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Moonlight Sonata
The Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, marked ''Quasi una fantasia'', Op. 27, No. 2, is a piano sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven. It was completed in 1801 and dedicated in 1802 to his pupil Countess Giulietta Guicciardi. The popular name ''Moonlight Sonata'' goes back to a critic's remark after Beethoven's death. The piece is one of Beethoven's most popular compositions for the piano, and it was a popular favourite even in his own day. Beethoven wrote the ''Moonlight Sonata'' in his early thirties, after he had finished with some commissioned work; there is no evidence that he was commissioned to write this sonata. Names The first edition of the score is headed ''Sonata quasi una fantasia'', the same title as that of its companion piece, Op. 27, No. 1. Grove Music Online translates the Italian title as "sonata in the manner of a fantasy". "The subtitle reminds listeners that the piece, although technically a sonata, is suggestive of a free-flowing, improvised fantasia." T ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ludwig Van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. Beethoven remains one of the most admired composers in the history of Western music; his works rank amongst the most performed of the classical music repertoire and span the transition from the Classical period to the Romantic era in classical music. His career has conventionally been divided into early, middle, and late periods. His early period, during which he forged his craft, is typically considered to have lasted until 1802. From 1802 to around 1812, his middle period showed an individual development from the styles of Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and is sometimes characterized as heroic. During this time, he began to grow increasingly deaf. In his late period, from 1812 to 1827, he extended his innovations in musical form and expression. Beethoven was born in Bonn. His musical talent was obvious at an early age. He was initially harshly and intensively tau ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ignaz Moscheles
Isaac Ignaz Moscheles (; 23 May 179410 March 1870) was a Bohemian piano virtuoso and composer. He was based initially in London and later at Leipzig, where he joined his friend and sometime pupil Felix Mendelssohn as professor of piano at the Conservatory. Life Early life and career Moscheles was born 1794 in Prague, Bohemia, the son of Klara Popper (Lieben) and Joachim Moises Moscheles. He was from an affluent German-speaking Jewish merchant family. His first name was originally Isaac. His father played the guitar and was keen for one of his children to become a musician. Initially his hopes fixed on Ignaz's sister, but when she demurred, her piano lessons were transferred to her brother. Ignaz developed an early passion for the (then revolutionary) piano music of Beethoven, which the Mozartean Bedřich Diviš Weber, his teacher at the Prague Conservatory, attempted to curb, urging him to focus on Bach, Mozart and Muzio Clementi. After his father's early death, Moscheles se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Maynard Solomon
Maynard Elliott Solomon (January 5, 1930 – September 28, 2020) was an American music executive and musicologist, a co-founder of Vanguard Records as well as a music producer."Maynard Solomon" in ''Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians'', vol. 5 ( N. Slonimsky & D. Kuhn, 2001). Later, he became known for his biographical studies of Viennese Classical composers, specifically Beethoven (writing an influential biography and an award-winning collection of essays), Mozart (biography), and Schubert (Solomon was the first to openly propose the highly disputed theory of Schubert's homosexuality in a scholarly setting). Education Having attended New York's High School of Music & Art, Solomon graduated Phi Beta Kappa''Billboard'', 19 November 1966, featuring Vanguard Records from Brooklyn College, CUNY, with a BA in 1950, subsequently pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University from 1950 to 1952. In 1979 he became adjunct associate professor at the Graduate School, CUNY, and betw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Prelude (music)
A prelude (german: Präludium or '; la, praeludium; french: prélude; it, preludio) is a short Musical piece, piece of music, the musical form, form of which may vary from piece to piece. While, during the Baroque era, for example, it may have served as an introduction to succeeding movements of a work that were usually longer and more complex, it may also have been a stand-alone piece of work during the Romantic era. It generally features a small number of rhythmic and melodic Motif (music), motifs that recur through the piece. Stylistically, the prelude is improvisatory in nature. The term may also refer to an overture, particularly to those seen in an opera or an oratorio. History The first preludes to be Musical notation, notated were Organ repertoire, organ pieces that were played to introduce church music, the earliest surviving examples being five brief ''praeambula'' in the Ileborgh Tablature of 1448. These were closely followed by freely composed preludes in an Mus ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sonata-allegro
Sonata form (also ''sonata-allegro form'' or ''first movement form'') is a musical form, musical structure generally consisting of three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation. It has been used widely since the middle of the 18th century (the early Classical music era, Classical period). While it is typically used in the first Movement (music), movement of multi-movement pieces, it is sometimes used in subsequent movements as well—particularly the final movement. The teaching of sonata form in music theory rests on a standard definition and a series of hypotheses about the underlying reasons for the durability and variety of the form—a definition that arose in the second quarter of the 19th century. There is little disagreement that on the largest level, the form consists of three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a recapitulation; however, beneath this general structure, sonata form is difficult to pin down to a single model. The st ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Bekker
Max Paul Eugen Bekker (11 September 1882 – 7 March 1937) was a German music critic and author. Described as having "brilliant style and ..extensive theoretical and practical knowledge," Bekker was chief music critic for both the ''Frankfurter Zeitung'' (1911–1923), and later the ''New Yorker Staats-Zeitung'' (1934–1937). Life and career Max Paul Eugen Bekker was born in Berlin on 11 September 1882 as the only child of Hirsch Nachmann Michel Bekker and Olga Elsner. He studied piano with Alfred Sormann, theory with Benno Horwitz, and violin with Fabian Rehfeld. He began his career as a violinist in the Berlin Philharmonic, before employment as a conductor between 1902 and 1905. He ceased playing violin professionally in 1906, although continued to give lessons privately. After Bekker stopped professional performance he began music criticism, publishing monographs on Oskar Fried (1906/7) and Jacques Offenbach (1909), as well as a successful book on Beethoven in 1911. The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MIDI
MIDI (; Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a technical standard that describes a communications protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, computers, and related audio devices for playing, editing, and recording music. The specification originates in the paper ''Universal Synthesizer Interface'' published by Dave Smith and Chet Wood of Sequential Circuits at the 1981 Audio Engineering Society conference in New York City. A single MIDI cable can carry up to sixteen channels of MIDI data, each of which can be routed to a separate device. Each interaction with a key, button, knob or slider is converted into a MIDI event, which specifies musical instructions, such as a note's pitch, timing and loudness. One common MIDI application is to play a MIDI keyboard or other controller and use it to trigger a digital sound module (which contains synthesized musical sounds) to generate sounds, which t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digital Piano
A digital piano is a type of electronic keyboard instrument designed to serve primarily as an alternative to the traditional acoustic piano, both in how it feels to play and in the sound it produces. Digital pianos use either synthesized emulation or recorded samples of an acoustic piano, which are played through one of more internal loudspeakers. They also incorporate weighted keys, which recreate the feel of an acoustic piano. Some digital pianos are designed to also look like an upright or grand piano. Others may be very simple, without a stand. While digital pianos may sometimes fall short of acoustic ones in feel and sound, their advantages include being smaller, weighing much less, and costing less than an acoustic piano. In addition, they do not need to be tuned, and their tuning can be modified to match the tuning of another instrument (e.g. a pipe organ). Like other electronic musical instruments, they can be connected to an amplifier or a PA system to produce a sound ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bärenreiter
Bärenreiter (Bärenreiter-Verlag) is a German classical music publishing house based in Kassel. The firm was founded by Karl Vötterle (1903–1975) in Augsburg in 1923, and moved to Kassel in 1927, where it still has its headquarters; it also has offices in Basel, London, New York and Prague. The company is currently managed by Barbara Scheuch-Vötterle and Leonhard Scheuch. Since 1951, the company's focus has been on the New Complete Editions series for various composers. These are urtext editions, and cover the entire work of the selected composer. Series include: J. S. Bach (the ''Neue Bach-Ausgabe'', a joint project with the Deutscher Verlag für Musik), Berlioz, Fauré, Gluck, Handel, Janáček, Mozart (Neue Mozart-Ausgabe), Rossini, Saint-Saëns, Schubert (New Schubert Edition), Telemann Georg Philipp Telemann (; – 25 June 1767) was a German Baroque composer and multi-instrumentalist. Almost completely self-taught in music, he became a composer against his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Czerny
Carl Czerny (; 21 February 1791 – 15 July 1857) was an Austrian composer, teacher, and pianist of Czech origin whose music spanned the late Classical and early Romantic eras. His vast musical production amounted to over a thousand works and his books of studies for the piano are still widely used in piano teaching. He was one of Ludwig van Beethoven's best-known pupils. Early life Infancy Carl Czerny was born in Vienna (Leopoldstadt) and was baptized in St. Leopold parish. His parents were of Czech origin; his mother was Moravian. His parents spoke Czech with him. Czerny came from a musical family: his grandfather was a violinist at Nymburk, near Prague, and his father, Wenzel, was an oboist, organist and pianist. When Czerny was six months old, his father took a job as a piano teacher at a Polish manor and the family moved to Poland, where they lived until the third partition of Poland prompted the family to return to Vienna in 1795. As a child prodigy, Czerny began playin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Donald Tovey
Sir Donald Francis Tovey (17 July 187510 July 1940) was a British musical analyst, musicologist, writer on music, composer, conductor and pianist. He had been best known for his '' Essays in Musical Analysis'' and his editions of works by Bach and Beethoven, but since the 1990s his compositions (relatively small in number but substantial in musical content) have been recorded and performed with increasing frequency. The recordings have mostly been well received by reviewers. Life He was born at Eton, Berkshire, the son of Duncan Crookes Tovey, an assistant master at Eton College, and his wife, Mary Fison. As a child Tovey was privately educated exclusively by Sophie Weisse. She was impressed by his musical gifts evident at an early age and took it upon herself to nurture him. Through her network of associates he was introduced to composers, performers and music critics. These included Walter Parratt, James Higgs and (from the age of 14) Hubert Parry for composition. Also in S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Compton Mackenzie
Sir Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie, (17 January 1883 – 30 November 1972) was a Scottish writer of fiction, biography, histories and a memoir, as well as a cultural commentator, raconteur and lifelong Scottish independence, Scottish nationalist. He was one of the co-founders in 1928 of the National Party of Scotland along with Christopher Murray Grieve, Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, R. B. Cunninghame Graham and John MacCormick. He was Knight Bachelor, knighted in 1952. Background Edward Montague Compton Mackenzie was born in West Hartlepool, County Durham, England, into a theatrical family of Mackenzies, many of whose members used Compton as their stage surname, starting with his English grandfather Henry Compton (actor), Henry Compton, a well-known William Shakespeare, Shakespearean actor of the Victorian era. His father, Edward Compton (actor), Edward Compton Mackenzie, and mother, Virginia Frances Bateman, were actors and theatre company managers; h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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