Richard Strauss was born in Munich, Germany on June 11, 1864. He was born to Franz Joseph Strauss, who was regarded as one of the best French hornists of his time, and Josepha Pscorr. Strauss composed Don Quixote, technically known as “Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character, in the year 1987 and it was first performed on March 8, 1898 in Colgne, Germany and was conducted by Franz Wüllner. It is based on the novel “El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Moncha”, which was written by Michael Cervantes and published in two separate parts, the first in 1605 and the second in 1615. The genre for this piece is called Symphonic Poem, or Tone Poem.
A symphonic poem is a piece of orchestral music that is based on a non-musical source, for example the content of a poem, novel, perhaps a painting or even a landscape. It is believed that Franz Liszt, an Hungarian virtuoso and composer, invented the form and the term. In a lot of his compositions, Liszt uses theatrics to parallel the non-musical emotions of his sources, “...the poetic idea is simultaneously the formative element.” Liszt also said that “when ‘the music does not develop intrinsically from within, it becomes ‘literature music’.” A symphonic poem does not merely copy its source of inspiration, for example taking the literal meaning of it, but the music creates its own “self” from the inspiration.
One of the best things about this genre, is that every composer who has worked within it has approached it a different way. Remarkably, when the same composer is using the inspiration of a novel for one score and then the inspiration of a painting for another, you see that even the same composer will differentiate in their musical design depending on their source of insp...
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... Quixote” astounded people when it was first played, and it still astounds people today.
Works Cited
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"STRAUSS, R.: Don Quixote / Romance for Cello and Orchestra." STRAUSS, R.: Don Quixote / Romance for Cello and Orchestra. Naxos, n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.
The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. "Symphonic Poem (music)."Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.
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Kopplin, Dave. "An American in Paris." LA Phil. Los Angeles Philharmonic, n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.
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Grove, George. The Musical Times Volume 47. United Kingdom: Musical Times Publications Ltd. 1906, Print.
It was not only until the spring of that year that he for first time left Hamburg professionally. He undertook a tour with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Remenyi for the purpose of introducing himself and his works. At Gottingen they gave a concert in which the young pianist made a deep impression upon the musicians present. He and Remenyi were to play Beethoven?s Kreutzer sonata, but at the last moment it was discovered that the piano was half a tone too low.
The first piece presented in this concert was Robert Strauss’ Metamorphosen, Study for 23 Solo Strings a piece was composed during the last months of World War II, from August 1944 to March 1945, dedicated it to Paul Sacher. It was first performed in January 1946 with ten violins, five violas, five cellos, and three double basses, this was immolated in the performance by the Atlanta Symphony orchestra on April 13th that I attended. It is widely believed that Strauss wrote the work as a statement of mourning for Germany's destruction during the war, in particular as an elegy for devastating bombing of Munich during the second World War.
One of the most prominent examples of program music is Richard Strauss’s tone poem Don Quixote. This tone poem tells the story of Miguel de Cevantes Saavedra’s novel The Adventures of Don Quixote. The story of the hero Don Quixote is one of insanity and delusion that Strauss was able to depict very well. Don Quixote was a middle aged man that read too many books about knights and their heroic deeds. This is shown by three different themes given to show Don’s dreams of being a knight. Over time, he read so many books and dreamt of rescuing his ideal woman named Dulcinea from a dragon so many times that his mind was unable to separate his real life from his fantasy world. Strauss chose to depict Dulcinea with a beautiful lyrical melody while the dragon is represented by a loud, low, sustained melody in the tenor and bass tubas. Don’s victory over the dragon is shown by a victory flourish in the flute and oboe. After this melding of his mind occurs, he believes that he is really the knight Don Quixote de la Mancea. From here, he and his side kick Sancho Panza set out into the world to do chivalrous deeds. From here on out, Don is represented by a solo cello voice. When ...
A metrical composition; a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme, and characterized by imagination and poetic diction; contradistinguished from prose; as, the poems of Homer or of Milton. This is but one of Webster 's definitions of a poem. Using this definition of “poem,” this paper will compare and contrast three different poems written by three different poets; William Shakespeare 's Sonnets 116, George Herbert’s Easter Wings and Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Whoso List to Hunt.
Willoughby, David. "Chapter 11." The World of Music. 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. 249-53. Print.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was an Austrian composer and pianist who shaped classical music with his concertos, symphonies, operas, and sonatas. He was born in Salzburg, Austria on January 27, 1756 and he wrote over 600 pieces in his lifetime.
Kamien, Roger. "Part VI: The Romantic Period." Music: An Appreciation. 10th ed. Boston: McGraw-Hill Higher Education, 2008. 257-350. Print.
Going from Beethoven to Mozart. Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 in D Major K 835 (the Haffner Symphony) offers a great example of analogous in its overall motivic structure. The melodic lyricism correlates with a high degree of motive affinity which to all of its “melody owe their aesthetic associations in many instances to their motivic peculiarities.” We basically owe it to all the composers from the early ages of musical composition (Renaissance, Classical, Romanticism, Baroque, etc.) for all the techniques that are used for composing and learning about music
Don Quixote is one of the oldest forms of the modern novel. Written in the early 17th century it follows the adventures of Don Quixote and his sidekick Sancho Panza. In Don Quixote, Cervantes satirizes the idea of a hero. Don Quixote sees himself as a noble knight among the ignorant common folk, but everyone else sees him as a bumbling idiot who has gone mad. Therefore, the novel’s longevity in the western canon is due to the humorous power struggle and the quest of a hero Don Quixote faces throughout the story.
Susskind, Pamela. "Clara Schumann." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Ed. Stanley Sadie and George Grove. 1980. Print.
This is the second volume of Richard Taruskin's historical work, and it highlights composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He examines the progression of different styles and eras of music.
Heritage of Music: Volume II The Romantic Era (Heritage of Music). New York: Oxford UP, USA, 1992. Print.
Roughly from 1815 to 1910, this period of time is called the romantic period. At this period, all arts are transforming from classic arts by having greater emphasis on the qualities of remoteness and strangeness in essence. The influence of romanticism in music particularly, has shown that romantic composers value the freedom of expression, movement, passion, and endless pursuit of the unattainable fantasy and imagination. The composers of the romantic period are in search of new subject matters, more emotional and are more expressive of their feelings as they are not bounded by structural rules in classical music where order, equilibrium, control and perfection are deemed important (Dorak, 2000).
John Williams Interview for Music Express Magazine. Perf. John Williams. YouTube, 20 Apr. 2012. Web. 21 Nov. 2013.