This special presentation electronically replicates the book The Rosaleen Moldenhauer Memorial. Music History from Primary Sources: A Guide to the Moldenhauer Archives. In some cases, complete works discussed in the essays are available for viewing online.
A Guide to the Moldenhauer Archives
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Foreword IN 1987, A BEQUEST OF HANS MOLDENHAUER (1906-1987) brought to the Library of Congress the greatest composite gift of musical documents this institution has ever received. Established as the Moldenhauer Archives at the Library of Congress, it consisted of about 3,500 autograph music manuscripts, letters, and other materials spanning the range of musical genres from medieval chant to modern serialism, with neumes inscribed with…
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Acknowledgments The Music Division has been blessed with donors, each of whom has shaped, through a personal vision, the course of our development. This volume is the first landmark in the work that Hans Moldenhauer envisioned when he bequeathed the greatest portion of his Archives to the Library of Congress. Dedicated to the memory of his wife Rosaleen, with whom he gathered the Moldenhauer Archives…
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Introduction THIS BOOK, WHICH DOCUMENTS THE Moldenhauer Archives now in the Library of Congress and eight other institutions, is the realization of a project first envisioned by Hans Moldenhauer in 1982 as a memorial to Rosaleen, his wife of nearly four decades. He referred to it often as "my Taj Mahal." They collaborated throughout most of their long marriage in a working relationship that grew…
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Music History from Primary Sources The Art of Musical Notation In its primary sources, music merges with the representational arts. Oral tradition has played a fundamental role in all ages, but in its formal sense, history--and the history of music--begins with the visual record.
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The Nathan Bequest: Payment Receipts in the Hand of Johann Sebastian Bach, 1746 to 1748 Among Johann Sebastian Bach's duties as Thomas Cantor in Leipzig was the obligation to lead the choirboys of the Thomasschule in annual renditions of motets or chorales offered in memory of benefactors of the school. In some twenty instances the terms of the bequest governing these performances entailed an honorarium for the cantor, who dutifully prepared and signed a receipt confirming its payment.1
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Béla Bartók's Working Method in Dealing with Proofs for His Violin Concerto (1937-1938) Bartók himself once said to the writer of these lines that his artistic development might be likened to a spiral: to deal with the same problems on an ever rising level, with correspondingly rising success--this seemed to him the guiding principle of his development.1
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A Sketch Leaf from Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata, Op.28 One of the more poignant assertions made on the subject of the history of Beethoven's sketchbooks is that the day of his death marked the beginning of the history of their destruction.1 This statement is particularly apropos with regard to a single-leaf manuscript from the Moldenhauer Archives, which contains music from the second movement of the Piano Sonata, op. 28, and which is one…
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A Beethoven Sketch for the Puzzle Canon "Das Schweigen," WoO 168 In his essay on "Beethoven's Sketches for Sehnsucht (WoO 146)," Lewis Lockwood cites Gustav Nottebohm's pioneering essays on the subject of Beethoven's sketchbooks as primary sources for what he calls the prevailing view of the composer's creative approach to composition. Defined as a process of assiduous labor by which initial musical ideas were transformed by gradual stages into artistic substance, this view is admonished…
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Two Sketches for Alban Berg's "Lulu" Both sketches for Lulu preserved in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek contain material from Act I, scene 3, and originate from the same collection of autographs in the Austrian National Library.1 Mus. ms. 17489 is a single leaf containing a draft of the ragtime music of Act I, scene 3, measures 10071021, and a rhythmic sketch of the opening of the ragtime music, measures 991993. Berg…
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Ernest Bloch's Conducting Score for "Schelomo" ...For years I had a number of sketches for the book of Ecclesiastes which I had wanted to set to music, but the French language was not adaptable to my rhythmic patterns. Nor was German or English, and I hadn't a good enough command of Hebrew. Thus the sketches accumulated and...lay dormant.
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John Blow's "Arise, Great Monarch, and Ascend the Throne" Following restoration to his throne in 1660, King Charles II initiated the regular practice of having a specially written ode set to music for performance at the English Court in celebration of New Year's Day and royal birthdays. It was maintained until 1820, but its heyday lies in the last twenty-five years of the seventeenth century during which it was responsible for such fine…
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Pierre Boulez's Le Marteau sans maître Pierre Boulez wrote his Le Marteau sans maître (The Hammer without a Master) between the years 1952 and 1955. The work, whose title is borrowed from the collection of poems by René Char, consists of three intermingled cycles, each based on a specific musical setting of one of the three poems the composer has selected, surrounded by purely instrumental "commentaries." He has deliberately avoided…
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Johannes Brahms's Autograph of "Die Kränze" Music autographs can be elusive. After the composer puts finishing touches on a work, the manuscript may remain in the possession of the author for a while longer, or in the hands of the publisher to whom the work is sold, or it may be given as a present to a friend in gratitude for loyalty past or to ensure continuing goodwill or as…
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Some Autobiographical Overtones in Brahms's "Rinaldo" Since its earliest performances Brahms's Rinaldo has met with challenge. The premiere (Vienna, February 28, 1869), at which Brahms conducted the Akademische Gesangverein and the Hofoper orchestra, was greeted by largely negative reviews.1 With the exception of Theodor Billroth's qualified praise, commentary ranged from tepid to hostile, with critics emphasizing Rinaldo's "endless shades of gray," "excessive Baroque conceits," and lack of sensuality.2 Somewhat more…
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Two Letters by Anton Bruckner The two letters published here for the first time were written during a crucial period in the life of Anton Bruckner (1824-1896): the midlife years in which he fought for recognition of his music, especially his symphonies, by the musical world at large. In fact, the letters may be considered representative of two different stages in the reception of Bruckner's work: neglect and misunderstanding,…
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Dr. Burney, Samuel Wesley, and J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations Dr. Charles Burney's letter to Samuel Wesley of around July 15, 1810, concerning arrangements for a private performance for Burney of J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations by Wesley and Vincent Novello illustrates both the warm friendship between Burney and Wesley and the lively interest that Burney developed in the music of Bach in the last years of his life. It is one of over…
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John Cage's "The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs" John Cage's setting of "The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs" signals the beginning of what would become a profound and enduring fascination with the writings of James Joyce. Subsequent to this setting, composed in the fall of 1942, Cage would return to Joyce repeatedly throughout his career, using Joyce's words as the basis not only for a variety of musical compositions1, but also a…
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Pablo Casals: A Letter Written from Exile There is a remarkable poignancy to this document written by Pablo Casals on May 6, 1940. Penned in the village of Prades, France, only a few miles from the Spanish border, it breathes the anguish of exile, the pain of shattered dreams, and a prophetic foreboding about the future.
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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's "Ozymandias" In the late 1950s Hans Moldenhauer began an extensive correspondence with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco that continued until the composer's death in 1968. In addition to some 134 letters to the collector, the Archives include a wealth of scores that the composer sent to Moldenhauer, the result of what the composer, writing in 1959, called his "library cleaning." Among the musical items are sketches and preparatory…
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A Chopin Manuscript: Prelude in A-flat Major, op. posth. Chopin's Prelude in A-flat Major, without opus number, was first published in Geneva in the August 1918 issue of the art journal Pages d'Art. Untitled by Chopin, the forty-one-measure piece appeared under the title Prélude inédit. The work was first performed in public on April 9, 1919, by E. R. Blanchet and was subsequently reissued in an edition by the music publisher Henn. French…
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Luigi Dallapiccola's Sketch for Ulisse Ulisse, an opera in a prologue and two acts, is the only full-length opera of Luigi Dallapiccola. It was preceded by two one-act pieces, Volo di Notte (1940) and Il Prigioniero (1950); by Job, a "sacra rappresentazione" in one act (1950); and by an edition of Monteverdi's Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria (1941-1942). Like Monteverdi's opera, Ulisse is based on the Odyssey (Dallapiccola was…
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Frederick Delius's "Zwei Braune Augen" On March 2, 1884, twenty-two-year-old Fritz Delius--he did not change his name to Frederick until 1902--set sail from Liverpool for America with the intention of managing a large orange plantation in the then primitive State of Florida. Disembarking in Jacksonville, a backward but booming city of around 17,000 inhabitants, he traveled by river steamer to his lush plantation, Solano Grove, forty miles south up…
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George Gershwin: A Sketch for Porgy and Bess George Gershwin's sketches for Porgy and Bess come in many varieties. Most important--less a "sketch" than a step in the creation of the work--is the manuscript short score, four large oblong volumes, bound by Gershwin and containing the entire score (save for the prelude) in its unorchestrated form. This is the score from which the published vocal score was prepared; one suspects that Gershwin…
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Excerpts from Gluck's Alceste, Copied and Revised by Hector Berlioz The survival of Gluck's operas owes much to the efforts of Hector Berlioz. The present manuscript is an important document of some of those efforts, the culmination of a lifetime of experience and thought, to preserve Alceste.
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George Frideric Handel's 1749 Letter to Charles Jennens A good deal of twentieth-century musical research about George Frideric Handel's great contemporary Johann Sebastian Bach has been occupied with the search for the "Bach organ." Since Bach's some 250 surviving compositions for organ are central to that instrument's repertory, modern performers and organ builders have been anxious to find out what sort of organ Bach preferred for his music. This is particularly crucial…
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Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Miserae (1933-1934) Karl Amadeus Hartmann's symphonic poem Miserae (1933-1934) stands as a watershed in the career of an artist for whom the political events of the early 1930s would assume major personal significance. A lifelong resident of Munich, Hartmann wrote Miserae to protest the establishment of the first Nazi concentration camp, which opened in the neighboring village and former artistic community of Dachau in March of…
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Josef Matthias Hauer's Melischer Erntwurf History has relegated Josef Matthias Hauer (1883-1959) to the rank of Kleinmeister and his twelve-tone works to a position subordinate to that held by the Schoenberg circle. His highly idiosyncratic compositions and theoretical writings exerted little influence on later generations, and they were regarded as inconsequential, if not somewhat eccentric, by many of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, Hauer remains a notable and colorful figure, and…
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Paul Hindemith's Hérodiade Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) had leapt onto the musical scene in the 1920s as an enfant terrible and musical revolutionary. Even though at the end of the decade his compositional style was increasingly informed by a striving for comprehensibility and by ethical considerations, the unrestrained modernity and shock character of some of his early works haunted him when the Nazis came to power in his…
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Arthur Honegger's "Les Ombres": Fragment of a Lost Film Score Arthur Honegger (1892-1955), French composer of Swiss parentage, wrote symphonies, concertos, chamber works, and ballets; probably his best-known compositions are the "dramatic psalm" Le Roi David and the "mouvement symphonique" Pacific 231. But Honegger also wrote music for more than forty motion pictures (some in collaboration with other composers), and that aspect of his career spanned both the silent and sound film eras. Many…
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Transformation and Adaptation: The Evolution of Charles Ives's Song "From 'Paracelsus'" One of the most fascinating aspects of the work of Charles Ives is his untiring activity as arranger of his own pieces. It went beyond the normal measure not only with respect to quantity, but above all with respect to quality, for Ives often transformed works to the extent that more or less independent new ones resulted. In some cases a strict separation between…
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The Kerver Missale Romanum On January 2, 1564, the Parisian printer and bookseller Jacques Kerver had a stroke of good fortune. He was given exclusive rights for ten years to publish all the works which reflected the reforms of the Council of Trent. This privilege, granted by King Charles IX of France, gave Kerver a veritable monopoly on the required texts, such as breviaries and missals, essential to…
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Franz Liszt's Psalm XVIII In the summer of 1860, Franz Liszt still believed that he and his longtime companion, the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, were to be married in the very near future. The obstacles to their union were fewer. The princess's first husband, Nicholas, had himself obtained a Protestant divorce in 1855 and remarried the following year. This did not, of course, remove the objections of the Roman…
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Witold Lutosławski Venetian Games In 1960 Witold Lutosławski (born January 25, 1913, in Warsaw) began experimenting with aleatoric techniques in Venetian Games (1960-1961). The piece won first prize at the Tribune Internationale des Compositeurs (May 1962) and marked Lutosławski's emergence as one of the world's leading composers. Lutosławski himself considers Venetian Games to demonstrate his "first maturity as a composer."1
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Gustav Mahler Sketches in the Moldenhauer Archives The sketches in the Moldenhauer Archives for Mahler's Seventh Symphony (with one leaf also representing the Sixth) are only one part of a considerable body of important manuscripts of that composer's works in the collection. Manuscripts connected with the Second1, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Symphonies and with several songs, to say nothing of letters and other documents, make the Archives a major source for…
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Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: Overture to Elijah, Arrangement for Piano Duet (1847) Few works by Mendelssohn have reflected the composer's shifting critical reception as compellingly as the oratorio Elijah. Hailed after its English premieres in 1846 and 1847 as a seminal masterpiece, Elijah remained a popular cornerstone in the oratorio repertory, though it withstood a later assault as the work of a composer whose polished, impeccable craftsmanship was somehow not consonant with newer directions in musical…
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A Letter by Pietro Metastasio During Pietro Metastasio's years as court poet for the Habsburgs in Vienna, people of talent--real or perceived--solicited him for opinions of their work. Women as well as men wrote to him, requesting his endorsement or, more directly, his aid in ameliorating their artistic situations. As Charles Burney noted in his memoirs of Metastasio, the poet did not appear to seek the post of judge…
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Wolfgang Amadè Mozart's Allegro and Andante ("Fantasy") in F Minor for Mechanical Organ, K. 6o8 Anyone visiting Europe's palaces, stately homes and museums is likely to notice the musical automata. These often exquisitely made creations range in size from costly toys that can be held in one hand to organs filling whole walls. But their most common manifestations are in the form of large tabletop clocks that contain small pipe organs, and the best of them are serious instruments,…
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The Coronation Scene from Modest Musorgsky's Boris Godunov in Rimsky-Korsakov's Edition The group of Russian composers who began to assemble after 1857, consisting of Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Musorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Alexander Borodin, came to be known as the moguchaia kuchka (literally, "the mighty little heap," traditionally rendered in English as "the Mighty Handful," or simply "The Five"), after this term first appeared in the Russian press in 1867 to describe this loose…
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Krzysztof Penderecki's Polymorphia and Fluorescences During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Hitler's forces razed the major concert halls and conservatories, burned most of the existing scores, and imprisoned or murdered numerous musicians. The period immediately following the devastation of World War II was characterized by a new intensity of governmental support for the arts. Musical education was revived with a new vigor, as concert halls and conservatories were quickly…
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A Fragment from Act II of Giacomo Puccini's La Bohème Giacomo Puccini's fourth opera, La Bohème, is the work which reflects his reaching full compositional maturity. After the completion of Manon Lescaut in 1892, Puccini considered setting either Giovanni Verga's short story, La Lupa, or Henry Murger's novel, Scènes de la Vie de Bohème. For a time, it appears that he favored the Verga work, and even visited the author in Catania to observe…
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George Rochberg's Fifth Symphony: A Commentary by the Composer Of the six symphonies I have produced, the fifth is the most terse--some twenty-two minutes in playing time--because it is the most compressed, and its compression determines its single, large-scale, uninterrupted movement form.
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Gioachino Rossini's Moïse It was to the Théâtre Italien that Gioachino Rossini first turned his attention when he began his official activities in Paris in 1824, mounting productions of his major Italian works, some of which were unknown in France. Few doubted, however, that among his goals was to compose operas in French for the primary theater of the capital, the Académie Royale de Musique, commonly known…
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Arnold Schoenberg's Adagio for Strings and Harp This complete, single-movement, lovely little piece in A-flat, for an unusual combination of solo violin, small string ensemble and harp--twelve players in all--immediately brings to mind the slow movement of Brahms's F-Minor Piano Quintet (whose tempo indication, by the way, is Andante, un poco Adagio), though the resemblances are subtle rather than blatant. Perhaps the connection is implied through an initial melodic span of…
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Two Leaves of Sketches for Arnold Schoenberg's Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra The four pages of sketch material pertaining to movements III and IV of this Concerto aptly fill in those gaps in the otherwise mostly uninterrupted sequence of sketches cited and discussed in the complete edition of Schoenberg's works.1 Although it is to be noted that these gaps were never editorially acknowledged, their existence would have been impossible to ignore by anyone seriously studying this…
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Of Songs and Cycles: A Franz Schubert Bifolio Franz Schubert was by any standard a prolific composer. With well over six hundred lieder, scores of chamber and solo instrumental works, symphonies, music for the stage, and various vocal ensembles to his name, Schubert possessed an extraordinary capacity for musical composition. The legacy of this artistic productivity is documented in its most immediate form in the manuscripts that have survived to the present…
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Robert Schumann's Burla in G Minor Apart from occasional forays into chamber and orchestral music, Robert Schumann devoted his attention during the 1830s mainly to works for piano. In addition to publishing over a dozen collections of keyboard miniatures, three sonatas, and the C-Major Fantasie, op. 17, he left a number of manuscript fragments ranging from the briefest of idea sketches1 to almost fully elaborated drafts. The Burla in G…
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Igor Stravinsky's Threni: Conducting Details This set of undated printer's proofs for Threni1 was submitted to Stravinsky's attention in three separate missives (pages 1-27, 28-51, and 52-70, as shown on the initial pages of each) by his London publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. Clearly identified on each successive sheet as first proof, it reveals the corresponding first stage of corrections. Subsequent stages include not only second proofs (which the publisher…
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Germaine Tailleferre's Concerto pour Piano et 12 Instruments Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983), distinguished not merely as the only woman in the circle of composers known as Les Six, but as a twentieth-century French composer who "builds a bridge between the contemporary mode and classical tradition,"1 dedicated her "Concerto pour Piano et 12 Instruments" to the great Parisian patroness of avant-garde music, Princess Edmond of Polignac, whose husband was a composer of some note.…
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Aurelio de la Vega's The Magic Labyrinth: Reminiscences of the Composer "Your music is progressively turning into painting," exclaimed Hans Burkhardt, the Swiss-born painter who lived in Los Angeles for many decades until his death, and who in his old age received the honors, the glories and the international recognition and critical acclaim due him many years before. The times were the early 1970s, and the artist was looking through some of my scores from…
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Giuseppe Verdi's Attila In May of 1830 two young Russian musicians appeared in Milan: they were the composer Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka and the twenty-year-old tenor Nicolai Ivanov. They soon developed connections to musicians throughout the city (including the composers Bellini and Donizetti and the publisher Ricordi); later they traveled south, to Rome and ultimately Naples. By 1833, however, Glinka felt that he had absorbed what Italy could…
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Anton Webern's Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6, Arrangement for Chamber Ensemble Arnold Schoenberg first disclosed his plan for a private society devoted to the performance of contemporary music on June 30, 1918, at a meeting with friends and students in his Mödling home. The project, whose immediate incentive had been a series of public rehearsals of Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony op. 9 (in June 1918), took shape very rapidly; it led to the foundation of the…
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Anton Webern's "Mein Weg geht jetzt vorüber," op. 15, No.4 During the years from 1915 ti 1925, Webern was preoccupied almost exclusively with the composition of Lieder. Totalling over forty settings (complete and fragmentary) of Latin liturgical texts, pious folk texts and poems by George Trakl, these songs chronicle his continued experimentation with atonal writing and gradual adoption of the twelve-tone method. "Mein Weg geht jetzt vurüber," composed in 1922 and published as No.…
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Anton Webern's Zwei Lieder für gemischten Chor, op. 19 Anton Webern's Zwei Lieder für gemischten Chor, op. 19 (1925-1926) remains one of his least-known compositions, yet it occupies an extremely important position in his oeuvre. Not only is this Webern's first twelve-tone work on a comparatively large scale, it also marks the first time he organized constituent movements around the same row. His previous experiments with twelve-tone composition had treated the row rather…
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Anton Webern's Jone Poems On the evening of November 29, 1944, at the Archbishop's Palace in Vienna, there occurred a poetry reading devoted to the works of Hildegard Jone. The evening was sponsored by Dr. Otto Mauer, a priest, professor, and patron of modern art who was also a personal friend of Jone's. The poetry reading was one of many such events that Mauer organized during the latter…
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Frank Wedekind: Stock Poster with His Autograph Prologue to "Der Erdgeist" During the winter and spring of 1898, a dramatic ensemble known as the Ibsen Theater and sponsored by the Leipziger literarische Gesellschaft toured northern Germany, Silesia, and Austria. The ensemble's program was devoted almost exclusively to works by the playwright for whom it was named, Henrik Ibsen, but in this, their final season, they also included premiere performances of Frank Wedekind's Lulu play Der…
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Repositories Bayerische StaatsBibliothek Ludwigstraße 16 80539 München Germany Tel. ++49 89 28638-0 Fax ++49 89 28638-2200 www.bsb-muenchen.de External
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Contributors FERENC BÓNIS, who resides in Budapest, is a musicologist and an eminent expert on Béla Bartók. He is also President of the Hungarian Kodály Society.