Reinhard Keiser News
German opera composer (1674–1739)
Commemorations 2024 (Birth: Reinhard Keiser)
- opera, classical music
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2024-04-24
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The Boston Musical Intelligencer
2023-12-19 16:22:40
Locke’s List for 2023: Notable Operatic Recordings Plus
[…] to great acclaim in Jordan Hall (see the detailed review in the Boston Musical Intelligencer). Particularly fascinating in this group of recordings is Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s sacred opera David et Jonathas (1688), whose recording (the work’s fourth!) includes, as a bonus, a video version on DVD, which is staged and costumed both imaginatively and appropriately. (Unlike some other opera productions nowadays.) The highly capable performance becomes even more effective when watched as well as heard. Reinhard Keiser was the leading opera composer and impresario in Hamburg in the early 1700s, and it was at his theater in the “Goose Market” that some of Handel’s first operas were performed. Keiser’s operas have mostly not survived, but Ulysses has, and now it has gotten a spiffy reading. The work is mostly in German, but some of the arias are in Italian, as was common at the time in Germany (and occasionally in France). […]
2023-12-04 15:01:32
Ernst Toch and more, 2023
This Week in Classical Music: December 4, 2023. Ernst Toch and more. Erns Toch, the Jewish-Austrian composer, was born on December 7th of 1887 in Leopoldstadt, a poor, mostly Jewish area in Vienna. Toch was one of a group of Austrian and German composers whose lives were upended by the rise of Nazism (Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schreker, Karl Weigl, Egon Wellesz, Hans Gál, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Berthold Goldschmidt, all Jewish, mostly forgotten except of course for Schoenberg, all talented if to a different degree, had their lives broken in 1933). One thing we find interesting is the ease with which they moved from Austria to Germany. These were two very different empires, one, declining, ruled by the peace-seeking Emperor Franz Joseph from Vienna, another – very much on the ascent, economically, politically and militarily, ruled by the arrogant and insecure Keiser Wilhelm II. But musicians thought nothing of moving from […]
2021-02-22 14:42:28
Young Handel
[…] in Germany (all other opera theaters were set up by royal courts, of which there were many). Handel was hired as the opera orchestra’s violinist, but later switched to playing the continuo (harpsichord). In 1704 Handel’s first opera, Almira, was staged at the theater and proved to be successful. He composed at least three more operas but the music for them is lost. From the late1690s the Hamburg Opera was dominated by the composer Reinhard Keiser, the author of more than 100 operas. On the one hand, Keiser’s music was influential (Handel quoted him not only in Almira, but in many other operas throughout his life); at the same time, as a junior composer, Handel felt highly constrained. In 1706 he met the younger brother of Ferdinando de' Medici, duke of Tuscany, who was visiting Hamburg. The prince showed Handel examples of talian music and invited him to the […]
2020-12-15 09:42:55
Richness of invention in the contemplation of God in the beauties of nature: Iestyn Davies and Arcangelo in Handel's German Arias
[…] his talent and the profusion of his works, Handel did not set very much of his native language. There are only two mature works in German and both of these have links to Hamburg and to the poet Barthold Heinrich Brockes (1680–1747), who was a Hamburg town councillor, Handel's Brockes Passion and the Nine German Arias. The passion seems to have been written in around 1716 and performed, alongside settings of the same text by Keiser, Telemann and Matheson (Handel had worked for the first as a young man in Hamburg and was friends with the latter two) in Hamburg in 1719. Handel may have written the passion as a feeler towards a career in German if the political situation deteriorated (the Jacobite Rebellion had been in 1715, it many not have been completely obvious to those on the ground that the Hanover Dynasty would survive in England and Handel's […]
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