Messa di Gloria Renowned as the composer of such operas as La Boheme, Tosca and Madame Butterfly,Giacomo Puccini began his musical career in the composition of church music. Messa di Gloria was written by Puccini at the age of 18 as his graduation thesis from the Institute Musicale of Lucca, Italy. It was also his…

Lord Nelson Mass Franz Josef Haydn’s enormously productive, 54-year composing career was also enormously diversified. “Papa Haydn”, as his friend and protege Mozart called him, `fathered’ the symphony and the string quartet, though he originated neither, in the sense of expanding these relatively new forms to full flower. Notwithstanding his contributions to those genres, he…

Israel in Egypt Handel. George Frideric Handel was born in 1685, at Halle, in the central part of what recently was East Germany. He was almost exactly contemporaneous with Johann Sebastian Bach, born at Eisenach, Thuringia, about 120 miles southwest. Both men were deposited into a fragmented, economically depressed and depopulated region: With the collapse…

Hodie Christus Natus Est Giovanni Gabrieli (ca.1555-1612) was born in Venice and instructed in music by his uncle, Andrea Gabrieli, an organist at St. Mark’s Cathedral. Giovanni eventually became an organist at St. Mark’s. As a composer, he was considered the greatest of the Venetian Masters. The use of cori spezzati(divided choirs) was frequent at…

Fauré Requiem and Cantique de Jean Racine. ABOUT THE COMPOSER Gabriel-Urbain Fauré (1845-1924) figured prominently in the upheaval which took place in French music from the late 1800’s into this century. Educated as an organist, his teachers included Niedermeyer and Saint-Saens, and he served several churches including the Madeleine Church in Paris, where he was…

Elijah 1. The Composer and His Work Felix Mendelssohn was born Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn and given the additional surname of Bartholdy when his family converted from Judaism to Christianity– a move motivated by his parents’ desire to spare the children from the rife anti- Semitism of 19th-century Berlin, rather than by some discovery of…

Day-Spring A Christmas Cantata based on Early American Hymns Alice Parker is probably best known to followers of choral music as the person who arranged music for many of the works performed by the Robert Shaw chorus. Many of those arrangements are now standard arrangements for choruses all over the world. She is a composer…

King David A Symphonic Psalm in three parts based on a drama by Rene Morax ABOUT THE COMPOSER: Arthur Honegger was born in Le Havre, France in 1892 and died in 1955 at a time when he was one of the most famous composers in Europe. The son of Protestant Swiss merchants from Zurich, Honegger…

The Creation In August, 1795, London impresario Johann Peter Salomon presented his departing visitor, Josef Haydn– Kapellmeister to the Esterházy family of Eisenstadt, Austria and Esterháza, Hungary — with a potential oratorio libretto describing ” …the Creation of the Earth and Human Kind”. According to Salomon, the libretto had been prepared by one Lidley (of…

Carol Fantasy by John D. Miller John D. Miller was a young choral director at Countryside Community Church in Omaha, Nebraska at the time this Fantasy was conceived. His success at composing and arranging led him to begin doctoral studies at Eastman School of Music, but he died before that dream could be realized. His…