Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall - Photo By Roger Mastroianni
There is truly something for absolutely everyone in classical music. Whether you're looking for wit or romance, relaxation or rejuvenation, music to soothe or to fire up your own imagination--it's all here. There are literally thousands upon thousands of compositions that comprise this vast musical landscape; sampling from even a small collection of this incredible array will provide a lifetime of enjoyment.
The stories and moods that classical music evokes are legion. There are the great love stories, from Tchaikovsky's take on Romeo and Juliet to the tenderness of La Boheme. There are the towering masterpieces, like Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 "Choral" or Mahler's Symphony No. 8 "Symphony of a Thousand", that possess a grandeur and sweep which inspire utter awe akin to their natural-world counterparts of the Grand Canyon or Mount Everest. There are the thrills and chills of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain and Berlioz' mad nightmare of a Symphonie fantastique. On the other end of the spectrum, pieces like Handel's Messiah and Haydn's Seven Last Words from the Cross inspire us to reflect on our highest humanity.
Some music offers brain-teasingly mathematical twists and turns, such as Bach's astonishingly constructed Art of the Fugue to the work of Iannis Xenakis, a composer and architect who heavily used game theory, set theory, and other types of mathematics and physics in his music. Other compositions were penned purely for the entertainment of the listener, such as Handel's Water Music and the father-and-son pair of Johann Strauss I and II, whose waltz confections thrilled dance-crazy Vienna.
Other works simply dazzle with the extraordinary technical demands composers have placed on their soloists: listening to a pianist grapple with the virtuosic twists and turns of Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit or to a violinist scaling the mountains of the notoriously difficult Paganini Caprices is to behold an individual reaching Olympian heights, stretching his or her skills to the absolute ultimate reaches of human ability. Other works celebrate the art of collaboration, from the sublime intimacy of Debussy's sole String Quartet to the back-and-forth, conversational interplay between soloist and orchestra in a work like Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2.
With such an extraordinary range of expression and wielding such immense historical influence, classical music--whether written three hundred years ago or last year--still has the power to delight us and inspire us, and to give us a deeper glimpse into our common humanity. There's no secret handshake or previous education required: but as with experiencing great works of literature, painting, architecture, theater, and film, you'll soon discover that the more you explore, the deeper your enjoyment will undoubtedly be.
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
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