Sea/in The Forest/five Pr

Description

MikolajusKonstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911 ) TheSea (Jūra) Inthe Forest (Miške) FivePreludes (arranged for string orchestra)  Lithuaniahas enjoyed a distinguished past. From the time in the mid-thirteenth centurywhen the country, under its warrior leader, turned to Christianity and madepeace with the Teutonic knights, there was territorial expansion that extendedto the Black Sea. The union with Poland in the fourteenth century, under theGrand Duke Jagiello, lasted until 1795, when Poland was partitioned andLithuania became part of the Russian Empire. In 1917 Lithuania became anindependent republic, a situation that lasted until the secret protocol of theSoviet-German treaty of 1939.  Lithuaniawas relatively late in developing its own culture. Union with Poland led to theuse of the Polish language by the ruling classes and limited national artisticdevelopment, while absorption into the Russian Empire presented a threat ofanother kind. Music tended, in consequence, to be foreign rather than nationalin form, except for the indigenous art of the peasantry. The country shared inthe music of Catholic Europe and of the Counter-Reformation, but, as in Russiaitself, it was the nineteenth century that brought a new current of nationalfeeling and a sense of national identity, in part through the work of thePolish poet Mickiewicz, friend and inspiration to Chopin, who made Vilnius thecentre of romantic interest. He had studied at the university there, and basedmuch of his earlier work on legends of Lithuanian epic heroism. Like Chopin, hechose exile in Paris, avoiding the Polish attempts at independence of 1830. Theabortive rising against the Tsarist government in 1863 led to the banning ofpublications in Lithuanian, unless printed in Cyrillic, a prohibition onlylifted in 1904. National music found expression in choral singing, and amateurorchestras, often in primitive surroundings, and in the foundation of organschools.  MikolujasKonstantinas Čiurlionis was born at Varena in southern Lithuania in 1875, theson of an organist. From the age of fourteen he studied at the music school inPlunge, acquiring a knowledge of various instruments, following this in 1894 bya period at the Warsaw Music Institute as a piano pupil eventually of the widelycultured Antoni Sygietynnski. He later studied composition with ZygmuntNoskowski, whose pupils included Szymanowski and Fitelberg, and went on tofurther study of composition in Leipzig with Liszt?é?í?é?ªs pupil Salomon Jadassohnand Carl Reinecke. In 1902 he began to develop another aspect of his talentwhen he entered the Warsaw Drawing School, moving two years later to the newlyestablished School of Fine Arts, and exhibiting in Warsaw in 1905 and inVilnius, where he made his home in 1907. As a painter he won posthumous successwith exhibitions in Warsaw, Vilnius and St. Petersburg soon after his death.  Čiurlioniswas closely concerned with Lithuanian nationalism, boosted by the r