English genius Benjamin Britten was born.
CD, SACD, DVD & download (MP3 & FLAC)In 2. Understanding of the Jewish musicians’ work conditions allows to discover the hidden meaning of their actions.Britten: Les illuminations, Op. They indicate rather complexity, not unilaterality, of the self-identification of Jews in diaspora. Its aim is to encourage musicologists to reconsider the issue of prewar Jewish musicians’ identity and to use findings of historians and sociologists in musicological literature. Then, it discusses their influence on individual musicians like: Bronisław Gimpel, Bronisław Huberman, Józef Koffler, Stanisław Lipski, Wilhelm Mantel, Paweł Anhalt, Stefan Schleichkorn, Henryk Guensberg, Józef Neger, Henryk Apte, Izaak Lust, Zofia Lissa, Mordechaj Gebirtig, Nachum Sternheim and musicians active on the stage of popular music. It emphasizes the role of social and political divisions within Jewish community and the impact of assimilation, liberalism, socialism and Zionism on the musical life of Jews in Galicia. The article discusses the issue of Jewish musicians’ identity by the example of prewar Galician artists. Ultimately, I suggest that attending to Britten’s complex and self-conscious canonical negotiations can teach us a lot not just about his own role in history, but also about the wider ways that twentieth-century canons are negotiated, mediated, transmitted, and performed. I argue that, far from marginalizing his oeuvre, Britten’s ambivalent, peripheral, and even diminutive relationship with the ‘major’ figures of musical modernism was central both to his mid-century appeal and his enduring place in the canon. After illuminating key tropes in Britten’s mid-century reception, I examine how the composer and his critics fashioned his canonical minority and, in the process, helped to construct the ‘majority’ of his modernist counterparts. Using Benjamin Britten as a case study, I sketch a more ambivalent and reciprocal relationship between major and minor composers than has often been suggested. In this article, I revisit the mid-century process of canon formation in order to excavate a deeper, less divisive understanding of its history. In the last few decades, established narratives of twentieth-century music – with Schoenberg and his disciples at the centre and others on the periphery – have come under considerable fire: some have denounced the modernist canon itself as narrow and esoteric, while others have sought to restore marginalized ‘minor’ composers to a supposedly rightful centrality.
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