December Anniversaries of classical composers

December Great Classical Composer Anniversaries

2/12/1990 Copland died 4/12/1976 Britten died 5/12/1791 Mozart died 5/12/2007 Stockhausen died 7/12/1863 Mascagni born 8/12/1865 Sibelius born 8/12/1890 Martinu born 10/12/1822 César Franck born 10/12/1908 Messiaen born 11/12/1803 Berlioz born 16/12/1770 Beethoven born 16/12/1921 Saint Saëns died 17/12/1749 Cimarosa born 22/12/1858 Puccini born 25/12/1871 Scriabin born 28/12/1937 Ravel died

Death of Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky's death mask

Tchaikovsky died on this day, 6 November, in 1893 aged 53 in St.Petersberg.
Officially he died of cholera but for many his death was suspicious and there are various intriguing theories about the true cause.
Cholera was common at the time and everyone knew that you must not drink unboiled water. Certainly for an educated man in high society it is very unlikely that he would have drunk it accidentally.
He was a very important highly regarded person in Russia. He was also gay, which at that time was illegal and could ruin your reputation.
The main theories link his death to his homosexuality:
- suicide due to personal problems including his infatuation with his nephew which could never be revealed.
- contraction of cholera through unhygienic sexual practices
- suicide by "court of honour". Eight of his close circle convened with him and convinced him that the only way for him to avoid a massive scandal was for him to kill himself.
- suicide or murder ordered by Tsar Alexander III, in order to avoid scandal.
You can find plenty of articles and opinions on the internet which make interesting reading. Here are a few:
- Wikipedia
- BBC
- Daily Telegraph
- Tchailovsky-research.net

Exhibition at Morley

I am in the throes of preparing for a group exhibition at the Morley College Gallery.

It is called 'Sixteen @ Morley' as it is sixteen of us from Frank Connely's class who have clubbed together to rent the gallery for two weeks.

This is the second year we do it. Last year it was in Spring and was quite successful. This year it is 3-14 November so we are hoping that people will be buying their Christmas presents!

Will the 'credit crunch' affect us? We'll soon see.

My theme will be classical composers again. Last year I had 16 portraits done. This year I have over 50 so I need to select and make best use of the available space.

This photo is of my display at last year's show.

52composers.com - My new website

I am building a new website for the series of classical music composer portraits I'm working on.
So far I have been putting all my art into my www.PaulHelm.com site which just isn't getting much traffic and therefore no sales.

I have been building on-line stores at imagekind, art.com, lulu, cafepress, zazzle and various other sites with varying success. These sites are fantastic at providing a Print on Demand service but it is up to you to drive traffic to them in order to get sales. You cannot just build a store and sit back hoping for the dollars to roll in.

Having had some success with the composer portraits I have decided to build a site dedicated just to my composers. This way, if I can generate the interest I will be able to drive traffic to my stores.

I have called it 52composers.com as 52 is an easily remembered number and my plan is to produce one a week for a year. I have done over 40 portraits so far so I will have plenty of work putting them onto the new site.

Having spent a long time evaluating various site building options I have settled on using SBI for my exciting new project. I will keep you informed on progress in this blog.

Take a look at progress so far at www.52composers.com