Friday, March 29, AD 2024 9:42am

1812 Overture

 

Something for the weekend.  Tchaikovsky’s  1812 Overture.  Written in 1880 to commemorate the victory of Russia over Napoleon, its composition was due to the fact that the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, commissioned by Tsar Alexander I in thanksgiving for the victory, was nearing completion.  As it happens, Tchaikovsky did not think much of what would become his most famous piece, writing that it was noisy and lacked all artistic merit and was written by him without love.  Oddly enough, it has become associated in this country with the Fourth of July, as I have heard it performed on several Independence Day celebrations.

Although it has been endlessly parodied, “the cereal that’s shot from guns”, I have always liked it.  Listening to a great piece of music like this, I wonder if the below humor piece does not possess a rare insight:

GENEVA—Physicists affiliated with the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) released a report Wednesday revealing that classical music exists in a field of reality entirely removed from the four-dimensional spacetime inhabited by human beings.

Scientists were performing a routine search for fifth-dimensional activity using the Large Hadron Collider, the immense particle accelerator famous for proving the existence of the Higgs Boson, when they came across the entire corpus of Western classical music from 9th-century plainchant to Nico Muhly.

According to the report, the innumerable works making up this body of repertoire exist in a continuum that resides just beyond the limits of human perception.

“Classical music transcends both the linear, forward flow of time and the Euclidean space we are used to,” said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN. “A musical work is a mysterious entity whose essence totally eludes our senses.”

Physicists claim that any given performance or recording of a classical music piece is a kind of audible hologram projected into our everyday reality by the true musical work, which vibrates eternally in an ethereal medium floating in and around us at all times.

Go here to read the rest.

0 0 votes
Article Rating
5 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Saturday, February 27, AD 2016 6:55am

Love those canons!

Thomas Collins
Thomas Collins
Saturday, February 27, AD 2016 7:49am

Military pieces are rarely the composer’s best. Beethoven admitted that “Wellington’s Victory” was “sh*t” but that his sh*t was better than other composers best music.
My reaction when I first heard it was, “Wut? Beethoven wrote ‘The Bear Went Over the Mountain’?”

Pinky
Pinky
Saturday, February 27, AD 2016 10:18am

If there’s a composer whose name can be mentioned in the same breath as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, it’s Tchaikovsky. He suffers from the same dilemma as Mozart: he’s often so accessible that people overlook his skill. In Mozart’s case, the more you study music, the more impressive he gets. In Tchaikovsky’s case, I think that people who study Russian music in greater depth become enchanted with later, less accessible composers.

TomD
TomD
Saturday, February 27, AD 2016 10:53am

“As it happens, Tchaikovsky did not think much of what would become his most famous piece, writing that it was noisy and lacked all artistic merit and was written by him without love.”

If anyone would like to hear what Tchaikovsky considered his love, listen to his Serenade for Strings Op 48 (the 1812 Overture is Op 49, both were written in 1880). The two have similarities, but the Serenade is a very beautiful work, one of the best ever.

.Anzlyne
.Anzlyne
Saturday, February 27, AD 2016 11:01am

very interesting article– the “hologram” of great music seems possible ! 🙂
.
I have always been drawn to pre-Soviet music, prose and poetry…that Russian spirit is also close the the heart of our blessed Mother, I think

Discover more from The American Catholic

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading

Scroll to Top