# Incidental Music



## Guest (Aug 7, 2007)

I thought I would broach this genre and solicit your views and comments, I don’t intend it to be a “What’s your favourite” kind of subject although inevitably this will happen.
My first recollection was seeing a Shakespeare Play on TV, A Midsummer Nights Dream with music by Felix Mendelssohn, it got me right from the start, I was hooked, at that young age I saw nothing but the magical world of Fairies and could not read any thing else into it. 
Many years later I am still enraptured by this music with all the magnificent melodies by such a wonderful composer, even he could not escape it and you can hear bits of it in a lot of his latter works, eg St Qt E flat Op12, 2nd mov. Even when I was Married what was played……..
There is heaps of other music out there, The Gadfly, Romeo and Juliet, Rosamunde, L’Arlesienne etc, but for me it will always be "Ye spotted snakes"!


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## Chi_townPhilly (Apr 21, 2007)

Andante said:


> There is heaps of other music out there, ...Romeo and Juliet...


Which one(s)?

A nice topic... I'll start with one "usual suspect" and add another very common piece, although perhaps not thought of as incidental music (though it is). The usual suspect... Grieg's _Peer Gynt_, which evolved and expanded to encompass the range and scope of much of Ibsen's play.

Next, a piece that contains perhaps one of the two dozen or so most recognizable melodies in the entire canon... _Dichter und Bauer_ (Poet & Peasant) overture, by Suppe'. Composed for a long-forgotten stage play, one can only suppose that it's likely that the inequalities between the music and the motivic parent-piece are similar in nature to the inequalities between Hartmann's paintings and Mussorgsky's _Pictures at an Exhibition._


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## Lisztfreak (Jan 4, 2007)

I can remember two more examples: Sibelius' _Valse triste _and Elgar's _Grania & Diarmid_.

Has anyone heard _Egmont_ by Beethoven?


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## Kurkikohtaus (Oct 22, 2006)

Lisztfreak said:


> Has anyone heard _Egmont_ by Beethoven?


I assume you mean the incidental music and not just the overture? I have not heard it, I have wanted to listen to it for quite some time now and simply have never gotten around to picking up a recording. Hearing it in performance is more or less out of the question, I have never seen it programmed anywhere, and I go though quite a number of season calendars every year.


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## Handel (Apr 18, 2007)

Haydn' Il distratto. (which became the symphony # 60 in 6 parts)


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## Guest (Aug 10, 2007)

Chi_town/Philly said:


> Which one(s)?


My Romeo is Prokofiev, Cleveland Orch, Lorin Maazel.

You mention another great one Greig's "Peer Gynt" 
Have you heard the Neeme Jarvi recording of the original version with the Gothenburg Sym Orch ?? I brought this many years ago and it is certainly different.


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