United States or Niger ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


His treatment of the orchestra is brilliant and effective, but the national element in his music is the signe particulier of his style. He rarely used actual Russian folk-tunes, but his music is coloured throughout by the plaintive melancholy of the national type. A composer, whose music smells so strongly of the soil, can scarcely expect to be appreciated abroad.

Brodsky was born in 1851 at Taganrog, in Southern Russia, and was one of those who found his profession at the age of four, when he bought a violin at a fair, and began to pick out Russian folk-tunes. For four years he was taught music at home, and made good progress.

In the midst is a dash of the rogue's heartiest laugh, amid the echoes of the fearful chord, while the growing roar of the mob can be heard below. Once again it rings out undaunted, and then to the sauciest of folk-tunes, leichtfertig, Till dances gaily and jauntily. Presently, in a mystic passage, schnell und schattenhaft

The sound of a big rattle is added to the scene, where perhaps the whole village is in an uproar over some wholesale trick of the rogue. And what are we to say to this simplest swing of folk-song that steals in naïvely to enchanting strum of rhythm. We may speculate about the Till as the people saw him, while elsewhere we have the personal view. The folk-tunes may not have a special dramatic rôle.

They are so much like folk-tunes that one wonders whether they were not produced hundreds of years ago and handed down by generations of Russians. One of them even, the great chorus in the first scene, might stand as a sort of national anthem for Russia.

The sweet, broad, diatonic idiom, the humor, the sleepy Bavarian accent, the pert, naïve, little folk-tunes it employed, the tranquil, touching, childlike tones, the close of "Tod und Verklärung," with its wondrous unfolding of corolla upon corolla, were refreshing indeed after all the burning chromaticism of Wagner, the sultry air of Klingsor's wonder-garden.

It is like the wind sighing over bog water. It is a prophetic echo and final despair of a people who knew they were done for from the beginning. A mere folk-tune, mere nature, raw and unintellectual; and these raw folk-tunes are all that we shall have done: and by these and these alone, shall we be remembered." "Ned," she said at last, "I think you had better go away.

Austerity is not barrenness not the barrenness that would result from imitating the austerity of the old church composers with their hundred rules and regulations: the harmony is as free as could be wished; at the needful moment the melodies pass without hesitation from key to key; but when we have long known them and learnt to understand them we find them at heart to be idealised folk-tunes simple and indescribably pathetic, as the situation demands.

There are no or few contrapuntal formulas, hardly any mere chord progressions broken into arpeggios and figurated designs. By going to the native dances and folk-tunes of his childhood Haydn took one of the most momentous, decisive steps in his own history and in the history of music.