Week 2: Vienna in 19th !🍰
Welcome to the Main Thread for the second week of the "Around the 19th Century Guitar World" challenge!
Vienna was a hub for all classical music in the 19th century. Home to Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, among others, the classical guitar was alive and well in the 19th century. In Vienna in the 19th century classical guitar composers were heavily influenced by orchestral composers and had relationships with them; Giuliani played cello in the premiere of Beethoven’s 7th symphony and Mertz arranged Schubert’s Songs for Piano and Voice on guitar.
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Mertz - Selected Practice Pieces from School for the Guitar
Mertz published a method book called Schüle für die Guitare, and at the end are fifteen Practice Pieces (Übungsstücke) that are quite nice. I made a video with my five favorites. I also used this as an opportunity to try some new things with my video editing. Nothing too fancy, just some text.
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Okay. here’s my Matiegka - because he’s the oldest and because he’s Czech.
His style is definitely less romantic, more classical than the other composers mentioned in this challenge. This menuet is from the sonata b minor op.23. The first part in fugetto form echoes Haydn. It s too much to learn in one week, but I’ll work on it. The menuet is in the B major scale, (less familiar maybe (5##), but works great harmonically on guitar), the trio in b minor.
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Matiegka Sonata IV Allegro Moderato measures 1-26
I'm going to try to work on the Matiegka piece that Hannah sent us. It is definitely a large step up in difficulty for me, so we'll see how it goes. Here is a video of the first big section (labeled A on the score), measures 1-26. I'm fairly pleased with it so far, except for the last phrase, which is choppy and needs work. Measure 14 is also problematic. Maybe I need to do some three-minute drills.
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Matiegka Sonata IV Allegro Moderato measures 27-46
Here are the next few phrases of this piece. Measure 33 is difficult, almost like a spider exercise for the left hand. The short little runs here have very exact articulation markings that I find challenging to follow,
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Matiegka - Sonata IV Allegro Moderato Update July 20
I'm now playing the entire large A section, measures 1-67 (pages 1 and 2 in the edition Hannah sent us). In order to be able to play the arpeggios in measures 52-62, I needed to bring the tempo down from what I was playing yesterday. This is at about 80bpm, and the goal tempo would be more like 116bpm.
This is obviously going to take me more than this week to get through, as I'm only halfway through the piece, and at a tempo that's too slow. I'm not sure what I'll do. Maybe for next week, I could just play some really easy Paganini, Legnani, and Regondi. (That's a joke. They wrote nothing easy, especially Regondi.) We'll see.