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April 07, 2025Read More
By Sam Girling
The recent and ongoing subseries of scholarly editions String Quartets in Beethoven’s Europe addresses an overlooked aspect of chamber music history by focusing on string quartets from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Traditionally, only the quartets of iconic Viennese composers—Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—have remained prominent in the repertory, but this series broadens the scope to include lesser-known compositions (and composers) and their rich contextual backgrounds. The popularity of string quartets in small musical circles during this period was significant, yet many works were published only as performance parts rather than full scores. This practice contributed to their exclusion from broader canon formation as concert culture and music scholarship evolved in the late nineteenth century. As a result, the repertoire promoted in our subseries was mostly confined to private music-making and has not been thoroughly explored until now.
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August 05, 2024Read More
By Jane Schatkin Hettrick
When you hear the name Salieri, what comes to your mind? A villain? The jealous rival who killed Mozart? If you have seen F. Murray Abraham play Salieri in the award-winning film Amadeus (1984) or perhaps Ian McKellen in the same role in Peter Shaffer’s play on Broadway (1979), you might hold that negative view. Indeed, theatergoers a century and a half earlier would have heard a similar treatment of the composer in Alexander Pushkin’s drama Mozart and Salieri (1831), which likewise focused on the subject of envy (one of the “seven deadly sins”). Keeping the malign portrayal of Salieri going seventy years later, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov created an opera, also titled Mozart and Salieri (1898), based on Pushkin’s play. All this and more, all false characterization. Could it be, however, that “bad press was better than no press”? In any event, that question no longer obtains as we prepare to mark in 2025 the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death.
