Introduction
One of the greatest figures of 19th century European art, Wilhelm Richard Wagner, is most commonly recognized in the world by his outstanding operas. However, the legacy he left for the future generations goes far beyond his music. Wagner’s personal philosophy, controversial ideas, progressive vision, and most of all, his enigmatic personality still evokes interest among both his admirers and critiques. Addressing the composer’s musical heritage, it is probably the legendary opera Parsifal that is just as much disputed over as its creator. The significance of this work, as well as its controversy, seems to reflect Wagner’s complicated personality, and thus is worth studying even in more than a century after the composer’s death.
Parsifal creation
The creation of Parsifal, Wagner’s last and most dramatic work, lasted 25 years from 1857 to 1882, embracing the last third of the composer’s life, and thus absorbing his most mature and thoughtful ideas. Inspired by Wolfram von Eschenbach’s poem Parzival, Wagner at the same time sharply criticizes the 13th century author, calling him a poet of “barbaric and muddled period” who “understands nothing whatever of the real content” (Beckett 3). Therefore, the poem conjured up the vision of the future opera in Wagner’s imagination. However, it is the poem’s imperfection (in the eyes of Wagner) that made the composer seek for a more organized and meaningful form for the plot and actually gave a kick-start to Parsifal’s creation. Wolfram’s poem included characters that were mainly plain, while he focused on the plot and the symmetry of the events more. Meanwhile, Wagner managed to develop psychological depth in all Wolfram’s characters and intensify their dramatic individualities (K...
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... modern musicians and artists name Wagner as their inspirer..
Conclusion
One of the world’s most talented composers and polemists, Richard Wagner, appeared to be also one of the most ambivalent figures in history. His last dramatic musical opera Parsifal reflects on both its author’s immense talent and his complicated character. The multitude of aspects considered in this work, together with the historic and political situation of the time creates a mixture of emotions that is sometimes difficult to analyze. However, even with his moral and ethical values being questioned by some researchers, Wagner’s significance as an innovator and a dedicated perfectionist of musical plays is undeniable. Regardless of your position towards Wagner and his personality, Parsifal is a work of art with worldly significance, which should be appreciated as the masterpiece that it is.
Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, published in 1938, has garnered attention from the very beginnings of its existence. It quickly seduced the initial director and producers with its varied musical styles ranging from classical arias to satirical ensemble numbers. However, this proletarian opera has reached moderate infamy not necessarily because of the quality of its content, but because of the way it reached its premiere performance. What began as a government-sponsored production became a guerrilla effort to perform in spite of government censors. This controversial piece resonated with both performers and audiences, and most of the cast’s sheer determination to present Blitzstein’s work is a source of great fascination. Due largely to the perfect storm created by the lingering tensions of the First Red Scare and the Great Depression, The Cradle Will Rock and the events surrounding its debut contributed directly to the end of the Federal Theatre Project.
What struck me as odd throughout my research, aside from many eerie coincidences in the progression of their lives, was how many times the subject of Ludwig van Beethoven appeared in my research, as he was Wagner's first real musical inspiration and various references are made to him. I was able to make many parallels between the life of Nietzsche and Beethoven, and it is in my opinion that the similarities between these two men are even more profound than the parallels between Wagner and Neitzsche. As academic interest in the comparison between these two men is buried beneath an overwhelming amount of material relating Nietzsche and more directly related historical characte...
Eastern Washington University Department of Music presented a program of Opera works by Giacomo Puccini, Aron Copland, W.A. Mozart, John Dowland, Franz Shubert, Maurice Ravel, and Robert Schumann on Friday, March 7, 6:30 p.m., in the Music Building, Recital Hall. These Opera works were sung by Senior Recitalist, Alexandra Rannow.
For the musical composer essay, I have chosen to write about a man who I felt made the greatest impact on Romantic opera in the 19th century this master of a man was given the name Giuseppe Fortunio Francesco Verdi but was commonly known as Giuseppe Verdi by all who knew and loved him. This great man was born on either October 9, or 10 in the year 1813 in the community of Le Roncole, near a small town called Busseto in the province of Parma, Italy his astrological sign is that of a Libra. His mother and father were both of Italian descent and their names were Carlo and Luigia Verdi respectively. Now this is where it gets complicated Verdi told every person that talked to him about his background that his parents were illiterate peasants. Despite this lie that Verdi told them they later discovered that his parents were not illiterate peasants as he had claimed but were very smart individuals tha...
In Act III, scene 1 of his opera Wozzeck, Alban Berg employs his take on a theme and variations. When one hears that a piece of music is classified as an “invention on a theme,” they immediately associate the style with early composers from the Baroque era, a time when classical conventions truly started to take their form. By employing methods of long term tonicization, bending the classical expectations of form and harmony, and accentuating Marie’s sense of wandering conscious and morality, Berg is able to give the audience a profound insight into Marie’s relationship with Wozzeck, her child, and herself.
40 is an effective composition that allows one’s mind to imagine vivid pictures. While listening to the piece by Mozart, I felt a sense of urgency throughout the piece while eliciting strong emotions of passion and grief. Composers like Richard Wagner and Peter Tchaikovsky were greatly influenced by Mozart’s musical capabilities of conveying intense feelings. The listener is affected by the different measures of commonalties between the musical periods, the composers of those periods and the pieces they compose. Mozart’s music pulled away from the norms and constraints of period style music. This composition enhances my knowledge because he has created compositions that employ the sonata, rondo, aria as well as other forms to exude strength, beauty, and grace with every
Paul Hindemith set out to anchor a new movement towards 'unnatural' music, while Germany lacked composers of New Music, to attempt to bring structure and pedagogy to the creation of an otherwise unstructured and unteachable new musical art form. Being in exile from Germany due to his unconventional and unappreciated (by the Nazi party primarily) work, he sought refuge in the United States to pursue and be faithful to his art. He discovered that theory constants were truly undefinable, however the process of trying to find them opened his mind increasingly inwardly.1 Hindemith’s ideas permeate his musical creations and his chronology of works represent a timeline of their changes. The first of three movements, “Angelic Concert”, in his Mathis der Maler symphony preceding his opera, is an example of how his theoretical processes ultimately came together into a solidified and understandable practice.
Wagner believed that as time went on, Greek art slowly disintegrated, each individual art going a separate way, developing alone—instrumentals without words, poetry without music, drama without either, etc. He believed it further disintegrated with the introduction of Christiani...
Grout, Donald Jay, and Williams, Hermine Weigel. A Short History of Opera: 4th Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003
The play “Amadeus” by Peter Shaffer was not written in order to be a biography of the great composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, much more than this, Peter Shaffer wrote it as a story, rather than a history. In his story he was free to insert fiction to make the play more interesting to a wide audience, as well as to fulfill his purposes. However, musicologists and historians have written several articles claiming that Peter Shaffer “trashed this immortal”. What none of them can see is that in “Amadeus” there are situations that are plausible while others are “fictional ornament”. In this paper I will make an attempt to point what is fiction or untruth.
Historical. This brilliant composition is considered as one of the two most important violin concertos of the German Romantic period, with Mendelssohn’s vi...
In order to understand a composer’s popularity one not only needs to analyse the circumstances and the composer’s works, but those pieces that provided the basis of the operas as well. Dent’s (1926) idea is that the melody of the music should follow the rhythm and pace of spoken English language. He also has a language requirement: an opera cannot become genuinely English if it is composed to foreign language. He emphasises that Purcell’s work needs to be studied; his works are in connection with the proper musical adaptation, since in Dent’s view Purcell was a master in following the rhythm of the language with the music. He even adds that the original story does not need to be written by an English author. In this chapter I am examining
Mozart composed many great works during his life, three of which are flute concertos, and also numerous orchestrated pieces, as well as opera hits. However, there is a great deal of speculation about Mozart’s attitudes towards writing flute oriented pieces, and whether or not he “rearranged” an oboe concerto in order to compose a piece suitable for his client’s needs, making us wonder if it is right to call his second Flute Concerto in D Major K.314, one of Mozart’s original works composed to display great skill and technique on the flute. In this paper I will use a few critiques to accurately display the accusations people have made against Mozart, and provide my own feedback into this situation.
These composers and their music have a lot in common. For a time, both lived in Vienna, composed in all of the major genres, and expressed an indefinable element of charm or even whimsy in their works. Yet, in other respects, they could not have been more different. One was a venerated gentleman, the other an impudent young man. One held a long, prosperous position with a respected music-loving aristocratic family, the other suffered through tremendous financial ups and downs, partly incurred by his own mismanagement. One was a self-made musician who lived to the ripe age of 77, the other a child prodigy who died at 35. Together they wrote the greatest music of the Classical age and, thus, are considered two of the greatest composers the world has ever known.
My composer is known as an influential minimalist and has written a variety of works such as opera, musical theater, symphonies, chamber music, and film scores and much more. This composer’s identity is none other than Philip Glass. The major focus in this paper are to give a moderately brief background on Philip Glass, examining his style of music along with how others view it and describe one of Philip Glass’s musical pieces. The background or bio about Philip Glass has information primary associated with events surrounding his career. When we reach examining Philip Glass’s style of music, people’s opinions on his music and who he sounds similar too is discussed. The final part of paper basically discuss one of Philip Glass’s works and how it serves as an example to his other music.