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15
Thu
May
2019
19:30
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03
Wed
Jul
2019
19:30 |
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$50 |
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Lecture Hall, Hong Kong Space Museum |
BUY TICKET
Music
“Journey Through Music” Lecture Series: Into Germany (II)
Journey through Music is a musical and cultural tour in chronology of great composers. After highly acclaimed series of Eastern Europe (2014), Russia (2015), France (2017) and Austria (2018), the series returns to Germany, where it began its life back in 2013. Restructured, this series will discover and discuss the rise of German romanticism, and how this process constitutes to what we think and experience music as it is nowadays.
(Conducted in Cantonese and free seating)
15 May 2019 (Wed)
1st Lecture: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)
Considered paramount as the “father of music”, the personal life of Johann Sebastian Bach was shrouded in relative mystery. We knew the life of Bach only through official letters he wrote to the city, the records at the church, and, most importantly, the obituary written by his son. We never know from first person how he thought about music nor how he felt. However, his posthumous fame transcended a mere craftsman of the arts of keyboard with renewed insights. We will look at the reasons why Bach, who has never left Germany as we know today, is considered the beginning of music, and how it becomes so.
22 May 2019 (Wed)
2nd Lecture: Georg Friederich Händel (1685–1759)
Although born a German, Georg Friedreich Händel gained his everlasting fame first in England writing Italian operas. Many of his operas expired after their usual lifespan, as most operas did in his era; some of his works defies oblivion, and were continuously performed in England after his death, albeit under the banner of “old music”. Unlike Bach’s music, Händel’s saw no interruption through history. He succeeded not only as a composer, but also an opera impresario, an entrepreneur and a musician who annointed music with a universal character.
29 May 2019 (Wed)
3rd Lecture: Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827)
He was a well-known supporter of Napoleon of France; he was a musician resisting patronage from the wealthy and brought music to the public with his own might. The image of a fiery Beethoven, a revolutionary individual forging a new path to music, is often enhanced through the stories of personal struggle, with family, lovers, fate, and himself. Many of his works, particularly the late ones, were considered not performable some time after his death. However, his visionary will find audience in the century to come, and his shadow will cast over all the composers in perpetuity.
5 Jun 2019 (Wed)
4th Lecture: Carl Maria von Weber (1786–1826)
Before he was arrested and thrown into prison for embezzlement from the brother of King of Württemberg in 1810, Carl Maria von Weber has been a successful pianist and composer, having traveled to cities near and far. With indictments against him and his father, Weber was tried by the king, found guilty, banished for life from the realm of Württemberg, and penniless. He would find a new life elsewhere, through sharing his views on music in societies, and through producing operas that were essentially German. With the success of Der Freischütz, Weber has become the torchbearer of the search for German romanticism.
5th and 6th Lectures: Richard Wagner (1813–1883)
12 Jun 2019 (Wed)
The Road to Bayreuth
Richard Wagner took up the post of Kapellmeister in Dresden in 1843 at the King of Saxony’s court, and left for Zürich in 1849, with a warrant of his arrest. That was a tumultuous time of insurrection; courts would fall, demand of democracy ran high. However, Wagner’s support of revolution was not purely political; he wrote of arts, being the noblest of human activities, should be liberated from profit-making, so that it could encapsulate the essence of humanity. He would live a life work that out, with his ideal and his epic music.
19 Jun 2019 (Wed)
The Ring, and the Idea of Gesamtkunstwerk
Richard Wagner dreamed of a festival house performing his music dramas, a genre where music and text comes together in equal status, where the public could enjoy the greatest work of arts free of charge. Most of these were realised in his lifetime. Bayreuth would see his genre a new type of opera house built specifically to his specification; cycles of music dramas would emerge, overpowering operas as we know; and new vehicle of musical expression and construction of large-scale work would be known as “total work of art”. With that, the public were frenzied to get a place in the audience, to unpack the complexity of Wagner the genius, with money well spent up to this day.
26 Jun 2019 (Wed)
7th Lecture: Gustav Mahler (1860–1911)
“A Bohemian born amongst Austrians, an Austrian amongst Germans, and a Jew throughout the world”, Gustav Mahler said he was three-times homeless. The German-speaking lands were also having a complex struggle over their identity. Mahler’s music was, in one way or another, trying to answer questions that were larger than the land and the life of the people living on it. The inner journey into Mahler’s psycho, an abyss of identity, ecstasy, profanity and self-prophecy, is a reflection of the age that would soon see the world crumbled in ditches.
3 Jul 2019 (Wed)
8th Lecture: Richard Strauss (1864–1949)
When Richard Strauss completed the somewhat autobiographical Ein Heldenleben, he would not have thought this hero would still have half a decade to live, to wearily witness the world war, to see the rise of the Nazi, and to suffer yet another world war. His international fame came early, through first symphonic poems and then operas. There was no shortage of consummately beautiful yet harmonically refreshing music, yet the meaning of his music, extending what Wagner has done, is buried deep under the surface. With his peaceful death, the age of German romanticism went along.
(Information provided by the speaker.)
Each lecture will run for about 1 hour and 30 minutes.
The programme does not represent the views of the Leisure and Cultural Services Department.
The presenter reserves the right to change the programme and substitute speaker.
TICKETING
DATE VENUE PRICE 15.05.2019 - 03.07.2019
(Every Wed, 7:30pm, 8 lectures in total)
(Every Wed, 7:30pm, 8 lectures in total)
Lecture Hall, Hong Kong Space Museum
$50
DATE15.05.2019 - 03.07.2019
(Every Wed, 7:30pm, 8 lectures in total)
(Every Wed, 7:30pm, 8 lectures in total)
PRICE
$50