Amilcare Ponchielli

 Classical Music / Composer's Datebook: August 31

 

Brief biography of Italian composer Amilcare Ponchielli, regarded as founder of Modern School of Italian Opera. He is famous for opera 'La Gioconda' (The Joyful Girl), and he was teacher of Puccini and Mascagni.

 

Amilcare Ponchielli (1834-1886) is considered the most important Italian composer of the opera between Verdi and Puccini, and founder of modern school of Italian opera.    

 

Early Life

Amilcare Ponchielli was born in Paderno Fasolano (now Paderno Ponchielli) near cremona, on August 31, 1834. Ponchielli's early musical training came from his father, a shopkeeper, who played the organ in the village church, although a businessman by profession.

 

Early Musical Training

At the age of nine, Ponchielli studied music theory, composition, and piano at the Milan Conservatory. After Milan Conservatory, he settled in the province as a church organist, municipal band conductor.

Ponchielli's Career and First Success 

In 1854, aged 20, Ponchielli was music director of the Cremona Theater, where his first opera was premiered.  

Success didn't come early in Ponchielli's life. After he was maneuvered out as a professor at the Milan Conservatory, he took odd jobs, and composed several operas. None of these were successful, until he was 38 years old, with the much-revised I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) in 1872. A year later, his ballet Le due gemelle was also well-received.     

 

Ponchielli's Works:

I Lituani (The Lithuanians) with the Ricordi commission, and above all, with La Gioconda (Gioconda), considered his masterpiece on a text drawn from French writer Victor Hugo. La Gioconda is a melodramatic opera of passion, love, and murder that includes the famous act 3 ballet "Dance of the Hours."

His other works include operas Bertrando, La savoiarda (The Savoyard Woman), I mori di Valenza (The Moors of Valencia), Il figliuol prodigo (The Prodigal Son).

Ponchielli also composed ballets, cantatas, songs, orchestral and chamber music, piano works, and  numerous sacred music. Of his works, only his best known work La Gioconda is in the modern repertory.

 

Later Years

During the last ten years of Ponchielli, he was professor of composition at the Milan Conservatory and maestro di cappella of Bergamo Cathedral.  He taught Giacomo Puccini and briefly, Pietro Mascagni, of Cavalleria Rusticana fame.

Although Amilcare Ponchielli lacks a strong personality, his work shows remarkable imagination and craftsmanship. He is remembered with La Gioconda. He died in Milan, 16th of January, 1886

 

Ponchielli's Operas

I promessi sposi, 1856

Bertranda del Barnia, 1858  (scheduled but not performed)

La Savaiarda, 1861

Roderico, re dei Goti, 1863

I promessi sposi, 1872.  (Success in a revised version) 

Il parlatore eterno, 1873

I Lituani, 1874 (revised as Aldona)

La Gioconda, 1876, (includes the "Dance of the Hours")

Il figliuol prodigo, 1880

Marion Delorme, 1885

 

Ponchielli's Cantatas

 

A Gaetano Donizetti, cantata  1875

In Memoria di Garibaldi, cantata  1882

 

Image Credit:

Amilcare Ponchielli. Karadar.com / Public Domain

 

Resources:

The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2^nd Edition, edited by Stanley Sadie, Macmillan (1994) 

Amilcare Ponchielli. en.wikipedia.org 

August 2008. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.

Voice as Music Instrument

The Child's Singing Voice - Best Musical Instrument 
 
Parents who are thinking for their children to learn to play musical instruments can begin by harnessing their child's own instrument, the singing voice. Choosing the best musical instrument for one's child is a challenge and requires more thinking. From experience, this writer thinks that the best instrument in which children can easily start learning to use, is the instrument they already have, a singing voice!

Read the full article ---  [Child's Singing Voice]

Note: I wrote this piece for musicedmagic.com some years ago. Unfortunately, the link is no longer available. / Tel



(c) August 2008. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.

Carrie Jacobs-Bond's "I Love You Truly"

Music / Parlour Song

 

Carrie Jacobs-Bond's Most Popular Song Still Close to Hearts. 

 

In 1901 Jacobs-Bond wrote and composed the endearing parlor song "I Love You Truly". After a century, the song remains an all-time favorite. 

 

This endearing song "I Love You Truly" by Carrie Jacobs-Bond is always one of my favorite parlour songs to this day. While revisiting a box of piano sheets, one that got my attention was this piece along with "Oh Promise me" (lyrics by Clement Scott) and "A Perfect Day," also by her.  Sentiments drifted to after-dinner family singing together around that old upright piano, and many more memories.  Those teenage years, I simply doted on singing and never bothered about the song writer who shared her heart for a lifetime, at least not until later years when passion for music and composers especially classical music intensely grew. 

The songwriter of this lovely song is Carrie Jacobs-Bond, an American songwriter and singer born 145 years ago on August 11, 1862 in Janesville, Wisconsin. Her family (parents were Dr. Hannibal Jacobs and Emma Davis Jacobs) had financial difficulties when her father died while she was still a child. She also started studying the piano with local teachers and began writing music in the late 1880s.   

Bing Crosby singing Carrie Jacobs-Bond's endearing song "I Love You Truly". (YouTube, uploaded by 'A Trip Down Memory Lane'. Accessed August 11, 2023.)

Jacobs-Bond composed many popular music pieces from 1890s to early 1940s. She was a distant cousin of John Howard Payne, writer of another extremely popular song "Home Sweet Home."

At 18, Carrie Jacobs-Bond was first married to E.J. Smith but the couple separated after seven years. They had a son Frederic. Later in 1887, at 25, she remarried to her childhood sweetheart Dr. Frank Lewis Bond. The family moved to Iron River, Michigan.  After seven years, her husband died of injuries from a fall. She moved to Chicago, Illinois the following year. Slowly, she started drawing audience after singing her own songs by providing recitals in local homes.   

Inspired by her new following, in 1901, she published her first collection, Seven Songs: as Unpretentious as the Wild Rose which included two of the most  enduring songs, "I Love You Truly" and "Just a-Wearyin' for You." 

From the success of her first collection, she founded her own music publishing company The Bond Shop which she opened with her son Frederic in Illinois Chicago. She published another collection of her songs called Songs Everybody Sings and a memoir called The Roads to Melody.  In 1910, she created her other most popular song of all, "A Perfect Day." 

Carrie Jacobs-Bond suffered from rheumatism. In 1920, hoping to find a suitable climate for her pains, she moved to California.  On December 28, 1946, she died from heart attack at the age of 84 in Glendale, California. 

A website with a lot of superb information about Carrie Jacobs-Bond is at parlor songs.  

Carrie Jacobs-Bond was the most successful songwriter-composer of her day.  "I Love You Truly" remains popular, the song and the writer-composer endeared for all time. 

 

Image Credit:

Carrie Jacobs-Bond. Wikipedia Commons / Public Domain.  Accessed August 11, 2023. 

  

Resources: 

Carrie Jacobs-Bond. en.wikipedia.org

Parlor Songs of Carrie Jacobs-Bond. Parlorsongs.com/bios/cjb. Accessed August 11, 2008.

 

(c) August 2008. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.

Alexander Glazunov

Classical Music / Composer's Datebook: August 10

 

Brief biograpahy of Alexander Glazunov, Russian composer of the late Romantic period. He completed the third act of Borodin's Prince Igor, among others, after the composer's death.

 

Alexander Konstantinovich Glazunov was among the late Russian Romantic composers like Rachmaninoff. For almost three years, he studied privately with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov at Balakirev's suggestion.  A son of a successful publisher, Russian composer Alexander Glazunov was born on August 10, 1865, in St. Petersburg. He mother was a good amateur pianist who had studied with Mily Balakirev, a leader of a group of Russian composers known as "The Mighty Handful" or "The Five."   

 

Young Glazunov

When he was 16 years old, Glazunov showed his talent when he wrote his first symphony which was conducted by Mily Balakirev. He became a protege of the latter. At the opening of his performance, Glazunov was befriended by a wealthy patron, a timber merchant Mitrofan Belayev, who started a publishing house to support young Russian hopefuls. From the 1880s, he travelled widely in Paris and London, conducting his own works. In Weimar, he also met with Franz Liszt, who had some influence in his music. 

 

Career

In 1899, he was appointed professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and after six years, he was appointed as director there until leaving the Soviet Union in 1928, when he went to live in Paris but before he did, he first went to Vienna, then toured Europe and the US.  Dmitry Shostakovich was one of his prominent students in St Petersburg.  

Glazunov - The Seasons. Edo de Waart conducts the Minnesota Orchestra. YouTube, uploaded by winkle522000. Accessed August 10, 2023.  

 

Like some of his contemporaries, Glazunov also suffered hardships during the Russian Revolution and settled in other places, of which he did, in Paris.

A notable trivia, it has been said that Glazunov ruined the premiere of Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony by conducting while drunk. 

 

Glazunov's Major works

1881 Symphony No.1 (first performed and conducted by Balakirev. Glazunov was 16 years old)

1882 String Quarter in D major

1883 Serenader No.1

1884 Serenade No.2

1885 Stenka Razin, tone poem

1886 Symphony No.2

1889 The Forest, fantasia

1891 Oriental Rhapsody

1892 Symphony No.3

1893 Symphony No.4

1895 Symphony No.5

1896 Symphony No.6

1897 Raymonda, ballet

1901 The Seasons, ballet

1902 Symphony No.7

1904 Violin Concerto

1905 Symphony No.8

1909 Symphony No.9 (left unfinished, first performed 1948)

1911 Piano concerto

1933 Epic Poem

1936 Saxophone Concerto

 

Legacy  of Glazunov

Glazunov has a significant place in the history of Russian music for he reconciled Russianism and Europeanism - by absorbing Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral virtuosity, Balakirev’s nationalism,  Tchaikovsky’s lyricism, Borodin’s epic grandeur and Taneyev’s contrapuntal skill. His music  has a distinctive Russian national school of composition, at the same time and absorbed  influences of western Europe. He completed the act three of Borodin's famous Prince Igor after Borodin's death, collaborated in other works, and made more arrangements.

Alexander Glazunov died in Paris in1936, the same day that Mussorgsky and Johann Sebastian Bach were born, in different centuries.   

 

Image Credit:

Alexander Glazunov (before 1913). Wikipedia Commons / Public Domain

 

Resources: 

Dictionary of Composers and their Music by Eric Gilder (1987)

The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music, edited by Stanley Sadie (1994)

 

 

(c) August 2008. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.

None but the Lonely Heart (Film)

Classic Movies


None but the Lonely Heart is a 1944 American drama romance film. It tells the story of an itinerant  young Cockney drifter who reluctantly returns home with no ambitions, but finds that his family needs him. He helps his sickly mother run her shop. To make ends meet, they are both tempted to turn to crime.


The movie stars Cary Grant, Ethel Barrymore, and Barry Fitzgerald. It is adapted by director Clifford Odets from the novel by Richard Llewelyn.


Film Trailer (1944)


17th Academy Awards:

Ethel Barrymore wins the Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Nominations for Cary Grant, Best Actor; Roland Gross, Best Film Editing; Hanns Eisler and Constantin Bakaleinikoff, for Best Music (Music Score of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture).


The film title None but the Lonely Heart is taken from one of Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's loved and best-known popular heart-rending music of the same title, "None but the Lonely Heart, Op. 6 No.6," featured in the background music.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Literature / Writer's Datebook: August 4

 

Brief biography of English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, one of England's finest Romantic poets. He was also a novelist and essayist, contemporary of John Keats, and husband of Mary Godwin Shelley, of Frankenstein fame. Percy Shelley is known for Prometheus Unbound.

 

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born into a wealthy family, in Field Place, near Horsham in Sussex on August 4, 1792, three years older than John Keats, and another one of finest English Romantic poets. He was educated at Eton College, where his radical views on politics and religion earned him the nickname 'Mad Shelley" and later "Eton Atheist." While still at Eton and aged just 18, he published his first book, a gothic horror novel called Zastrozzi. He attended Oxford University, where he read radical authors like William Godwin, and behaved in an eccentric way. A year later, he was expelled from the University for his anti-Christian writings.

That same year 19-year-old Shelley shocked his family even more by secretly marrying 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook. This was the start of Shelley's adventurous life and restless travels. He had two children with Harriet.  Three years later Shelley fell in love and eloped with another 16-year old, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Harriet drowned herself, and Shelley married his new love, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. She was known as Mary Shelley, famous for her masterpiece Frankenstein.  Mary gave birth to a daughter who died prematurely, but had a son William Shelley, beloved of his father.

The Shelleys moved around constantly. His reputation grew and met John Keats and William Hazlitt. They travelled around Europe and lived in  different towns in England. Shelley's poems, such as Alastor and 'Ozymandias,' overflow with intense emotion and radical ideas.  

In 1818, Shelley and Mary left England to live in Italy. He completed some of his greatest poetry there, including his masterpiece Prometheus Unbound. While on a short voyage along the Italian coast, Shelley's small sailboat was caught in a storm. He drowned on July 8, 1822, aged 29. At a young age, Percy Bysshe Shelley had written poetry that established him as one of the greatest English Romantic poets.

 

Works by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Zastrozzi  1810

Queen Mab  1813

The Revolt of Islam  1818

The Cenci  1819

Prometheus Unbound  1820

The Triumph of Life  1824  (published after he died)

The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe, Poetry Book

 

Poetry

A Lament

A New World

A Widow Bird Sate Mourning for her Love

Adonais

Alastor (The Spirit of Solitude)

Asia: From Prometheus Unbound

England in 1819

Feelings of a REpublican on the Fall of Bonaparte

Invocation

Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills

Love's Philosophy

Mont Blank

Music, When Soft Voices Die

Ode to the West Wind

On a Poet's Lips I Slept

One Word is Too Often Profaned

Ozymandias

Prince Athanase

Sont To the Men of England

Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples

The Daemon of the World

The Indian Serenede

The Invitation

The Revolt of Islam

The Waning Moon

 The Witch of Atlas

Time

To a Lady, With a Guitar

To Night

To the Moon

To Wordsworth

When the Lamp is Shattered 

 

Image Credit.

Percy Bysshe Shelley. NNDB / Public Domain.

 

Resources:

Cambridge Guide to Literature in English by Ian Ousby, Cambridge. (1993)

Larousse Dictionary of Writers, edited by Rosemary Goring, Larousse.  (1994)

Percy Bysshe Shelley / Online-Literature.com

 

(c) August 2008. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.