Word: franzes
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...common attitude toward German expressionist artists like Emil Nolde, Ernst Kirchner, Franz Marc, Karl Schmidt-Rottluffor Max Pechstein used to be that their work was a talented but provincial response to French Fauvism...
...mother called him Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Jr. Why not? He was the second surviving son of a great composer, and it was a name certainly worth preserving. The only problem was that when Mama made the decision, the boy was well along in childhood and already had a name: Franz Xaver. Wolfgang Jr. or just plain Franz? It was a dilemma that plagued the young Mozart most of his life (1791-1844). Having studied with such notables as Hummel and Salieri, he was a talented enough musician to make his piano debut at age 13. Yet Franz was not another...
Bouncy Spirits. The pity of it is that Franz did have talent. Last week in New York at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival (Wolfgang Sr., that is), listeners got a rare chance to hear Franz's Piano Concerto No. 2 in E Flat, Op. 25. The soloist was the eminent Gary Graffman, that master of diverse styles for whom the score was reconstructed and edited from the original edition by the New York composer and musicologist Douglas Townsend...
Apparently written in 1818, when Franz was 27, the work shows the unmistakable influence of the concertos written by the elder Mozart a generation before. But then so did most everything written in the post-Mozart era. What is interesting about Franz's concerto is the way it has absorbed some of the innovations of Beethoven and Weber and gone on to anticipate some of the expressive, warm-blooded styles that would be heard later from the leading German romantics. There is a point in the first movement, for example, when the piano becomes a discreet accompanist (arpeggios mostly...
Obviously, Franz knew his trade and all the latest trends. The Concerto in E Flat (one of his father's favorite key signatures, by the way) makes up for a certain lack of profundity with its bouncy good spirits and melodic charm. Franz performed it frequently as a concert pianist, and if he was able to bring it off as brilliantly as Graffman did last week, he must have had a first-rate keyboard technique. He also played (and revered) his father's music and quite clearly was burdened by the comparison. Finally he had to get away...