#Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

[surfingkaliyuga]

Die Walküre (1955) Original His Master's Voice cover artwork with slight alterations for the Warner Classics edition.

[rastronomicals]

6:57 AM EDT September 19, 2024:

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra -   "The Ride Of The Valkyries (Richard Wagner)" From the Soundtrack album Apocalypse Now OMPST (1979)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

[idroolinmysleep]

Robert Schumann, Julius Caesar Overture, op. 128, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond.

[cultreslut]

richard strauss, the vienna philharmonic orchestra, & georg solti, elektra, 1967

archive / discogs

[hong-kong-art-man]

Music Is Never Just Music. It Is Bound Up With A Heart-to-heart Infiltration Between Music And A Man/Woman―The Well-liked ‘Slashie’ Music Conductor Stephen Lam(林屴汧)’s Comments On The Missing Part Of Music Education In Hong Kong

The world trend of ‘fusion’ can be fascinating. Taking different philosophies, rationales, cultures and styles and putting them together, yet mixing without absorption, create uniqueness and surprise. Many music fusion projects sadly fail simply because artists do not really understand the music of the other side and just conscript deviating musicians or compose awkward pieces to play discordant backdrops to their acts.

There is nothing new under the sun but can we try to turn the sun upside down?  The popular and young orchestra conductor Stephen Lam(林屴汧), always treating people with great deference, laughed, “Okay, music can be a fusion. Let us walk into the sun, fly to the moon and carry ourselves to the stars on a music journey!”

I laughed too, “Can we?” Stephen replied, “Not only eyes can reflect the truth. Our music souls can also reflect the truth of mixed feelings. Music, of human and cultural differences, is a wonderful vehicle. I call it a ‘space shift’. Music conveys our imagination from one place to another. Different people have different emotional destinations and associations.” I said, “When I listened to Autumn Song of Tchaikovsky, I felt like being on Lamma Island with my old classmates. How about you?” Stephen smiled, “My ‘space shift’ for that piece of music is that I suddenly walked on a path in Beethovengang in Vienna. Beethoven once lived there when he discovered that he, a great musician, was about to become deaf.”

Born in Hong Kong, Stephen Lam was recently selected by the renowned conductor Riccardo Muti to participate in the opera production of his Italian Opera Academy. Stephen is currently the Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of Ponte Orchestra & Singers, as well as the Associate Conductor of the Macao Youth Symphony Orchestra. He has worked with orchestras around the world, including the Vienna Radio Orchestra and St. Petersburg Chamber Philharmonic etc. Stephen is placid but responsive reply is his forte.

Stephen said, “Music creates forest out of rocks. I want to inspire toddlers and youngsters with music.” He is a dedicated music educator and ardent advocate of community outreach. His collaborations with young musicians have been widely praised. He is currently the lecturer and conductor of United International College between Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University, as well as regular guest conductor in Sichuan Music Conservatory.

Stephen continued, “When I was a boy, I studied in St. Paul’s College. I was active in music. I took part in music events in and out of Hong Kong. Idealism often lost to pragmatism when it came to selecting subjects in university. In the 2000s, I obtained a bachelor’s degree of Environmental Science from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a Master of Arts from the University of Hong Kong. After that, I seriously challenged myself: there would be no dream in my life without action to make it become reality. So, I packed my things and left Hong Kong for Vienna. I studied conducting at the prestigious University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, where I was one of the last students of Uros Lajovic, Ordner Edwin, and Konrad Leitner. I also worked in music events there. I loved Hong Kong and wanted to do something for it. In 2017, I returned to my city and pursued a music career!”

I asked, “How do you find the music education in Hong Kong?” He gave it a thought, “The approach at the moment is not bad but not good enough. We give a lot of information about music to kids and ask them to sing, practise music and go to concerts. Do we really teach them how to appreciate music and I mean, how to go beyond knowledge and experience; and connect the ‘heart’ of a kid with the ‘heart’ of a music piece? In other words, we should teach a kid how to emotionally respond to and interact with the music with his own feelings and stories. The other problem is that parents do not really want their kids to enjoy music or make music a soulful refuge from the life. For them, music is just a means to get a certificate so that the kid can go to a good school.” I lamented, “Teachers may think such an approach for students is a burdensome duty and parents may think a good future is more discernible than the spiritual wellness of a kid.”

I switched to a new topic, “Any advice for those who wish to choose music as a career?” Stephen threw his hands in the air, “Ha! Receive formal music training in your university days or as early as possible! There are many people who practise music in other industries like pop music in the entertainment world. Trust me! Western classical music or traditional Chinese music tutoring will give them the solid and rich foundation on which their music career can be built. The complicated but necessary music education will let them be able to combine sounds to produce beauty of form, harmony and emotion well for the long term. Inspirations will not easily dry up!” I nodded, “I am glad to see more pop singers like Gin Lee(李幸倪) & Gareth T(湯令山) who had serious music training become popular and hot. They bring new thoughts and strength to the music industry.”

To succeed in any creative career, one must possess the importance of a solid foundation in the intricate basics of constructing and expressing skills.

I asked Stephen, “Make a wish!” He winked, “Hong Kong will be a music centre for 'East meets West’ and I am part of it. There have been a lot of oriental music embodying the ingredients of western music. I want to contribute more the other way round especially when I can master German and Italian language.”

‘Flower by flower a garden grows’. Some do music for self-esteem. Stephen Lam is determined to be rather a river that feeds thousands of flowers. He pursues multiple music careers including education in lieu of simply holding a traditional full-time job of an orchestra conductor. He said, “Every day is different. Music for every life is different too.”

MLee Chinese Version 中文版: https://www.patreon.com/posts/zhi-shou-ke-re-75006967?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

Stephen Lam in Concert  https://youtu.be/l-zSh46TQVU  Acknowledgement  – Stephen Lam

Shirley Kwan Song – “Late Night Harbour”  https://youtu.be/y6Jg4Z1I8GI  Acknowledgement-沿途有你2

Tchaikovsky - Autumn Song  https://youtu.be/Aq7TNv7Pbm8  Acknowledgement-Pianushko

Bobby Chen Song – “Keep the Sadness to  yourself”  https://youtu.be/7f6305MkDsI  Acknowledgement – ROCK RECORDS

The Peony Pavilion  https://youtu.be/9IScrauecgk  Acknowledgement-xiyue1113

Stephen Lam interview  https://youtu.be/mzQtTG8iuyA  Acknowledgement-time flies 生涯規劃

[girlactionfigure]

THURSDAY HERO: Herbert Zipper

Herbert Zipper was a conductor and composer who founded a secret orchestra at Dachau, and wrote a song that became an anthem for death camp inmates.

Born in 1904 to an affluent Jewish family in Vienna, Herbert was a musical prodigy who studied at the prestigious Vienna Music Academy with the great composer Richard Strauss. He found employment as a conductor and composer for cabaret shows.

Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and immediately started persecuting Jewish citizens. Herbert was arrested that year and sent by the SS to Dachau, where he became a “horse,” pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with heavy rocks for 12 hours a day. One of the most talented composers in Europe was doing the work of an animal.

Herbert was not the only music man in Dachau. All the Jewish members of the Munich Philharmonic – comprising most of the orchestra – were also incarcerated there. Herbert enlisted the other musicians in an audacious, even insane, plan. They would make instruments and create an orchestra, right there at Dachau.

How could anybody create musical instruments in a concentration camp? They combed the camp for discarded pieces of wood and metal and fashioned eleven primitive yet functional instruments. At least one guard helped the musicians; Herbert requested a piece of wire for a string instrument, and later found it under his pillow.

Herbert’s Dachau orchestra performed concerts for the other inmates every Sunday, in an outhouse. It’s hard to imagine the experience of listening to sublime music in a filthy environment, while knowing they could be all killed for their participation. Herbert said that the concerts were not for entertainment, but rather to bring purpose and even a bit of normalcy back to their lives.

Noted playwright Jura Soyfer, an old friend of Herbert’s from his cabaret days, was also at Dachau. Together they wrote “Dachaulied” (Dachau song), with Herbert composing the haunting music in his head and Jura penning the sad, sardonic lyrics inspired by the concentration camp motto “Work will make you free.” They thought that writing the song would help them maintain some dignity in an atmosphere of constant humiliation and demonization. Herbert deliberately made the song difficult to learn, so that his fellow inmates would have to use all of their concentration and thereby mentally escape from their horrific surroundings. Amazingly, the Nazis never discovered the secret orchestra.

At the end of 1938, Herbert and Jura were transferred to Buchenwald where they taught other inmates the Dachau song. Soon after, Jura died of typhus at age 26, and Herbert lovingly prepared his body for burial. At this time Hitler hadn’t yet began to implement his “Final Solution” to kill all the Jews, which started in 1941. Herbert’s father Emil was in London, desperately trying to get a visa for Herbert and his two brothers to escape Austria. Miraculously, Emil was able to secure his sons’ release from Buchenwald, and they joined him in Paris on March 16, 1939.

During all this time, Herbert’s fiancee, dancer Trudl Dubsky, was working in Manila, in the Philippines. She recommended him for the job of conductor of the Manila Symphony Orchestra, and he was hired, traveling there in September, 1939. Herbert and Trudl were married on October 1. Although it wasn’t a world-class orchestra at the time, Herbert enjoyed working with the Manila Orchestra and under his leadership it improved dramatically. Life was good for Herbert and Trudl until January 1942, when the Japanese army invaded the Philippines and occupied Manila. It was a brutal occupation and once again Herbert was arrested, this time for refusing to conduct the orchestra for Japanese military officers. He was incarcerated and harshly interrogated for four months before being released. For the next three years Herbert and Trudl survived hand-to-mouth, owning no belongings and traveling frequently in search of safe haven in a country at war.

The most difficult period was the Battle of Manila in early 1945. More than once the building where they took shelter was bombed by the Japanese artillery and they escaped with only seconds to spare. In the end of February they were living with hundreds of other displaced people in a seven-story building in Manila that had neither electricity or water. Herbert volunteered to get water every day, a dangerous and difficult undertaking.  On the early morning of February 26, 1945, Herbert was on his water run when he saw an opportunity to reach the American front line, and he rushed across a battle field to do it. While there he received a crucial piece of information: the apartment building where he was staying was due to be bombed by the Allies within fifteen minutes! Herbert desperately explained that 800-1000 civilians were inside the building! Due to his pleas, the bombardment was delayed for 45 minutes, giving him just enough time to get back to the building and rescue everyone inside including Trudl.

Until Japan was defeated on September 2, 1945, Herbert worked secretly for the American army under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, transmitting valuable information about Japanese shipping schedules by shortwave radio. When Japan finally surrendered, Herbert organized and conducted a concert of Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, a goal he’d set during the darkest hours at Dachau. The concert was performed in a bombed-out church.

Herbert and Trudl immigrated to America in 1946, joining the rest of his family. He co-founded and conducted the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, and organized another orchestra especially to give free concerts for public school children. Students called Herbert, who had no children of his own, “Papa Z.” For the rest of his life he volunteered and supported arts education for young people.

Herbert was close friends with poet Langston Hughes and they collaborated on an opera together, “Barrier.” Trudl worked as a ballet tacher. They moved to Chicago in 1953, where Herbert founded the Music Center of the North Shore, and then to Los Angeles, where Herbert directed the School of Performing Arts at USC.

Interviewed by a Los Angeles Times reporter at the end of his life, Herbert said “We have to see the world as it is, but we have to think about what the world could be. That’s what the arts are about.”

Herbert is the subject of a biography, “Dachau Song: The Twentieth Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper,” and a documentary that was nominated for an Academy Award. His beloved wife Trudl died of lung cancer in 1976. He continued his music for two more decades, conducting his last concert in 1996. Herbert Zipper died in Santa Monica in 1997.

For inspiring concentration camp inmates and inner-city schoolchildren with his music, and for saving hundreds of lives during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, we honor Herbert Zipper as this week’s Thursday Hero.

Lyrics of Dachau Song:

Barbed wire fraught with death surrounds our world

On which a merciless heaven visits frost and sunburn.

Far from us are all joys, far our home, far the women

When mute we march to work, thousands in the gray dawn.

But we learned the Dachau motto and it made us hard as steel.

Be a man, comrade, remain human comrade

Do good work, pitch in, comrade

Because work, work will make you free!

[haveyouheardthisband]

[foreskinniest]

So there’s this cute Austrian guy who wants to take me to the vienna philharmonic concert but I feel like that’s too upper class for me. I want, no, need your advice.

Go to the fancy concert, the man clearly has money and class. I don't even know what else there is to do in europe besides getting drunk in shitty bars and pissing on each other "as a laugh, m8." It's either orchestras and museums or killing each other over fútbol

[bobdobalina]

Album cover to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Don Giovanni, starring Cesare Siepi with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Josef Krips. Recorded June 1955, released on Decca Records (LXT 5103, 5104. 5105, 5106).

Artist/designer unknown

[veronika-tserber]

Zodiac Signs, Cities & Curious Facts! 🌆

Each city was selected by me from "The Rulership Book" by Rex E. Bills, alongside one fact that matches that particular sign's energy! There are more cities and places that align with the vibration of each sign, but these are the ones I picked for this post. All pictures are from Google Images.

Enjoy this random and (hopefully) fun thread!😁

♈Aries: FLORENCE, Italy

Florence has a unique street festival: The "Calcio Storico" is a traditional street football game played annually there. The game involves four teams representing the four historic quarters of the city, and it's known for its rough and intense style of play!

♉Taurus: LEIPZIG, Germany

Leipzig is known as the "City of Music": Leipzig has a rich musical heritage and is considered one of the world's most important cities for classical music. Famous composers such as Johann Sebastian Bach, Richard Wagner, and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy have strong connections to Leipzig, and their music is celebrated in the city's numerous concert halls, museums, and festivals.

♊Gemini: LONDON, England

London has a "whispering gallery": The Whispering Gallery in St. Paul's Cathedral is a circular gallery that runs around the interior of the dome. Due to its unique acoustics, if you whisper against the wall on one side of the gallery, the sound can be heard on the other side, over 100 feet away.

♋Cancer: ISTANBUL, Turkey

Istanbul has a famous street for cats: The "Cat Street" or "Kedi Sokak" in Turkish is a narrow street in the historic district of Sultanahmet that is home to dozens of stray cats. The cats are well-fed and cared for by locals, and the street has become a popular tourist attraction.

♌Leo: BERLIN, Germany

Berlin is a graffiti artist's paradise: The city has a long history of street art and is home to some of the most famous graffiti murals in the world. The East Side Gallery, a section of the Berlin Wall that has been turned into an open-air gallery, features over 100 paintings by artists from around the world.

♍Virgo: MOSCOW, Russia

Moscow has a rich literary history: Many famous Russian writers, including Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov, lived and worked in Moscow. It also has the largest number of public libraries in the world: "The Russian State Library" , which is the largest library in Europe and the second largest library in the world, after the Library of Congress in the United States.

♎Libra: VIENNA, Austria

Vienna has a rich musical history: Vienna has been a center of musical innovation and creativity for centuries and has been home to many famous composers such as Mozart, Beethoven, and Strauss. Today, the city is renowned for its classical music scene and is home to the world-famous Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

♏Scorpio: TOKYO, Japan

Tokyo has a unique fashion scene: Tokyo's fashion scene is known for its avant-garde and eclectic styles, with Harajuku being the center of youth fashion culture. "Gothic Lolita" is part of Harajuku, and it incorporates darker and more macabre elements into the Lolita fashion aesthetic.

♐Sagittarius: TUSCANY, Italy

Tuscany is home to the oldest university in Europe: The University of Bologna, which is located in Tuscany, is the oldest university in Europe, having been founded in 1088. It is still one of the most prestigious universities in Italy.

♑Capricorn: BRUSSELS, Belgium

Brussels is home to the "Atomium": The Atomium is a unique architectural structure in Brussels that was built for the 1958 World Exposition. It is designed to represent an iron crystal magnified 165 billion times, and it has become an iconic symbol of the city.

♒Aquarius: LOS ANGELES, California

LA is the birthplace of the Internet: The first successful transmission of a message over the Internet occurred on October 29, 1969, between two computers located at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute. This event is considered the birth of the Internet.

♓Pisces: GALICIA, Spain

Galicia is home to an ancient spiritual destination: The Way of St. James, also known as the Camino de Santiago, is a famous pilgrimage route that leads to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. Every year, thousands of people from all over the world make the 780 km journey on foot, bicycle, or horseback. Many of them walk the route for spiritual reasons, while others enjoy the physical challenge and the opportunity to meet people from all over the world.

Now, that was a pleasure to put together! How do you feel about the fact/city for your sign? As a Virgo, I'd love to visit the Moscow library, but as a weird/edgy fashion sucker, Tokyo seems like a whole lot of fun! Also, the Aries one made me LOL! Y'all just can't stop fighting, can you? 😂

Which fact/city is your favorite one(s)? Let me know down below! 🖤

- Foxbörn

ᴍᴀꜱᴛᴇʀʟɪꜱᴛ 1

ᴄʜᴀʀᴛ ʀᴇᴀᴅɪɴɢꜱ

ᴡᴀɴᴛ ᴛᴏ ʙᴜʏ ᴍᴇ ᴀ ᴄᴏꜰꜰᴇᴇ?

[rastronomicals]

11:32 PM EST December 1, 2023:

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra -   "The Ride Of The Valkyries (Richard Wagner)" From the Soundtrack album Apocalypse Now OMPST (1979)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

[paul-archibald]

Fairy tales

Fairy tales have stimulated generations of composers to write some of their finest music. With a rich source of characters that includes dragons, dwarfs, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes, goblins, monsters, talking animals, trolls, unicorns, witches and wizards, it’s no wonder these stories have captivated the imaginations of compsers and audiences alike. Engelbert Humperdinck (1854-1921)Hansel…

[justforbooks]

Peter Eötvös

Hungarian conductor of modernist music who went on to compose operas with texts ranging from Three Sisters to Angels in America

The Hungarian composer and conductor Peter Eötvös, who has died aged 80, is now best known for the 12 operas that he wrote during the last 25 years of his life. Before that, he played a leading role as a conductor specialising in the promotion of European musical modernism.

Premiered in Lyon in 1998, the work that launched Eötvös’s career as a successful opera composer was Three Sisters. The libretto, written with Claus H Henneberg, reworks Anton Chekhov’s play into a series of three “sequences”, each offering a version of events from the point of view of a single character; no fewer than four roles are taken by countertenors.

From then onwards, he frequently added new stage works to an already growing number of concert works in an extensive output notable for its radiant lyricism and brilliant orchestration. By extending the modernist origins of an approach rooted in the music and ideas of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen with the aid of deeply considered investigations of other music of cultures beyond Europe, Eötvös gradually found his own voice.

Stockhausen had already drawn on Japanese musical and theatrical traditions, and Eötvös’s earliest opera, Harakiri – based on the ritual suicide of Yukio Mishima – was composed as far back as 1973, while both composers were working together in Osaka. Subsequently, however, Eötvös’s style – variously influenced by Chinese as well as Japanese traditions, by Indian, African and Basque musics, by jazz and, not least, by Béla Bartók and the folk repertoires of his native Transylvania – developed much of its individuality from interrogations of those cultures that went far beyond any mere cultural tourism.

His instrumental compositions, as well as his operas, often spring from such sources: the large-scale orchestral work Atlantis (1995), for example, draws on Transylvanian dances that act as a symbol of a lost culture associated, for the composer, with renewed hope. In later years he received many commissions from the world’s leading orchestras: in 2016, for instance, for Oratorium Balbulum, to a text by Péter Esterházy, for the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, premiered at the Salzburg festival. Ruminating on a variety of topical political issues, from the 9/11 terrorist attacks to relationships between countries, this work is typical of Eötvös’s social and political concerns.

But his operas already seem likely to represent the most enduring and surprisingly varied dimension of his output. Adapting novels and plays by writers both classic and modern – including Jon Fosse, Jean Genet, Tony Kushner and Gabriel García Márquez – these works demonstrate both Eötvös’s wide literary ambitions and his willingness to explore a variety of different dramatic approaches, comic as well as tragic. He was assisted in devising some of these opera libretti by Maria Eötvösne Mezei, his third wife.

Le Balcon – its libretto, by Françoise Morvan, André Markovitz and the composer, derived from Genet’s now classic tale of power struggles within a revolutionary setting – was first seen at Aix-en-Provence in 2002. Mezei’s libretto for Angels in America (2004) boils down to less than three hours the original seven hours of Kushner’s play about HIV/Aids.

Several of his operas have been seen in the UK. When his Márquez-based Love and Other Demons was produced at Glyndebourne in 2008, Eötvös became the first non-British composer to have a stage work premiered there. Described by the composer as “a bel canto opera”, it explored illicit love, superstition, race and demonic power, with a libretto by Kornél Hamvai. The music underpins the drama with an innate understanding of how orchestral forces can enhance the overall effect; though indulging in some gorgeous sounds, the composer displays the rare knack of knowing when less can sometimes be more powerful than more.

Eötvös’s final opera, Valuska – also his first with a libretto in Hungarian, by Mezei and Kinga Keszthelyi – was drawn from the novel The Melancholy of Resistance, by László Krasznahorkai: a tragi-comic, surreal story centring on a newspaper delivery man and the arrival in his small town of a circus with, as its star attraction, the world’s largest taxidermied whale. Valuska was premiered in Budapest last December.

Eötvös was, like his older compatriots György Ligeti and György Kurtág, a native of multi-ethnic Transylvania – then in Hungary but subsequently transferred to Romania; his birthplace was Székelyudvarhely. The turbulent final months of the second world war caused his family, including his mother, Ilona Szucs, to flee westwards. She was a pianist, and his father, Laszlo Eötvös, was a lawyer. Peter’s early childhood was spent in Miskolc, a northern Hungarian town where he first met Ligeti. The latter was already becoming established as a composer and teacher by the late 1940s, and the two remained in contact.

Eötvös studied piano and composition at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest from 1958 onwards; after advice from Zoltán Kodály, János Viski became his composition teacher. He soon gaining a reputation for improvising to accompany silent films and composing scores for both cinema and theatre.

In 1966, at the age of 22, he moved to Cologne on a scholarship to work with Stockhausen. He also studied composition with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and began to conduct. When I first went to the Darmstadt Summer School, in 1974, I recall Eötvös not only as one of Stockhausen’s closest acolytes but also as a member of a recently formed group of young Cologne-based musicians calling themselves the Oeldorf Group and specialising in live performance involving electronics.

From 1978, after Boulez asked him to conduct the opening concert of IRCAM, his Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique, in Paris, Eötvös found fame as a conductor specialising in all the latest compositional trends that helped to drive the global modernist agenda of the time. He quickly assumed the position of musical director of Ensemble Intercontemporain, IRCAM’s flagship chamber orchestra.

He conducted the world premieres of Stockhausen’s operas Donnerstag aus Licht (1981) and Montag aus Licht (1988). In the UK, he conducted the Covent Garden performances of Donnerstag in 1985 and was principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from that year until 1988. He worked with the London Sinfonietta and also conducted Leos Janáček’s The Makropulos Case at Glyndebourne in 2001.

It was only after relinquishing his duties with the Ensemble Intercontemporain, in 1991, that Eötvös really came to the fore as a composer. With his new status on the European scene, and the political events of 1989 onwards, came new responsibilities.

He taught conducting and contemporary chamber music in both Karlsruhe and Cologne in Germany. Having already founded the International Eötvös Institute for young conductors and composers in Budapest in 1991, he went on to establish the Peter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation in 2004. It was at this moment, when Hungary joined the European Union, that Eötvös and his wife Maria – who had both previously lived in Cologne, Paris and then Hilversum in the Netherlands – finally moved back to Budapest.

A son from Eötvös’s first marriage, to the actor Piroska Molnár in 1968, predeceased him. In 1976 he married the Taiwanese-German pianist Pi-hsien Chen, with whom he had a daughter, Ann-yi. They divorced and he subsequently married Maria Mezei in 1995. He is survived by her, Ann-yi and by two stepsons from that marriage, Peter and Daniel.

🔔 Peter Eötvös, composer and conductor, born 2 January 1944; died 24 March 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[blackswaneuroparedux]

What one makes music from is still the whole - that is the feeling, thinking, breathing, suffering, human being.

Gustav Mahler

On 26 June 1912, Gustav Mahler's 9th Symphony was given its posthumous premiere in Vienna with Bruno Walter leading the Philharmonic. This profoundly valedictory work - the last Mahler completed before he died - is considered by many Mahler devotees to be his greatest achievement.

Back in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, a superstition developed in the classical music world that prophesied the Ninth would be a composer’s last symphony. Arnold Schoenberg summed it up in an eloquent fashion, stating that “he who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the Tenth which we ought not yet to know, for which we are not ready. Those who have written a Ninth stood too close to the hereafter.”

To support this, history gives us Beethoven, Schubert, Dvorák, Bruckner, Mahler, and Vaughan Williams, who either died after completing the ninth (Dvorák waited ten years) or never made it through a tenth. We’ll overlook Shostakovich, who not only completed a ninth but went on to write and publish six more. He was Shostakovich, after all. Even death kept a wary, respectful distance.

Mahler, some say was superstitious about the matter, tried to sneak around it by calling his ninth symphonic-length work, “Das Lied von der Erde,” a song-cycle rather than a symphony. He bravely undertook his Ninth, rife with its intimations of death and the ache of the human condition, and published it (although he never heard it performed). A year later he began working on his Tenth, but, true to the curse, he died before finishing it. Although he’d sketched out the whole symphony, only the first movement, “Adagio,” and a brief third movement, “Purgatorio,” are complete.

I’m not sure I buy it that this was Mahler’s song song as he saw it. I think that’s just a convenient mythos that enveloped around the traumatic death of one of finest composers ever. Far from going gently into a sort of pre-deathly contemplation, Mahler was full of plans, action, and music in the years when he was writing the Ninth Symphony. He was taking up his post at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, writing Das Lied von der Erde, preparing for the premiere of the Eighth Symphony, and writing, but not completing, what would truly be his last symphony, the Tenth. That’s another danger of thinking about that last page of the Ninth Symphony as the end of Mahler’s compositional life. It’s not: for Mahler, and maybe for us, it should be an insight into life - albeit a life transformed after the intensity of what you’ll have been through after listening to any complete performance of his symphony - rather than a leaving of it.

Daniel Barenboim conducts Mahler's 9th Symphony with the Stasoper Berlin orchestra.

[dkettchen]

I need to make a fancam of the contrabass lady from the vienna philharmonics orchestra, she brings me joy every year