What Makes It Great: Short Masterpieces, Great Composers

322 Pages·2011·19.59 MB·English

by  Rob Kapilow

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What Makes It
Great?
Short Masterpieces,
Great Composers
ROB KAPILOW
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 by Rob Kapilow. All rights reserved
Lincoln Center and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts names and logos are registered
trademarks of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc., in the United States and other
countries. Used here by license.
Recordings for accompanying website and enhanced e-books provided by Naxos of America,
with the exception of chapter 2 (Bach), which was provided by Konstantin Soukhovetski
(piano).
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
Design and composition by Forty-Five Degree Design, LLC
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Kapilow, Robert.
What makes it great? : short masterpieces, great composers / by Rob Kapilow.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-55092-2 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-05814-5 (ebk);
ISBN 978-1-118-05815-2 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-05816-9 (ebk);
ISBN 978-1-118-17198-1 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-17199-8 (ebk)
1. Music preparation. I. Title.
MT6.K234W43 2011
781.1'7—dc23 2011018342
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
C O N T E N T S
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS v
HOW TO USE THE WEBSITE vi
INTRODUCTION
“To Know One Thing Well” 1
1 Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) 5
“Spring” (Movement 1) from The Four Seasons
2 Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) 26
Invention No.1 from the Two-part Inventions
3 George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) 39
“Hallelujah Chorus” from Messiah
4 Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) 59
String Quartet, Op.76, No. 1, Movement 3
5 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) 73
“Dove Sono” from The Marriage of Figaro
6 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) 89
Waldstein Sonata, Movement 1
iii
iv CONTENTS
7 Franz Schubert (1797–1828) 117
“Erlkönig”
8 Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) 140
A-Minor Mazurka, Op.17, No.4
9 Robert Schumann (1810–1856) 156
“Träumerei” from Kinderszenen
10 Franz Liszt (1811–1886) 166
Transcendental Étude in A Minor
11 Felix Mendelssohn (1809–1847) 182
Scherzo from the String Octet in E-flat Major, Op. 20
12 Richard Wagner (1813–1883) 206
Prelude to Tristan and Isolde
13 Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) 223
“De’ Miei Bollenti Spiriti” from La Traviata
14 Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) 237
“Un Bel Di” from Madama Butterfly
15 Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) 249
A-Major Intermezzo, Op.118, No.2
16 Antonín Dvorˇák (1841–1904) 264
Slavonic Dance, Op.46, No.8
17 Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) 283
“Trepak” from The Nutcracker Suite
18 Claude Debussy (1862–1918) 296
“Des Pas sur la Neige” from Preludes, Book I
GLOSSARY 307
INDEX 309
AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S
It is one thing to delude yourself into believing that you might have
something of value to say in a single book. It is quite something else
to believe you actually have enough to say to merit a second one. For
this delusion, I would like to cheerfully thank my editor/saint at
Wiley for both books, Hana Lane; my literary agent, Carl Brandt; and
my manager, Charles Letourneau at IMG. In addition, I would like
to thank Lincoln Center for their continued support of this second
book and Naxos Records, which provided the recordings for the
book’s musical examples—with particular thanks to Randall Foster,
who helped to make this possible. I also cannot give enough credit
to my two superb assistants from Juilliard, Nicholas Csicsko and Sasha
Popov, who once again undertook the daunting task of making the
book’s musical examples spring to life both on the page and on the
website. Without their dedication, perseverance, and painstaking
work, this book would not have been possible.
I would also like to thank my wife and children, who put up with
me as I fought my way through the writing of the book, and in par-
ticular my son Benjamin, who read nearly all of the manuscript and
offered the kind of brutal if valuable criticism that could come only
from a budding teenage composer.
Finally, I would like to thank the many readers of my first book
who were kind enough to write to me and let me know how much
the book enriched their listening. Their enthusiasm and excitement
helped convince me that I was on the right path and encouraged me
to continue the conversation in this second book.
v
H OW TOC UOSNET TEHNET SW E B S I T E
To complement the text of this book, we have created a website
where you can see and listen to the musical examples used in this
book. Watch the scroll bar move along with the notes as they’re played,
or download the .mp4 files to your computer.
To listen to or download the files, follow these steps:
1. Enter www.wiley.com/go/whatmakesitgreat into your Internet
browser.
2. Click on the chapter you are looking for in the list located on
the left side of the page orclick on the link labeled“Download
All Examples” to save all the examples to a location of your
choice on your computer.
3. Click on the numbered example you want to listen to.
If you want to download the files to an .mp4-compatible portable
device, such as an iPod, follow your portable device’s directions on
downloading an .mp4 file.
That’s all there is to it. Have fun, and remember, all you have to do
is listen.
Also look for the new enhanced e-book edition, which
incorporates the musical examples from the website into
the text. It is available for devices that support enhanced
e-books and video playback.
vi
[ ]
I N T RO D U C T I O N
“To Know One Thing Well”
If you watch people walk down the street playing a pop song on
their iPods or drive by in a car blasting the latest chart-topping rap
song at full volume, you cannot help but be struck by the intensely
engaged way they listen. They react physically to every beat of the
music and invariably sing along or move their mouths to every word
of a vocal line that they have effortlessly memorized through repeated
hearings on their radio or playlist. Even after twenty years have gone
by, most people can still remember the pop songs of their teenage
years word for word, note for note, and frequently, according to
researcher Dan Levitin, in their original key. Aaron Copland said that
you don’t really “own” a piece of music until you can sing it through
in your head from beginning to end, and a song doesn’t really arrive
on the popular landscape until fans everywhere know by heart not
only every word and note of the vocal line, but every rhythm and ges-
ture of the accompaniment as well.
Because ideas and forms in popular music are generally short and
repetitive, and because people tend to listen to current hits over and
over again, learning to sing a popular song in one’s head from begin-
ning to end takes little effort. However, singing a complex, fifty-minute
Beethoven symphony in one’s head from beginning to end, even after
repeated hearings, is far more challenging. In general, performers, as a
group, tend to find it easier to meet Copland’s ownership requirement
1
2 WHAT MAKES IT GREAT?
than do nonperformers. Anyone who has ever played an instrument,
sung in a chorus, played chamber music, or been part of a band or an
orchestra knows that over time, practicing and rehearsing a piece of
music bit by bit almost invariably produces the ability to sing it
through in their head from beginning to end. But what about the
music lover who does not play an instrument or read music—one of
the key groups this book is written for? Can a nonmusician own a
piece of classical music like a performer or a pop-music listener?
I hope that this book answers that question with a resounding yes.
One of the central goals of this book is to help you own eighteen
short masterpieces by eighteen great composers. Like a performer, we
will learn these pieces slowly; measure by measure, phrase by phrase,
and layer by layer, so that by the time you finish the book, you will
not only be able to sing these pieces through in your head from
beginning to end but will also have a rich, in-depth understanding of
their language and style. Each chapter will focus on the achievement
of one major composer by looking extremely closely at one short
masterpiece from his body of work—either a complete piece like an
aria, a prelude, or a song, or an individual movement from a larger
work, like a sonata or a quartet. To facilitate ownership, I have cho-
sen the shortest pieces I could find that effectively convey the central
features of each composer’s style. In each chapter, after briefly estab-
lishing a conceptual/historical context for each composer and piece,
I will offer a close examination of one short work as a window on
that composer’s genius. I will discuss each piece from three continu-
ally overlapping points of view. First and foremost, how is the piece
put together, and what makes it great? Second, in what way is the
piece a representative example of the core achievement of that par-
ticular composer? How does the piece exemplify Beethoven’s or
Bach’s style? Finally, in what way does the piece work with and trans-
form the musical language of its time?
It is my deepest belief that what is great about these pieces is get-
table by both musicians and nonmusicians alike, and I hope that this
book will be valuable to a wide range of listeners, from first-time con-
certgoers to trained musicians. New, innovative, user-friendly
technology is at the heart of this book, and this technology is the key
to my attempt to address nonmusicians in an engaging, in-depth way.
To write about music in any kind of meaningful detail requires that
the reader be able to hear the music you are describing. Though a