Page 210 - (DK) The Classical Music Book - Big Ideas Simply Explained
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I AM SURE MY MUSIC
HAS A TASTE OF COD
FISH IN IT
PEER GYNT (1875), EDVARD GRIEG
ncidental music has probably
IN CONTEXT existed as long as theatre
I itself. It was intrinsic to
FOCUS Shakespeare’s plays, which include
Music for the theatre
cues for instrumental music as well
BEFORE as songs—some 100 in total—
1810 Beethoven writes the although no scores have survived.
incidental music to Goethe’s By the late 1700s, Europe’s
tragic play Egmont. major theatres would employ
a substantial orchestra, and
1843 Shakespeare’s A sometimes vocal soloists and
Midsummer Night’s Dream a chorus, to accompany plays.
opens in Potsdam with Examples of incidental music
Mendelssohn’s music. of the 18th and early 19th century
include Mozart’s Thamos, King of
1872 Grieg composes music Egypt (c.1773–1779), Beethoven’s
for Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson’s Egmont (1810), and Schubert’s
Sigurd Jorsalfar, celebrating Rosamunde (1823), which were
King Sigurd I of Norway. of sufficient quality to make it “The Dance of the Trolls” was
AFTER into the concert hall. illustrated in macabre style by the
British artist Arthur Rackham for
1908 La Mort du duc de Guise, The music that Felix an edition of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.
a film with a score by Camille Mendelssohn composed for a
Saint-Saëns, opens in Paris. German-language production of
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer productions of Oedipus at Colonus
1915 Edward Elgar writes Night’s Dream was one of the most and Racine’s Athalie in 1845. In
the incidental music for The successful pieces to make such a 1849, Robert Schumann wrote
Starlight Express, a children’s transition. It was first staged in music to accompany Byron’s
play by Violet Pearn. Potsdam, Germany, in 1843, dramatic poem Manfred.
including a masterful overture
written when the composer was Norwegian collaboration
just 17. While under the patronage When Henrik Ibsen, Norway’s most
of Frederick IV, king of Prussia, celebrated writer, completed Peer
Mendelssohn would go on to Gynt, based on a Norwegian folk
compose incidental music for hero, in 1867, he thought of it as a
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