Music courses

In Part II of this series of courses on Music in Europe in the late Nineteenth Century, we continue to explore and weave together the various nationalist strands of orchestral and operatic music composed in this period, by now universally being referred to as the Fin de Siècle. 

We not only see how Brahms dominates the German musical scene after the death of Wagner, but how his protégé Dvorak has established himself as a force to be reckoned with, both in England – composing a series of major orchestral and choral works for the annual English music festivals – and also further afield, accepting a specially-created and highly-lucrative position as head of a new musical conservatory in New York. 

We see Saint-Saëns’s neglected opera Samson et Dalila finally take its rightful place at the Paris Opéra, where it rapidly becomes part of the repertoire, and note the huge success of Massenet’s Manon at the Opéra-Comique. We also pay homage to Fauré’s gentler vocal muse through his delightful collections of mélodies and chansons. 

Through this decade, the Russian school is dominated by Tchaikovsky, particularly his late sequence of masterpieces comprising the Pushkin opera The Queen of Spades, the ballets Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker, and the final symphony, the so-called Pathétique. Rimsky-Korsakov also dazzles with his breathtakingly voluptuous orchestration in his ‘symphonic suite’ Sheherazade. 

Verdi rounds off a remarkable 50-year career with two magnificent operas based on his beloved Shakespeare – the tragic Otello, and the comic Falstaff – both featuring brilliant librettos by Arrigo Boito. Meanwhile, in the early 1890s, the young Italian school revel in the violence of the new verismo style, launched by Mascagni with Cavalleria rusticana and confirmed soon afterwards by Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci. 

In the final lecture we encounter the music of newcomers Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss for the first time.