sala quartett
Hector Berlioz, full name Louis-Hector Berlioz, was a French composer, conductor, and music critic of the Romantic era.
Berlioz received his primary education from his father, an enlightened physician, who gave him his first lessons in music and Latin. By the age of 12, he was already composing music for local chamber ensembles and learning to play the guitar and flute with virtuosity. In 1821 his father sent him to Paris to study medicine, and he received his first scientific degree. But in parallel, he often visited the Paris Opera, where he studied the entire repertoire on the score.
Against the will of his parents, Berlioz took a compulsory course of study at the Conservatory of Paris and in 1830 received the Prix de Rome. In Italy he met the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka and became lifelong friends with Mendelssohn. From 1832 Berlioz worked for 30 years as a music critic for periodicals. He was acquainted with many of the leading writers and musicians of his time, including Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Niccolò Paganini, and George Sand.
Berlioz adored the works of Weber and Beethoven, as well as Gluck, and tirelessly introduced audiences to their works. As a result of his many trips as a conductor to Germany, Belgium, England, Russia, and Austria-Hungary, he taught the leading orchestras of Europe a new style.
Berlioz during these years wrote, among other things, the "Symphonie Fantastique" (1830) that made him famous, and the symphony "Harold in Italy" (1834). After a concert in 1838, where he conducted their performance, the famous violin virtuoso Paganini declared Hector Berlioz a continuator of Beethoven's musical traditions and presented him with 20,000 francs. A grateful Berlioz wrote a choral symphony, Romeo and Juliet, dedicated to Paganini.
In 1844, Berlioz created "Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration", which is not just a technical manual, it served as an introduction to the aesthetics of expression in music for generations to come. Among Berlioz's dramatic works, The Damnation of Faust (1846) and The Nativity (1854) are world-famous.
Felix Mendelssohn (full name Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy) was a German composer, pianist, conductor, teacher, and one of the greatest representatives of Romanticism in music.
Felix was born into a Jewish musical family that later converted to Christianity. He received a versatile education and already as a child wrote many musical compositions, including 5 operas, 11 symphonies for string orchestra, concertos, sonatas and fugues. Mendelssohn's first public performance took place in Berlin in 1818, when he was nine years old. In 1821 Mendelssohn was introduced to J.W. von Goethe, for whom he performed works by J.S. Bach and Mozart and to whom he dedicated his Piano Quartet No. 3 in B minor. A friendship developed between the famous wise poet and the 12-year-old musician.
A few years later, the talented musician began conducting in various orchestras in Europe, and became acquainted with Carl Weber. In England, where Mendelssohn visited very often, by the middle of the 19th century his music had become very popular, even with Queen Victoria he was the most favorite composer. He dedicated his Symphony No. 3 in A minor major (Scottish Symphony) to the Queen.
Among Mendelssohn's most famous works are A Midsummer Night's Dream (1826), the Italian Symphony (1833), a violin concerto (1844), two piano concertos (1831, 1837), the oratorio Elijah (1846) and several chamber pieces. The tradition of playing the "Wedding March" from A Midsummer Night's Dream in wedding processions dates back to its performance at the wedding of a royal princess in 1858, already after Mendelssohn's death.
In 1843, Mendelssohn founded a conservatory in Leipzig, where he taught composition with Schumann. Mendelssohn was one of the first great Romantic composers of the nineteenth century.
Tauba Auerbach is a visual artist working in many disciplines including painting, artists' books, sculpture and weaving. They live and work in New York.
A life-long student of math and physics, Auerbach's work contends with structure and connectivity on the microscopic to the universal scale.
