Waltz (masquerade)
The masquerade waltz is a movement from the incidental music composed by Aram Chatschaturjan for the play Masquerade by the Russian poet and playwright Mikhail Jurjewitsch Lermontow from 1941. It is still part of the repertoire of many large symphony orchestras, who like to play it as an encore. This concert waltz is also often played at large classical balls and festive events .
history
The composer struggled with the commissioned piece, only when the second subject occurred to him, on the sheet music from bar 45, the rest was easy for him. Chatschaturjan wrote the waltz for Nina , the actress Alla Kazanskaya (1920–2008), who said about dance: How beautiful is this new waltz [...] something between sadness and joy gripped my heart.
The premiere of the play and its incidental music took place on the evening of June 21, 1941 in Moscow's Vakhtangov Theater , a few hours before the start of the German-Soviet War . After only a few performances, the theater was hit by a German aerial bomb during a performance, killing actor Vasiliy Kuza . After that, operations had to be stopped.
In 1944 Aram Chatschaturjan arranged five pieces from incidental music for an orchestral suite in which the waltz sounds right at the beginning. The Canadian music journalist Don Anderson writes about the piece: The first movement is a waltz. Its surging rhythms and dark emotional undercurrents show more passion than elegance.
In the film War and Peace by Robert Dornhelm from 2007, the waltz in the ball scene accompanies the dance of Natascha and Andrei in the first part. In 2010 the Japanese figure skater Mao Asada won the silver medal at the Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver with her performance to the music of the waltz.
Musical structure and instrumentation
The waltz is written in the key of A minor . The composer specifies a tempo di valse as a measure of time for the composition , so the playing time is between three and a half and four minutes, depending on the interpretation. Like most danceable waltzes, this one is kept in 3/4 time and creates a rhythmic tension with effective delays . The tone strength is consistently forte . The introduction consists of 12 bars, the following first theme sounds over 28 bars. After a repetition, the second theme appears with 16 bars, which is also repeated. After a transition in nine bars, the waltz returns to the first theme (41 bars).
Khachaturian looks for the waltz Instrumentation two flutes , piccolos , oboes , clarinets , bassoons , four horns , two trumpets , three trombones , a tuba , timpani, percussion and a string section before.
Audio sample
Individual evidence
- ↑ Victor Yuzefovich: Aram Chatschaturjan . Translation by Nicholas Kournokoff and Vladimir Bobrov. New York, Sphinx Press, 1985. ISBN 0-943-07100-3 , p. 78
- ^ Website of the Vakhtangov Theater with the story of the play (accessed November 27, 2015)
- ↑ Toronto Symphony Orchestra website (accessed November 17, 2015) ( Memento of the original from December 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ YouTube video with a film sequence showing the dance
- ↑ Mao Asada won the silver medal in Vancouver in 2010
