User:Ravpapa/My Drafts

List of residences of Joseph Haydn

ImageMap

ImageMap editor

File:Icon-boxing-gloves.jpg

Culture

The Shrine of the Book, housing the Dead Sea Scrolls, at the Israel Museum

Although Jerusalem is known primarily for its religious significance, the city is also home to many artistic and cultural venues. The Israel Museum attracts nearly one million visitors a year, approximately one-third of them tourists. The 20 acre museum complex comprises several buildings featuring special exhibits and extensive collections of Judaica, archaeological findings, and Israeli and European art. The Dead Sea scrolls, discovered in the mid-twentieth century in the Qumran caves near the Dead Sea, are housed in the Museum's Shrine of the Book. The Youth Wing, which mounts changing exhibits and runs an extensive art education program, is visited by 100,000 children a year. The museum has a large outdoor sculpture garden, and a scale-model of the Second Temple was recently moved from the Holyland Hotel to a new location on the museum grounds. The Rockefeller Museum, located in East Jerusalem, was the first archaeological museum in the Middle East. It was built in 1938 during the British Mandate.

The Islamic Museum on the Temple Mount, established in 1923, houses many Islamic artifacts, from tiny kohl flasks and rare manuscripts to giant marble columns.

The Jerusalem Theater at night

Yad Vashem, Israel's national memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, houses the world's largest library of Holocaust-related information, with an estimated 100,000 books and articles. The complex contains a state-of-the-art museum that explores the genocide of the Jews through exhibits that focus on the personal stories of individuals and families killed in the Holocaust and an art gallery featuring the work of artists who perished. Yad Vashem also commemorates the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis, and honors the Righteous among the Nations. The Museum on the Seam, which explores issues of coexistence through art is situated on the road dividing eastern and western Jerusalem.

The International Convention Center.

The Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, established in the 1940s, has appeared around the world. Other arts facilities include the International Convention Center (Binyanei HaUma) near the entrance to city, where the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra plays, the Jerusalem Cinemateque, the Gerard Behar Center (formerly Beit Ha'am) in downtown Jerusalem, the Jerusalem Music Center in Yemin Moshe, and the Targ Music Center in Ein Kerem. The Israel Festival, featuring indoor and outdoor performances by local and international singers, concerts, plays and street theater, has been held annually since 1961; for the past 25 years, Jerusalem has been the major organizer of this event. The Jerusalem Theater in the Talbiya neighborhood hosts over 150 concerts a year, as well as theater and dance companies and performing artists from overseas. The Khan, located in a caravansarai opposite the old Jerusalem train station, is the city's only repertoire theater. The station itself has become a venue for cultural events in recent years, as the site of Shav'ua Hasefer, an annual week-long book fair, and outdoor music performances. The Jerusalem Film Festival is held annually, screening Israeli and international films.

The Ticho House, in downtown Jerusalem, houses the paintings of Anna Ticho and the Judaica collections of her husband, an ophthalmologist who opened Jerusalem's first eye clinic in this building in 1912. Al-Hoash, established in 2004, is a gallery for the preservation of Palestinian art.

Besides being a center for Jewish Israeli culture, Jerusalem is a capital of Palestinian culture. Jerusalem was selected by UNESCO as the 2009 Arab Capital of Culture. Jerusalem is home to the Palestinian National Theatre, which engages in cultural preservation as well as innovation, working to upgrade and rekindle interest in the arts at the national level.. The The Edward Said National Conservatory of Music is headquartered in Jerusalem. The conservatory sponsors the Palestine Youth Orchestra, which has achieved acclaim throughout the Arab world - in 2009, the orchestra, which includes Palestinian musicians from Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel, and Palestinians living in the Palestinian diaspora - toured the Gulf states and other Middle East countries.

The Islamic Museum on the Temple Mount, established in 1923, houses many Islamic artifacts, from tiny kohl flasks and rare manuscripts to giant marble columns.

The Jerusalem Theater at night

While Israeli authorities approve and even support some Palestinian cultural activities, restrictions often make expansion of Jerusalem Palestinian culture difficult. The Israelis forbad festivities marking the selection of Jerusalem as the Arab Capital of Culture, because they were sponsored by the PNA, which Israel claims has no authority in Jerusalem. Israeli border restrictions make it difficult for music teachers and artists to move freely between Jerusalem and cultural centers in the West Bank. On the other hand, Israeli authorities allowed a four-day culture fest in the Beit Anan suburb of Jerusalem in 2009, attended by more than 15,000 people

Jerusalem is also a center for Israeli-Palestinian cultural cooperation. Several organizations, including the Abraham Fund and the Jerusalem Intercultural Center (JICC) actively promote joint Jewish-Palestinian cultural projects. The Jerusalem Center for Middle Eastern Music and Dance offers courses and performances by Arab and Jewish students and artists. The JICC offers workshops on Jewish-Arab dialogue through the arts.

A Tolerance Monument sculpted by Czesław Dźwigaj in collaboration with Michal Kubiak is situated on a hill marking the divide between Jewish Armon Hanatziv and Arab Jebl Mukaber, standing opposite the United Nations headquarters in Jerusalem in a park near Goldman Promenade. Unveiled in Jerusalem in 2008, it was funded by Polish businessman Aleksander Gudzowaty as a symbol to promote peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Gush Shalom

Gush Shalom (Hebrew: גוש שלום, lit. The Peace Bloc [Coalition]) is an Israeli peace group. Founded and led by Uri Avnery, a former Knesset member and journalist known for his left-wing views, the organization is one of the most militant of the Israeli peace organizations, adopting positions unpopular in Israel and often criticizing other left-wing organizations for being too moderate. As a result, Gush Shalom has been frequently villified by moderate and conservative columnists in Israel, and praised by some local and international organizations that oppose Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

The left-wing organization has been involved in several Israeli controversies, such as sending a “Relief Convoy to Gaza” while it is under Hamas administration, and has elicited the mainstream Israeli media to describe it, on occasion, as "radical" and "extreme." The American Friends Service Committee has described the group as "one of Israel’s most influential peace organizations."

Cynthia Lennon

Cynthia Lennon (née Powell) (b. 10 September 1939) was the first wife of musician John Lennon of the Beatles. She was married to Lennon from 1962 to 1968, the period of the Beatles' meteoric rise from an obscure British rock band to one of the leaders of popular music worldwide.

Cynthia Lennon wrote two books about John, A Twist of Lennon in 1990, and John in 2006. The books portray the rock star as passionate, creative, imaginative, but also as a philanderer, sometimes violent, and a heavy drug user. In her books, Cynthia contends that it was John's drug use that was a key factor in driving them apart. John attempted to suppress the first book, claiming it was libellous.

The Lennons met at art college, and after a stormy romance, married in a hasty ceremony when Cynthia revealed that she was pregnant with John's child. After their divorce, she remarried three more times. She now lives in Majorca, Spain.

Death and the Maiden

The String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, known as Death and the Maiden, is a string quartet written by Franz Schubert. Composed in 1824, after the composer suffered through a serious illness and realized that he was dying, it is Schubert's testament to death. The quartet is named for the theme of the second movement, which Schubert took from a song he wrote in 1817 by the same title; but the theme of death is palpable in all four movements of the quartet.

The quartet was first played in 1826 in a private home, and was not published until 1831, three years after Schubert's death. Yet, passed over in his lifetime, the quartet has become a staple of the quartet repertoire. It is D. 810 in Otto Erich Deutsch's thematic catalog of Schubert's works.

Composition

1823 and 1824 were hard years for Schubert. For much of 1823 he was sick with an outburst of tertiary stage syphillis, and in May had to be hospitalized. He was broke: he had entered into a disastrous deal with Diabelli to publish a batch of works, and recieved almost no payment; and his latest attempt at opera, Fierabras, was a flop. In a letter to a friend, he wrote,

"Think of a man whose health can never be restored, and who from sheer despair makes matters worse instead of better. Think, I say, of a man whose brightest hopes have come to nothing, to whom love and friendship are but torture, and whose enthusiasm for the beautiful is fast fanishing; and ask yourself if such a man is not truly unhappy."

Yet, despite his bad health, poverty and depression, Schubert continued to turn out the tuneful, light and gemütlich music that made him the toast of Viennese society: the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin, the octet for string quartet, contrabass, clarinet, horn and bassoon, more than 20 songs, and numerous light pieces for piano.

In 1824, Schubert returned to the string quartet form, which he had last visited as a teenager. He wrote the one-movement Quartettsatz and the Rosamunde quartet, using a theme from another failed stage opera of his. These quartets are a huge step forward from his initial attempts. Even Schubert recognized this fact; in July of 1824, he wrote his brother Ferdinand, "it would be better if you stuck to other quartets than mine, for there is nothing in them..." There are several qualities that set these mature quartets apart from Schubert's earlier attempts. In the early quartets, it is primarily the first violin that carries the melody, with the other instruments playing supporting roles; in the later quartets, the part writing is much more advanced, and each instrument brings its own character and presence, for a more complex and integrated texture. Also, the later quartets are structurally much more integrated, with motifs, harmonies, and textures recurring in a way that ties the entire work together.

But beyond these technical improvements, Schubert in these later works made the quartet medium his own. "He had now ceased to write quartets to order, for experimental study, or for the home circle," writes Walter Willson Cobbett. "To the independent artist... the string quartet had now also become a vehicle for conveying to the world his inner struggles." For Schubert, who lived a life suspended between the lyrical, romantic, charming and the dramatic, chaotic, and depressive, the string quartet offered a medium "to reconcile his essentially lyric themes with his feeling for dramatic utterance within a form that provided the possibility of extreme color contrasts," writes music historian Homer Ulrich.

Schubert wrote the D minor quartet in March 1824, within weeks of completing the A minor Rosamunde quartet. He apparently planned to publish a three-set volume of quartets; but the Rosamunde was published within a year, while the D minor quartet was only published in 1831, three years after Schubert's death, by Diabelli. It was first played in January, 1926, at the Vienna home of Karl and Franz Hacker, amateur violinists, apparently with Schubert on the viola.

Death: Inspiration of the quartet

The quartet takes its name from the lied "Der Tod und das Mädchen" ("Death and the Maiden, D.531), which Schubert wrote in 1817. The theme of the song, which is the theme of the second movement of the quartet, is a death knell that accompanies the song about the terror and comfort of death:

Death and the Maiden

Peter Schöne (baritone) and Boris Cepeda (piano)

The Maiden:

Pass my by, oh, pass me by!

You wild man of bones!

I am still young, leave me, my dear,

Leave, and touch me not.

Death:

Give me your hand, you gentle creature!

I come as a friend, not one to cause you pain.

Be of good cheer - I am not wild.

In my arms you shall sleep.

was written in 1824 by Franz Schubert, just after the composer became aware of his ruined health. It is popularly known as the Death and the Maiden Quartet because the second movement is adapted from the piano accompaniment to Schubert's 1817 song (or Lied), Death and the Maiden. In the numerical order of his quartets it is his String Quartet No. 14, and is D. 810 The work is a string quartet in four movements:

1. Allegro, in D minor and common time
2. Andante con moto, in G minor and divided common (2/2) time
3. Scherzo: Allegro molto, in D minor and 3/4 time
4. Presto, in D minor and 6/8 time

The opening movement is, along with that of the preceding and next quartet and that of his string quintet, among the most extended and substantial in his chamber music output, if not in his output as a whole. It is a sonata form movement whose exposition encompasses three main key regions, D minor, F major and A minor.

The second movement is a theme — taken from his macabre song Der Tod und das Mädchen (D 531 in Deutsch's catalog) — and five variations, with coda.

The third movement's main theme can also be heard in one of a set of piano dances; its lyrical D major trio varies its 'repeats'.

The relentless finale-tarantella is a sonata-rondo in form — a rondo whose first episode returns as the last, and whose central section contains elements of development. Its coda promises major-mode triumph, and snatches it away.

Arrangements

In 1878, Robert Franz transcribed the quartet for piano duet.

This is one of the quartet works, along with Beethoven's String Quartet No. 11 in F minor ("Quartetto serioso"), that Mahler arranged for use by a string orchestra, mostly by doubling some of the cello parts with double basses.

In 1930 the British composer John Foulds made a version "as a symphony" for full (classical) orchestra.

In 1990s the American composer Andy Stein made a version "Symphony in D minor, 'Death and the Maiden'" for full orchestra. This version has been performed by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Buffalo Philharmonic and others. A recording of this version was released by Naxos Records in March of 2009

Appearances in film, television, theater and radio

Ariel Dorfman's 1991 play Death and the Maiden and its 1994 film adaptation (directed by Roman Polanski) take their names from the quartet.

Additionally, Schubert's quartet has been used in the score of at least the following:

• The 1996 Jane Campion film The Portrait of a Lady.
• The 1972 Roman Polanski film What?
• The BBC TV production of Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking.
• The 1962 Samuel Beckett radio play All That Fall.

External links

• Free scores by Death and the Maiden Quartet at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
• [http://gardnermuseum.libsyn.com/media/gardnermuseum/schubert_d810.mp3 Recording performed by the Borromeo String Quartet from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in MP3 format
• A website with MIDIs of the quartet
• Andy Stein's list of compositions
• In the BBC Discovering Music: Listening Library