Benson’s Private Land

Composer: Sergei Taneyev

Essay:

Taneyev was born to a cultured and literary family of Russian nobility. A distant cousin, Alexander Taneyev, was also a composer, whose daughter, Anna Vyrubova, was highly influential at court. Alexander was drawn closely to the nationalist school of music, while he would gravitate toward a more cosmopolitan outlook.

He began taking piano lessons at age five with a private teacher. His family moved to Moscow in 1865. The following year, the nine-year-old Taneyev entered the Moscow Conservatory. His first piano teacher at the Conservatory was Edward Langer. After a year’s interruption in his studies, Taneyev studied again with Langer. He also joined the theory class of Nikola Hubert and, most importantly, the composition class of Tchaikovsky. In 1871, Taneyev studied piano with the Conservatory’s founder, Nikolai Rubinstein.

Taneyev graduated in 1875, the first student in the history of the Conservatory to win the gold medal both for composition and for performing (piano). He was also the first person ever to be awarded the Conservatory’s Great Gold Medal; the second was Arseny Koreshchenko and the third was Sergei Rachmaninoff.That summer he travelled abroad with Rubinstein. That year he also made his debut as a concert pianist in Moscow playing the first piano concerto in D minor of Johannes Brahms, and would become known for his interpretations of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. In March 1876 he toured Russia with violinist Leopold Auer.

Taneyev was also the soloist in the Moscow première of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto in 1875. Tchaikovsky was clearly impressed by Taneyev’s performance; he later asked Taneyev to be soloist in the Russian premiere of his Second Piano Concerto. (After Tchaikovsky’s death, Taneyev also completed and premiered his Third Piano Concertoand Andante and Finale.)

Taneyev attended Moscow University for a short time and was acquainted with outstanding Russian writers, including Ivan Turgenev and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. During his travels in Western Europe in 1876 and 1877, he met Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, César Franck and Camille Saint-Saëns amongst others.

When Tchaikovsky resigned from the Moscow Conservatory in 1878, Taneyev was appointed to teach harmony. He would later also teach piano and composition. He served as Director from 1885 to 1889, and continued teaching until 1905. He had great influence as a teacher of composition. His pupils included Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Rachmaninoff,Reinhold Glière, Paul Juon, Julius Conus, and Nikolai Medtner. The polyphonic interweaves in the music of Rachmaninoff and Medtner stem directly from Taneyev’s teaching. Scriabin, on the other hand, broke away from Taneyev’s influence.

Taneyev was also a scholar of massive erudition. In addition to music, he studied—for relaxation—natural and social science, history, mathematics, plus the philosophies of Platoand Spinoza.

During the summers of 1895 and 1896, Taneyev stayed at Yasnaya Polyana, the home of Leo Tolstoy and his wife Sofia. She developed an attachment to the composer which embarrassed her children and made Tolstoy jealous, though Taneyev himself remained unaware of it.. However this also released her from the distress of the isolation she experienced when Tolstoy grew distant from family concerns and devoted himself to the Christian anarchist-pacifism which shaped his last years. Sofia’s infatuation with Taneyev and his music echoes the story of Tolstoy’s great and penetrating dissection of marital relations in The Kreutzer Sonata.

In 1905, the revolution and its consequent effect on the Moscow Conservatory led Taneyev to resign from the staff there. He resumed his career as a concert pianist, both as soloist and chamber musician. He was also able to pursue composition more intensely, completing chamber works with a piano part which he could play in concerts as well as some choruses and a substantial number of songs. His last completed work was the cantata At the Reading of a Psalm, completed at the beginning of 1915.

Taneyev contracted pneumonia after attending the funeral of Scriabin. While he was recovering, he succumbed to a heart attack.

A museum dedicated to Taneyev is located in Dyudkovo, where he died. There is also a section dedicated to Taneyev at the Tchaikovsky Museum in Klin.

Composer: Édouard Lalo

Essay:

Lalo was born in Lille (Nord), in northernmost France. He attended that city’s music conservatory in his youth. Then, beginning at age 16, Lalo studied at the Paris Conservatoireunder Berlioz’s old enemy François Antoine Habeneck. For several years, he worked as a string player and teacher in Paris. He joined with friends to found the Armingaud Quartet, playing viola and second violin. Lalo’s earliest surviving compositions are songs and chamber works. (Two early symphonies were destroyed.) Julie Besnier de Maligny, a contraltofrom Brittany, became his bride in 1865. She aroused Lalo’s early interest in opera and led him to compose works for the stage. Unfortunately, they were deemed too progressive and Wagnerian and were not initially well received despite their freshness and originality. This led him to dedicate most of his career to the composition of chamber music, which was in vogue, and to writing works for orchestra.

Although Lalo is not one of the most immediately recognized names in French music, his distinctive style has earned him some degree of popularity. Symphonie espagnole for violin and orchestra still enjoys a prominent place in violinists’ repertoire, and is known in many classical circles simply as “The Lalo”. Lalo is also known for concertos, including his Cello Concerto in D minor. The same Breton legend that inspired “Le roi d’Ys“, went on to spark the creation of his Symphony in G Minor and chamber works. Lalo’s style is notable for strong melodies and colourful orchestration, with a rather Germanic solidity that sets him apart from most of his compatriots. This distinctive style and strong expressive bent can be seen even in such compactly constructed works as the Scherzo in D minor, one of Lalo’s most colorful compositions.

Lalo did not gain fame as a composer until his late forties. “Le roi d’Ys” (“The King of Ys”), an opera based on a Breton legend , is his most accomplished and complex work. (The same legend inspired Debussy to compose his famous piano piece, La Cathédrale engloutie.) The opera was rejected for 10 years after composition and was not performed until 1888, when he was 65 years old. Its success opened doors for Lalo to the end of his life. However, his imagination and the desire to compose new music were diminishing. He died in Paris at age 69, leaving several unfinished works.

Lalo’s son Pierre Lalo (6 September 1866 – 9 June 1943) was a music critic who wrote for Le Temps and other French periodicals from 1898 until his death.

Composer: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Essay:

(27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791), was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choralmusic. He is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers.

Mozart showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood in Salzburg. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty; at 17 he was engaged as a court musician in Salzburg, but grew restless and traveled in search of a better position, always composing abundantly. Visiting Vienna in 1781 he was dismissed from his Salzburg position and chose to stay in the capital, where over the rest of his life he achieved fame but little financial security. His final years in Vienna yielded many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and the Requiem. The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons.

Mozart always learned voraciously from others, and developed a brilliance and maturity of style that encompassed the light and graceful along with the dark and passionate—the whole informed by a vision of humanity “redeemed through art, forgiven, and reconciled with nature and the absolute”. His influence on all subsequent Western art music is profound. Beethoven wrote his own early compositions in the shadow of Mozart, of whom Joseph Haydn wrote that “posterity will not see such a talent again in 100 years”.

Composer: Dmitri Chostakovitch

Essay:

(25 September  1906 – 9 August 1975) was a Russian composer of the Soviet period and one of the most celebrated composers of the 20th century.

Shostakovich achieved fame in the Soviet Union under the patronage of Leon Trotsky’s chief of staff Mikhail Tukhachevsky, but later had a complex and difficult relationship with the Stalinist bureaucracy. His music was officially denounced twice, in 1936 and 1948, and was periodically banned. Yet he also received accolades and state awards and served in the Supreme Soviet of RSFSR. Despite the official controversy, his works were popular and well received.

After a period influenced by Prokofiev and Stravinsky, Shostakovich developed a hybrid style, as exemplified by his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934). This single work juxtaposed a wide variety of trends, including the neo-classical style (showing the influence of Stravinsky) and post-Romanticism (after Mahler). Sharp contrasts and elements of the grotesque^[1] characterize much of his music.

Shostakovich’s orchestral works include 15 symphonies and six concerti. His music for chamber ensembles includes 15 string quartets, a piano quintet and two piano trios. For the piano he composed two solo sonatas, an early set of preludes, and a later set of 24 preludes andfugues. Other works include two operas, and a substantial quantity of film music.

Composer: Ludwig Van Beethoven

Essay:

(17 December 1770 – 26 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. He was a crucial figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music, and remains one of the most acclaimed and influential composers of all time.

Born in Bonn, of the Electorate of Cologne and a part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in present-day Germany, he moved to Vienna in his early twenties and settled there, studying with Joseph Haydn and quickly gaining a reputation as a virtuosopianist. His hearing began to deteriorate in the late 1790s, yet he continued to compose, conduct, and perform, even after becoming completely deaf.