Just as many notes as necessary

[truehobbit]

Can you sing it, too, Jude?

That Iphigenia sure was a far-travelled person!


Well, I made my daily upload to the Mozart music file. As I've just watched the Magic Flute, that's the piece that was on my mind!

At first I had meant to give you Pamina's sad aria, but then I had such a good laugh here, that it seemed unfitting, however, I couldn't bring myself to drop it entirely. So, I uploaded two love-sick pieces tonight for your listening pleasure.
http://esnips.com/web/truehobbit-Mozart

Papageno sings "Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen wünscht Papageno sich."

Code: Select all

Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen       A girl or a wife
Wünscht Papageno sich!               Papageno would like to have
O so ein sanftes Täubchen            O such a tender dove
Wär' Seligkeit für mich! -              Would be blessedness for me.
Dann schmeckte mir Trinken und Essen;    I'd enjoy food and drink
Dann könnt' ich mit Fürsten mich messen,     I could compare to princes
Des Lebens als Weiser mich freu'n,            Enjoy life as a wise man
Und wie im Elysium seyn.                           And feel like in Elysium.

Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen
Wünscht Papageno sich!
O so ein sanftes Täubchen
War' Seeligkeit für mich! -
Ach kann ich denn keiner von allen         Alas, can none of all
Den reitzenden Mädchen gefallen?         you charming girls like me?
Helf' eine mir nur aus der Noth,              One to help me in my need
Sonst gräm' ich mich wahrlich zu Tod'.      Else I'll be sad to death.

Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen,
Wünscht Papageno sich!
O so ein sanftes Täubchen
Wär' Seligkeit für mich.
Wird keine mir Liebe gewähren,             Will none grant me love
So muss mich die Flamme verzehren!     The fire must consume me!
Doch küsst mich ein weiblicher Mund,     But if a woman's mouth kisses me
So bin ich schon wieder gesund.              I'll be well again right away!

If you feel like more like serious heartache, listen to Pamina's aria:

Edited to add: Ooops! I didn't realise the track on the CD for this aria included some subsequent spoken text! I should have cut that bit - but I don't yet know how to do that - I'll try to figure it out sometime - sorry about that!

Code: Select all

Ach ich fühls, es ist verschwunden -       Oh, I feel it is gone
Ewig hin der Liebe Glück!                      Forever lost love's happiness!
Nimmer kommt ihr, Wonnestunden,       Never you pleasant hours will 
Meinem Herzen mehr zurück.                return to my heart.
Sieh Tamino, diese Thränen                  See, Tamino, these tears
Fliessen Trauter, dir allein.                    Fall for you, my dear, alone.
Fühlst du nicht der Liebe Sehnen,           If you don't feel love's longing
So wird Ruh im Tode seyn.                    There will be rest in death.

(I can't believe I'm picking so much from this opera - my favourite is Figaro, dangit! But that makes it even harder to decide on a single piece. But I think this should really be all from a single recording - something different next time! )

[Whistler]

th:

Papageno appears also in The Abduction of Figaro!

So does Mama Geno.

As for those lyrics...I think they're brilliant, but you have to hear them in proper musical context. They're often intentionally lowbrow and infantile to serve as a contrast to music that is highly sophisticated.

That's the key to Schickele's humor: the civilized and sublime, jumbled randomly with humor that would have been beneath the Three Stooges.

[vison]

There used to be a radio show on CBC that occasionally played P. D. Q. Bach. Wonderful stuff.

Jurgen Gothe? On Disc Drive? Or the other one. . .

[cemthinae]

vison, you can get PDQ Bach on cd. I was it when I was at Barnes & Nobles the other day.

[Jude]

I learned something new today - I didn't know Mozart's son was a composer! And according to the following article, he seems to be worth checking out!

Original article

Soprano Barbara Bonney talks to Ivan Hewett about her passion for the music of Mozart's son, Franz Xaver

Of all the misfortunes that can befall a composer, being the son of a genius is probably the most crushing. No matter how eminent you become, and how hard you struggle, you'll never be anything more than "the distinguished X, son of the immortal".

n the case of Franz Xaver Mozart, youngest son of Wolfgang Amadeus, there was the additional burden of having a doting and very pushy mother, determined to turn her son into the reincarnation of his father.

She even renamed him "Wolfgang Amadeus", which seems a refinement of cruelty. Nature connived at her cunning plan, by making the son the spitting image of his father. And it gave him just enough musical talent to make the idea half-plausible, if helped along with a hefty dollop of wishful thinking.

Given a robust enough talent, and a strong enough character, a musical son can fight back. Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, son of the great J S Bach, had the confidence to refer to his father as "the old fusspot", and became much more successful in a worldly sense than his father ever was. Without that confidence, these composer sons tend to end up as pale epigones of the father, like Soulima Stravinsky or Mercer Ellington.

Franz Xaver could have been one of them. The portraits of him show a striking resemblance to Wolfgang, certainly, but there's a dreaminess about the eyes that's different. The stories that have come down about Franz Xaver reveal a timid man, never very good at pushing himself or his music.

He certainly got off to an impressive start, singing Papageno's aria from The Magic Flute at the age of five at a memorial concert for his father. And he must have acquired an impressive piano technique, as his own piano concertos are flashily difficult in an early romantic sort of way. But after he moved to remote Lemburg to become a tutor in an aristocratic household, his career trickled into the sands. In his late forties, he tried to break into Viennese musical life, but by then it was too late.

His unworldliness is one of the things that endears him to soprano Barbara Bonney, who's recently released a CD of his songs, and will be performing some of them next Wednesday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. "I love the way the character of the man shines through the music," she says. "The songs have this very charming self-deprecation and melancholy, as though he's saying to us 'I know have some talent, but really I know I'm not good enough.' I want to say to him, it's OK, you don't have to be the genius your father was, what you've done is good enough."

She really does seem touchingly protective of this long-dead and long-forgotten composer, whom she stumbled across when preparing a programme for some young singers at the Lincoln Centre in New York.

"I was building it round Mozart, and I thought, hey, what about all the other Mozarts. His sister Nannerl was a fine pianist, but she didn't compose as far as we know, and Mozart's father Leopold wrote mostly instrumental music. Then the head of the Mozart archives in Salzburg suggested I look at Franz Xaver Mozart. There were piles of stuff there and in Vienna, and I went through it all, and found these marvellous songs."

Franz Xaver wrote his songs at a time when Schubert was in full flood, and Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Schumann were just around the corner. Like them, he sets the early romantic poets, such as Byron, Grillparzer and Schiller, and so the same theme of yearning - for an unattainable beloved or a homeland left behind - recurs often.

Bonney thinks this is connected to an unhappy love affair with a married woman. "Maybe there was more to his reluctance to leave Lemburg than just lack of ambition," she says. Compared with the songs of his more famous contemporaries, Franz Xaver's seem quite slender, almost shy in the way they gesture towards feelings rather than embracing them in a full-blooded way.

But Bonney doesn't agree this makes them negligible. "Well, the early ones are slight, but he really grows in the later songs. These are fascinating in the way they foreshadow so much later music. I can hear echoes of Weber's opera Der Freischütz, which really was the cornerstone of German musical romanticism, and of course Franz Xaver was related to Weber through his mother. I can even hear Verdi at times. And there's one particular song, Bertha's Lied an der Nacht, which takes us straight into the world of Wagner's Tannhaüser."

That quality of being an echo of something bigger is part of the charm of these songs. Bonney is clearly pleased and proud to have found them. "It's a wonderful feeling. I feel I've discovered an unknown island, where no-one even thought of looking."

Barbara Bonney's CD 'The Other Mozart' is out now on Decca.

Edit: link to Amazon, where you can hear samples of the music

Edit again: I think it's cute that one of the songs is simply titled "Nein!"

[Erunáme]

Way back from a couple weeks ago:

Eru, I think his music is far from sterile! But it IS in classical form...which does not have the emotional dynamics and huge crescendos of the later, Romantic composers. Do you tend to not like Classical music in general? (Handel, for instance? or Salieri?)

I don't think it's bad, but it's certainly not my favorite. I can get bored with Mozart, Handel, Haydn, and sometimes Beethoven as well.. I do appreciate it though and enjoy listening to the musiciality of the musicians when they play this music.

An excerpt from one of my music history books, since it has a great explanation:

Musical classicism is in many respects the direct opposite of romanticism. Whereas the latter sought to bring music into close relation with literature and painting, classicism upheld the independence of music as a self-contained art. Romanticism leaned toward program music, classicism toward absolute. Romanticism glorified folklore and exploited peasant song and dance. The music of classicism came out of the culture of cities and the sophistication of courts (although the popular tone, significantly, makes its appearance in the vivacious finales of Haydn). Romantic music is a democratic art; classical music is aristocratic. Romantic music was intensely national; classical music created a universal style disseminated through two international art forms - Italian opera and Viennese symphony. Romantic music evoked atmosphere and mood, whereas classical music concentrated upon the development of abstract ideas. The masters of the classical era favored a clean sensible music, limpid and discreet; not for them the rhetoric and gesture that marked the nineteenth-century style.

Romantic music was given to excess; classical music favored moderation. Romantic music sounded the nature tone in its land and seascapes; classical music on the whole ignored the scenic element, fastening instead upon the landscape of the spirit. For the romantics music was an enchantment, a religion, a way of life. The classical era enjoyed music as an embellishment of gracious living. Hence romantic pessimism is alien to this urbane and essentially optimistic art.

For the romantic composer color and harmony, melody and rhythm often existed as ends in themselves. For the classicist these functioned in the closest possible relationship, serving a single goal: unity of form: form as the principle of artistic law and order, born of the mating of reason and emotion.

One more:

It is important to avoid the common misconception that classical art is form without feeling while romantic art is feeling without form. There can be no art without feeling, nor can there be art without form. Thus classical art contains profound emotion and drama, just as romantic art often exhibits a most subtle sense of form. The difference between them is one of emphasis; it has to do with the way in which form and content are fused. Classicism purifies emotion by subjecting it to the discipline of an all-embracing design. In romantic art the emotion often struggles against this discipline, it floods and threatens to burst asunder the form. From this is derived the inner tension of romantic art, the sense of strain that is alien to the classical spirit.

Pretty much every description of romantic music appeals and speaks to me whereas the classical traits do not.

Ugh...typing that out took longer than expected. I'll continue my own words tomorrow.

[Primula Baggins]

Those are really interesting quotes, Eru. Thanks for going to all that trouble!

I'd have to say I love both classical and romantic music, each for what they are, though romantic music definitely spoke more to me than classical when I was younger. Now that I'm old and weird, though, I'm more and more drawn to the tension between form and feeling that comes out so clearly in classical music. (I'm not a serious musician, so pardon my handwaving!) I find a lot of emotion within that tension in classical and even baroque music. Bach wrote some of the most heartbreaking music I've ever heard.

[Old_Tom_Bombadil]

I think I'm a bit late coming to this thread, but for whatever it's worth here's my 2 cents...

Yes, in Mozart's time all the keys were attributed a particular expression.
I remember that F-major is rural and C-major of course triumphant.
One of the minor ones is for death - not sure if it's g or d minor.

IIRC from my music history education of many years ago, there was a time where keys did not all sound alike. You get a hint of that by reading "What tuning did Bach intend?" at the Wiki Encyclopedia discussing the Well-Tempered_Clavier. Today pitches are adjusted up and down to even out the distances between the steps of a scale so that the keys are more or less relative to one another.

For a total Opera Virgin, I think I would go with something by Puccini. Very angsty, very romantic. Maybe La Boheme.

OR...for those with a more adventurous streak, I'd go with Aida or Tosca.

Carmen is fun, I guess, but I always have a problem with an opera sung in French that takes place in Spain.

Another advantage to Puccini is that his operas have little to no overture. Turandot is a good example of that.

Yes, "Carmen" is sung in French and takes place, I believe, in Seville, Spain. Of course, so do Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" and Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro". "Don Giovanni" also takes place in Spain as does Beethoven's "Fidelio". The first three operas I mentioned are in Italian, while "Fidelio" is in German. "La Boheme" takes place in France, but is sung in Italian. "La Fanciulla del West" takes place in the United States and is sung in Italian. "Madama Butterfly" takes place in Japan, has American and Japanese characters, and is sung in Italian. I could go on, but I think I've made my point.

Mozart took care to adapt his writing to the skills of his singers, and the original singer was a famous virtuoso and therefore maybe better suited to the role than many others who are given the part.

Exactly, and many of the operas we hear now weren't how they were originally composed. When a singer would have great difficulty with a particular aria, Mozart would write a different one for them. We now commonly hear all the arias that he wrote.

I recall learning that one of the sopranos he wrote for had an extraordinary range, so some of his operas have these strange arias where the soprano has prolonged passages in the lower part of her range. One of these roles, I believe, is Dorabella in Così Fan Tutte. I know there are others--I think the Countess in Figaro may be one of them--but I don't recall what they are. (Sopranos are not my area of expertise. )

This is the prayer of the priests from The Magic Flute, "Oh Isis und Osiris". It's the piece that I'm quoting in my avatar (not sure you can see that there are a few bars of music in the corner).

Ah, so that's what that is! I've heard that it's more difficult to cast the role of Sarastro than it is the Queen of the Night. Does anyone know if that is true? (Sarastro, a bass role, has these incredibly low notes while the Queen is full of fantastic colortura. I believe the more famous of her two arias, "Der Holle Rache", features an F above high C!)

Speaking of "O Isis und Osiris", I spent Mozart's 250th birthday anniversary listening to our local classical music station, KXPR, which was featuring live broadcasts from Salzburg as well as some recorded earlier that week during the Mozart Festival. On my way to work in the car I heard a fantastic performance of this aria by a German bass-baritone named Thomas Quasthoff. Not only does he have an incredible vocal range and the most beautiful tone you can imagine, the expressiveness of his voice is astounding. After hearing him on the radio I bought a recording of him singing Brahms and Liszt lieder and I love it!

I got 10 of 10 on that BBC quiz, too. How could anyone ever mistake Tchaikovsky for Mozart?

If you feel like more like serious heartache, listen to Pamina's aria:

Ah, yes. I remember discussing this over at TORC. Poor Pamina. But in the end she gets her Prince so all is well.