# Some great Composer documentaries



## jani

I personally enjoyed about these composer documentaries and decided some of you might too!
Some of you have maybe seen them already but here are the links
The genius of Beethoven ( its a 3 part documentary each part is about 50min long, you can find rest of the parts from related videos




The genius of Mozart ( same kinda documentary as the Beethoven one!)




Great Composers: "Beethoven Ludwig van" ( A Beethoven documentary its about 1h long)





Great Composers: "Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus" (same type a doc as the Beethoven one)




Great Composers: "Bach Johann Sebastian"




Great Composers: "Tchaikovsky"




Great Composers: "Wagner Richard"





Happy watching


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## SottoVoce

Some more if you guys are interested





 - Milton Babbitt: Portrait of a Serial Composer, a lot of talk about post-1945 music. This one is amazing.





 - Edgard Varese, the one all alone


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## HarpsichordConcerto

Thanks! Lovely. Period instruments used throughout the scenes as it appears! Fascinating.


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## TheBamf

Very neat! Thanks a lot for linking these, I will definitely be watching them.


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## crmoorhead

I love documentaries on composers because they bring elements of the composers to life in the way that just reading about them can't. I am watching (at this very moment) a fascinating documentary about John Cage. He amuses me greatly, but he comes across as one of the most genuinely happy men I have ever seen recorded. 

Lately I watched another one called 'The Unknown Shostakovich' which I particularly enjoyed. It's more insightful to have people who actually knew the composers recall their moments with them.


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## Andreas

Alan Hovhaness:
Part 1: 



Part 2: 



Part 3:


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## jani

A lecture about one of the greatest symphonies ever written!
( You can find rest of the parts from that guys channel.)


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## SottoVoce

Another of Bruno Monsaingeon's greats, along with some of his documentaries on Glenn Gould; this one I enjoyed immensely, even though it wasn't particularly about one composer, but a teacher of composers.


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## Manxfeeder

SottoVoce said:


> Milton Babbitt: Composer, a lot of talk about post-1945 music. This one is amazing.


So many videos, so little time! I just saw the Babbitt documentary. Interesting without being pedantic - quite a feat for this particular composer. I like the scene where he looks at a book about his compositions and says he doesn't understand it.

I'm particularly impressed that he was as blown away at Jerome Kern's _All The Things You Are_ as I've been. (Seriously. I thought Steve Allen and I were the only ones.)


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## jalex




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## jalex

Whatever you think of Stockhausen, he was an engaging and entertaining speaker.


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## Crudblud

Earlier I watched A Labyrinth of Time, a documentary about Elliott Carter which I have as part of the Juxtapositions set (includes documentaries on Messiaen, Glass, Pärt and Boulez). It does not provide a complete life story but gives an intimate view of the composer's working process, his ideas both musical and otherwise, and opinions of contemporaries such as Pierre Boulez. No narration, no dramatisation, just Carter, his music and a guy with a camera. Unfortunately, it isn't available on youtube, so you're on your own. The director, Frank Scheffer, has also made a trio of documentaries (which I have yet to see) on my next subject...

I was originally planning to write up a blog post explaining what Frank Zappa's music means to me and also to include quotes from various respected music people so that - if no one took me seriously, as would probably be the case - they might be encouraged to look past their preconceptions and see him in a different light.






And, oh hell, here's a (typically bizarrely phrased, oddly punctuated) quote for ya:

"There will be a new millennium eight years from now. I admire everything Frank does, because he practically created the new musical millennium. He does beautiful, beautiful work, he has beautiful ideas. It has been my luck to have lived to see the emergence of this totally new type of music which a hundred years ago didn't exist, a music created out of the recombination of dissonances between two tones, which are intervals, and a variety of separate tonalities which are combined in various ways - that's the best definition I can give. It doesn't contain quarter-tones or small intervals. Zappa sticks to 12 different intervals. What he does with them in terms of organisation is what is so far, far from traditional approaches. That's the secret of his greatness. But, of course, he is very careful. He doesn't just throw things together without any order or without a plan of what to do next. He's a remarkable man. He's somebody who is completely new and completely different. Zappa sticks to the classical type of music. He is a classicist and a constructionist. And yet, why should he have to know formal harmony or counterpoint? Webern never finished a counterpoint book. Zappa would stand on good footing with Schoenberg, because Schoenberg never departed from his scale of 12 tones and 11 different intervals, whereas Webern and Stockhausen completely discarded such things and made the world of music just sound completely different and practically as unrecognisable as Chinese music. But Zappa puts musical sounds together and creates something new but not destructive of scales or intervals. He is a remarkable man, and I think that he will make a decided triumph towards new harmony and new counterpoint and new intervallic construction and everything that is new, while still keeping the old components of notes, intervals, and harmonies. He can do anything now, and with his technology there is no limit to what he can achieve." - Nicolas Slonimsky

Here's Frank's response, taken from "The Mother of All Interviews" conducted by Don Menn and Matt Groening:

Menn: "Nicolas Slonimsky describes you as the pioneer of the future millennium of music. Do you have a concept of what he means?'

Zappa: "No, but he's very kind to make up something like that. When you start using words like millennium, that's pushing the boundaries of good taste."

Lastly, here are some words on Zappa from conductor Kenneth Woods.


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## LordBlackudder




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## hocket

By curious coincidence I saw the first episodes of both the 'Genius of...' Mozart and Beethoven today, and then popped my head in here only to stumble upon this thread. Anyway, yes, they're nicely done.


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## LordBlackudder

this one shows many composers. looks like theres a few more parts on youtube.


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## violadude

Wow, I didn't know Steven Hawking was a Wagner fan.


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## aleazk

violadude said:


> Wow, I didn't know Stephen Hawking was a Wagner fan.


 .


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## Crudblud

Half an hour of interviews with Zappa discussing his work, influences and his typically negative view of the music industry and US politics and culture, interspersed with another interview with an English music critic who talks about what he feels are Zappa's biggest strengths and weaknesses.


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## QuietGuy

The ones I know are _A Harvest of Sorrow_, about Rachmaninoff; and _Once at a Border_, about Stravinsky.


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## Orfeo

Here's a couple:

_Vissarion Shebalin_





_George Lloyd_


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## regenmusic

Bach - A Passionate Life - (2013)


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## DavidA

regenmusic said:


> Bach - A Passionate Life - (2013)


Well worth watching


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## DavidA

Howard Goodall's History of Music is a very entertaining look at it's title. It's 6 episodes can be found on YouTube


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## Barelytenor

How wonderful to see a cameo appearance by none other than a young Jonas Kaufmann in Part II of the Beethoven documentary (link on page 1 of this thread), singing the part of the "starving" replacement tenor in _Fidelio_!

... And he reappears near the end of Part II singing the "Zum Freiheit in Himmlischer Reich" conclusion of the great tenor aria.

Kind regards, :tiphat:

George


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## David Phillips

Ken Russell's early TV documentaries on Bartok, Debussy, Delius and Elgar are well worth watching.


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## DavidA

jani said:


> I personally enjoyed about these composer documentaries and decided some of you might too!
> Some of you have maybe seen them already but here are the links
> The genius of Beethoven ( its a 3 part documentary each part is about 50min long, you can find rest of the parts from related videos
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The genius of Mozart ( same kinda documentary as the Beethoven one!)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Great Composers: "Beethoven Ludwig van" ( A Beethoven documentary its about 1h long)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Great Composers: "Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus" (same type a doc as the Beethoven one)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Great Composers: "Bach Johann Sebastian"
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Great Composers: "Tchaikovsky"
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Great Composers: "Wagner Richard"
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Happy watching


I've just watched Hazlewood exploring Beethoven. Very good viewing. Recommended!

Beethoven! What a musical colossus! What a genius! What music!

But what a hopeless human being. How sad!


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## larold

The wonderful *Celebrating Haydn With Peter Ustinov* is on YouTube but, apparently, not in English. This is the best thing I've ever seen of Franz Josef Haydn -- very funny and witty, like the composer himself.


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## Huilunsoittaja

I love this Russian documentary of Shostakovich so so much!






I've only been able to figure out a little of what's being said, since there are no English subtitles included. But the visuals and musical excerpts are so lovely. Not a meep about Stalin as far as I can tell. It's 100% Shostakovich the man, the musician, the legend.

A Shostakovich documentary not mentioning his relation to Stalin? Somebody pinch me!


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## brianvds

Anything and everything with Stephen Fry is hugely entertaining:






There used to be a great documentary titled _The Passions of Vaughan Williams_ on YouTube. Alas, it appears to have been taken down and all that is left is this brief intro:


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## DavidA

jani said:


> I personally enjoyed about these composer documentaries and decided some of you might too!
> Some of you have maybe seen them already but here are the links
> The genius of Beethoven ( its a 3 part documentary each part is about 50min long, you can find rest of the parts from related videos
> 
> 
> 
> 
> The genius of Mozart ( same kinda documentary as the Beethoven one!)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Great Composers: "Beethoven Ludwig van" ( A Beethoven documentary its about 1h long)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Great Composers: "Mozart Wolfgang Amadeus" (same type a doc as the Beethoven one)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Great Composers: "Bach Johann Sebastian"
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Great Composers: "Tchaikovsky"
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Great Composers: "Wagner Richard"
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Happy watching


 Just watched the Wagner program which was pretty balanced . Showed how great a genius Wagner was musically and how awful the person he was and how distasteful views were. Some excuses nade for him of course at the end but pretty revealing.


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## Richard8655

For me, these 2 stand out:

Shostakovich:
"Into the Cold Dawn"





Purcell:
"England, My England"
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112964/

The BBC also did a very nice 5 part documentary on Handel:


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## Woodduck

DavidA said:


> Just watched the Wagner program which was *pretty balanced *. Showed how great a genius Wagner was musically and how awful the person he was and how distasteful views were. Some excuses nade for him of course at the end but pretty revealing.


A documentary that begins by propagating a misconception about its subject promises to be something less than "balanced."

Wagner did not create, or advocate, the idea of a "nation of masters," a master race which would rule the world. That self-identified survivor of Auschwitz who calls this a "fact" is mistaken. Later on we're told by the narrator that the Nazis used Wagner's writings about the Jews to support their own racist ideology. This too is false; the Nazi ideology of German "pure blood" and world domination, and the "final solution" of genocide, did not come from Wagner, who encountered those ideas only in his old age. Still later in the film it is asserted, again as if it were uncontested fact, that the negative traits of certain characters in the operas are intended to represent Jewishness. What's cited as evidence for this is very much open to dispute.

Obviously, no one could do justice to a life as rich and dramatic as Wagner's in an hour. The basic biographical outline seems accurate, but the composer's artistic ideas and innovations are treated sketchily, and we're given little idea of the brilliance, wit, garrulousness, sociability, emotional volatility, and playfulness as a parent (not to mention his advocacy for animal rights and his fetish for silk underwear!) that were part of the deeply serious artist we know from his works.

I found conductor Roger Norrington to be rather foolish in saying that he could more easily imagine Wagner running a country or an airline than writing music! But then, I'd rather hear Norrington giving a stock market report than waving his baton at an orchestra and stripping Wagner's music of its passion, sensuality, mystery and grandeur.


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## KenOC

I get so tired of this. Certainly Wagner was anti-Jew, particularly anti-Jews in music publishing industry. He even embarrassed some of his friends with his writings. But did he ever advocate any actions - any at all - against Jews? Not that I can find.

And of course he counted some very illustrious Jews among his friends and musical interpreters, and evidently the feelings were reciprocated.

See: https://sites.google.com/site/kenocstuff/wagner-on-judaism-in-music


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## Enthusiast

The BBC ran an interesting if rather strange documentary about George Benjamin a week or so ago ... and then they screened his latest opera, Lessons in Love and Violence. Did anyone see either? Many things struck me from them including the clear belief (almost a given - they certainly didn't argue the case although there were a few comparisons with Mozart!) behind the programmes that Benjamin is Britain's greatest living composer. I won't argue - but Birtwistle? - but still would have expected the BBC to come down that decisively on the matter.


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## DavidA

KenOC said:


> I get so tired of this. Certainly Wagner was anti-Jew, particularly anti-Jews in music publishing industry. He even embarrassed some of his friends with his writings. But did he ever advocate any actions - any at all - against Jews? Not that I can find.
> 
> And of course he counted some very illustrious Jews among his friends and musical interpreters, and evidently the feelings were reciprocated.
> 
> See: https://sites.google.com/site/kenocstuff/wagner-on-judaism-in-music


The program I just watched certainly dealt with the anti-Semitism but certainly did not say he advocated actions against the Jews. But then hate speech from one person can produce hate action from someone else, as history shows. What the program did emphasise (interesting for me as it corresponded with a view I have held for quite some time) is that you cannot understand Wagner without understanding the effect the anti-Semitism had. Watch it and see for yourself. I think it was fair;y even handed.


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## Woodduck

DavidA said:


> The program I just watched certainly dealt with the anti-Semitism but certainly did not say he advocated actions against the Jews. But then hate speech from one person can produce hate action from someone else, as history shows. *What the program did emphasise (interesting for me as it corresponded with a view I have held for quite some time) is that you cannot understand Wagner without understanding the effect the anti-Semitism had.* Watch it and see for yourself. I think it was fair;y even handed.


Insistent, aren't you? Precisely _which_ "effect the anti-Semitism had" is it necessary to understand in order to understand Wagner? How well do you think you understand Wagner? Evidently hard historical facts cited by people not obsessed with Nazism don't provide the sort of "understanding" you're looking for.


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## Richard8655

KenOC said:


> I get so tired of this. Certainly Wagner was anti-Jew, particularly anti-Jews in music publishing industry. He even embarrassed some of his friends with his writings. But did he ever advocate any actions - any at all - against Jews? Not that I can find.
> 
> And of course he counted some very illustrious Jews among his friends and musical interpreters, and evidently the feelings were reciprocated.
> 
> See: https://sites.google.com/site/kenocstuff/wagner-on-judaism-in-music


People in powerful and/or influential positions who express rascist attitudes or voice opinions against certain groups of people, need not directly advocate violence to have an impact. This, as we see in contemporary times. These are not always the innocent bystanders as we now conveniently like to think.


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## Resurrexit

Richard8655 said:


> People in powerful and/or influential positions who express rascist attitudes or voice opinions against certain groups of people, need not directly advocate violence to have an impact. This, as we see in contemporary times. These are not always the innocent bystanders as we now conveniently like to think.


True. There's no excusing his hateful sentiments. But there's also no doubt that Wagner is often treated as a scapegoat. His racism was obnoxious, but unfortunately it had a nearly 2,000 year old pedigree of Jews attracting hatred and persecution in Europe, and nothing Wagner did affected its trajectory. Wagner was a minor player compared to other 19th century figures in Germany, such as the virulent Karl Lueger of Vienna, or the rabid Bernhard Förster who organized a masssed petition to the German Reichstag against the Jews.


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## Richard8655

Resurrexit said:


> True. There's no excusing his hateful sentiments. But there's also no doubt that Wagner is often treated as a scapegoat. His racism was obnoxious, but unfortunately it had a nearly 2,000 year old pedigree of Jews attracting hatred and persecution in Europe, and nothing Wagner did affected its trajectory. Wagner was a minor player compared to other 19th century figures in Germany, such as the virulent Karl Lueger of Vienna, or the rabid Bernhard Förster who organized a masssed petition to the German Reichstag against the Jews.


Good point, which I see and can agree with. Wagner was an element of his time. And those were the attitudes, unfortunately, in many circles then, even cultural and intellectual.


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## DavidA

Resurrexit said:


> True. There's no excusing his hateful sentiments. But there's also no doubt that Wagner is often treated as a scapegoat. His racism was obnoxious, but unfortunately it had a nearly 2,000 year old pedigree of Jews attracting hatred and persecution in Europe, and nothing Wagner did affected its trajectory. Wagner was a minor player compared to other 19th century figures in Germany, such as the virulent Karl Lueger of Vienna, or the rabid Bernhard Förster who organized a masssed petition to the German Reichstag against the Jews.


You are right and wrong in this. Certainly the anti-semitism in Europe was well established - I have just seen a monument to Jews who perished in the twelfth century in a purge. To say Wagner was a 'minor player' is rather naive as his music was enormously influential and dragged his obnoxious views along with it. Don't forget, either, that subsequently the family (via Chamberline) were noted and influential anti-semites. We might wanted to wash Wagner but history does not. But of course, as I said, that was not the point the documentary made - if you have seen it you will see this.


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## Woodduck

DavidA said:


> To say Wagner was a 'minor player' is rather naive as *his music was enormously influential and dragged his obnoxious views along with it.* Don't forget, either, that subsequently the family (via Chamberline) were noted and influential anti-semites. We might wanted to wash Wagner but history does not.


Statements like this are such irresponsible nonsense. Wagner's music does not "drag his obnoxious views along with it." Music does not have "views." People with unhealthy obsessions attribute their own obnoxious views to it.

So many of us on this forum are sick to death of your using this forum to propagate your own obsession with denigrating Wagner. Wagner, please note, is dead, but his art lives: it is rich, vibrant, and inspiring to innumerable people, and the only person dragging obnoxious views into the matter is you.


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## Resurrexit

DavidA said:


> You are right and wrong in this. Certainly the anti-semitism in Europe was well established - I have just seen a monument to Jews who perished in the twelfth century in a purge. To say Wagner was a 'minor player' is rather naive as his music was enormously influential and dragged his obnoxious views along with it. Don't forget, either, that subsequently the family (via Chamberline) were noted and influential anti-semites. We might wanted to wash Wagner but history does not. But of course, as I said, that was not the point the documentary made - if you have seen it you will see this.


You say that I'm wrong, but you don't actually demonstrate it. You only make a vague, meaningless assertion. But I wasn't addressing you in my response, and I've seen enough of your posts on this topic to know you are only trying to stir the pot and don't have anything more substantive to offer, so I'm not going to engage with you any further. Keep on scapegoating.

Back on topic about composer documentaries, while most I've tried to watch have been a little dry and have rarely been insightful, I think Werner Herzog's quirky and unique "Death for Five Voices" on Carlos Gesualdo is one of the more entertaining ones.


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## Richard8655

I’ve always been interested in the composers behind their works. Too bad we don’t see more such documentaries for historical context and the humanity behind their music. Maybe has to do with waning interest in classical musical by the general public? I suppose it was always a small audience anyway, compared to mass popular music.


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## regenmusic

Garrick Ohlsson: "Why Chopin? and Other Questions"

There are also these kinds of videos, where you have musicians, conductors, or other classical music educators such as scientists who talk about the relationship of classical music or a composer to something quantifiable.


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## Jacck

Domenico Scarlatti - His Music and His World (Part 1/2) (1985)
Domenico Scarlatti - His Music And His World (Part 2/2) (1985)


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