Khachaturian：假麵舞會組曲(Masquerade Suite) - by 塵埃

【哈恰圖良（Aram Khachaturian）作品欣賞】假麵舞會組曲(Masquerade Suite)

 

Aram Khachaturian (June 6, 1903 – May 1, 1978) was a Soviet Armenian composer. Alongside Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, Khachaturian is sometimes called one of the three "titans" of Soviet music. Khachaturian's works were often influenced by classical European music and Armenian folk music.

Born in Tiflis (Georgia) to a poor Armenian family from Nakhichevan (Azerbaijan), Khachaturian moved to Moscow at the age of 19. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1934.

Khachaturian is famous for the Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia from his ballet Spartacus, and for the "Sabre Dance" from his ballet Gayane and the adagio from the same ballet, much used in films and TV series around the world.

The Incidental music to Masquerade was written in 1941 by Aram Khachaturian for a production of Russian poet and playwright Mikhail Lermontov's play of the same name. It premiered on 21 June 1941 in the Vakhtangov Theatre in Moscow. It is better known in the form of a five-movement suite.

Khachaturian was asked to write music for a production of Masquerade being produced by the director Ruben Simonov. The famous waltz theme in particular gave Khachaturian much trouble in its creation: moved by the words of the play's heroine, Nina - "How beautiful the new waltz is! ...something between sorrow and joy gripped my heart." - the composer struggled to "find a theme that I considered beautiful and new". His former teacher, Nikolai Myaskovsky, attempted to help Khachaturian by giving him a collection of romances and waltzes from Lermontov's time; though these did not give immediate inspiration, Khachaturian admitted that "had it not been for the strenuous search" for the appropriate style and melodic inspiration, he would not have discovered the second theme of his waltz which acted "like a magic link, allowing me to pull out the whole chain. The rest of the waltz came to me easily, with no trouble at all."

Later, in 1944, Khachaturian extracted five movements to make a symphonic suite. The movements are:
1. Waltz
2. Nocturne
3. Mazurka
4. Romance
5. Galop.

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