music, literature, ideas
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musik, schriften und andere ideen
Drew Wilson
Mephistophoria for Solo Violin & Chamber Orchestra
This is the first movement of a concerto for Violin & Chamber Orchestra with a Mephistophelean subtext. When composing, one is mostly focused on musical issues, but a philosophical underpinning was a consideration of the nature of evil, what it is, how a course of action may begin in with lofty aims, become an obsession and lead to a sense of irreversibility and final disaster. (With the demise of religion as a credible hypothesis, an inability to blame terrible things on the Devil is an inconvenience hardly less regretable than the plausibility of a well-intended Deity...) Perhaps Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus is at the back of it, but I have chosen to head the work with quotations from Baudelaire. In terms of the musical goal of this first movement, it was to write a real moto perpetuo with a baroque character. The movement is based on 5ths (rather like the Berg).
Violin Concerto 2nd Movement - in which snatches may be heard of other music with devilish connotations, including Tartini’s 'Devil’s Trill' Sonata, Scriabin’s Ninth Piano Sonata (the 'Black Mass') and Bach’s Cantata BWV 101 (notes from the tenor’s recitative, to the words 'Der Teufel plagt uns noch viel mehr'...); the cadenza - which links without a break to the finale, at one point quotes Robert Johnson's 'Me and the Devil Blues' (in harmonics).
Concerto for Violin and Small Orchestra, 3rd Movement. This is a 'Ride to the Abyss' in the manner of Berlioz's 'Damnation of Faust' - not quoted musically, instead the reference is to Liszt's even more obligatory 'First Mephisto Waltz'.
This is 'Mephistophoria' complete in higher audio quality. The pdf pf the score is below if you would like to click on the thumbnail picture
Score PDF
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