Latest news with #composers
Times
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
Puccini's La bohème is a classic — but did he pinch the idea from a rival?
We tend to put our composers on pedestals, often literally. Puccini reclines on a bench in Lucca, Italy. A giant, robed Wagner looks imperiously over Berlin. The UK is full of effigies in stone, bronze and steel: Chopin, Handel, Beethoven, Elgar. In Victoria Embankment Gardens in London a bust of Arthur Sullivan is mourned by a bronze lady so apparently inconsolable that she has neglected to put on a top. Like the ancient oracles, composers seem to float above the rest of humanity while being blessed with extraordinary insight into our mortal state. This is, of course, cobblers. Composers, then and now, are artists, and like all artists they misbehave, being prone to the intense rivalries and scandalous squabbles that are all part of the scrabble to reach the top of the tree. In late-19th-century Milan, as the reigning king of opera Giuseppe Verdi headed towards retirement, the gallerias were packed with composers falling over themselves, and each other, to be his successor. In 1893 the young rivals Ruggero Leoncavallo and Giacomo Puccini got into a stand-up row in a café after Leoncavallo accused Puccini of stealing his idea for an opera of La bohème. Each composer went on to write his own version, and the Italian public took sides in a 'battle of the Bohèmes' that played out across the stages of Europe. There are similar stories of sabotage and plagiarism. Gioachino Rossini aroused the fury of Giovanni Paisiello after he copied the latter's idea — already an enormous hit — for an opera of Beaumarchais's play The Barber of Seville. On Rossini's opening night there were heckles and chants of Paisiello's name — all quite possibly paid for by the rival composer. The brilliance of Rossini's piece carried the day, but when an admiring crowd came to his house, he hid, fearing reprisals from Paisiello fans. Rossini himself was not beyond the odd dig. Of one German rival he said: 'Wagner has some beautiful moments, but some bad quarters of an hour.' • The best classical concerts and opera: our reviews Wagner has drawn more than his fair share of envy and barbed remarks from other composers. 'After the last notes of Götterdämmerung,' Tchaikovsky said, 'I felt as though I had been let out of prison.' Brahms was another composer who laid into Wagner — but if he expected some collegiate support from his contemporary Tchaikovsky, he was disappointed. The Russian summed him up thus: 'Brahms is a giftless bastard.' Wagner turned on his great champion the Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer. After Meyerbeer helped the younger man to ascend Parisian musical society, Wagner — for reasons of intense jealousy mixed with antisemitism — turned on his mentor, viciously lobbying against him, until Meyerbeer fell out of fashion and Wagner was in vogue. One night in Hamburg in 1704, Handel and his fellow composer Johann Mattheson let their friendship turned rivalry get out of hand. A quarrel during an opera performance turned into a duel, and Handel's life was saved from Mattheson's blade by — depending which version you believe — a metal coat button or, more poetically, a score carried next to his chest. In every era composers have flown into great rages, stabbed each other in the back, stolen ideas or simply driven each other crazy. Sometimes, intended or not, a little unwanted criticism is all it takes. Was Richard Strauss playing mind games when he devastated poor Gustav Mahler after a rehearsal for the latter's huge Sixth Symphony by sniffily saying only that it was 'overinstrumented'? • Read more opera reviews, guides and interviews One of my favourite stories, described in Alex Ross's book The Rest Is Noise, is of the irascible French composer Pierre Boulez showing the composer René Leibowitz the piano sonata he was dedicating to him — only for Leibowitz to offer some helpful pointers. 'Vous êtes merde!' Boulez screamed and later removed Leibowitz's name from the score by stabbing it out with a letter opener. In England, Benjamin Britten cut off ties with so many colleagues he felt weren't enthusiastic enough that they became known simply as 'Britten's corpses'. Across the Atlantic, the Americans Steve Reich and Philip Glass didn't speak for 40 years after (as Reich told it) a dispute about the extent of Reich's influence led to Glass changing the name of a new work from Two Pages for Steve Reich to, simply, Two Pages. So great composers do not live at a saintly remove. Puccini got close to the truth when he said: 'Art is a kind of illness. Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties.' That means feeling everything more intensely — the good stuff, but also jealousy, rage and vengefulness. Because only by diving deeply into our shared human frailties can the greats reflect them back to us — and, apparently, to each other. James Inverne's play about the battle of the Bohèmes, That Bastard, Puccini!, is the Park Theatre, London, Jul 10-Aug 9
ABC News
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Musicians like Abel Selaocoe are broadening classical music to reflect our evolving stories
As a tradition spanning centuries, classical music has a rich history of composers, performers and music-lovers. But for most of us, classical music is typified by a small group of European male composers from the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Mozart, Brahms and Beethoven. "Classical music is not immune to politics, prejudices and world forces that have affected all kinds of art forms," says Jessica Cottis, the Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra. One of Cottis's main tasks is selecting music the orchestra rehearses and performs. This includes concert staples by beloved composers as well as newly commissioned music that reflects our ever-changing stories. And the audience, she says, are very excited to go on the journey with her. Cottis and other musicians discuss how classical music is a living, breathing art form. Australia's state symphony orchestras and institutions have a decades-long history of supporting Australian music. However, this support wasn't always as available for musicians from diverse and marginalised backgrounds, or who deviated from the sounds of the classical 'canon.' In the ABC's early years, trailblazing composer Margaret Sutherland frequently criticised the broadcaster for inopportune placement of Australian music. During the first live televised concert by the ABC in 1957, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra had only a handful of women in its ranks. There has been progress, albeit slow. Noongar man Aaron Wyatt became the first Indigenous person to conduct an Australian state orchestra as recently as 2022. In recent years, the sustained efforts of advocates in broadening music selection in Australia has accelerated, Cottis says. "We're now much more in a place where audiences can see [beloved classics] like Mahler alongside Australian composers and no one will blink twice," she says. This shift in attitude has opened up classical music's wealth of creative voices. "Australians have a very strong acoustic identity with land and landscape through our Indigenous connection," Cottis says. She relishes the challenge of presenting Australia's multiple histories and lifting up diverse sets of voices. "As a conductor and a programmer, it's fascinating to find ways to create programs that tell stories through music, whether that was written 100 years ago, 200 years ago or in 2025," Cottis says. When cellist Abel Selaocoe visited Australia in April, he proved how classical music can co-exist with African musical traditions. Selaocoe, who grew up in South Africa's Johannesburg, incorporates throat-singing and percussion as part of his performances. During his Australian debut with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Selaocoe asked orchestral members to learn each other's languages through singing and improvising with their voices. "The different thing that binds cultures together is the idea of the voice," he says. During his visit to ABC Classic's studios, Selaocoe demonstrated how he combines the Western classical music and African influences which are equally important to his identity. Music hasn't always simply been for pleasure for Selaocoe, who grew up in post-apartheid South Africa as a black person. "This is our survival tactic," he says. "I think living in the township [around Johannesburg], you are very aware that other children who maybe live in the suburbs or live in better conditions, have opportunities." Selaocoe's love for music took him to the African Cultural Organisation of South Africa, an outreach program for young South Africans in Soweto. Later, he pursued his studies to Manchester in England, where Selaocoe refined his unique musical style. Selaocoe's international collaborators include the London Symphony Orchestra and Chineke! Orchestra, an ensemble focused on diversity and inclusion in classical music. Melbourne-based guzheng virtuoso Mindy Meng Wang has been gracing Australian stages for a decade. The instrument has a venerable musical tradition going back 2,500 years. In Meng Wang's hands, the guzheng becomes a bridge between Chinese and Western classical music traditions. Meng Wang's practice includes experimenting with expanding the guzheng's musical capabilities, such as finding different tuning systems and working with composers on new repertoire. "The guzheng is traditionally tuned to a pentatonic scale, which makes a unique and singular sound world," Meng Wang explains. "For me, working with Western music is like learning to speak a different language on the same instrument." Meng Wang recently premiered the Concerto for Guzheng and Orchestra by Australian composer Jessica Wells, marking the first concerto for the instrument written outside China. The concerto was part of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's Metropolis Festival, designed to showcase music by Australian composers. Meng Wang describes the process of working with Wells as very collaborative, from finding children's tales which underpin the concerto to workshopping Meng Wang's role in the orchestra. "I played the role of a demon, which then transformed into a beautiful ghost girl," Meng Wang says. "In the concerto, I played two differently tuned guzheng, which represent the shifting of the story and my visual and musical transformations." Meng Wang's growing list of collaborators includes pianist Paul Grabowsky, composer and soprano Deborah Cheetham Fraillon, the Australian Art Orchestra, Orchestra Victoria and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. She says her favourite aspect of collaboration is leveraging music's power to create "a space where we can share stories without language." Stream the Australian Chamber Orchestra's concert with cellist Abel Selaocoe on Front Row with Megan Burslem on ABC iview.
Telegraph
22-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
While his friends played sport, this 10-year-old wrote an operetta – now he's one of the greats
Samuel Barber was a genius, and a prodigy. At nine years old, he told his mother he did not want to be an athlete – the favoured outcome for upper-middle-class American boys of his generation, en route to a job in one of the professions and marriage – but, rather, a composer. Luckily, his parents agreed. The following year, 1920, he wrote an operetta. Two years later, he was a church organist. By the mid-1930s, in his 20s, despite a brief spell as a professional baritone, he was writing music that went straight into the repertoire of American orchestras, and then into concert programmes around the world. He made several visits to Europe, studying in Vienna, Turin and Rome. To his instinctive voice these studies added polish, but they did not divert Barber from his idea of music: something that spoke directly to his audience. At his death in 1981, he was one of America's, and the world's, most renowned composers. He remains famous for two works in particular: his Adagio for Strings, of 1936, developed from his string quartet of the same year; and Knoxville: Summer of 1915, for soprano and orchestra, from 1947. He has been recorded extensively: yet, as is often the case for composers celebrated for one or two popular works, many other pieces are overlooked, of which a few, in the estimation of some critics, are superior to those that are well-known. Barber came heavily under the influence of his maternal uncle, Sidney Homer Sr, far less well-known than his nephew, but regarded by the cognoscenti as one of the finest American composers of art songs. For the best part of 25 years – the formative phase of Barber's career – he studied with his uncle, and his style of composition owes much to him. Barber's writing is characterised by its lyricism, warmth and colour. As he became older, there was the occasional injection of modernism, but he was so adept at writing highly originally in traditional forms that experiments with extensive dissonance were not required. He was not afraid to seduce his listeners with beautiful tunes and phrases, but in doing so expressed nothing derivative or hackneyed. He is always an original, strong voice. The Adagio and Knoxville exemplify this. The latter is a setting of a text by James Agee, a native of Knoxville, Tennessee now recognised as one of America's most noted writers and poets of the 1930s and 1940s. The work is usually sung by a soprano but can be performed by a tenor. Its words are those of the small boy Agee was in 1915; the year before his father was killed in a car crash, and his blissful childhood came abruptly to an end. The writing is, appropriately, wistful and nostalgic, at different times warm and reflective. The work, like the Adagio, deserves its fame, and Barber was so motivated by his subject that it took him only a few days to write it. But there is so much more to Barber: two symphonies, from 1936 and 1944, the second withdrawn, revised and republished after his death; three operas, written in the 1950s and 1960s; concerti for violin, cello and piano, and an unfinished oboe concerto; much choral music and song; and much chamber music, as well as solo works for piano and organ. He showed his orchestral brilliance with his first major work: his 1931 overture to The School for Scandal, which has some echoes of his near-contemporary William Walton. Unlike Walton, Barber was no enfant terrible, and more given to introspection. This comes across in his three Essays for Orchestra, written in 1938, 1942 and 1978 respectively; and although the composer claimed that the third, composed after so long an interval, was less lyrical and more abstract than its predecessors, it bears great similarities to them. For me, the Second Essay is Barber's absolute masterpiece. It is 11 minutes long, but the composer packs so much in that, as one critic put it, it feels like a symphony. Its initial moodiness grips the listener from the start, but then the work expands into the turbulent, the majestic and the beautiful. Listeners will also suspect that every composer asked to write music for an epic Hollywood film for the next 10 or 15 years was influenced by it to some extent. There are two stunning recordings: Leonard Slatkin and the St Louis Symphony, on EMI, and Marin Alsop and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, on Naxos. If new listeners to Barber start with this work, it is likely to lead to a musical journey of some significance.
