Musicon / Musical education / Inventing Bonds of Union in Symphonies
The desire of composers to have their symphonies accepted as unities instead of compages of unrelated pieces has led to the adoption of various devices designed to force the bond of union upon the attention of the hearer. Thus Beethoven in his symphony in C minor not only connects the third and ::More
Musicon / Mendelssohn / Mendelssohn – He went on writing music until he suffered a fatal series of strokes
According to Goethe, Mendelssohn bore “the same relation to the little Mozart that the perfect speech of a grown man does to the prattle of a child.” Even if Goethe got a bit carried away, his enthusiasm is understandable. Mendelssohn began composing at the age of ten, and within a year or ::More
Musicon / Mozart / Bernard Williams: Mozart changed our thinking on Don Juan
Later writers have not simply gone back to some archetype of Don Juan, or taken Mozart’s opera merely as one previous embodiment of that character, but have in many cases been quite specially influenced by the opera. Indeed, nineteenth- and twentieth- century thoughts about Don Juan have been ::More
Musicon / Music and Literature / Homesickness
It was life and reality that were wrong. It was as little right that a woman like me should have no other choice than to grow old in poverty and in a senseless way at a typewriter in the pay of a money-maker, or to marry such a man for his money’s sake, or to become some kind of drudge, as ::More
