“Water Works” from four centuries

“Water Works” from four centuries – composers have dealt over and over again and extremely diversely with the “melancholy element.”

It has become a stylistic and colorful technical scoring configuration, even though a “Sea Symphony” is missing in our catalogue, and we have unfortunately not published the “14 ways of describing rain” in all the many Eisler works. The selection criterion was: the pieces must be nonspecific, so that they open a lot of room for fantasy, i.e., the “Moldau” and the “beautiful blue Danube” had to remain outside – in favor of the wide, wide sea and flowing material in general. Twice out of volume 2-2018 of our “Up to date” brochure, incidentally, we have bailed out the motivation for our topic. Firstly, of course, and above all, from the new ARGO opera, secondly, also from the river of the dead, charged in Sibelius’s Lemminkäinen with portentous meaning.

Vocal Works

Ludwig van Beethoven: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage op. 112 (1815)

Franz Schubert: Gesang der Geister über den Wassern D 714 (1821)

Jean-Louis Nicodé: The Sea op. 31 (1888)

Hanns Eisler: Die Ballade vom Wasserrad (1934) from: Roundheads and Peakheads Op. 45

Concert Pedagogy

Philipp Mathias Kaufmann: Fisch und Vogel (2009)

Orchestral Works

Georg Friedrich Händel: Water Music in F major HWV 348-350 (1715/1717/1736)

Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy: Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage MWV P 5 Op. 27 - Overture (1828)

Paul Gilson: La Mer (1892)

Claude Debussy: La Mer (1904/05)