United States or Qatar ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Before the close we hear the first fanfare of trumpet from the opening symphony, that has the ring of a motto of the whole. At the very end is a transfigured entrance, very slowly and softly, to a celestial touch of harp, of the first descending figure of the movement. Scherzo. Jovial in high degree, the Scherzo begins with the thematic complexity of modern fashion.
Extravagance began to rule; scarlet fanfares are sounded; amethysts and emeralds sparkle; yet there is more thematic variety. Voluptuous, perfumed, and semi-tragic notes were uttered by this dainty poet of the carnival of life. The canvas glowed with more reverberating and infernal lights, but lyric ever.
In order to keep me strictly under his calming and friendly influence, he had at the same time given me a sonata to write which, as a proof of my friendship for him, I had to build up on strictly harmonic and thematic lines, for which he recommended me a very early and childlike sonata by Pleyel as a model.
The development of the themes of "Tristan" and "Die Meistersinger" and "Parsifal" out of single kernels; the fine logical sequence, the expositions of the thematic material of "Parsifal" in the prelude and in Gurnamanz's narrative, and its subsequent reappearance and adventures and developments, are something like a summit of symphonic art as Beethoven made it to be understood.
And it is only the spiciness of the thematic material, the nimbleness and suavity of the composition, and, chiefly, the piquancy of the orchestral speech, that saves the music of Rimsky-Korsakoff from utter brittleness, and gives it a certain limited beauty. It is just this essential superficiality which makes the place of the music in the history of Russian art so ambiguous.
Those who have but newly learnt their way through The Ring will not readily admit that there is a bar too much repetition. But how if you find some anti-Wagnerite raising the question whether the thematic system does not enable the composer to produce a music drama with much less musical fertility than was required from his predecessors for the composition of operas under the old system!
His symphony, which is in D major, is so ebullient with life that its dashing first subject cannot brook more than a few measures of slow introduction. The second subject is simpler, but no less joyous. The thematic work is scholarly and enthusiastic at the same time.
Alixe could not refuse, for the moment he finished speaking she heard a too familiar motive, the ponderous phrase in the brass choir which Van Kuyp intended as the thematic label for his hero, "Sordello." "Ah, there's your Browning in tone for you," whispered the critic. She wished him miles away.
MacDowell has derived the greater part of the thematic substance of the suite, as he acknowledges in a prefatory note, from melodies of the North American Indians, with the exception of a few subsidiary themes of his own invention.
Presto con fuoco Chopin marks the second section. Kullak gives 84 to the quarter, and for the opening 66 to the quarter. He also wisely marks crescendos in the bass at the first thematic development. He prefers the E as does Klindworth nine bars before the return of the presto. At the eighth bar, after this return, Kullak adheres to the E instead of F at the beginning of the bar, treble clef.
Word Of The Day