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The Maiden In The Tower
''The Maiden in the Tower'' (in Swedish: ; in Finnish: ; occasionally translated to English as ''The Maid in the Tower''), JS 101, is an opera ("dramatized Finnish ballad") in one act—comprising an overture and eight scenes—written in 1896 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The piece was a collaboration with the Finnish author Rafael Hertzberg, the Swedish-language libretto of whom tells a "simple tale of chivalry" that may nonetheless have had allegorical ambitions: the Bailiff (Imperial Russia) abducts and imprisons the Maiden (the Grand Duchy of Finland); although she endures hardship, she remains true to herself and is freed subsequently ( Finland's independence) by her Lover (Finnish nationalists) and the Chatelaine of the castle (social reformers). The opera premiered on 7 November 1896 at a lottery soirée to benefit the Helsinki Philharmonic Society, which Sibelius conducted, and its music school; the Finnish baritone Abraham Ojanperä and the Finnish ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Opera
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librettist and incorporates a number of the performing arts, such as acting, scenery, costume, and sometimes dance or ballet. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble, which since the early 19th century has been led by a conductor. Although musical theatre is closely related to opera, the two are considered to be distinct from one another. Opera is a key part of the Western classical music tradition. Originally understood as an entirely sung piece, in contrast to a play with songs, opera has come to include numerous genres, including some that include spoken dialogue such as '' Singspiel'' and '' Opéra comique''. In traditional number opera, singers employ two styles of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jussi Jalas
Jussi Jalas (23 June 1908 – 11 October 1985) was a Finnish conductor and composer. Biography Jalas was born as Armas Jussi Veikko Blomstedt in Jyväskylä in 1908.Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed, 1954, Vol. IV, p. 576 His father was Yrjö Blomstedt. He studied at the Helsingfors Conservatory 1923–30 (later renamed the Sibelius Academy), and then in Paris 1933–34, under Wladimir Pohl, Pierre Monteux and Rhené-Baton. He had further study in Germany, Austria and Italy before returning to Finland. He changed his surname to Jalas in 1943. He taught at the Sibelius Academy from 1945 to 1965, and was the music director of the Finnish National Opera from 1945. He conducted the Finnish premieres of Benjamin Britten's operas ''Peter Grimes'' and ''The Rape of Lucretia''. His wife Margareta ''née'' Sibelius was the daughter of Jean Sibelius, and virtually every one of his concerts included a work by his father-in-law. His own works included orchestral works, pi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Musicologist
Musicology (from Greek μουσική ''mousikē'' 'music' and -λογια ''-logia'', 'domain of study') is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music. Musicology departments traditionally belong to the humanities, although some music research is scientific in focus (psychological, sociological, acoustical, neurological, computational). Some geographers and anthropologists have an interest in musicology so the social sciences also have an academic interest. A scholar who participates in musical research is a musicologist. Musicology traditionally is divided in three main branches: historical musicology, systematic musicology and ethnomusicology. Historical musicologists mostly study the history of the western classical music tradition, though the study of music history need not be limited to that. Ethnomusicologists draw from anthropology (particularly field research) to understand how and why people make music. Systematic musicology includes music theory, aesthe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Symphonic Poems (Liszt)
The symphonic poems of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt are a series of 13 orchestral works, numbered S.95–107. The first 12 were composed between 1848 and 1858 (though some use material conceived earlier); the last, ''Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe'' (''From the Cradle to the Grave''), followed in 1882. These works helped establish the genre of orchestral program music—compositions written to illustrate an extra-musical plan derived from a play, poem, painting or work of nature. They inspired the symphonic poems of Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Richard Strauss and others. Liszt's intent, according to musicologist Hugh Macdonald, Hugh MacDonald, was for these single-movement works "to display the traditional logic of symphonic thought." In other words, Liszt wanted these works to display a complexity in their interplay of themes similar to that usually reserved for the opening movement (music), movement of the Classical symphony; this principal self-contained sectio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the ''Gesamtkunstwerk'' ("total work of art"), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle ''Der Ring des Nibelungen'' (''The Ring of the Nibelung''). His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lemminkäinen Suite
The ''Lemminkäinen Suite'' (also named ''Four Legends'' or ''Four Legends from the Kalevala''), Op. 22, is a four-movement symphonic poem for orchestra completed in 1895 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The piece was originally conceived as ' (''The Building of the Boat''), an opera with a mythological setting, before the work took form as a suite. Its story is based on the heroic character Lemminkäinen from the ''Kalevala'', a collection of Finnish folklore and mythology epic poetry. The second movement, ''The Swan of Tuonela'', is the most popular of the four movements and is often performed on its own. History The piece was originally conceived as a mythological opera before Sibelius abandoned the idea and made it a piece consisting of four distinct movements. The first two though were withdrawn by the composer soon after its premiere and were neither performed, nor added to the published score of the suite until 1935. Sibelius changed the order of the movements when h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Wood Nymph
''The Wood Nymph'' (in Swedish: '; subtitled '), Op. 15, is a programmatic tone poem for orchestra composed in 1894 and 1895 by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. The ballade, which premiered on 17 April 1895 in Helsinki, Finland, with Sibelius conducting, follows the Swedish writer Viktor Rydberg's 1882 poem of the same title, in which a young man, Björn, wanders into the forest and is seduced and driven to despair by a ', or wood nymph. Organizationally, the tone poem consists of four informal sections, each of which corresponds to one of the poem's four stanzas and evokes the mood of a particular episode: first, heroic vigor; second, frenetic activity; third, sensual love; and fourth, inconsolable grief. ''The Wood Nymph'' was performed three more times that decade, then, at the composer's request, once more in 1936. Never published, the ballade had been thought to be comparable to insubstantial works and juvenilia which Sibelius had suppressed until the Finnish musi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tone Poem
A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music, usually in a single continuous movement, which illustrates or evokes the content of a poem, short story, novel, painting, landscape, or other (non-musical) source. The German term ''Tondichtung (tone poem)'' appears to have been first used by the composer Carl Loewe in 1828. The Hungarian composer Franz Liszt first applied the term ''Symphonische Dichtung'' to his 13 works in this vein. While many symphonic poems may compare in size and scale to symphonic movements (or even reach the length of an entire symphony), they are unlike traditional classical symphonic movements, in that their music is intended to inspire listeners to imagine or consider scenes, images, specific ideas or moods, and not (necessarily) to focus on following traditional patterns of musical form such as sonata form. This intention to inspire listeners was a direct consequence of Romanticism, which encouraged literary, pictorial and dramatic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Veneen Luominen
''The Building of the Boat'' (in Finnish: ) was a projected Wagnerian opera for soloists, chorus, and orchestra that occupied the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius from 8 July 1893 to late-August 1894, at which point he abandoned the project. The piece was to have been a collaboration with the Finnish author J.H. Erkko, whose libretto (joint with Sibelius) adapted Runos VIII and XVI of the ''Kalevala'', Finland's national epic. In the story, the wizard Väinämöinen tries to seduce the moon goddess Kuutar by building a boat with magic; his incantation is missing three words, and he journeys to the underworld of Tuonela to obtain them. In July 1894, Sibelius attended Wagner festivals in Bayreuth and Munich. His enthusiasm for his own opera project waned as his attitude towards the German master turned ambivalent and, then, decisively hostile. Instead, Sibelius began to identify as a " tone painter" in the Lisztian mold, and subsequently reworked most of 's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gesamtkunstwerk
A ''Gesamtkunstwerk'' (, literally 'total artwork', translated as 'total work of art', 'ideal work of art', 'universal artwork', 'synthesis of the arts', 'comprehensive artwork', or 'all-embracing art form') is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so. The term is a German loanword accepted in English as a term in aesthetics. Background The term was developed by the German writer and philosopher K. F. E. Trahndorff in his 1827 essay ''Ästhetik oder Lehre von Weltanschauung und Kunst'' (or 'Aesthetics, or Theory of Philosophy of Art'). The German opera composer Richard Wagner used the term in two 1849 essays, and the word has become particularly associated with his aesthetic ideals. It is unclear whether Wagner knew of Trahndorff's essay. In the 20th century, some writers applied the term to some forms of architecture, while others applied it to film and mass media.For discussions of architecture as Gesamtkunstwerk, see the relevant section o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Kajanus
Robert Kajanus (2 December 1856 – 6 July 1933) was a Finnish conductor, composer, and teacher. In 1882, he founded the Helsinki Orchestral Society, Finland's first professional orchestra. As a conductor, he was also a notable champion and interpreter of the music of Jean Sibelius. Life Kajanus studied music theory with Richard Faltin, violin with Gustaf Niemann in Helsinki, with Hans Richter, Carl Reinecke and Salomon Jadassohn in Leipzig and Johan Svendsen in Paris.Finnish Music Information Centre Robert Kajanus biography page accessed 29 March 2011. His music drew on the legends of the Finnish peop ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emmy Achté
Emmy Charlotta Achté née Strömer (1850–1924) was an operatic mezzo-soprano, the first prima donna of the Finnish Opera. She performed in Helsinki from 1873 to 1879, excelling in dramatic roles. She was also a voice teacher for over 40 years, starting an opera class at the Helsinki Institute of Music. Biography Born in Oulu on 14 November 1850, Emmy Strömer studied singing in Helsinki under Emilie Mechelin. From 1869 to 1873, she received further training in Stockholm under Fredrika Stenhammar (1838-1880) and in Paris under Jean-Jacques Masset. In 1875, she married Lorenz Nicolai Achté, the conductor of the Finnish Opera. When Kaarlo Bergbom opened the Finnish Opera in 1873, Achté played all the main mezzo-soprano roles until 1879. These included Azucena in ''Il trovatore'', Valentine in ''Les Huguenots'' and Pamina in ''The Magic Flute''. She also gave concerts in Finland, Sweden, Norway and Germany and in 1878 sang at the opera in Gothenburg as a guest star. She i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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