Great Composers and Their Lives

This great composer, Bendřich Smetana, was son of a beer brewer.  Born in Litomyšl, Bohemia, he was his father’s eleventh child and the first son to survive infancy.  His father, an amateur violinist and great admirer of music, made Bendřich Smetana’s musical education a priority. Therefore, young Smetana had started learning piano and violin at the early age of four with great aspiration. After only two years of lessons, he had his first piano recital and was already playing in a string quartet. At the age of eight, he started composing.

His love for music greatly intensified throughout the years. It was his first passion and, despite his great interest for philosophy and literature, came before anything else. His greatest wish was to one day become a truly great composer.

At the age of nineteen, he formally settled in Prague earning a living as a tutor to a family of aristocrats.  Up until this point, he clearly lacked a formal musical education.  In order to make his dream of one day becoming a composer a reality, he continued his composition and piano studies.  His eventual friendship with Franz Liszt proved to be of great importance throughout his musical career.

Two of his greatest works were The Bartered Bride and Má Vlast. After having taken part in the fighting during the nationalist uprising in 1848 and gaining a name amongst Czech nationalists, moving to Sweden to further his musical career, and then eventually returning to Prague, The Bartered Bride had been first performed in 1866, the very same year Smetana got the opportunity of a lifetime…  He was named principal conductor of the Prague Provisional Theater Orchestra, a position he held for eight years. To give you an idea of what a great orchestra this was, it must be said that Anton Dvořák was the first chair violinist.

Má Vlast, translated as “My Fatherland” was completed in 1879. Its composition took Bendřich Smetana seven years to complete. In its 6 cycles, this symphonic poem is symbolic of the Czech nationalist movement representing their political and cultural oppression.

The pieces of this great composer have been performed throughout Europe and America in the great concert halls of yesteryear and today; it goes without saying why this great composer, Bendřich Smetana, became known as “Father of Czech Classical Music”.

To listen to music by this great composer click here.

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Now, we come to composer whose name is not necessarily recognized off the bat like those of Mozart or Beethoven, yet anyone whose has graduated high school or college knows his music. – I will get to that later.

 Born on the countryside in Worcestershire, England, this composer was the son of a musician. Sir Edward Elgar’s father was a violinist, the organist at a local church and even owned a music shop. Growing up in a music shop contributed a lot to Sir Edward’s interest for music. In fact, due to the unlimited access had to sheet music in his father’s shop, it enticed him on to learn composition. To great amazement, except for taking violin lessons locally, his composition skills were completely self-taught.

After leaving school in 1872 at a very early age, he managed to find work at a lawyer’s office, but his true aspiration was to be a freelance musician.  He worked very hard to play wherever he could. This entailed learning to play several instruments. Among the instruments he learned in addition to the violin were double bass, piano, bassoon, trombone and the cello. He had working knowledge on all of these instruments and took work performing on them. Among the work he had taken on, he took up the position of violinist in an orchestra in Birmingham conducted by a man by the name of W.C. Stockley. It was during this time that Sir Edward saw a few of his compositions performed and made some experience conducting.

Three years into his musical career, he ended up taking over his father’s position as organist at the local church.  Along with performing, he was also active as a teacher. One of his most important students was an author by the name of Caroline Alice Roberts.  Another three years went by and the two of them got married in 1889. Caroline Alice Roberts was very supportive to her husband, being there during bouts of depression which he very often suffered from.   Additionally, the relationship helped his musical career immensely on account of the fact that Caroline Alice Roberts came from a very influential family. The two of them went to live in London for a while, but unfortunately, it didn’t really work out for them financially, so they came back to Worcestershire where Sir Edgar Elgar began to teach for a living once again. He hated it but it was a necessary must to continue his work and support himself as a composer.

His first true success was in 1899 when his Variations on an Original Theme (also known as Enigma) were performed in London and made him renowned throughout England as a composer. This piece is really quite interesting. Each variation was based upon one of his friends. Sir Edward claimed that he tried to write each variation as if his friends might have written them if they have been endowed with knowledge of composition. In addition to this, Sir Edward claimed that there was an ‘enigma’ or puzzle built into the piece. Along with the variations upon the original theme, there is a mystery tune upon which the entire piece is based upon, overshadowing the entire work.  Some say it was based upon “God Save the Queen”, but it is something that is still augmented for Sir Edward never revealed the answer.

This composer had written a great deal of works and he is without a shadow of doubt one of England’s greatest composers, but as mentioned before, anyone who has graduated high school or college knows his music. His most famous work, “Pomp & Circumstance March No. 1”, was written in 1904, a song which, without a doubt, rings in the minds of many on that very special graduation day.  

If you would like to hear some music by this great composer, click here.

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 Here is a great composer that had a really difficult life. Although he was quite a great musician and an accomplished composer, he never really received the recognition he deserved. Originally from the city of Naples, Italy, he started at the conservatory (Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella) at the age of 9 and studied for a period of ten years before moving on to the University of Bologna to broaden his education. This is where he spent two years to get a degree in literature.

At the age of 19, Leocavallo held his very first opera, Chatterton. The work was intended to be of great financial gain for him. It certainly would have been, if the person organising the event had not run off with the money. For a period of five years, Ruggero Leoncavallo lived in poverty, making his living by playing piano in cafés and travelling all over Europe.

Despite his lack of money and his travels, it did not stop him from writing another opera, known as I Pagliacci (The Clowns). After writing it, Leoncavallo took it directly to a publisher who arranged for its performance to be held at the Teatro del Verme in Milan on May 21^st, 1892. It remains a success to this very day.

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Hugo Philipp Jakob Wolf was a very interesting Austrian composer. A true picture of how detrimental it can be for a composer to get a venereal disease. Yet, due to his genius, he was able to truly give a lot to the world in an incredibly short time.

Having been taught violin and piano by his father since the age of 4, at the age of 8, he was taken to see his first opera, Belisaro by Donizetti. He was so taken back by the work, that he went home and started trying to play pieces of it on the piano. To everyone’s amazement, he was able to play large portions of the opera by heart after having only heard it for the first time. He was sent to an array of different schools to support his musical education, but on account of his stubbornness, he proved to be an incredibly difficult student. - So difficult, that he was not able to keep from getting expelled from the various schools he attended.

It was not until the age of 15 that he was enrolled at the Vienna Conservatory, where he had the chance to meet and make friends with the great composer and director Gustav Mahler, a person for whom he had a great deal of admiration. During this time, he regularly visited the opera house and developed quite a passion for the works of Wagner, which undoubtedly had an influence upon his music. Unfortunately, this stability did not last very long, for only two years after, he was expelled from the conservatory due to his rebellious and unpredictable temper and went back home a disgrace.

That same year he returned to Vienna with the intention of teaching. Shortly after his arrival in Vienna, he got involved with a ring of friends who had been very well educated as well as intelligent. Although these friends had certainly been a good influence, it was during this time that it is believed that he had visited a brothel with them that will have changed and ended his life. By 1880, he had already started suffering from intense depression which only intensified his temperament. He had always been able to find various sorts of opportunities though. From everything I’ve read, I have understood that he suffered from serious depressions and had a bad temper, yet at the same time he was incredibly talented and charming, which enabled him to find a great deal of employment, even though not always suited for it. He took the job as second Kapellmeister(music director) in Salzburg in 1881, a position he was only able to hold for a few months after which returning to Vienna.

In 1884, he started working as a music critic for a newspaper, the ‘Wiener Salonblatt’, writing a lot of very controversial articles, to the point of even being offensive. During his years as a critic, it was noted that he was especially keen on writing horrible things about Brahms. It was only a few years after, in 1887, that he wrote one of his most popular pieces, Italian Serenade for string quartet. After this, he quit his job as a critic and started composing pieces at an immense rate… several a day!!! Among these pieces were:

the Mörike-Lieder- a set of songs based upon the poems of Eduard Mörike, the Goethe-Lieder, Eichendorff-Lieder, Der Corregidor (the Magistrate)- an opera he finished after only 14 weeks, Spanishes Liederbuch (Spanish Songbook), Penthesilea – a symphonic poem based on a play by the German author Heinrich von Kleist, and the Italienisches Liederbuch (Italian Songbook).

All of these great works were composed within an amazing time span of a little over 9 years!!! A note to the reader, should it not have already been noticed by the list above: He was especially noted for writing in the German Song form known as Lied. This term is used to describe a German art song of the 19^th century written for voice and piano known for its expressiveness. After Franz Schubert, Wolf was one of the most significant composers of this musical form, known to have not only placed great importance upon the spoken word using lyrical expression, but also a lot of psychological insight in his pieces.

Unfortunately, the sickness (syphilis) he had acquired 20 years beforehand finally took hold of him completely and he was committed to an insane asylum in 1897 where he spent 6 long years before his death in 1903. Manuel Venegas, an opera, was the last of the works he left unfinished in 1887, right before his sickness took complete hold of him.

To listen to music by this great composer click here.

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Here is what I call an interesting musician. Erik Satie, a pianist and composer, grew up in a bicultural family, having a mother who was Scottish and a father who was French. Although he studied at the Paris Conservatoire and was always a very gifted musician, in the beginning of his career, he had reputation to be very lazy and unreliable, even to the point of being untalented. Despite this, he wrote 3 Gymnopédies.

In 1890, living in Montmartre, France, he met his life-long friend Claude Debussy. He used to like to go to a lot of cafés to meet other musicians and have discussions with them. It was in this year that he wrote Gnosssiennes, which sounds very oriental.

For a long time, he was very low on money and had to live in very humble accommodations, although his desire was to always do more with his music. Not being very satisfied with his knowledge of composition, he went back to school and studied basic compositional technique in 1905. It was during this time that his musical style truly matured, leading up to 1911, when among others, Maurice Ravel, a great composer and one of the friends he got to meet going to the cafés, brought him into the spotlight. His career as a musician began to grow rapidly.

Erik Satie, in a way, was quite a rebel within the musical world. For example, he once co-produced, along with the playwright and poet Jean Cocteau a ballet, Parade. This ballet caused quite a debate in the musical world on account of the magnitude of comedy it contained. In the pit orchestra for this ballet there were, for example, typewriter-players, people playing pistols, and even steamboat whistle players.

He was ridiculed by many during his lifetime, yet some people truly looked up to him as being ahead of his time, a real genius that did not just want to play the same things as everyone else. He was, in other words, as he is for many musicians even today, an inspiration.

To listen to music by this composer, click here

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