Carl Bohm: Victoria Gavotte, Op.327 No.10

Описание: Phillip Sear plays a gavotte from Carl Bohm's monumental Op.327 series of 78 salon pieces from 1885-99.
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"Carl Bohm (also spelled Karl Bohm, and known by the pseudonym Henry Cooper) was a German pianist and composer, born in Berlin on 11 September 1844 and dying there on 4 April 1920. He studied with the virtuoso pianist and teacher Carl Albert Löschhorn, and later worked principally as a music teacher, remaining based in Berlin for most of his life. Bohm became remarkably prolific, publishing a vast output that catered to the flourishing market for domestic music-making in the later nineteenth century. His reputation during his lifetime was considerable: his publisher N. Simrock is reported to have claimed that the profits from Bohm’s compositions effectively subsidised the publication of Brahms’s works, attesting both to Bohm’s popularity and to his position in the musical economy of his time.

Bohm is generally regarded as one of the leading German songwriters of the later nineteenth century, remembered especially for salon pieces such as "Still as the Night", "Twilight", "May Bells", "Enfant chéri" and "The Fountain". His music is typically characterised as melodious, accessible and sentimental, belonging to the lighter vein of Romanticism rather than to the more introspective, structurally complex tradition represented by Brahms. Like Schubert, he did not confine himself to song, composing in many genres, with chamber works—particularly quartets and piano trios—proving highly popular with both amateur ensembles and touring professional groups seeking reliable audience-pleasers. Despite this wide circulation in his own day, Bohm’s name now rarely appears in mainstream concert programming, and his once-ubiquitous works have largely fallen into obscurity."

The publisher's catalogue indicates that this opus number contains 78 separate pieces, which makes Bohm a very prolific composer indeed. If all the pieces were as long as this one (and those I have seen are all 5-6 pages long), this one opus would constitute over 400 pages of published score.

I'm not sure who the title refers to, if anyone specific. Of course, it could be Queen Victoria (1819–1901), the British monarch, or, more likely, her daughter Victoria, Princess Royal (1840–1901) who was the Crown Princess of Prussia and the German Empire at the time this piece was written.

Thumbnail image by Grok Imagine
#germanmusic #gavotte
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Played by Phillip Sear
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