Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Why were so many of the great composers from Germany/Austria?

Is that the one containing the superb Gavotte with variations?

Nothing boring there, rather difficult too. Sometime you must compare a Rameau score with Alkan. The appearance on the printed page is oddly similar. Deep in the crypts of libraries do epiphanies arise...

Sammartini, now there's your man!

btb your post is hard to follow!

That's 'cause his native tongue's Xhosa.

btb, you're precious. But let us also not forget Cole Porter. When this debonair (no other word for him, really) man met Rodgers and Hammerstein, he simply asked: 'So it takes two of you guys to write a song?'

Eh, Ivor Novello and Noel Coward, I wish I could love them like I do the best of the Americans. We're not talking the likes of Elgar, you know? Dowdy Brits, but prepare to swoon. Did you see that great film 'Gosford Park'?. It featured a delicious tune by Novello. Sorry, I just wept, and good grief, it's gorgeous.

Yeah, yeah... English legacy be damned. After the long dark winter of the hopeless Victorian Anglicans, Oxbridge suddenly came alive with new and fresh settings of the Anglican canticles. How exciting can this be? Then think of Stanley Vann at Peterborough, Herbert Sumsion at Gloucester, Francis Jackson at York Minster...

Hi Kingy,

Glad you approved of Sammartini ... but did you know that there were two of the blighters ... Milan-born eldest brother Giuseppe forsook the good Italian weather to spend a good deal of his life beside the Thames in London ... where he
developed a taste for traditional fish and chips (wrapped of course in the Sunday Times) ... the chappie is reputed to have been the greatest hautboy (hautbois) player (type of high-oboe)
ever heard up to his day ... (apparently also an “active and reputable composer.”)

Just thought you ought to know about this once Londoner.

PS Fan gives every indication of needing to get out more and play golf ... he's getting his Anglican canticles into a bit of a knot.

I mean his younger brother Giovanni-Battista, teacher of Gluck and JC Bach, who more-or-less invented the symphony. He never left Milan.

Ham DIY artist (that's me) "more-or-less" fixed my darn lawn-mower ... but the grass laughs at my blundering endeavours (lucky for you, you don't boast a lawn) ... next you'll be saying that Giovanni-Battista's symphonies could well sound like my beat-up mower ... but, if the younger brother was smart, he'd have sensibly got famous in the Milanese fashion industry.

But imagine being remembered for giving lessons to the chappie (Gluck) who wrote forty five operas, four ballets, nine symphonies and seven sonatas for two violins and bass ... and end up sadly, a forgotten man ... the mind boggles!

And neither in my 1878 Groves! "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" or not as the case may be. Still, I'm sure good ol' Percy'll give 'em an'earin'.

Why are there so many more great cricket players in Pakistan than in U.S.? Why was Adolph Hitler so popular in Germany but not the U.S. or Israel? My point is I think we can all agree that it's cultural.

Jeez a lot of people here have a pretty provincial outlook... I hear implications of cultural resentment in several people's posts here.

The best way to avoid this I think is to imagine that you spent half of your childhood in any country you notice that you seem to have an aversion to or dislike of.

When you grow up in a place you understand how people there are diverse. Even imagining growing up there helps to stop prejudice, at least in my own experience.

Actually it's funny to me that no one thought of the more contemporary example of so many great rock bands coming from the UK, or so many great rap artists from the US, etc.

Right time, right place. Everything clicks together just the right way.

With communication back then, doesn't it make sense that things would develop in one area?