“Anton Bruckner arrives in Heaven”. Silhouette drawing by Otto Böhler
В начале месяца приводил в порядок теги в обнаруженных 15Gb классики в mp3, как обычно это сопряжено с ползаньем по Wikipedia и другим ресурсам, в поисках/проверке/подтверждении информации.
В результате этих погружений в жизнь и творчество разных композиторов – пару недель кормил собеседников избранными фактами из биографий. Так как композиторы личности несомненно творческие, то биографии полны всякого, просто всякого, поэтому я очень поржал с картинки выше. Очень оптимистичное утверждение, что все эти товарищи в раю. Версия Good Omens о том, что в раю только Эльгар – куда реалистичнее.
На рисунке слева направо: Liszt, Wagner, Schubert, Schumann, Weber, Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Haydn, Handel, Bach.
Под катом – места из переписки с друзьями.
Maurice Ravel
During the first years of the new century Ravel made five attempts to win France’s most prestigious prize for young composers, the Prix de Rome, past winners of which included Berlioz, Gounod, Bizet, Massenet and Debussy.
In 1900 Ravel was eliminated in the first round; in 1901 he won the second prize for the competition.
In 1902 and 1903 he won nothing: according to the musicologist Paul Landormy, the judges suspected Ravel of making fun of them by submitting cantatas so academic as to seem like parodies.In 1905 Ravel, by now thirty, competed for the last time, inadvertently causing a furore. He was eliminated in the first round, which even critics unsympathetic to his music, including Lalo, denounced as unjustifiable.
The press’s indignation grew when it emerged that the senior professor at the Conservatoire, Charles Lenepveu, was on the jury, and only his students were selected for the final round; his insistence that this was pure coincidence was not well received. L’affaire Ravel became a national scandal, leading to the early retirement of Dubois and his replacement by Fauré, appointed by the government to carry out a radical reorganisation of the Conservatoire.
Я уверен, что это было сознательно, чтобы доебаться и подсветить проблему.
Фото справа в шубе – Равель во французской армии в 1916г.
After several unsuccessful attempts to enlist, Ravel finally joined the Thirteenth Artillery Regiment as a lorry driver in March 1915, when he was forty. Some of Ravel’s duties put him in mortal danger, driving munitions at night under heavy German bombardment. Stravinsky expressed admiration for his friend’s courage: “at his age and with his name he could have had an easier place, or done nothing”.
Jeremiah Clarke
Английский композитор Jeremiah Clarke:
Apparently, he fell madly in love with one of his female students, a young, beautiful woman, of much higher social rank than himself. The woman was out of his league in every way, and he could not bear it. He thus decided that life was not worth living.
Clarke had been visiting a friend who lived in the countryside. He abruptly determined to leave and return to London. His friend observed his dejection, and disappointment in love, and furnished him with a horse and a servant to take care of him. While riding near London, a fit of melancholy seized him on the road and he alighted, giving the horse to the servant. He went into a field, where there was a pond surrounded by trees, and stood on the bank. He began debating with himself about whether he should drown himself in the pond or hang himself on the trees. To decide his fate, he tossed a coin in the water. The coin fell with its edge embedded in the clay, so Clarke mounted his horse, returned to London, and went back to his home in the churchyard of St Paul’s Cathedral. Instead of consoling himself, he chose another method of suicide, shooting himself in the head with a pistol.
У райских ворот должно было быть неудобно.
Тебе дали Знак, а ты?
Carl Nielsen
Из биографии датского композитора Карла Нильсена, ситуация противоположная семейству Малера:
Anne Marie was a gifted artist and a “strong-willed and modern-minded woman, determined to forge her own career”.This determination would strain the Nielsens’ marriage, as Anne Marie would spend months away from home during the 1890s and 1900s, leaving Carl, who pursued extramarital affairs with other women in her absence, to raise their three young children in addition to composing and fulfilling his duties at the Royal Theatre.
В театре он играл в скрипичной секции, а не просто “поставлял” музыку.
Зарплата скрипача в оркестре подпитывалась также частными уроками.
Из этого у меня вопрос, где он брал силы еще и на женщин?
Antonín Dvořák
Про первую симфонию Дворжака:
Dvořák submitted the score for a competition in Germany, but never saw it again, and always believed it was destroyed or irretrievably lost. He later included the work in a list of early compositions he claimed to have destroyed.
However, in 1882, an unrelated person named Dr. Rudolf Dvořák, a 22-year-old Oriental scholar, came across the score in a second-hand bookshop in Leipzig, and bought it. At that time the composer Dvořák was not widely known: although he had written six symphonies, only one of them (No. 6) had been published and only three of them (Nos. 3, 5 and 6) had been performed. Rudolf Dvořák kept the score in his possession, telling nobody about it, not even the composer. He died 38 years later, in 1920, when it passed to his son. The son brought it to the attention of the musical world in 1923. Its authenticity was proven beyond doubt, but it did not receive its first performance until 4 October 1936 in Brno.
Вот это я понимаю, зашел в букинистический магазинчик…
Михаил Глинка
Чайковский гей, Чайковский гей… Меж тем, в биографии Глинки:
Glinka went through a dejected year after the poor reception of Ruslan and Lyudmila. His spirits rose when he travelled to Paris and Spain. In Spain he met Don Pedro Fernández, his secretary and companion for the last nine years of his life.
В англ. версии нет про его бурные отношения с дамами и развод, сие читается однозначно.
Girolamo Frescobaldi
Тут просто выражение лица на портрете понравилось.
Girolamo Frescobaldi как бы говорит нам “на меня равнялся Бах, а чего добился ты?”
Born in the Duchy of Ferrara, he was one of the most important composers of keyboard music in the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods.
Frescobaldi’s printed collections contain some of the most influential music of the 17th century. His work influenced Johann Jakob Froberger, Johann Sebastian Bach, Henry Purcell, and other major composers. Pieces from his celebrated collection of liturgical organ music, Fiori musicali (1635), were used as models of strict counterpoint as late as the 19th century.
