Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was an Italian Renaissance composer of sacred music and the best-known 16th-century representative of the Roman School of musical composition. He had a lasting influence on the development of church music, his work is considered as the culmination of Renaissance polyphony. Palestrina was born in the town of Palestrina, near Rome part of the Papal States. Documents suggest that he first visited Rome in 1537, when he is listed as a chorister at the Santa Maria Maggiore basilica, he studied with Firmin Lebel. He spent most of his career in the city. Palestrina came of age as a musician under the influence of the northern European style of polyphony, which owed its dominance in Italy to two influential Netherlandish composers, Guillaume Dufay and Josquin des Prez, who had spent significant portions of their careers there. Italy itself had yet to produce anyone of comparable skill in polyphony. From 1544 to 1551, Palestrina was the organist of the Cathedral of St. Agapito, the principal church of his native city.
In 1551 Pope Julius III appointed Palestrina maestro di cappella or musical director of the Cappella Giulia, the choir of the chapter of canons at St. Peter's Basilica. Palestrina dedicated to Julius III a book of Masses, it was the first book of Masses by a native composer, since in the Italian states of Palestrina's day, most composers of sacred music were from the Low Countries, Portugal, Italy, or Spain. In fact the book was modeled on one by Cristóbal de Morales: the woodcut in the front is an exact copy of the one from the book by the Spanish composer. During the next decade, Palestrina held positions similar to his Julian Chapel appointment at other chapels and churches in Rome, notably St. John Lateran, St Mary Major. In 1571 he remained at St Peter's for the rest of his life; the decade of the 1570s was difficult for him personally: he lost his brother, two of his sons, his wife in three separate outbreaks of the plague. He seems to have considered becoming a priest at this time, but instead he remarried, this time to a wealthy widow.
This gave him financial independence and he was able to compose prolifically until his death. He died in Rome of pleurisy in 1594; as was usual, Palestrina was buried on the same day he died, in a plain coffin with a lead plate on, inscribed Libera me Domine. A five-part psalm for three choirs was sung at the funeral. Palestrina's funeral was held at St. Peter's, he was buried beneath the floor of the basilica, his tomb was covered by new construction and attempts to locate the site have been unsuccessful. Palestrina left hundreds of compositions, including 105 masses, 68 offertories, at least 140 madrigals and more than 300 motets. In addition, there are at least 72 hymns, 35 magnificats, 11 litanies, four or five sets of lamentations; the Gloria melody from Palestrina's Magnificat Tertii Toni is used today in the resurrection hymn tune, Victory. His attitude toward madrigals was somewhat enigmatic: whereas in the preface to his collection of Canticum canticorum motets he renounced the setting of profane texts, only two years he was back in print with Book II of his secular madrigals.
He published just two collections of madrigals with profane texts, one in 1555 and another in 1586. The other two collections were spiritual madrigals, a genre beloved by the proponents of the Counter-Reformation. Palestrina's masses show, his Missa sine nomine seems to have been attractive to Johann Sebastian Bach, who studied and performed it while writing the Mass in B minor. Most of Palestrina's masses appeared in thirteen volumes printed between 1554 and 1601, the last seven published after his death. One of his most important works, the Missa Papae Marcelli, has been associated with erroneous information involving the Council of Trent. According to this tale, it was composed in order to persuade the Council of Trent that a draconian ban on the polyphonic treatment of text in sacred music was unnecessary. However, more recent scholarship shows that this mass was in fact composed before the cardinals convened to discuss the ban. Historical data indicates that the Council of Trent, as an official body, never banned any church music and failed to make any ruling or official statement on the subject.
These stories originated from the unofficial points-of-view of some Council attendees who discussed their ideas with those not privy to the Council's deliberations. Those opinions and rumors have, over centuries, been transmuted into fictional accounts, put into print, incorrectly taught as historical fact. While Palestrina's compositional motivations are not known, he may have been quite conscious of the need for intelligible text, his characteristic style remained consistent from the 1560s until the end of his life. Roche's hypothesis that Palestrina's dispassionate approach to expressive or emotive texts could have resulted from his having to produce many to order, or from a deliberate decis
Renaissance
The Renaissance is a period in European history, covering the span between the 14th and 17th centuries and marking the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. The traditional view focuses more on the early modern aspects of the Renaissance and argues that it was a break from the past, but many historians today focus more on its medieval aspects and argue that it was an extension of the middle ages; the intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman Humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that "Man is the measure of all things." This new thinking became manifest in art, politics and literature. Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and the recycled knowledge of how to make concrete. Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of ideas from the 15th century, the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe: the first traces appear in Italy as early as the late 13th century, in particular with the writings of Dante and the paintings of Giotto.
As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch. In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, in science to an increased reliance on observation and inductive reasoning. Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, it is best known for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man"; the Renaissance began in the 14th century in Italy. Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics, focusing on a variety of factors including the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time: its political structure, the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici, the migration of Greek scholars and texts to Italy following the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks.
Other major centres were northern Italian city-states such as Venice, Milan and Rome during the Renaissance Papacy. The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and, in line with general scepticism of discrete periodizations, there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of the "Renaissance" and individual culture heroes as "Renaissance men", questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and as a historical delineation; the art historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of "Renaissance": It is no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been most vigorously questioned by those who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the aesthetic aspects of civilization – historians of economic and social developments and religious situations, most natural science – but only exceptionally by students of literature and hardly by historians of Art. Some observers have called into question whether the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity, while social and economic historians of the longue durée, have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras, which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties".
The word Renaissance meaning "Rebirth", first appeared in English in the 1830s. The word occurs in Jules Michelet's 1855 work, Histoire de France; the word Renaissance has been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century. The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the early modern period. Beginning in Italy, spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its influence was felt in literature, art, politics, science and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, searched for realism and human emotion in art. Renaissance humanists such as Poggio Bracciolini sought out in Europe's monastic libraries the Latin literary and oratorical texts of Antiquity, while the Fall of Constantinople generated a wave of émigré Greek scholars bringing precious manuscripts in ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity in the West.
It is in their new focus on literary and historical texts that Renaissance scholars differed so markedly from the medieval scholars of the Renaissance of the 12th century, who had focused on studying Greek and Arabic works of natural sciences and mathematics, rather than on such cultural texts. In the revival of neo-Platonism Renaissance humanists did not reject Christianity. However, a subtle shift took place in the way that intellectuals approached religion, reflected in many other areas of cultural life. In addition, many Greek Christian works, including the Greek New Testament, were brought back from Byzantium to Western Europe and engaged Western scholars for the first time since late antiquity; this new engagement with Greek Christian works, the return to the original Greek of the Ne
Good Friday
Good Friday is a Christian holiday commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus and his death at Calvary. It is observed during Holy Week as part of the Paschal Triduum on the Friday preceding Easter Sunday, may coincide with the Jewish observance of Passover, it is known as Holy Friday, Great Friday, Black Friday. Members of many Christian denominations, including the Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran and Reformed traditions, observe Good Friday with fasting and church services; the date of Good Friday varies from one year to the next on both the Julian calendars. Eastern and Western Christianity disagree over the computation of the date of Easter and therefore of Good Friday. Good Friday is a instituted legal holiday around the world, including in most Western countries and 12 U. S. states. Some countries, such as Germany, have laws prohibiting certain acts, such as dancing and horse racing, that are seen as profaning the solemn nature of the day. A common folk etymology claims "Good Friday" is a corruption of "God Friday".
The term in fact comes from the sense "holy" of the word good. The Oxford English Dictionary gives other examples with the sense "of a day or season observed as holy by the church" as an archaic sense of good as in good tide meaning "Christmas" or "Shrove Tuesday", Good Wednesday meaning the Wednesday in Holy Week. In German-speaking countries, Good Friday is referred to as Karfreitag: Mourning Friday; the Kar prefix is a cognate of the English word "care" in the sense of woes. The day is known as Stiller Freitag and Hoher Freitag. In the Nordic countries it is called "The Long Friday". In Greek and Hungarian, Good Friday is referred to as Great Friday. In Bulgarian, Good Friday is called either Велики петък - Great Friday, or, more Разпети петък which translates to "Crucified Friday". According to the accounts in the Gospels, the royal soldiers, guided by Jesus' disciple Judas Iscariot, arrested Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. Judas received money for betraying Jesus and told the guards that whomever he kisses is the one they are to arrest.
Following his arrest, Jesus was taken to the house of Annas, the father-in-law of the high priest, Caiaphas. There he was interrogated with little result and sent bound to Caiaphas the high priest where the Sanhedrin had assembled. Conflicting testimony against Jesus was brought forth by many witnesses, to which Jesus answered nothing; the high priest adjured Jesus to respond under solemn oath, saying "I adjure you, by the Living God, to tell us, are you the Anointed One, the Son of God?" Jesus testified ambiguously, "You have said it, in time you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Almighty, coming on the clouds of Heaven." The high priest condemned Jesus for blasphemy, the Sanhedrin concurred with a sentence of death. Peter, waiting in the courtyard denied Jesus three times to bystanders while the interrogations were proceeding just as Jesus had predicted. In the morning, the whole assembly brought Jesus to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate under charges of subverting the nation, opposing taxes to Caesar, making himself a king.
Pilate authorized the Jewish leaders to judge Jesus according to their own law and execute sentencing. Pilate told the assembly that there was no basis for sentencing. Upon learning that Jesus was from Galilee, Pilate referred the case to the ruler of Galilee, King Herod, in Jerusalem for the Passover Feast. Herod received no answer. Pilate told the assembly. Under the guidance of the chief priests, the crowd asked for Barabbas, imprisoned for committing murder during an insurrection. Pilate asked what they would have him do with Jesus, they demanded, "Crucify him". Pilate's wife had seen Jesus in a dream earlier that day, she forewarned Pilate to "have nothing to do with this righteous man". Pilate had Jesus flogged and brought him out to the crowd to release him; the chief priests informed Pilate of a new charge, demanding Jesus be sentenced to death "because he claimed to be God's son." This possibility filled Pilate with fear, he brought Jesus back inside the palace and demanded to know from where he came.
Coming before the crowd one last time, Pilate declared Jesus innocent and washed his own hands in water to show he had no part in this condemnation. Pilate handed Jesus over to be crucified in order to forestall a riot and to keep his job; the sentence written was "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." Jesus carried his cross to the site of execution, called the "place of the Skull", or "Golgotha" in Hebrew and in Latin "Calvary". There he was crucified along with two criminals. Jesus agonized on the cross for six hours. During his last three hours on the cross, from noon to 3 pm, darkness fell over the whole land. Jesus spoke from the cross, quoting the messianic Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" With a loud cry, Jesus gave up his spirit. There was an earthquake
Anton Bruckner
Josef Anton Bruckner was an Austrian composer and music theorist best known for his symphonies, masses, Te Deum and motets. The first are considered emblematic of the final stage of Austro-German Romanticism because of their rich harmonic language polyphonic character, considerable length. Bruckner's compositions helped to define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their dissonances, unprepared modulations, roving harmonies. Unlike other musical radicals such as Richard Wagner and Hugo Wolf, Bruckner showed extreme humility before other musicians, Wagner in particular; this apparent dichotomy between Bruckner the person and Bruckner the composer hampers efforts to describe his life in a way that gives a straightforward context for his music. Hans von Bülow described him as "half genius, half simpleton". Bruckner was self-critical of his work, reworked his compositions. There are several versions of many of his works, his works, the symphonies in particular, had detractors, most notably the influential Austrian critic Eduard Hanslick, other supporters of Johannes Brahms who pointed to their large size and use of repetition, as well as to Bruckner's propensity for revising many of his works with the assistance of colleagues, his apparent indecision about which versions he preferred.
On the other hand, Bruckner was admired by subsequent composers including his friend Gustav Mahler. Anton Bruckner was born in Ansfelden on 4 September 1824; the ancestors of Bruckner's family were craftsmen. They lived near a bridge south of Sindelburg, which led to their being called "Pruckhner an der Pruckhen". Bruckner's grandfather was appointed schoolmaster in Ansfelden in 1776, it was a poorly paid but well-respected position in the rural environment. Bruckner Sr. married Therese Helm, they had eleven children, Anton Bruckner being the eldest. Music was a part of the school curriculum, Bruckner's father was his first music teacher. Bruckner learned to play the organ early as a child, he was dedicated to the instrument just as he was in life in composing practicing for 12 hours a day. He entered school when he was six, proved to be a hard-working student, was promoted to upper class early. While studying, Bruckner helped his father in teaching the other children. After Bruckner received his confirmation in 1833, Bruckner's father sent him to another school in Hörsching.
The schoolmaster, Johann Baptist Weiß, was respected organist. Here, Bruckner refined his skills as an organist. Around 1835 Bruckner wrote his first composition, a Pange lingua – one of the compositions which he revised at the end of his life; when his father became ill, Anton returned to Ansfelden to help him in his work. Bruckner's father died in 1837; the teacher's position and house were given to a successor, Bruckner was sent to the Augustinian monastery in Sankt Florian to become a choirboy. In addition to choir practice, his education included organ lessons. Bruckner was in awe of the monastery's great organ, built during the late baroque era and rebuilt in 1837, he sometimes played it during church services; the organ was to be called the "Bruckner Organ". Despite his musical abilities, Bruckner's mother sent her son to a teaching seminar in Linz in 1841. After completing the seminar with an excellent grade, Bruckner was sent as a teacher's assistant to a school in Windhaag; the living standards and pay were appalling and Bruckner was humiliated by his superior, teacher Franz Fuchs.
Despite the difficult situation, Bruckner never rebelled. He stayed at Windhaag from age 17 to 19. Prelate Michael Arneth noticed Bruckner's bad situation in Windhaag and awarded him a teacher's assistant position in the vicinity of the monastic town of Sankt Florian, sending him to Kronstorf an der Enns for two years. Here he would be able to have more of a part in musical activity; the time in Kronstorf was a much happier one for Bruckner. Between 1843 and 1845, Bruckner was the pupil of Leopold von Zenetti in Enns. Compared to the few works he wrote in Windhaag, the Kronstorf compositions from 1843–1845 show a improved artistic ability, the beginnings of what could be called "the Bruckner style". Among the Kronstorf works is the vocal piece Asperges me, which the young teacher's assistant, out of line of his position, signed with "Anton Bruckner m.p.ria. Comp"; this has been interpreted as a lone early sign of Bruckner's artistic ambitions. Otherwise, little is known of Bruckner's life intentions.
After the Kronstorf period, Bruckner returned to Sankt Florian in 1845, for the next 10 years, he would work as a teacher and an organist. In May 1845, Bruckner passed an examination, which allowed him to begin work as an assistant teacher in one of the village schools of Sankt Florian, he continued to improve his education by taking further courses, passing an examination giving him the permission to teach in higher education institutes, receiving the grade "very good" in all disciplines. In 1848 Bruckner was appointed an organist in Sankt Florian and in 1851 this was made a regular position. In Sankt Florian, most of the repertoire consisted of the music of Michael Haydn, Johann
Johann Jakob Froberger
Johann Jakob Froberger was a German Baroque composer, keyboard virtuoso, organist. Among the most famous composers of the era, he was influential in developing the musical form of the suite of dances in his keyboard works, his harpsichord pieces are idiomatic and programmatic. Only two of Froberger's many compositions were published during his lifetime. Froberger forbade publication of his manuscripts, restricting access to his noble patrons and friends the Württembergs and Habsburgs who had the power to enforce these restrictions. After his death the manuscripts went to his patroness Sibylla, Duchess of Württemberg and the music library of the Württemberg family estate. Johann Jakob Froberger was baptized on 19 May 1616 in Stuttgart; the exact date of his birth is unknown. His family came from Halle, where his grandfather Simon lived and his father Basilius was born. In 1599 Basilius became a tenor in the Württemberg court chapel. At some point before 1605 he married Anna Schmid, who came from a Schwabian family living in Stuttgart.
By the time Johann Jakob was born, his father's career was flourishing, in 1621 Basilius became court Kapellmeister. Of his eleven children with Anna, four became musicians, so it is that Johann Jakob received his first music lessons from his father. Although the Thirty Years' War which started in 1618 undoubtedly made life in Stuttgart somewhat more difficult, the city's musical life was rich and varied, influenced by musicians from all over Europe, so at the beginning of his life Froberger must have been exposed to a wide variety of musical traditions. Little is known about his actual education, though, his teachers included Johann Ulrich Steigleder, he might have met Samuel Scheidt during the latter's visit to Stuttgart in 1627. Basilius Froberger's music library also helped in Johann Jakob's education, it contained more than a hundred volumes of music, including works by Josquin des Prez, Samuel Scheidt and Michael Praetorius, as well as pieces by the lesser known Johann Staden, founder of the Nuremberg school, Giovanni Valentini, the then-famous Viennese Kapellmeister who taught Johann Kaspar Kerll.
The Hofkapelle Stuttgart was disbanded in 1634 in the wake of the Protestants' defeat in the Battle of Nördlingen. In Grundlage einer Ehrenpforte Mattheson writes that a certain Swedish ambassador was so impressed with Froberger's musical skills that he took the 18-year-old musician to Vienna and recommended him to the imperial court; this seems unlikely, because at the time Sweden was allied with Lutheran Württemberg against the imperial forces. In 1637 Basilius Froberger, his wife and one of his daughters died of plague. Johann Jakob and his brother Isaac sold their father's music library to the Württemberg court. In June he was granted a stipend to go to Rome to study under Frescobaldi. Froberger spent the next three years in Italy and, like many other musicians who went to study there converted to Catholicism, he returned to Vienna in 1641 and served as organist and chamber musician until the fall of 1645, when he took a second trip to Italy. It was thought that Froberger went to study under Giacomo Carissimi, but recent research shows that he most studied with Athanasius Kircher in Rome.
If so, Froberger's intention must have been acquiring mastery of vocal composition of the prima pratica. Sometime during 1648–49 Froberger might have met Johann Kaspar Kerll, taught him. In 1649 Froberger travelled back to Austria. On his way back he stopped in Florence and Mantua to show the arca musurgica, a powerful compositional device Kircher taught him, to some of the Italian princes. In September he arrived in Vienna and demonstrated the arca musurgica to the Emperor, an avid amateur musician. In September, Froberger played before William Swann, an English diplomat. Through Swann he got to know Constantijn Huygens, who became Froberger's lifelong friend and introduced the composer to works by contemporary French masters – Jacques Champion de Chambonnières, Denis Gaultier and Ennemond Gaultier. Following the Empress Maria Leopoldine's death in August the court's musical activities were suspended. Froberger left the city and travelled for the next four years entrusted by the Emperor with some extra-musical duties in the fields of diplomacy and espionage.
Not much is known about these voyages. Dresden was one of the first cities Froberger visited: he played before the electoral court of John George I and presented the Elector with a collection of his works, he met Matthias Weckmann whi
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, music teacher and organist of the Romantic era. He was a writer, a philanthropist, a Hungarian nationalist and a Franciscan tertiary. Liszt gained renown in Europe during the early nineteenth century for his prodigious virtuosic skill as a pianist, he was a friend, musical promoter and benefactor to many composers of his time, including Frédéric Chopin, Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg, Ole Bull, Joachim Raff, Mikhail Glinka, Alexander Borodin. A prolific composer, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the New German School, he left behind an extensive and diverse body of work which influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated 20th-century ideas and trends. Among Liszt's musical contributions were the symphonic poem, developing thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form, radical innovations in harmony. Franz Liszt was born to Anna Liszt and Adam Liszt on 22 October 1811, in the village of Doborján in Sopron County, in the Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire.
Liszt's father played the piano, violin and guitar. He had been in the service of Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy and knew Haydn and Beethoven personally. At age six, Franz began listening attentively to his father's piano playing. Adam began teaching him the piano at age seven, Franz began composing in an elementary manner when he was eight, he appeared in concerts at Sopron and Pressburg in October and November 1820 at age 9. After the concerts, a group of wealthy sponsors offered to finance Franz's musical education in Vienna. There Liszt received piano lessons from Carl Czerny, who in his own youth had been a student of Beethoven and Hummel, he received lessons in composition from Ferdinando Paer and Antonio Salieri, the music director of the Viennese court. Liszt's public debut in Vienna on December 1, 1822, at a concert at the "Landständischer Saal", was a great success, he was greeted in Austrian and Hungarian aristocratic circles and met Beethoven and Schubert. In spring 1823, when his one-year leave of absence came to an end, Adam Liszt asked Prince Esterházy in vain for two more years.
Adam Liszt therefore took his leave of the Prince's services. At the end of April 1823, the family returned to Hungary for the last time. At the end of May 1823, the family went to Vienna again. Towards the end of 1823 or early 1824, Liszt's first composition to be published, his Variation on a Waltz by Diabelli, appeared as Variation 24 in Part II of Vaterländischer Künstlerverein; this anthology, commissioned by Anton Diabelli, includes 50 variations on his waltz by 50 different composers, Part I being taken up by Beethoven's 33 variations on the same theme, which are now separately better known as his Diabelli Variations, Op. 120. Liszt's inclusion in the Diabelli project—he was described in it as "an 11 year old boy, born in Hungary"—was certainly at the instigation of Czerny, his teacher and a participant. Liszt was the only child composer in the anthology. After his father's death in 1827, Liszt moved to Paris, he gave up touring. To earn money, Liszt gave lessons in piano playing and composition from early morning until late at night.
His students were scattered across the city and he had to cover long distances. Because of this, he kept uncertain hours and took up smoking and drinking—all habits he would continue throughout his life; the following year, he fell in love with one of his pupils, Caroline de Saint-Cricq, the daughter of Charles X's minister of commerce, Pierre de Saint-Cricq. Her father, insisted that the affair be broken off. Liszt fell ill, to the extent that an obituary notice was printed in a Paris newspaper, he underwent a long period of religious doubts and pessimism, he again was dissuaded this time by his mother. He had many discussions with the Abbé de Lamennais, who acted as his spiritual father, with Chrétien Urhan, a German-born violinist who introduced him to the Saint-Simonists. Urhan wrote music, anti-classical and subjective, with titles such as Elle et moi, La Salvation angélique and Les Regrets, may have whetted the young Liszt's taste for musical romanticism. Important for Liszt was Urhan's earnest championship of Schubert, which may have stimulated his own lifelong devotion to that composer's music.
During this period, Liszt read to overcome his lack of a general education, he soon came into contact with many of the leading authors and artists of his day, including Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine and Heinrich Heine. He composed nothing in these years; the July Revolution of 1830 inspired him to sketch a Revolutionary Symphony based on the events of the "three glorious days," and he took a greater interest in events surrounding him. He met Hector Berlioz on December 1830, the day before the premiere of the Symphonie fantastique. Berlioz's music made a strong impression on Liszt later when he was writing for orchestra, he inherited from Berlioz the diabolic quality of many of his works. After attending a charity concert on 20 April 1832, for the victims of a Parisian cholera epidemic, organised by Niccolò Paganini, Liszt became determined to become as great a virtuoso on the piano as Paganini was on the violin. Paris in the 1830s had become the nexus
Jesus
Jesus referred to as Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus Christ, was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious leader. He is the central figure of Christianity, is described as the most influential person in history. Most Christians believe he is the incarnation of God the Son and the awaited Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament. All modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed although the quest for the historical Jesus has produced little agreement on the historical reliability of the Gospels and on how the Jesus portrayed in the Bible reflects the historical Jesus. Jesus was a Galilean Jew, baptized by John the Baptist and began his own ministry, he preached orally and was referred to as "rabbi". Jesus debated with fellow Jews on how to best follow God, engaged in healings, taught in parables and gathered followers, he was arrested and tried by the Jewish authorities, turned over to the Roman government, crucified on the order of Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect. After his death, his followers believed he rose from the dead, the community they formed became the early Church.
The birth of Jesus is celebrated annually on December 25th as Christmas. His crucifixion is honored on his resurrection on Easter; the used calendar era "AD", from the Latin anno Domini, the equivalent alternative "CE", are based on the approximate birthdate of Jesus. Christian doctrines include the beliefs that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit, was born of a virgin named Mary, performed miracles, founded the Christian Church, died by crucifixion as a sacrifice to achieve atonement for sin, rose from the dead, ascended into Heaven, from where he will return. Most Christians believe; the Nicene Creed asserts that Jesus will judge the living and the dead either before or after their bodily resurrection, an event tied to the Second Coming of Jesus in Christian eschatology. The great majority of Christians worship Jesus as the incarnation of God the Son, the second of three persons of the Trinity. A minority of Christian denominations reject Trinitarianism, wholly or as non-scriptural. Jesus figures in non-Christian religions and new religious movements.
In Islam, Jesus is considered one of the Messiah. Muslims believe Jesus was a bringer of scripture and was born of a virgin, but was not the son of God; the Quran states. Most Muslims do not believe that he was crucified, but that he was physically raised into Heaven by God. In contrast, Judaism rejects the belief that Jesus was the awaited Messiah, arguing that he did not fulfill Messianic prophecies, was neither divine nor resurrected. A typical Jew in Jesus' time had only one name, sometimes followed by the phrase "son of <father's name>", or the individual's hometown. Thus, in the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as "Jesus of Nazareth". Jesus' neighbors in Nazareth refer to him as "the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon", "the carpenter's son", or "Joseph's son". In John, the disciple Philip refers to him as "Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth"; the name Jesus is derived from the Latin Iesus, a transliteration of the Greek Ἰησοῦς. The Greek form is a rendering of the Hebrew ישוע, a variant of the earlier name יהושע, or in English, "Joshua", meaning "Yah saves".
This was the name of Moses' successor and of a Jewish high priest. The name Yeshua appears to have been in use in Judea at the time of the birth of Jesus; the 1st-century works of historian Flavius Josephus, who wrote in Koine Greek, the same language as that of the New Testament, refer to at least twenty different people with the name Jesus. The etymology of Jesus' name in the context of the New Testament is given as "Yahweh is salvation". Since early Christianity, Christians have referred to Jesus as "Jesus Christ"; the word Christ was a office, not a given name. It derives from the Greek Χριστός, a translation of the Hebrew mashiakh meaning "anointed", is transliterated into English as "Messiah". In biblical Judaism, sacred oil was used to anoint certain exceptionally holy people and objects as part of their religious investiture. Christians of the time designated Jesus as "the Christ" because they believed him to be the Messiah, whose arrival is prophesied in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.
In postbiblical usage, Christ became viewed as a name—one part of "Jesus Christ". The term "Christian" has been in use since the 1st century; the four canonical gospels are the foremost sources for the message of Jesus. However, other parts of the New Testament include references to key episodes in his life, such as the Last Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:23. Acts of the Apostles refers to the early ministry of its anticipation by John the Baptist. Acts 1:1 -- 11 says more about the Ascension of Jesus. In the undisputed Pauline letters, which were written earlier than the gospels, the words or instructions of Jesus are cited several times; some early Christian groups had separate descriptions of the life and teachings of Jesus that are not included in the New Testament. These include the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel
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