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Blagoje Bersa
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Browse piano sheets by Blagoje Bersa on Zen Virtual Piano. Blagoje Bersa was born in Dubrovnik on 21 December 1873 and died in Zagreb on 1 January 1934, and a biography on mic.hr calls him one of the prime pillars of Croatian music of the first half of the twentieth century. His father Ivan was a passionate amateur musician who founded a string quartet in Dubrovnik. Of the children of Ivan’s marriage to Filomena de Medici, the sons Blagoje, Vladoje and Josip showed a particular love for music, poetry and the theatre. A household with a string quartet and brothers drawn to poetry and theatre suggests a childhood in which music and words sat side by side. From 1893 to 1896 Bersa was a student at the music school in Zagreb, where his teachers included Ivan Zajc for piano and composition. From 1896 to 1899 he studied at the Vienna Conservatory, with Robert Fuchs for composition, who also taught Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf, Jean Sibelius and Alexander Zemlinsky. After graduation he returned home and worked as a choirmaster for singing societies in Sarajevo and Split, then went to Graz as conductor of the City Theatre, and in 1903 he was in Vienna again as a freelance artist. A path through Zagreb, Vienna, Sarajevo, Split and Graz suggests a young musician who moved wherever the work was, and who gathered training and experience along the way. From October 1904 to March 1905 he toured Germany, Switzerland and the Czech lands with the reciter Paula Wirth, accompanying her melodramas at the piano or conducting a small ensemble. The music drama Oganj (Fire, German title Der Eisenhammer) was a great success when first performed at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb on 11 January 1911. In his review A. G. Matoš wrote that the orchestral part was more brilliant than the vocal, and called it the first artistic opera of a high and modern style to have been created by a Croat. A tour as an accompanist, followed by an opera praised in print, can be read as a path from the piano stool to the opera house, one that took several years and a good deal of travel. The Austrian Music Lexicon counts him among the representatives of the so-called Moderne, with orchestral works showing masterly, differentiated instrumentation, and says he experimented with spatial effects. From 1911 he worked as a musical adviser and arranger for the Doblinger publishing company in Vienna, and mic.hr adds that his increasing dedication to teaching led to a total cessation of his work as a composer, so that the music drama Raskolnikov, after Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, on which he worked for some twenty years, remained incomplete. An unfinished music drama on Raskolnikov, worked on for twenty years, points to a composer who kept returning to a large idea while teaching took up his time.
Browse piano sheets by Blagoje Bersa on Zen Virtual Piano.
Blagoje Bersa was born in Dubrovnik on 21 December 1873 and died in Zagreb on 1 January 1934, and a biography on mic.hr calls him one of the prime pillars of Croatian music of the first half of the twentieth century. His father Ivan was a passionate amateur musician who founded a string quartet in Dubrovnik. Of the children of Ivan’s marriage to Filomena de Medici, the sons Blagoje, Vladoje and Josip showed a particular love for music, poetry and the theatre. A household with a string quartet and brothers drawn to poetry and theatre suggests a childhood in which music and words sat side by side.
From 1893 to 1896 Bersa was a student at the music school in Zagreb, where his teachers included Ivan Zajc for piano and composition. From 1896 to 1899 he studied at the Vienna Conservatory, with Robert Fuchs for composition, who also taught Gustav Mahler, Hugo Wolf, Jean Sibelius and Alexander Zemlinsky. After graduation he returned home and worked as a choirmaster for singing societies in Sarajevo and Split, then went to Graz as conductor of the City Theatre, and in 1903 he was in Vienna again as a freelance artist. A path through Zagreb, Vienna, Sarajevo, Split and Graz suggests a young musician who moved wherever the work was, and who gathered training and experience along the way.
From October 1904 to March 1905 he toured Germany, Switzerland and the Czech lands with the reciter Paula Wirth, accompanying her melodramas at the piano or conducting a small ensemble. The music drama Oganj (Fire, German title Der Eisenhammer) was a great success when first performed at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb on 11 January 1911. In his review A. G. Matoš wrote that the orchestral part was more brilliant than the vocal, and called it the first artistic opera of a high and modern style to have been created by a Croat. A tour as an accompanist, followed by an opera praised in print, can be read as a path from the piano stool to the opera house, one that took several years and a good deal of travel.
The Austrian Music Lexicon counts him among the representatives of the so-called Moderne, with orchestral works showing masterly, differentiated instrumentation, and says he experimented with spatial effects. From 1911 he worked as a musical adviser and arranger for the Doblinger publishing company in Vienna, and mic.hr adds that his increasing dedication to teaching led to a total cessation of his work as a composer, so that the music drama Raskolnikov, after Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, on which he worked for some twenty years, remained incomplete. An unfinished music drama on Raskolnikov, worked on for twenty years, points to a composer who kept returning to a large idea while teaching took up his time.
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Blagoje Bersa
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Blagoje Bersa (1873–1934) was a Croatian composer and teacher born in Dubrovnik, who wrote orchestral, operatic, chamber and vocal works.
Oganj (Fire, German title Der Eisenhammer) is a music drama by Bersa, first performed at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb on 11 January 1911.
He studied at the music school in Zagreb from 1893 to 1896 and at the Vienna Conservatory from 1896 to 1899.
It is an unfinished music drama after Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, on which Bersa worked for some twenty years.