Unconscious bursts of creativity that engender significant artistic endeavors are not necessarily inspired by passionate romantic love alone. Greek mythology believed that this kind of stimulus came from nine muses, the inspirational goddesses of literature, science, and the arts. Muses were long considered the source of knowledge embodied in poetry, lyric songs and ancient myths. Throughout the history of Western art, artists, writers and musicians have prayed to the muses, or alternately, drawn inspiration from personified muses that conceptually reside beyond the borders of earthly love. True to life, however, composer inspiration has emerged from the entire spectrums of existence and being. Nature has always played a decidedly important role in the inspiration of various classical composers, as did exotic cities, landscapes or rituals. Composer inspiration is also found in poetry, the visual arts, and mythological stories and tales. Artistic, historical or cultural expressions of the past are just as inspirational as is the everyday: the third Punic War or the contrapuntal mastery of Bach is inspirationally just as relevant as are the virulent bat and camel. Composer inspiration is delightfully drawn from heroes and villains, scientific advances, a pet, or something as mundane as a hangover. Discover what fires the imagination of people who never stop asking questions.
Although the public reception of the works of Niels Wilhelm Gade (1817-1890) was left untouched by political and cultural censorship, he never quite achieved the fame of Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann. Nevertheless, Gade is still regarded as one of
1 February 2017Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Concert Arias for Tenor and Orchestra, KV 420, 431, 36, 21 The vast majority of Mozart’s independent arias is composed for the soprano voice. However, there are a handful of concert arias for the tenor
A New Year’s Eve tradition in the opera world is Johann Strauss II’s operetta Die Fledermaus (The Bat). A year earlier, Eisenstein abandoned his friend Falke in center of town, drunken and dressed as a bat (hence the title), and
In April 1817, a merry little band of artists decided to form a small private club called the “Unsinnsgesellschaft” (Nonsense Society). Based in Vienna, this congenial group of artistic friends published a weekly magazine, the “Archiv des menschlichen Unsinns” (Archive
From its first notes, Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker takes us to someplace warm and magical. Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker, Op. 71: Overture (Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra; Simon Rattle, cond.) The ballet originates in a story by E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Nutcracker and the
The tale of the two children and how they fool the wicked witch who has captured them in her gingerbread house has become a holiday opera. The recasting of the Grimm Brother’s tale into something more family friendly was done
Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) was born in Buenos Aires and studied at the conservatory there. One of his best known students is the tango composer Ástor Piazzola, who studied with him in 1941. Ginastera was inspired by the life of Argentina,
Moritz Moszkowski was known the world over as the “Sunshine Composer.” When he died in April 1925, a prominent musical journal reported, “Moszkowski dead! So painful an announcement has not stricken the entire musical word since the deaths of Chopin,
