The Enjoyment of Music 10th
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The Enjoyment of Music 10th, Shorter Edition
Unit XX
Choral and Dramatic Music
in the Nineteenth Century
“God sent his singers upon earth with songs of
sadness and of mirth.”
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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56. Romantic Choral Music
“The oldest, truest, most beautiful organ of music,
the origin to which our music owes its being, is the
human voice.”
—Richard Wagner
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Richard Wagner
Increased popularity
Choral music societies as artistic outlet
Part songs, oratorio, Mass, Requiem Mass
Repetition helps lead to understanding
Beethoven: King Stephan final chorus
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Brahms: A German Requiem
(Listening Guide)
Johannes Brahms
• Protestant tradition - console the living
• Old Testament & New Testament text
• Written after death of Robert
Schumann and Brahms’s mother
• Soloists, four-part chorus, and
orchestra
Robert
Schumann
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Brahms: A German Requiem
(Listening Guide)
• 7 movements, arch form
• Connections between movements:
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–
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1 and 7
2 and 6
3 and 5
IV
III
V
II
VI
I
VII
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Brahms: A German Requiem
(Listening Guide)
Fourth movement chorus,
“How lovely is thy dwelling place…”
• Centerpiece of work
• Psalm 84
• Form: A-B-A’-C-A’
IV
III
V
II
VI
I
VII
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The Enjoyment of Music 10th, Shorter Edition
The Enjoyment of Music 10th
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The Enjoyment of Music 10th, Shorter Edition
57. Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and
the Romantic Part Song
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Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805-1847)
Pianist, composer, older sister of Felix
– Encouraged (as a female) not to pursue music as a
career
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Participated in salon concerts at parent's home
After her mother's death Fanny took over the
concerts
Died suddenly of a apoplectic stroke in 1847
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Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel: Under the
Greenwood Tree (Listening Guide)
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Four-voice part song
A cappella
Text drawn from Shakespeare's As You Like It
Strophic, with two verses
Chorus "Come hither" follows each verse
Changing textures provide interest
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The Enjoyment of Music 10th, Shorter Edition
58. Romantic Opera
“I have never encountered anything
more false and foolish than the effort to
get truth into opera. In opera everything
is based upon the untrue.”
—Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
• Basic emotions with an elemental force
• Logic of reality
Rossini: The Barber of Seville
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The Development of National Styles
France
Grand opera
Opéra comique
Germany
Singspiel
Lyric opera
Music drama
Italy
Opera seria
Opera buffa
Bel canto singing style
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Exoticism in Opera
•
Music evokes faraway locale
Verdi: Aida
Puccini:
Madame Butterfly
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Women in Opera
•
Visibility for women composers:
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•
Louise Bertin La Esmerelda
And singers
– Jenny Lind (1820–1887)
– Maria Malibran (1808–1836)
– Pauline Viardot (1821–1910)
Bizet: Carmen, “Habanera”
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59. Verdi and Italian Opera
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28 operas
Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901)
Italian composer
Patriotic, nationalistic works
Composed successfully until age 80
Died at 87
National hero
Verdi: Requiem, “Dies irae”
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Verdi’s Music
Melody above all
• Three compositional periods
Early period:
Macbeth, Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata
Middle period (French grand opera):
A Masked Ball, The Force of Destiny, Don
Carlos
Final period:
Aida, Otello, Falstaff
Verdi. Règoletto, “La donna e mobile”
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Verdi: Rigoletto
(Listening Guide)
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Victor Hugo’s The King Is Amused
(Le roi s’amuse)
Libretto by Francesco Piave
Seduction and deceit, with a tragic end
Popular moments from Act III:
– Tenor aria, “La donna è mobile”
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–
Strophic
Quartet, “Un dì”
•
4 characters/emotions
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The Enjoyment of Music 10th, Shorter Edition
60. Wagner and the Music Drama
• Richard Wagner (1813–1883)
• German composer
• Career in Dresden
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Grand operas, nationalistic operas
• Failed revolution in 1849
• Exile in Switzerland
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Music drama
Wagner: Die Walküre (leitmotif: idea)
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Wagner and the Music Drama
• Festival Theater at Bayreuth
– Performance space for music
dramas
• Summoned back to Germany
– Ludwig II
• Married Cosima Liszt
• Last work: Parsifal
• Died at age 70
Wagner: Die Walküre
(leitmotif: landscape)
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Wagner’s Music
• “Endless melody”
• Total artwork
(Gesamtkunstwerk)
• Orchestra as unifying element
– Leitmotifs
– Chromatic dissonance
“True drama can be conceived only as resulting from the collective impulse of
all the arts to communicate in the most immediate way with a collective public…
Thus especially the art of tone, developed with such singular diversity in
instrumental music, will realize in the collective artwork its richest potential…
For in its isolation music has formed itself an organ capable of the most
immeasurable expression—the orchestra.” —Richard Wagner
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Wagner: Die Walküre
• The Ring of the Nibelung
– Gold in the Rhine River
– Rhine Maidens
• Cycle: Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried,
Götterdämmerung
• Libretto from Norse sagas & medieval German
epic poem, the Nibelungenlied
Wagner: Die Walküre (leitmotif: object)
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Wagner: Die Walküre
(Listening Guide)
Act III (Finale) of Die Walküre
• Leitmotifs:
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–
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slumber
magic sleep
magic fire
Siegfried
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The Enjoyment of Music 10th, Shorter Edition
61. Puccini and Late
Romantic Opera
Post-Romantic Italian composers
(verisimo movement):
• Giacomo Puccini
• Ruggero Leoncavallo
• Pietro Mascagni
Puccini
Leoncavallo
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Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924)
• Italian composer
• Early operatic successes:
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–
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Manon Lescaut
La bohème
Tosca
Madame Butterfly
• Last work, Turandot left
unfinished
• Died in 1924 of a heart attack
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Puccini: Madame Butterfly
(Listening Guide)
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Verismo and exoticism
Inspired by performance of a play
Disastrous premiere
Revised version
Central tragic-heroic character:
geisha Cio-Cio-San
• Act II, Cio-Cio-San’s aria “Un bel dì”
describes desire for her lover’s return
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62. Tchaikovsky and the Ballet
Ballet: Past and Present
Renaissance
18th Century
Part of a larger work
• intermedio
• masque
• ballet de cour
Independent art
form, especially in
France and Russia.
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19th-Century Russian Ballet (Czar’s Court)
•
Marius Petipa (St. Petersburg)
Pas de deux
Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker, “Pas de deux”
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Early 20th Century Ballet:
Serge Diaghilev (1872–1929)
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Ballets Russes
Dancers: Vaslav Nijinksy and Tamara Karsavina
Set artists: Picasso and Braque
Composer: Igor Stravinsky
Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring, “Sacrificial Dance”
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Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky
(1840–1893)
• Russian composer
• End-of-the-century pessimism
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Sexual identity
Antonina Milyukova
• Nadezhda von Meck
• Carnegie Hall in New York (1891)
• Died suddenly at age 53
Piano Concerto No. 1, III
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Tchaikovsky
• Popular Ballets
– Swan Lake
– Sleeping Beauty
– The Nutcracker
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Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker
(Listening Guide)
• The Nutcracker by E. T. A.
Hoffmann
– Christmas tale: Clara and
her gift of a nutcracker
– March, Act I
– Celesta
• Dance of the Sugar Plum
Fairy
– “Exotic” dances
• Arab, Chinese, Trepak
Listening Guide PDF
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The Enjoyment of Music 10th, Shorter Edition