Interestingly, her brother Felix would also explore drought, heat, and suffering through music only a few years later in his oratorio Elijah. For inspiration, she chose a Schiller quotation about drought and exhaustion. Nach erquickendem Tau, der Mensch verschmachtet.įor livening dew people are languishing.įor the month of July, Fanny Hensel explores the suffering that summer’s heat can bring. The women are greeted by one angel (who looks a lot like Fanny Hensel), while a second angel rings a bell–a reference to the Goethe quotation. He depicts Mary Madgalene, Mary of Cleopas, and Salome, the three women who discovered Christ’s empty tomb in the biblical narratives. Wilhelm’s vignette for this movement emphasizes the work’s spiritual dimension. The movement’s journey from darkness to light reflects both the liturgical progression through Holy Week to Easter, and the seasonal progression from winter into spring. After the chorale enters the piece, the music grows in energy and joy until concluding in a triumphant C-sharp Major–quite a harmonic distance from its opening key. It grows in intensity until it gives way to simple statement of the Lutheran Easter chorale, Christ ist erstanden. This movement begins in an agitated f minor, with relentless ostinato eighth notes. Both Fanny and her brother Felix were dedicated students of Bach’s music. Proclaim the first solemn hour of Easter?įanny Hensel labels this piece Preludium und Choral, making it a Romantic, pianistic reworking of a Baroque liturgical organ genre associated with Johann Sebastian Bach. Musicologist Larry Todd has suggested that Wilhelm could be framing the whole cycle as Fanny’s musical dream. Cecilia or a Greek muse, holding a lyre and dreaming of angels. Wilhelm Hensel illustrated this movement with a portrait of Fanny, perhaps as St. Musicologist Christian Thorau has found echoes of this initial motive throughout the entire cycle: this whole musical year finds its source in the January movement. The movement opens with a somber, descending motive in the bass of the piano, which returns periodically to bind the movement together. Typical of the genre fantasia, the music explores a variety of moods in a style reminiscent of improvisation. Hensel’s performance direction for this piece is Adagio, quasi una Fantasia. – From “Im Herbste” by Johann Ludwig Uhland Because Das Jahr includes actual texts and pictures accompanying each character piece, we receive a uniquely nuanced glimpse into the composer’s imagination while we travel through this musical year. Character pieces are short works, often for piano, often with programmatic content: they tell a story or paint a picture. Listening to Das Jahrĭas Jahr is a set of character pieces, a popular nineteenth-century genre. Today, you can peruse a complete facsimile of Fanny and Wilhelm Hensels’ bound and illustrated Das Jahr. Despite their efforts, this unique work was lost after Fanny Hensel’s lifetime, and was not rediscovered until the late 1980s. The Hensels clearly valued their creation as more than just a “beautification,” for they preserved it carefully in a bound volume. The result was a unique collaboration by two sensitive artists, working together to “strew beautifications,” to use Fanny’s self-deprecating phrase. She also selected a quotations from German poets to precede each movement. Fanny Hensel had created a manuscript of Das Jahr with space left at the top of each movement for Wilhelm to add illustrations. The vignettes were to be provided by Hensel’s husband, Wilhelm Hensel, who was the Court Painter to the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III.
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