MENUET from Suite Bergamasque by Claude Achille Debussy (1862-1918) Debussy was a Frenchman groomed by his father for a career in the French navy. Thanks to his musical godmother, Mme. Roustan, he started to take piano lessons when he was seven and progressed so well that he entered the Conservatoire in Paris when he was eleven. He remained at the Conservatoire for eleven contentious years. He obtained the highest honour in the Conservatoire's gift, the Grand Prix de Rome in 1884, with a cantata, L'Enfant Prodigue (The Prodigal Son). The Suite Bergamasque was composed in 1890 and published in 1905. The four movements are Prelude, Menuet (usually a slow dance in 3/4 time), Clair de lune, (one of Debussy's most popular and well-known pieces and his first example of Impressionistic Piano music), and Passepied. The bergamasque originated in the region of Bergamo, in northern Italy. "Bergamasque" implies the use of outlandish attire and clown costumes. Debussy uses the form of the baroque or classical suite (an instrumental composition consisting of a succession of short pieces forming a longer composition), in which Clair de lune takes the place of an aria or one of the slower dance forms. This Menuet is not for dancing as we know it, but is more free and imaginative, containing fresh and original rhythms and harmonies. The rhythms and harmonies that Debussy wrote come alive with the added rhythms and instrumentation on Classical Spice. You can almost see the costumes and dancing when playing through the menuet.

The tempo marking is in 3/4, but the arrangement on Classical Spice uses 6 pulses per measure (you can count it 1+2+3+), as you can hear in the drum loop introduction. Notice the contrast in the legato passages (smooth) and staccato (sharp and detached) and how they alternate quickly and help to create the playful mood. The main theme that you hear at the beginning of the menuet runs throughout the whole piece, a masterful characteristic of classical music. This theme connects even the larger, grander section at the key change. The menuet ends playfully with a quiet glissando (where a finger slides up the keyboard from one note to another) to a single quiet note, octaves apart.

FUER ELISE by Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany, the son of a singer (tenor). Before he was four, his father started to teach him to play the violin and piano. Ludwig could not remember the time when his father was not standing over him with a cane to rap his knuckles when he made a mistake. He made his debut as a piano virtuoso at the age of eleven and soon made a name for himself. Not until he was twenty-two and had moved to Vienna to study with Haydn (the famous Viennese composer), did his career as a composer get under way. He was hired by Prince and Princess Lichnowsky of Vienna, with an annual income and instruments to use for playing and composing. He would dress carelessly, come to meals late or not at all, would leave the piano in a huff if anyone talked while he played, and was quite sensitive to criticism. But his music made up for all shortcomings. By the time he was thirty-one, publishers were vying for his works. At thirty-one, another major event happened to Beethoven. He became painfully aware that he was growing deaf. He went through some major depression with this realization. He did not become totally deaf until his fiftieth year, but after 1804, (34 years old), the buzzing in his ears grew progressively worse. Even though he could not hear the music with his ears, he could hear it in his mind. In fact, it is remarkable that he composed some of his greatest works after becoming totally deaf.

Beethoven would write the music right on paper as he heard it in his head, then he would perfect every measure, sitting at his messy desk. There are those who believe that it is because of Beethoven's deafness that his genius burned so intensely and that he became a massive link between the Classic and the Romantic period composers.

Fuer Elise is a Bagatelle (a short piece of music written in a light, airy style), written in 1810. It has the very familiar 1/2 step, (the closest distance between two notes on a piano), turn at the beginning of the main theme that runs throughout the piece. The A (main) theme occurs three times and two other sections (B and C), alternate between the A themes to make an ABACA form.

SARABANDE by George Frederich Handel (1685-1759) Handel was born in the same year as Johann Sebastian Bach to unmusical parents in Germany. His father desired for him to be a lawyer, but from the age of seven, he had taught himself to play the harpsichord (ancestor of the piano), practicing on an instrument smuggled into the attic. When his father took him on a visit to a nobleman, the nobleman persuaded his father to give him lessons. Handel then learned to play the violin, oboe, harpsichord and organ and also studied harmony, counterpoint and composition. When his father died, he dropped law and accepted a position as an organist in a church in Dom.

Handel went on to compose many operas (a musical drama where the story is completely sung with acting and props), and oratorios (a musical composition with a sacred theme with no action or scenery), with one of his most famous oratorios being Messiah. At the rousing Hallelujah Chorus, audiences rise spontaneously to their feet today as they did at the first London performance. It all started when King George II of England stood at a performance and in all due respect, the whole audience rose when the king stood. The tradition has lasted to this day. For the last seven years of his life, Handel was blind. But he continued to play the organ and conduct until his death.

The Sarabande is a Spanish Dance and is originally just a page long and in the time signature of 3/2 (3 beats to a measure, 1/2 note gets one beat). It is arranged on Classical Spice to focus on it's Spanish theme and uses the instrumentation of mandolin, castanets and trumpet to do so. The time signature also changes several times from 3/2 to 9/8, then 7/8, 6/8, then finally back to the 3/2 as it was in the beginning. Time signature changes can help make a piece more exciting and interesting by making it feel faster or slower as the piece progresses. As you listen to the Sarabande, see if you can feel the changes in mood between the sections. The melody and basic harmony remains the same throughout the arrangement (you can almost sing along), even though there are a lot of notes added with each section!

THE SWAN (Le Cygne) by Charles Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921) Saint-Saens was a French composer, organist and pianist. He started composing by the age of seven and started performing before an audience at ten. In 1852, when he was seventeen, he entered the competition for the Prix de Rome, and lost. But the same year, his composition for voice and orchestra won first prize in Paris. In the early years of his career, he composed constantly and achieved fame as a virtuoso (one who has mastered his instrument).

Saint-Saens composed piano and organ music, symphonies (for large orchestra groups), chamber music (for small orchestral groups), cantatas (a piece for choir with some drama), oratorios, songs and choral works, operas, a ballet (a dance that tells a story in pantomime), and arrangements. He also wrote a book of poems and various papers on scientific topics.

The Swan is from the Carnival of The Animals, a Suite of short pieces (14 in all), for small orchestra, written in 1886 as a musical joke. After the first performance at a Paris carnival, Saint-Saens put the Suite in a drawer and forbade it's further performances. Because he was an accomplished musician and composer, he felt this piece would give a comic view of his writing. The Swan (Le Cyne in French) is the most elegant of the pieces. If you use your imagination, you can hear the water flowing with the running sixteenth note arpeggios, (notes running up and down on chord tones), and the swan gracefully gliding with the beautiful theme that was originally written for a cello.

SPRING (La Primavera) from the Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi (1675-1741) Vivaldi was born in Italy, the son of a violinist. Not much is known of his early years. He studied the violin with his father and became an outstanding virtuoso on that instrument. Vivaldi not only influenced the great Johann Sebastian Bach, but he composed notable concertos for stringed instruments. In fact, he was better known as a composer than Bach in his own day. But his forty operas are never sung, his hundred or more religious works are seldom played. But some of the hundreds of concertos (an elaborate composition with orchestra and one or more solo instruments), for stringed instruments and sonatas (a piano or other solo instrumental piece with several movements), have received fine performances and are popular listening even today. Vivaldi was employed by both the court (by a prince), and by the church (he became a priest and music director).

Spring is a movement in a larger work called the Four Seasons, which was a hit in 18th century Venice during Vivaldi's lifetime, then fell into obscurity before it's revival just 40 or 50 years ago. The Four Seasons covers Spring (the first movement), Summer, Autumn, and Winter and is a set of four violin concertos, each with three movements. The arrangement of Spring included on Classical Spice uses the piano as the main melodic instrument, then uses the string orchestra and added rhythms for accompaniment. Spring is a very popular piece and you may have heard it on TV on one of many car commercials.

WALTZ in A Flat, Op.39, no.15 by Johnannes Brahms (1833-1897) Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany, the son of a double bass player. His father instructed him at first and by the age of ten, Brahms had already made his debut as a pianist. Bach and Beethoven were the composers on whom he modeled his style, but he also played in the local taverns for the entertainment of sailors and their friends. He became great friends with Robert and Clara Schumann, other great musicians of his time. As he grew older, he performed less and less in public and devoted most of his time to composition.

Brahms knew that he was at his best when he was working at a leisurely pace in his simple bachelor's quarters, alone. He rose every day at 5 A.M., prepared his own coffee because nobody else brewed it strong enough to suit him, and set to work. Brahms was a painstaking composer, who worked over and over his pieces before he pronounced them finished. It was ten years from the time he started to write his First Symphony to the day when he allowed it to be published.

Brahms has often been painted seated at a piano, a bulky figure with a flowing beard. As a pianist, he was described as a fluent and brilliant performer. The Waltz in A Flat, included on Classical Spice, written in 1865, was with a group of waltzes (a dance in 3/4 time), first written for four hands (two players), then for two hands (one player). The form is ABABA, with the main theme (A) repeated three times. On Classical Spice, a Bolero style (a type of Spanish dance), accompaniment is combined with the waltz, as the waltz and bolero have similar time signatures (3/4) and merge together extraodinarily. Brahms uses full chords (groups of notes played together), in his writing with many doublings in notes. Having a chordal melody, most often in thirds or sixths, is a common characteristic of his music. The Waltz in A Flat starts with the melody in sixths, then uses thirds and full chords in the rest of the piece to make the piano almost sound like the full orchestra by itself. (Compare this with the single-note melody Beethoven uses at the beginning of Fuer Elise, making it a light, airy piece).

RONDEAU from Sinfonies De Fanfares (Premiere Suite, 1st movement) by Jean Joseph Mouret (1682-1738) Mouret was a French composer of ballets, operas and instrumental works. He was in the service of the Duchess of Maine in Paris from about 1707 and composed his first ballets in 1714. This Rondeau was written by Mouret for the court of Louis XV, King of France, in his Symphonies and Fanfares for the King's supper. Today, it is best known for it's use as the theme for the Masterpiece Theatre, a popular British-made educational television series that first debuted January 10,1971 and still runs today.

The Rondeau is an excellent example of an early rondo form (RARBR, where R appears at least three times). R is the main theme that is repeated between the A and B sections. This is very similar to the ABACA form. The martial (military) character of the Rondeau is acheived through the use of trumpet and timpani in the original manuscript

ALLEGRO MAESTOSO (Water Music) by George Frederich Handel (1685-1759) (his biography is under the Sarabande) Allegro Maestoso is a movement from Handel's Water Music, which he wrote in 1717. The Water Music consists of three suites for orchestra, 20 or so pieces in all, and the Allegro Maestoso, or the "Alle Hornpipe", as it is called, is from Suite II in D Major.

The Water Music was first performed with fifty instrumentalists playing from a city company barge (large flat-bottomed boat), accompanying the King's royal barge and other rivercraft up the Thames river from Whitehall to Chelsea. The King enjoyed the music so much that he had the entire composition played twice before and once after supper. The original orchestration alternates two horn fanfares (a trumpet "call"), with strings. You may have heard this piece in the movie Dead Poets Society.

PRELUDE in C by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) Bach's parents died when he was young and there was very little money. He received his earliest piano instruction from his brother. He was refused permission to play a group of German piano pieces, so he copied the whole volume at moonlight in a six month time period in the attic. This achievement illustrates a habit which accompanied him through life. It ruined his eyesight, but he was very careful with form and detail in all his compositions. JS Bach was not famous for his composing during his lifetime, but he was the greatest organist of his time. He also wrote almost all sacred (religious) music, working mostly as a church musician. Other compositions he wrote on his time off, or in his free time, of which he had very little.

At twenty-two, he married his cousin , Maria Barbara Bach, and lived in Weimar, working for a Duke as an organist. Maria died in 1721 and he remarried Anna Maddalena. He had twenty children in all. He was a prolific writer (as well as a father!), writing a different piece for each week of events for churches where he was employed. Music was not kept as it is now. Once it was played, many times, it was discarded, therefore losing many of the precious manuscripts of great works. In fact, many of Bach's manuscripts were used as fish wrappings! But if you were to study all of the pieces we have from JS Bach today, (and we only have a fraction of what he really wrote), it would more than fill a lifetime of study. His genius is shown in the details of form (pattern of his pieces) and his fugues (where one or more melodies are repeated in many different ways). When you analyze how he uses a main theme with three to five parts going at the same time, in different directions, you can get a glimpse of his genius. Due to the great amount of work he had been doing, Bach became totally blind in 1749. He died shortly after. When Bach died, so did the Baroque era.

The Prelude in C is taken from a collection called the Well-tempered Clavier, two volumes of 24 preludes and fugues in each for the piano. They are a tremendous study in form and technique and are included in the repertoire of most pianists. The Prelude in C has so much rhythmic energy (driving repetition of a rhythmic pattern), and is very conducive to an added rhythm section behind the piano. It was fun going from the major key in the Prelude to the minor key in the Solfeggietto, then back to the major key in the Prelude, as the pieces are arranged in Classical Spice.

SOLFEGGIETTO by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) Carl Philipp was the second son of Johann Sebastian and Maria Barbara Bach. He did not follow closely in his father's footsteps in his writing style, but did become the mentor of Haydn and Mozart (other great Classical composers), as was Beethoven, His art songs became the inspiration of Schubert (also a great writer of art songs). CPE Bach was a tremendous pianist, especially in improvisation (making up music as you go along). He wrote nearly 700 vocal and instrumental compositions.

The Solfeggietto is a very popular piece among musicians. Not only do pianists like to perform the running sixteenth note arpeggiated and scale passages, but also many guitarists and vocalists. It is a fun, fast piece that demonstrates how good Carl Philipp must have been as a pianist. The sixteenth note pattern of the Solfeggietto matches the rhythmic patterns of the Prelude in C by JS Bach, thus the joining together of the two pieces work remarkably well in Classical Spice.

JESU JOY OF MAN'S DESIRING, from Cantata #147 by Johann Sebastian Bach (his biography under the Prelude) This piece is the final choral section from one of Bach's 200-plus cantatas (a piece for choir with some drama). When he was writing a cantata a week, Bach would start on Monday, composing and copying all instrumental parts for four days. The first rehearsal would be on Saturday and the performance would be at 8 A.M. on Sundays at church. He did four complete cycles of 52 weeks like this, and probably more. Bach's cantatas are an incredible collection of great music that have attracted many great musical minds. The average cantata is about 30 minutes long and would be included with many other musical pieces, as church services many times would last all day. Women were not allowed to sing in church, so boy sopranos were used for the high parts. Jesu Joy was first performed July 2, 1723. This is a very popular piece and is performed today with almost any instrument of the orchestra for weddings and other special events.

ROMEO and JULIET by Peter Ilyich Tschaikovsky (1840-1893) Born in Russia to a nonmusical family. He was not encouraged in his musical education, but took piano lessons along with his schooling. He was described as a "porcelain child" by his first governess, sensitive and charming, but fragile. At nineteen, he became a clerk, but continued his music education in a chorus class and piano lessons. At twenty, he composed waltzes and polkas,(dances), which he did not write down, but started realizing that he had chosen the wrong career. He decided to no longer be a clerk but a musician in 1863 (23 years old). He found quickly that it was hard to exist as a musician and took on some private students while continuing to write and study. He suffered the first of many nervous breakdowns when his his First Symphony, which he had labored with passionate intensity, was denied a performance.

He became engaged to an opera singer who ended up marrying someone else and the yearning Juliet theme of the Romeo and Juliet Overture, composed at this time, may have been inspired by this passing affair. When he was thirty-four, a psychopathic young woman proposed that he marry her. She went so far as to threaten suicide if he refused. To save her life he gallantly assented, but after two weeks of marriage it was he who tried to commit suicide by standing immersed to his neck in the icy waters of the Neva river, hoping to catch pneumonia.

Tschaikovsky was perhaps the greatest symphonist after Beethoven, and certainly the most popular. He was considered by many to be the most expressive Romantic composer that Russia produced, as he produced some of the most passionate music. He wrote the famous Nutcracker Suite (ballet) that we see and hear so much at the holiday season. The Romeo and Juliet Overture was written in 1869. The version you are hearing on Classical Spice is a reduction of the complete orchestral score for piano, but an arrangement where you can hear the beautiful, haunting melody Tschaikovsky wrote. The Romeo and Juliet Overture has also played in several movies, including Wayne's World.

RONDO CAPRICCIOSO by Felix Bartholdy Mendelssohn (1809-1847) Mendelssohn was born in Germany to a wealthy family. He seemed to have a lot going for him: looks, intelligence, sensitivity and loads of talent. His training was strict and he once said that he and his brother and sisters loved Sundays because on that day they did not have to get up to study at five in the morning! Felix played his first piano concert at nine, composed prolifically from the age of ten, and by the age of thirteen, was ready to conduct the Sunday morning musicals that were the delight of his youth. In the garden of their home on the outskirts of Berlin, friends, neighbors and musicians gathered to hear Felix play the piano, the viola, or the organ, and conduct his orchestra of brother, sisters and friends. He played his own compositions, too The fairy strains of the Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, which he composed at seventeen, were first heard at one of these home concerts.

Mendelssohn organized and became the director of the first German Conservatory of Music in Leipzig. He taught there himself and attracted to it a brilliant teaching staff. Besides teaching, he traveled frequently to give concerts and conduct the court orchestras.

In perpetuating the ideals of Bach and Mozart, in encouraging the composers of his day and performing their music and in reviving neglected composers of the past, Mendelssohn did music a great service. The effortless flow, the glow and sparkle and delicacy and sweetness, the singing melodies, and fluency and polish of his own music are universally appealing. The Rondo Capriccioso is a character piece, a piece of keyboard music without any distinctive form or trait, and is very popular among most intermediate to advanced piano students. It starts with a very slow, expressive beginning, then bursts into Mendelssohn's typical scherzo style; it's light and fast, evenly moving and staccato (sharp, detached notes). There are sharp accents (emphasis on a certain note, chord or beat), on the off-beats and a very light texture. It is a beautiful, magnificent piece and the Fantasia-type arrangement on Classical Spice accentuates the staccato passages and the accents of the bass notes, contrasted with the smooth, almost orchestral sections. The Rondo Capriccioso is truly a piece that shows off the virtuosity of the pianist and shows us what a great pianist Mendelssohn must have been.