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| Gustav Mahler was a Bohemian-born Austrian composer and conductor. He was best known during his own lifetime as one of the leading orchestral and operatic conductors of the day. Mahler is generally recognized as the last great German symphonist. He sought to expand the scope and breadth of the symphony to the greatest possible extent, believing that the symphony should “take in the whole world.” This expansion of scope can be seen not only the great length of his works, but also in the explosion of orchestral forces employed and in the aesthetic goal of maximum expressive impact. |
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| Richard Georg Strauss was a German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras, particularly of operas, Lieder and tone poems. Strauss was also a prominent conductor. |
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| Hugo Wolf was an Austrian composer of Slovene origin, particularly noted for his art songs, or Lieder. He brought to this form a concentrated expressive intensity which was unique in late Romantic music, somewhat related to that of the Second Viennese School in concision but utterly unrelated in technique. |
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| Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka was the first Russian composer to gain wide recognition inside his own country, and is often regarded as the father of Russian classical music. Glinka’s compositions were an important influence on future Russian composers, notably the members of The Five, who took Glinka’s lead and produced a distinctive Russian style of music. |
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| Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky, one of the Russian composers known as the Five, was an innovator of Russian music in the romantic period. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music. Many of his works were inspired by Russian history, Russian folklore, and other nationalist themes, including the opera Boris Godunov, the orchestral tone poem Night on Bald Mountain, and the piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition. |
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| Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was a Russian composer, and a member of the group of composers known as “The Five.” Noted particularly for a predilection for folk and fairy-tale subjects as well as his extraordinary skill in orchestration, his best known orchestral compositions—Capriccio espagnol, Russian Easter Festival Overture, and the symphonic suite Scheherazade—are considered staples of the classical music repertoire, along with suites and excerpts from some of his 15 operas. |
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| Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist who initially developed a highly lyrical and idiosyncratic tonal language inspired by the music of Chopin. Unlike the later Roslavets and Schonberg, Scriabin developed, via mysticism, an increasingly atonal musical language that presaged 12-tone composition and other serial music. He may be considered to be the primary figure of Russian Symbolism in music as well as the progenitor of Serialism. |
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| Bedrich Smetana was a Czech composer who pioneered the development of a musical style which became closely identified with his country’s aspirations to independent statehood. He is thus widely regarded in his homeland as the father of Czech music. Internationally he is best known for his opera The Bartered Bride, and for the symphonic cycle Ma vlast (“My Fatherland”) which portrays the history, legends and landscape of the composer’s native land. |
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| Leos Janacek was a Czech composer, musical theorist, folklorist, publicist and teacher. He was inspired by Moravian and all Slavic folk music to create an original, modern musical style. Until 1895 he devoted himself mainly to folkloristic research and his early musical output was influenced by contemporaries such as Antonin Dvorak. His later, mature works incorporate his earlier studies of national folk music in a modern, highly original synthesis, first evident in the opera Jenufa, which was premiered in 1904 in Brno. The success of Jenufa (often called the “Moravian national opera”) at Prague in 1916 gave Janacek access to the world’s great opera stages. Janacek’s later works are his most celebrated. They include the symphonic poem Sinfonietta, the oratorial Glagolitic Mass, the rhapsody Taras Bulba, string quartets, other chamber works and operas. He is considered to rank with Antonin Dvorak and Bedrich Smetana, as one of the most important Czech composers. |
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| Edvard Hagerup Grieg was a Norwegian composer and pianist who composed in the Romantic period. He is best known for his Piano Concerto in A minor, for his incidental music to Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt (which includes Morning Mood and In the Hall of the Mountain King), and for his collection of piano miniatures Lyric Pieces. |
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| Charles Edward Ives was an American modernist composer. He is widely regarded as one of the first American composers of international significance. Ives’ music was largely ignored during his life, and many of his works went unperformed for many years. Over time, Ives came to be regarded as an “American Original”; Ives combined the American popular and church-music traditions of his youth with European art music, and was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones, thus foreshadowing virtually every major musical innovation of the 20th century. |
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| Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer of the later Romantic period whose music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity. The core of Sibelius’s oeuvre is his set of seven symphonies. Like Beethoven, Sibelius used each one to develop further his own personal compositional style. Unlike Beethoven who used the symphonies to make public statements, and who reserved his more intimate feelings for his smaller works, Sibelius released his personal feelings in the symphonies. These works continue to be performed frequently in the concert hall and are often recorded. |
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| Sir Edward William Elgar was an English composer. Several of his first major orchestral works, including the Enigma Variations and the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, were greeted with acclaim. He also composed oratorios, chamber music, symphonies, instrumental concertos, and songs. He was appointed Master of the King’s Musick in 1924. |
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| Manuel de Falla the most distinguished Spanish composer of the early 20th century. In his music he achieved a fusion of poetry, asceticism, and ardour that represents the spirit of Spain at its purest. |
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| Gabriel Urbain Faure was a French composer, organist, pianist, and teacher. He was the foremost French composer of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th century composers. His harmonic and melodic language affected how harmony was later taught. |
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| Eric Alfred Leslie Satie was a French composer and pianist. Satie was introduced as a “gymnopedist” in 1887, shortly before writing his most famous compositions, the Gymnopedies. Later, he also referred to himself as a “phonometrician” (meaning “someone who measures sounds”) preferring this designation to that of “musician”, after having been called “a clumsy but subtle technician” in a book on contemporary French composers published in 1911. |
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| Achille-Claude Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of Impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions. His music is noted for its sensory component and how it is not often formed around one key or pitch. Often Debussy’s work reflected the activities or turbulence in his own life. His music virtually defines the transition from late-Romantic music to twentieth century modernist music. In French literary circles, the style of this period was known as Symbolism, a movement that directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant. |
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| Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer of Impressionist music known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects. Much of his piano music, chamber music, vocal music and orchestral music has entered the standard concert repertoire. Ravel’s piano compositions, such as Jeux d’eau, Miroirs and Gaspard de la Nuit, demand considerable virtuosity from the performer, and his orchestral music, including Daphnis et Chloe and his arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, uses a variety of sound and instrumentation very effectively. |
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| Giacomo Puccini was an Italian composer whose operas, including La boheme, Tosca, Madama Butterfly and Turandot, are among the most frequently performed in the standard repertoire. Some of his arias, such as “O mio babbino caro” from Gianni Schicchi, “Che gelida manina” from La boheme, and “Nessun dorma” from Turandot, have become part of popular culture. |
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| The Five, also known as The Mighty Handful, refers to a circle of composers who met in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in the years 1856-1870: Mily Balakirev (the leader), Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin. The group had the aim of producing a specifically Russian kind of art music, rather than one that imitated older European music or relied on European-style conservatory training. In a sense, they were a branch of the Romantic Nationalist movement in Russia, with the Abramtsevo Colony and Russian Revival striving to achieve similar goals in the sphere of fine arts. |
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| Societe nationale de musique fran?aise |
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| The National Society of Music was founded on February 25th 1871 by Romain Bussine and Camille Saint-Saens, who shared the chairmanship. Its purpose was to promote French music and allow young composers to play their works in public. His motto was “Ars gallica. Among its original members were: Cesar Franck, Ernest Guiraud, Jules Massenet, Jules Garcin, Gabriel Faure, Alexis de Castillon, Henri Duparc, Paul Lacombe, Theodore Dubois, and Paul Taffanel. It was created in response to the trend of promoting French vocal music and opera at the expense of orchestral music, and to reaffirm the greatness of French music in the Germanic tradition. |
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| Verismo (meaning “realism”, from Italian vero, meaning “true”) was an Italian literary and, by extension, operatic movement which peaked between approximately 1875 and the early 1900s. It was mainly inspired by French naturalism. Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana were its main exponents and the authors of a verismo manifesto. Unlike French naturalism, which was based on positivistic ideals, Verga and Capuana rejected claims of the scientific nature and social usefulness of the movement. Italian verists were pessimistic and based their work on the premise of impersonality, meaning that the writer should not impose any personal meaning or point of view on his works, which should seem as if they were ‘written by themselves’. Verismo is also used to refer to a post-Romantic Italian operatic tradition associated with composers such as Pietro Mascagni, Ruggiero Leoncavallo, and Giacomo Puccini, who advocated bringing the naturalism of writers such as Emile Zola and Henrik Ibsen into opera. |
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| Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles. The emergence of Impressionism in the visual arts was soon followed by analogous movements in other media which became known as Impressionist music and Impressionist literature. |
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