AT A GLANCE
William Grant Still was hailed in his lifetime as the “Dean of African-American Composers,” and Darker America was his first large-scale composition. It combines themes and rhythms derived from Black music with some of the modernist sounds of his teacher, the French composer Edgar Varèse.
Listeners of Ludwig van Beethoven’s C minor Piano Concerto may entertain recollections of an earlier C minor Piano Concerto, the brooding, even despairing one that Mozart composed in 1786. Beethoven was an admirer of the Mozart work, and his own C minor Piano Concerto, which was not completed until 1803, displays a strikingly unified vocabulary and taut structure. One might argue that it is the first of his five piano concertos really to sound like the mature Beethoven.
Who is the hero of Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life)? Many believe it is Strauss himself. The first section of this six-part work depicts the hero in his changing aspects and moods. Then we hear drastically different music: sharp, prickly, disjunct, dissonant—this is the scene of The Hero’s Adversaries, the grudgers and the faultfinders. Next we hear love music for The Hero’s Companion, as lush as only Strauss could make it.
Adversaries disturb the idyll and the hero must go into battle. Trumpets summon him, introducing the immense The Hero’s Battlefield. The music quiets down for the remarkable The Hero’s Works of Peace. But the adversaries are still not silenced. The Hero rages, but his passion gives way to renunciation in The Hero’s Escape from the World and Completion.
Listeners of Ludwig van Beethoven’s C minor Piano Concerto may entertain recollections of an earlier C minor Piano Concerto, the brooding, even despairing one that Mozart composed in 1786. Beethoven was an admirer of the Mozart work, and his own C minor Piano Concerto, which was not completed until 1803, displays a strikingly unified vocabulary and taut structure. One might argue that it is the first of his five piano concertos really to sound like the mature Beethoven.
Who is the hero of Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life)? Many believe it is Strauss himself. The first section of this six-part work depicts the hero in his changing aspects and moods. Then we hear drastically different music: sharp, prickly, disjunct, dissonant—this is the scene of The Hero’s Adversaries, the grudgers and the faultfinders. Next we hear love music for The Hero’s Companion, as lush as only Strauss could make it.
Adversaries disturb the idyll and the hero must go into battle. Trumpets summon him, introducing the immense The Hero’s Battlefield. The music quiets down for the remarkable The Hero’s Works of Peace. But the adversaries are still not silenced. The Hero rages, but his passion gives way to renunciation in The Hero’s Escape from the World and Completion.
