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Maurice Ravel was a French
composer, pianist and conductor, born on March 7, 1875 and died on December 28,
1937. Although both composers rejected the term, Ravel is often associated with
impressionist music along with his elder contemporary Claude Debussy. In the
1920s and 1930s, Ravel was internationally recognized as France's greatest
living composer.
Ravel (1925)
Born into a music-loving family, Ravel entered the Paris Conservatoire, France's premier music college, but he was not well regarded by its conservative establishment. After leaving the conservatoire, he found his own way as a composer, developing a style of outstanding clarity, and incorporating elements of modernism, baroque, neoclassicism, and in his later works, jazz.
Le Belvédère in Montfort L'Amaury,
where Ravel lived from 1921 until his death
As in his most famous work, Boléro
(1928), Ravel liked to experiment with musical form that repetition replaces
the development of music. He also made orchestral arrangements of other
composers' music, the most famous of which was his 1922 version of Mussorgsky's
Pictures at an Exhibition.
Maurice Ravel's Museum House, Montfort L' Amaury
Ravel, who composed music slowly
and painstakingly, left fewer works than many of his contemporaries. Among his
works, the works included in the repertoire are works for piano, chamber music,
two piano concertos, ballet music, two operas and eight song cycles. Many of his
works exist in two versions, one for the piano and the other for the orchestra.
Bust of Maurice Ravel,
Montfort L'Amaury
Ravel was one of the first composers to recognize the potential of recording to
bring their music to a wider audience, and despite limited technique at the
time, he took part in recordings of several of his works from the 1920s.
Born:
December 11, 1803; La Côte-Saint-André, France
Died:
March 8, 1869; Paris, France
Nationality:
France
Occupation:
Composer, Conductor
Hector Berliozwas a French
Romantic composer who was born on December 11, 1803 and died on March 8, 1869.
His works include orchestral works such as the Symphonie fantastique and Harold
in Italy, choral works including the Requiem and L'Enfance du Christ, his three
operas, Benvenuto Cellini, Les Troyens and Béatrice et Bénédict, and works of
hybrid genres such as the "dramatic symphony" Roméo et Juliette and
the "dramatic legend" La Damnation de Faust.
Berlioz (1845)
Born as the eldest son of a
doctor's family, Berlioz had to follow his father to major in medicine, and
went to a medical college in Paris before defying his family by choosing music
as a profession.
He refused to follow traditional rules and formulas for music,
resulting in conflict with conservative musical establishment of Paris.
However, he also briefly moderated his own style sufficiently to win the Prix
de Rome, France's premier music prize in 1830.
Berlioz, Gustave Courbet (1850)
The opinion for Berlioz was
divided over the years between those who consider him as an original genius and
those who think his music as lacking in form and coherence.
At the age of 24, Berlioz fell in
love with Harriet Smithson, a famous Irish Shakespearean actress and married
her after seven years of courtship. Harriet inspired Berlioz's first major
success, the Symphonie fantastique, in which an idealized depiction of her
occurs throughout.
Harriet Smithson
Berlioz completed three operas, the
first of which, Benvenuto Cellini, ended in complete failure. The second opera,
the huge epic Les Troyens (The Trojans), was so large in scale that it had
never been entirely staged during his lifetime. His last opera, Béatrice et
Bénédict, based on Shakespeare's comedy “Much Adoe About Nothing” was
successful at its premiere, but was not included in the regular operatic
repertoire.
Poster for the premiere of Benvenuto Cellini (September 1838)
Berlioz, who had little success in France as a composer, increasingly
turned to conducting, gained an international reputation. He was highly
regarded as a composer and a conductor in Germany, England and Russia.
Musée Hector-Berlioz
He wrote
musical journalism throughout much of his career to supplement his earnings.
Some of them have been preserved in the form of books, including his
"Treatise on Instrumentation (1844)," which influenced the 19th and
20th centuries.
Richard Strauss was a German
composer, conductor, pianist and violinist who was born on June 11, 1864 and
died on September 8, 1949. Strauss, one of the leading composers of the late
Romantic and early Modern eras, has been described as one of the successors of
Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.
Strauss with his wife and son (1910)
Strauss began composing in 1870 at
the age of six, and then continued to compose until his death for nearly 80
years. His works cover almost all kinds of classical music genres, but he has
been particularly successful with “tone poems” and “operas.”
His first tone
poem, which was widely acclaimed, was “Don Juan,” then it was followed by other
works, including “Death and Transfiguration”, “Till Eulenspiegel's Merry
Pranks”, “Also sprach Zarathustra”, “Don Quixote”, “Ein Heldenleben”,
“Symphonia Domestica”, and “An Alpine Symphony”.
His first internationally
acclaimed opera was "Salome" using the German libretto by Hedwig
Lachmann which was a translation of the French play “Salomé” by Oscar Wilde.
Subsequently, with librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal he made other well-received
operas such as “Elektra”, “Der Rosenkavalier”, “Ariadne auf Naxos”, “Die Frau ohne
Schatten”, “Die ägyptische Helena”, and “Arabella.”
His last operas “Daphne”,
“Friedenstag”, “Die Liebe der Danae” and “Capriccio” used libretti by Austrian
theater historian Joseph Gregor. Other famous works of Strauss include two
symphonies, lieder including “Four Last Songs”, “Violin Concerto in D minor”,
“Horn Concerto No. 1”, “Horn Concerto No. 2”, “Oboe Concerto” and other
instrumental works such as “Metamorphosen.”
Strauss was a famous conductor and
enjoyed the status of celebrity as his works became standards of orchestral and
operatic repertoire. In addition to his own works, he received great acclaim
for his interpretations of the works of Liszt, Mozart, and Wagner.
Strauss conducting (c.1900)
Strauss, who learned conducting
from Hans von Bülow, began his conducting career as Bülow's assistant with the
Meiningen Court Orchestra in 1883. After Bülow's resignation in 1885, Strauss
served as primary conductor of that orchestra for five months before being
appointed as the conducting staff of the Bavarian State Opera, where he served
as third conductor from 1886 to 1889. Then, from 1889 to 1894, Strauss was the
principal conductor of the Deutsches Nationaltheater and Staatskapelle Weimar.
Richard Strauss
In 1894, he conducted at the Bayreuth Festival, conducting Wagner's Tannhäuser
with his wife, soprano singer Pauline de Ahna, singing Elisabeth. Then, he
served as principal conductor of the Bavarian State Opera from 1894 to 1898,
and then from 1898 to 1913 as principal conductor of the Berlin State Opera.
From 1919 to 1924, he was principal conductor of the Vienna State Opera and
co-founded the Salzburg Festival in 1920.
Pauline de Ahna Strauss (c.1900)
In 1933, Strauss was appointed to
two important positions under the Nazi German, such as head of the
Reichsmusikkammer and principal conductor of the Bayreuth Festival. The latter
position he accepted was vacant because the conductor Arturo Toscanini had
resigned from the position in protest against the Nazi Party.
Strauss on the cover of TIME (1938)
In accepting
these positions, some criticized Strauss for collaborating with the Nazis.
However, Strauss' daughter-in-law, Alice Grab Strauss, was a Jew and his
cooperation with the Nazis was mostly to save her life and the lives of his
grandchildren. He was not interested in politics, and the reason he accepted
the Reichsmusikkammer position was to preserve the works of Debussy, Mahler,
and Mendelssohn, who were banned by the Nazi Party, and to strengthen the
copyright protections for composers.
Stamp issued (1954)
Moreover, Strauss insisted that he would
work his opera, “Die schweigsame Frau,” along with a Jewish librettist, Stefan
Zweig, resulting in being fired from the positions of the Reichsmusikkammer and
Bayreuth.
Strauss villa at Garmisch-Partenkirchen
His opera "Friedenstag", which premiered just before the
outbreak of World War II, was a criticism of the Nazis, which attempted to
persuade Germans to give up violence for peace.
Star on the Walk of Fame, Vienna
In 1948, a year before his
death, he was cleared of any wrongdoing by a denazification tribunal in Munich.
Gustav Mahler was an
Austro-Bohemian Romantic composer who was born on July 7, 1860 and died on May
18, 1911 and one of the main conductors of his generation. As a composer,
Mahler served as a bridge between 19th-century Austro-German tradition and
early 20th-century’s modernism.
Gustav Mahler's birth house, Kaliště
Although Mahler established a position as
conductor in his life, his music gained wide popularity after periods of
neglect, including the banning of performances in many parts of Europe during
the Nazi era.
After 1945, Mahler's works have been rediscovered by a new
generation of music listeners, making him one of the most frequently performed
and recorded of all composers to date. In 2016, Mahler's three symphonies were
selected among the top ten symphonies of all time by a BBC Music Magazine with
the survey of 151 conductors.
Gustav Mahler (1907)
Born in a German-speaking Jewish
family in Bohemia (then the Austrian Empire), Mahler showed musical talent from
an early age.
After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he took
the conducting position in the opera houses of Europe and in 1897 was appointed
as director of the Vienna State Opera. During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler,
who converted to Catholicism to secure his position, experienced constant
criticism and hostility from the anti-Semitic press.
Vienna State Opera (1898)
Nevertheless, with his
innovative works and insistence on the best performances standards, he earned
fame as one of the greatest opera conductors, especially as a stage performance
interpreter for works by Wagner, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. Later in his life,
Mahler also served as director of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the New
York Philharmonic for a while.
The Metropolitan Opera House, New York (1908-09)
Since many of his works have been
made by spending part time while earning his living as a conductor, Mahler's
works are relatively limited. Except for early works like a piano quartet
composed when he was a student in Vienna, Mahler's works were generally made
for large orchestras, symphonic choruses and operatic soloists. These works
were controversial when they premiered, except for his Second Symphony, Third
Symphony and Eighth Symphony.
Bronze bust of Mahler, Auguste Rodin (1909)
Some of Mahler's music successors include
composers of the Second Viennese School, such as Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg
and Anton Webern, and Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten are composers of
the late 20th century who were influenced by Mahler.
In 1955, The International
Gustav Mahler Institute was founded to honor Mahler's life and achievements.
