Basics - Genres - Classical 2

Mozart

What would classical music without dear Mozart? One of the most brilliant composers of all time. And one of the most difficult to truly understand.

His music is perfect, yet in its perfection it is riddled with so much feelings and imperfection of humanity. Like how my piano teacher liked to describe him, "Too simple for beginners, too difficult for the masters", Mozart has this amazing quality of making simplistic rules still sound so filled with emotions.

The biggest difficulty of all time to really play or experience Mozart's music is to understand his difficult life despite having that immense talent within him. Confined by the rules of the aristocrats and the ideas of the people of his time, he still managed to bring forth his cynicism, and true emotions into his music despite the constant need for "happy music" by the nobles.

Here is his masterpiece, in a few excerpts. Please do listen more if you find this emotional scintillating, for it is for me.



Haydn

Again, one of the best composers. One who had to continuously produce symphonies after symphonies because of the fact that he was commissioned to do weekly symphonic pieces for the ones who hired him. He was ingenious with his ideas throughout these symphonies, but couldn't fully expand his music to its full potential until he left the service later in his life.

That's when some of his best works were produced. My personal favourites are his quartets; actually my favourite music within classical is chamber music to begin with anyway. Despite the largely classical framework, Haydn, much like Mozart, inserted his own ideas and beautiful feelings in every piece.

Here is a beautiful cello concerto written by him.



Gluck



One of the greatest violin masters playing this beautiful piece. Gluck was more well known for his works in operatic work. Operas are amazingly difficult grand works in my opinion. Firstly, plot, characters and lyrics are some really difficult things to do. On top of that you have to work on orchestration, arrangement, and melodic writing and present it all in a coherent form with thematic repetitions (repeating themes, which are melodic phrases or certain sounds that reminds people of each individual in the opera or characterises the ideas behind the opera) so that people can relate to the piece and understand it as a play and a symphony all at the same time.



Enjoy. =)

Beethoven

Everyone trained in classical music would be able to identify Beethoven as one of the great masters. Much like Mozart defined the transition between Baroque and Classical, Beethoven defined the transition between Classical to Romantic.

He wrote so many amazing pieces that till now everyone knows the melodies at the very least. But not only are his pieces filled with great melodic value, they have amazing arrangements. He magically uses different instruments to bring out the melody to bring contrasting sounds and emotions within his works. His usage of instrumentation to colour his chords in the way to evoke emotions is still one of the most studied materials for all classical composing students.

The piece coming up is one of the most well-known pieces ever. Used over and over again in movies and played virtually everywhere, this piece of music was only but one of the masterpieces that Beethoven created.

Remember that Beethoven slowly turned deaf as he progressed through the years. He might have lost his hearing, but that might have been the secret to his amazing ability to compose new melodies arrangements - for all those music were in his head and he had no other distractions. This is an amazingly important thing to note - for in music, if we cannot even begin to hear the sound within our own mind, how would it ever come out any bit meaningful and powerful. I think that Beethoven is a great proof of that point.



Hope you enjoyed this one too! =D