 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: beejay
Date: 2002-06-20 18:52
Does anyone have any thoughts about the composer Joachim Raff?
According to the web site dedicated to him, he was once bigger than Wagner, but I'd never heard of him until now.
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Author: GBK
Date: 2002-06-20 21:27
Raff fell into the common trap of "too much quantity, too little quality", thus his music did not sustain the interest of the general public past his lifetime.
However he did show great judgement in hiring Clara Schumann as his first piano instructor at the Conservatory he founded in Frankfurt. She remained employed there until the end of her life...GBK
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Author: Micaela
Date: 2002-06-22 22:25
I've played his Symphony No. 3, "In the Forest." In my opinion, it isn't the greatest symphony ever written by a long shot but, for a composer that almost nobody has ever heard of, it's better than you'd expect. It's Mendelssohn-ish, like the Scottish Symphony particularly. The third movement sounds to me like a bit of a rip-off of Mendelssohn's scherzos (esp. Midsummer's Night's Dream and the Octet). I don't know if the dates support a bit of borrowing but I think Raff's orchestrations and form owe a lot to Mendelssohn, at least in this piece. I didn't like the piece enough to do any further research about him.
If you are ever asked to play it, the 2nd clarinet part is extremely dull.
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