HANSLICK QUOTES:

Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.

Eduard Hanslick, quoted by Wolfgang Sandberger (1996) in the liner notes to the Juilliard String Quartet's Intimate Letters. Sony Classical SK 66840.

You cannot imagine the wild enthusiasm that these two men created in Vienna. Newspapers went into raptures over each new waltz, and innumerable articles appeared about Lanner and Strauss.

Quoted by Bob January

That the sweetly intoxicating three-four rhythm which took hold of hand & foot, necessarily eclipsed great & serious music & made the audience unfit for any intellectual effort goes without saying.

Quoted by Long Beach Opera Co.

The Prelude to Tristan and Isolde reminds me of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.

Neue Frei Presse

(Referring to the music of Anton Bruckner) "Nightmarish hangover style" (traumverwirrten Katzenjammerstil)

From Norman Lebrecht, The Book of Musical Anecdotes (1985, Sphere Books)

The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent of him. In this sense music, too, has no aim (object), and the mere fact that this particular art is so closely bound up with our feelings by no means justifies the assumption that its aesthetic principles depend on this union.

The Beautiful in Music (1854)

Music means itself. The Beautiful in Music (1854)

Riccardo Eugenio Drigo (ru. Риккардо Эудженьо Дриго), (30 June 1846 – 1 October 1930) was an Italian composer of balletmusic and Italian opera, a theatrical conductor, and a pianist.

Critical evaluation

Only knowing the work from a piano score, the British critic W.J. Turner declared that Les Troyens was "the greatest opera ever written" in his 1934 book on Berlioz, much preferring it to the vastly more popular works of Richard Wagner. American

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critic B. H. Haggin heard in the work Berlioz's "arrestingly individual musical mind operating in, and commanding attention with, the use of the [Berlioz] idiom with assured mastery and complete adequacy to the text's every demand". David Cairns described the work as "an opera of visionary beauty and splendor, compelling in its epic sweep, fascinating in the variety of its musical invention... it recaptures the tragic spirit and climate of the ancient world." Hugh Macdonald said of it:

In the history of French music, Les Troyens stands out as a grand opera that avoided the shallow glamour of Meyerbeer and Halevy, but therefore paid the price of long neglect. In our own time the opera has finally come to be seen as one of the greatest operas of the 19th century. There are several recordings of the work, and it is performed with increasing frequency.

COMPOSITION HISTORY

Berlioz began the libretto on 5 May 1856 and completed it toward the end of June 1856. He finished the full score on 12 April 1858.[2] Berlioz had a keen affection for literature, and he had admired Virgil since his childhood.[3] The Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein was a prime motivator to Berlioz to compose this opera.[4]

[…] At that time I had completed the dramatic work I mentioned earlier and which I referred to in a footnote to one of my earlier chapters [i.e. chapter 59 concerning Les Troyens: see above]. Four years earlier I happened to be in Weimar at the home of Princess Wittgenstein – a devoted friend of Liszt, and a woman of character and intelligence who has often given me support in my darkest hours. I was led to talk of my admiration for Virgil and of the idea I had formed of a great opera, designed on Shakespearean lines, for which Books Two and Four of the Aeneid would provide the subject-matter. I added that I was all too aware of the pain that such an undertaking would inevitably cause me ever to embark on it. "Indeed, the princess replied, the conjunction of your passion for Shakespeare and your love of antiquity must result in the creation of something grand and novel. You must write this opera, this lyric poem; call it what you like and plan it as you wish. You must start work on it and bring it to completion." As I persisted in my refusal: "Listen, said the princess, if you shrink before the hardships that it is bound to cause you, if you are so weak as to be afraid of the work and will not face everything for the sake of Dido and Cassandra, then never come back here, for I do not want to see you ever again." This was more than enough to decide me. Once back in Paris I started to write the lines for the poem of Les Troyens. Then I set to work on the score, and after three and a half years of corrections, changes, additions etc., everything was finished. As I was polishing the work over and over again, after giving numerous readings of the poem in different places, listening to the comments made by various listeners and benefiting from them to the best of my ability, I decided to write the following letter to the Emperor:

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Les Troyens (in English: The Trojans) is a French grand opera in five acts by Hector Berlioz.[1] The libretto was written by Berlioz himself from Virgil's epic poem the Aeneid; the score was composed between 1856 and 1858. Les Troyens is Berlioz's most ambitious work, the summation of his entire artistic career, but he did not live to see it performed in its entirety. Under the title Les Troyens à Carthage, the last three acts were premièred with many cuts by Léon Carvalho's company, the Théâtre Lyrique, at their theatre (now the Théâtre de la Ville) on the Place du Châtelet in Paris on 4 November 1863, with 21 repeat performances.

Aesthetic Autonomy and Heteronomy

examine and clarify the relationship between artworks and extra-aesthetic developments (be they socio-historic, cultural or economic). The view, arguably inaugurated by Kant, that art can be seen as wholly autonomous (free of extra-aesthetic function, and explicable purely in terms of aesthetic categories) has repeatedly been problematized in the modern history of aesthetics.

Understanding the relationship between art and the extra-aesthetic pertains not only to philosophy of art, but also has implications for a number of other areas of inquiry, such as social philosophy and art history, not to mention the study and practice of the arts themselves.

1830: In Symphonie Fantastique the orchestra narrates an imaginary drama. the drama is described in text in the program, a paragraph for every movement.

1859: Liszt had been developing (with Berlioz) his belief that music must join with poetry at the abstract level when Wagner crossed against him, stating that the orchestra joined with naturalistic dramatic presentation and visual language (pointing towards suspension of disbelief which was radical at the time) the subjective magnitude of an aural journey will become its highest state of resonance.

1946: film-music observers begin to bemoan something called "Mickey Mousing," wherein the action and rhythm of the instrumental part is directly miming the contents of the screen. throughout most of film-music history, this is seen as low-brow.

Hector Berlioz

Symphonie Fantastique

Also titled "Episode in the Life of an Artist," this first symphony by Berlioz was one of the most original and fanciful work of the 19th century. Completed in

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February, 1830, the programmatic symphony described a romantic tale of a young artist meeting a woman, his un-reciprocated love, and the eventual tragic sequences. The story was concocted from Berlioz's own despair and love for Harriet Smithson, the English actress who first dazzled Berlioz by playing Orphelia in a Paris production of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

On its first performance on December 5, 1830, Berlioz handed out written programs of the symphony for the audience prior to its performance, a practice unheard of before. Berlioz's intention was to give the concert-goers an actual outline of the tale depicting by the music in the work. The concert was a great success. The audience even requested to have an encore of the March played.

This symphony was a first of its kind in every way. The idea of a programmatic symphony had previously only briefly been touched upon by Beethoven in his "Pastoral" 6th. In this work, Berlioz gave us a full fancy of a tale that involved romance, a ball, a suicide, a guillotine, and a Witch's Sabbath! Each of these events were imaginatively depicted by musical ideas of their own kind. For instance, the March to the guillotine movement is ended by having plucked strings representing the skips of a chopped head! The following is a brief guide to the individual movements of this symphony. For each movement, Berlioz's abbreviated notes are first listed and some comments about the movement follow. 

Reveries-Passions

Berlioz's Notes: I take as my subject an artist blest with sensibility and a lively imagination... who meets a woman who awakens in him for the first time his heart's desire. He falls desperately in love with her. Curiously, the image of his beloved is linked inseparably with a musical idea representing her graceful and noble character. This idee fixe haunts him throughout the symphony."

After a introduction, the 40-bar theme of idee fixe was first played by the violins in unison. This music idea comes and goes throughout the movement as if the young artist repeatedly encounters her and looses her every time.

Click HERE to hear the idee fixe being played in the first movement.

 

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A Ball

Berlioz's Notes: The artist attends a ball, but the gaiety and festive tumult fails to distract him. The idee fixe returns to torture him further.

Berlioz composed a perfect waltz for this, suggesting all the glitter and glamour of a 19th century ball. As noted, the young artist cannot enjoy the occasion as he spotted his unobtainable beloved. Musically, it is depicted by the idee fixe playing with the waltz theme, as if suggesting the beloved dancing among crowds of people.

Scene in the Country

Berlioz's Notes: Alone in the country on a summer's evening, the arti9st hears two distant herdsmen calling to each other in a franz des vaches (an alphorn melody of the Swiss Alps). Their pastoral duet, the rustle of wind in the trees, and the hope that his beloved might yet be his, all lull him into a reverie, but the idee fixe returns in his dreams. His heart palpitates and he experiences dread premonitions. The sun sets, there is thunder in the distance, then solitude and silence.

A cor anglais and an oboe represent the two Swiss 'alphorn' players. The idee fixe is played by cellos and violas when the young artist falls asleep, which was represented by violins and flutes.

March to the guillotine

Berlioz's Notes: In despair the artist attempts to commit suicide by taking an overdose of opium, but the drug, too weak to prove fatal, instead induces fearsome dreams. He dreams that he has killed his beloved, is condemned to death, and is being taken for execution. The idee fixe floats into his mind, only to be terminated by the fall of the blade.

The drums being the march, which is then furthered by timpani, cornets, ophicleides, and other instruments to give this ceremony a gruesome mood. Violins take over the theme. Then, the brass enter to play a blaring and elaborate march theme. The movement ends first with a brief playing of idee fixe, played by a clarinet, which suggests a brief reminder of the beloved in the artist's mind. As the artist's head is severed and bounched off (as depicted by plucked strings), the movement ends with a cheerful fanfare.

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Dream of a Witches' Sabbath

Berlioz's Notes: The artist at a Witches' Sabbath hears again the idee fixe, but now transformed into a brazen and trivial dance. She has come to witness his burial! Later comes a monstrous parody of the Dies Irae ('Day of Wrath', from the Latin Mass for the Dead). The dance of the witches is combined with the Dies Irae.

Idee fixe first enters as solo clarinet in somewhat of a distorted dance accompanied by timpani; this depicts the beloved among the witches here to watch the artist's burial. Funeral bells could be eard in distance, and Dies Irae is heard playing. The Dies Irae is repeated twice, each time increased in speed. A section of fugue is also played to depict this grotesque dance. Later, as if to imitate dancing skeletons, the violins and violas play on the strings with the wooden part of their bow, creating a unique, eerie sound. A loud climax ends the movement, as if declaring the triumph of the Witches.

Les Soirées de l’Orchestre (1852) (complete text in the original French)

Les Grotesques de la Musique (1859) (complete text in the original French)

À Travers Chants (1862) (complete text in the original French)

Mémoires (1870) (complete text in the original French)

Treatise on Instrumentation and Orchestration (Extracts)   

The Conductor – Theory of his Art  

Feuilleton- deneme veya kısa makale

Voyage to russia, memoirs…

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