Ferdinand Büchner News
German flutist and composer
- flute
- Germany
- composer, music teacher, university teacher
Last update
2024-03-25
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2024-02-12 15:35:19
Alban Berg, part II, 2024
[…] broke off. WWI was in full swing; Berg was conscripted into the Austrian Army and served for three years (the 42-year-old Schoenberg, who moved back to Vienna in 1915, also served in the army, but only for a year). Things changed in 1918 after Berg was discharged: he returned to Vienna and reestablished his relationship with his teacher. In May of 1914 Berg attended a performance of Woyzeck, a play by the German playwright Georg Büchner. He immediately decided to write an opera based on the play; it would become known as Wozzeck, a misspelling of the original play’s name that somehow stuck. Berg wrote the libretto himself, selecting 15 episodes from Woyzeck, a macabre story of a poor and desperate soldier, who, suspecting that the mother of his illegitimate child is having an affair with the Captain, murders her, and then drowns. Berg started writing sketches soon after he […]
2022-05-24 20:38:28
Anglais - Wozzeck at the Liceu: The Dark Beauty of Horror
In the 18th century there was pain and misery, but art generally displayed the beauty of the world. In the 19th century there was also pain and misery and art showed a part of it. In the 20th century there was a lot of pain and a lot of misery and very often art became unpleasant because the artist felt the need to show the world all the unnecessary pain, the avoidable misery, the great alienation and violence that govern human relationships. For many artists, failing to do this would have been a guilty omission. The opera Wozzeck, composed a hundred years ago by Alban Berg, is colossal, genius, truly innovative, sad, sordid, unpleasant and uncomfortable. It belongs to the group of pieces of horrible beauty that show the world its own ugliness. In order to bring Wozzeck to the stage, Liceu turned to the production from the […]
2020-07-27 12:10:00
Wagner and Young Germany
(Article, ‘Young Germany’, originally published in The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) A group of German writers during the pre-1848 period. Reacted strongly against perceived apolitical and reactionary tendencies in German Romanticism. Several, including Heinrich Laube, Karl Gutzkow, Heinrich Heine, and Georg Herwegh, were known personally to Wagner; others include Ludwig Börne, Theodor Mundt, Ludolf Wienbarg, and Georg Büchner. In 1835, the German Confederation proscribed many such writings as injurious to the Christian religion and morality; Laube’s subsequent imprisonment made a great impression upon Wagner. According to Heine (Die romantische Schule), Young Germans, unlike Goethe and the Romantics, treated life and literature as one; as for Wagner, this signaled revival of the Hellenic spirit following Christian aberration. Wagner published articles in Laube’s Leipzig-based Zeitung für die elegante Welt, including his Autobiographical Sketch(1842), where Wagner likens Das Liebesverbot to Laube’s Young Europe […]
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- timeline: Composers (Europe). Performers (Europe).
- Indexes (by alphabetical order): B...