Polonia (Wagner)

Polonia (WWV 39) is a concert overture written by Richard Wagner. Wagner completed Polonia in 1836, although it may have been drafted as early as 1832. It was premiered in Magdeburg, with the composer conducting, on March 29, 1836.

Wagner's biographer Ernest Newman wrote that the overture was "shapeless and frothy...the oddest mixture of a pseudo-Polish idiom and the cheap assertive melody of Rienzi". The critic Adrian Courleonis has commented that "Polonia 's coarse-grained excitement, which may at first seem audacious, looms as merely clumsy ... well before its run halfway through its dozen-minute course, the curious compulsion to revisit lame material having something about it of the boorish, drunken frat boy imagining that he's the life of the party".

In contrast to this negative criticism, Wagner himself, who was very sympathetic to the Polish revolutionary attempt to reestablish Poland's political sovereignty, states that Polonia resulted from a "dreamlike evening" in which he heard uninterrupted Polish songs at a celebration of May_3rd_Constitution_Day (Wagner, My Life 1983, pp. 58-61). Similarly, Professor Halina Goldberg points out that Wagner was one of several foreign composers who were sympathetic to the Polish cause, namely the restoration of Poland, which had been eliminated from the map after a series of 3 partitions. According to her, Wagner wrote Polonia after hearing Polish patriotic songs for a May 3 Constitution Day celebration. (Halina Goldberg, The Age of Chopin, p. 92).

Richard Wagner

Wilhelm Richard Wagner (/ˈvɑːɡnər/; German: [ˈʁiçaʁt ˈvaːɡnɐ]; 22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is primarily known for his operas (or, as some of his later works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Weber and Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama, and which was announced in a series of essays between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).

His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs—musical phrases associated with individual characters, places, ideas or plot elements. His advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, greatly influenced the development of classical music. His Tristan und Isolde is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music.

Wagner, Bahia

Wagner is a municipality in the state of Bahia in the North-East region of Brazil.

See also

References

Coordinates: 12°17′13″S 41°10′04″W / 12.28694°S 41.16778°W / -12.28694; -41.16778

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The seventh UK series of The X Factor was broadcast on ITV between 21 August and 12 December 2010. The final 12 were declared on 3 October 2010. Four wildcards were announced on the first live show of the finals on 9 October 2010, bringing the number of finalists up to 16.

Boys

The Boys category was mentored by Dannii Minogue. Contestants in this category are males aged 16 to 28. The eight candidates were Karl Brown, Matt Cardle, Nicolò Festa, Aiden Grimshaw, Marlon McKenzie, Tom Richards, Paije Richardson and John Wilding. Minogue chose:

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Polonia

Polonia may mean

Polish areas

Places

Music

Sport

Polonia (train)

The Polonia is a EuroCity (EC) express train. It was introduced in 1997, to supplement the existing EuroCity train, the Sobieski, on the international route between Vienna, the capital of Austria, and Warsaw, the capital of Poland, via the Czech Republic.

The train's name, Polonia, is the Latin word for "Poland".

As of 2013, the northbound train, EC 102, departs from Villach Hbf, in Villach, Austria, at shortly after 09:00, and the southbound train, EC 103, departs from Warszawa Wschodnia in Warsaw at shortly after 06:00. Both trains arrive at their destinations after a journey time, via Vienna, of approximately twelve and a half hours.

Formation (consist)

The train is composed of rolling stock of all three participating railways PKP, ČD and ÖBB and includes a dining car operated by PKP/WARS. Some of the coaches only operate on certain days between Villach and Břeclav or Bohumín.

The train is pulled by locomotives of the Siemens ES 64 U type: between Villach and Břeclav by an ÖBB 1116, between Břeclav and Warszawa by a PKP EU44.

Polonia (Elgar)

Polonia is a symphonic prelude by the English composer Edward Elgar written in 1915 as his Op. 76.

History

On 13 April 1915 the Polish conductor Emil Młynarski asked Elgar to compose something, thinking of how Elgar's Carillon had been a recent tribute to Belgium, but this time using Polish national music.

The piece was mainly Elgar's own work, but he included quotations from the Warszawianka and other Polish patriotic songs, the Polish National Anthem, and themes by Chopin and Paderewski.

It was first performed at the Polish Victims' Relief Fund Concert in the Queen's Hall, London on 6 July 1915, with the orchestra conducted by the composer. The Relief Fund was a worldwide effort, organised by Paderewski and Henryk Sienkiewicz, in aid of refugees from the terrible conflict in Poland between the forces of Russia and Germany. There were elaborately engraved programmes, each tied with a red and white ribbon, containing messages from Paderewski. Elgar conducted his première and Thomas Beecham conducted the remainder of the concert.