Rhapsody

The first rhapsodies in music date from the mid 19th century and are one-movement works that have a free-flowing structure and feature a range of highly contrasted moods, colour and tonality. At that time Liszt and Dvorak wrote ‘rhapsodies’ with the music based on and reflecting the folk music and musical idioms of different countries and areas. Listen to an example from Dvorak’s 'Slavonic Rhapsody No 3’ and notice the introduction on a solo harp and the orchestral build-up to a main theme which is very folk-like in its sound.

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Rachmaninov wrote ‘Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini’ in 1934, a work for piano and orchestra which was in effect a theme with a series of variations. This work is well known as it has been arranged for cello and orchestra and in fact there is a modern version using synthesisers and rock instruments. Here is an excerpt from the original version and notice the free-flowing style of the music and the extreme difficulty of the piano music.

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In England Vaughan Williams wrote a number of rhapsodic works and among the best known of these is ‘Norfolk Rhapsody’, which is based on two tunes collected from Norfolk fishermen in 1905. Listen to the beginning of the work, which opens in a very peaceful mood before the first melody, ‘The Captain’s apprentice’, is played on a solo viola.

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American George Gershwin is famous as a great composer of jazz and, along with his brother Ira, who wrote the lyrics, a vast number of songs and musicals, but he was also a composer who wrote a number of ‘serious’ works, a piano concerto, a rhapsodic-style work, ‘An American in Paris’, and perhaps most famous, his ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, full of jazz influence, beautiful melodies and exciting orchestration. Listen to the beginning of the work and notice the trill and glissando on the clarinet, the syncopation, use of blue notes, trills on the piano, chromatic scales, muted trumpet, flutter tonguing on the trumpet and many other concepts.

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