Great Composers and Their Lives

 Here is a great composer that had a really difficult life. Although he was quite a great musician and an accomplished composer, he never really received the recognition he deserved. Originally from the city of Naples, Italy, he started at the conservatory (Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella) at the age of 9 and studied for a period of ten years before moving on to the University of Bologna to broaden his education. This is where he spent two years to get a degree in literature.

At the age of 19, Leocavallo held his very first opera, Chatterton. The work was intended to be of great financial gain for him. It certainly would have been, if the person organising the event had not run off with the money. For a period of five years, Ruggero Leoncavallo lived in poverty, making his living by playing piano in cafés and travelling all over Europe.

Despite his lack of money and his travels, it did not stop him from writing another opera, known as I Pagliacci (The Clowns). After writing it, Leoncavallo took it directly to a publisher who arranged for its performance to be held at the Teatro del Verme in Milan on May 21^st, 1892. It remains a success to this very day.

Posted by Michael Ferris at 11:30 AM | Permalink

Born in Magdeburg, Germany, this composer managed to learn to play four instruments(flute, keyboard, zither and violin) by the time he was ten and wrote his first opera at ten years old. Nonetheless, his family, not coming from a musical background at all, were not at all impressed. In fact, his mother took away all of his instruments away and sent him to school. Luckily for Georg Telemann, the superintendant of that very school was a music theorist and supported Telemann's passion for music. The young boy was able to learn composition for an entire four years along with studying his normal subjects to please his family.

After entering high school(*German: Gymnasium), he was once again fortunate to find another teacher that supported his interest in music, encouraging him to compose works for school events, dramas, and even got him involved with the local Catholic church.

His time at high school soon camed to an end and he went to Leipzig to study law. Although he was most probably complying with his mother's wishes, his studies did not last very long. His will to be a musician was far too strong. Having settled in Leipzig, he decided to concentrate on composition. Having written a musical psalm setting that was perfomed at a church (the Thomaskirche). The city's mayor liked it so much, he invited Telemann to compose a cantata for Sunday mass every two weeks. The cantor of the church did not much like Telemann's increasing influence at his church, but could not do anything about it. His works were requested for every Sunday soon after.

At the age of 21, Georg Telemann founded the Collegium Musicum, a musical ensemble for which he organized concerts regularly. Shortly afterwards, he was appointed director of the Leipzig Opera and started to compose operas and giving the roles to his own music students.

After leaving Leipzip in 1705, he took up employment composing and directing in various places all over Germany and what is now Poland including Count Erdmann II of Promnitz in Sorau, the Eisenach Court where he made the aquantance of Johann Sebastian Bach, and finally a post in Frankfurt where he married the daugher of a Frankfurt council clerk and had ten children.

At the age of fourty, Teleman moved to Hamburg where he was made Cantor of the Hamburg Johanneum(*German name: Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums.) It is the oldest highschool in Hamburg. Since the school had been founded in 1529, its cantor was not only the director of the school, but also responsible for the music played in Hamburgs five main churches. This position soon led Telemann to become the music director of the Hamburg Opera. It was here that he was closer to his good friend, the musician Georg Frideric Handel, for whom he arranged a lot of concerts.

Along with staging vast musical events for the city, Telmann was known quite well for his composition of Tafelmusik(table music). The pieces were meant to be played at banquets in circles of nobility and the middle class, always beginning with a French-style overture and a series of melodic pieces that were to be played in any which order.

Living over a span of eighty-six years, Georg Philipp Telemann wrote six hundred Italian overtures, fourty-seven concertos(concerts for solo insturmentalists and orchestra), six oratorios including the famed Tag des Gerichts (Judgement Day) and fourty operas, this great composer will live on in our hearts as one of the most prolific of all time, having given a gift to humanity that has and will always endure throughout the centuries.

To listen to music by this great composer click here.

Posted by Michael Ferris at 03:30 PM | Permalink

Frederick Delius was an English composer born into a family of fourteen children. He grew up in Bradford located in the north of England, but his parents, who were wool-merchants, were actually German. His musical training during his youth consisted of piano and violin lessons, although it has to be said that his music at that time was considered more of a hobby at an amateur level. Nonetheless, he showed a lot of musical promise and wanted to be a musician. His father was dead-set against it, having impressed upon Frederick Delius that a future in the wool business had been where his destiny lay.

After finishing grammar school, he decided to enter into the family business, giving in to his father's wishes. This did not last very long, for he proved not to be a very talented businessman. Yet, having had to go on many business trips abroad to Paris and Norway during that time did spark a great interest for travel and led him to the United States. Little did he know at that time, his travels to Paris and Norway would be important to his musical career in the future.

At the age of twenty-two, he persuaded his father to help him set up as a grower of citrus fruit in Florida. During his stay, he negleted his work as a farmer and was finally able to dedicate himself to his true passion, music. He ended up meeting Thomas Ward, a local musician, who became his teacher in composition. It was here on the desolate plantation in subtropical weather where his first compositions were written. Following this, he moved to Virginia for several months, earning his keep by playing the organ, singing and giving music lessons.

In 1886, two years after his arrival in America, Frederick Delius ended up returning to Europe. His father finally gave in to his wishes and granted him the support he needed to study for a while at the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany. The academic training at the conservatory did very little to benefit his very instinctive talent, yet he met a person that would change his whole life, namely the Norwegian composer Edward Grieg. Grieg not only became a life-long friend who encouraged his music, but also persuaded Delius's father to fully support his son's ambitions as a composer.

After eventually moving to Paris, Delius started composing a great deal of works and became known in artistic circles by many of the greats. It was not until 1896 that he met his wife-to-be, a young artist named Jelka Rosen, marrying her only a year after they had met. The two of them settled down in a little French village named Grez-sur-Loing.

Continuing to devout his life to music, he wrote his first true masterpieces between the age of thirty-seven and fourty - Paris and A Village Romeo and Juliet – two compositions that are truly representative of his style and musical ability. He composed many works after that such as Sea Drift, Appalachia, Brigg Fair, A Mass of Life, On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring, among many others. Due to his acquaintanceship with Thomas Beecham, a famous English conductor who advocated Delius's music, he not only became famous in Germany, but also in his fatherland, England, and the rest of the English-speaking world.

In 1918, Deilius contracted syphilis and eventually stopped composing due to becoming blind and paralyzed. It was not until a man by the name of Eric Fenby, a composer, teacher and great fan of Delius, offered his services as a scribe (as an amanuensis) that Delius was able to dictate his final works over a period of six years. Frederick Delius, aided by Fenby, painstakingly composed some of his most noted works, among which were A Song of Summer and Songs of Farewell.

To listen to music by this great composer, click here.

Posted by Michael Ferris at 07:58 AM | Permalink

 ISBN: 978-1-60264-373-4      For more info, click here

Cultural misunderstandings, crazy and dangerous situations, inter-cultural friendships, love and disappointment and the excitement of exploring. "Crossing Borders" tells the story of living and becoming an adult in a foreign country away from friends and family. This narrative is not a simple travel log of pondering curiosities, it unites the weirdest, most interesting and funniest experiences from twelve years living abroad. The story starts out with the author's experiences of his first adventure in the heart of Europe-in German speaking Austria. Dreams of going to study at the Viennese Academy of Music go up in smoke when the protagonist fails the entrance exam. The protagonist not only ends up living in a mountain village in the Alps, but also discovers traits and virtues in his new Austrian friends that he never thought possible. From almost getting shot in Cairo, having his bride kidnapped on their wedding day, to getting blackmailed by a Moroccan snake charmer, each chapter takes the reader on an extraordinary cultural trip, a book for anyone who likes to travel, whether in their mind or reality.

To learn more about this book, click here

Posted by Michael Ferris at 07:45 AM | Permalink

 This Spanish composer was one of the greatest in the sixteenth century. Tomás Luis de Victoria came from a very religious background in a time when Spain was influenced much by Catholicism and the church. It was the time of the Inquisition, a tribunal responsible for purging the society by actually persecuting a great deal of people who refused to be Catholic, as well as many people who did, sometimes just to save their lives. (These new-born Catholics were known in Spain as 'conversos'. ) This great composer was living during a time when the Jesuit Order was in effect, a Roman Catholic order founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in 1534 to defend Catholicism against the Reformation and to do missionary work among the heathen, the ones that did not want to submit to religious conversion.

Religion during this time had a great impact on not only the society, but also its music. Tomás Luis de Victoria born in Ávila to a family of eleven children, the seventh child in fact. After the death of his father at nine years of age, he was cared for by his two uncles who happened to be priests. He went to school and sang at the local cathedral. Through his musical ability, he gained quite a reputation. After his voice changed, he was encouraged by everyone around him, including King Philip II of Spain to carry on his music in Rome, Italy at the Collegio Germanico(a boarding school), where he not only studied music but also strived to be a priest, a goal he finally reached at twenty-seven years of age.

His faith is reflected in the music he had written to a great extent. He wrote motets, masses, magnificats and many sacred works. Actually, he dedicated all of his musical ability to the composition of sacred works. It is believed that living in Rome brought him into contact with a great deal of composers during the era, either living or visiting the city. The fact that the great and influential composer of the time, Palestrina, was a choir director (maestro di cappella) at the nearby Seminario Romano leads to the undoubted belief that the two knew each other and frequently exchanged their thoughts and ideas with one another. It may have very well been that Victoria had even taken lessons from him.

After spending fifty years in Rome all together. Victoria finally went back to Spain under the service of the Dowager Empress Maria. It was her that caused him to write one of his best known works, Officium defunctorum, a requium (mass for a deceased person) for her death in 1603.

To listen to more music by this great composer, click here.

Posted by Michael Ferris at 12:28 PM | Permalink

This composer actually came from a very poor family from Italy. The poverty of his family had almost kept him from making a musical career. Having shown a lot of talent for music at a very young age, his father did everything possible to be able to buy him a used spinet (a type of harpsichord) to learn on. Already at the age of twelve, Giuseppe Verdi had become the local organist.

As he grew older, despite his talent as a player and composer, he was refused entrance into the Milan Conservatory in favor of better, more trained candidates. This disappointment did not stop him though. Though his perseverance, he had been found by a patron, Antonio Barezzi, who loved Verdi's music. This allowed him to study privately in Milan. It was to his patron's daughter that he gave piano and sing lessons to, whom he married in 1836.

His first opera, Oberto, brought him a great deal of success, having been commissioned to write three more, the first of which was a huge failure. During the casting of his second opera, Nabucco, which had been a great success, Giuseppe Verdi was subject to a great blow. His two sons and his wife died and despite the success of his opera, it proved to be the most difficult time of his life. The distress mixed in with the success of his opera had caused Verdi to dive into his work, wanting to bring the opera to a new level. In contrast to the other composers of that time, it is interesting that he was more interested in the dramatic side of opera and less in the purity of showmanship portrayed by many other composers. For his opera, Macbeth, he incorporated a very poor voice for the soprano role of Lady Macbeth instead of someone who could sing to absolute perfection. In his opinion, the beauty and drama was intensified by such a voice.

Having written a great deal of operas and extensively traveling, he met his second wife, a soprano named Giuseppa Strepponi, in London, whom he married at the age of 46 in 1859. Throughout his life, he composed a great deal of works such as La traviata, Rigoletto, Il trovatore, Les vêpres siciliennes, un ballo in maschera, Aida, and Don Carlo. His last two operas were named Othello and Falstaff, having been written and performed when Verdi was in his seventies.

Giuseppe Verdi died at the ripe old age of 87 in year 1901. He had requested that no music be played for his funeral, yet a person watching the procession started singing Va, pensiero from his first huge success, the opera Nabucco, and then everyone started singing, all two thousand spectators.

To listen to music by this great composer, click here.

Posted by Michael Ferris at 06:50 AM | Permalink