MusiLLection

The optimism and serenity of Mozart's music is in stark contrast to a life of debt-chewing and an incurable anxiety.   Mozart was a child prodigy. Born on January 27, 1756, he played without difficulty any melody he heard on the piano at the age of three, violin at four and composed music at the time he gave his first public concerto, that is, when he was five and a half years old. A painting of the time, presents the Mozart  playing with his father and his sister Maria-Anna in  the garden of the house of his children’s years in Salzburg.  His life was full of music. Even in his games, young Wolfgang used to move from room to room, to the lively melody of a march. In the age of 12 years he had written three operas, six symphonies and hundreds of other works. European tours Mozart's father, Leopold, was a composer and a virtuoso violinist in the service of the Archbishop of Salzburg. He understood that Wolfgang's extraordinary talent could bring significant economic ...

   Smetana loved polka and often used its rhythm in his work, as in String Quartet No. 1. The intensity of this autobiographical work with nationalistic elements has an emotional depth unprecedented throughout Smetana's work. Smetana's hearing loss was heralded in 1847 by a permanent and unbearable hum in his ears (medical tinnitus). When in 1876 he found that his hearing would never be restored, he began composing the String Quartet No. 1 a four-movement chamber composition. With this work, Bedřich Smetana musically expressed the anguish and pain caused by his hearing loss. Twenty-one years had passed since his last chamber music composition, the Piano Trio in G minor, with which he had expressed his sadness at the loss of his four-year-old daughter. Once again, he turned to chamber music in search of solace in his personal tragedy. Smetana himself described the String Quartet as "a memory of my life and the destruction of absolute deafness". Each of the first three...

The harpsichord has been sounding for about six hundred years. It's a keyboard instrument, but its strings are stimulated in a nocturnal way and not by hammering like on the piano. The sound produced is characteristic and easily recognized. When the harpsichord first appeared, it immediately became beloved and its reputation spread throughout Europe. With the begining of the 16th century it became extremely popular and the composers used it in almost every organic combination. It served more as an accompaniment, providing the harmonious substrate, rather than as a solo instrument. The body of the harpsichord has the shape of a wing. For each note there are two or more strings - the performer can choose how many are used at a time, allowing the instrument to produce loud and soft sounds. Some later instruments used a mechanism to change the volume, opening and closing some grilles on the body of the instrument, allowing the sound to strengthen. Usually the harpsichords have two, som...

The lyrics in "Gott, erhalte den Kaiser!" ("God save the Emperor") were written by Lorenz Leopold Haschka.  The winter of 1797-8 Joseph Haydn composed six String Quartets and dedicated them to the Hungarian count Joseph Georg von Erdődy.   The Quartet No. 62 in C major, Op. 76, No. 3, boasts the nickname Emperor (or Kaiser), because in the second movement is a set of variations on "Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser" ("God save Emperor Francis"), an anthem he wrote for Emperor Francis II, which later, is the national anthem of Austria-Hungary. This same melody is known to modern listeners for its later use in the German national anthem, the Deutschlandlied , which is used since Austria-Hungary and the Nazi era, known today as "Deutschland uber alles". Μovements : Ι. Allegro The first part , Allegro , although it begins with a pattern of just five notes, the rest of the part is developed from this simple phrase. As in the case of the "...