Category: 19th-century music

  • Classically Black, part III: Nationalism and Internationalism in the 20th Century

    In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, some African-American composers working in classical music chose to compose in the standard forms of the European classical music traditions — i.e, an international style. William Grant Still, for instance, known as the “Dean of African-American Composers,” could be considered an “internationalist.” Among many other works, Still wrote five…

  • Classically Black, part II: The Songs of Black Volk Playlist

    W.E.B. Du Bois (above), who spent several years studying in Germany in the 1890s, greatly admired German classical music, and considered it a repertoire full of freedom and possibility for black performers. He especially loved the operas of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), and in 1936 he made a pilgrimage to Bayreuth, the opera house in Bavaria…

  • Black Opera

    Harry Lawrence Freeman (1869-1954). Harry Lawrence Freeman, known in his lifetime as “the black Wagner,” was the first African-American opera composer to have a staged work successfully produced. Born in Cleveland, Freeman eventually moved to Harlem, where he taught music and established the Negro Grand Opera Company. His opera 1914 Voodoo is about a love triangle…

  • Classically Black, part I

    A playlist of some of the earliest known music by African-American composers writing in the traditions of European classical music. Newport Gardner, 1746-1826. Francis Johnson (1792-1844). “The Wildflower Wreath” by Aaron J.R. Connor (d. 1850), sung by the great African-American tenor George Shirley: More Blind Tom Wiggins:

  • Schubertiades in a Police State

    Schubert’s room, as drawn by his friend Moritz von Schwind, 1821. Franz Schubert at age 16. Franz von Schober. The Austrian poet Franz von Schober (1796-1882) was evidently the driving force behind the Schubertiades, the semi-private salon gatherings at which Franz Schubert premiered many of his Lieder. Schober was in fact such a close friend of…

  • Ragtime

    TW/CW: Racist imagery and lyrics. One of the earliest published songs that uses a ragtime style, Rollin Howard’s “Good Enough” (1871). The chorus, marked “Dance” (at 1:15) used a syncopated figure before going back into the straightforward on-the-beat verse section. This rhythmic figure is a bridge from the cakewalk to ragtime. The cakewalk was a…

  • Little Wild Rose in the Heather

    (The manuscript of “Heidenröslein.” Schubert’s marking is “lieblich,” i.e. charming or lovely.) Read through the score here: IMSLP09270-SchubertD257_Heidenroslein The song starts almost without starting: the voice and piano begin together, without any introduction. Although the song is a setting of a poem by the great German poet, playwright, novelist, and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,…

  • Death and the Maiden

    The theme of Death and the Maiden comes from the Middle Ages, where the visual motif of the danse macabre or Totentanz (the dance of death) was a popular decoration in painting and architecture. The danse macabre usually shows the allegorical figure of Death leading an unsuspecting group of the living in a round dance which ends in the grave…

  • Late Quartet

    A sketch Beethoven made for his String Quartet no. 14 in C# minor, op. 131. The last works Beethoven wrote were a series of six string quartets. Why do you think, in the last two years of his life, he turned to this extremely difficult form? Richard Taruskin suggests that: The intimacy of chamber music…

  • One with Everything

    Beethoven as a cultural icon crops up in some unexpected places. But perhaps the Buddhists are on to something. In this scene from the 1994 film Immortal Beloved, the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony becomes the soundtrack for the mystical experience of the traumatized composer finding healing in nature and truly becoming one with…