Composers

Franz Liszt has been sighted on this thread at least four times. This stamp, from Serbia, is of course redundant, but the design is original and a little strange. I like it.



If the portraits are accurate, Liszt's appearance changed more as he aged than most people's did. You'd hardly know it was the same person.

Frédéric Chopin on a 1947 stamp from Poland. There are four separate printings that took place over a year or so: two different colors, one of each perforated and one of each not. They were all printed on paper that resembles heavy newsprint and is usually found in various shades of discoloration, but the ink itself has held up nicely.



Back when shortwave radio was a thing, I used to listen to the different English-language broadcasts (and some others, too, but that's a long story). One of the more unusual regularly scheduled broadcasts was from Poland; it was part of their international radio service, but it didn't identify itself. You'd hear silence as they fired up the transmitters, then a piano came on. You could sit there and listen to Chopin's music for 15 minutes. Then the broadcast would quietly sign off. Shortwave was like AM (mediumwave) radio but with more crowded frequency allocations and more fading, interference, and static than some people could put up with. Not a great medium for music, but a solo piano could cut through the worst of the impediments, and a curious knob-twirler could stumble on fifteen minutes of pure magic.

Chopin (his father was French, an itinerant music teacher who ended up in Poland in the wake of the Revolution) wrote almost exclusively for piano. His two piano concertos have some wonderful passages, but they also sound like he wrote the orchestral parts because he had to, not because writing for an instrument without 88 keys inspired him very much. His solo works, though, sound - and feel - like nothing else in the world.

If you want more Chopin stamps, the Polish postal service has probably issued 30 of 'em over the years .


I had to look that place up! I learned that the place where Dvořák stayed is now the Bily Clock Museum, which has a lot of fans on TripAdvisor. Quite a few Bohemians (including my wife's grandparents) emigrated to Iowa; the National Czech and Slovak Museum is in Cedar Rapids, a couple of hours south of Spillville. I don't really know the American Quartet, or most of his string quartets for that matter, but I slapped together a couple of non-orchestral-Dvořák playlists a few weeks ago and I'm starting to go through them.

George Enescu.



Enescu was born in 1881 in Liveni-Virnav, Romania, a town near the Moldovan and Ukrainian borders that is so small I had to go to a Romanian-language map to locate it! A child prodigy with an eidetic memory, he was an in-demand violinist and conductor who wowed audiences by often not needing any sheet music. Of course, he was also the one Romanian composer that many music fans have ever heard of. (His fellow Romanian, the excellent Luiza Borac, is working hard to change that.)

Enescu is best known for his Romanian Rhapsodies - lively, extroverted showpieces that were audience favorites for decades. As fun as the Rhapsodies are, they don't sound like most of his music. Much of what he wrote is complex and cerebral, though it was always (as far as I know) tonal and well within the Western European classical tradition. Here's a good article from the Bach Cantatas web site that can tell you more.

You'll sometimes see him called Georges Enesco, which is the French version. I'm honestly not clear about whether his birth name was Georg or George.

The stamps are from 1946 and are part of a seven-stamp series commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Bucharest Philharmonic Orchestra. The second stamp is one of two semi-postals included in the series and has the remarkable denomination of 350 + 1,650 lei. If you want to start a topical collection of wildly backloaded semis, start with Romania; this isn't even the most extreme example.

Recent issue from Guatemala for the 250^th anniversary of Beethoven's birth:

Hello nbstamper,
Until a few years ago, I had a lovely collection of British composers on Lyrita LPs. One of my favorites was Omar Khayyám by Sir Granville BANTOCK. I've mentioned before on the Forum how much I admire Sibelius. I have all of his works in multiple orchestras on CD and SACD. I listen to him in the car and while stamping. Glorious stuff. Also like Bax - Tintagel on Lyrita (CD). Love Debussy a lot too. So much Music... So little Time...

Yes, the Op. 17 is superb!

Thank you for sharing such great music references.

Rob



Finland Music , The Sibelius Academy,

(copied from eBay)

Paul Hindemith.



He had a long career as a composer and substantial ones as a violist - either as a soloist or as part of a string quartet - and conductor. He's not what I would think of as an avant-garde composer, but he became associated with that movement because his string quartet promoted the works of Schoenberg and his followers. Personally, I find much of his music interesting but not always very involving on a visceral or emotional level, but that may have been his intention in at least some cases; he was into something called Gebrauchsmusik, which I can't really translate but it's something like "working music" or "music for situations", meant to accompany or enhance an event. Some of it was expressly for amateur musicians, too. The orchestral suite he put together from the music in his opera Mathis der Maler is fun; so is his Symphonic Metamorphoses. And one thing he was very gifted at was orchestration: even in his chamber music, he wrote sonatas for the tuba, the bassoon, and other instruments you usually don't find sonatas for.

He also was a leader of the anti-Nazi art community. He was lucky enough to get out of Germany in 1938, first to Switzerland and then to the United States. He taught at Yale and got American citizenship as the war wound down. He seems like an extremely interesting person and a more than decent human being, and I keep looking for compositions of his that I can love.

Beside these Austrian stamps, his native country Germany has also honoured Richard Strauss (1864 - 1949) twice. The first time in 1954, the second time in 1999 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death.

Daniel François Esprit Auber (1782 - 1871) was a French composer and director of the Paris Conservatoire. This stamp was issued in 1971 on the occasion of the centenary of his death.

France has hitherto issued 3 stamps of Hector Berlioz (1803-1869): the first and the second in 1936 and 1938 as part of the 'Pour les chômeurs intellectuel' (For Unemployed Intellectuals) series; the third one in 1983.

There are 3 stamps of Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897) issued by his native and adopted countries. 

(1) DDR - 1983 on the occasion of the composer's 150th birth anniversary.

(2) Deutsche Bundespost - 1983 on the occasion of the composer's 150th birth anniversary.

(3) Österreichische Post - 1997 on the occasion of the composer's 100th death anniversary. This stamp was issued in conjunction with the Schubert stamp posted by salentin .



[Picture: the 3 stamps fixed on my linover of Brahms]

This French stamp of Emmanuel Chabrier (1841 - 1894) was issued in 1942.



He is perhaps best known for his orchestral work España, but I prefer to listen to his piano music, especially the complete set recorded by Alexandre Tharaud.