Word: beethoven
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...most of Shostakovich's later music, there are traces of Beethoven, Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mahler, moderns like Poulenc and Busoni. The Seventh Symphony has been described by those who have already heard it as a modern Russian version of Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique. It has also been called a sound-track for a psychological documentary film on Russia today...
...were plopping into prison like turtles into a pond, Stalin decided to hear Lady Macbeth. He did not like it, walked out before it was over. Murder from boredom struck him as a bourgeois idea. Besides, Stalin's musical taste runs to simple, more tuneful things, zigzags between Beethoven's Eroica and Verdi's Rigoletto. Also, he had a seat directly above the brasses...
Outside his office Albert Kahn leads the quiet life of a man of culture. He owns a whole gallery of French Impressionist paintings, on which he dotes, and spends many happy moments with his record collection, shushing anyone who dares whisper while he is listening to Beethoven or Brahms. A member of six golf clubs, he has yet to make his first pass at a golf ball...
...Beethoven: Grosse Fugue, Op. 133 (Adolf Busch and his Chamber Players; Columbia; 4 sides). A puzzler even to musical savants of the 1820s, the granite-surfaced "grand fugue" which Beethoven composed as a finale to his String Quartet B Flat so irritated audiences that his publisher persuaded him to write a simpler finale, issue his pet fugue separately. Now recognized as a titan among fugues, it comes to life eloquently, pulsingly in the first album of Violinist Adolf Busch's reorganized chamber musicians, who made their U.S. debut earlier this year (TIME, March...
Aaron Copland's book, "Our New Music," although contributing a few good insights, is on the whole no more valuable than a modern composer's apologia pro arte sua should be, and about as impartial as an epitaph. He brings up the old notion that Beethoven and the Romantics were too "subjective" and personal, while the new music has to "grapple" with the objective problem of the times. Of course, he hastens to add, the old devices of melody, rhythm and strong feeling are still used, only "extended and enriched" and made more "objective." All this is reassuring reading...