Amilcare Ponchielli
Amilcare Ponchielli was born in Paderno Fasolaro, Italy, on August 31, 1834. For nine years he attended the Milan Conservatory where he wrote an operetta in collaboration with three other students. Following the termination of his studies, he became organist in Cremona, and after that a bandmaster in Piacenza. His first opera, I Promessi sposi, was introduced in Cremona in 1856, but it did not become successful until sixteen years later when a revised version helped to open the Teatro dal Verme in Milan. World renown came to Ponchielli with La Gioconda, first given at La Scala in Milan in 1876. Though Ponchielli wrote many other operas after that he never again managed to reach the high artistic level of this masterwork, nor to repeat its world success. From 1883 until his death he was professor of composition at the Milan Conservatory. He died in Milan, Italy, on January 16, 1886.
What is undoubtedly Ponchielli’s most famous orchestral composition, “The Dance of the Hours” (“Danza della ore”) comes from his masterwork, the opera La Gioconda. This opera—first performed in Milan on April 8, 1876—was based on Victor Hugo’s drama, Angelo, tyran de Padoue, adapted by Arrigo Boïto. The setting is 17th century Venice, and the principal action involves the tragic love triangle of Alvise, his wife Laura, and her beloved, Enzo.
“The Dance of the Hours” comes in the second scene of the third act. Alvise is entertaining his guests at a sumptuous ball in his palace, the highlight of which is a magnificent ballet, intended to symbolize the victory of right over wrong. The dancers in groups of six come out impersonating the hours of dawn, day, evening, and night. The music begins with a slight murmur, shimmering sounds passing through the violins and woodwind. Dawn appears. The music is carried to a dramatic climax with a strong rhythmic pulse as the day unfolds. When the music achieves mellowness and tenderness, the softness of evening touches the stage; and with the coming of night the music acquires a somber character. At midnight, the music is reduced to a sigh. The harp presents some arpeggios, and a broad melody unfolds. The mood then becomes excitable as all the twenty-four hours plunge into a spirited dance, as light conquers darkness.
The most familiar vocal excerpts from this opera are La Cieca’s romanza from the first act, “A te questo rosario”; Barnaba’s fisherman’s barcarolle (“Pescator, affonda l’esca”) and Enzo’s idyll to the beauty of the night (“Cielo e mar”) from the second act; and La Gioconda’s dramatic narrative in which she plans to destroy herself (“Suicidio”).
Cole Porter
Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, on June 9, 1893 to an immensely wealthy family. Precocious in music, he began studying the violin when he was six, and at eleven had one of his compositions published. He pursued his academic studies at the Worcester Academy in Massachusetts and at Yale; music study took place at the School of Music at Harvard and subsequently in Paris with Vincent d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum. At Yale he participated in all its musical activities and wrote two football songs still favorites there, “Yale Bull Dog” and “Bingo Eli Yale.” In 1916 he wrote the music for his first Broadway musical comedy, See America First, a failure. During the next few years he was a member of the French desert troops in North Africa, while during World War I he taught French gunnery to American troops at Fontainebleau. Just after the close of the war he contributed some songs to Hitchy Koo of 1918, and in 1924 five more songs to the Greenwich Village Follies, both of them Broadway productions. Success first came in 1928 with his music for Paris which included “Let’s Do It” and “Let’s Misbehave.” For the next quarter of a century and more he was one of Broadway’s most successful composers. His greatest stage hits came with Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), The Gay Divorce (1932), Anything Goes (1934), Leave It to Me (1938), Panama Hattie (1940), Let’s Face It (1941), Kiss Me Kate (1948), Can-Can (1953) and Silk Stockings (1955). From these and other stage productions came some of America’s best loved popular songs, for which Porter wrote not merely the music but also the brilliant lyrics: “Night and Day,” “Begin the Beguine,” “Love for Sale,” “You Do Something to Me,” “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” and so forth. He was also a significant composer for motion pictures, his most successful songs for the screen including “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “In the Still of the Night,” “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” “Don’t Fence Me In,” and “True Love.”
The most successful of all the Cole Porter musical comedies was Kiss Me Kate which began a Broadway run of over one thousand performances on December 30, 1948, then went on to be a triumph in Vienna, Austria, where it became the greatest box-office success in the history of the Volksoper where it was given. In Poland it was the first American music performed in that country. The text by Bella and Sam Spewack was based partly on Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, but it was really a play within a play. A touring company is performing the Shakespeare comedy in Baltimore, Maryland. The musical comedy moves freely from scenes of that production to the backstage complications in the private lives of its principal performers. In the end, the amatory problems of the two stars are resolved within a performance of the Shakespeare comedy. This was not only Cole Porter’s most successful musical comedy but also the finest of his scores. Never before (or since) was he so prolix with song hits in a single production; never before was his style so varied. The repertory of semi-classical music has been enriched by a symphonic treatment given the best of these melodies by Robert Russell Bennett. Bennett’s symphonic presentation of Kiss Me Kate opens with “Wunderbar,” a tongue-in-cheek parody of a sentimental Viennese waltz. It continues with the sprightly measures of “Another Openin’, Another Show,” and after that come the plangent, purple moods of “Were Thine That Special Face,” “I Sing of Love,” and the show’s principal love song, “So In Love.”
Serge Prokofiev
Serge Prokofiev was born in Sontzovka, Russia, on April 23, 1891. He was extraordinarily precocious in music. After receiving some training at the piano from his mother, he completed the writing of an opera by the time he was ten. Preliminary music study took place with Glière. In his thirteenth year he entered the Moscow Conservatory where he was a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov and Liadov among others and from which he was graduated with the Rubinstein Prize for his first piano concerto. His advanced musical thinking was already evident in his first major work for orchestra, The Scythian Suite, introduced in St. Petersburg in 1916. He continued to develop his own personality, formulating his highly individual style and creative idiosyncrasies in works like the ballet Chout, the first violin concerto, and the Classical Symphony, all written during the era of World War I. In 1918 he toured the United States, making his American debut with a New York piano recital on November 20. While in the United States he was commissioned to write the opera The Love for Three Oranges for the Chicago Opera. From 1919 to 1933 Prokofiev made his home in Paris, but in 1933 he returned to his native land to stay there for the rest of his life. Though he was honored in the Soviet Union as one of its great creative figures—and was the recipient of the Stalin Prize for his monumental Seventh Piano Sonata inspired by World War II—he did not escape censure in 1948 when the Central Committee of the Communist Party denounced Soviet composers for their partiality towards experimentation, modernism and cerebralism, in their musical works. Nevertheless, Prokofiev soon recovered his high estate in Soviet music; in 1951 he received the Stalin Prize again, this time for his oratorio On Guard for Peace and the symphonic suite, Winter Bonfire. His sixtieth birthday, that year, was celebrated throughout the country with concerts and broadcasts. Prokofiev died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Moscow on March 5, 1953.