Felix Cherniavsky - Maud Allan's Music Training

Added 18th Mar 2022 by Beth Dobson (Archives and Programming Assistant, DCD) / Last update 18th Mar 2022

Maud Allan 994 51 2008-2-64.jpg
Maud Allan 994 51 2008-2-64.jpg
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Felix Cherniavsky - Maud Allan's Music Training

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Maud Allan Research Collection
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51.2008-2-64
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constantly fluctuating between grim humour and playful serious ness , and I seem to have succeeded . ' The Turandot libretto is an arrangement based on Gozzi , as opposed to Schiller . Here again , we find the same individual combination of seriousness and irony , which is so characteristic of Busoni . Yet another short dramatic libretto , Das Wandbild , was written during the same period as Doctor Faust . Busoni calls it a ' scene ' and a ' pantomime ' . The short text is dedicated to his friend and pupil , Philipp Jarnach , and was set to music by the Swiss composer , Othmar Schoeck . The scene , set in a Parisian antique shop , is disturbed by the sudden appearance of a mime , followed by a priests ' song and a chorus of young girls . There is some thing reminiscent of E. T. A. Hoffmann in the eerie moment , when the picture on the wall springs to life , and a silent dancer emerges from the torn canvas . It is a life - size painting of a girl in Chinese dress with loose , flowing hair . A student - Busoni calls him Novalis - had come into the shop in the Rue Saint Honoré at eight o'clock in the evening with a friend . He falls in love with the picture , almost in the same way that Tamino falls in love with the picture of Pamina . He wants to know , who it is and what it means . He struggles with the centenarian antique dealer who , apparently quite unconcerned , tell him how he frightened his dead daughter by putting on a suit of armour , when she was being difficult . Eventually , Novalis rushes at the picture , and immediately finds himself in the spirit world of the Chinese , where the picture in some magic way belongs . He and the girl fall into one another's arms ; as a symbol of her marriage , her handmaids arrange her hair in a wifely style . The couple are surprised in their wedding embrace by a black giant in golden armour , hung with chains and armed with a hammer . On seeing her changed hair - style , he binds the girl with chans and disappears into th ground with her . Novalis reappears in the shop . The girl in the painting has acquired the other hair stvle . How do you explain that ? ' Novalis snaps at the old man . The answer uncover : a piece of typical Busophis ophy The appearance of a face depends entirely on the person who is looking at it ! Busoni discovered this uncanny story in a collection of Chinese Ghost- and Love - stories that Martin Buber edited and wrote a preface for , in 1918. In June of the same year , he sent the libretto to Othmar Schoeck , with a poem dedicating it to him . Das Wandbild appeared for the first time in July 1918 , in René Schickele's Zürich monthly , Die weissen Blätter . For Othmar Schoeck's musical setting , which had its first performance in Halle in 1921 , Busoni added another song for the old priest , which is reminiscent in every way of the spirit of the Faust libretto . In its extraordinary fantasy ' quality , the combination of the two settings : Paris in 1830 , and a timeless Chinese spirit world ; and finally in the moralizing note of his closing observa tion , the libretto is typical of Busoni's dramatic writing . It is to some extent a synthesis of numerous themes that appear constantly in his operatic work , from the Mächtiger Zauberer and the Brautwahl , through Turandot to Doctor Foust and Arlecchino . During his extensive travels , Busoni spent countless free hours reading . Consequently , it was not unusual for a book to remind him of his own literary projects ; in the course of reading , a plot would occur to him , and he would jot it down , sometimes even work it out to some extent . On one occasion , he even wrote to Gerda from London about a ballet that he planned to write . The date was March 1913. Busoni was spending a lot of time with the dancer , Maud Allan , who had been one of his pupil , in Weimar in 1900. ( * Partly out of kindness , and partly for pleasure ' ) he was working on a scenario for her : ' The idea is to tell the story of a girl in a series of tableaux , suitably entitled The Dance of Life and Death . The stage becomes a music hall ” , in which a Beardsle type scene is enacted -- a Farisian dance hall and then there is a dance with a barrelurgan in the sueets of London ; the final tableau is ( as I see it ) mystical , and is set in a church , in front of a strange altar ; on this altar tands a group , with the cross in the middle , and o the right and left simres a O

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