Arts & Events

At the tender age of twenty-one, George Frideric Handel left Hamburg on a trip to Italy, where he intended to acquaint himself with Italian musical styles. Handel visited Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice, but he spent most of his Italian stay in Rome. Though operas were banned by papal decree, Italian cantatas offered composers ample opportunities for vocal writing. Indeed, many cantatas were operas in all but name, and they often were given with elaborate scenic effects. On Easter Sunday, 1708, Handel’s oratorio La Resurrezione was performed in Palazzo Bonelli, and a second performance occurred the next day. -more-

Robert Schumann had enjoyed great success as a composer, but by 1853 he was chronically depressed, attempted suicide, and was subsequently placed in a mental asylum, where he died three years later at age 46. Nonetheless, in 1853 Schumann composed a violin concerto that premiered in a reading rehearsal in January 1854 with the great violinist Joseph Joachim and his orchestra. Joachim was not particularly pleased with Schumann’s Violin Concerto, and he never performed it publicly. When Schumann died, Joachim, Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms all seem to have concurred that the Violin Concerto was not up to Schumann’s earlier standards, so Joachim donated the score to the Prussian State Library in Berlin on condition that it must not be played until 100 years after Schumann’s death. -more-