A journey through the great names of music
There was a time, back in the XIX century, in which Europe witnessed how new states were created, how Italy and Germany were reunited under a single flag and how old and new identities resurfaced that claimed their place in the world.
The musicians of the time, straddling Romanticism and Nationalism, explored more descriptive and poetic forms of expression, such as the suite or the symphonic poem, while recovering popular melodies and traditions to tell stories of their land.
But not only from his land. Some composers also had the opportunity to travel and get to know other countries, to which they later paid tribute through their music.
Mikhail Glinka is considered the father of Russian musical nationalism. thanks to works like his patriotic opera a life for the tsar but few know that he traveled through Spain and he was fascinated by our sounds and traditions. The Spanish Overture No. 1 Brilliant whim on the Aragonese jack and the Spanish Overture No. 2 Summer night in Madrid are good proof of it.
Glinka served as inspiration for the famous group of The five, which was made up of five young nationalist composers: Mili Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Aleksandr Borodin.
All of them were self-taught, they met in St. Petersburg and shared the goal of compose a type of music that arose from popular roots and moved away from academic training of European conservatories. Some of his best-known works are the symphonic suite Scheherazade of Rimsky-Korsakov or One night in the bare mountain of Mussorgsky, who was put images in the Disney film Fancy (1941).
Although to Tchaikovsky considered more romantic than nationalist, it is undeniable that he is one of the best-known composers of all time with ballets like Swan Lake, The Nutcracker or Sleeping Beauty, also illustrated by Disney in 1959.
However, the work that we could consider the most nationalist of all would be the 1812 Overture, premiered in 1882 for commemorate the anniversary of the Russian victory over the Napoleonic army. The work is composed for an orchestra of more or less traditional instruments and a cannon. Yes sirs. A canyon. Or several. Unfortunately, for practical reasons, many times its spectacular sound is replaced with gunshot noises. But here we leave you a recording with cannons in which you can enjoy a climax with the authentic smell of gunpowder.
And speaking of apotheosis. The grand finale of the movie v for Vendetta has this overture as its soundtrack. A symbol of freedom from oppression.
Scottish descendant, Edvard Grieg contributed his compositions to create a Norwegian national identity by adapting in his works many popular dances and songs from the folklore of his country.
One of his best known works, Peer Gynt, is made up of two suites of four movements each, which he composed on commission for illustrate the work of the writer Henrik Ibsen. This fantastic drama tells the story of Peer, an adventurer who seduces and then abandons the beautiful Solveig, then flees to Africa to seek his fortune.
His adventures are very varied and have given rise to well-known melodies, such as In the cave of the mountain king , when Peer escapes from trolls guarding a cave. At first the music is stealthy because he tries to run away quietly, but then things get complicated and the crescendos and accelerandos of the melody indicate that Peer has to leave on the run with trolls hot on his heels.
So much tension generates this score that Fritz Lang used it to sonically illustrate the film M, the Vampire of Düsseldorf , Finnish metal band apocalyptic he covered it in hard rock mode and even The Who did their own adaptation.
Another of the best known movements is The morning , which mixes the flute and the oboe as protagonists to describe how the light floods the landscape and gradually becomes day.
However, contrary to what many might think, the Morgenstemning does not happen in a fjord but rather recounts a sunrise in the Sahara in another of Peer's adventures, before come back to home. When he finally returns, good old Solveig forgives him and sings a song to him in which she tells him that she for all that time she has been waiting for him. And so the story has a happy ending.
Jean Sibelius He has been the most famous composer that Finland has given to date and one of the main promoters of nationalism in his country, since with his symphonies, suites and symphonic poems contributed to strengthen national identity against the rule of the Russian empire. The two best known and patriotic works of his are the symphonic poem Finland and the Karelian Suite.
In Finland, the turbulent, rough and heavy sounds that symbolize the oppression to which the Finnish people were subjected and that evolve to a climax of liberation and hope in the last minutes. It has been proposed on numerous occasions to be the national anthem and thus replace Maamme, which means Our Land and it was composed by a German with lyrics in Swedish.
The Karelia Suite refers to the region between Finland and Russia in which they lived the Karelians, a Baltic ethnic group that inhabited from the White Sea to the Gulf of Finland and which is currently part of the Russian Federation. The use of many brass instruments It gives a epic, fast-paced and festive character, especially at the beginning, which softens as it progresses to become more descriptive.
Although at that time the Czech Republic did not yet exist, not even the now defunct Czechoslovakia, one could speak of musical nationalism in 19th century Bohemia, which then belonged to Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Bedrich Smetana was one of the fathers of Czech music and is known for his opera the sold bride , but above all for the cycle of symphonic poems more vlast (My homeland) that describes landscapes and legends of the bohemian tradition.
Each of them tells a different story. A) Yes, Vyšehrad (The High Castle) describes the residence where the former Czech kings stayed; Vltava (Moldava) tells of the course of the river from its source to its mouth in the Elbe, passing through forests, pastures, castles and even a peasant wedding. The third poem takes the name of the amazon warrior Šárka , heroine of The War of the Maidens who took up arms after the death of Princess Libuse, one of the founders of Prague in the 8th century. The room is titled Z českých luhů a hájů , which means From the forests and meadows of Bohemia; and the fifth Tabor , referring to the southern Bohemian city founded by the followers of the Protestant reformer Jan Hus. The last poem is Blanik, a mountain where, according to legend, sleeps an army of knights with Saint Wenceslas at their head, that will save the country when its most difficult moment arrives.
Antonín Dvorak is another of the fathers of Czech music, with works of such nationalist fervor as the patriotic anthem The heirs of the white mountain or your collection slavic dances , which include popular forms such as furiants, dumkas, polkas, mazurkas or polonaises.
However, international recognition came to Dvořák after his stay as director at the New York Conservatory, when he composed his Symphony No. 9, better known as the New World Symphony , which was influenced by African-American spiritual songs and the rhythms of the native North American Indians. A waste of multicultural energy that was well received by the public and ended up being one of Dvořák's greatest triumphs as a composer.
Frédéric Chopin was a self-taught pianist and the most famous Polish composer of all time. His music, mostly composed for piano, is characterized by a exquisite sensitivity, intimate and subtle, and an aesthetic recreation, as precise as it is passionate, who flees from everything ugly, vulgar, rude and pedantic that may exist in the world.
Chopin knew firsthand the m polish traditional music, since since I was a teenager he danced, transcribed and even played folk instruments at peasant festivals. A) Yes, their polonaises from him they picked up the epic spirit and the vibrant rhythms of his country in such mythical examples as the Polonaise in A flat (Op. 53) the heroic , in F sharp minor (Op. 44) and the Great Brilliant Polonaise for piano and orchestra Op. 22, preceded by an Andante spianato.
The same thing happened with his 58 mazurkas, based on Polish folk dance, and the rest of his work in which they are clearly appreciated the rhythms, forms, harmonies and melodies typical of Polish folklore.
"When I listen to Wagner for a long time, I feel like invading Poland." With this irony Woody Allen described in the film Murder Mystery in Manhattan the German patriotic fervor raised by the composer Richard Wagner.
And maybe it's true. Few compositions (if any) are more inciting to get on a horse and participate in a great epic battle than the ride of the valkyries , which belongs to the second opera of his tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung.
Wagner was inspired by the myths and legends of German, Nordic and Scandinavian mythology to compose it and in it narrates the fights between gods, heroes and other creatures to get a magic ring with which to dominate the entire world.
In the film Apocalypse Now by Francis Fors Coppola, American helicopters attack a village during the Vietnam War to the rhythm of the Valkyries.
It's funny that some of the greatest exponents of Hungarian music were of other nationalities, but there is something in the torn melancholy of the gypsy violins and their glissandos that catches you without being able to avoid it.
Johannes Brahms was German, but their hungarian dances they have become one of the sounds that have best described the Magyar landscape and captured the desolate and inhospitable spirit of the Puszta. His 21 dances were originally composed for piano four hands, but some of them were adapted for orchestra with results as exciting as hungarian dance no. 5
The zardas or czardas are a typical dance of Romani music that became popular in Hungary, but also in other neighboring countries such as Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia or Ukraine. Italian Vittorio Monti he composed some zardas for violin and piano that were later orchestrated and that have become everything a challenge of virtuosity for brave violinists.
As for local composers, the fathers of Hungarian nationalism were undoubtedly Franz Liszt, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. Liszt composed wonders like the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 to show off by skilled pianists because of its considerable technical difficulty, but he also wrote 18 more rhapsodies (Magyar rapszódiák), all of them inspired by the verbunkos, a popular dance attributed to the gypsies.
Bartók and Kodály were great researchers of folk music and at the beginning of the 20th century they toured rural areas of Hungary and Romania to collect traditional melodies. Some of his most outstanding patriotic works were the Hungarian folk opera Háry János de Kodály, which recounts the adventures of a veteran Austrian army hussar, and the Romanian folk dances by Bartók.
In many houses it is already a tradition to start the year with the New Year's Concert which is celebrated in the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein.
Although they do not consider themselves nationalists, because at that time the identity of the Austrian Empire was more than recognized, the soul of this country could not be understood without the waltzes composed by the Strauss family. Especially the one from Blue Danube , which narrates the flow of the river through its lands and which has become the second Austrian national anthem.
The first operas Giuseppe Verdi served as inspiration for the Italian Risorgimento, which aimed to unify the country and gain independence from the Austrian Empire. The chorus ok i think of Nabucco is considered as the composer's masterpiece and tells of the exile of the Jewish people in Babylon in clear reference to the situation in Italy at that time.
The people perfectly understood the metaphor "Oh, my homeland, so beautiful and lost!" and instantly turned it into an anthem for Italian patriots. In fact, the day of its premiere in the Scala of Milan, the audience, responding to that nationalist fervor, immediately demanded an encore.
Verdi's later operas also had a marked vindictive and patriotic character, although some historians doubt whether it was really due to the composer's own political inclination or because the Italian people needed a hero with whom they could identify.
In Spain we could not be less, and our maximum representatives of musical nationalism were the Catalans Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados, the Andalusians Joaquín Turina and Manuel de Falla and the Madrid Joaquín Rodrigo.
Albéniz's best-known work is undoubtedly the Iberia suite, one of the top pieces of piano composition of all time which is structured in four notebooks, with three pieces each, which pay homage to different places in the Spanish geography. The port (of Santa María), Corpus Christi in Seville, Almería, Triana or Lavapiés are some of the titles.
The Spanish Suite No. 47 it also travels through Spain through Granada, Catalonia, Asturias, Aragon or Castile.
Pomegranates He was a great admirer of the Aragonese painter Francisco de Goya and was inspired by his work to compose Goyescas. the lovely lovers , which is considered his most important work. The first notebook of this piano suite was premiered at the Palau de la Música in Barcelona and the second at the Pleyel Hall in Paris. The titles of the works could not be more traditional: The compliments , Colloquium at the gate either The fandango of the lamp.
Of Turine highlight their fantastic dances , formed by Exaltation (Aragonese jack), Dream (Basque zortziko) and Orgy (Andalusian Farruca), as well as the symphonic poem The procession of the Rocío.
Of Manuel de Falla we must remember the ballets of The love wizard Y The Three-Cornered Hat , the Seven Spanish folk songs and the Betic Fantasy.
Finally, we could not finish this review of national compositions without the mythical Aranjuez concert by Maestro Rodrigo, written in Paris in 1939 to reflect the beauty of the gardens of the Royal Palace of Aranjuez.