Orpheus Revisited: A Ten-Year Retrospect on the Andante con moto of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto

In her contemporaries’ imaginations Clara Schumann transcended aesthetic pitfalls endemic to virtuosity. Scholars have stressed her performance of canonic repertory as a practice through which she established this image. In this study I argue that her concerts of the 1830s and 1840s also staged an elevated form of virtuosity through showpieces that inhabited the flagship genres of popular pianism and that, for contemporary critics, possessed qualities of interiority that allowed them to transcend merely physical or “mechanical” engagement with virtuosity. They include Henselt's études and variation sets, Chopin's “Là ci darem” Variations, op. 2, and Clara's own Romance variée, op. 3, Piano Concerto, op. 7, and Pirate Variations, op. 8. Her 1830s and early 1840s programming offers a window onto a rich intertwining of critical discourse, her own and her peers’ compositions, and her strategies as a pianist-composer. This context reveals that aspirations about elevating virtuosity shaped a broader, more varied field of repertory, compositional strategies, and critical responses than we have recognized. It was a capacious, flexible ideology and category whose discourses pervaded the sheet music market, the stage, and the drawing room and embraced not only a venerated, canonic tradition but also the latest popularly styled virtuosic vehicles. In the final stages of the article I propose that Clara Schumann's 1853 Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, op. 20, alludes to her work of the 1830s and 1840s, evoking the range of guises this pianist-composer gave to her virtuosity in what was already a wide-ranging career.

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Orpheus Revisited: A Ten-Year Retrospect on the Andante con moto of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto

19th-Century Music ◽

10.1525/ncm.1995.19.1.02a00020 ◽

1995 ◽

Vol 19 (1) ◽

pp. 31-49 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Owen Jander

Keyword(s):

Piano Concerto

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Topoi in der Musik Béla Bartóks

Studia Musicologica ◽

10.1556/smus.54.2013.3.3 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 54 (3) ◽

pp. 289-299

Author(s):

Jürgen Hunkemöller

Keyword(s):

Bird Song ◽

Musical Analysis ◽

Piano Concerto ◽

The Third ◽

Different Types ◽

Important Means

The recognition of topoi, i.e. traditional formulae, is an important means of musical analysis. To illustrate this, the paper discusses the types of the battaglia and the pastoral in Bach’s Cantata Halt im Gedächtnis Jesum Christ, and briefly enumerates different types of allusions to jazz in 20th-century compositions by Stravinsky, Milhaud, Blacher, Tippet, and Zimmermann. Then it raises the possibility of an analysis of topoi in Bartók’s music in four main categories. It considers Bartók’s musical quotations from Bach to Shostakovich; the chorale as special topos appearing in Mikrokosmos, in the Concerto for Orchestra, in the Adagio religioso of the Third Piano Concerto; the topos-like employment of the tritone; and finally the idea of a Bartókian Arcadia in the Finale of Music for Strings, and the integration of bird song in the Adagio religioso.

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Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 54

Notes ◽

10.2307/891149 ◽

1948 ◽

Vol 5 (4) ◽

pp. 518

Author(s):

Edward N. Waters ◽

Robert Schumann ◽

Harold Bauer

Keyword(s):

Piano Concerto ◽

A Minor

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An Unfinished Piano Concerto by Mendelssohn

The Musical Quarterly ◽

10.1093/mq/lxviii.1.80 ◽

1982 ◽

Vol LXVIII (1) ◽

pp. 80-101 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

R. LARRY TODD

Keyword(s):

Piano Concerto

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Nineteenth-Century Music?? The Case of Rachmaninov

19th-Century Music ◽

10.1525/ncm.2008.31.3.245 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 31 (3) ◽

pp. 245-265 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Charles Fisk

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Twentieth Century ◽

Musical Language ◽

Piano Concerto ◽

Dreamless Sleep ◽

Piano Prelude ◽

Interpretive Reading

Abstract In two of Rachmaninov's last works, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini of 1934 and the first of the Symphonic Dances of 1940, a stylistic contrast between an opulently scored lyrical theme and the more angular, dissonant music that surrounds that theme throws into relief the extent that Rachmaninov's musical language had changed and developed since his first great successes thirty years earlier with the Second Piano Concerto and the Second Symphony. The words that motivate a similar stylistic contrast in the song Son (Sleep), composed in 1917, near the end of his most compositionally productive years, suggest an interpretive reading of such a stylistic contrast: the earlier, lusher style is associated here with dreams, and hence with memories; while the later, sparer, more tonally ambiguous style accompanies an evocation of something more impersonal, in the case of the song the stillness of a dreamless sleep. Some of the developing aspects of Rachmaninov's style revealed in these later examples are already evident even in the more traditional-sounding pieces of the last decade (1907––17) of his Russian period, which is shown in an analysis of the piano Prelude in G## Minor of 1910. Even this seemingly traditional Prelude, but more and more in his later music, Rachmaninov emerges as an indisputably twentieth-century composer.

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Music in Turkey

Tempo ◽

10.1017/s0040298200050191 ◽

1951 ◽

pp. 29-30

Author(s):

George Weldon

Keyword(s):

Fine Arts ◽

Piano Concerto ◽

Symphony Orchestras ◽

Music Festivals ◽

British Council ◽

Almost All ◽

Vaughan Williams

Turkey has now had four Anglo-Turkish Music Festivals in Ankara, organised by the British Council and the Turkish Ministry of Fine Arts. The first of these (1948) and the fourth (1951) I had the pleasure of conducting.Perhaps because of her distance from England, it is frequently not realised to what extent Turkey has advanced musically during the relatively brief space of time that she has been developing on Western musical lines. There are only two Symphony Orchestras in Turkey, at Ankara and at Istanbul, and both these are composed almost entirely of Turkish musicians. The Presidential Philharmonic Orchestra at Ankara is over seventy strong, and also provides the nucleus for the Radio Orchestra and the Opera Orchestra. For the Festival, seven rehearsals were allowed for each concert, and these were of course necessary to assimilate what were almost all new works to the repertory of the Orchestra, including Vaughan Williams' Job, Richard Arnell's Piano Concerto and Alan Rawsthorne's Symphonic Studies, quite apart from new Turkish works, which I will refer to later. The quality of orchestral playing is reasonably high, by any standard; there is a very pleasant warm string tone, and the principal woodwind players are truly excellent, the brass section is quite reliable, and I was particularly struck by the playing of the first horn.

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