The mature music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—the Viennese Classical composers—reflects the best ideals of the Enlightenment in that it embodies rational clarity and order and makes a direct appeal to the listener without undue obscurity. What they produced forms the backbone of a repertoire of music that is recognized and celebrated as some of [...]
The violin concerto as a form of music has endured for some 300 years and remains, alongside the piano concerto, the most popular type of concerto played in modern concert halls and committed to recording. The genre was first developed during the Baroque era, when the concerto was conceived as a tripartite structure, running about fifteen [...]
Love has inspired countless composers, some of whom have written pieces dedicated to, or directly inspired by, their own beloveds. Here are ten of the best musical love letters ever composed. 1. Wagner: Siegfried Idyll Though his reputation rests on his big, long, and loud mythological operas, Richard Wagner was also capable of composing on a [...]
While original in his style, Felix Mendelssohn was certainly no radical. What he offered was a perfect blending of classical proportion with Romantic fervor. In that sense, he amounts to a kind of missing link between Mozart and the remainder of the nineteenth century. Of all the underrated genius-level composers of the nineteenth century, none [...]
Mozart’s genius consisted in absorbing, building upon, and transcending the musical influences of his day. The emotional complexity of his music raises it above the gracious, charming, but often superficial and forgettable aesthetics of the rococo era in which he was raised. In an essay in this journal titled “The Wild and Terrible Mozart,” Stephen [...]
The movie "Amadeus" is a wondrous meditation, through the reminiscences of Antonio Salieri, on the ways of genius, the value of contrition, and the arbitrariness of metaphysical justice. "Amadeus" opened the door to a fantastic world of whose existence I had not been aware. The movie changed my life. " —Anonymous viewer of the film [...]
Who completed Mozart's unfinished Requiem? The masterpiece that we know today was the work of many hands. But who wrote which parts? And how much did Mozart actually write? "The last movement of his lips was an endeavor to indicate where the kettledrums should be used in his Requiem. I think I still hear the [...]
Michael Haydn's Requiem—like the composer himself—has receded into the historical mists. But this astounding work heavily influenced Mozart's own Requiem and is worthy of comparison with every other setting of the Mass for the Dead ever composed. Michael Haydn The 1984 film Amadeus brought to the general public's attention that many minor composers [...]
The sunshine, and the grace of falling rain, The fluttering daffodil, the lilt of bees, The blossom on the boughs of almond trees, The waving of the wheat upon the plain— […]
Is it possible and does it make sense to deal with the last four years of Wolfgang Amadè Mozart’s creative life without being fixated on the catastrophe of the composer's premature end? His death forever changed the course of musical classicism at the turn of the eighteenth century because, to give just one example, it [...]
Did Beethoven steal tunes from his older contemporary for the "Eroica" Symphony, the Ninth Symphony, and for his most popular and beautiful song? "This entire passage has been stolen from the Mozart symphony in C." —written by Beethoven on one of his own musical sketches It is one of the most popular tunes in all [...]
Here are four recently-published books and four new classical music albums that I have greatly enjoyed this past year… Books I’ve read several excellent biographies (and one great autobiography) this past year. Foremost among the former is Jan Swafford’s magisterial Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, which could easily be termed the definitive biography of perhaps the greatest [...]
Listen to musicologist/pianist Robert Levin play Mozart's own piano and explain why it is important to know how Mozart's music sounded to the composer on the very instrument for which he composed... Books on the topic of this essay may be found in The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore. We hope you will join us in The Imaginative Conservative community. The [...]
The Vatican knew it had a winner on its hands with Allegri’s “Miserere” and, wanting to preserve its aura of mystery and exclusivity, forbade replication, threatening anyone who attempted to copy or publish it with excommunication. But that didn’t stop the teenaged Mozart. The fourteen-year-old Mozart didn’t see himself as being a music pirate, mind [...]