Timelining this summer’s artworks

Short answer review question 55 asks

What are the birth-death dates of the following: Shakespeare, Bach, Beethoven, Frederick Douglass, Tchaikovsky, Dvořák, Elgar, and Stravinsky?

This, for me, is an enormously important question. We have spent the summer focusing very closely on individual artists and their achievements; however, you can only get a scope of the work we have done these past six weeks if you see everything lined up by date. Here, then, is a very partial list:

• Shakespeare: 1564–1616
• Bach: 1685–1750
• Beethoven: 1770–1827
• Balzac: 1799–1850
• Dickens: 1812–1870
• Douglass: ca. 1818–1895
• Turgenev: 1818–1883
• Tchaikovsky: 1840–1893
• Dvořák: 1841–1904
• Maupassant: 1850–1893
• Perkins Gilman: 1860–1935
• Joyce: 1882–1941
• Stravinsky: 1882–1971
• Porter: 1890–1980
• J. Renoir: 1894–1979
• Borges: 1899–1986
• Hemingway: 1899–1961
• Hitchcock: 1899–1980
• Berke (Jungle Jim): 1903–1958
• Welles: 1915–1985
• O’Connor: 1925–1964
• Updike: 1932–2009
• Jin: 1956–
• Bourne: 1960–
• Wallace: 1962–2008
• Packer: 1973–

Isn’t it fascinating that Turgenev and Douglass were born in the same year, and both spent their careers fighting slavery in their home countries? And that Borges and Hemingway were exact contemporaries––and Stravinksy and Joyce? And that Shakespeare, the earliest of all these figures, reads in a way that is nearly as modern as anyone who came after?

Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, op. 92, conducted by Leonard Bernstein (1978)

First! A startlingly candid introduction to Beethoven’s Seventh by Leonard Bernstein, who conducted the performance we heard this morning:

Here is Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 in A Major, recorded in 1978.

I: Poco sostenuto—vivace (in two parts)

II: Allegretto

III: Presto: assai meno presto

IV: Allegro con brio

Beethoven’s Symphony N° 9 conducted by Bernstein (1989)

“An die Freude,” by Friedrich Schiller, forms the basis of the text for the 4th movement; Beethoven altered it slightly. There’s a little bit more about Bernstein’s staging of the Ode to Freedom in the Naxos catalogue.

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

Part IV:

Email from Larry: Short lecture on Monday after discussion

Because we couldn’t get to the Beethoven last week, I’d like to meet on Monday at 11 sharp following discussion sections; we’ll watch Bernstein lead the Berlin Philharmonic in the last movement of Beethovens 9th Symphony–one of the great monuments of classical music. We’ll meet in our regular lecture hall. Please be on time because the movement is 24 minutes long. And also please bring the handout from last week with the words to the last movement (“Song of Joy”).

On a related note: The standard terms to use to describe classical music are “piece” or, depending on the genre, “symphony” or “concerto” or “ballet score,” etc. You want to avoid calling a piece of classical music a “song” unless it really is a song–that is, a piece for voice, either unaccompanied or accompanied by a piano or orchestra or some combination of instruments. On the first day of class, we heard a real “song”–Britten’s setting of Shakespeare’s “When Most I Wink.” But everything else we’ve heard hasn’t been a song–we’ve heard a symphony, a ballet score, a movement from a symphony, and so on.