Johann Strauss

Johann Strauss was the most famous and accomplished member of the musical dynasty that began with his father, Johann Strauss (older) (1804-49), a noted violinist, conductor, and composer. Together with his brothers Josef and Eduard, who both wrote waltzes and polkas, the younger Strauss effectively ruled the dance music world of Vienna, the city of his birth, for most of the 19th century.

He wrote his first waltz at the age of six; but it was not until his father, who had wanted him to go into banking, deserted the family in 1842 that he began his formal musical education. He soon formed his own small orchestra and their debut in 1844 was such a success that he became his father’s leading rival overnight. When his father died five years later the two orchestras were merged under his direction.

In the 1850s Strauss introduced some of the compositional techniques of Wagner and Liszt into his waltzes, receiving a rebuke from the fiercely anti-Wagnerian critic Eduard Hanslick. The public was in favour, however, and in the 1860s he became increasingly busy both composing and conducting, particularly during the ball season of Vienna’s high society. Most of his finest waltzes elate from this decade — Morning papers (1864), the ever popular Blue Danube (1867), Tales from the Vienna Woods(1868), and Wine, Women and Wong (1869) among them.

Strauss’s waltzes all fit a basic pattern, consisting of a slow, scene-setting introduction, followed usually by five waltz sections. They finished with a coda (end section) that reintroduced the main waltz tunes in a continuous sequence, creating a sense of quickening musical pace. It was a format that any competent composer could use to good effect; but Strauss’s best waltzes were more poised and better orchestrated, his rhythmic combinations more finely balanced, and his melodies simply more graceful than those of anyone else. They captured the mood of 19th century Vienna — its sophistication and its hedonism.

The “Waltz King” was naturally expected to tour — during the 30 years from 1856 Strauss made appearances all over Europe, from England to Russia, hailed as Austria’s most successful ambassador. He was invited to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1872 for an “International Peace Jubilee” marking the end of the Franco-Prussian War. It was a huge gala affair, in which he was forced to endure numerous performances of Blue Danube and Wine, Women and Song, but it brought him worldwide popularity. In 1876 he dedicated his Centennial Waltzes to the American people in honour of the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Comic opera and operetta had become popular in Vienna, particularly the works of the Parisian composer Jacques Offenbach. In the 1870s theatre directors and librettists turned to Strauss for a distinctly Viennese contribution to the genre. He had never had to tit his free-flowing melodies to a text before, and he was no discerning judge of librettos suitable for the task. Of his 18 published stage works only two operettas passed into the repertory, largely due to their excellent librettos. Die Fledermaus (The Bat) from 1874 does, however, sparkle with all the wit and elegance of his best waltzes, while Der Zigeunerbaron (The Gypsy Baron), dating from 1885, uses gypsy melodies and exotic harmonies to capture the Hungarian flavour of its subject.

In 1885 Strauss converted to the Protestant faith in order to divorce his second wife Angelika (his first, Henrietta, had died) and marry the young widow Adele Strauss (no relation). This cost him his Austrian citizenship. He assumed that of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha for the rest of his life, but Vienna was always his home. When he died there in 1899 a part of the Austrian Empire died with him.

Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky grew up in a family both upper class and unmusical. His father was a government mining official in St Petersburg, where the family moved when Tchaikovsky was eight. He developed a love of music largely by improvising at the piano, but he was sent to school to prepare for a training in law. At the age of 19 he obtained a position in the Ministry of Justice in St Petersburg, continuing musical studies in his spare time at the St Petersburg Conservatoire. Its director, Anton Rubinstein, commented that Tchaikovsky, though careless, was “definitely talented”. With this encouragement Tchaikovsky gave up his job in order to study full time, and in 1865 he was appointed professor of harmony at the new Moscow Conservatoire. In 1866 he suffered his first nervous breakdown, brought on by the stress of overwork on his First Symphony. Tchaikovsky’s “abnormally neurotic tendency” (in his brother’s words) and lifelong unhappiness apparently stemmed in large part from feelings of guilt about his homosexuality and his attempts to repress it. About this time he met Balakirev - one of the group of Russian composers known as “The Five” — and out of their friendship came the suggestion for Tchaikovsky’s fantasy overture Romeo and Juliet. Tchaikovsky’s attitude to “The Five” later soured as he grew to dislike their use of exotic oriental folk melodies (which he parodied in the dances of his ballet The Nutcracker in 1892) in the name of a Russian nationalist style. In 1877 he began to receive love letters from a woman he had never met, Antonina Milyukova. She threatened suicide unless he would meet her. At the time Tchaikovsky was working on his opera Eugene Onegin, based on Pushkin’s poem, in which the hero rebuffs the love letter sent to him by the heroine, Tatiana. Tchaikovsky had no wish to stoop to such behaviour and was trapped into marrying Antonina, with disastrous consequences. She turned out to be mentally unstable and, far from “curing” his homosexuality, the experience drove him to attempt suicide. He fled to St Petersburg in a state of nervous collapse. He never saw her again, and she eventually died in an asylum. By this time Tchaikovsky had begun corresponding with a wealthy widow, Nadezhda von Meek, who confessed to an admiration for his music and gave him an annual pension of 6,000 roubles. It was enough to allow him to compose and tour freely in Europe, and he resigned from his Moscow professorship in 1878. Their letters were intense and passionate but, although they actually met on her estate once by chance, they never exchanged a spoken word. The relationship continued for 13 years until she broke it off suddenly without any explanation. He completed Eugene Onegin in 1878, together with the Fourth Symphony (dedicated to his “best friend”, Nadezhda von Meek) and the Violin Concerto. His credentials as a master of melodic invention were already established; but never before in such overtly Romantic material as these two orchestral works were lyrical themes tautly organized into a framework of such sustained dramatic impact. Tchaikovsky had travelled in Europe almost every year since 1870, but toured as a conductor for the first time in 1888, and again in 1889. He met Brahms, Dvorak, Grieg, and others, visited London, and completed his Fifth Symphony and his great ballet score, The Sleeping Beauty. In his last year he travelled again to England, this time to receive an honorary doctorate in music at Cambridge University in the distinguished company of Boito, Bruch, Saint-Saens, and Grieg. He returned to complete the Pathetique Symphony, of which he wrote, “I love it as I have never loved any one of my musical offspring”. Its many innovative features include a “waltz” movement in 5/4 time and a slow, sorrowful finale. It stands as a fitting end to the career of a tragic man who displayed his deepest feelings in music, often with tremendous emotional power. He died of cholera after drinking contaminated water — possibly deliberately, according to recent research — just nine days after the premiere.

is Beethoven muzik, he was amazing person XD

Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany, the son of a singer in the service of die Elector of Cologne. His father was weak-spirited and drank excessively, but he recognized the boy’s talent and was disappointed when the young Beethoven failed to emulate Mozart as a child prodigy. Nevertheless, Beethoven soon held positions as harpsichordist in the court theatre and assistant organist in the Electoral chapel, where he obtained his first lessons in composition from the court organist.

During his first visit to Vienna in 1787 Beethoven impressed Mozart with his improvisations at the keyboard. Before any formal tuition could take place, however, news that Beethoven’s mother was dying took him back to Bonn. By the time he returned to Vienna in 1792, Mozart too was dead. He went instead to Haydn for composition lessons, but the two men were temperamental opposites, and the instruction he received from Johann Albrechtsberger proved more valuable.

Meanwhile, Beethoven’s career as a pianist made a promising start. His passion and dynamism at the keyboard more than compensated for a lack of polish. He made his first appearance in Vienna in 1795 playing his Piano concerto Nо. 2 in В flat, and was soon established as the city’s leading pianist. Other compositions from the 1790s include piano sonatas, cello sonatas, and violin sonatas. The two forms that were to have special significance for Beethoven were still to come: he completed his first symphony in 1800 and his first set of string quartets in 1801. Beethoven was Vienna’s first successful freelance musician: he never again held a court position after leaving Bonn. Instead he had wealthy aristocratic friends, patrons and perhaps lovers, to whom he dedicated his early compositions in return for payment. His success in such circles, despite notoriously awkward manners, an unpredictable temper, and a refusal to defer to superior social rank, can be attributed to his genius and personal magnetism. Beginning in 1798, Beethoven experienced a continual humming and whistling in his ears that gradually grew stronger, eventually prompting the agonizing realization that he was going deaf. In 1802, in a state of desperation in which he contemplated suicide, Beethoven retired to the secluded village of Heiligenstadt and addressed to his brothers a statement expressing his anguish. The ”Heiligenstadt Testament”, as it is known, marks the start of a new period in Beethoven’s output; the next ten years saw one of the most prodigious outpourings of masterpieces in the history of music. By 1812 he had completed Symphonies 2-8, Piano concertos 4 and 5, the Violin concerto, his opera Fidelio, the three Rasumovsky string quartets and a wealth of piano sonatas and other works.

Haydn and Mozart had demonstrated that melody alone, no matter how beautiful, could not hold an audience’s attention for more than a minute or two and had mastered the principle of using harmonic tension to sustain large-scale structures. But Beethoven went further; with the Eroica (3rd) symphony (1803) he created a single span of uninterrupted music of unprecedented length. He also widened the scope of the piano sonata to symphonic proportions with his Waldstein sonata (1803) - dedicated to his old friend Count Waldstein — and even more with the Appassionata (1804—5). In this he introduces new dynamic extremes, shattering the thoughtful calm of the opening with sudden fortissimo chords. This music was revolutionary, and not only in technique. Beethoven’s expanded forms broadened the scope for emotional expression, giving voice to the revolutionary spirit of the age. He was a passionate democrat and greatly admired the young Napoleon, whose name in fact originally appeared on the title page of the Eroica symphony. When Beethoven heard that Napoleon had declared himself Emperor, however, he tore the page out and substituted “In Memory of a Great Man.”

What raises Beethoven’s genius in music to the level of Shakespeare’s in literature is his supreme master of musical form. He was able to create vast and complex musical structures stemming from the fundamental building blocks of music itself. For him a simple musical figure had manifold implications that could generate an entire symphony. So, for example, the opening four notes of his Fifth symphony (1807), supposedly depicting Fate knocking at the door, are especially portentous, since some derivation of them is heard in nearly every bar of the first movement.

After 1812 Beethoven’s output dropped drastically. He became involved in a number of lawsuits, including one over royalties for his only truly programmatic and probably his worst published work - Wellington’s Victory. In 1820 he won custody of his nephew Karl, following the death in 1815 of Beethoven’s brother. Although there is no doubting his good intentions and love for the boy the arrangement was not a success. Beethoven had never married and wanted to treat Karl as his own son, but deepening poverty and a frenetic resumption of composition meant that his nephew was neglected. The year before Beethoven’s death the boy attempted suicide.

Beethoven began composing intensively again in 1817. Most of 1818 was taken up with his colossal Hammerklavier sonata, and the years until 1824 were divided between the last three Piano sonatas, the Diabelli variations, the Missa Solemnis -a Mass commissioned by Beethoven’s patron Archduke Rudolph, delivered three years late owing to the complexities of its composition — and the Ninth symphony. This work, whose final movement is a triumphant setting of Schiller’s Ode to joy, again broke new ground in terms of scale and introduced choral forces into the symphony for the first time. After the first performance Beethoven stood stone deaf on the stage, oblivious of everything, until one of the soloists turned him around to see the thunderous applause.

In his final years Beethoven turned once again to the string quartet. In 1825 and 1826 he produced five works, at once profoundly complex and serene, for this intimate medium. He had become preoccupied with fugal techniques, just as in later life Bach had done, and the Grossc fuge —originally the finale to his Quartet in В flat - is one of the most extended and elaborate examples of the form.

These last works were far ahead of their time and still challenge scholars and listeners. Beethoven did not live to complete sketches he had made for further works. At his funeral in 1827 he was mourned by a huge crowd, including fellow artists and aristocratic friends. His tombstone bore a single word: “Beethoven.”