The Black Knight (Elgar)
   HOME
*





The Black Knight (Elgar)
''The Black Knight'', Op. 25 is a symphony/cantata for orchestra and chorus written by Edward Elgar in 1889–93. The librettist borrows from Longfellow's translation of the ballad ''Der schwarze Ritter'' by Ludwig Uhland. Elgar was motivated to complete work on ''The Black Knight'' when offered a performance at the Worcester Festival. Cantatas were favoured by choral societies of the time. However, Elgar's desire to organize the loose format of the cantata by shaping it to a more rigid form is apparent. For example, Elgar divides the text into four contrasting scenes corresponding to the four movements of a typical symphony. Basil Maine, a leading Elgar biographer, believes the purpose of the work is to create a close mix of vocal and instrumental tones. Synopsis Elgar's ''The Black Knight'' tells the story of the intrusion of a mysterious stranger into a king's court with disastrous and gruesome result. It starts with a medieval jousting competition held in honor of the feast ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

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]  


picture info

Edward Elgar
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, (; 2 June 1857 – 23 February 1934) was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the ''Enigma Variations'', the ''Pomp and Circumstance Marches'', concertos for Violin Concerto (Elgar), violin and Cello Concerto (Elgar), cello, and two symphony, symphonies. He also composed choral works, including ''The Dream of Gerontius'', chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924. Although Elgar is often regarded as a typically English composer, most of his musical influences were not from England but from continental Europe. He felt himself to be an outsider, not only musically, but socially. In musical circles dominated by academics, he was a self-taught composer; in Protestant Britain, his Roman Catholicism was regarded with suspicion in some quarters; and in the class-consci ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (February 27, 1807 – March 24, 1882) was an American poet and educator. His original works include "Paul Revere's Ride", ''The Song of Hiawatha'', and ''Evangeline''. He was the first American to completely translate Dante Alighieri's ''Divine Comedy'' and was one of the fireside poets from New England. Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, which was then still part of Massachusetts. He graduated from Bowdoin College and became a professor there and, later, at Harvard College after studying in Europe. His first major poetry collections were ''Voices of the Night'' (1839) and ''Ballads and Other Poems'' (1841). He retired from teaching in 1854 to focus on his writing, and he lived the remainder of his life in the Revolutionary War headquarters of George Washington in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His first wife, Mary Potter, died in 1835 after a miscarriage. His second wife, Frances Appleton, died in 1861 after sustaining burns when her dress caught ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Ludwig Uhland
Johann Ludwig Uhland (26 April 1787 – 13 November 1862) was a German poet, philologist and literary historian. Biography He was born in Tübingen, Württemberg, and studied jurisprudence at the university there, but also took an interest in medieval literature, especially old German and French poetry. Having graduated as a doctor of laws in 1810, he went to Paris for eight months to continue his studies of poetry; and from 1812 to 1814 he worked as a lawyer in Stuttgart, in the bureau of the minister of justice. Poetry He began his career as a poet in 1807 and 1808 by contributing ballads and lyrics to Seckendorff's ''Musenalmanach''; and in 1812 and 1813 he wrote poems for Kerner's ''Poetischer Almanach'' and ''Deutscher Dichterwald''. In 1815 he collected his poems in a volume entitled ''Vaterländische Gedichte'', which almost immediately secured a wide circle of readers. To almost every new edition he added some fresh poems. His two dramatic works ''Ernst, Herzog von S ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Movement (music)
A movement is a self-contained part of a musical composition or musical form. While individual or selected movements from a composition are sometimes performed separately as stand-alone pieces, a performance of the complete work requires all the movements to be performed in succession. A movement is a section Section, Sectioning or Sectioned may refer to: Arts, entertainment and media * Section (music), a complete, but not independent, musical idea * Section (typography), a subdivision, especially of a chapter, in books and documents ** Section sig ..., "a major structural unit perceived as the result of the coincidence of relatively large numbers of structural phenomena". Sources Formal sections in music analysis {{music-stub ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Jousting
Jousting is a martial game or hastilude between two horse riders wielding lances with blunted tips, often as part of a tournament (medieval), tournament. The primary aim was to replicate a clash of heavy cavalry, with each participant trying to strike the opponent while riding towards him at high speed, breaking the lance on the opponent's shield or jousting armour if possible, or unhorsing him. The joust became an iconic characteristic of the knight (stock character), knight in Romantic medievalism. The participants experience close to three and a quarter times their body weight in G-forces when the lances collide with their armour. The term is derived from Old French , ultimately from Latin "to approach, to meet". The word was loaned into Middle English around 1300, when jousting was a very popular sport among the Anglo-Normans, Anglo-Norman knighthood. The synonym tilt (as in tilting at windmills) dates . Jousting is based on the military use of the lance by heavy cavalry. ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Pentecost
Pentecost (also called Whit Sunday, Whitsunday or Whitsun) is a Christianity, Christian holiday which takes place on the 50th day (the seventh Sunday) after Easter Sunday. It commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles in the New Testament, Apostles and other followers of Jesus Christ while they were in Jerusalem during the Second Temple Period, Jerusalem celebrating the Feast of Weeks, as described in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2:1–31). In Western Christianity, Pentecost is celebrated on the 50th day (the seventh Sunday) after Easter Sunday. In the United Kingdom, traditionally the next day, Whit Monday, was (until 1970) also a public holiday. (Since 1971, by statute, the last Monday in May has been a Bank Holiday). The Monday after Pentecost is a legal holiday in many European countries. In Eastern Christianity, Pentecost can also refer to the entire fifty days of Easter through Pentecost inclusive; hence the book containing the liturgical texts is calle ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Diana McVeagh
Diana McVeagh (born 6 September 1926, Ipoh) is a British author on classical music. She has written a biography of Gerald Finzi and several books on Edward Elgar. McVeagh studied at the Royal College of Music in the 1940s and was assistant editor with Andrew Porter at ''The Musical Times ''The Musical Times'' is an academic journal of classical music edited and produced in the United Kingdom and currently the oldest such journal still being published in the country. It was originally created by Joseph Mainzer in 1842 as ''Mainze ...''. Since 2013 the North American British Music Studies Association awards a biennial Diana McVeagh Prize for Best Book on British Music. References 1926 births Living people British musicologists Alumni of the Royal College of Music British biographers {{UK-writer-stub ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Novello & Co
Wise Music Group is a global music publisher, with headquarters in Berners Street, London. In February 2020, Wise Music Group changed its name from The Music Sales Group. In 2014 Wise Music Group (as The Music Sales Group) acquired French classical music publisher Éditions Alphonse Leduc. Éditions Alphonse Leduc publishes classical music by French composers including Jacques Ibert, Henri Dutilleux, Olivier Messiaen, Francis Poulenc, and Joseph Canteloube. It also publishes operatic works by Italian composers Gioachino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini, and works by Muzio Clémenti, Johannes Brahms, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. In March 2017, The Music Sales Group acquired disco publisher Bleu Blanc Rouge from Belgian record producer and songwriter Jean Kluger. In April 2018, Music Sales sold its physical and online print divisions, including Musicroom, to Milwaukee-based publisher Hal Leonard for $50 million. Hal Leonard will continue to distribute Wise Music's publishing catalogue wo ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Diminished Seventh
In classical music from Western culture, a diminished seventh () is an interval produced by narrowing a minor seventh by a chromatic semitone.Benward & Saker (2003). ''Music: In Theory and Practice, Vol. I'', p.54. . Specific example of an d7 not given but general example of minor intervals described. For instance, the interval from A to G is a minor seventh, ten semitones wide, and both the intervals from A to G, and from A to G are diminished sevenths, spanning nine semitones. Being diminished, it is considered a dissonant interval. The diminished seventh is enharmonically equivalent to a major sixth. Its inversion is the augmented second. The diminished seventh is used quite readily in the minor key, where it is present in the harmonic minor scale between the seventh scale step and the sixth scale step in the octave above. In an equal tempered tuning, a diminished seventh is equal to nine semitones, a ratio of 29/12:1 (approximately 1.682), or 900 cents. There is no s ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Neapolitan Sixth
In Classical music theory, a Neapolitan chord (or simply a "Neapolitan") is a major chord built on the lowered ( flatted) second (supertonic) scale degree. In Schenkerian analysis, it is known as a Phrygian II, since in minor scales the chord is built on the notes of the corresponding Phrygian mode. Although it is sometimes indicated by an "N" rather than a "II", some analysts prefer the latter because it indicates the relation of this chord to the supertonic. The Neapolitan chord does not fall into the categories of mixture or tonicization. Moreover, even Schenkerians like Carl Schachter do not consider this chord as a sign for a shift to the Phrygian mode. Therefore, like the augmented sixth chords it should be assigned to a separate category of chromatic alteration. In European Classical music, the Neapolitan most commonly occurs in first inversion so that it is notated either as II6 or N6 and normally referred to as a Neapolitan sixth chord. In C major or C minor, fo ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  




Elgar Society
The Elgar Society was founded in 1951 to promote performance of the music of British composer Edward Elgar, especially the more rarely performed items. Registered as a charity on 22 January 1988, It is particularly concerned with introducing the composer and his music to younger audiences and, by making grants to appropriate educational activities, to enhance the quality of life of members of the public. It also supports the Elgar Birthplace Museum with an annual grant with the objective of widening accessibility to the location and its contents and encouraging research. In the 1980s the Society encouraged the making of recordings of works such as ''The Black Knight'' which remained unrecorded. Organization The current president of the Elgar society is Sir Mark Elder. Previous presidents were Sir Adrian Boult from 1951, Lord Menuhin from 1983 and Richard Hickox from 1999. There are seven UK Branches organised geographically: Great Western, London, North West, Scotland, Southern ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]