On Wednesday, September 30, 2020 at 12:17:01 PM UTC-4, John W Kennedy wrote:
On 9/29/20 6:44 PM, ggggg9271@gmail.com wrote:
On Tuesday, June 23, 2020 at 9:59:13 AM UTC-7, gggg...@gmail.com wrote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg#Relationship_with_the_general_public
Does this apply to Schoenberg?:
-To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.
Leo Tolstoy
I don’t know that Tolstoy is entirely correct, there. If nothing else,
one must allow for the depredations of mere Fashion.
That being said, I believe serialism has had some success in Hollywood underscoring.
I guess I was lucky that the first Schoenberg I got to know was "A
Survivor from Warsaw" -- once you've learned the choral part, the transformations of the melody are easy to follow in what precedes
in the orchestra during the narration.
Years later, Orpheus Chamber Ensemble played the Chamber Symphony
No. 2 (at Carnegie Hall).
Then I heard "Verklaerte Nacht" three times in different free
chamber series over a couple of seasons.
Craft's nearly complete survey of the Works on Naxos is musical,
Boulez's on (now) Sony is much less so (net helped by having
Glenn Gould and Charles Rosen in the piano and song works).
"Erwartung" didn't make sense either at Lyric Opera or at New
York City Opera, but Solti's slightly staged concert performance
of Moses und Aron was magnificent (soon put on CD).
Levine's "Gurrelieder" at Ravinia and "Friede auf Erden" by a
chamber chorus in New York barely count, being pre-serial. A
_good_ performance of "Friede auf Erden" is thrilling, because
the major chords that punctuate the phrases just pop out of the
texture when they're perfectly tuned. Which they usually aren't.
The moral of the story: Don't start with "Pierrot Lunaire."
The linked Wikiparticle calls it the "period of free atonality."
But by the time he arrived at "Third period: Twelve-tone and
tonal works," his greatness as a musician had re-emerged.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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