Contemporary American Composers: Being a Study of the Music of This Country, Its Present; Conditions and Its Future, with Critical Estimates and; Biographies of the Principal Living Composers; and an; Abundance of Portraits, Fac-simile Musical Autographs, and; CompositionsHughes, Rupert
History
Contemporary American Composers: Being a Study of the Music of This Country, Its Present; Conditions and Its Future, with Critical Estimates and; Biographies of the Principal Living Composers; and an; Abundance of Portraits, Fac-simile Musical Autographs, and; Compositions
Hughes, Rupert
Composers -- United States -- Biography; Music -- United States -- History and criticism
Among his published songs are to be noted the unusually good setting
of Heine's "Wenn ich in deine Augen seh'" and of his less often heard
"Sapphire sind die Augen dein," and "Der Schmetterling ist in die Rose
verliebt." A deservedly popular work is "I Plucked a Quill from
Cupid's Wing." Among so many morose or school-bound composers, Hadley
is especially important for the fact that he is thrilled with a sane
and jubilant music.
_Adolph M. Foerster._
[Illustration: ADOLPH M. FOERSTER.]
It has been fortunate for American song that it forsook the narrow,
roystering school of English ballad and took for its national model
the _Lied_ of the later German school. It is true that the earlier
English had its poetry-respecting music in the work of such a man as
Henry Lawes, or Purcell, just as it had its composers who far preceded
Bach in the key-roving idea of the "Well-tempered Clavier;" but that
spirit died out of England, and found its latest avatar in such men
as Robert Franz, who confessed that he had his first and fullest
recognition from this country.
A correspondence with Franz was carried on for eighteen years by one
of the solidest of American composers, Adolph M. Foerster, who gives
distinction to the musical life of Pittsburg. He knew Franz
personally, and has written an important appreciation of him for the
magazine _Music_. Foerster was born at Pittsburg in 1854. After three
years of commercial life, he took up music seriously, and spent the
years from 1872 to 1875 at Leipzig,--studying the piano under Coccius
and Wenzel, singing under Grill and Schimon, and theory under E.F.
Richter and Papperitz. Returning to America, he connected himself with
the Fort Wayne (Ind.) Conservatory of Music, then under the direction
of the beneficent inventor of the Virgil Clavier. A year later he
returned to Pittsburg, where he has since remained. For awhile he was
conductor of a symphonic society and a choral union, which are no
longer extant. Since, he has devoted himself to teaching and
composition.
Of Foerster's piano compositions opus 11 is a "Valse Brillante," warm
and melodious. Opus 13 is a "Sonnet," based, after the plan of Liszt,
upon a lyric of Petrarch's, a beautiful translation from his "Gli
occhi di ch'io parlai si caldamente." It is full of passion, and shows
a fine variety in the handling of persistent repetition. Opus 18
couples two sonatinas. The second has the more merit, but both, like
most sonatinas, are too trivial of psychology and too formal even to
be recommended for children's exercises. "Eros" is a fluent melody,
with a scherzesque second part.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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