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Gurre-Lieder
' (''Songs of Gurre Castle, Gurre'') is a tripartite oratorio followed by a Melodrama, melodramatic epilogue for five vocal soloists, narrator, three choruses, and grand orchestra. The work, which is based on an early song cycle for soprano, tenor and piano, was composed by the then-Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg from 1900 to 1903. After a break, he resumed orchestration in 1910 and completed it in November 1911. It sets to music the poem cycle ''Gurresange'' by the Danish novelist Jens Peter Jacobsen (translated from Danish to German by ). The Gurre Castle and its surrounding areas in Denmark are the settings of the plot, which involves the mediæval love-tragedy (related in Jacobsen's poems) revolving around a legend of the love of king Valdemar IV of Denmark, Valdemar Atterdag (Valdemar IV, 1320–1375, German: Waldemar) for his mistress, Tove, and her subsequent murder by Valdemar's jealous wife, Queen Helvig of Schleswig, (a legend which is historically more likely co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gurre Castle
Gurre Castle () was a royal castle situated in North Zealand, Denmark. Its ruins lie on the outskirts of Helsingør, close to the town of Tikøb on lake Gurre Sø at Gurre, Denmark, Gurre. The ruins have been excavated and are now restored. History The castle was built in the 12th century. Four towers and a perimeter wall were added in the 1350s. It was first mentioned in court chronicles in 1364, when Pope Urban V sent a gift of relics to its chapel. King Valdemar IV of Denmark, Valdemar Atterdag died in the castle in 1375. Many stories, ballads, and poems have been made about Valdemar. The castle is associated with a legend about King Valdemar, his love for his beautiful mistress Tove Lille, who according to tradition stayed for a long time at Gurre Castle, and the resulting jealousy of his Queen Helvig of Schleswig. Over the centuries, this core saga was enriched by other legends, eventually growing into a national myth of Denmark. The myth was put into poetical form by the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dirk Kaftan
Dirk Kaftan (born 1971) is a German opera and concert conductor. Career Born in Marburg, West Germany, Kaftan grew up in Wittlich and Canada. At the age of 18 he began employment as a repetiteur at the Theater Trier. Kaftan then studied sound engineering (''Tonmeister'') at the Hochschule für Musik Detmold. Kaftan was ''Erster Kapellmeister'' at the Graz Opera from 2006 to 2009. From 2009 to 2014 he was Generalmusikdirektor (GMD) in Augsburg. His contract with the Theater Augsburg was to have run till 2016; however he vacated the Augsburg post early to return to Graz Opera as their GMD. His debut in June 2013 was a performance of Schönberg's ''Gurre-Lieder'' with soloists, the expanded opera chorus, the Wiener Singverein and the Grazer Philharmonisches Orchester. Kaftan was GMD of Graz Opera from 2013 to 2017. In Graz, his repertoire included Wagner's ''Tristan und Isolde'', Zemlinsky's ''Der Zwerg'', Dallapiccola's ''Il prigioniero, Der Gefangene'' and Bernstein's ''Wes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arnold Schoenberg
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian and American composer, music theorist, teacher and writer. He was among the first Modernism (music), modernists who transformed the practice of harmony in 20th-century classical music, and a central element of his music was its use of motive (music), motives as a means of coherence. He propounded concepts like developing variation, the emancipation of the dissonance, and the "unified field, unity of musical space". Schoenberg's early works, like ''Verklärte Nacht'' (1899), represented a Brahmsian–Wagnerian synthesis on which he built. Mentoring Anton Webern and Alban Berg, he became the central figure of the Second Viennese School. They consorted with visual artists, published in ''Der Blaue Reiter'', and wrote atonal, expressionist music, attracting fame and stirring debate. In his String Quartets (Schoenberg)#String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10, String Quartet No. 2 (1907–1908), ''Erwartung'' (1909), ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Valdemar IV Of Denmark
Valdemar IV Atterdag, Valdemar Christoffersen or Waldemar (24 October 1375) was King of Denmark from 1340 to 1375. He is mostly known for his reunion of Denmark after the bankruptcy and mortgaging of the country to finance wars under previous rulers. He gradually reacquired the lost territories that had been added to Denmark over the centuries. His heavy-handed methods, endless taxation, and usurpation of rights long held by noble families led to uprisings throughout Valdemar's reign. Accession He was the youngest son of King Christopher II of Denmark and Euphemia of Pomerania. He spent most of his childhood and youth in exile at the court of Emperor Louis IV in Bavaria, after the defeats of his father and the death and imprisonment, respectively, of his two older brothers, Eric Christoffersen of Denmark, Eric and Otto, Duke of Lolland and Estonia, Otto, at the hand of the Holsteiners. Here he acted as a pretender, waiting for a comeback. Following the assassination of Gerhard II ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drei Klavierstücke (Schoenberg)
Drei Klavierstücke ("Three Piano Pieces"), Op. 11, is a set of pieces for solo piano written by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in 1909. They represent an early example of atonality in the composer's work. Music The tempo markings of the three pieces are: The first two pieces, dating from February 1909, are often cited as marking the point at which Schoenberg abandoned the last vestiges of traditional tonality, implying the language of common-practice harmony that had been inherent in Western music, in one way or another, for centuries. The functionality of this language, to Schoenberg at least, had by this time become stretched to bursting point in some of the more chromatically-saturated works of Wagner, Mahler, Richard Strauss and indeed some of Schoenberg's own earlier tonal works such as the string sextet ''Verklärte Nacht'', Op. 4, of 1899. Although there are vestigial, superficial remnants of tonal writing, such as lyrical melody, expressive appoggiaturas ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jens Peter Jacobsen
Jens Peter Jacobsen (7 April 1847 – 30 April 1885) was a Danish novelist, poet, and scientist, in Denmark often just written as "J. P. Jacobsen". He began the naturalist movement in Danish literature and was a part of the Modern Breakthrough. Biography Jacobsen was born in Thisted in Jutland, the eldest of the four children of a prosperous merchant. He went to school in Copenhagen and was a student at the University of Copenhagen in 1868. As a boy, he showed a remarkable talent for science, in particular botany. In 1870, although he was already secretly writing poetry, Jacobsen adopted botany as a profession. He was sent by a scientific body in Copenhagen to report on the flora of the islands of Anholt and Læsø. Around this time, the discoveries of Charles Darwin began to fascinate him. Realizing that the work of Darwin was not well known in Denmark, he translated ''The Origin of Species'' and ''The Descent of Man'' into Danish. When still young, Jacobsen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sprechgesang
(, "spoken singing") and (, "spoken voice"), more commonly known as speak-singing in English, are expressionist musical vocal techniques between singing and speaking. Though sometimes used interchangeably, is directly related to the operatic recitative manner of singing (in which pitches are sung, but the articulation is rapid and loose like speech), whereas is closer to speech itself (because it does not emphasise any particular pitches). is more closely aligned with the long-used musical techniques of recitative or than is . Where the term is employed in this way, it is usually in the context of the late Romantic German operas or "music dramas" that were composed by Richard Wagner and others in the 19th century. Thus, is often merely a German alternative to 'recitative'. The earliest compositional use of the technique was in the first version of Engelbert Humperdinck's 1897 melodrama '' Königskinder'' (in the 1910 version it was replaced by conventional singin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Franz Schreker
Franz Schreker (originally ''Schrecker''; 23 March 1878 – 21 March 1934) was an Austrian composer, conductor, librettist, teacher and administrator. Primarily a composer of operas, Schreker developed a style characterized by aesthetic plurality (a mixture of Romanticism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Impressionism, Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit), timbral experimentation, strategies of extended tonality and conception of total music theatre into the narrative of 20th-century music. Formative years He was born as Franz Schrecker in Monaco, the eldest son of the Bohemian Jewish court photographer Ignaz Franz Schrekker (Germanized from ''Ignácz Furencz'', originally ''Isak''), and his wife, Eleonore von Cloßmann, who was a member of the Catholic aristocracy of Styria. He grew up during travels across half of Europe and, after the early death of his father, the family moved from Linz to Vienna (1888) where in 1892, with the help of a scholarship, Schreker entered the Vienna Cons ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oratorio
An oratorio () is a musical composition with dramatic or narrative text for choir, soloists and orchestra or other ensemble. Similar to opera, an oratorio includes the use of a choir, soloists, an instrumental ensemble, various distinguishable characters (e.g. soloists), and arias. However, opera is musical theatre, and typically involves significant theatrical spectacle, including sets, props, and costuming, as well as staged interactions between characters. In oratorio, there is generally minimal staging, with the chorus often assuming a more central dramatic role, and the work is typically presented as a concert piece – though oratorios are sometimes staged as operas, and operas are not infrequently presented in concert form. A particularly important difference between opera and oratorio is in the typical subject matter of the text. An opera libretto may deal with any conceivable dramatic subject (e.g. history, mythology, Richard Nixon, Anna Nicole Smith an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( ; ; 22 May 181313 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, essayist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the ''Gesamtkunstwerk'' ("total work of art"), whereby he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. The drama was to be presented as a continuously sung narrative, without conventional operatic structures like Aria, arias and Recitative, recitatives. He described this vision in a List of prose works by Richard Wagner, series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss (; ; 11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a German composer and conductor best known for his Tone poems (Strauss), tone poems and List of operas by Richard Strauss, operas. Considered a leading composer of the late Romantic and early Modernism (music), modern eras, he has been described as a successor of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt. Along with Gustav Mahler, he represents the late flowering of German Romanticism, in which pioneering subtleties of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmony, harmonic style. Strauss's compositional output began in 1870 when he was just six years old and lasted until his death nearly eighty years later. His first tone poem to achieve wide acclaim was ''Don Juan (Strauss), Don Juan'', and this was followed by other lauded works of this kind, including ''Death and Transfiguration'', ''Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks'', ''Also sprach Zarathustra'', ''Don Quixote (Strauss), Don Quixote'', ''Ein Heldenleben'', ''Symph ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Five Pieces For Orchestra
The ''Five Pieces for Orchestra'' (''Fünf Orchesterstücke''), Op. 16, were composed by Arnold Schoenberg in 1909, and first performed in London in 1912. The titles of the pieces, reluctantly added by the composer after the work's completion upon the request of his publisher, are as follows: The ''Five Pieces'' further develop the notion of "total chromaticism" that Schoenberg introduced in his '' Three Piano Pieces'', Op. 11 (composed earlier that year) and were composed during a time of intense personal and artistic crisis for the composer, this being reflected in the tensions and, at times, extreme violence of the score, mirroring the expressionist movement of the time, in particular its preoccupation with the subconscious and burgeoning madness. Premiere The work had its world premiere in the Queen's Hall, London at a Promenade Concert on 3 September 1912, conducted by Sir Henry Wood, a constant champion of new music. During rehearsals for Schoenberg's suite he urged ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
