Castelnuovo-Tedesco was first introduced to the piano by his mother, and he composed his first pieces when he was just 9 years old. The resprected Italian composer and teacher, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, was descended from a prominent banking family that had lived in Florence since the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. In his inventions Castelnuovo-Tedesco demonstrates “ancient” erudition and rigour, while also succeeding in dressing his counterpoints with ever-modern musical content.Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (Composer, Arranger) There is then the relatively large group of fugues constructed on a dance movement: gigue (Fugue II in D major), bourrée (Fugue IV in E major and Fugue XVII in B major), minuet (Fugue XIII in G major) and gavotte (Fugue XV in A major).
While some of the subjects, owing to their very incisive rhythmic and melodic characteristics, are immediately impressed on the memory of the listener, others – perhaps less immediate – lend themselves to more abstract and audacious musical constructions, in particular those in which the chromatic progress favours a greater ambiguity of tone and a continual play of modulations (as for example Fugue VI in F sharp major, Fugue IX in E flat minor and Fugue XI in F minor). The fugues can develop a thematic idea already proposed in the prelude (as in V, VII, VIII, XIV, XIX, XX, XXII, XXIII and XXIV), or can be inspired by a completely autonomous and original idea. They echo with heterogeneous musical references (from Beethoven to Smetana, from Gershwin to Pizzetti’s “Rapsodia di settembre”), and refined literary allusions (the homage to Walt Whitman in Prelude XV, with the quotation of “I hear America singing” from “Leaves of Grass”, or the double literary citation “embedded” in Browning’s epigraph, with a “Tempo di Siciliana” which celebrates the Siceliot poet Theocritus in Prelude XXI) and also we find there is room for onomatopoeic games (“le coucou” and “le roisseau” in Fugue XXI), self-citations (allusion to a minute fragment of “Romancero Gitano” in Fugue VI), internal references (in Fugue XVI there is an anticipation of the idea which will be the cornerstone of Prelude XVII). 87 by Shostakovich, where the major keys – starting from that of C – are certainly organised according to the cycle of ascending fifths, but always coupled with their respective minor key.įrom the formal point of view, Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s preludes and fugues are diptychs with a light and flexible structure, used from time to time as containers of ideas and melodic-rhythmic gestures, as a vehicle for musical homages, as a starting point for elegant assumptions of style. 28 by Chopin or the 24 Preludes and Fugues Op.
#Romancero gitano tedesco pdf series
The series of keys moves forward in ascending fifth intervals, stating from G minor and alternating rigorously between preludes and fugues in a minor key and preludes and fugues in a major key: a different and original solution from the “Well-Tempered Clavier” (in which the progression of the keys takes place by ascending semitones) and texts like the 24 Preludes Op. For an instrument that rarely and reluctantly departs from the close context of the usual keys, it was an ambitious challenge, taken up by the composer who in his youth, as an enthusiastic composition student of Ildebrando Pizzetti, had set himself the task of writing three hundred and sixty-five fugues in a year – one a day – with the purpose of perfecting his command of counterpoint.
Similarly to the two books of the Bach model of reference (“The Well-Tempered Clavier”), the twenty-four preludes and fugues of the “guitares bien tempérées” are written in all the major and minor keys.
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