Category: MUS 111

  • Mountain Music

    The sound of the French horn provides one of the most emblematically Romantic timbres in nineteenth-century music. Why is that? The French horn derives its origin from the hunting horn (in German, waldhorn or forest horn) — a brass instrument played while hunting on horseback to call back the hounds from the hunt. Some horns,…

  • Heaven and Earth Will Tremble

    (The title page of Beethoven’s manuscript of his third symphony, with the dedication scratched out.) In October 1803, Beethoven’s friend, student, and acolyte Ferdinand Ries wrote to the music publisher Simrock: [Beethoven] wants to sell you [his new] Symphony for 100 gulden. In his own opinion it is the greatest work he has yet written. Beethoven…

  • Piping Down the Valleys Wild: Some Literary and Historical Sources

    The title page of Songs of Innocence (1793) by William Blake (1757-1827). You can view the entire 1793 edition and read commentary at the Tate Museum’s website. An 1802 poem along similar lines by William Wordsworth (1770-1850): My heart leaps up when I behold   A rainbow in the sky: So was it when my life…

  • Gypsy Kings

    The verbunkos, a Hungarian Roma dance. The musician is playing a gajda, a free-reed pipes made from goatskin (the goat’s head is still attached!). The third movement of Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D Major. The young Brahms first heard Roma music as a boy in Hamburg, which, as a major port on the North Sea, was a way-station…

  • He Who Knows Longing

    Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in a traveling robe on a trip to Italy. In 1795, Goethe published his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), a Bildungsroman (novel concerned with the growth of the individual human spirit) about a young merchant who, dissatisfied with his life in business, goes off to join a group of traveling street…

  • “Yes, Brahms is evil . . .”

    I do not know who wrote the short-lived and now-defunct-blog called Nihilism, Optimism, and Everything In Between. I found this piece a long time ago, and I’m very glad that the author hasn’t taken it down. It is about Brahms’s profoundly Romantic, deeply moving Piano Concerto no. 1 in D minor, op. 15: Brahms, you…

  • Free, But Lonely

    (Joseph Joachim in 1868.) “Frei Aber Einsam” — Free but lonely — was the personal motto of Brahms’s best friend, the Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim. In 1853, for Joachim’s twenty-seconnd birthday, Robert Schumann, his composition student Albert Dietrich, and Brahms decided to collaborate on a present for their friend: a sonata for violin and piano…

  • The Blue Flower

    (Clara Wieck Schumann, Johannes Brahms, and Robert Schumann.) On October 1, 1853, the twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms, who was on tour accompanying violinist Eduard Remenyi throughout the German-speaking lands, knocked on the door of his idol, Robert Schumann in Düsseldorf. He played his Piano Sonata no. 1 in C Major for Schumann and his wife, the…

  • The Hobgoblin of Little Minds

    A hobgoblin is, in European folklore, a spirit of the hearth or fireside (the “hob”). Hobgoblins are considered meddlesome and mischievous beings. In the universe of Marvel Comics, the Hobgoblin is one of Spiderman’s nemeses. In his well-known 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” the American transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson stated that “A foolish consistency is the…

  • Time and Space from Beethoven to 1913

    (Variation V m. 30 from the second movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata no. 32 in C minor, op. 111.) In 1913, an art exhibit was mounted at the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue in New York City (around the corner from where Hunter College is now located). This exhibit, which came to be known…