Über die verschollenen geglaubte Schauspielmusik zu Shakespeare "Othello" von August Wilhelm Ambros

Der Musikwissenschaftler August Wilhelm Ambros (1816-1876) spielte als Feuilletonist und Komponist im Prager Musikleben der 1840er Jahre eine wichtige Rolle. Seine 1848 komponierte Schauspielmusik zu William Shakespeares "Othello" (die in Prag zahlreiche Aufführungen erlebte) wurde nie publiziert und galt als verschollen. Diese Ansicht muss revidiert werden. Das Autograph der Komposition befindet sich seit 1939 unbeachtet im Besitz der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Die erste Sichtung ergab folgenden Befund: Ambros hat sich an dem für eine Schauspielmusik üblichen Modell orientiert. Neben Ouvertüre und Finale besteht die Komposition aus mehreren Zwischenaktmusiken, die durch die Handlung des Dramas miteinander verknüpft sind. Stilistisch orientiert sich die Komposition an den Werken Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys und Robert Schumanns, die für den Prager Davidsbündler Ambros als wichtige Vorbilder fungierten. Durch die Entdeckung der Schauspielmusik zu "Othello" lässt sich diese immer wieder betonte Nähe nun an einem größeren Werk untersuchen. The musicologist August Wilhelm Ambros (1816-1876) played an important role as feature writer and composer in the musical life of Prague during the 1840s. In 1848 he composed an incidental music for William Shakespeare's drama "Othello" which was performed in Prague for several times, but never was published. It has been considered to be lost, what has to be revised. The autograph of the composition is owned by the Austrian National Library since 1939, but has met with no response so far. The results of a first investigation are: the music to the drama "Othello" does not diverge from the common patterns of this genre. It consists an overture, a finale and some intermission music. Its style is affected, like most of Ambros' other compositions, by Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. The recovering of this composition now allows to research this influence on a larger opus.

Music in the Polish-Jewish theatre in the first decades of the 20th century in the light of surviving sources

The article presents the few surviving documents concerning the incidental music to Polish-Jewish plays performed on the Polish stages in the first decades of the 20th century (until 1939). This theatre was to constitute a space for the dialogue between the Jewish and Polish communities. The idea of its creators was to reject the existing, usually negative, way of presenting Jews in Polish theatre as well as to show authentic Jewish life — customs, rituals, music and dances — on stage. A breakthrough in both of these areas came with the so-called Jewish plays of Gabriela Zapolska — Małka Szwarcenkopf and Jojne Firułkes. The idea of the Polish-Jewish theatre was then developed by Marek Arnsztajn (Andrzej Marek). Referring to the surviving sources (scores as well as press reviews and notes in directors’ copies of the scripts), the author analyses music to two performances of Małka Szwarcenkopf, and presents the musical appendix to the Polish version of An-ski’s Dybbuk published in 1922. The analysis seeks to capture the composers’ specific ideas of Jewish music and to discover the sources of their inspiration. The second objective of the article was to present the cultural background against which the Polish-Jewish theatre evolved.

Incidental Music, Part 2

John Eccles's active theatrical career spanned a period of about sixteen years, though he continued to compose occasionally for the theater after his semi-retirement in 1707. During his career he wrote incidental music for more than seventy plays, writing songs that fit perfectly within their dramatic contexts and that offered carefully tailored vehicles for his singers’ talents while remaining highly accessible in tone. This edition includes music composed by Eccles for plays beginning with the letters H–P. These plays were fundamentally collaborative ventures, and multiple composers often supplied the music; thus, this edition includes all the known songs and instrumental items for each play. Plot summaries of the plays are given along with relevant dialogue cues, and the songs are given in the order in which they appear in the drama (when known).

14. The Violin in L’histoire Du Soldat – A Metaphor of the Soul

From 1909, Stravinsky manifested a keen interest in composing theatre music, as proves the many and various dedicated scores. Almost all of his large works, from the ballet The Firebird (1909-10) to the one-act opera buffa Mavra (1921-22), are written for the stage. Stravinsky thus worked most of the time with scenic presentations, with questions on movement, dance, gestures or scenic tableaus. He develops a particular theatrical instinct: his works have a good scenic orientation, and the correlation with modernism and the new currents in theatre aesthetics is more than obvious. Critics have already analysed and discussed the parallels with such contemporary theatrical concepts as by Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) or Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940). After three great ballets, whose new conception by Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929) brought about a fundamental revolution in dance aesthetics, the composer crystallises his notion of incidental music. The aesthetics of L’Histoire du soldat, a work “to be read, played and danced”, is opposed to that of Richard Wagner (1813-83) and his Gesamtkunstwerk (a work blending various arts, a total work of art): a new artistic idea, frozen in gesture and movement, compressed, finding its concentrated expression. Stravinsky establishes a brilliant draft of the issues of Opera, to which he would from now on dedicate himself. Stravinsky’s theatre music reveals a tendency to introduce new concepts in the works written between Sacre du printemps and Pulcinella. A quick look at his stage works before and after L’histoire is necessary in order to fit it in his artistic view.

Saint-Saëns and Sophocles

Saint-Saëns's incidental music for Sophocles’ Antigone (Comédie-Française, 1893, trans. Meurice and Vacquerie) gives witness both to his engagement with culture classique and an experimental orientation in the context of fin-de-siècle music theatre. This essay situates Saint-Saëns's highly idiosyncratic score within the frame of late nineteenth-century research into ancient Greek music by François-Auguste Gevaert and Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray. It documents how Saint-Saëns aimed to participate in the creation of an authentic experience of ancient Greek theatre, one enhanced by the initiative of the Comédie-Française to stage its production at the open air Théâtre d'Orange in southern France. The article also shows the limitations of authenticity resulting from the nature of the translation as well as from Saint-Saëns's own compositional instincts.

Nielsen, Shakespeare and the Flute Concerto: From Character to Archetype

In June 1916 Nielsen supplied incidental music for the tercentenary Shakespeare celebrations in Hamlet’s castle of Kronborg, Helsingør (Elsinore). The three choruses and two songs he composed constitute one of his least-known works. But they had a legacy, and not only in the final choral number, which, to other words, subsequently became a candidate for Danish national anthem. Shortly after the event, Nielsen confided that he found Ariel and Caliban (for each of whom he had composed a sharply characterful song) so fascinating that he was considering writing an instrumental work based on their contrasting temperaments. This he never did, at least not overtly. However, ten years later the drastic instrumental contrasts in his Flute Concerto invite a reading based on the Ariel/Caliban duality. The distinctiveness of the concerto’s confrontation between the flute solo and the orchestral bass trombone has long been recognised. However, this duality takes on a more focused and at the same time broader significance when viewed in the light of Nielsen’s life-long, albeit mainly indirect, engagement with Shakespeare. Suggesting how a composer’s occasional character-music may re-emerge in their concert work in the guise of archetypes, our article seeks to contribute to a growing field of investigation into the relationship between ‘applied’ and concert music.

Surrealism and Faith 1934–1939

This chapter recounts the first Bernac/Poulenc recital that took place at the École normale de musique after Francis Poulenc's North African tour with Maria Modrakowska in February 1935. It talks about Plume d'eau claire and Rodeuse au front de verre, which Poulenc thought belonged to his more familiar style of almost classical arrangement of harmonies spiced up with a few unimpeachable chromaticisms. It also describes Poulenc's compositions during the remainder of 1935 that turned their back temporarily on surrealism in favour of less demanding fare, including two pieces of incidental music. The chapter looks into Poulenc's devotion to film music and occasional collaborations with Georges Auric and Arthur Honegger, writing five scores between 1935 and 1951. It also assesses Poulenc's most interesting literary contributions that appeared during October 1935, Mes maîtres et mes amis, that was published in Conferencia.

The Popular Front Years and World War II

During the Popular Front Years (1934–1939), Auric’s politics swung to the left and he joined several arts organizations of the French Communist Party. His populist works from these years include numerous pieces of incidental music and film scores, but also concert music, music for young musicians, campfire songs, and other popular songs. Although his music hardly changed stylistically from the 1920s, he now actively reached out to the broadest audiences possible. During the German Occupation, Auric joined or otherwise contributed to several intellectual networks of the French Resistance. His war-time roles would result in a privileged position after the war, as a leading critic and arts administrator.

New Beginnings in the Post-War Years

After World War II, Auric enjoyed a privileged position in the French musical scene, with numerous ballets and scores of incidental music. He was also by this time the leading composer for the French cinema; he remains the only person to have won music prizes at both the Cannes and Venice film festivals. From the 1940s through the 1960s, he composed dozens of films in the French “tradition of quality,” but also for British and American films and for international co-productions. He also was elected to the Administrative Council at SACEM, ultimately serving as President for three decades. In the late 1950s, he was a defendant in Hirshon v. United Artists, a case that clarified two sections of the U.S. Copyright Code, and he was also the principal lobbyist on behalf of the Loi Escarra, the first modern copyright law in France.