First up on the list:
Christian Wolff on Bach
Jan Swafford on Brahms
Jan Swafford is responsible for this wonderful 10 minute clip from NPR
on composer's last works.
p.s. Is it heinous to admit that the Grosse Fugue also sounds like Chinese to me?
I need a group who will play it with me. Any takers?
A 1791 painting of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on his deathbed, surrounded by his wife and friends
(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Deathbed Music: The Final Works Of Famous Composers
When it comes to last words, there's a kind of
poetry in even the oddest ones. Oscar Wilde hated the wallpaper in the
room where he died: "One of us has to go," he muttered. Salvador Dali:
"Where is my clock?" Steve Jobs: "Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow," according to
his sister, who was in the room.
Writer and composer Jan Swafford was thinking about these and other last words recently. In a piece for Slate, he takes a look at another kind of swan song: the late or final works of famous classical composers.
Swafford
says that final compositions, like last words, are often desperate,
manic, indulgent and reverent. Some are all of those at the same time.
Take, for example, the most widely known last work: Mozart's Requiem.
"One
of the things that's interesting is that composers of his era, Haydn
and Mozart in particular, were really more into lighthearted things than
tragic things," Swafford says. "Mozart's operas, which are basically
sex comedies, are generally more popular and more highly regarded than
his religious music. Tragedy wasn't really his style — except, when he
happened to be dying, he wrote one of the great tragic pieces of all
time."
For the full version of this
story, including Jan Swafford's thoughts on last works by Beethoven,
Schubert and others, click the audio link at the top of the page.
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