Musical Conversation: Musical Meditations on Mortality – Exploring Chrysanthemums and Death and the Maiden with Michael Parloff
In this Musical Conversation, lecturer Michael Parloff takes listeners on a journey that investigates the circumstances that influenced the writing of Puccini’s Chrysanthemums and Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. For this presentation, Parloff writes: In January of 1890, Giacomo Puccini was startled to learn of the untimely death of his friend, Prince Amadeo di Savoia. In response, he composed his deeply elegiac string quartet, Crisantemi, in a single night. Sixty-six years earlier, in 1824, the 27-year-old Franz Schubert confided to his artist friend Leopold Kupelweiser, “I feel myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again.” As he contemplated his own untimely demise, Schubert wrote his defiant quartet masterpiece, Death and the Maiden.
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