Composers

Eugène Ysaÿe (1858 - 1931) was a Belgian violin virtuoso who also composed.

This stamp was issued in Belgium in 1958 on the occasion of the composer's birth centenary.




With the stamp of Ysaye ends my composer collection. I still have some composer stamp left but it's incomplete (I am obsessed with the ideal of completion). I will share them in due time. Thanks to everyone who made me discover, and will make me continue to discover, music I have never heard before.

Fanny Mendelssohn was a German composer and pianist of the early Romantic era who was also known as Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy and, after her marriage, Fanny Hensel. In addition, she was referred to as Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel. Wikipedia

Born: 14 November 1805, Hamburg, Germany
Died: 14 May 1847, Berlin, Germany

Commenting anecdotally about a couple of earlier posts; I was fortunate to visit the Mendelssohn house in Leipzig a few years ago.  This part of Leipzig was bombed during WWII, but the house apparently came through almost unscathed.  The Mendelssohn apartment has been beautifully restored to look as it did when occupied by the Mendelssohn family.  Upstairs, a museum dedicated to Fanny Hensel, Felix's sister.

I also wanted to mention that Denmark's famous composer Carl Nielsen may be one of the most under-rated composers of the twentieth or any century.  His Fifth Symphony is one of the most dramatic and compelling works ever written, ranking right there with the best of Beethoven and Mahler.

Mozart's genius is unquestionable, but there are some who think his pecuniary needs got the better of his talent and, in his final years, he churned out a bunch of potboilers to earn enough money to support a more than lavishly necessary lifestyle.  The later piano concertos are particularly suspect, although most of them have lots of lovely tunes.  I have always thought Joseph Haydn was the better composer from that period.

Meet Dimitrie Cantemir.



This guy was one of the most remarkable people ever. He was the son of a voivode (ruler or warlord) of Moldavia, and he succeeded his father for three weeks, only to be ousted in favor of his brother. Not a man to hold grudges, he became his brother's ambassador to Constantinople. Later on, he became voivode of Moldavia again, and - apparently not a man to hold onto outmoded loyalties either - he basically handed Moldavia over to the Russians (an act that has consequences to this day) and joined them in a war on the Ottoman Empire. While Cantemir was in Constantinople, he developed the idea that the empire was on the verge of collapse, and he wished to be on the winning side of history. Most of his descendants settled in Russia.

When he wasn't being a voivode, he wrote books: the first worthwhile history of the Ottoman Empire, the first comprehensive history of any kind of Romania, Moldavia, and Wallachia, the first Romanian novel (Istoria ieroglifică, or A Hieroglyphic Hostory; to my knowledge it hasn't been translated, which is a shame), and a primer on Islam for Europeans. He was considered one of the great minds of the age, and rightfully so.

So why is he in this thread? Because he wrote music, too. While he was in Constantinople, he became interested in Turkish music; he developed a system for transcribing it into a form that Europeans could read, and he arranged some of it for Western orchestras as well. These arrangements were published under his own name; I don't know how many of them are originals - pieces that he actually composed and wrote - and how many are literal transcriptions. But if you ever have a chance to hear any of this stuff, go for it; you've never heard anything quite like it. Spotify used to have a whole album of his works; on Idagio and Tidal (which pay artists better royalties) they're more scattered around and you'll probably have to assemble a playlist.

Moldova, which has apparently forgiven him for his dealings with Muscovy, issued this stamp in 2003. Romania, which still contains part of the old Moldavian principality, also claims him, and there is a town in Romania named Dimitrie Cantemir. If anybody is in the area, send me a postcard, because I really want a Dimitrie Cantemir postmark!


I wouldn't necessarily call Haydn the better composer, but the more likeable composer? Yeah, definitely. As impressed as I have to be with Mozart's sheer musicality, there isn't much he wrote that thrills me or that makes me enjoy life more or anything like that. Haydn was a composer-for-hire, too, and he perceived his job as entertainment, but he definitely had a sense of humor, and his late string quartets and the last few symphonies give us a blink into what he could have been doing if his day job hadn't been writing things that his employers' family could play on relaxing evenings.

Recent stamp from Monaco commemorating composer Sergueï Rachmaninov on his 150^th birthday:

Presentation booklet issued by Austria in 2011, on the occasion of the 220^th anniversary of Mozart's death, containing a normal postage stamp and the same motif used on a miniature silver stamp: