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This is the second movement of Georg Philipp Telemann's fourth Canonic Sonata for two flutes. It is marked “Piacevole non largo”, which could be translated as “pleasant (but) not slow”.
This popular nocturne was composed by Frédéric Chopin in the year 1830 for solo piano and dedicated to his older sister, Ludwika Chopin. First published 26 years after the composer's death, the piece is also known by its tempo marking of “Lento con gran espressione” (“Slow with great expression”), or by the popular appellation “Reminiscence”.
The piece is featured in Roman Polanski's 2002 film The Pianist. It is played twice by the protagonist Adrien Brody as Władysław Szpilman, both times at the recording studio at Warsaw Radio at the beginning and the end of the film.
This tune appears in Daniel Wright's Compleat Collection of Celebrated Country Dances (printed in London in 1740 by John Johnson), as well as in the 3rd edition of John Walsh's Second Book of the Compleat Country Dancing Master (London, 1735). A broadside ballad was set to the air, one version of which can be found in Thomas D'Urfey's Pills to Purge Melancholy (1707), under the title “The Town Gallant”.
Let us drink and be merry, dance, joke, and rejoice,
With claret and sherry, theorbo and voice;
The changeable world to our joy is unjust,
All treasure's uncertain, then down with your dust:
In frolicks dispose of your pounds, shillings and pence,
For we shall be nothing one hundred years hence.
Today we propose the first étude from Sigfried Karg-Elert's 30 Caprices: a “Gradus ad Parnassum” of the modern technique for flute solo.
This binary-form, 2/4-time Vivace is the fourth and last movement of the fourth of Telemann's Sonates sans Basse à deux Flutes traverses, ou à deux Violons, ou à deux Flutes à bec, or “Sonatas without Bass for Two Transverse Flutes, or Two Violins, or Two Recorders”.
Thanks to Raquel for suggesting this piece!
This piece was perhaps one of the most popular melodies in Europe of the fin de siècle, the last decades of the nineteenth century, often referred to as the Belle Epoque (literally, “Beautiful Era”). Massenet originally composed “Élégie” in 1866 for a piano cycle titled Dix pièces de genre. In 1872, he incorporated the piece into Les Erinnyes (The Furies), a play by Leconte de Lisle.
“Elégie” gained even greater renown as a song for voice and piano, set to a poem by Louis Gallet, with the title “O doux printemps d'autrefois” (“O sweet spring of days long ago“).
The earliest appearance of this jig is found in Francis O'Neill's collection Music of Ireland, published in Chicago in 1903.