Classical music written in collaboration

Classical music written in collaboration

In classical music, it is relatively rare for a work to be written in collaboration by multiple composers. This contrasts with popular music, where it is common for more than one person to contribute to the music for a song. Nevertheless, there are instances of collaborative classical music compositions.

Contents

Collaborations

The following list gives some details of classical works written by composers working collaboratively.

Opera and operetta

  • Federico Chueca and Joaquín Valverde Durán collaborated on a number of zarzuelas. Chueca provided most of the melodies and Valverde provided the orchestral polish. Their collaborations included Un maestro de obra prima (1877), La Canción de la Lola (1880), Luces y sombras and Fiesta Nacional (both 1882), Cádiz (1886), El año pasado por agua (1889), and other operas. Their masterpiece was La gran vía (Madrid, 1886). Valverde Durán also collaborated with Ruperto Chapí, Tomás Bretón, his own son Joaquín "Quinito" Valverde Sanjuán, and other composers. Quinito Valverde Sanjuán also collaborated with other composers, such as Tomás López Torregrosa, Ramón Estellés, Rafael Calleja and José Serrano, however, his contribution to these works was more significant than his father's had been to his.
  • In 1929, Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill collaborated on the opera Der Lindberghflug (Lindbergh's Flight), based on the writing of American pioneer aviator Charles Lindbergh. This was later changed by removal of Hindemith’s contribution, renaming it to Der Ozeanflug (The Flight across the Ocean), and removal of Lindbergh’s name. The opening line was changed from "My name is Charles Lindbergh" to "My name is of no account".
  • In 1937, Arthur Honegger and Jacques Ibert wrote the opera L'aiglon. Ibert wrote Acts 1 and 5, Honegger the rest. In 1938, they again collaborated on an opera, this time Les petites cardinal.

Ballet

  • La source (1866) is a ballet with music by Léo Delibes and Ludwig Minkus. Minkus wrote Act I and Scene 2 of Act III; Delibes wrote Act II and Scene 1 of Act III.
  • In 1956 appeared Don Perlimpin (also seen as Don Perlimpinada), a collaboration between Federico Mompou and Xavier Montsalvatge. Most of the work was by Mompou, but Montsalvatge helped with the orchestration and linking passages, and added two numbers of his own.[2]

Orchestral

  • Johann Strauss II collaborated on a number of pieces with his brothers Josef and Eduard, mostly famously Pizzicato Polka (1870) with Josef.
  • In 1936, shortly after they first met at the ISCM Festival in Barcelona, Benjamin Britten and Lennox Berkeley together wrote Mont Juic, a suite of Catalan dances. It was named after the Barcelona park in which they had heard some popular tunes, which Britten wrote down on the spot. For many years, it was not known which composer wrote which movement[4], but Britten later revealed he had written only the last two movements. It was published as Berkeley's Op. 9 and Britten's Op. 12.[5]
  • In 1953, Lennox Berkeley, Benjamin Britten, Arthur Oldham, Humphrey Searle, Michael Tippett, and William Walton jointly wrote Variations on an Elizabethan Theme. The theme (Sellinger's Round) was arranged by Imogen Holst from a keyboard harmonisation by William Byrd. Each of the composers also quoted briefly from one of their own earlier compositions. At the first two performances, the audience was not told which composer had written which variation, but were invited to take part in a competition to match the variations to the composers, to raise funds for the Aldeburgh Festival.[9][10] Nobody correctly guessed all six composers.

Concertante works

  • In 1833, Felix Mendelssohn and Ignaz Moscheles collaborated on a work for two pianos and orchestra, Fantasy and Variations on the "Gypsy March" from Carl Maria von Weber's 'La Preziosa'. Moscheles later made an arrangement for two pianos alone. The manuscript score of this arrangement, inscribed by both Moscheles and Mendelssohn, was presented by Moscheles's son to Anton Rubinstein, and is in the library of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.
  • Ungarische Zigeunerweisen is a piece for piano and orchestra, dating from 1885. It has a curious and still uncertain origin. The piano part was written either by Sophie Menter or Franz Liszt or possibly both had a hand in it. The piece was orchestrated by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1892, and premiered under his baton in Odessa in 1893, with Sophie Menter as the soloist.

Vocal and choral

  • In the early 1830s, Felix Mendelssohn published two sets of 12 songs each, as Opp. 8 and 9. Three songs in each set were written by his sister Fanny Mendelssohn.[3] While each song was the product of one composer alone, as sets, they were collaborations.
  • In 1840, around the time of their marriage, Robert Schumann and Clara Schumann published a set of 12 songs called Gedichte aus Liebesfruhling (Love's Spring). Clara wrote numbers 2, 4 and 11, while Robert wrote the rest. It was published as Robert's Op. 37, but Clara's songs were also given the opus number 12 in her own catalogue of works.
  • Shortly after Gioachino Rossini's death in November 1868, Giuseppe Verdi decided that a Requiem Mass in his memory would be appropriate. He commissioned 12 composers to write a section each, and together with Verdi's own section, Libera me, the Messa per Rossini would be performed on 13 November 1869, the first anniversary of Rossini's death. The other composers were Antonio Bazzini, Raimondo Boucheron, Antonio Buzzolla, Antonio Cagnoni, Carlo Coccia, Gaetano Gaspari, Teodulo Mabellini, Alessandro Nini, Carlo Pedrotti, Pietro Platania, Federico Ricci, and Lauro Rossi. The performance was cancelled only a few days before it was due to take place. It did not have its premiere until 1988, in Stuttgart. In the meantime, Verdi had taken his Libera me and incorporated it into his Requiem for Alessandro Manzoni, this time a work written by himself alone, which was performed in May 1874, on the first anniversary of Manzoni's death.
  • In 1881, Gabriel Fauré and André Messager collaborated on Messe des pêcheurs de Villerville (Mass of the Fishermen of Villerville). Messager wrote sections 1 and 4 (Kyrie and O Salutaris), and Fauré wrote sections 2, 3 and 5 (Gloria Benedictus, Sanctus and Agnus Dei). The first performance was accompanied by a harmonium and a violin. For the second performance with orchestra the following year, Messager orchestrated the first four sections, and Fauré the last.

Chamber music

  • In 1886, the suite for string quartet, Fridays (Les Vendredis), was written by Nikolai Artsibushev, Borodin, Felix Blumenfeld, Glazunov, Alexander Kopylov, Lyadov, Maximilian D'Osten-Sacken, Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai Sokolov and Joseph Wihtol. Borodin later orchestrated his section as the Scherzo of his Symphony No. 3, which was left unfinished at his death and later completed by Glazunov.[3]
  • In 1887, Glazunov, Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov wrote a string quartet called "Name Day" (Jour de Fete).[3]
  • In 1899, ten Russian composers wrote Variations on a Russian Theme for string quartet. They were Artsibushev, Blumenfeld, Victor Ewald, Glazunov, Lyadov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Scriabin, Sokolov, Wihtol and Alexander Winkler.[3]

Piano solo

  • In 1819, the publisher Anton Diabelli invited a large number of Austrian composers to each write a variation on a little waltz (or ländler) he had composed, to go into an anthology to be called Vaterländischer Künstlerverein, and 51 of them responded. Ludwig van Beethoven composed not one but 33 variations, which were originally published as his Diabelli Variations, Op. 120, and later as Part I of the anthology. Part II comprised the single variations by each of the 50 other composers. These people are mostly now forgotten, but include such names as Carl Czerny, Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt and Johann Nepomuk Hummel. Part II has long since become a musical footnote, while Beethoven's set quickly acquired a life of its own and is considered one of the greatest achievements of the piano literature.
  • In 1900, Felix Blumenfeld, Glazunov, Lyadov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Sokolov, Wihtol and Alexander Winkler wrote Variations on a Russian Theme.[3]

Piano four-hands

  • In c. 1888, remembering their 1883 trip to the Bayreuth Festival to hear Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle, Gabriel Fauré and André Messager wrote a piece for piano four-hands called Souvenir de Bayreuth (subtitled Fantaisie en forme de quadrille sur les thèmes favoris de L'Anneau Du Nibelung de Richard Wagner). It was not published during their lifetimes and appeared in print only in 1930.[16]

Other forms of musical collaboration

Another case of note was that of Eric Fenby, who worked as amanuensis for the blind Frederick Delius. Delius would dictate the notes and Fenby would transcribe them. While Fenby was himself a composer, these works on which he and Delius worked together were a collaboration in terms of the labour involved in writing them down, but not in terms of the musical ideas, which were entirely Delius's own.

Film scores over the years have tended to be collaborative projects in various ways, from the simple matter of orchestrators working with the sketches by the composer, to multi-composer collaborative efforts. Originally, with the studio system, composers often contributed parts of a score assigned by the head of the music department. Sometimes this was music not specific to that film for lower budget movies. In modern times, collaboration is seen in such groups as Remote Control Productions. True collaboration has also occurred, with such varied examples as Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman, who together composed the music for The Egyptian (1954); and Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, who wrote the music for two Batman films, Batman Begins (2005) and The Dark Knight (2008).

Transformations

There are various cases where a later composer has transformed an existing work or group of works into a new form, but this would generally be considered an arrangement by another hand, rather than a collaboration. Examples of this would include:

  • Franz Liszt's many piano arrangements of symphonies and other works by composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert. Liszt was the most prominent of a great number of composers who arranged the works of others for other combinations of instruments.
  • Charles Gounod took the melody line from Johann Sebastian Bach's Prelude No. 1 in C major from Book I of The Well-Tempered Clavier, and added his own harmonies, setting it to the words of the prayer Hail Mary (in Latin, Ave Maria). His setting was called Ave Maria.
  • Edvard Grieg wrote additional piano parts for a number of solo piano sonatas by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, to be played simultaneously with the original music, on piano four-hands. Mozart's original score was untouched. The resultant work is certainly music by both Mozart and Grieg, however they did not collaborate in the ordinary sense of the term, Mozart having died 52 years before Grieg was born.
  • Leopold Godowsky's reworking of Frédéric Chopin's études by playing two études simultaneously, or playing in the left hand the music originally written for the right hand, and vice-versa. (See Studies on Chopin's Études.)
  • Arthur Benjamin took a number of unrelated harpsichord sonatas by Domenico Cimarosa, arranged them for oboe and orchestra, and grouped them into a work he called "Oboe Concerto on Themes of Cimarosa". Concert promoters and record companies often gave it the misleading title "Oboe Concerto by Cimarosa", arr. Benjamin, but in this form it was perhaps more Benjamin's work than Cimarosa's.
  • In a similar but slightly different vein, Alan Kogosowski arranged three solo piano pieces by Frédéric Chopin for piano and orchestra, and grouped them into a work that he himself gave the misleading title "Piano Concerto No. 3 in A major by Chopin".
  • During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, a group of six composers including Yin Chengzong rearranged the Yellow River Cantata by Xian Xinghai into a four-movement piano concerto entitled Yellow River Piano Concerto.

Completions

There are also instances where a work was left unfinished at the composer's death, and was completed by another composer. In such cases, the later composer generally strives to ensure the finished product is as close as possible to the original composer's intentions, as revealed by their notes, rough drafts, or other evidence. One of the best known examples is the completion by Franco Alfano of Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot. There may also be a case for describing Sir Edward Elgar's Symphony No. 3 as a work by both Elgar and Anthony Payne. However, these types of works cannot properly be called collaborations.

References

  1. ^ Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed, 1954: Vol. 1, Bizet, Georges, p. 734
  2. ^ Naxos
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed, 1954
  4. ^ Chester Novello
  5. ^ Music Web International
  6. ^ a b Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 5th ed., 1954: Vol III, Goossens, Eugene (iii), p. 715
  7. ^ Slonimsky, Nicolas (January 1947). Roy Harris. 33. 1 (The Musical Quarterly ed.). 
  8. ^ cocteau, satie & les six
  9. ^ Letters from a life: The selected letters of Benjamin Britten 1913-1976
  10. ^ Britten-Pears Foundation
  11. ^ [1]
  12. ^ Amazon
  13. ^ Seraphim Trio
  14. ^ Google Books
  15. ^ Matthew Quayle
  16. ^ Answers.com

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