Niels Ebbesen and his brothers, Valdemar was proclaimed king of Denmark at the Viborg Assembly (''landsting'') on St John's Day (St Hans' Day) on 24 June 1340, led by Ebbesen. By his marriage with Helvig of Schleswig, the daughter of Eric II, Du ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Franz Schreker
Franz Schreker (originally ''Schrecker''; 23 March 1878 – 21 March 1934) was an Austrian composer, conductor, teacher and administrator. Primarily a composer of operas, Schreker developed a style characterized by aesthetic plurality (a mixture of Romanticism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Impressionism, Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit), timbral experimentation, strategies of extended tonality and conception of total music theatre into the narrative of 20th-century music. Formative years He was born as Franz Schrecker in Monaco, the eldest son of the Bohemian Jewish court photographer Ignaz Schrecker, and his wife, Eleonore von Clossmann, who was a member of the Catholic aristocracy of Styria. He grew up during travels across half of Europe and, after the early death of his father, the family moved from Linz to Vienna (1888) where in 1892, with the help of a scholarship, Schreker entered the Vienna Conservatory. Starting with violin studies, with Sigismund Bachrich and Arnold R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pierrot Lunaire
''Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire"'' ("Three times Seven Poems from Albert Giraud's 'Pierrot lunaire), commonly known simply as ''Pierrot lunaire'', Op. 21 ("Moonstruck Pierrot" or "Pierrot in the Moonlight"), is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems from Albert Giraud's cycle of the same name as translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The work is written for reciter (voice-type unspecified in the score, but traditionally performed by a soprano) who delivers the poems in the ''Sprechstimme'' style accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the ''Gurre-Lieder'', which was a fashionable musical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Though the music is atonal, it does not employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which he did not use until 1921. ''Pier ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sprechgesang
(, "spoken singing") and (, "spoken voice") are expressionist vocal techniques between singing and speaking. Though sometimes used interchangeably, ''Sprechgesang'' is directly related to the operatic ''recitative'' manner of singing (in which pitches are sung, but the articulation is rapid and loose like speech), whereas ''Sprechstimme'' is closer to speech itself (because it does not emphasise any particular pitches). Sprechgesang ''Sprechgesang'' is more closely aligned with the long-used musical techniques of ''recitative'' or ''parlando'' than is ''Sprechstimme''. Where the term is employed in this way, it is usually in the context of the late Romantic German operas or "music dramas" that were composed by Richard Wagner and others in the 19th century. Thus, ''Sprechgesang'' is often merely a German alternative to ''recitative''. ''Sprechstimme'' The earliest compositional use of the technique was in the first version of Engelbert Humperdinck's 1897 melodrama ''Königs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cantata
A cantata (; ; literally "sung", past participle feminine singular of the Italian verb ''cantare'', "to sing") is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir. The meaning of the term changed over time, from the simple single-voice madrigal of the early 17th century, to the multi-voice "cantata da camera" and the "cantata da chiesa" of the later part of that century, from the more substantial dramatic forms of the 18th century to the usually sacred-texted 19th-century cantata, which was effectively a type of short oratorio. Cantatas for use in the liturgy of church services are called church cantata or sacred cantata; other cantatas can be indicated as secular cantatas. Several cantatas were, and still are, written for special occasions, such as Christmas cantatas. Christoph Graupner, Georg Philipp Telemann and Johann Sebastian Bach composed cycles of church cantatas for the occasions of the liturgical year. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drei Klavierstücke (Schoenberg)
Drei Klavierstücke ("Three Piano Pieces"), Op. 11, is a set of pieces for solo piano written by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in 1909. They represent an early example of atonality in the composer's work. Music The tempo markings of the three pieces are: The first two pieces, dating from February 1909, are often cited as marking the point at which Schoenberg abandoned the last vestiges of traditional tonality, implying the language of common-practice harmony that had been inherent in Western music, in one way or another, for centuries. The functionality of this language, to Schoenberg at least, had by this time become stretched to bursting point in some of the more chromatically-saturated works of Wagner, Mahler, Richard Strauss and indeed some of Schoenberg's own earlier tonal works such as the string sextet ''Verklärte Nacht'', Op. 4, of 1899. Although there are vestigial, superficial remnants of tonal writing, such as lyrical melody, expressive appoggiaturas, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jens Peter Jacobsen
Jens Peter Jacobsen (7 April 1847 – 30 April 1885) was a Danish novelist, poet, and scientist, in Denmark often just written as "J. P. Jacobsen". He began the naturalist movement in Danish literature and was a part of the Modern Breakthrough The Modern Breakthrough ( no, Det moderne gjennombrudd, da, Det moderne gennembrud, sv, Det moderna genombrottet) is the common name of the strong movement of naturalism and debating literature of Scandinavia which replaced romanticism near the .... Biography Jacobsen was born in Thisted in Jutland, the eldest of the five children of a prosperous merchant. He went to school in Copenhagen and was a student at the University of Copenhagen in 1868. As a boy, he showed a remarkable talent for science, in particular botany. In 1870, although he was already secretly writing poetry, Jacobsen adopted botany as a profession. He was sent by a scientific body in Copenhagen to report on the flora of the islands of Anholt (Denmark), A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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