Beethoven's Unfinished Piano Concerto: A Case of Double Vision?

1989 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 338-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Cook
Keyword(s):  
Late Stage ◽  
Considerable Proportion ◽  
Double Vision ◽  
Piano Concerto ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Symphonic Work ◽  
Curious Feature

During 1814-15 Beethoven sketched the first movement of a piano concerto, writing out a considerable proportion of it in full score. Some of the curious stylistic features that have been ascribed to this movement are the consequence of a faulty reading of MS Artaria 184, in which open-score sketches have been bound in with the autograph score. One curious feature, however, remains: the symphonic nature of the materials. There is some reason to believe that, because of this, Beethoven considered deleting the tutti exposition, resulting in a symphonic work with obbligato piano. Such indecision at a late stage in the compositional process could explain why Beethoven abandoned the work.

scholarly journals “Romantic Concert” for Piano and Orchestra by Joseph Marx in the Aspect of Aesthetics of Late Romanticism

2021 ◽  
pp. 69-88
Author(s):  
Yevhen Dashak
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Research Methodology ◽  
Late Stage ◽  
Stylistic Analysis ◽  
Piano Concerto ◽  
Huge Number ◽  
Romantic Era ◽  
Creative Style ◽  
Almost All ◽  
Symphonic Work

There is considered the “Romantic Concert” for piano and orchestra in E major (1919) by the Austrian composer, pianist, teacher, theoretician and public figure Joseph Marx (1882–1964). The “Romantic Concert” was included in the repertoire of such pianists as W. Gieseking, J. Bolet, M.-A. Hamelin and D. Lively. The relevance of the study consists not only in the absence in Ukraine publications devoted to the study of the “Romantic Concert”, but also in the need to introduce this work into the creative practice of native performers. The main objective of this study is to explore how the realization of the traditions of the piano concerto genre in the opus of J. Marx is combined with the composer’s thinking as a late romantic and his individual creative style. Scientific novelty lies in an attempt to spread the scientific understanding of the existence of late romanticism in the musical art of the early twentieth century and to determine features of its embodiment in the genre of a concert for piano and orchestra on the example of the “Romantic Concert” by J. Marx. The research methodology is based on the methods of holistic and stylistic analysis described in the works by M. Mikhaylov and Ye. Ruch’yevskaya. Also this article is based on the concept of late romanticism by L. Nebolyubova, which is supplemented by the theses set forth in the works of Russian musicologist O. Sheludyakova.All three parts of the “Romantic Concert” were analyzed in detail, which made it possible to produce the findings set out in article. In his work, J. Marx reproduces in detail the type of piano concerto of the Romantic era, using almost all possible genre-compositional and style parameters. “Romantic Concert” is an example of an instrumental concert of a symphonic type, where the soloist and orchestra act as a comprehensive whole, and the cycle itself is based on the dramatic basis of the symphonic work. The musical fabric of the concert is based on a huge number of style allusions to the work of composers of different eras and styles, which is a vivid manifestation of the synthetic, conclusive character of the late stage of musical romanticism. Piano concert of J. Marx played a part in the formation of “romantic-centric” trends in the musical art of the twentieth century.

Lincoln Center Commissions

Samuel Barber ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 451-469
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Heyman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Emotional Expression ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
100Th Anniversary ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Piano Concerto ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Antony And Cleopatra ◽  
Lincoln Center ◽  
Individual Style

For the opening week of the new Philharmonic Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1962, Barber composed a piano concerto in honor of the 100th anniversary of his publisher. The concerto was tailored to the technical prowess and individual style of John Browning, reflecting the Russian influence of his piano teacher Rosina Lhévinne. The second movement was a reworking of an earlier piece, Elegy, written for Manfred Ibel, a young art student and amateur flute player, to whom Barber dedicated his piano concerto. This chapter details Barber’s compositional process and influences for each movement of the concerto and describes the enthusiastic reception of the debut performance. Nearing completion of the concerto, Barber was invited to Russia as the first American composer ever to attend the biennial Congress of Soviet Composers, where he freely discussed his compositional philosophy and methods. For the concerto, Barber won his second Pulitzer Prize and the Annual Award of the Music Critics Circle of New York. His second composition for the opening season of Lincoln Center was Andromache’s Farewell, for soprano and orchestra. Based on a scene from Euripides’s The Trojan Women, the piece displayed deep emotional expression and striking imagery. With a superior opera singer, Martina Arroyo, singing the solo part, the success of Andromache’s Farewell presaged Barber’s opera Antony and Cleopatra.

First Movement

2019 ◽  
pp. 232-265
Author(s):  
Anna Stoll Knecht
Keyword(s):  
Creative Process ◽  
Late Stage ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Final Version ◽  
Common Features ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

Starting from Mahler’s compositional narrative on the Seventh (“boat letter”), according to which the introduction to the first movement triggered his creative process and allowed him to complete the work in a few weeks, this chapter examines the constitutive elements of this beginning and their contradictory interpretations. In terms of formal structure, the analysis concentrates on the emotional center of the movement, the Durchbruch (breakthrough). If this moment appears to be structurally fundamental in the final version, sketches reveal that the movement was far from being built around it, since it was inserted at a rather late stage of the compositional process. The relationship between genesis and interpretation is further explored at the end of this chapter, which discusses the impact of Mahler’s boat story on our understanding of the work and the striking common features between several compositional narratives.

"How I Compose": Ferruccio Busoni's Views about Invention, Quotation, and the Compositional Process

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 224-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erinn E. Knyt
Keyword(s):  
Piano Concerto ◽  
Compositional Process ◽  
Ferruccio Busoni ◽  
Original Works ◽  
Creative Art

An anecdote circulating among pupils of Egon Petri (1881––1962), a protégé of Ferruccio Busoni (1866––1924), was the story Petri told of how on more than one occasion Busoni's wife was mistakenly introduced as "Mrs. Bach-Busoni." Whether fact or fiction, this social faux pas illustrates how closely Busoni's name has been associated with the names of composers whose works he arranged. Despite his prolific compositional career, he is remembered more as a transcriber and arranger than as a composer of original works. His practice of arranging others' works also affected his own compositions, which frequently contained borrowed material. Busoni's creative art thus blurred conventional boundaries between what is traditionally considered to be primary "original" works and subsidiary transcriptions or arrangements. While Busoni's tendency to blur boundaries between new pieces and arrangements has been already noted, his compositional aesthetics has only been cursorily studied. Relying on the essay "How I Compose," the section on notation from The Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music (1907), and unpublished sketches from the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, I examine Busoni's idiosyncratic compositional ideology, explain the meaning of his terms Idee, Einfall, Transkription and Bearbeitung in his compositional process, and show that Busoni valued the creativity involved in transforming already existing musical material no less than invention of the new. I illustrate Busoni's compositional aesthetics through analyses of his arrangements of Liszt's sixth Paganini Etude, Mozart's Piano Concerto, K. 453, and his Fantasia nach J. S. Bach.

D-Minor Concertos and Symphonies of the Brahms–Schumann Circle in the 1850s: Cross-Relationships and the Influence of Beethoven

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Jacquelyn Sholes
Keyword(s):  
Johannes Brahms ◽  
Robert Schumann ◽  
Orchestral Music ◽  
Piano Concerto ◽  
The Social ◽  
Violin Concertos ◽  
Social Intimacy ◽  
Joseph Joachim ◽  
Symphonic Work

This article examines cross-relationships and mutual influences in the D-minor symphonies and concertos written in the 1850s by a close-knit circle of composers: Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann, and their friends Joseph Joachim, Julius Otto Grimm and Albert Dietrich. Outlining the overlapping compositional timelines of Brahms's First Piano Concerto (at one point a candidate to become his first symphonic work), the violin concertos of Joachim and Schumann, and the symphonies of Grimm and Dietrich, it demonstrates that the pieces were shared among the composers during their periods of composition and explores musical correspondences indicating mutual influences both among the composers and from other specific works. The musical choices involved in this group of pieces seem to point to an underlying backdrop of Beethovenian influence involving specific works from Beethoven's body of orchestral music, an oeuvre concluding with an unforgettable symphonic work in D minor—to which the younger generation's collection of works may relate symbolically. This study not only emphasizes the central role that Beethoven played in the minds of these composers in the mid-1850s, but also underscores the musical intimacy that extended from the social intimacy of the composers in the Brahms–Schumann circle.

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