Johann Strauss II - Kaiser-Walzer (Emperor Waltz), Op. 437

Strauss often played in the glittering Imperial balls, conducting the orchestra and playing the first violin at the same time.   The majestic launch of this fascinating waltz presents the backdrop of the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the hegemony of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph in 1888. Johann Strauss II was Music Director of the Dance Hesperides of the Imperial Court from 1863 to 1872 and composed on occasion for the celebration of an imperial anniversary. The ingenuity of the melody of the Emperor Waltz, which was originally orchestrated for a full orchestra, is such that it was easily adapted for the four or five instruments of a chamber ensemble by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in 1925. This waltz is a tender and somewhat melancholic work, which at times turns its gaze nostalgically to the old Vienna. The waltz praises the majesty and dignity of the old monarch, who was fully devoted to his people. It begins with a majestic, magnificent march, which soon re
0

Claude Debussy - Introduction

Claude Debussy's portrait by Raphael Schwartz.

Claude Debussy is a special case of musical innovator. With his lyrical drama "Pelléas and Mélisande" he was freed from the laws of tonality and created the conditions of a new musical language. First he changed the painting status of impressionism into music.

As a good "music painter" he was mainly interested in the color expression and extent of the sounds and projected through them, moods and mental impressions, which are caused by images and natural phenomena.

He listened to the rhythms, the "music" of nature and tried - and succeeded - to re-form it by proposing "music for the ear and not for the paper". He dared and of course won.

Without being dogmatic, he experimented by reordering the prevailing principles of aesthetics and art until his time and formed a new way of expressing discreetly sensual and discharged from the emotional tensions and successive explosions of mature and tired romance that ran through the end of the 19th century. He denied the established forms, repetitive sound patterns and conventional developments, screaming at every measure of his poetry, the right to difference.

The music composed by Claude Debussy has the hallmarks of a perpetual sluggish daydream. Benefited by an unparalleled orchestral technique, an exemplary balance and a harmonious boldness completely free from the shackles of academicism, she erased her own luminous path and despite all the initial doubts that emerged in a musical matrix for many of the later homotechnotic expressions of the 20th century.


(George Monemvasitis)


Comments

Post a Comment