Page 200 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained

198

IN CONTEXT
IF A COMPOSER COULD FOCUS

Exotic worlds in music
SAY WHAT HE HAD BEFORE

1863 Set in Ceylon, The Pearl
Fishers, by rising opera-
TO SAY IN WORDS, HE composer Georges Bizet, is a

success at its Paris premiere.
WOULD NOT BOTHER 1882 Wagner’s final opera,
Parsifal, blending elements
of Buddhist spirituality with
SAYING IT IN MUSIC Christian ideas and imagery,
is first performed at Bayreuth’s
DAS LIED VON DER ERDE (1908–1909), Festival Theatre.
AFTER
GUSTAV MAHLER 1926 Maurice Ravel composes
Chansons madécasses (Songs
from Madagascar), based on
three prose-poems written in
1787 by Évariste de Parny.

1957 Benjamin Britten
conducts the premiere of
his ballet The Prince of the
Pagodas in London. The score
is influenced by Indonesian
gamelan music, which Britten
heard in Bali in 1956.

hen Gustav Mahler
began work on the six
W settings of Chinese
poems that make up Das Lied von
der Erde (The Song of the Earth),
he was exploring what was for him
new territory. But exotic oriental
subject matter was already a
familiar theme in European art and
culture, reflecting the yearning of
the popular imagination for more
colorful and intriguing worlds.
This sense of longing had come
into sharper focus in the 15th and
16th centuries, when long-distance
sea voyages had led to the discovery

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