The Schumanns are probably the most famous pair of married composers, and most definitely the sappiest. Romantic sensibilities simply drip from nearly every note they wrote. Robert‘s sappy high-point is probably Dichterliebe (poet’s love); Clara‘s might be her Three Romances for Violin & Piano.

Clara was an all-around musical powerhouse with an extensive performing career and a long list of compositions to boot. Thanks to good-old-fashioned-19th-century sexism (not to mention the 20th and 21st centuries), her music is overshadowed by her husband’s – though I would argue that only an expert could pass the “pepsi challenge” and tell their music apart. Even more unfortunate is the fact that her music is overshadowed by inferior male composers of her time (Jacques Offenbach, for example, was born the same year as Clara …)

I occasionally play organ music to accompany silent films (and did so at a concert yesterday evening). When I do this, I like to steal borrow melodies from other composers. One of the pieces I used last night was Csárdás – though I admit that I knew nothing about the piece or its composer. (I’ll never forget the first time I heard it, though, under a funny circumstance***).

So here it is: Vittorio Monti‘s only lasting contribution to the Art Music world – but it’s a good one!

*** The funny circumstance: I was teaching at a university, and giving a final exam in Music Theory. The students were silent, hard at work, concentrating deeply. Suddenly, music broke out from the practice room next door – it was a marimba playing the fast section of Csárdás. The music can be a bit silly to begin with, and having it break the solemn silence of an exam made all the students’ heads pop up, eyes wide open – and then we all had a good laugh. I guess you had to be there.

And so here is your obligatory summer piece, titled (what else) “Summer”, by Antonio Vivaldi.

Vivaldi wrote 500 concertos, though musicians will say that he actually wrote the same concerto 500 times. Most of these concertos are given really interesting titles – for example, “Violin Concerto in D” or “Violin Concerto in E” or maybe even “Violin Concerto in F.” In a sea of compositions with very similar names, four of his concertos stand out above the rest (not surprisingly) because they bear a title that suggests something extra-musical. The Four Seasons (having nothing to do with Franki Valli) are four Baroque concertos that musically capture the spirit of the respective times of year – Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. This sort of use of extra-musical influences is known as Program Music, and is commonplace nowadays. If a composer today wrote a piece called “A Cold Winter’s Day” or “The Ice Storm”, we wouldn’t think twice about it; in fact, we would probably begin making assumptions as to how the piece would sound, built on the musical ideas handed down through generations of wintery composers. But in 1720, for Vivaldi to write a Concerto that captures the spirit of summer AND to title it “Summer” was out of the ordinary.