Robert Schumann wrote four symphonies. The last of them, the third (don′t ask! …well, not yet, anyway) was dubbed – not by Schumann – The Rhenish. With the exception of one movement, it’s a rather jolly work and its nickname seems, for once, almost justified [seeming to conjure the great waterway (of course); jolly peasants; […]
Category Archives: Symphony
Vítězslav Novák may not exactly be a household name, but –together with another Dvořák pupil, Josef Suk – he was one of the most influential composers and teachers of the generation that followed Smetana and Dvořák. The tone poem In the Tatras is one of his most performed works and does for the Tatras mountains (they’re on […]
Dumka (pl. Dumky): An alternately melancholy and gay piece of music, found chiefly in the work of Slavonic composers. OED There’s something bipolar about the dumka with its instant swings from deep sadness to manic jollity. It’s tempting to say that it’s to do with the Slavic temperament, except for the fact that the Hungarians – who […]
Schubert’s last symphony – like much of the composer’s later work – has a darkness at its heart. As in the Adagio of his Octet, this emotional crisis occurs during the sonata-like reprise of the symphony’s second movement (Andante con moto). A fff outburst is followed by a shocked and traumatised total silence. The strings – still […]
The trouble with alliteration is that once you start in on it, it’s not so simple to stop. Anyway, it’s not the title of Wilhelm Müller’s pithily named collection of poems (Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten) – the source of the Winterreise texts –that concerns us here but more the wandering horn player himself. […]
In the evening twilight we went today to the palace where Queen Mary lived and loved; a little room is shown there with a winding staircase leading up to the door: up this way they came and found Rizzio in that dark corner, where they pulled him out, and three rooms off there is a […]
What did holidaymakers do in the halcyon days before the internet, Wi-Fi, smartphones and tablets? They sent one another postcards, of course! And before the postcard?? In the 18th/19th century affluent young gentlemen and (rarely) ladies were packed off to do the Grand Tour; sent traipsing around Europe in the fond hope that – rather […]
