PEGGY GLANVILLE-HICKS - SWEDEN
BORN 29 DECEMBER
Peggy Winsome Glanville-Hicks was an Australian composer.
At age 15 she began studying composition with Fritz Hart in Melbourne. She also studied the piano under Waldemar Seidel. She spent the years from 1931 to 1936 as a student at the Royal College of Music in London, where she studied piano with Arthur Benjamin, conducting with Constant Lambert and Malcolm Sargent, and composition with Ralph Vaughan Williams. (She later asserted that the idea that opens Vaughan Williams' 4th Symphony was taken from her Sinfonietta for Small Orchestra (1935), and it reappears in her 1953 opera The Transposed Heads.) Her teachers also included Egon Wellesz.
She was the first Australian composer whose work was performed at an International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) Festival (1938). This was her Choral Suite.
Major works in her output include the Sinfonia da Pacifica, Etruscan Concerto, Concerto romantico, and her Harp sonata which was premiered by Nicanor Zabaleta in 1953 as well as several operas. At the APRA Music Awards of 1996, her Sonata for Harp won Most Performed Contemporary Classical Composition, after it appeared on Marshall Maguire's Awakening. Her best known operas are The Transposed Heads and Nausicaa. The Transposed Heads is in six scenes with a libretto by the composer after Thomas Mann and premiered in Louisville, Kentucky, on 3 April 1954.
Nausicaa was composed in 1959–60 and premiered in Athens in 1961. The libretto was prepared together with Robert Graves in Majorca in 1956, based on his novel Homer's Daughter. The premiere was a major event in the operatic calendar, and was considered a triumph for Glanville-Hicks, but the opera has never been re-staged.
Her last opera, Sappho, was composed in 1963 for the San Francisco Opera, with hopes that Maria Callas would sing the title role. However, the company rejected the work and it has never been produced. This opera was recorded in 2012 by Jennifer Condon conducting the Gulbenkian Orchestra and Coro Gulbenkian with Deborah Polaski in the title role.
♫ LISTEN
Concertino de Camara Finale by Peggy Glanville Hicks
Concertino de Camara Finale by Peggy Glanville Hicks
JADWIGA SARNECKA - POLAND
BORN 29 DECEMBER
Jadwiga Sarnecka was probably born in 1883 in Szarogród in Podole and died on 29 December 1913 in Kraków. Tuberculosis, which she had been fighting all her life, took in the prime of her life. She was buried in the Rakowicki cemetery, but her grave has not been preserved till the present day.
Very little is known about her life. She was well-educated in music; her teachers included Aleksander Michałowski and Teodor Leszetycki. Although she was famous as an excellent pianist, first and foremost she wanted to be (and was) a composer. She took lessons from Władysław Żeleński and Felicjan Szopski and perhaps Henryk Melcer – irregularly, privately. Her compositions could not have been liked. Being different, they received scathing reviews and were described as bizarre, depressing and half-amateurish, chaotic both in their form and content. But Sarnecka kept writing. She printed her compositions at her own expense. Finally, fortune started to smile at her and her talent was noticed: Feliks „Manggha” Jasieński funded publication of her compositions from his own money. The people who exerted the greatest influence over the shape of the Polish music of that time - Chybiński, Reiss and Jachimecki, started to write about her work in a favourable, almost euphoric tone. At last, a prize came. II prize for the IV Ballad at the composition contest organized in Lviv to celebrate the centenary of Chopin’s birthday (the I prize went to Karol Szymanowski). And during the I Meeting of Polish Musicians she was the only woman asked to give a paper. She chose to talk about “Creativity vs virtuosity in musical composition”.
Unfortunately, the illness had been developing unrelentingly. Bitter criticism continued and Jadwiga supposedly fell into depression. We do not know the exact reason that she stopped publishing her compositions, although she kept writing. Moreover, during that period she wrote her most avant-garde compositions, she radicalized her harmonic and stylistic language. She came close to experimenting with polytonality and followed her own, individual path. Her handwriting became shaky, then it died, disappeared from view. She did not finish her VII Ballad, Sonata, Variations…Later the war began, the world changed.
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Tranquillo Molto Cantando by Jadwiga Sarnecka
Tranquillo Molto Cantando by Jadwiga Sarnecka
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