A Century of Classical — a first listen to the 20th Century (part 1)
Classical music has an image problem; contemporary classical more than most. Perhaps it is the admittedly daunting breadth of the repertoire, combined with at times shocking and unfamiliar sounds, but I tend to stay away from ‘blaming the music’ or even the composers that write it, if at all possible. More to blame, I think, is the members’ club mindset that often permeates new music circles — that you should already be in the know to appreciate the art, that any attempt to meet the audience halfway diminishes the quality and effect of the work. I’m not suggesting altering the music in any way (again, not the music’s fault) — simply that a more inviting culture, a few helpfully placed sentences of exegesis in a programme or a short introduction by a concert presenter, can help introduce some of the conceptual groundwork that informs much of the period’s music.
That was the thinking behind this series, anyway. Over the next three weeks, I’m going to be curating a playlist of classical pieces — one from each year of the 20th Century (plus one from 2000, for good luck). Each entry will explain what the piece is in terms of form and instrumentation (i.e. sonata for piano and viola, five songs for voice and piano), and will be accompanied by a couple of sentences to provide something of a way in. I’ve attempted to curate a variety of genres, schools of composition, and composer demographics within the list — a list of one hundred white men writing atonal music would be too much — but obviously with only one work a year some very significant pieces (and composers) have been left off. If there was a choice between multiple big pieces for a year, I tended to opt away from the most notable choice in favour of a more interesting pick. (Hence why, for example, there is no Rite of Spring for 1913.)
The pieces are also accompanied by a star rating I’m naming their ‘GAGA’, or Grade of Accessibility to a General Audience. (😐) This is not a marker of their quality (I think all 101 of these pieces are great) but of how approachable I feel a general audience would find the piece, with 1 star being the easiest works and 5 star being the most challenging. A five-star rating is not an indicator to STAY AWAY by any means, but simply an note in advance to say that the piece might be less immediately accessible than some others. Approachability is, obviously, a subjective thing, but some things I used to rank it were:
- Harmonic language — often tonal works with consonant harmonies will be more approachable than atonal, harshly dissonant ones.
- Stylistic language — works that are rooted within recognisable soundworlds such as popular music, jazz or even earlier classical music will be more approachable than ones that are strongly modernist without that point of reference
- Scale, size and genre — the longer a piece, often the more daunting it is for a listener. Similarly, certain genres such as opera tend to be less immediately approachable to a general audience than, say, a piano piece, or a work for choir.
So that’s the idea. But first, a couple of words that are worth defining here — these are some of the building blocks of will come up again and again as these pieces are described:
- modernism: a broad artistic philosophy concerned with breaking away from past aesthetics and forms. Some hallmarks of modernist music include rhythmic complexity, innovation of structure and form, dissonance and atonality, extended techniques (using instruments in non-standard ways), and experimentation in how the music is notated.
- atonality: atonal music is music that doesn’t have a key centre. Atonality is not the same as dissonance (where notes class according to classical ideas of harmony), but atonal music with more than one part typically has a lot of dissonance within it.
- serialism: the use of repeating numerical series to create musical materials. Most commonly used to create a set of pitches in a particular order (if using all twelve notes of the octave, this is known as twelve-tone composition), but can also be used to generate rhythms, phrase lengths, or any other aspect of the music. While not the absolute first in history to use serialist procedures, Arnold Schoenberg is seen as the composer who most firmly popularised the concept.
- neoclassicism: a loosely-defined aesthetic whereby the music of the Classical (and sometimes Baroque) periods is used as inspiration for contemporary music. Neoclassical music often imitates the melodic style, texture or general ‘poise’ of Classical and Baroque music, while using contemporary harmony and instrumentation.
- minimalism: a label applied (sometimes contentiously) to music that puts a greater-than-average focus on repetition as a source of development. Though there are a lot of stylistic precursors, the term is particularly associated with a school of American composers working from the 1960s onwards, and their European counterparts beginning in the 70s.
Part 1 today will cover from 1900 to 1930; a full Spotify playlist of all these pieces (as well as a shorter one, comprised of highlights and excerpts) will be linked at the end of the story. Without further ado, let’s head back to 1900.
1900 — The Dream of Gerontius (Edward Elgar)
work in two parts for voices and orchestra
GAGA: ★★
Widely touted as Elgar’s masterpiece, The Dream of Gerontius is a strongly Catholic work that faced censorship from the staunchly Anglican choral world of England at the time. A meditation on old age and death told from a perspective of the elderly everyman Gerontius, the oratorio-in-all-but-name is full of gorgeous late Romantic harmonies and drama, alongside surprisingly intimate moments of tenderness.
1901 — Rusalka (Antonin Dvořák)
opera in three acts for voices and orchestra
GAGA: ★★½
Dvořák’s most famous opera is a dark fairy tale set to heartwrenchingly gorgeous music. A tale of betrayal and sacrifice, and the moral questions that come along with them, the opera has become a cornerstone of repertories in Czechia and beyond — and the famous Song to the Moon has become a showpiece for sopranos everywhere.
1902 — Pelléas et Mélisande (Claude Debussy)
opera in five acts for voices and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★½
One of four works based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s symbolist play to come out over eight years (Fauré, Sibelius and Schoenberg also write music inspired by the play), Debussy’s opera is the grandest in scope. His trademark harmonic language, influenced by Indian and Javanese musics he first encountered at the 1889 Paris Expo, is on full display, and Debussy’s evident skill as a dramatist pervades every musical choice in the score — a shame, then, that this was the only opera he ever managed to complete.
1903 — Helios Overture (Carl Nielsen)
concert overture for orchestra
GAGA: ★
Nielsen was and continues to be the pre-eminent figure in Danish classical music, helping to craft a distinct national flavour out of the Germanic Romantic idiom that had pervaded Europe by the end of the 19th Century. The Helios Overture, one of many shorter orchestral works that Nielsen wrote over his career, is a joyous if slightly ostentatious demonstration of his knack for orchestral writing, and its accessibility and vibrancy have made it a popular showpiece for orchestras since its composition.
1904 — Kindertotenlieder (Gustav Mahler)
song cycle for voice and orchestra
GAGA: ★★
Drawing text from Friedrich Rückert’s collection of 428 poems he wrote after the deaths of two of his children from scarlet fever in the 1830s, Mahler chose five of the poems to set as a song cycle. The work is an often overbearing and emotionally intense affair — but despite the anguish prevalent throughout the work, quotes of an earlier Mahler love song from his 3rd Symphony, and the final movement’s transition into a major key, hint at a greater, more powerful force that death cannot overcome.
1905 — Piano Sonata 1.X.1905 (Leoš Janáček)
sonata for solo piano in two movements
GAGA: ★★★
No-one sounds quite like Janáček. Through his innovative use of rhythm and repetition, his study and transcription of traditional Moravian folk songs and speech patterns, and his singular use of timbre, instrumentation and texture, he crafted a unique sonic world that was only truly appreciated after he died. This piano sonata — written in tribute to a young carpenter called František Pavlík who was bayonetted during a public demonstration on the titular date — is at the angriest and most despondent extremes of his sound, but the intensity, drama and heartfelt frustration held by the composer is clearly apparent upon listening to the work.
1906 — Decet for Winds (George Enescu)
composition in three movements for double wind quintet
GAGA: ★½
Enescu, widely seen as Romania’s national composer, is unfairly neglected outside his homeland in favour of other nationally significant Eastern European composers of his time (in particular, remaining in the shadow of the Hungarians Bartók and Kodály). His Decet for ten winds (two wind quintets, with one oboe replaced by a cor anglais) in many ways feels like a chamber symphony on account of Enescu’s comprehensive use of the different sounds of the ensemble, exploiting each instrument’s range and timbral capabilities to the fullest.
1907 — A Village Romeo and Juliet (Frederick Delius)
opera in six scenes for voices and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★
This opera splits people. While widely complimented for its instrumental colours and very precise sense of mood, some feel that the voices take a background role in Delius’ tale of young forbidden love in a rural community (we’ll return to this theme in next week’s installation); it’s telling that by far the most famous excerpt of the work is an instrumental interlude between scenes 5 and 6, ‘The Walk To The Paradise Garden’. However, A Village Romeo and Juliet is more than just its orchestra, and its vocal writing, while perhaps not so brazenly virtuosic, is nonetheless wholehearted, vulnerable and impassioned all at once.
1908 — The Unanswered Question (Charles Ives)
movement for wind quartet, solo instrument and strings
GAGA: ★★★
Unperformed until 1946, after which point it had undergone an extensive period of revision, Ives’ Unanswered Question is now seen as one of the cornerstones of American modernism. Against glistening hushed string chords (in Ives’ plan, representing the “Silence of the Druids”), the soloist (preferably a trumpet) repeatedly asks the titular “Perennial Question of Existence” despite the clamor of the quartet of “Fighting Answerers”. It’s a little heady, but through Ives’ clever staging (the three groups are separated from each other) and the underlying beauty of the string harmonies despite the racket that ensues, the work has cemented itself as a modern classic.
1909 — Fünf Lieder zu Gedichten von Stefan George (Anton Webern)
five songs for voice and piano
GAGA: ★★★★
Webern was a follower of Schoenberg’s (we’ll get to him in a bit), but unlike Berg (also later) Webern sought to take Schoenberg’s characteristic atonality further away from the Romantic tradition. Hallmarks of Webern’s work include use of canons, palindromes and other structural features, as well as noticeably clear textures. These songs, from early in his career, are short and condensed (Webern excelled at writing miniatures) and show a composer still developing the fineties of their distinctive style, but the expressive impact and quirky personality of Webern’s sound are already there in spades.
1910 — Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (Alexander Scriabin)
tone poem for piano, orchestra, optional choir and chromola
GAGA: ★★★
One of the great late Romantic weirdos, Scriabin’s orchestra music continued to progress in scale and experimentation as he grew older. Prometheus pre-dates the more famous (and salacious?) Poem of Ecstasy, but this earlier work is in many ways stranger — only one non-dissonant chord in the entire piece (right at the end), all built around permutations of a single, famously difficult-to-analyse collection of six notes — and what’s this chromola? (It’s an organ that can display coloured light in accordance with the music being played, by the way.) Prometheus is a big, messy and constantly shifting work that brings you along on its idiosyncratic journey and leaves you to bask in its glory.
1911 — Treemonisha (Scott Joplin)
opera in three acts for voices and orchestra
GAGA: ★★
Scott Joplin is almost certainly most famous for his piano rags (The Entertainer or The Maple Leaf Rag, anyone?), but his compositional output extended far beyond the piano. Determined to create a new style of opera for an African American audience, he fused popular songs, jazz, rag and classical music in Treemonisha, a radical work pushing for social change and education for Black Americans while celebrating and uplifting the community’s past. Tragically, but perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, the work was never performed in full in Joplin’s lifetime, though after its eventual premiere in 1972, the composer was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1976.
1912 — A Shropshire Lad (George Butterworth)
eleven songs for voice and piano
GAGA: ★
Comprising two shorter cycles, Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad (premiered the previous year) and Bredon Hill, A Shropshire Lad is one of the jewels in the English Song tradition, the distinctive national style of voice-and-piano writing found in Britain from the end of the 19th century and beyond. Butterworth was tragically killed at only 31 at the Somme, lending the set a particular weight (‘The lads in their hundreds’ specifically sings of young men before they go out to war to die) and leaving it by extension a haunting memorial to all lost in the First World War.
1913 — Gurre-Lieder (Arnold Schoenberg)
oratorio in three parts and epilogue for solo voices, narrator, choruses and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★½
When Schoenberg started Gurre-Lieder, he was a Romantic composer through and through. But as the work progressed (and over a healthy pause in its creation), he started experimenting in atonality and speech-singing (a technique known by its German name, Sprechgesang) — these experiments would later lead him on to his revolutionary theory of twelve-tone composition that inspired Webern, Berg and beyond. Gurre-Lieder threfore is an important work in bridging the two halves of his output. The structure is mad — the second part of the work is only 4 minutes long, dwarfed by what’s on either side; some members of the ensembles don’t come in until the very end of the whole work; and the musical language slides further and further into Schoenberg’s modernist style as it goes on. Despite its idiosyncrasies, it is a hugely affecting and truly gripping composition well worth a listen.
1914 — Sports et divertissements (Érik Satie)
cycle of 21 short pieces for piano
GAGA: ★½
Another Grade A oddball, Érik Satie is as known for his idiosyncratic personal habits (eating only white food, stacking two grand pianos in his apartment, etc.) as he is for his music, but that oddness bleeds through into a singular sense of humour across his oeuvre. These 21 peculiar little miniatures illustrate musically a variety of ‘sports and hobbies’ in which one might partake — preceded by an ‘unappetising chorale’, of course — and are annotated in the score with little lines of prose to help further the story. Tennis, anyone?
1915 — All-Night Vigil (Sergei Rachmaninoff)
liturgical composition in 15 movements for a cappella choir
GAGA: ★
In many people’s eyes, Rachmaninoff’s setting of the All-Night Vigil (and its companion, the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom written a few years earlier) is the peak of the Russian Orthodox musical tradition — though at its premiere it was decried by some for being too elaborate. Nonetheless, it is one of the few pieces of Orthodox choral music to have become famous outside of its initial setting, and today is one of the most beloved choral works in the canon.
1916 — Goyescas (Enrique Granados)
opera in one act for voices and orchestra
GAGA: ★½
The Granados opera Goyescas shouldn’t be confused with an earlier piano piece that the composer wrote… called Goyescas… that forms the origin of many of the melodies in the opera. The success of the earlier piece (it still holds a non-negligible place in the 20th century piano repertoire) pushed Granados to adapt it into a three-scene stage work, requiring a libretto to be written to the rhythm of the themes in a reversal of the usual creative process. The opera isn’t much performed, but it wears its hand-me-downs well.
1917 — Visions fugitives (Sergei Prokofiev)
suite in 20 movements for piano
GAGA: ★★½
Amidst Prokofiev’s early piano works (and before the aggression of his War Sonatas) came Visions fugitives, 20 miniscule pieces that are as stylistically evasive as they are harmonically intriguing. Straddling the line between tonal and atonal, and running the range from harp-like pastorales to thundering toccatas in miniature, they are perhaps less well known that some of Prokofiev’s other piano works, but over repeated listening more and more of the intricacies of these underappreciated gems become apparent.
1918 — The Planets (Gustav Holst)
suite in seven movements for orchestra
GAGA: ★
One of the most famous orchestral works of the 20th Century, it’s easy to forget just how creative Holst’s astronomical adventure truly is. Mars’s relentless martial rhythms and extended string techniques and Jupiter’s jubilant triplex of themes are often-lauded, but what of Venus’s ethereal shifting harmonies — Mercury’s tongue-in-cheek fleetness — Saturn’s geriatric demurity? Or my favourite pair of movements, Uranus’ unapologetically bizarre bombast leading on to Neptune’s glittering tension and ultimately peaceful coda (offstage choir and all).
1919 — Sonata for Viola and Piano (Rebecca Clarke)
sonata for viola and piano
GAGA: ★½
One of the first female instrumentalists to maintain a steady career as an orchestral player (and an incredibly skilled viola player), Clarke was also a composer from time to time — and while her output wasn’t huge, what does exist is dynamic and powerful stuff. Her Sonata is remarkable for its fresh modernist take on late 19th Century impressionism and English folk idioms, and has become one of several of her works to enter the viola canon. Dispirited by the fact that works published under a male pseudonym performed better than those under her name, she felt that the 1910s weren’t yet a time for female composers, but more recently her compositional talent has been celebrated anew, with many of her works now in the process of being published.
1920 — Die tote Stadt (Erich Korngold)
opera in three acts for voices and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★
Korngold is perhaps most famous for scoring Hollywood films in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s (including in particular several Errol Flynn flicks like The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Sea Hawk), but before he emigrated to America in the early days of the Nazi Party, he was a child prodigy composing concert works in his native Austria-Hungary. Born in Brno (now in Czechia), the young Korngold had a ballet toured when he was only 11, and by 23, when he wrote Die tote Stadt, he already had several one-act operas under his belt. But Die tote Stadt is where the composer’s theatrical visions truly crystallise — a tale of grief and attempting to move past it that resonated deeply with a post-WWI audience, underpinned by Korngold’s nuanced and often deeply touching post-Romanticisms.
1921 — Kammermusik Nr. 1 (Paul Hindemith)
work in 4 movements for 12 instruments
GAGA: ★★½
The first of Hindemith’s ‘Chamber Music’ series (most of which are full-on concertos rather than anything remotely chamber), Kammermusik Nr. 1 stands out as a noticeably scrappy and eager work. For wind trio, trumpet, string quintet, percussion, harmonium and piano, the work has a very distinctive set of timbres, and Hindemith’s equally characteristic harmonic language (and at times, deadpan sense of humour) unite with those sounds to create a work deemed so frivolous and vulgar that Hindemith immediately became the ‘bad boy’ of the German music scene (a reputation he would only intensify with his scandalous one-act operas that followed over the coming years).
1922 — Wozzeck (Alban Berg)
opera in three acts for voices and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★★½
In a century full of landmark operas, Wozzeck is perched atop one of the highest peaks. Berg’s intense psychodrama, composed between 1914 and 1922 and premiered in 1925, is deemed one of the crowning achievements of the Second Viennese School, the group of composers that included Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Widely seen as the first opera written in a 20th-Century avant-garde idiom, and also one of the only fully atonal operas to have entered the wider repertory, Wozzeck’s genius is in how Berg utilises other compositional ideas, such as motifs and classical structures, to give the work progression and unity usually granted by a strong harmonic footprint. Wozzeck is a tough listen for the uninitiated, but it became the blueprint for all atonal opera that followed.
1923 — Hyperprism (Edgard Varèse)
movement for wind, brass and percussion
GAGA: ★★★½
Varèse’s third major work after emigrating to America from his native France, Hyperprism is not amongst his most known compositions, despite its sonic similarities to the more widely known Amériques. Its markedly asymmetrical orchestration — two woodwinds, seven brass and 18 percussion including a siren — creates an instrumental palette that is rough, brutal and uncompromising, a fitting sonic portrait of the newly developing hustle and bustle of 1920s America.
1924 — Rhapsody in Blue (George Gershwin)
concerto for piano and jazz band
GAGA: ★
Another distinctly American work, though admittedly much more popular in spirit than Hyperprism, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue is almost certainly the most notable of his works for the concert hall — and across its various orchestrations, many created not by Gershwin but by Ferde Grofe, and with its infectious melodies, it cemented itself as one of the all-time great jazz-classical fusions.
1925 — Java Suite (Leopold Godowsky)
suite for solo piano
GAGA: ★★
Described by Godowsky as ‘Phonoramas’ — sonic dioramas, if you will — his Java Suite breaks away from the typical orientalism of many of his contemporaries with a studied reimagining of the sounds of Java, where Godowsky had travelled before composing the piece. What results is a rich and imaginative evocation of traditional gamelan treated both with fondness and great admiration.
1926 — King Roger (Karol Szymanowski)
opera in three acts for voices and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★
Szymanowski’s most popular and well-known opera, King Roger’s libretto marks it out as something of an antiquated, Mediterranean affair; the music, however, is vivid and stylistically varied, and the work’s deep psychoanalytical bent and focus on the notion of ‘transformation’ come across both in the text and in the striking musical language. The enlightenment of a Christian figure by a pagan central to the work’s story was shocking to some members of the audience at the time, though increasingly has been seen as part of Szymanowski’s wider exploration of mysticism found both within his music and outside of it.
1927 — Symphony No. 1, “The Gothic” (Havergal Brian)
symphony and two parts and six movements for orchestra and voices
GAGA: ★★★
That description sort of hides the kind of scale we’re talking about here — this symphony typically runs about 105 minutes long (in comparison, Beethoven 9 tends to clock in at a little over an hour) and calls for 32 woodwinds, 24 on-stage brass, 32 off-stage brass, 30 percussion instruments (including four off-stage timpani), four vocal singers, four full choirs, a children’s choir, organ, celesta, 2 harps and at least 82 string players. And if that’s not enough to convince you to check this behemoth out, the music is actually rather fantastic too — a reconciliation of the instrumental and choral traditions that Brian found himself both enthralled and alienated by, with a tortuous second half that collapses at length into a glorious, well-earned E major.
1928 — Boléro (Maurice Ravel)
movement for orchestra
GAGA: ★½
This piece still raises eyebrows today — January 6th, 2023, saw Joyce Carol Oates tweet out that Boléro was “one of the [most] absolutely awful, glaringly unmusical, excruciatingly unbearable compositions in musical history”. And while such an opinion may have perhaps been more commonplace nearer the work’s premiere, its innovative use of repetition and texture in place of traditional development has seen it hailed by many as one of the most influential and ground-breaking pieces of the 20th Century, prefiguring minimalism by several decades. Come for the world’s catchiest drum rhythm, stay for the stacked major-chords-in-the-piccolo weirdness that ensues.
1929 — Chôros No. 9 (Heitor Villa-Lobos)
movement for orchestra
GAGA: ★★
The official date of composition for this orchestral monolith by Villa-Lobos is given as 1929, though many people believe that it wasn’t finished until much closer to its eventual 1942 premiere. However long it took him to write the work seemed to have paid off, though, with Brazil’s national composer writing what is in my opinion his sonically richest and most emotive work, replete with undulating harmonies and instantly unforgettable melodies.
1930 — Antikrist (Rued Langgaard)
opera in two acts for voices and orchestra
GAGA: ★★★
A much-neglected masterpiece plagued by censorship troubles that remained unperformed for almost 50 years after the composer died, Rued Langgaard’s Antikrist suffered both textual and musical censure on account of its religiously incendiary premise (God sending the Antichrist to Earth to test his people) and sensual musical language. Langgaard’s position as a headstrong experimental alternative to the much more in-fashion Carl Nielsen certainly didn’t help; all the above combined to mean that Langgaard struggled to find opportunities to demonstrate his work. In recent years, however, the original uncensored form of the opera has been reprioritised, leading to the work massively gaining stature, and it is now seen as this underrated composer’s masterpiece.
So there you have it — 1900 to 1930! Spotify playlists are here for the full list and here for the selections — I hope you found this somewhat interesting and maybe even found a couple new pieces to enjoy. The next part will be published in a week’s time — consider subscribing to my Medium page to make sure you don’t miss it!
A.C.
