Mihály Mosonyi: Festival Music
Festival Music’ was premiered in 1861, and the same concert also featured Schumann’s ‘Symphony No. 1 in B-flat Major’, an excerpt from Erkel’s ‘Bánk bán’ and the 1st movement of Beethoven’s ‘Violin Concerto in D Major’. ‘Festival Music’ was not as successful as Mosonyi’s earlier work entitled ‘Gyászhangok (Funeral Music)’, but even then there was no shortage of enthusiastic reviews of the premier concert: “Mosonyi’s ‘Festival Music’ gives us another opportunity to express our heartfelt joy at the intellectual development Hungarian music is capable of. We find that this overture as an apt representation of our age. All our desires and wishes for our beloved homeland, which, after a long period of oppression, burst free from our hearts constricted by the shackles of the Austrian Alexander Bach Age, seem to be expressed here; all our hopes find expression in the work, and finally, after the fulfilment of our hopes, the musical piece ends with a sublime thanksgiving note expressed by Hungary’s second national anthem ‘Szózat (The Appeal)’. (Daily paper Pest-Ofner Bürger-Zeitung, 8th January 1861 issue) Franz Liszt was so much inspired by the piece that when ‘The Legend of Saint Elizabeth’ was performed at the 25th anniversary of the opening of Pest-Buda School of Music in 1865, Liszt himself undertook to conduct ‘Festival Music’. No other Hungarian contemporary composer was accorded such honour by Franz Liszt in his homeland.
Franz Liszt: From the Cradle to the Grave – Symphonic poem
Franz Liszt, who was creative in the middle period of his life, captured the struggles and glorification of heroes through music particularly in the 12 symphonic poems he wrote during his Weimar period. Over two decades later, in 1881, in his last symphonic poem, struggle appears to be merely an intermezzo between the two major events in one’s life, i.e. birth and death. Moving beyond the struggles, Liszt interprets the end of human existence in a resigned mood, and looks at afterlife awaiting him with complete serenity. The piece was inspired by Mihály Zichy’s graphic work of the same title. While the symphonic poems of the Weimar period were single-movement works, the piece ‘From the Cradle to the Grave’ consists of three clearly distinct movements separated by intervals. What is more important, however, is that the style of the piece differs radically from the Franz Liszt style of the 1850s, and is comparable to Liszt’s latest, most modern and most interesting works.
Luigi Cherubini: Requiem in C Minor
One of the most celebrated composers of the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, Luigi Cherubini had a major influence on his contemporaries including Ludwig van Beethoven. Composed in 1817 to commemorate the fate of the executed French King Louis XVI, ‘Requiem’ was considered Cherubini’s significant musical piece by Berlioz, Schumann and Brahms alike. The composition was performed at Beethoven’s funeral in 1827 and was even staged at a concert dedicated to Beethoven’s memory in Marseille’s main cathedral in 1834. A contemporary Hungarian newspaper reported on the latter event writing: the large-scale work was staged by nearly five hundred performers, and the piece “has made a great impression on the audience that filled every part of the church.” Cherubini composed music for the entire text of ‘Requiem’: this piece is characterised not only by the clear form of the Viennese classical style but also by the nuanced musical tone of Romanticism.
Cherubini: Requiem
Pesti Vigadó
NOV 11., 7:30 PM
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