Music History Monday: Recent Episodes
Robert Greenberg
Exploring Music History with Professor Robert Greenberg one Monday at a time. Every Monday Robert Greenberg explores some timely, perhaps intriguing and even, if we are lucky, salacious chunk of musical information relevant to that date, or to … whatever. If on (rare) occasion these features appear a tad irreverent, well, that’s okay: we would do well to remember that cultural icons do not create and make music but rather, people do, and people can do and say the darndest things.
We mark the London premiere on August 26, 1952 – 72 years ago today – of the film “An American in Paris.” With music by George Gershwin (1898-1937), directed by Vincente Minnelli, starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, and Oscar Levant, the flick won six Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture. While the film actually opened in New York City on October 4, 1951, this London premiere offers us all the excuse we need to examine both the film and the music that inspired it, George Gershwin’s programmatic orchestral work, An American in Paris.
Here’s how we’re going to proceed. Today’s Music History Monday post will deal specifically with Gershwin’s An American in Paris, a roughly 21-minute workfor orchestra composed in 1928.
Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will feature the 1951 film of the same name, focusing on (and excerpting) four of its musical numbers.
StatementGeorge Gershwin (1898-1937) on the cover of Time magazine, July 20, 1925George Gershwin is among the handful of greatest composers ever born in the United States. His death at the age of 38 (of a brain tumor) should be considered an artistic tragedy on par with the premature deaths of Schubert (at 31), Mozart (at 35), and Chopin (at 39).
He was born Jacob Gershovitz (though his birth certificate reads “Jacob Gershwine”), the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, on September 26, 1898. He was born at home, in a flat at 242 Snediker Avenue in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.
(In 1963, a bronze plaque commemorating Gershwin’s birth was affixed to the building. By the 1970s, the neighborhood had fallen on very hard times: the plaque was stolen – it is still MIA – and the building vandalized. It burned down in 1987, and all that remains today of this once thriving neighborhood of immigrants is a blighted area of warehouses and junkyards.)
Rarely has a major composer begun his life in an artistically less promising manner. Tall, athletic, and charismatic, Gershwin was the leader of his various tenement gangs, playing street ball, roller skating everywhere, and engaging in petty crime. By his own admission, he cared nothing for music until he was ten, when George’s parents Morris and Rose bought his elder brother Ira a piano. But it was George who attacked the thing, with an intensity and precocity that shocked everyone. …
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Addendum: A Heartfelt PostscriptThis will be my final Music History Monday podcast and post. I have been writing Music History Monday for exactly eight years – since September 5, 2016 – during which I have created over 400 of them. It’s been a wonderful run, and now it’s time for me to return to writing music. From here on out, my blogging and vlogging will take on the character of a personal journal punctuated with generalized and editorial commentary, all of which will be accessible through my Patreon subscription site at Patreon.com/RobertGreenbergMusic.
If you are not already part of my Patreon family, I would urge you to consider joining us!
Become a Patron!Listen and Subscribe to the Music History Monday PodcastThe Robert Greenberg Best SellersBest selling products* Mozart In Vienna Select options * Great Music of the 20th Century Select options * Understanding the Fundamentals of Music Select options * Music as a Mirror of History Select options * How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition Select options * Great Masters: Mahler — His Life and Music Select options * The Chamber Music of Mozart Select options * The Concerto Select options * The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works Select options * The Symphony Select options The post Music History Monday: An American in Paris first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
Serge (or Sergei) Diaghilev (1872-1929) in 1916We mark the death on August 19, 1929 – 95 years ago today – of the Russian impresario, patron, art critic, and founder of the Ballets Russes Serge (or “Sergei”) Pavlovich Diaghilev, in Venice. Born in the village of Selishchi roughly 75 miles southeast of St. Petersburg on March 31, 1872, he was 57 years old when he died.
Movers and Shakers
Serge Diaghilev was one of the great movers-and-shakers of all time. In a letter to his stepmother written in 1895, the 23-year-old Diaghilev described himself with astonishing honesty and no small bit of prescience, given the way his life went on the develop:
“I am firstly a great charlatan, though con brio [meaning vivacious and spirited!]; secondly, a great charmer; thirdly I have any amount of cheek [meaning chutzpah; moxie; nerve!]; fourthly, I am a man with a great quantity of logic, but with very few principles; fifthly, I think I have no real gifts. All the same, I think I have found my true vocation – being a patron of the arts. I have all that is necessary except the money – but that will come.”
Diaghilev at 17, circa 1889Serge Diaghilev’s audacious and spectacular career was intertwined completely with the audacious and spectacular career of one Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). Without Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky would never have become STRAVINSKY: the enfant terrible of Western music in the years before World War One. Without Diaghilev, Stravinsky would never have seen his career reborn and finances recover after the war. Conversely, without Stravinsky, Diaghilev might have made his mark but not his legend. Consequently, I’m going to dedicate this post to not just Monsieur Diaghilev, but to his discovery of and ongoing relationship with Igor Stravinsky!
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Giovanni Gabrieli (circa 1555-1612)We mark the death on August 12, 1612 – 412 years ago today – of the composer Giovanni Gabrieli. Born in Venice circa 1555, he grew up and spent his professional life in that glorious city, and died there as a result of complications from a kidney stone.
Gabrieli’s magnificent, soul-stirring music went a long way towards helping to define the expressive exuberance of what we now identify as Baroque era music. The impact and influence of his music was ginormous, an impact and influence that culminated a century later in the German High Baroque music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)!
To a degree beyond any other composer before or after him, Gabrieli’s music has come to be identified with his hometown of Venice, in particular the acoustically unique Venetian performance venues for which so much of his music was composed.
It is necessary, then, for us to spend some time in Venice, if only to get some inkling of what makes this singularly remarkable city so spiritually, artistically, and architecturally unique; and why Gabrieli’s music is uniquely Venetian.…
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Easy Times!We’ve been having a good time, an easy time here at Music History Monday these last few weeks. Five of our last six MHM posts have featured fairly recent musical events from the “popular” side of the musical aisle. Music History Monday for June 24 focused on Disco; on July 1, the invention and marketing of Sony’s Walkman; on July 8, the American crooner Steve Lawrence (who was born, as I know you recall, Sidney Liebowitz); on July 22, Taylor Swift; and on July 29, Cass Elliot (born Ellen Naomi Cohen).
Today we get back to the historical repertoire. But let me assure you: the composer we will focus on was as ground-breaking as Sony’s Walkman; his music as gorgeous as the silken voices of Steve Lawrence and Cass Elliot; his rhythmic sensibilities as sharply honed as those of the Bee Gees and Taylor Swift (though, to my knowledge, a concert of his music never simulated a magnitude 2.3 earthquake in downtown Seattle, as did Ms. Swift’s on July 22, 2023).
“Portrait of a Young Man” (1432) by Jan van Eyck; possibly Guillaume Du Fay (1397-1474)Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Guillaume Du Fay!
We celebrate the birth on August 5, 1397 – 627 years ago today – of the composer Guillaume Du Fay. He was, by every standard, one of the greatest composers to have ever lived and was admired as such in his own lifetime.
Guillaume Du Fay as The First Professional ComposerWriting in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the Venezuelan -American musicologist, conductor, and composer Alejandro Enrique Planchart observes that:
“Before Du Fay’s time, the concept of a “composer” – that is, a musician whose primary occupation is composition [and not a priest, choir master, or teacher] – was largely unfamiliar in Europe. The emergence of musicians who focused on composition above other musical endeavors arose in the 15th century, and was exemplified by Du Fay.”
Early LifeHe was born in the Flemish (today Belgian) town of Bersele (today spelled Beersel), just south of Brussels. He died 77 years later, on November 27, 1474, just across the border in northern France in the city of Cambrai.…
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We mark the death of Cass Elliot on July 29, 1974 – 50 years ago today – in an apartment at No. 9 Curzon Street in London’s Mayfair District. Born on September 19, 1941, she was just 32 years old at the time of her death.
Cass Elliot (born Ellen Naomi Cohen); 1941-1974Brief BiographyCass Elliot was born Ellen Naomi Cohen in Baltimore, Maryland. According to her biography, “all four of her grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants.”
The Pale of Settlement(Parenthetically, I grew up hearing that all four of my great-grandparents were, likewise, from “Russia,” which created a misunderstanding that I carried around with me until my twenties. As it turns out, in this case, “from Russia” actually means from the Pale of Settlement, that part of the western region of the Russian Empire where Jews were allowed to live. Today, the territory that encompassed the Pale includes all of Belarus and Moldova, much of Ukraine and Lithuania, part of Latvia, and only a small area of what is today the western Russian Federation.)
It was while she was in high school that Ellen Cohen was bitten by the musical theater bug and began calling herself “Cass Elliot.” Ms. Elliot’s parents fully expected her to go to college, so we can all imagine their . . . “surprise” when she dropped out of high school just before graduation and moved to New York City, there to pursue her dream to be an actor!
Cass Elliot’s acting career never quite got off the ground. (Yes, she was part of a touring production of The Music Man, but her one-and-only shot at the bigtime came and went when she lost the part of Miss Marmelstein in the Broadway show I Can Get it for You Wholesale to an up-and-comer named Barbra Streisand.)
It was as a singer that Cass Elliot made her mark. She had a clear, strong, distinctive voice and a charismatic stage presence to go along with her 300-pound “figure.” In 1963 she helped form a progressive folk trio called the Big 3 which recorded two albums and appeared on The Tonight Show, Hootenanny, and The Danny Kaye Show. In 1964, the Big 3 became a quartet called the Mugwumps. Finally, in 1965, Cass Elliot and fellow Mugwump member Denny Dougherty joined the husband/wife team of John and Michelle Phillips to become the Mamas and the Papas.…
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Taylor Swift (born 1989)Only July 22, 2023 – one year ago today – Taylor Swift (born 1989; she has, according to Forbes, a present net worth of $1.3 billion) literally “shook up” Seattle: her concerts in that city shook the ground with such violence that it registered as a magnitude 2.3 earthquake. (As if to prove that the “Swiftquake” at her first show was no fluke, her second show in Seattle also registered a 2.3 on the Richter Scale.)
Talk about shake, rattle, and roll!
A necessary acknowledgement before kicking things off: as entertainers go, there is no one on the planet who is presently more overexposed than Taylor Swift.
No one, I mean, not even Englebert Humperdinck (born Arnold George Dorsey, 1936) in his prime, heaven bless him.
Yet here I am, seemingly jumping on the Swifty bandwagon, writing about she-who-does-not-need-to-be-spoken-of-ever-again. My reason for doing so has nothing to do with Taylor Swift herself but rather, the nature of the geology on which my house, neighborhood, city, and region of Northern California (NoCal) rests.
“Earthquake Country”: San Francisco, April 1906I live in what is euphemistically called “earthquake country,” at the edge of where the North American tectonic plate borders the Pacific plate. These plates are moving at approximately the speed of a growing fingernail in opposite directions. The Pacific Plate is moving north; the North American Plate is moving south. The immediate area where the plates meet is called the fault zone or the fracture zone, because the bedrock adjacent to the plates is filled with faults – fractures – where the rock has given way due to the movement of the plates against each other.
Like them or not (and I would hazard to guess that most people and animals do not like them), earthquakes are an almost everyday occurrence up and down the Pacific coast. So like it or not, most folks who live on the fault lines – especially home owners, who have to bolt their homes to the ground using technologies unknown outside of earthquake country, whose families keep survival supplies and have emergency plans in case of a Big One – know more about earthquakes and fault lines than they’d like to.…
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IndispensabilityThe title of this blog – “An Indispensable Person” – might be considered controversial. That’s because any number of very smart people would argue that there is, in fact, so such thing as an “indispensable person.”
According to both Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt:
“There is no indispensable man.”
Said President John F. Kennedy:
“Nobody’s indispensable.”
Observed the redoubtable Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970):
“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”
And there we have it: there is a school of thought that states without equivocation that “No one, absolutely no one, no matter how anyone has painted someone’s existence or value, is indispensable.”
It’s a school of thought that I do not attend. That’s because based on my reading of history, there are indeed certain individuals without whom certain positive historical ends could not have been achieved. Here are four obvious examples.
James Thomas Flexner entitled his superb biography of George Washington The Indispensable Man (Plume, 1974; currently published by Back Bay Books). Flexner was correct in so titling his book, because George Washington (1732-1799) was, in fact, an indispensable person. Without his leadership and indomitable will, the American Revolution would have quickly unraveled and been lost. And without Washington, the American presidency and with it, the nascent American democracy, would very likely have devolved into autocracy, perhaps even monarchy. (This book should be required reading for a certain six members of our current not-terribly-Supreme Court, who need – desperately – to be reminded of what the Founders intended and what moral greatness look like.)
We should all be loath to even consider what the United States would look like today if not for the indispensable moral guidance and eloquence of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). As for the twentieth century, the world as we know it would not exist, and the forces of darkness might very well have triumphed, without the indispensable Winston Churchill (1874-1965) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945).
(As for the overly politically and socially sensitive among us: yes, yes, I am aware that these are all white, Protestant men; one of them a slave owner [Washington]; one of them an imperialist [Churchill]; and three of them members of the wealthy, ruling class [Washington, Churchill, and Roosevelt]. So what? Does that information in any way reduce their contributions to humanity?)
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (left) and President Franklin D. Roosevelt together at the White House on May 24, 1943The Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) pinpointed the traits that leaders require to make them “indispensable”:
“Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.”
Okay: some perspective as we observe the obvious: the indispensable people of, say, the world of potash-mining; of lip-gloss manufacturing; and of shipping palette design may not be as well-known and their impact on humanity not as universal as Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt. But in terms of their fields, they are indispensable people as well. Yo: without Howard T. Hallowell (1877-1955), who patented the first shipping palette in 1924 (he called it a “Lift Truck Platform”), the American trucking industry might never have gotten off the ground in the manner it did. Long live Howard T. Hallowell, the indispensable person of the shipping palette!
Carl Czerny (1791-1827) in 1833Another Unsung Hero! Another Indispensable Person!We mark the death on July 15, 1857 – 167 years ago today – of the Austrian composer, pianist, chronicler of Beethoven, and teacher Carl Czerny. For all his various and extraordinary contributions, Czerny must be considered an indispensable person to Western music during the first half of the nineteenth century!
I would hazard that some might think that I’m stretching the “indispensable-thing” just a tad by including Carl Czerny on a list that just featured George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Howard T. Hallowell. But no, I’m not.…
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We mark the birth on July 8, 1935 – 89 years ago today – of the American Grammy and Emmy Award-winning singer, actor, and comedian Steve Lawrence, in Brooklyn, New York. He died just four months ago, on March 7, 2024, in Los Angeles.
Steve Lawrence (1935-2024)Steve Lawrence, one might ask? Have potential topics for Music History Monday become so depleted that after nearly eight years (my first such blog was posted on September 9, 2016) I’ve been reduced to profiling baritone-voiced male pop singers of the second half of the twentieth century? Who’s next: Dean Martin? Perry Como? Andy Williams? Tom Jones? Jack Jones? Vic Damone? Al Martino? Robert Goulet?
And what of it, I would rather AGGRESSIVELY ASK IN RESPONSE? Over the years, I’ve profiled the likes of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Tony Bennett, Otis Redding, and Chubby Checker, among others. SO WHY NOT STEVE LAWRENCE?
Okay, I will admit that there is an ulterior motive here, and we’ll get to that ulterior motive behind this profile of Maestro Lawrence in due time. But first, permit me, please, to reminisce.
“Fitting In”As I have mentioned more than once, I was born and spent my first years in that Olduvai Gorge of American ethnicity (pronounced “et-nicity”): the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Three of my four grandparents were born there as well (the fourth – my paternal grandfather – was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey but moved to Brooklyn as a toddler and grew up there). Both of my parents and my stepmother were born in Brooklyn and grew up in Brooklyn.
That’s a lot of freaking Brooklyn.
While I grew up in the New Jersey ‘burbs and was shaped by the lower middle-class suburban experience of the 1950s and 1960s, my grandparents and parents were all New Yorkers to the bone, and were shaped by the dual experience of growing up in Brooklyn and by being the children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants from Belarus. That meant maintaining something of their ethnic and religious identity while, paradoxically, at the same time, trying to blend in – to assimilate – and be, as my paternal grandfather Sidney would say, “real Yankees!”
When my extended family got together, you could count on certain conversations to always take place. The alte kaker (meaning the old men; literally “old poopers”) would play pinochle and complain about politicians, taxes, the stock market, the weather, and the New York Mets. Boring and predictable. It was the women of my mother’s and grandmothers’ generations whose conversations I would eavesdrop on, because they were interesting and they were funny. (If they saw me listening, they’d start speaking in Yiddish, so I’d have to keep my distance and look as if I wasn’t listening to them at all.)
I recall their conversations as representing gossip and innuendo raised to high art, conversations more often than not fixated on other women: who was married to the worst/best husband (sometimes the same thing: “he slaps her around, but he makes a BUCK”); who had the best/worst clothes and jewelry, and what they paid for their best/worst clothing and jewelry; who was too fat or too thin (these were Jewish ladies, so it was indeed possible to be “too thin”); who wore too much makeup and who wore too little; whose teeth needed fixing and hair needed cutting and/or coloring; who was drinking too much and popping diet pills (meaning methamphetamines, which were legal at the time); who was sexless and who was shtupping the mailman; etc. The comments I enjoyed the most were about the people I knew: my girl cousins, some of whom were these ladies’ daughters. This one needs to go on a diet, that one needs a nose-job; this one needs to see a dermatologist, that one has to dress more appropriately; this one needs to do something with her hair, that one needs braces.
Genuine compliments for anyone were few and far between, though the greatest compliment that these women could bestow on any fellow female is burned into my memory:
“She could pass.”
“She could pass”: meaning, she could pass for a goy, for not being Jewish. The beneficiary of such a compliment would be slim (but not, God forbid, skinny); her hair and teeth would be straight; her skin would be clear, her accent undetectable, and her nose a button.
Sidney LiebowitzWhich – finally! – brings us back to Steve Lawrence. He was indeed born Sidney Liebowitz, in Brooklyn, on July 8, 1935. He came by his musical bona fides honestly: his father, Max Liebowitz was a cantor (a professional singer and prayer leader) at Temple Beth Sholom Tomchei Harav in Brooklyn; his mother Anna (born Gelb), was a homemaker.…
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The original Sony Walkman, model TPS-L2We mark the introduction on July 1, 1979 – 45 years ago today – of the Sony Walkman. The Walkman was the first entirely portable, high-fidelity (or at least fairly high-fidelity) audio cassette player, a revolutionary device that allowed a user to listen to entire albums anywhere, anytime. Introduced initially in Japan, the higher-ups at Sony expected to sell 5000 units a month for the first six months after its release. Instead, they sold 30,000 units in the first month alone and then – then – sales exploded. All told, Sony has sold over 400 million Walkmen (“Walkmans”?) in cassette, CD, mini-disc, and digital file versions, and Sony remained the market leader among portable music players until the introduction of Apple’s iPod on October 23, 2001.
For Sony the Walkman was a commercial triumph. For consumers, it was a technological game-changer. But for humanity, taken as widely as we please, it can (and will!) be argued that the “portable music player” – or PMP – has been an unmitigated disaster, a tragedy that has served to increasingly isolate human beings from one another in a manner unique in our history.
A Walkman ad from 1979, inadvertently promoting individual isolation and the death of public interactionHeadphones and EarbudsGrowing up, my maternal grandparents lived in a pre-War apartment building at 82nd and Riverside Drive in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (or just Lincoln Center) was just 16 blocks to the south, a 16.3-acre complex between 66th and 62nd Streets. Lincoln Center’s Library & Museum of the Performing Arts opened in 1965, and I remember my grandmother taking me and my brother Steve down to see it. Actually, I don’t just “remember” the visit; it is etched forever in my 11-year-old memory because of what happened there.
There was a large, open area filled with small, circular tables on which were built in record turntables. As I recall, each of these circular tables had four stereo headphones plugged in around the turntable. One would go up to a counter, request a particular record, and then sit down and listen to it through the headphones.
I had never listened to music through over-the-ear headphones (stereo or otherwise) before that visit, and I still remember the amazement I felt: I’d never, ever experienced such sonic fidelity; I’d never imagined that recorded music could sound so fantastic. And because I was listening through over-the-ear headphones, most of the ambient noise in the room was blocked out, effectively isolating me and allowing me to focus strictly on the music. I don’t remember what my grandmother did to drag me away from that turntable, whether she used a leather sap, a fire hose, the jaws-of-life or, more likely, the promise of ice cream on the way back to her apartment. Whatever; because of those stereo headphones, I had experienced musical high-fidelity for the first time in my life, and I was hooked.
To this day, I have a number of excellent over-the-ear headphones, and when I really must “listen” for recorded detail, I will listen through one of them. (FYI: I will not use earbuds, as I can’t tolerate the sensation of something shoved into my ear canal. Too bad for me.)
To the point. The immersive experience provided by headphones – by broadcasting directly into our ears while isolating us from ambient sound – is seductive. But at what point might the isolating aspect of the headphone/earbud experience become a less-than-positive thing? The advent of PMPs – be they Walkmen, iPods, or smartphones – has allowed two generations of listeners to isolate themselves from the world around them, often to the point of near total disengagement. …
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One sort of Boogie Fever: Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989) cuttin’ the rug at New York’s Studio 54, circa 1978On June 24, 1374 – 650 years ago today – the men, women, and children of the Rhineland city of Aachen began to dash out of their houses and into the streets, where – inexplicably, compulsively, and uncontrollably – they began to twist and twirl, jump and shake, writhe and twitch until they dropped from exhaustion or, in some cases, just plain dropped dead. It was a real-life disco inferno, true boogie-fever stuff: the first (but not the last) major occurrence of what would come to be known as the “dancing plague (or mania)” or “choreomania,” which soon enough spread across Europe.
There had been small outbreaks of the “dancing plague” before, going back as far as the seventh century. An outbreak in the thirteenth century – in 1237 – saw a group of children jump and dance all the way from Erfurt to Arnstadt in what today is central Germany, a distance of some 13 miles. It was an event that is believed to have inspired the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
But the outbreak in Aachen 650 years ago today was big. Before it was over, thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children had taken to the streets as the “dancing plague” spread from the western German cities of Aachen, Cologne, Metz, and Stuttgart; to the Belgian cities of Hainaut, Utrecht, Tongeren; then across France, the Netherlands, and finally, back into Germany!
Another sort of Boogie Fever. The authorities typically had music played during outbreaks of dancing plague, as it was believed to somehow “cure” the mania; painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1638), after drawings by his father.This gigantic outbreak came to be referred to as “St. John’s Dance,” though at other times and in other places it was called “St. Vitus’ Dance.” (These names were coined based on the assumption that the dancing plague was the result of a curse cast by either St. John the Baptist or St. Vitus, St. John having been beheaded by Herod Antipas between 28 and 36 CE and St. Vitus martyred in 303 during the persecution of Christians by the co-ruling Roman Emperors Diocletian and Maximian.)
Writing in his book The Black Death and the Dancing Mania, the German physician and medical writer Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker (1795-1850) describes St. John’s Dance this way:
“They formed circles hand in hand and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack.”…
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John Taylor McClure (1929-2014; bottom left) with Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971; bottom right”) in the recording studio on July 20, 1964We mark the death on June 17, 2014 – an even 10 years ago today – of the Grammy Award winning American record producer and Director of Columbia Masterworks Recordings John Taylor McClure. McClure was born in Rahway, New Jersey on June 28, 1929, and died in Belmont Vermont at the age of 84, 11 days short of his 85th birthday.
Record ProducersThe title of this post says it all: “Unsung Heroes.” It is my experience that unless someone has personally been involved in creating a recording, it’s pretty much impossible to appreciate the amount of work a producer puts into the process and the degree to which the producers’ own musical taste, musical proclivities, and musicality influence the final product. The front of a record jacket or CD case might bear the image of a composer or performer, and the producer’s name might appear in the tiniest of print on the lower left-hand corner of the back of the jacket, but in fact – in terms of their singular impact on a recording – the producer should, by all rights, be pictured on the front of the album side-by-side with whomever else the producer deems worthy of joining them.
Over the years, I’ve featured a few of the most important record producers of the post-World War Two era. Thus far, I’ve written about the opera record producer John Royds Culshaw (1924-1980; Dr. Bob Prescribes, March 24, 2020); the Beatles’ record producer and so-called “Fifth Beatle” George Martin (1926-2016; Music History Monday January 3, 2022, and Dr. Bob Prescribes January 4, 2022); and the jazz record producer Orrin Keepnews (1923-2015; Music History Monday, March 21, 2021).
Today we add John McClure to this august list.
The Job of a Record ProducerHere’s how The Recording Academy (formally the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, or NARAS) defines a record producer:
“The person who has overall creative and technical control of the entire recording project, and the individual recording sessions that are part of that project. He or she is present in the recording studio or at the location recording and works directly with the artist and engineer. The producer makes creative and aesthetic decisions that realize both the artist’s and label’s goals in the creation of musical content. Other duties include but are not limited to keeping budgets and schedules, adhering to deadlines, hiring musicians, singers, studios and engineers, overseeing other staffing needs and editing.”
(And editing. I trust we all realize that expert editing will make [and bad editing break] almost every musical and literary enterprise. From book editors and newspaper editors; to television and film editors; to radio producers and record producers, it is the editors/producers that are, in the end, responsible for shaping and delivering the final product that goes out to the public.)
When it comes to making a recording, then, the producer is the chief, the chef, the Jefe, the top dog, the Geeter-with-the-Heater, the Big-Boss-with-the-Hot-Sauce: that single person responsible for every aspect of a recording, from hiring the players to running the recording sessions to supervising the editing to choosing the cover art!
Having said all that, we should also be aware that the exact job of a record producer will vary depending upon the genre of music involved (meaning operas, concert music, rock/pop/country/hip-hop, or jazz) and whether the recording is made in a studio or live, in front of an audience.
John McClure (right) and Georg Solti (1912-1997)A concert music record producer (like today’s featured producer, John McClure) is working from a script: a composer’s score. Whether a producer is partnered up with a conductor and an orchestra, or a string quartet, or a solo pianist, or whatever, said producer’s job is to present that conductor’s, that quartet’s, or that pianist’s interpretation of the score in as flattering a sonic environment as possible. In a studio, such a recording will typically be done in multiple takes. In the case of a live performance, multiple performances will typically contribute bits and pieces to the final – edited – recorded product.
A producer of opera recordings is also dealing with a script: again, with a composer’s score. But they must also cope with a vastly greater number of moving parts than a concert music record producer: not just instrumentalists but solo singers and, not unusually, choruses as well. But even more than all of the moving parts, an opera recording producer must deal with the egos of the singers, meaning that such a producer must have the calm, steady nerves of a brain surgeon and the diplomatic skills of Kofi Annan.…
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The real-life married couple Ludwig and Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld as Tristan and Isolde at the first performance of Tristan und Isolde on June 10, 1865On June 10, 1865 – 159 years ago today – Richard Wagner’s magnificent and groundbreaking music drama Tristan und Isolde received its premiere in Munich under the baton of Hans von Bülow (whose wife, Cosima Liszt von Bülow, Wagner was enthusiastically shtupping at the same time).
Oh Goodness; Did I Just Write That?I did.
I know, right? Here I am, introducing Tristan und Isolde – one of the most awesome, incredible works of art ever created – and I still couldn’t resist a cheap dig at Wagner the person. As we have discussed in the past and will do so again, the same personality flaws that made Richard Wagner an often despicable narcissist allowed him the conceit to reject the operatic clichés and conventions of his time and to create a body of dramatic musical art unfathomable in its originality, beauty, dramatic power, and imagination. Of course, had he not been the towering genius he was, and had he not risked everything – including his sanity, over and over again – to create his unparalleled body of work, well, he would just have been another loathsome crank, writing nasty letters to newspaper editors and shouting at people in the street.
But he was a towering genius, and he did create a singularly stunning body of work, a body of work we all deserve to revel in. So revel we shall, with the satisfying understanding that our pleasure in Wagner’s music affords him no monetary profit or emotional gratification at all, given that he’s been dead since February 13, 1883.
Richard Wagner (1813-1883) in 1860Our gameplan. This post will indeed discuss Tristan und Isolde; it’s basic story line and its origins. But this post will deal primarily with the cliché but inescapable “Wagner Problem”: how to reconcile Wagner the “man” with Wagner the “artist,” and how to allow ourselves to accept the man while reveling in the artist!
Meanwhile, my Dr. Bob Prescribes posts for June 11 and 18 will feature my favorite DVD recording of Tristan und Isolde and, as such, will be all about Tristan und Isolde, all the time!
Don’t Call it an Opera!!!Tristan und Isolde is a three-act music drama, or what Wagner himself called “eine Handlung” (which means “a drama” or“an action”). By his mid-career, Wagner outright refused to use the word “opera” except as a pejorative, claiming that the word represented the debased musical stage works of everyone not named “Richard Wagner.” Tristan und Isolde’s libretto (or “poem,” as Wagner would have us call it) was written and its music composed by Wagner between 1855 and 1859.
- The Music of Richard Wagner Wagner based his “poem” on a twelfth-century romance entitled Tristan by Gottfried von Strassburg, who died circa 1210. Wagner’s poem tells the story of two presumed “enemies” – the Irish princess Isolde and the Cornish (southern English) knight Tristan – who presumably fall madly in love only when they are duped into drinking a love potion. (Many modern observers – yours truly included – believe that this “love potion” is in fact a placebo, likely of high alcohol content – Bacardi 151, for example – a drink that allows Tristan and Isolde to, like, finally get in touch with their feelings and admit that they’ve actually loved each other for years.) Unfortunately, their love for each other is illicit (Isolde is due to marry the King of Cornwall, an old dude named “Marke”) and “unconsummated” (despite their very best efforts, T and I never manage to “do the dirty,” perhaps because they just can’t stop singing about how much they love each other). In the end, Tristan is cut down by a fellow knight of Cornwall and Isolde, on watching Tristan die, expires over his now dead body in an orgasmic haze.
Critics of Tristan und Isolde have referred to Wagner’s linked infatuation with sex and death as “perfumed obscenity” and its orgasmic and deathly conclusion as “snuff opera.”
Those nattering nabobs of critical negativism aside, I will happily argue that Tristan und Isolde is Wagner’s single greatest work. There’s nothing else even remotely like it in the repertoire.…
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Ludwig Alois Friedrich Ritter (“Ritter” meaning “Knight”) von Köchel” (18900-1877)We mark the death on June 3, 1877 – 147 years ago today – of the Austrian lawyer, botanist, geologist, teacher, writer, publisher, composer, and “musicologist” Ludwig Alois Friedrich Ritter (“Ritter” meaning “Knight”) von Köchel, of cancer, in Vienna. Born on January 14, 1800, he was 77 years old at the time of his death.
Ludwig Köchel and the Archduke
Herr Köchel wasn’t born a “Ritter” – a “knight” – a “von” – with all the privileges and perks that such a title brought. Rather, he was born to the middle class in the Lower Austrian town of Krems an der Donau (meaning “At the junction of the Kremas and Danube Rivers”) some 43 miles west of Vienna. Smart and ambitious, he studied law in Vienna and went on to earn a Ph.D. in 1827, at the age of 27.
Köchel was a polymath, someone who knew a lot about a lot of things. As such, despite having a law degree, he chose a career as a teacher. But he was not just any teacher, and he didn’t teach just any students. For 15 years, Köchel was the tutor to the four sons of Archduke Charles of Austria.
This requires a wee bit of discussion/explanation.
Archduke Charles of Austria (1771-1847) in 1819Archduke Charles Louis John Joseph Laurentius of Austria, Duke of Teschen (1771-1847) was an Austrian field-marshal, the third son of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II and the grandson of the Empress Maria Theresa. He was the nephew of both Emperor Joseph II (of Amadeus fame) and Marie Antoinette (of “oops, has anyone seen my noggin?” fame).
In a virtual sea of Austrian military incompetence against Napoleon, Archduke Charles stands out as the best Habsburg general officer of the Napoleonic era, and arguably the best commander ever produced by the House of Habsburg in its 636-year run (from 1282 until 1918). According to Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington (1769-1852), Archduke Charles was:
“the greatest general of his time.”
This, then, is the man who chose Ludwig Köchel to educate his four sons. Köchel lived with and worked with the Archduke’s boys for 15 years, from 1827 to 1842 (from the time Köchel was 27 years of age to 42). It would appear that everyone was satisfied with Köchel’s teaching, because upon his departure in 1842, he was rewarded by the archduke with a knighthood and life-time pension large enough to guarantee that he’d never have to “work” for a living again.…
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There Must Be Something in the AirHave any of you done – or anticipate doing – anything particularly foolish today, anything particularly inappropriate?
If you do, know that you will be in good company. Perhaps it’s the angle of the sun; perhaps it’s something in the air or water, because as dates go, May 27 is ripe with musical stories and actions that we shall deem as being “inappropriate.”
For example.
Coventry Evening Telegraph May 26, 1964: “In May of 1964, eleven 16-year-old boys were suspended from Woodlands Comprehensive School, Coventry, for having Mick Jagger haircuts. They were told by the Head of School, Donald Thompson, that they could return once they’d cut their hair.”On May 27, 1964 – 60 years ago today – four of the eleven 16-year-old boys suspended fromWoodlands Comprehensive School in Coventry, UK, for having Mick Jagger haircuts complied with their headmaster’s demand that they cut their hair, and returned to school. The other seven lads put their hair (or at least the allegiance to Mick Jagger!) before their schooling and remained suspended. According to an article in the Coventry Evening Telegraph:
“their headmaster Mr. Donald Thompson has said that he would not object if they returned to school with a ‘neat Beatle cut.’
Mr. Thompson told the Coventry Evening Telegraph today that he was not against boys having modern hair styles, but he did object to the ‘scruffy, long hair style of the Rolling Stones with hair curling into the nape of the neck and over their ears.’”
Thompson’s anti-Jagger, anti-Stones, pro-neatly-shorn hairdecree was handed down about a month after the President of the UK’s National Federation of Hairdressers declared that the Rolling Stones’ haircuts were “the worst” of all their rock ‘n’ roll colleagues. He then added:
“One of them [no doubt referring to Keith Richards] looks as if he has a feather duster on his head.”
Oh my goodness, how worried everyone was about hair in the 1960s! Was it inappropriate for the parents of those eleven suspended boys to send their kids to school in violation of what was a stated “hair code policy?” Yes, it was inappropriate of them. Was it inappropriate for the headmaster to indefinitely suspend those children at the end of the school year? Yes, doubly inappropriate.
At least those boys weren’t yet wearing their pants down around their knees, as they might do so today. Triply inappropriate.
Speaking of INAPPROPRIATE
The Sex Pistols in 1977: every parent’s worst nightmareOn May 27, 1977 – 47 years ago today – the Sex Pistols released their single, God Save the Queen,in the UK.
Now, if you thought I was going to label the Sex Pistols’ “song” God Save the Queen as being “inappropriate,” you are incorrect. Insipid? Yes. Artless? Surely. Ridiculous? Of course: it’s the freaking Sex Pistols, for heaven’s sake, the lowest, bottom-feeding punkers of the punks.
What was inappropriate was the reaction of the “establishment” to the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen and the degree to which that reaction made the song a cause célèbres. You see, after its release, the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen was instantly banned from British TV and radio stations. Many of the workers in UK record pressing plants refused to even manufacture the record, and many UK record shops simply refused to stock and sell it.
We should all know what happens when this sort of spontaneous censorship occurs, and that’s exactly what did happen. The single sold 200,000 copies in one week, making it the No. 2 hit on the UK charts, just behind Rod Stewart’s I Don’t Want to Talk About It.
No. 2 on the charts, for what amounts to a total piece of musical merde. But certain rumors continue to circulate, rumors that have never been confirmed nor denied: that the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen was actually No. 1 on the UK charts, but the British Phonographic Industry – the trade association that controls the UK charts – conspired to keep it out of the top slot. If true, that would have been most inappropriate!…
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Gaston Leroux’s Paris Opera House (today the Palais Leroux) in 1875, the year of its inaugurationBefore we get to the principal topic of today’s post, we must note an operatic disaster that had nothing to do with singers or the opera being performed on stage. Rather, it was a disaster that inspired Gaston Leroux to write the novel The Phantom of the Opera, which was published in 1909.
On May 20, 1896 – 128 years ago today – a counterweight helping to hold up the six-ton chandelier at Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House fell into the audience during a performance of Étienne-Joseph Floquet’s opera Hellé (composed in 1779). We don’t know how the opera performance was going, but the counterweight was a big hit: one woman in the audience was killed and a number of other audience members were badly injured.
Installing the six-ton chandelierThe disaster was covered by a reporter for the Parisian daily Le Matin named Gaston Leroux (1868-1927). The accident – to say nothing for the Paris Opera House itself and the lake beneath it – made quite an impression on Monsieur Leroux.
About that underground “lake.” Writing in The New York Times on January 24, 2023, Sam Lubell tells us that:
“When digging the foundations [for the Paris Opera House], workers hit a hidden arm of the Seine, causing water to flood the site. It was impossible to remove all the water, so crews had to contain it with a massive concrete reservoir with a vaulted ceiling from which water is still pumped today. The so-called lake was dramatized by Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom of the Opera, who made it the stomping grounds of the Phantom. [Christopher Mead, author of Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera: Architectural Empathy and the Renaissance of French Classicism] was mesmerized by [the opera house house]. ‘You can see why it inspired Leroux,’ he said. ‘You could invent a whole world there.’”
Which, of course, is precisely what Gaston Leroux did.
Onwards to the star attraction of today’s post!
Clara Schumann in 1857, age 38With our heads bowed, we mark the death – 128 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Clara Wieck Schumann, who died of a stroke at the age of 76 on May 20, 1896.
She was among the great pianists of her time, a child prodigy whose performances were described with awe by her adult contemporaries. She was a composer of outstanding promise, who – for reasons we will discuss in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post – never had the opportunity to fulfill that promise. She was the compositional muse for her fiancé and husband, Robert Schumann (1810-1856), and the spiritual muse of her best friend, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897). Most of all she was a survivor: someone whose life reads like some endlessly tragic Victorian novel, only without the “happy ending” tacked on at the end.
No One Escapes This Life Unscathed, But When it Came to Clara . . .Next time one of us gets into a self-pitying funk (at which I am a particular virtuoso), during which we stand convinced that our personal lives represent the very nadir of human existence, I would recommend that we think of Clara Schumann and her life as a cautionary tale, as an example of how very badly things can go if fate is not on one’s side. If such reflection doesn’t temper our own self-absorbed misery, frankly nothing will.…
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World Cocktail Day! Whoever wrote the copy for this notice was clearly well into their third, perhaps fourth cocktailWe recognize May 13th as being, among other “days” here in the United States, National Frog Jumping Day, Leprechaun Day, International Hummus Day, National Crouton Day, and – wait for it – World Cocktail Day!
National Days, Weeks, and Months!Who creates these damned things?
We’ll get to that in a moment. But first, let’s distinguish between a national holiday and a national day (or week or month).
In the United States, national (or “federal”) holidays are designated by Congress and/or the President. There are presently a total of ten national/federal holidays, meaning that federal employees get to take the day off. However, anyone can declare a national day (or week or month). The trick is getting enough people to buy into the “day” that it actually gains some traction and has some meaning. Such national days are created by advocacy groups; lobbying groups; industry groups; government bodies; even individuals.
A different sort of “cocktail” day, May 13 is also National Fruit Cocktail Day!According to the “National Day Calendar,” today, May 13, 2024, is – along with those “days” listed at the top of this post – National Women’s Checkup Day; National Fruit Cocktail Day; and National Apple Pie Day. May 13 of this year is also the first day of Bike to Work Week; of Dementia Awareness Week; Water Savings Week; American Craft Beer Week; National Salvation Army Week; National Stationary Week; and National Smile Month.
I am oh-so-tempted to call this list of promotional idiocy, well, idiocy. But that today is both World Cocktail Day and the first day of American Craft Beer Week has gratefully given us the hook for both today’s Music History Monday post and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post: the drinking habits of some of our favorite composers, and drinking songs we should all know (and love).
A Disclaimer and a Necessary, Pre-emptive PointFirst the disclaimer. While I like my dry, gin martinis as much as the next guy – hell, probably a lot more than the next guy – I am in no way promoting the consumption of alcohol in this post, especially in excess. Rather, as is my usual m.o., my goal is to render as human as I can composers who are otherwise pedestalized and, as such, de-humanized.
And now the necessary point. Today, some of us tend to be very judgmental about the regular consumption of alcohol. And no wonder: given its potentially addictive nature and sometimes adverse effects on our bodies, moods, and minds, it is – for many people – nothing less than poison. But for most of us it is a great pleasure in a life otherwise in short supply of such.
Now please: in the centuries prior to the twentieth, alcoholic beverages were more than merely recreation fluids but lifesavers as well, as the dearth of clean drinking water necessitated the consumption of far more alcohol than many of us, today, would consider healthy. But given the choice, say, between a mug of ale or a pilsner glass of cholera-infected water, I do believe every one of us would choose the ale every time.
There’s a tendency, then – today – to call all sort of historical figures “alcoholics,” despite the fact that the word and the concept behind it only came in to being in 1852. Today, we can read that Mozart was an alcoholic, Beethoven was an alcoholic, Schubert was an alcoholic; Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, etc.: all alcoholics.
Please.
Drinkers? Yes. But we must (and will) be careful about who we call an “alcoholic,” especially if they lived at a time when alcoholic beverages were among the only safe ways to consume fluid.…
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We mark the public release, on May 6, 2015 – nine years ago today – of a scientific/statistical study published by The Royal Society Open Science Journal, a study entitled “The Evolution of Western Pop Music: USA (1960-2010).”
Royal Society Open ScienceScoff not, my friends: this was, in fact, a high-end study conducted (and written up) by four high-end scientists: Dr. Matthias Mauch, of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, whose current professional title is “Research Manager for Recommender Systems and Music Intelligence at Apple Music”; Dr. Robert M. MacCallum, who teaches in the Division of Life Sciences at Imperial College, London; Dr. Mark Levy, a former research assistant at the Centre for Digital Music at the University of London and for the last three years a principal research scientist at Apple, where he researches potential future applications of machine learning to music creation and listening; and finally, Armand M. Leroi, a professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College in London.
Scary fine creds on display here: up, down, and sideways.
The study’s abstract is as follows. I figure it’s better to get it directly from the quartet of Mauch, MacCallum, Levy, and Leroi than to offer up a watered down and abbreviated version of the abstract by yours truly.
“In modern societies, cultural change seems ceaseless. The flux of fashion is especially obvious for popular music. While much has been written about the origin and evolution of pop, most claims about its history are anecdotal rather than scientific in nature. To rectify this, we investigate the US Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010. Using music information retrieval and text-mining tools, we analyze the musical properties of approximately 17,000 recordings that appeared in the charts and demonstrate quantitative trends in their harmonic and timbral properties. We then use these properties to produce an audio-based classification of musical styles and study the evolution of musical diversity and disparity, testing, and rejecting, several classical theories of cultural change. Finally, we investigate whether pop musical evolution has been gradual or punctuated. We show that, although pop music has evolved continuously, it did so with particular rapidity during three stylistic ‘revolutions’ around 1964, 1983 and 1991. We conclude by discussing how our study points the way to a quantitative science of cultural change.”
Fascinating, yes?
MethodologyThe actual paper – “The Evolution of Western Pop Music: USA (1960-2010)” – is rather lengthy; 4614 words (FYI: I let my computer do the word count). Overall, the paper is characterized by the sort of technical jargon we would expect to find in a scientific journal. For example: in the course of their introduction, the authors lay out their methodology as follows.
“We adopted an approach inspired by recent advances in text-mining. We began by measuring our songs for a series of quantitative audio features, 12 descriptors of tonal content and 14 of timbre. These were then discretized into ‘words’ resulting in a harmonic lexicon (H-lexicon) of chord changes, and a timbral lexicon (T-lexicon) of timbre clusters. To relate the T-lexicon to semantic labels in plain English [“plain English”; if only!], we carried out expert annotations. The musical words from both lexica were then combined into 8+8=16 ‘topics’ using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). LDA is a hierarchical generative model of a text-like corpus, in which every document (here: song) is represented as a distribution over a number of topics, and every topic is represented as a distribution over all possible words (here: chord changes from the H-lexicon, and timbre clusters from the T-lexicon). We obtain the most likely model by means of probabilistic inference. Each song, then, is represented as a distribution over eight harmonic topics (H-topics) that capture classes of chord changes (e.g. ‘dominant-seventh chord changes’) and eight timbral topics (T-topics) that capture particular timbres (e.g. ‘drums, aggressive, percussive’, ‘female voice, melodic, vocal’, derived from the expert annotations), with topic proportions q. These topic frequencies were the basis of our analyses.”
Got that?
Okay: I am so, so sorry I made you read that; really, I am. But it was necessary to show you why we aren’t going to get into the details of the study but rather, fairly quickly cut to the study’s conclusions which are, to my mind, of no small interest, methodology aside!…
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John Wayne as Genghis Kahn (1956); not one of his finest cinematic momentsWe mark the birth of The Duke on April 29, 1899 – 125 years ago today – in Washington D.C.
By “The Duke,” we are not here referring to the actor John Wayne (who was born on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa), but rather, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, one of the greatest songwriters and composers ever to be born in the United States.
Aside from their shared nickname, it would appear that the only thing Duke Ellington had in common with John Wayne was that they both suffered from lung cancer. In Ellington’s case, cancer killed him at the age of 75 on May 24, 1974, at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City (and not at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, as is inexplicably claimed on certain web sites!).
Born in Washington D.C., he grew up at 2129 Ida Place (now Ward Place) NW, in the district’s West End neighborhood. His father, James Edward Ellington, worked as a blueprint maker for the Navy Department and on occasion as a butler, sometimes at the White House. His mother, Daisy (born Kennedy) was the daughter of formerly enslaved people. Theirs was a musical household; both of Ellington’s parents played piano. (We are told that James Edward Ellington preferred to play arrangements of operatic arias, while Daisy preferred the semi-classical parlor songs that were popular with the middle and upper middle classes at the time.)
Ellington as a childAnd let us make no mistake; the Ellingtons were indeed of the upper middle class: sophisticated, educated, upwardly mobile, proud of their racial heritage and unwilling to allow their children to be limited by the Jim Crow laws of the time. According to Studs Terkel, writing in his book Giants of Jazz (The New Press, 2nd edition, 2002):
“Daisy [Ellington] surrounded her son with dignified women to reinforce his manners and teach him elegance. His childhood friends noticed that his casual, offhand manner and dapper dress gave him the bearing of a young nobleman.”
It was that noble bearing that prompted Ellington’s high school friend Edgar McEntee to come up with the nickname that Ellington wore so very well for so very long. According to Ellington himself:
“I think he [Edgar McEntee] felt that in order for me to be eligible for his constant companionship, I should have a title. So he called me Duke.”)
For the young Ellington, piano lessons were a must; it was, for children of his generation (and mine as well!) an inevitable childhood rite-of-passage. Having said that, like so many red-blooded American kids, Ellington preferred baseball, at which he excelled. In his autobiography he recalled that:
“President [Theodore] Roosevelt would come on his horse sometimes, and stop and watch us play.”
(For our information: Ellington’s love of the game ran deep, and his first paying job was selling peanuts at Washington Senators games.)
(Because we all should know: the Senators, also-known-as the “Nationals,” played in D.C. from 1901 to 1960. It was in 1960 that the team broke the collective hearts of its District fans and moved to Minnesota, there to become the “Minnesota Twins”: “twins” as in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.)
Ellington’s first piano teacher was the spectacularly named Marietta Clinkscales (OMG; who could make such a name up?). As a teenager, he took up ragtime piano and studied harmony, though as a teen his growing love of music shared equal time with a real talent for painting and design. …
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I am writing this post from my hotel room in what is presently (but sadly, not for long) warm and sunny Vienna. As I mentioned last week, I will be here for eight days acting as “color commentator” for a musical tour of the city sponsored by Wondrium (a.k.a. The Teaching Company/The Great Courses). I also indicated, one, that I would keep you up-to-date on the trip with near-daily posts, and two, that Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes will be rather truncated while I am here.
We mark the birth on April 15, 1894 – 130 years ago today – of the American contralto and blues singers Bessie Smith. Appropriately nicknamed “The Empress,” Bessie Smith remains one of the most significant and influential musicians ever born in the United States. Well, it just so happens that we celebrated Maestra Smith birthday in my Music History Monday post of April 15, 2019, and I will thus be excused for directing your attention to that post through the button below:
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Anton Diabelli (1781-1858)We mark the death on April 8, 1858 – 166 years ago today – of the Austrian composer, editor, and music publisher Anton Diabelli in Vienna, at the age of 76. Born on September 5, 1781, his enduring fame is based on a waltz of his composition that became the basis for Beethoven’s epic Diabelli Variations for piano.
Quick Work
We are, fairly or unfairly, going to make rather quick work of Herr Diabelli. That’s because, with all due respect, what I really want to write about is Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.
There’s a powerful ulterior motive at work here as well. In a field of great recordings, my numero uno favorite Diabelli Variations is the recording made by the Milan-born Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini in 1998 and released by Deutsche Grammophon in 2000. Pollini passed away at the age of 82, on March 23, 2024: 16 days ago. As such, we will honor Maestro Pollini in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes even as we celebrate his unequaled performance of Beethoven’s variations.
Anton Diabelli (1781-1858)
Despite his Italian surname, Anton Diabelli was Austrian born-and-bred.
He was born in Mattsee, a market town just outside of Salzburg. He was a musical child, and typical of almost every musically talented boy of his time and place (and by “place” we’re referring to Catholic Europe), he was musically schooled as a chorister in a boys’ choir, in Diabelli’s case at the Salzburg Cathedral (where he almost certainly studied composition with Joseph Haydn’s younger brother, Michael Haydn [1737-1806]).
By the time he was 19 years old – in 1800 – Diabelli had composed a number of large-scale works, including six masses. It was in that year that Diabelli, who had been trained for the priesthood, was packed off to the monastery at Raitenhaslach, in the southeastern German state of Bavaria. …
Important Programming NoteA scheduling note before I leave you. I will be in Vienna leading a tour starting on April 13, which – sadly – will preclude me from posting Music History Monday Podcasts on April 15 and 22. I will, however, be posting daily reports from Vienna on my Patreon site. I would be remiss, then, if I didn’t invite everyone who is not already a subscribing member to join me at Patreon and partake in the fun.
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Bob Dylan (born 1941) in 2017On April 1, 2017 – 7 years ago today – Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, 1941) was awarded his Nobel Prize in Literature in a private ceremony held at an undisclosed location in Stockholm, Sweden. At the ceremony, Dylan received his gold Nobel Prize medal and his Nobel diploma. The cash prize of eight million Swedish kronor (837,000 euros, or $891,000) was not handed over to Dylan at the time, as he was required to give a lecture before receiving the cash. That lecture was recorded and then released some 9 weeks later, on June 5, 2017.
The private award ceremony was attended by twelve members of the Swedish Academy, that organization tasked with choosing the recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature. According to Sara Danius, the academy’s permanent secretary, a good time was had by all:
“Spirits were high. Champagne was had.”
Sara Danius in 2017Ms. Danius went on to describe the occasion in a bit more detail:
“Quite a bit of time was spent looking closely at the gold medal, in particular the beautifully crafted back, an image of a young man sitting under a laurel tree who listens to the Muse. Taken from Virgil’s Aeneid, the inscription reads: ‘Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes,’ loosely translated as ‘And they who bettered life on earth by their newly found mastery’.”
We would observe that the announcement of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize was made nearly six months before, on October 16, 2016. Dylan, who was performing in Las Vegas, was immediately informed. However, in the days that followed, he failed to return any of the phone calls he received from the Swedish Academy. Neither did Dylan make any public comment or statement about the prize to the press. No one knew if he intended to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, where prize winners were to receive their awards from Swedish King Carl XVI and where they were then expected to give a speech.
In reference to not hearing even a peep from Bob Dylan, a member of the Swedish Academy, the writer Per Wastberg, said on Swedish television:
“This is an unprecedented situation.”
He then criticized Dylan as being:
“Impolite and arrogant.”
We don’t imagine Per Wastberg’s opinion changed much when, after over a week, Dylan’s people finally communicated with the Swedish Academy, informing them that he could not attend the award ceremony on December 10 due to “previous commitments,” as if he’d been invited to play a round of golf.
When Dylan finally did show up to accept his award, on April 1, 2017 – seven years ago today – he honored those champagne-swilling academy members by showing up in a hoodie under a leather jacket. And lest you think he ventured to Stockholm specifically to receive his prize, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. Rather, Stockholm was the first stop on a long-planned European concert tour, so a visit to the Swedish Academy was conveniently booked between the first and second concerts of the tour. …
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Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) circa 1890We mark the birth on March 25, 1867 – 157 years ago today – of the cellist and conductor Arturo Toscanini, in the city of Parma, in what was then the Kingdom of Italy. He died, at the age of 89, on January 16, 1957, at his home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, in New York City.
(Properly embalmed and, we trust, adequately chilled, his no-doubt well-dressed corpse was shipped off to Milan, Italy, where he was entombed in the Cimitero Monumentale. His epitaph features his own words, words he spoke in 1926 after conducting the posthumous premiere of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, which had been left unfinished at Puccini’s death:
“Qui finisce l’opera, perché a questo punto il maestro è morto.” (“Here the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died.”)
The Toscanini family tomb at the Monumental Cemetery of MilanWhat Made Toscanini So Special
Arturo Toscanini lived a long life, and he lived it to the hilt. Firmly in the public eye from the age of 19 (in 1886) until his death in 1957, he travelled everywhere, seemed to have performed with everyone, and had more affairs than Hugh Heffner had bunnies. This is my subtle way of saying that even the most cursory examination of his life is far, far beyond the purview of a 2300-word post. Consequently, we will focus today on the two aspects of Toscanini’s career that made Toscanini special and that together created the Toscanini legend: his revolutionary (at the time) style of conducting and his incendiary, Vesuvian temper.
In tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post, we will pick back up with Maestro Toscanini, first with his breakthrough performance on June 30, 1886 (when as the principal cellist in a travelling opera company he was called upon to conduct Aida in Rio de Janeiro in the middle what amounted to an audience riot) and then with recordings made and tantrums thrown during his final gig, with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in New York City.
The First “Modern” Conductor
Toscanini in 1885, at the age of 18As a conductor, Toscanini was a literalist. At the time he broke in as a conductor in 1886, at the age of 19 (to instant acclaim on the part of audiences and performers!), conductors typically treated the scores they conducted as vehicles for their personal self-expression and self-aggrandizement. For those conductors, that meant milking every piece of music they performed for as much expressive Sturm und Drang, and Schmerz und Angst as was possible. If such conducting meant constantly speeding up and slowing down in a manner not indicated in the score, so be it; if it meant exaggerating the dynamics, so be it; if it meant playing movements at speeds vastly different from those indicated by the composer, so be it; and if it meant altering a composer’s indicated instrumentation, yes: so be it as well.
It was said that hearing Toscanini conduct a familiar work – be it an opera by Puccini or a symphony by Beethoven – was like seeing a familiar painting cleaned and restored: with centuries of grime stripped away, viewers could experience and revel in its original colors for the first time. …
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Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), painted in 1896 by Ilya RepinWe mark the birth of the Russian composer Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov on March 18, 1844: 180 years ago today. Born in the Russian town of Tikhvin – roughly 120 miles east of St. Petersburg – Rimsky-Korsakov died at the age of 64, on June 21, 1908, on his estate near the Russian town of Luga, about 85 miles south of St. Petersburg
Fake It ‘til You Make ItLike most kids growing up, I had various assumptions about grownups (i.e. “adults”). As someone who has now – presumably – been an adult for very nearly a half of a century, I have learned that my assumptions – a few of which I’ve listed below – were all crazy wrong.
Assumption one: at around 21, we cross the line into adulthood.
Wrong. There are no such “lines”; we’re all changing, all the time.
Assumption two: adults are emotionally mature.
Wrong. Physically, yes, I’m pushing seventy. Emotionally? I’m roughly fifteen. On a good day.
Assumption three: adults know what they’re doing.
Really? Adults only “know” what they’re doing (if they ever learn what their “doing” at all) after they’ve been doing it for decades. Until then, they are apprentices, “learning on the job,” which are nice ways of saying “faking it”!
Growing up, I had no concept of this. I just assumed that once you got to a certain age, you actually knew what you were doing.
The Purnell School, Pottersville, New Jersey, main entranceSilly me. I was disabused of that bit of foolishness as soon as I entered the job market when, at the age of 23, I was hired as the music teacher at a now defunct, all-girls’ private high school in Pottersville, New Jersey called the Purnell School. Oh sure, I thought I had it all together at the time, but in retrospect I didn’t know Scheiße from Shinola (which was a brand of shoe polish that was popular during the first decades of the twentieth century).
In retrospect, my “apprenticeship” as a teacher – that period that saw me “fake it ‘til I made it” – lasted some 5 years. This doesn’t mean that I ever stopped learning on the job; hopefully, I’ll never stop getting better at what I do. It only means that it took me around 5 years to achieve what today I consider to be a passing competence at teaching.
And so it was as well for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.…
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We mark the first performance on March 11, 1851 – 173 years ago today – of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto at Venice’s storied Teatro la Fenice: The Phoenix Theater.
Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) in 1852, a year after the premiere of RigolettoWe set the scene.
The year was 1849. Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (1813-1901) was – at the age of 36 – the most famous and popular composer of opera living and working in Italy.
Living in his hometown of Busseto, in the Parma region of northern Italy, Verdi spent the last days of 1849 and the first weeks of 1850 considering future opera projects. He sat down and drew up a list of stories that captured his interest, a list filled with literary masterworks old and new. At the top of the list were Shakespeare’s King Lear, Hamlet, and The Tempest. There was Kean, by Alexander Dumas pere and Victor Hugo’s Marion Delorme, Ruy Blas, and Le Roi s’amuse (“The King’s Jester”). Among other works on the list were Lord George Gordon Byron’s Cain; Jean Baptiste Racine’s Phedre; Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s A Secret Grievance, a Secret Revenge; Vicomte Francois Rene de Chateaubriand’s Atala; and Count Vittorio Alfieri’s Filippo (which would eventually become the opera Don Carlo).
Stifellio
Francesco Maria Piave (1810-1876)Narrowing things down more than just a bit, Verdi wrote the librettist Francesco Maria Piave (1810-1876) at his home in Venice and asked him – per favore – to prepare a draft scenario for Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse,(“The King’s Jester”). Piave consented to do so, and additionally suggested some other possible texts, including a play by the French dramatists Émile Souvestre and Eugène Bourgeois entitled Stifellio.
Verdi and Piave went ahead with Stifellio, which was Verdi’s 16th (of 27) operas. It received its premiere on November 16, 1850, at the Teatro Grande in the city of Trieste, in the north-eastern corner of Italy.
To say that Stifellio has a controversial plot is a major understatement. It’s a drama about a Protestant minister who leaves his home to preach, during which time his lonely wife takes a lover. Having confessed her infidelity, the opera reaches its climax as the preacher forgives her adultery while delivering a sermon from his pulpit. All in all, it was a most unusual subject for an opera composed and performed in Catholic Italy.
Just days before Stifellio’s opening, the local censors in Trieste exercised their “prerogative” and savaged the opera, cutting out whole sections of what they called “offensive text.”
Those poor, offended censors hardly knew where to start! OMG, the protagonists were Protestant! Actual verses from the Bible were sung onstage! An adulterous woman was portrayed sympathetically, and then – then – she was forgiven by her husband! Various pieces of religious paraphernalia were used as props! By the time the censors had finished with it, little of Stifellio was left untouched. Verdi was apoplectic, and he accused the censors of having “castrated” his opera. Somehow, Verdi, Piave, and the cast managed to stitch together what was left and went on with the show. It was nothing short of a miracle that Stifellio wasn’t a complete flop. It was only a partial flop, because its sympathetic audience – including the critics – were aware of its 11th hour demolition.
It’s important that we know something of Stifellio’s fate, because when censors threatened Verdi’s next project – Rigoletto – Verdi was prepared to go to war!…
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“Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1843-1893), circa 1875, at the time he was composing Swan LakeWe mark the first performance of the ballet Swan Lake on March 4, 1877: 147 years ago today. Premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, with music by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), choreography by the Czech-born dance master Julius Reisinger (1828-1892), and its music performed by the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, the first performance of Swan Lake landed with an epic THUD, meaning not good.
Pretty much every aspect of the ballet was critically blasted. The vast majority of the critics present found Tchaikovsky’s score to be far too “complex” for a ballet; one critic called it:
“too noisy, too ‘Wagnerian,” and too symphonic.”
A visiting correspondent by the name of Tyler Grant called the ballet:
“utter hogwash, unimaginative and altogether unmemorable.”
Now, admittedly, there were some problems with that premiere performance.
For example.
Anna Sobeshchanskaya (1842-1918The famed Russian prima ballerina Anna Sobeshchanskaya (1842-1918) was originally cast in the role of Odette – the “white swan” – the star and heroine of the ballet. She may also have been slated to dance the role of the villainous Black Swan, Odile; today it is common practice for the same ballerina to perform the parts of both Odette and Odile. However, it is now believed that the ballet had originally called for two different dancers to dance the parts.
Whatever the case, the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina – Anna Sobeshchanskaya – was to star in the original production of Swan Lake. And then, out of the blue, she was suddenly removed from the cast and replaced by an entirely inferior dancer named Pelageya Karpakova (who was also known as Polina Karpakova)!
What happened?
Apparently, a major figure in the Russian government (who has remained nameless over the years, a testament to his power!) had Sobeshchanskaya black-balled (or “black-swanned,” as it were) and bounced from the ballet. This government big-wig and Sobeshchanskaya had been having an affair (seedy but true; this is how ballet worked in France and Russia, where aristocrats took as their lovers ballerinas), and he had rewarded her prowess-in-the-sack and loyalty towards him with some very expensive jewelry. Having received the jewelry, Madame Sobeshchanskaya turned around and married a fellow dancer and sold the bling for cash.
A lot of cash, leaving her erstwhile fat-cat boyfriend unhappy.
And so it was up to a lesser and likely under-rehearsed dancer to negotiate the virtuosic part of Odette at the premiere, a part that had been created for Anna Sobeshchanskaya. As the replacement, Pelageya Karpakova’s performance did not go well.
Then there were the issues surrounding the score Tchaikovsky composed for this, his first ballet.
He was, frankly, an odd choice to be commissioned by the Imperial Theaters in 1875 to compose Swan Lake. Okay, he was an accomplished composer with three symphonies under his belt, but in Russia, ballets were usually composed by specialists who wrote nothing but dance music. Such dance music was generally characterized by glaringly obvious and easily followed “oom-pah-pah” type rhythmic accentuation tricked out with simple melodies set in even phrases. Along came Tchaikovsky, who composed for ballet the way he composed for the symphony hall, writing music in which the groupings of beats are not always obvious and phrases that are not always even; music replete with countermelodies and polyphony, thematic development, and long-range key relationships; music that did not merely accompany the dancers but that deepened the dramatic and emotional action being depicted on stage.
Tchaikovsky did not set out to be a “revolutionary” when it came to Russian ballet music, but that’s what he was, and it was only after his death that his “symphonic” ballets came to be acclaimed as the compositional masterworks that they are. But in his lifetime, Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores were considered to be “problematic.” …
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George Bizet (1838-1875) in 1875We mark the premiere on February 26, 1935 – 89 years ago today – of Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C. The premiere took place in Basel, Switzerland, in a performance conducted by Felix Weingartner (1863-1942). Bizet (1838-1875) never heard the symphony performed; he had died in the Paris suburbs in 1875 at the age of 36, a full 60 years before Weingartner’s premiere of his symphony. Bizet’s Symphony in C, considered today to be a masterwork, was only “discovered” in the archives of the Paris Conservatoire in 1933, 78 years after its composition in 1855!
What IfWe contemplate a short list of those great (or potentially great) composers who died before their fortieth birthday. Henry Purcell (dead at 36), Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (26), Wolfgang Mozart (35), Vincenzo Bellini (33), Frédéric Chopin (39), Felix Mendelssohn (38), Lili Boulanger (24), Juan Arriaga (19), and George Gershwin (who died at the age of 38). We should all deeply regret their early passing, not just because of the inherent tragedy of dying so young but because it is impossible not to think about what these composers might have accomplished had they at least lived Beethoven’s life span (56 years), or Sebastian Bach’s (65 years), or Richard Strauss’ (85 years), or Elliott Carter’s (103 years), or Leo Ornstein’s (106 years; though some say 109!).
Leo Ornstein (1892/1895-2002) in 1981, looking darned good for his age; Ornstein’s exact date of birth is unknown, with various sources claiming 1892, 1893 or 1895Admittedly, not everyone wonders about what those short-lived composers might have accomplished had they lived longer lives. For example, apropos of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann (who himself didn’t live a particularly long life; 1810-1856) wrote:
“It is pointless to guess at what more Schubert might have achieved. He did enough; and let them be honored who have striven and accomplished as he did.”
Rather more recently, the pianist András Schiff (born 1953) said that:
“Schubert lived a very short life, but it was a very concentrated life. In 31 years, he [composed] more than other people would in 100 years, and it is needless to speculate what he could have written had he lived another 50 years. It’s irrelevant, just like with Mozart.”
Schubert (1797-1828) in 1825, three years before his death at the age of 31At very least, I would accuse Messrs. Schumann and Schiff of being intellectual party-poopers, by denying themselves the joys of speculation. But I also believe their assertions that speculation is “pointless,” “needless,” and “irrelevant” to be downright wrong.
Why “wrong”? Because speculating on “what if” allows us to formulate alternative outcomes, alternative outcomes that in the end help us to recognize and process more deeply what actually did happen.
(Of course, if the American theoretical physicist and string theorist Brian Greene is correct, and we live in a “quilted multiverse,” then any possible event will occur an infinite number of times in an infinite number of parallel universes. If this is true, there is no such thing as “speculation,” as anything we might “speculate upon” will already have occurred or will occur in some universe or another!)
Back to our cozy, home universe. To my mind, far from being merely sport, speculating on possible outcomes allows us to sharpen our understanding of what actually did happen, and to appreciate as well the incredible web of interactive cause-and-effect that characterizes the progress of time.
For example. What if Georges Bizet had lived another thirty years, until 1905, and had died at the age of 67? He might very well have decided to compose another symphony, or another two symphonies, or another three symphonies, or whatever. Based on what we now know to be his Symphony in C, those subsequent symphonies would almost certainly have been terrific works. Had Bizet lived even a few more months, the fame and fortune that just eluded him in his lifetime (more on this in a bit) would have been his for the taking, and a work like the Symphony in C would likely not have languished in an archive for all those years.
Idle speculation? Yes. But it helps us to understand just how special Bizet’s Symphony in C really is and just how unfair was its fate.…
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I am aware that Valentine’s Day is already 5 days past, but darned if the romantic warm ‘n’ fuzzies aren’t still lingering with me like a rash from poison oak. As such, I will be excused for offering up what I will admit is a belated, but nevertheless Valentine’s Day-related post.
GratitudeWe should all be grateful that the following Valentine’s Day-related post is not on the lines of those blogs I wrote in 2010 and 2011, blogs written for various websites in my attempt to drum up sales for my Great Courses/Teaching Company Courses. For example, I wrote a couple of Valentine’s Day-themed blogs in 2011, one for Huffpost and the other for J-Date, as in “Jewish-Dating.” For those posts – entitled “Romantic Music” – I was tasked with recommending appropriately “romantic” music for an intimate, tête-à-tête Valentine’s Day evening. This is how they began:
“Fresh flowers, chilled champagne, and a candlelight dinner for two; the stereotypical trappings of a successful Valentine’s Day evening. But the sensual menu is still incomplete: smell, taste, touch, and sight are covered, but proper sound is still wanting.
Yes indeed, music, the purported feast of the gods, the indispensable aural lubricant for romance, must be chosen and chosen well.”
OMG; gag me with not just a spoon but an industrial-sized ladle. BTW, I will not waste your time with the music I recommended except to observe that it consisted of all the usual suspects, saccharine music for a Hallmark Holiday.
One song that wasn’t on my list back then but would surely be on it today is one that reflects the cynicism with which I now hold the entire St. Valentine’s Day trip. That song is Frankie and Johnny.
The Leighton Brothers, Frank (on the left, 1880-1927) and Bert (1877-1964)Frankie and JohnnyThere are so many different versions of the song Frankie and Johnny that to this day, no one is precisely sure who originally wrote it. (Writing in 1962, a musicologist named Bruce Redfern Buckley unearthed 291 different versions of Frankie and Johnny!) The version we are most familiar with today was created by the Leighton Brothers (Frank and Bert) along with the then well-known folk musician Ren Shields (1868-1913) in 1908.
The lyric of the song tells the lurid tale of a prostitute named Frankie and her wayward boyfriend, Johnny. Here are the first nine of the song’s thirteen verses.
“Frankie and Johnny were lovers,O Lordy, how they could love.They swore to be true to each other,Just as true as the stars above.He was her man but he done her wrong.Frankie and Johnny went walking,Johnny had a brand new suit.Frankie paid a hundred dollars,Just to make her man look cute.He was her man but he done her wrong.Johnny said, “I’ve got to leave you,But I won't be very long.Don’t you wait up for me, honey,Nor worry while I’m gone.”He was her man but he done her wrong.Frankie went down to the corner,Stopped in to buy her some beer.Says to the fat bartender,“Has my Johnny man been here?”He was her man but he done her wrong.“Well, I ain’t going to tell you no story,Ain’t going to tell you no lie.Johnny went by ‘bout an hour ago,With a girl named Nellie Bly.He is your man but he’s doing you wrong.”Frankie went home in a hurry,She didn’t go there for fun.She hurried home to get aholdOf Johnny's shootin’ gun.He was her man but he’s doing her wrong.Frankie took a cab at the corner,Says, driver step on this cab.She was just a desperate woman,Getting’ two-timed by her man.He was her man but he’s doin’ her wrong.Frankie got out at south Clark Street,Looked in a window, so high.Saw Johnny, man, a lovin’ up,That high-brow Nellie Bly.He was her man but he done her wrong.Johnny saw Frankie a-comin’,Out the back door he did scoot.But Frankie took aim with her pistol,And the gun went roota-toot-toot.He was her man but he done her wrong.”
Ah, romance, don’t you think?
Now that’s a Valentine’s Day-appropriate love song! No flowers and carb-loaded chocolates but rather, genuine passion and three .44 caliber slugs!
The song was inspired by an actual event that took place in an apartment building at 212 Targee Street in St. Louis, Missouri’s red-light district. At 2am on the morning of October 15, 1899, a 22-year-old prostitute named Frankie Baker (1876-1952) shot and killed her lover and pimp, the 17-year-old Allen (or “Albert”) Britt.…
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February 12 is one of those remarkable days in music history, remarkable for all the notable events that took place on this day. So: before getting to our featured topic, let us acknowledge some of those events and share some links to previous Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts that dealt with those events.
Carl Czerny (1791-1857)On this day in 1812, Beethoven’s student (and friend), the Austrian composer, pianist, and teacher Carl Czerny (1791-1857) performed as the soloist in the premiere of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, the “Emperor.” Czerny was the subject of Music History Monday on July 15, 2019.
We wish a heartfelt farewell to the German pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who died on this date in Cairo, Egypt in 1894, at the age of 64. Von Bülow was the subject of both Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes just last month, on January 8 and 9,respectively.
Birthday greetings to the American composer Roy Harris (1898-1979), who was born on this date in 1898 in Chandler, Oklahoma. Harris and his Symphony No. 3 were featured in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post on April 9, 2019.
On February 12, 1924 – exactly 100 years ago today – George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue received its premiere at Aeolian Hall in New York City. Gershwin (1898-1937), accompanied by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, played the solo piano part. George Gershwin and his music have been featured regularly on my Patreon page, including Music History Monday on July 11, 2022; and in Dr. Bob Prescribes posts on October 20, 2020, and January 5, 2021.
Finally, we mark the death on February 12, 1959, of the American composer George Antheil (1900-1959) at the age 58, in New York City. Antheil was the subject of Music History Monday on July 8, 2019.
With no further ado, it is – finally – time to move on to today’s topic!
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) in 1792, by John Hoppner and commissioned in 1791 by the future British King George IV when he was the Prince of WalesOn February 12, 1797 – 227 years ago today –– Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in C Major, Op. 76, No. 3, nicknamed “Emperor” reputedly received its premiere. The quartet’s nickname – “Emperor” – stems from the hymn tune Haydn employed in its second movement theme and variations, a hymn Haydn had composed just a few months before and which was adopted as the Austrian national anthem in 1797.
This elegant and stately hymn, through a route most circuitous (a route that will be detailed in a bit), eventually became the national anthem of Nazi Germany (an anthem that began with the words Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, or “Germany, Germany above all else”).
Had Joseph Haydn – who was a kind, considerate, gentle, optimistic, old-world man of peace and good-will – had even an inkling that a depraved, criminal regime was going to adopt his hymn as its anthem (and as a result forever link his hymn with that regime), he would likely first have vomited and then burned the manuscript of the hymn and every copy he could get his hands on.
The Nazi’s adoption of Haydn’s hymn for its own, political ends, was neither the first nor last example of something we call, today, “unauthorized use.”…
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On February 5, 1887 – 137 years ago today – Giuseppe Verdi’s 25th and second-to-last opera, Otello, received its premiere at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. The premiere was the single greatest triumph in Verdi’s sensational career. But it was a premiere – and an opera – that was a long time coming. Background He was born on October 10, 1813, in the sticks: in the tiny village of Le Roncole, in the northern Italian province of Parma. Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, received its premiere at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in November 1839, when Verdi was 26 years old. Oberto was a modest success – it received 13 performances – and based on its success, the management at La Scala offered Verdi a contract to compose three more operas. Verdi had begun his second opera – a comedy called A King for a Day – when catastrophe struck: he lost his wife and two young children to disease during a horrific, 20-month span between 1839 and 1840. Rendered nearly insane by the deaths, Verdi nevertheless battled through his grief and managed to complete A King for a Day. The opera received its premiere on September 5, […]
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We mark the premiere on January 29, 1781 – 243 years ago today – of Wolfgang Mozart’s opera Idomeneo, Re di Creta (“Idomeneo, King of Crete”). With a libretto by Giambattista Varesco (1735-1805), which was adapted from a French story by Antoine Danchet (1671-1748), itself based on a play written in 1705 by the French tragedian Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1674 -1762; that’s a lot of writing credits!), Idomeneo received its premiere at the Cuvilliés Theatre in Munich, Germany. Idomeneo was a hit, and it constitutes not just Mozart’s first operatic masterwork but, by consensus, the single greatest Italian-language opera seria ever composed! Setting the Biographical Scene On January 15th, 1779, the 23-year-old Wolfgang Mozart returned home to Salzburg after having been away for 15 months. His trip, which had taken him primarily to Mannheim and Paris, had been both a professional and personal disaster. He had left Salzburg with his mother, filled with high hopes, high spirits, and dreams of finding a permanent job and romance. He returned without his mother (who had died in Paris), without a job, without any money, and without the young woman he had met and fallen in love with during the trip (one Aloysia […]
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We mark the premiere on January 22, 1859 – 165 years ago today – of Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, in the German city of Hanover. No other work by Brahms caused him such effort; never before or after did he so agonize over a piece, working and reworking it over and over again. Background On October 1, 1853, the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms showed up at the door of Robert and Clara Schumann’s house in Düsseldorf, in the Rhineland. At the time, Brahms was pretty much a complete unknown outside of his hometown of Hamburg. He was visiting the Schumann’s at the behest of the violinist and conductor Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) who, although only two years older than Brahms, was already world famous. Physically, the young Brahms looked virtually nothing like the bearded, portly, cigar-smoking, bear-like dude of his later years; at twenty he was described as being: “a shy, awkward, nearsighted young man, blonde, delicate, almost wispy, boyish in appearance as well as in manner (the beard was still 22 years away) and with a voice whose high pitch was a constant embarrassment to him.” This 20-year-old kid might not have looked like our familiar image of […]
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On January 15, 1972 – 52 years ago today – Don McLean’s folk-rock song American Pie began what would eventually be a four-week stay at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The song made the singer, songwriter, and guitarist Don McLean (born 1945) very famous and very rich, and it is considered by many to be one of the greatest songs ever written. No One is Perfect Not a one of us is perfect, and that goes double/triple/quadruple for me. I eat ice cream right out of the carton before putting it back in the freezer, and will guzzle club soda and tonic water out of the bottle before putting it back in the fridge. I will lick a knife with cream cheese or peanut butter on it, lest any of it go to waste, and I will observe my personal ten-to-fifteen second rule when I drop food on the floor (providing one of the cats hasn’t gotten to it first). I don’t always turn my socks right-side-out before putting them in the washing machine, and I have been known to forget to water the plants even when I’ve been reminded to do so. (Regarding the freaking plants: […]
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We mark the birth on January 8, 1830 – 196 years ago today – of the German pianist, conductor, composer, and cuckold, Hans Guido von Bülow. Born in the Saxon capital of Dresden, he died in a hotel in Cairo, Egypt, on February 12, 1894, at the age of 64. Poor Hans von Bülow. He was one of the top pianists and conductors of his time. His career was closely associated with some of the greatest composers of all time, including Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Famous for his devastating wit and ability to turn a phrase, it was Bülow who coined the alliterative trio of “Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.” Sadly, for all of his many accomplishments and deserved renown, he remains best known today (in no small measure because of scandal-mongering sensationalists like myself) as one of the great cuckolds of all time, right up there with myself (cuckolded by my college girlfriend Maureen Makler and an Israeli guy named Avi Luzon); Eddie Fisher (cuckolded by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), and Henry VIII (cuckolded, or so we are told, by Ann Boleyn and a wide assortment of various courtiers and hangers-on). Bummer all the way around, […]
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On December 18, 1962 – 61 years ago today – Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 received its premiere in Moscow. The symphony stirred up a proverbial hornet’s nest of controversy, and we’re not talking here about your everyday hornet, but rather, those gnarly ‘n’ gnasty Asian Giant Hornets! It was a symphonic premiere that almost didn’t take place, though, in the end, the show did go on. Nevertheless, the authorities (the Soviet authorities, notable for their heavy blue serge suits, vodka breaths, and deficient senses of humor) did everything in their power to squash the symphony out of existence. In this they failed miserably, and Shostakovich’s Thirteenth is today acknowledged as not just one of Shostakovich’s supreme masterworks but as one of the most musically and politically important works composed during the twentieth century. A Good Communist During the late 1950s, Shostakovich was increasingly used by the Soviet authorities as a sort of artistic “figure head,” meant to represent the supposedly “free” Soviet intelligentsia. In 1960, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) – decided to make the 54-year-old Shostakovich the chairman of the newly founded RSFSR, the Russian Union of Composers. […]
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On December 11, 1721 – 302 years ago today – Johann Sebastian Bach’s employer, the 27-year-old Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen (1694-1728), married the 19-year-old Friederica Henrietta of Anhalt-Bernburg (1702-1723). She was the fourth daughter (and youngest child) of Charles Frederick, Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg (1668-1721) and his first wife, Sophie Albertine of Solms-Sonnenwalde (1672-1708). We can only hope that the kids enjoyed their wedding, because, sadly, their marriage was not fated to last for very long. (Allow me, please, a small bit of editorial bloviation. Speaking as a lower middle-class American kid born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in South Jersey – meaning someone with zero tolerance for all this royalty stuff – I find all of these puffed-up hereditary royals insufferable in both their titles and their actions. Among the actions of the literally hundreds of “princes” and “princesses” of the Holy Roman Empire was to intermarry, for generations, with other such “people of quality,” meaning their cousins. A brief look at their life spans – which are, indeed, representative of their “class” – reveals how well that turned out. Bach’s beloved boss, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, lived for all of 33 years. Leopold’s father, Emmanuel Lebrecht of […]
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We mark the premiere on December 4, 1881 – 142 years ago today – of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s one-and-only violin concerto, his Violin Concerto in D major. It received its premiere in Vienna, where it was performed by the violinist Adolf Brodsky and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Hans Richter. The concerto is, in my humble opinion, Tchaikovsky’s single greatest work and one of a handful of greatest concerti ever composed. Yet its premiere in Vienna elicited one of the most vicious reviews of all time. Unfortunately for him, Tchaikovsky was indeed one of the most over-criticized composers in the history of Western music. (Just asking: do any of us like being criticized? I think not, and please, let’s not dignify that oxymoronic phrase, “constructive criticism” by considering it seriously. I don’t mean to sound over-sensitive, but after a certain age – say, 25 – criticism of any sort, even if it is deserved [we’re talking to you, George Santos] is simply infuriating.) Tchaikovsky was also one of the most over-sensitive people ever to become a major composer, which meant that the sometimes brutal criticism he received drove him to near madness. (Regarding Tchaikovsky’s sensitivity, as a youngster, […]
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On November 27, 1896 – 127 years ago today – Richard Strauss conducted the premiere performance of his sprawling orchestral tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the German city of Frankfurt. Requests A momentary and applicable (if gratuitous) diversion. Over the course of the first half of my musical life I played a lot of gigs, both in bands and as a solo piano player. The bands ranged from fairly high end to not fairly high end. The best band I ever played with was led by the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz; the worst was a disco band the name of which will remain my little secret. The first band in which I played was a rock ‘n’ roll garage band called “Cold Sun” and the last was a Berkeley, California-based Klezmer group called “Hot Borscht.” (“Cold Sun” and “Hot Borscht”: temperature challenged tags in both cases.) As a solo player I’ve played pretty much every sort of gig, from cocktail parties, weddings, sing-a-longs, awards shows, and receptions to a long-running gig at a long defunct restaurant in Oakland, California, called The Pewter House. I played at The Pewter House, in 1978 and 1979, on Friday and Saturday evenings. It […]
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We mark the conclusion on November 20, 2022 – one year ago today – of the North American leg of Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour.” The concert took place at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles; it was the third of three “farewell” concerts held at Dodgers Stadium. The three concerts (on November 17, 19, and 20) saw a total attendance of 142,970 people and grossed $23,462,993. Since the first rock ‘n’ roll concert , which was held in Cleveland on March 21, 1952 (that would be the “Moondog Coronation Ball”), there have been rock ‘n’ roll concert tours and there have been rock ‘n’ roll farewell concert tours. But Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour” was in a league of its own and will likely never, ever be matched. The numbers are mind-boggling and bladder-weakening. The tour, interrupted, as it was, by the COVID epidemic, ran for nearly five years, from September 8, 2018, to July 8, 2023. It began in Allentown, Pennsylvania and concluded in Stockholm, Sweden. It consisted of nine separate legs (or “tours within the tour”) and a total of 330 shows. All together, the tour was attended by 6.1 […]
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We mark the death on November 13, 1868 – 155 years ago today – of the opera composer Gioachino Antonio Rossini, in Paris, at the age of 76. He was one of the most famous and beloved artists of his time, and he remains no less so today. It is my humble opinion that anyone who does not like Rossini’s operas – and, believe it or not, I have met any number of such people in the “rarified” confines of academia – well, such a person is a crank and a humbug, someone averse to melodic brilliance, theatric sparkle, and wit. 10,000 Hours? In his book Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown and Company, 2008), the English-born Canadian journalist (and staff writer at The New Yorker) Malcolm Gladwell posited his “10,000-hour rule.” Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule asserts that: “the key to achieving true expertise in any skill is simply a matter of practicing, albeit in the correct way, for at least 10,000 hours.” Of course this is complete nonsense. We must conclude that Mr. Gladwell has practiced making absurd statements for well over 10,000 hours, so completely daft is his “rule.” Listen: when I was twenty, I was 5’7” in […]
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We mark the birth on November 6, 1854 – 169 years ago today – of the American composer, conductor, and violinist John Philip Sousa. Born in Washington, D.C., Sousa died in Reading, Pennsylvania on March 6, 1932, at the age of 77. Timing, Location, Life Experience, and Talent We are told that talent – be it athletic, musical, artistic, culinary, whatever – will only take us so far; that without commitment, hard work, and perseverance “talent” is, in the end, nothing but potential. But success in any field in which innate, gene-given talent is an underlying necessity requires something more than just blood, sweat, and tears: it also requires timing, location, and life experience. We consider. How many potential William Shakespeares have been born in times and places in which vernacular, secular theater was not being cultivated to a revolutionary degree? How many latent Sebastian Bachs lived until one was born into the perfect family and at the perfect time and place to exploit his skill set? How many possible LeBron Jameses existed before the invention of basketball? I would suggest that what made Mozart “Mozart” was not just his talent and work ethic, but that his father was a […]
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We mark October 30, 1822 – 201 years ago today – as being the day on which Franz Schubert began what is now known as his Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the “Unfinished Symphony.” Lost just months after Schubert completed the two movements that make up the “Unfinished,” the symphony was heard for the first time in 1865, 43 years after its composition and 37 years after Schubert’s death. A Fable Agreed Upon One of the many clever statements (or in this case, a question) credited to Napoleon Bonaparte is: “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” A good question for a despot who was intent on creating his own version of history. However, it is a question that applies as well to our contemporary view of Ludwig van Beethoven, and how we have come to believe his music was perceived in his own time. Today, Beethoven’s mature symphonies (nos. 3 through 9) are rightly perceived as representing his own, personal struggles and revolutionary times. Our mistake – the “fable agreed upon” – occurs when we assume that Beethoven’s contemporaries believed the same thing about his mature symphonies. They did not. For Beethoven’s symphonic contemporaries, […]
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We mark the death on October 23, 1950 – 73 years ago today – of the Lithuanian-American singer and actor Al Jolson. Born “Asa Yoelson” on May 26, 1886, in the village of Srednik, in what was then the Russian Empire and what is today Lithuania, he died of a massive heart attack in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco at the age of 64. He was playing cards with friends when he collapsed; his last words were “Oh … oh, I’m going.” Singing ran deep in the Yoelson clan; his father Moses Yoelson was a cantor. The family immigrated to the United States in 1894 when young Asa was eight years old. Jolson grew up in southwest Washington, D.C., where he began his “career” singing on street corners. From there, it was onto burlesque shows and performing on the vaudeville circuit. In those days, entertainment, local retail, and professional sports were among the few American “industries” open to immigrant Jews. If this sounds painfully familiar to Black Americans, well, so it should. Equally painful is that by 1905, the 19-year-old Jolson began appearing in “blackface”: a holdover from the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century. […]
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A few, necessary words before moving on to today’s post. Our hearts bleed for the events currently playing out in Israel and Gaza. Frankly, there are no words. Today is also the 14th anniversary of my wife Diane’s death; she died at the age of 35 on October 16, 2009. Again, there are no words. Our grief notwithstanding, we soldier on – as we must – doing what we can to make our individual “worlds” a better place. For me, here on Patreon, that means publishing my blogs and podcasts, and thus – hopefully – allowing us to observe the best of the human spirit through our music. That’s my gig, inadequate though it feels on days like today. We mark the premiere on Wednesday, October 16, 1912 – 111 years ago today – of Arnold Schoenberg’s dazzling, controversial, and in all ways extraordinary work Pierrot Lunaire, at Berlin’s Choralion–saal. The premiere was preceded by a mind-blowing forty rehearsals! (For our information: chamber music premieres typically receive 3 to 5 rehearsals, max. It’s never enough, but that’s just how it is. Forty rehearsals for Pierrot Lunaire? Unheard of!) Happy Coincidences! As those of you who follow me on Patreon are […]
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We mark the birth on October 9, 1835 – 188 years ago today – of Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, in Paris. He died in that magnificent city on Beethoven’s 151st birthday – on December 16, 1921 – at the age of 86. The Nose Physically, the adult Camille Saint-Saëns was – literally – an odd bird. The music critic Pierre Lalo has left us with this description: “He was short and strangely resembled a parrot: the same sharply curved profile; a beak-like, hooked nose; [with] lively, restless, piercing eyes. He strutted like a bird and talked rapidly, precipitously, with a curiously affected lisp.” In fact, Saint-Saens was as famous for his nose as Beethoven was for his hair. When he concertized in the United States during the 1906-1907 season, Philip Hale wrote in the Boston Symphony program book: “His eyes are almost level with his nose. His eagle-beak would have excited the admiration of Sir Charles Napier, who once exclaimed, ‘Give me a man with plenty of nose!’” Please: heaven forbid I should be accused of nasal-shaming here; we should just know about Saint-Saëns second most distinguishing feature before we move on. His principal distinguishing feature was his prodigious genius, a genius […]
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Before we get to the central topic of today’s post – that being a particular address in San Francisco – we would wish a most happy birthday to someone we only know by his nickname. Please: no looking ahead and peeking! Today we wish a happy 71st birthday to the English singer, songwriter, bassist, and actor Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, CBE (“Commander of the Order of the British Empire”). He was born at Sir G. B. Hunter Memorial Hospital in Wallsend, Northumberland, England. He grew up near the shipyards there in Wallsend, which itself is located just outside of Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the east coast of northern England. The eldest of four kids, his mother Audrey was a hairdresser and his father Ernest a milkman. Our birthday boy took up the guitar as a child, but as music didn’t pay the rent, he worked as a bus conductor, a construction worker, a tax officer and, after having attended the Northern County College of Education (today known as Northumbrian University) from 1971 to 1974, he received a teaching credential. He went on to teach for two years at St. Paul’s School in Cramlington, some 9 miles north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His […]
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We mark the birth on September 25, 1932 – 91 years ago today – of the pianist Glenn Herbert Gold, in Toronto, Canada. (Yes, the surname on “Glenn Gould’s” birth certificate is “Gold.” When the young guy was seven years old his family began informally using the surname “Gould,” though Glenn himself never formally changed his name from “Gold” to “Gould.”) He died there in Toronto on October 4, 1982, at the age of fifty. Superlatives Cut Two Ways! I would observe that ordinarily, when we refer to someone as being “in a class by themselves,” it is usually understood as a compliment: that someone is “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without equal”; sans pareil”; and so forth. But in fact, superlatives such as these can cut two ways, and are consequently not necessarily complimentary in their entirety. For example. Tyrus Raymond “Ty” Cobb (1886-1961), the so-called “Georgia Peach” was – as I trust we all know – a baseball player during the Deadball Era (circa 1900-1920). He was a transcendent baseball genius (as you know, I do not use the “g-word” – genius – lightly); he was truly “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without […]
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We mark the death on September 18, 1970 – 53 years ago today – of the American guitarist, singer, and songwriter James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix, at St. Mary Abbots Hospital in London. He was born in Seattle, Washington on November 27, 1942, making him 27 years old at the time of his death, something we will discuss later in this post. Creating and Mastering a New Idiom “Top ten” lists are entirely subjective and thus often irrelevant. But they can be informative when they agree and as such, indicate a consensus. Here are a few such lists of rock ‘n’ roll guitarists, in which I’ve cut to the chase and listed only the “top four.” Rolling Stone, “100 Greatest [Rock] Guitarists”: Writing in Rolling Stone, the American guitarist, singer, songwriter, and political activist Tom Morello explains: “Jimi Hendrix exploded our idea of what rock music could [italics mine] be. His playing was effortless. There’s not one minute of his recorded career that feels like he’s working hard at it – it feels like it’s all flowing through him. He seamlessly weaves chords and single note runs together and uses chord voicings that don’t appear in any music book. His riffs […]
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9-11; a somber day for us all. A day for reflection, contemplation and perhaps, still, after 22 years, a day to grieve. Far more often than not, Music History Monday is about celebrating the life and accomplishments of a musician or identifying and exploring some great (or small) event in music history. If I chose to, today’s post could celebrate the lives and music of two wonderful composers. On September 11, 1733 – 290 years ago today – the French composer and harpsichordist François Couperin (1668-1733) died in Paris, at the age of 65. The Estonian-born composer Arvo Pärt was born 88 years ago today, on September 11, 1935. If we chose to explore an event rather than celebrate the lives and music of François Couperin or Arvo Pärt, this post could mark the 173rd anniversary of the first American concert of “The Swedish Nightingale” – Ms. Jenny Lind (1820-1887) – at the Castle Garden Theater in New York City, in a performance promoted by none-other-than P. T. Barnum. (For our information: Johanna Maria “Jenny” Lind was one of the most highly regarded operatic sopranos of her time. After a sensational European career, she retired from the opera […]
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We mark the birth on September 4, 1824 – 199 years ago today – of the composer and organist Josef Anton Bruckner, in the Austrian village of Ansfelden, which today is a suburb of the city of Linz. He died in the Austrian capital of Vienna on October 11, 1896, at the age of 72. It was Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) who famously said that Bruckner was: “Half simpleton, half God.” Strangeness I would be so bold as to suggest that there is such a thing as a “strangeness spectrum,” a scale of personality oddness that stretches from the merely quirky to the genuinely weird. If we were to consider such a spectrum as a scale from one to ten, with one being “quirky” (or idiosyncratic); five being “eccentric” (or odd); and ten being really “weird” (or bizarre), then the personality of the composer and organist Anton Bruckner would lie at about an eleven: an off-the-charts “downright whacky” (and even, at times, unnervingly creepy). I know, I know: many of you are probably thinking something on the lines of “so what? He was a professional composer. Show me a major composer besides, perhaps, Joseph Haydn and Antonin Dvořák who wasn’t a […]
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We mark the premiere performance on August 28, 1850 – 173 years ago today – of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, in the central German city of Weimar. The premiere was conducted by none-other-than Wagner’s friend and supporter (and future father-in-law!) Franz Liszt (1811-1886). Liszt had chosen the premiere date of August 28 in honor of Weimar’s most famous citizen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was born on August 28, 1749, 101 years to the day before Lohengrin’s premiere. The “opera” – the last of Wagner’s stage works to be designated by him as being an “opera” – was brilliantly received and has been a mainstay of the international repertoire since that first performance. Alas, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was not in attendance there at the premiere. With a price on his head, he had been de-facto exiled from Germany thanks to his activities in the Dresden Uprising of May of 1849. Wagner did not hear a full performance of Lohengrin until 1861, 11 years later, in Vienna. Be informed that both today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts will deal with Lohengrin. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes will focus on three video performances, comparing video excerpts from each […]
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We mark the death on August 21, 2005 – 18 years ago today – of the American engineer and electronic music pioneer Robert Moog. Born in New York City on May 23, 1934, he died of a brain tumor in Asheville, North Carolina, at the age of 71. First things first: let us pronounce this fine man’s surname properly. It is not pronounced as “moo-g.” “Moo-g” is a sound made by a cow after she painfully stubs her hoof. Despite its double-o, the name is pronounced “mogue,” as in “vogue.” Moog didn’t invent the sound synthesizer. Rather, he (and his inventing “partners,” the composer Herbert Arnold “Herb” Deutsch, 1932-2022 and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Wendy Carlos, born 1939) democratized the thing, making it affordable, portable, and playable enough to be bought and used by anyone who could get around a piano-like keyboard. Our Game Plan Today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts are conceived as a single post, one that I’ve divided in half and will post on two successive days. As my Patreon subscribers know, I’ve done this before; it’s no big deal and I will certainly do it again. However, for those of you […]
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On August 14, 1962 – 61 years ago today – the manager of the Beatles Brian Epstein made a phone call to the drummer Ringo Starr, inviting him to join the band. As I suspect we are all aware, Starr said “yes.” Two days later, on August 16, Epstein had the unenviable task of firing the band’s present drummer, Randolph Peter “Pete” Best (born Randolph Peter Scanland, 1941), who had been the Beatles’ drummer for almost exactly two years, since August 1960. Best’s firing, effective on August 18, 1962, was, for Best, the worst timing ever. 17 days later, on September 4, 1962, a reconfigured Beatles with Ringo Starr as drummer recorded their first #1 hit and went from nobodies to superstars in the span of a few weeks. Pete Best (Born 1941) Peter Best was born on November 24, 1941, in Madras, which was then part of British India. His father, a marine engineer named Donald Peter Scanland, died during World War Two. Pete’s mother Mona went on to marry a British officer from Liverpool named Johnny Best, with whom she had a second son, this one named Rory. In 1945, the Best family returned to Britain on […]
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We mark an online auction that concluded on August 7, 2008 – 15 years ago today – at which Elvis Presley’s white, sweat-stained, high-collared, plunging V-necked jumpsuit, decorated with a dazzling, hand-embroidered blue and gold peacock – sold for $300,000. (Because I know you want to know, the jumpsuit is cinched at the waist by a wide belt decorated in gold medallions in a design meant to resemble the eye of a peacock feather, all of it an ongoing reflection of Elvis’ fascination with peacocks as being his personal good luck symbol.) The outfit cost Elvis a cool $10,000. It was designed by the Los Angeles couturier Bill Belew (1931-2008), who designed all of The King’s stage wardrobe between 1968 and 1977. Talk about provenance (something we’ll define and discuss in just a bit)! Aside from Elvis’ personal sweat stains (do they still . . . give off an odor?), he performed wearing the jumpsuit for the better part of a year. Elvis first wore the “peacock” at a concert at the Forum in Los Angeles on May 11, 1974. He then performed wearing it in Las Vegas and wore it as well on the cover of his album “Promised […]
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Before we get to the actual date-related topic for today, I beg your indulgence, as I need to tell you a story. It’s a story that most of you know, at least in part. Again, indulge me. The Godfather III – the third film in the storied Godfather franchise, released in 1990 – was one of the most anticipated films of all time. And no wonder: the first of the Godfather movies – The Godfather, or “G1”, released in 1972 – was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and received three, including Best Picture and Best Actor (for Marlon Brando). G2, released two years later in 1974 was also nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning six of them, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor (for Robert DeNiro). So G3 – The Godfather III – had a lot riding on it. Much of the casting was easy. Al Pacino returned in the role of Michael Corleone; Diane Keaton in the role of Kaye Corleone; and Talia Shire in the role of Connie Corleone. But there were new roles to fill, none more important than Mary Corleone, the now grown-up daughter of the “godfather” himself, Michael Corleone. G3’s writer and director, […]
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We mark the birth on July 24, 1880 – 143 years ago today – of the Swiss-born American composer and educator Ernest Bloch, who was born in Geneva, Switzerland. He died in Portland, Oregon, on July 15, 1959, at the age of 78. Establishing a Genealogy People trace their family trees for all sorts of reasons: to establish family connections, to collect family medical information, to meet other people engaged in such research, and so forth. But at the root (pun intended) of these (and other) reasons to establish a family tree is the issue of self-identity: the desire to connect with oneself by connecting with one’s ancestors: learning what we can of who they were; where they came from; what sort of lives they led; and what they accomplished. With the advent of genetic testing sites like “23 and Me,” “AncestryDNA,” “LivingDNA,” and “HomeDNA,” the whole family tree trip has taken a crazy-giant step forward, in that our family trees have gone from saplings to 400-year-old oaks. A couple of years ago, bored to death during the pandemic and unable to resist any longer, my wife and I were so tested using the site “23 and Me.” Here are […]
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We mark the death on July 17, 2014 – 9 years ago today – of the Broadway and television actress Elaine Stritch, in Birmingham, Michigan, at the age of 89. I personally have a soft spot in my heart for Ms. Stritch the size of Manitoba. She was your quintessential brassy, tart-tongued (a euphemism for foul mouthed), cigarette smoking, alcohol-soaked blonde who took nothing from no one and could sell a song like nobody’s business. (Please note that I didn’t say “sing a song” but rather, “sell a song.” Her ability to do so will be discussed in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post.) It is my great hope that by the time you finish this Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts, you will have come to love her almost as much as I do. My decision to profile Elaine Stritch is, in my estimation, a great sign of respect, given the other musical events of the day. Both the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane and the singer Billie Holiday died on this date, in 1967 and 1959, respectively. (Be assured that both of these luminaries – Coltrane and Holiday – will receive their due on these pages sooner […]
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We mark the birth on July 10, 1895 – 128 years ago today – of the German composer and educator Carl Heinrich Maria Orff. Born in Munich, he died in that city on March 29, 1982, at the age of 86. The Good News Orff lived a long and productive life. He was a composer of considerable talent whose works draw on influences as diverse as ancient Greek tragedy and medieval chant, Baroque theater, and Bavarian peasant life. His so-called “scenic cantata”, Carmina Burana (of 1936), remains an audience favorite today. Along with the German educator Gunild Keetman, Orff developed a musical education method in the 1920s called the Orff Schulwerk, or the “Orff Approach,” a methodology that integrates music, movement, speech, and drama in a manner based on what children do instinctively, and that is play. Today, the Orff Approach is employed around the world and is one of the four major developmental music educational methodologies. The other three are the Kodály Method (created by the Hungarian composer and educator Zoltán Kodály, 1882-1967); the Suzuki Method (created by the Japanese violinist and educator Shinichi Suzuki, 1898-1998), and Dalcroze Eurhythmics (created by the Swiss composer and educator Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, 1865-1950). […]
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We mark the birth on July 3, 1854 – 169 years ago today – of the Moravian (meaning Czech) composer, music theorist, folklorist, and teacher Leoš Janáček. Born in the village of Hukvaldy in what today is the Czech Republic, he died on August 12, 1928 in the city of Ostrava, today the capital of the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. It’s All in the Name! Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) was an American writer and lecturer known for his self-help guides to self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. If he were alive today, he’d be on the speaking circuit, doing Ted Talks and, perhaps, making a fortune through a video self-help network. But given the comparatively limited technology of his day, Carnegie made his living writing books, books with such titles as The Art of Public Speaking (first published in 1915); How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948), and The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking (1962). But Dale Carnegie’s most famous and influential tome – one that remains in print today after 87 years! – is How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936. Among the thousands of assuredly useful tidbits […]
The post Music History Monday: Leoš Janáček: Composer, Patriot, and Patriot Composer! first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
‘Fessing Up Okay: you’re going to have to bear with me for one of my idiotic tangents, one that nevertheless explains precisely how I feel about Mozart and his music at a gut level. What follows is a deep confession, something I’ve never shared before. Be forewarned though, that once you’ve read and/or heard this confession (depending upon whether you’re reading Music History Monday as a blog or listening to it as a podcast), it cannot be unread or unheard. Here goes. Since childhood, I have had a deep and abiding affection for horror films, the gnarlier, the gnastier, the better. Yes, color me juvenile if you must, but there it is. Among the very greatest masters of the genre is the American filmmaker John Carpenter (born 1948), whose oeuvre includes such classics as the Halloween franchise, Escape From New York, Escape from L.A., Christine, The Fog, Assault on Precinct 13, They Live, and Prince of Darkness. But for my dinaro, Carpenter’s magnum opus is The Thing (which was released in 1982). Critically panned when it first opened, it is today considered (by those of us who consider it at all) to be a masterwork of graphic, on occasion inadvertently […]
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We mark the birth on June 19, 1810 – 213 years ago today – of the German virtuoso violinist and composer, Ferdinand David. Born in the exact same house in Hamburg that saw Felix Mendelssohn’s birth 16½ months before, David died while on vacation in Switzerland on July 18, 1873, at the age of 63. We will get to the specifics of Maestro David’s life and career and why, to my mind, he is “our kind of musician” in a moment. But first, with your indulgence, a brief bit of editorializing. When the Performer Becomes the Show Marlon Brando (1924-2004). Yes, Marlon Brando: actor, director, activist, and father of at least 16 children (at least 16 children). I would respectfully suggest that a movie with Marlon Brando is not so much a movie in which Marlon Brando plays a role as it is a movie in which Marlon Brando plays Marlon Brando playing a role. Accordingly, I would assert that in A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando portrays Marlon Brando portraying Stanley Kowalski; in The Godfather, Marlon Brando portrays Marlon Brando playing Vito Corleone; in Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando portrays Marlon Brando playing Colonel Walter Kurtz, and so forth. Brando […]
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We mark the birth on June 12, 1941 – 82 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He died of cancer after a brief illness on February 9, 2021, at his home just outside of Tampa Bay, Florida, at the age of 79. Chick Corea’s spectacularly varied, 50-plus year career as a professional musician offers an object lesson in both the necessity and futility of labels. “Spectacularly varied” is the operative phrase in the sentence above. In the mid-1960s Corea became deeply involved in Latin American music, having broken in with the Cuban bandleader and percussionist Mongo Santamaria (1917-2003) and the Puerto Rican-American bandleader and percussionist Willie Bobo (whose real name was Willie Correa, no relation, 1934-1983). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Corea played with the Miles Davis (1926-1991) band (he played piano on seven of Miles Davis’ albums, including Davis’ classic Bitches Brew album of 1969). As such, the Chick-Meister was a full-participant in Davis’ electrified experiment in fusion, in synthesizing jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. In 1970 and 1971 Corea led his own, avant-garde, free jazz band called Circle. In 1972, Corea formed his jazz/Latin […]
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Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier, 1948) with his beloved boa, Julius Squeezer, before the “breakfast incident”On June 5, 1977 – 46 years ago today – the shock-rock superstar Alice Cooper’s pet boa constrictor and concert co-star, a creature rather cleverly named “Julius Squeezer,” suffered what turned out to be a fatal bite from a live rat it was eating for breakfast. No doubt: Julius probably should have ordered the scrambled eggs and toast, and in doing so would have heeded the advice offered by the title of this post: “never eat anything that can bite you back.”
This is a heartbreaking tale, a tragic love story between a boy and his reptile, a love story brought to an ignominious end by an alpha-rodent. But it is also a story of hope, renewal, and love rekindled, as the auditions Alice Cooper subsequently held for a replacement snake allowed him to discover his new boa, a precious girl-snake named “Angel.”
Now of course we’re going to expand on this saga of reptilian eradication-by-rambunctious-rat and subsequent replacement in just a bit. But first, we’d observe two other, date-relevant items.
Martha Argerich (born 1941) in 2015First, we mark the birth on June 5, 1941 – 82 years ago today – of the pianist Martha Argerich, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. To my ear and mind, Argerich the pianist is an enduring miracle. When she plays in public (which, since the 1980s, has happened with painful infrequence) we listen, because her technically flawless pianism is expressively and intellectually compelling. Like the greatest of actors – and I’m thinking here of people like Laurence Olivier, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Katherine Hepburn – actors who become one with the roles they play, so Martha Argerich has that alchemical ability to become one with the music she plays. Speaking as a composer, this is, to me, the greatest (and rarest!) gift a musician can have: to remove one’s own ego from a performance and live entirely through music as it is written.
That might sound a bit flakey, but still, it’s true. A Martha Argerich performance – “volatile, explosive, quixotic, astounding and mesmerizing” though it may be – is never “about” Martha Argerich. Rather, it is “about” the music she is performing. Like her living pianistic contemporaries Vladimir Ashkenazy (born 1937), Maurizio Pollini (born 1942), Murray Perahia (born 1947), András Schiff (born 1953), and Krystian Zimerman (born 1956), Argerich is truly an advocate for the composers whose music she plays. But unlike all the marvelous pianists just mentioned, Argerich’s legend is such that the mere implication that she might show up to a venue and actually perform will sell out a house in minutes.
In order to discuss Maestra Argerich in the manner she justly deserves and, as well, to recommend three of my favorite Argerich recordings, she will be the topic of tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post.
Be there.
Moments ago, I mentioned that we’d get back to Alice Cooper’s snake and the rat after having discussed two other date-related items. The first was Martha Argerich’s 82nd birthday. The second item follows, under the heading of “can we really blame him?”
On June 5, 2003 – an even 20 years ago today – a pirate radio station in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom, was shut down by local authorities. The “pirate” himself has been identified only as a “grandfather” who went by the rather questionable name of “Ricky Rock.” Grandpa Rock had set up a 32-foot-high radio transmitter in the garden of his house, and had taken it upon himself to illegally broadcast hits by Elvis Presley and such bands as The Beatles and The Beach Boys. When questioned as to why he had done such a thing, this Robin Hood of the air waves told the authorities that his local radio stations did not address the listening needs of his generation, instead playing music by what he called:
“talentless boy bands and dance music.”
Can we blame Grandad Ricky Rock for doing what he did? No, we cannot.…
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Isaac Albéniz (1860-1909) in 1901On May 29, 1860 – 163 years ago today – the composer and pianist Isaac Albéniz was born in Camprodón, Spain. Albéniz was a brilliant pianist and, as evidenced by his 12-movement suite for piano entitled Iberia (written between 1905-1909), a composer of genius.
However, before we can get to Maestro Albéniz, I would beg your indulgence while we celebrate this remarkable day in music history!
Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1893-1957) in 1934Also born on this date was the Austrian-American composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who came into this world in 1893 in Brno, in what today is the Czech Republic; he died in Los Angeles in 1957. The Romanian-born Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was born on this day in 1922 in Brâila, Romania; he died in Paris in 2001. The American singer, songwriter, and composer Danny Elfman was born on this day in 1953; the singer LaToya Jackson in 1956; and the Academy Award and Grammy Award winning singer and songwriter Melissa Etheridge in 1961.
Sadly but not unexpectedly, notable people from the world of music passed away on this date as well.
Mily Balakirev (1837-1910) circa 1908May 29,1910, saw the death of Mily Balakirev in St. Petersburg;he was 73 years old.
On this day in 1911, the poet and librettist William S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) left this vale of tears at the age of 74. On this day in 1935, the Czech violinist and composer Joseph Suk died at the age of 61; and on May 29, 2005, the American composer George Rochberg died at 86.
Philip Kramer (1952-1995)Here’s a particularly grim date-related item. On May 29, 1999 – 24 years ago today – a group of photographers looking for old car wrecks to photograph at the bottom of Decker Canyon near Malibu, California, found a bit more than they bargained for: a wrecked car tricked out with its own skeletal remains still inside. Those remains belonged to Philip Kramer, the former bassist with Iron Butterfly, who had disappeared four years before, on February 12, 1995. His death was eventually ruled a suicide.
Sticking with grim, May 29 also marks the 326th anniversary of the assassination of the 44-year-old Italian castrato Giovanni Grossi (known popularly as “Siface”). One of the most famous singers of the entire Baroque era, Siface met his end on May 29, 1697, on the road between Bologna and Ferrara at the hands of “bravi” (meaning thugs/muscle) in the employ of a nobleman with whose wife Siface had had a . . . liaison. So much for the erroneous perception that those without balls cannot have a ball. (A crude statement, yes, but physiologically accurate).
And still May 29 is a gift that keeps on giving!
On May 29, 1942, Bing Crosby recorded Irving Berlin’s White Christmas. Crosby’s recording won an Oscar for “Best Song” and sold over 50 million copies world-wide. The link provided transits to Der Bingle and Marjorie Reynolds introducing White Christmas inthe movie Holiday Inn (1942).
But wait! There’s more! Because on May 29, 1913, 110 years ago today, the most famous riot in Western music history broke out during the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. (The riot was the topic of Music History Monday on May 29, 2017.)
Okay; deep, cleansing breath. It is time to talk about Isaac Albéniz and his supreme masterwork, his 12-movement suite for solo piano entitled Iberia. As happens not infrequently here on these august pages, our exploration of Albéniz’ life, his Spanish heritage, and the impact of that heritage on the creation and content of Iberia will take us through both today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post.…
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We mark the first performance on May 22, 1874 – 149 years ago today – of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem, written in memory of the Italian novelist, poet, and patriot Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1872).”
BackgroundGiuseppe Verdi circa 1870In June of 1870, the 57-year-old Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) agreed to compose an opera for the brand-new Cairo Opera Theater. The Khedive Ismail Pasha of Egypt personally handled the negotiations, as the opera was to celebrate nothing less than the opening of the Suez Canal. No expense was spared, either on the opera or on Verdi, who received the unheard-of commissioning fee of 150,000 gold francs: roughly $1,935,000 today!
The opera – Aida – received its premiere in Cairo on December 24, 1871. With no disrespect intended towards either the Khedive Ismail Pasha of Egypt or the Cairo Opera Theater, the opera’s real premiere – as far as Verdi and the larger opera world were concerned – took place six weeks later: at La Scala in Milan on February 8, 1872. That Italian premiere was a triumph, the greatest of Verdi’s career to date. He himself received 32 curtain calls!
Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873)The only contemporary Italian artist who could possibly be considered as beloved as Giuseppe Verdi was the novelist and poet Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1883). Manzoni’s most famous work is a novel entitled I promessi sposi (“The Betrothed”), which was written initially between 1821 and 1827; Manzoni completed the final, “definitive” version in 1842. Manzoni wrote this final version in what was (and still is) considered the stylistically superior Italian dialect of Tuscany. This final, “Tuscan” version of “The Betrothed” had a pivotal impact on the development of a consistent Italian-language prose style. At a time when the Italian peninsula boasted more dialects than varieties of pasta, Manzoni, more than any other single person, helped to popularize a single, ideal way of writing and speaking Italian, based on the dialect of Tuscany.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. At a time when Italian nationalism sought the creation of a single, unified Italian nation with a single national identity, Manzoni’s work offered his nation a single, universally understood Italian language. Manzoni came to be perceived – rightly – as not just the greatest Italian writer of his generation, but as a great Italian patriot as well. What Verdi did for his nascent Italian nation through the medium of opera, so Manzoni accomplished through the medium of literature: he inspired a national Italian identity through its oh-so-special language.
Giuseppe Verdi considered Manzoni to be a living saint, a man who combined astonishing talent with great personal virtue and nobility.
Manzoni died at the age of 88 on May 22, 1873. The following day Verdi wrote to his friend and publisher Tito Ricordi:
“I am profoundly saddened by the death of our Great Man! But I shall not go to Milan, for I do not have the heart to attend his funeral. I will soon come to visit his grave, alone and unseen, and perhaps (after further reflection, having weighed my strength) to propose something to honor his memory.”
A RequiemTen days after Manzoni’s death, Verdi did indeed go to the cemetery in Milan, where he stood at Manzoni’s grave and formulated a plan. He returned to his suite at the Grand Hotel de Milan and wrote another letter to his publisher Tito Ricordi, proposing that he compose a Requiem Mass for Manzoni, to be performed on the first anniversary of his death. Verdi’s intention was to write a work that, following its first performance, would be performed not in churches but rather, in concert halls, with each such performance offering a proper memorial to the memory of Manzoni. …
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Frontispiece to the Harmonice musices odhecaton A, published on May 15, 1501On May 15, 1501 – 522 years ago today – the first polyphonic (that is, multi-part) music printed using moveable type was released to the public by the Venice-based publisher Ottaviano dei Petrucci. (The publication features a dedication dated May 15, 1501, so we assume that this corresponds with its release date.) The publication was an anthology of works entitled Harmonice musices odhecaton A, meaning “One Hundred Pieces of Harmonic Music, Volume A”. (Volumes “B” and “C” followed in 1502 and 1503, respectively). In fact, “One Hundred Pieces of Harmonic Music, Volume A” consists of 96 (not “100”, as the title claims) instrumental works and French-language songs by some of the most famous composers of the day, as well as some anonymous works as well. Those famous composers represented in the anthology – which include Josquin de Prez, Johannes Ockeghem, Jacob Obrecht, Antoine Brumel, and Alexander Agricole – were all originally from northern France and southern Belgium: the so-called “Franco-Flemish” composers from the “oltre montani” (“the other side of the Alps”) who were so popular in Italy at the time.
I am aware that that previous, opening paragraph, filled with relatively obscure Italian and Franco-Flemish names, musicological rubric, and featuring an obscure, Latin-titled anthology – Harmonice musices odhecaton A -might have crossed your eyes and loosened your bladders even as it threatened to put you to sleep.
But!
But, but!
But in fact, the publication of “One Hundred Pieces of Harmonic Music, Volume A” in 1501 was a huge, big deal in the history of Western music, an event we can accurately call a “game changer”!
In reference to human evolution and development, there have been all sorts of large-case game changers: the control of fire; the invention of clothing; the development of tools and the invention of the wheel; the rise of agriculture; the ability to smelt, forge, and alloy metals; the harnessing of steam, and so forth. But I would argue that collectively, the most important game-changers in the evolution and development of humanity have to do with information transfer, starting with the development of language.
While it now appears likely that our ancestor homo erectus “invented” some sort of “grunted” language as long as 2 million years ago, complex language only emerged among the most loquacious of human species – that being we homo sapiens – some 150,000 years ago, as a systematic way for modern humans to communicate.
Next to language, sliced bread as a game changer is, well, overrated. …
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Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) circa 1864We mark the birth on May 8, 1829 – 194 years ago today – of the American composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, in New Orleans. He died, all-too-young, on December 18, 1869 at the age of forty, in exile in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Events that occurred in September of 1865 in San Francisco, California and across the San Francisco Bay in Oakland led directly to Gottschalk’s “exile” to South America. Those frankly tawdry events, most unfairly, have been recounted way too often and as a result, they have come to obscure Gottschalk’s memory as a composer, pianist, patriot, and philanthropist. That’s because people like me continue to write about them as if they, somehow, encapsulated the totality of who and what Louis Moreau Gottschalk was.
I hate myself for having participated in this unholy example of scandal mongering – I do – and I stand before you filled with shame and remorse.
Nevertheless.
Nevertheless, I fully intend to rehash these salacious events here and now with the understanding that following that rehash, we will spend the remainder of this post and all of tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post doing penance, by providing a proper account of the cultural importance of Gottschalk’s hometown of New Orleans, as well as his life, times, and musical career.
BackgroundGottschalk circa 1850, at the time he was being called “Chopin’s Successor”During his lifetime, Louis Moreau Gottschalk was considered to be the greatest pianist and composer ever born in the Western hemisphere, the “Chopin of the New World.” An American patriot, he foreswore his allegiance to his native South and embraced the Northern cause during the Civil War because of his unreserved hatred of slavery. During the Civil War he travelled and concertized tirelessly across the North and Midwest of the United States, inspiring his audiences with compositions and arrangements of patriotic melodies. He gave away much of his earnings to veterans’ organizations.
He was born in 1829 in what was then the most highly cultured and diverse city in the United States: New Orleans. Gottschalk’s personal heritage was diverse as well. His father was a Jewish businessman from London and his mother a Creole, that is, a Louisiana native of French descent. He was a musical prodigy whose compositions synthesized the incredibly different sorts of music he heard around him in New Orleans: African music, Caribbean music, Creole music, as well as the classics of the European concert tradition.
Trained at the Paris Conservatoire, the 20-year-old Gottschalk was called “Chopin’s Successor” when Chopin died in 1849. Subsequent concert tours took him across Europe, North America, Central America, and South America made him a legend in his time.…
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Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, title page of the first edition of the score, published by the firm of N. Simrock in 1819On May 1, 1786 – on what was also a Monday, 237 years ago today – a miracle was heard for the first time: Wolfgang Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro received its premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna.
Some 100 years later, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) wrote this about The Marriage of Figaro:
“Every number in Figaro is for me a marvel; I simply cannot fathom how anyone could create anything so perfect. Such a thing has never been done, not even by Beethoven.”
Herr Brahms, when you’re right, you’re right, and this case you are so right! 237 years after the premiere, Brahms’ awe of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro mirrors our own. For many of us – myself included – it is, simply, the greatest opera ever composed.
Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791) in 1783, by Joseph LangeComposing an Italian Language Opera for the Viennese
On May 7th, 1783 – some three years before the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro – Mozart wrote the following in a letter to his father back in Salzburg:
“The Italian opera buffa [here in Vienna] is very popular. I have looked through more than a hundred libretti [meaning literally “little book,” the script of an opera] but I have found hardly a single one that satisfies me. That is to say, there are so many changes that would have to be made that any poet, even if he were to undertake to make them, would find it easier to write an entirely new text. Our poet here now is a certain Da Ponte. He has an enormous amount to do, and he is at present writing a libretto for Salieri, which will take him two months. He has then promised to write a libretto for me. But who knows if he will be able to keep his word, or whether he will want to? As you know, these Italians are very civil to one’s face . . . I should dearly love to show what I can do in an Italian opera.”
That Mozart would “dearly love” to compose an Italian language opera for the Viennese was an understatement; “desperately want” would have been a far more appropriate way to put it!
When the 27-year-old Mozart wrote that letter to his father in May, 1783, he had been living and working as a freelance musician in Vienna for almost exactly two years. The young dude was, at the time, filled with inestimable energy, ambition, and – of course – fathomless talent. Italian language opera was the most prestigious (and potentially profitable) entertainment medium of the day, and Mozart desperately wanted a piece of that action. But he was also savvy enough to know that composing an Italian language opera in the 1780s for the Viennese was an entirely different ball-of-notes than composing one for audiences in Salzburg, Munich, and even Milan, which he had done already. He was no longer a child prodigy, for whom the composition of any opera would stun audiences merely by dint of its exitance. By the 1780s he was a seasoned pro, composing for a Viennese audience that was, at the time, arguably the most discriminating one in Europe.
Consequently, Mozart knew that when the time came for him to throw his compositional hat into the Viennese ring (pun intended) by composing an Italian language opera for the toughest crowd this side of the Roman Colosseum, it couldn’t be just any opera. It would have to represent his best work, and as such it would have to be based on a really good story with a libretto by a first-rate poet. Which is why – during the course of his letter to his father – Mozart mentioned Lorenzo Da Ponte, the official “poet” (meaning the official “librettist”) of the Viennese Court.…
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Barbra Streisand (born 1942) in 1965We mark the birth on April 24, 1942 – 81 years ago today – of the American singer, songwriter, actress, and filmmaker Barbara Joan “Barbra” Streisand, in Brooklyn, New York.
But first, before we get to the magnificent Babs, a brief but spirited edition of “This Day In Music History . . .” okay, “stupid” is too strong a word, so let’s just call it, “This Day In Music History . . . Dumb.”
On April 24, 2007 – 16 years ago today – the American musician, actress, singer, and songwriter Sheryl Crowe (born 1962) declared on her website that in order to help the environment, the use of toilet paper should be limited to:
“only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required.”
We cannot help but wonder precisely what “pesky occasions” Crowe might be referring to. Additionally, we must assume that Ms. Crowe’s proscription again TP overuse was intended to be voluntary, as the issues surrounding enforcement are, indeed, troubling.
Sheryl Crow’s environmental concerns extended, as well, to what she deemed to be the profligate use of napkins. She went so far as to design a line of clothing that featured what she called a “dining sleeve.” Those sleeves – what amounted to wearable napkins – were “replaceable”: they could be detached after diners had used them to wipe their mouths and replaced with clean sleaves. What a shock that “dining sleeves” never caught on!
Sheryl Crowe (born 1962) demonstrating (wastefully demonstrating!) how to properly employ toilet paperWhile we would acknowledge that Sheryl Crowe’s environmental heart is in the right place, we would respectfully suggest she aim a bit higher than toilet paper and for example, stop drinking from plastic water bottles, as seen in the image above.
Just suggesting.
Barbra Streisand (born 1942)There is nothing I can say about Maestra Streisand that has not already been said a thousand times. Regarding her talents as a singer, actress, and filmmaker; her command of the stage; her intelligence and sense of humor; her ego and ambition; her philanthropy and activism; the clichés be damned, she is truly a force of nature: one-of-a-kind. She has been a constant presence in our cultural lives for seven decades: her first network television appearance occurred on April 5, 1961, when she appeared on The Jack Paar Show (later, The Tonight Show), which was guest-hosted that evening by Orson Bean (1928-2020).
Orson Bean (1928-2020) in 1965Bean late recalled:
“I met Barbra when she was 18 and singing at a place in Greenwich Village. When I guest-hosted The Jack Paar Show I got them to fly her in from a club she was playing in Detroit. She was a nervous wreck. But then when she started singing – [the song] ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’ – it was like God singing through her. She got a standing ovation, which doesn’t happen on TV. It was an incredible moment.”
…
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Grand Opera House (originally “Wade’s Opera House”), San Francisco, in 1881We mark the final San Francisco performance – on the evening of Tuesday, April 17, 1906, 117 years ago today – of the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso (1874-1921). That performance at the no longer extant Grand Opera House at No. 2 Mission Street (between 2nd and 3rd Streets) was not intended to have been Caruso’s last local appearance, but circumstances beyond his control assured that it was!
Enrico Caruso (1874-1921)
Enrico Caruso in one of his first publicity photos, taken in Sicily 1896 at the age of 24; he is wearing a bedspread draped like a toga since his only dress shirt was at the laundryCaruso was born into a poor family in Naples, Italy, on February 24th, 1874. He was the third of seven children (and not the nineteenth of twenty-one, as Caruso himself often claimed!). Following in the professional footsteps of his father, Marcellino Caruso, who was a mechanic, young Enrico was apprenticed to a mechanical engineer at the age of 11. He “discovered” his voice singing in a church choir, and as a teenager he made a few extra dinero singing on the streets and in the cafes of Naples.
At the age of 18, Caruso had something of a revelation, when he used money he had earned as a singer to buy his first new pair of shoes. Realizing his real professional potential, he began taking voice lessons, and his progress was rapid.
The 21-year-old Caruso made his professional debut as an opera singer on March 15, 1895, when he sang in a now-forgotten opera (entitled L’Amico Francesco by Mario Morelli) at Naples’ Teatro Nuovo. He proceeded to pay his dues, singing a wide variety of roles in various provincial opera houses while continuing his vocal studies. He made his La Scala debut at the age of 26 on December 26, 1900, singing Rodolfo in Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème under the baton of Arturo Toscanini.
Caruso quickly became a fan favorite throughout Italy, but it was technology – a brand-new technology – that made him world famous.
Self-caricature by Caruso himself, making his first records in a hotel room in Milan in April 1902; note the drawing of Nipper the dog listening to “his master’s voice” at the upper right, originally the logo of Emile Berliner’s The Gramophone CompanyOn April 11, 1902, Caruso walked into a hotel room in Milan which had been outfitted as a makeshift recording studio. On that day, for a fee of 100 pounds sterling, Caruso recorded 10 discs, becoming in the process the first opera singer to make a flat disc, 78 rpm record.
(For our information, those records were made for Emile Berliner’s The Gramophone Company. Founded in London in 1898, The Gramophone Company was the parent company of the record label His Master’s Voice (HMV), which was the American affiliate of the Victor Talking Machine Company. The Victor Talking Machine Company was acquired by RCA in 1929 and the new label was initially known as RCA Victor. In London, in a separate transaction, His Master’s Voice merged with the Columbia Gramophone Company in 1931 to create Electric and Musical Industries Limited, better known as the classical labels EMI and Angel.)
The records Caruso recorded in that Milanese hotel room made him an overnight sensation. Just weeks after they were released, Caruso was signed to sing at London’s Covent Garden. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in a new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto on November 23, 1903, and from that day forward became the Met’s most popular tenor.
It was as a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company that Enrico Caruso came to perform in San Francisco, California, on April 17, 1906.…
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We mark the premiere on April 10, 1868 – 155 years ago today – of Johannes Brahms’ magnificent A German Requiem, for vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) in 1866Johannes Brahms, Again?I know I’ve been going heavy on Brahms (1833-1897) as of late. I would apologize if he wasn’t so fascinating a person and if his music wasn’t so darned good, but he was a fascinating person and his music is superb, so our continued attention is well deserved.
It’s not as if we didn’t have other topical options for this date. For example, on this date in 1970 – 53 years ago today – Paul McCartney “officially” announced the split-up of TheBeatles.Okay; whatever; if there’s one topic that’s gotten more play here in MusicHistoryMonday than Bach, Brahms and Beethoven combined, it’s the fourth “B”: TheBeatles.
The breakup of TheBeatles?
Sorry, but yawn.
The “Wilhelm Scream”Shelby Frederick “Sheb” Wooley (1921-2003)Then there’s this. April 10, 1921, marks the birth – 102 years ago today – of the American singer, songwriter, actor, and comedian Shelby Frederick “Sheb” Wooley, in Erick Oklahoma (he died in Nashville, Tennessee on September 16, 2003, at the age of 82). For the vast majority of us who do indeed remember him, Wooley is best known for his 1958 rock ‘n’ roll comedy single ThePurplePeopleEater, which he wrote in a matter of minutes and which sat at number 1 on Billboard’sHotPopChart for six weeks between June 9 and July 14, 1958. The so-called “Official Video” is linked below.
But for those “in the know” (which is about to include all of us), Wooley’s greatest contribution to Western culture is not ThePurplePeopleEater but rather, something called the “Wilhelm Scream.”
Here’s the scoop.
Among his various roles as an actor, Sheb Wooley made an uncredited appearance as one “Private Jessup” in a 1951 Gary Cooper movie called DistantDrums.At one point during the movie, a company of soldiers is fleeing through the Florida Everglades, pursued by a pack of Seminole Indians. Several soldiers die during the chase, including one who emits a blood-curdling scream as he is dragged underwater to his death by an alligator. Here is that scream:
The scream was created and recorded by none-other-than Sheb Wooley, and it has long outlived him. Wooley’s screeching sound-bite got its name when it was used again – in 1953 – in the movie The Charge at Feather River, when a character named “Private Wilhelm” got hit in the thigh with an arrow:
The now so-called “Wilhelm Scream” became part of Hollywood’s stock sound library, and as such, it went on to be been used – often multipletimesin a single film – in hundreds of movies, TV shows, and video games, including the StarWars, IndianaJones,LordoftheRings, KillBill, ToyStory, Cars, TheIncredibles, and LethalWeapon franchises; ReservoirDogs; Aladdin; BeautyandtheBeast; TheFifthElement; BreakingBad; TheSimpsons; TheX–Files; TheMandalorian; the list goes on and on!
I offer up two video links. The first one features what WatchMojo considers the “10 best” Wilhelm Screams:
The second link below features literally hundreds of Wilhelm Screams – that is, the samescream as recorded by Sheb Wooley in 1951 – over the course of its 12 minutes and 22 seconds!
Maestro Wooley, yours is a cinematic legacy of which to be proud!
WeTransition!Okay, enough screaming. We proceed to Johannes Brahms and A German Requiem. For your information, the remainder of this post and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes is going to constitute a “twofer”, as Dr. Bob Prescribes will pick up where today’s Music History Monday leaves off.…
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Johannes Brahms on his deathbed, April 1897We mark the death on April 3, 1897 – 126 years ago today – of the German composer and pianist Johannes Brahms at the age of 63. One of the great ones and along with Sebastian Bach and Louis van Beethoven one of the three bees – the killer bees – Brahms was born in the Hanseatic port city of Hamburg on May 7, 1833.
We will get to Maestro Brahms in just a moment but first – with appropriate fanfare – I offer up this edition of “This Day in Music History Stupid.”
Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust; Be Kind to My Ashes, Though Snort if You MustOn April 3, 2007 – 16 years ago today – the Reuters news agency reported that Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards (born December 18, 1943) admitted in a soon-to-be published interview with NME (New Musical Express) magazine that he had snorted his father’s ashes during a drug binge.
Keith Richards (born 1943)I think we’ve all wondered the same thing at some point or another: given his personal habits and corpse-like appearance, how and why is Keith Richards still alive, yet still performing at nearly 80 years of age?
Richards would seem to be as surprised as we are that he is still among the living. For decades he has expressed his (dubious) pride at having survived his legendary lifestyle. Back in his sixties Richards told an interviewer:
“I was number one on the ‘Who’s Likely to Die’ list for 10 years. I mean, I was really disappointed when I fell off the list. Some doctor told me I had six months to live and I went to his funeral.”
According to an NME magazine spokesperson, the interview in which Richards claimed to have snorted his father’s ashes was genuine and not a late April Fool’s joke. During that interview, Richards was asked what the strangest thing was he ever snorted. His response:
“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared. It went down pretty well and I’m still alive.”
For our information, Keith Richards’ father, Bert Richards, died in 2002 at the age of 84. Will his son Keith outlive him? On this we’ll simply have to wait and see.
Johannes Brahms Approaching 60Johannes Brahms in 1889, at the age of 56Johannes Brahms in his late-fifties was a picture of ruddy good health.
His schedule remained fixed: vacation in Italy during the early spring; compose in the countryside during the late spring and summer; return to Vienna in the fall to polish what he had written during the summer, conduct, or simply loaf around, as he pleased. Despite his bulky physique, Brahms remained quite spry, and despite the countless cigars and the gallons of beer and wine he consumed he remained a picture of health.
While in Vienna, he dined religiously – lunch and dinner – at the Zum rotten Igel – “The Red Hedgehog” – in the Wildpretmarkt. As far as he was concerned, the Hedgehog served the best cheap food in Vienna, a double positive if there ever was one, something he never tired of telling his less frugal friends and associates.
What Brahms did spend his money on were the Viennese ladies of the evening, with whom – we are told – he was kindly, caring, and generous, sometimes to a fault. Of the older Brahms writes biographer Jan Swafford:
“In his fashion, Brahms remained modest and generous and often self-deprecating, but he did not escape the effects of fame. In his age he could not abide being contradicted, took for granted that he was the center of every company. He maintained his chosen masks: the Master to be approached at peril; the gruff, hard drinking bourgeois man preferring the company of men or in mixed company telling naughty stories to the ladies. He played the old scamp, the old rogue, flirting with every pretty face and everyone’s daughter. But he looked, and did not touch, beyond a playful squeeze, laughed and held forth and gave lavish gifts but in the end gave nothing of himself beyond his art. Ruthlessly, he had sunk his fair features and moonstruck young soul under the patriarchal beard and forbidding bark of Herr Doktor Brahms.”
By the late 1880s and early 1890s, the awards, laurels, and prizes began to pour into Brahms’ Viennese flat, unbidden but not unwelcome. Brahms kept the lid on his grand piano down, and instead of the usual family photographs, he covered the piano with a rotating display of his medals and certificates. By far the most welcome honor to come his way arrived in May 1889: Brahms was informed that his hometown of Hamburg was to award him the “Freedom of Hamburg” prize, the city’s greatest honor. Only twelve people had ever received the prize, the most recent two being Otto von Bismarck and the Prussian general Helmut von Moltke. …
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A quick comment in reference to the title of today’s post, “Papa’s Last Appearance.” Not that you really need me to tell you, but by “Papa” we are not referring to Papa John Schnatter, who founded “Papa John’s Pizza” in 1984. Neither are we referring to the stand-up comedian Tom Papa, the sportscaster Greg Papa, the American rock band Papa Roach, nor the American Paul Karason (1950-2013), also-known-as “Papa Smurf,” whose skin turned to a purplish-blue color as a result of ingesting a home-made brew of silver chloride colloid.
Papa Smurf (Paul Karason; 1950-2013)By “Papa,” we are referring to Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) who was once-and-forever nicknamed “papa” while still in his thirties by the grateful musicians who worked for him!
We mark what turned out to be the final public appearance of “Papa” Joseph Haydn on March 27, 1808 – 215 years ago today – at a concert held in honor of his upcoming 76th birthday. The gala concert, held at Vienna’s University Hall, featured a performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, which had been completed ten years before, in 1798. The concert was what we would call today a “star-studded event”: everyone who was anyone in Vienna’s musical world was there, including Ludwig van Beethoven, Antonio Salieri, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel.
BackgroundJoseph Haydn (1732-1809) in 1791, at the age of 59Haydn was born on March 31, 1732, in the Austrian village of Rohrau, which at the time was just a hop-and-a-skip from the border with Hungary. He was a small, wiry, energetic, and genial boy, and he grew up to be a small, wiry, energetic, and genial man.
At a time when the average European life expectancy was just 33.3 years, Haydn remained a remarkably healthy man well into what was then considered to be old age. Having never travelled outside the immediate vicinity of his birth, Haydn undertook the arduous journey to England in 1791 at the age of 59, and then again in 1794, at the age of 62. Still composing masterworks into his 69th year (he completed his oratorio The Seasons in 1801), Haydn was considered an ageless wonder by everyone around him.
Unfortunately, no one of us is in fact “ageless,” and time caught up with Haydn when he was in his late sixties. Though he lived until May of 1809, his last years were marred by increasingly bad health. His symptoms – swollen legs, exhaustion, failing memory – point to a general case of arteriosclerosis, or “hardening of the arteries.” While symptoms of the disease first became apparent in 1799, Haydn’s health declined precipitously after 1805, by which time, at the age of 73, he was for all intents and purposes an invalid.
However, Haydn had the rare pleasure of knowing that in his old age he had not been forgotten. His ongoing popularity was astonishing, and from every corner of Europe, medals, awards, honors, and proclamations poured into his home in the Viennese suburbs. …
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We mark the premiere performance, on February 20, 1816 – 207 years ago today – of Gioachino Rossini’s comic opera masterwork, The Barber of Seville, at Rome’s famed Teatro Argentina.
Gioachino Antonio Rossini (1792-1868) in 1815 by Vicenzo CamucciniThe Natural
Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born on February 29 (bummer of a birthday!), 1792 in the Italian city of Pesaro, on the Adriatic Sea. He died of colorectal cancer on November 13, 1868, in his villa in Passy, which today is located in Paris’ chic, 16th arrondisement.
He was the only child of Giuseppe Rossini (1758-1839) and Anna (née Guidarini) Rossini (1771-1827).
Giuseppe Rossini (1758-1839)Rossini’s father Giuseppe was a professional trumpet and horn player, and as such was Gioachino’s first music teacher. (The adult Rossini liked to say that:
“Sono figlio di corna,” “I am the son of a horn!”)
Anna (née Guidarini) Rossini (1771-1827)“Son of a horn” he might have been, but when it came to his real musical education, it was as the son of an opera singer. Rossini’s mother Anna was, at the time of his birth in 1792, a seamstress by trade. But changes in Italian society allowed her to make a second career as a professional singer. According to Rossini’s biographer Richard Osborne (Rossini; Oxford University Press):
“Italian Society began to change in the late 1790s, not least in the arts, where a process of democratization set in. Admission to academic institutions became easier for ordinary folk; new music was encouraged from a wider variety of sources; ticket prices fell; women found it easier to take paid employment on the stage. The last development had enormous repercussions for the Rossini family, as it allowed Anna Rossini to earn useful money as a singer.”
According to her son Gioachino, Anna Rossini was a “natural,” with a voice, to quote her son:
“as sweet as her appearance.”
She wasn’t able to read music, but like her son Gioachino, she had a phenomenal musical memory. All together, she mastered and performed 15 roles, all of them from comic operas.
Anna Rossini began her singing career in the 1797-1798 season at Ancona’s Teatro della Fenice, where she performed as the second soprano in operas by Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816), Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801), and Giovanni Battista Martini (1706-1784). She concluded her career in the fall of 1808 as the prima donna assoluta (“the absolute first lady”: the starring soprano) at the Teatro Communale in Bagnacavallo, a town about 50 miles northwest of Pesaro.
By the time Gioachino was ten years old, he was going on tour with his mother, watching rehearsals from the house and following performances from backstage. It was a musical and operatic education like no other, and by the age of 13, he was hooked: he was a person of the theater.
As it turned out, Anna wasn’t the only musical “natural” in the Rossini clan. …
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Richard Wagner (1813-1883) in 1871We mark the death, on February 13, 1883 – 140 years ago today – of the German composer Richard Wagner, in Venice, at the age of 69. He had been born in the Saxon city of Leipzig on May 22, 1813.
Wagner’s HealthWriting in Hektoen International – A Journal of Medical Humanities, George Dunea, MD, states that:
“[Richard] Wagner was an extraordinarily highly strung individual.”
Do you think, Dr. Dunea?
In fact, he was a pathologically overwrought individual, a certifiable narcissist who required maximum stimulation at all times whether he was awake or asleep. (Yes, even asleep. As a young child he kept his many siblings awake at night by shouting and talking while he slept.)
Wagner was not born a particularly healthy person, and as an adult, his personal habits and constant excitability exacted a considerable toll on his already compromised constitution.
Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association back in 1903 (Gould, George M.; The Ill-health of Richard Wagner, JAMA 1903; 51: 293 and 368; as articles go, this is an oldie but a goodie!), Dr. George Gould described Wagner as having the collective symptoms of:
“[Thomas] DeQuincy [best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater]; [Thomas] Carlisle; [Charles] Darwin, [Thomas Henry] Huxley; [Robert] Browning, [Herbert] Spencer, and [James] Parkinson all together and all at once.”
The illnesses shared by these illustrious individuals included migraine headaches, severe gastric issues, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. They were all workaholics who, according to Dr. Gould, drove themselves until they were:
“threatened either by disease or by despair.”
From childhood on, Wagner suffered recurrent skin disease that has been variously diagnosed as eczema or erysipelas. He suffered from what were likely migraine headaches his entire life, complaining about “the nerves of his brain.” As an adult he suffered from depression and severe anxiety, and thought obsessively about death. (As early as 1852, as a young man of 39, he wrote: “I am daily thinking of my death.”)
He was an insomniac and subject to rheumatic pains and constant gastric discomforts. Physically, he was a mess. But migraines and dyspepsia were not likely to kill Wagner, as opposed to his problems with his heart.
Those problems began in December of 1873, when Wagner was 60, at a time when he was desperately trying to put together the funding for his Bayreuth Festival, his grand monument to himself and his art (more on the festival in just a moment). The anguish and stress he put himself through and the anxiety and depression he experienced began to affect his heart. (According to Wagner’s wife Cosima, writing in her diary:
“by starting the festival, he signed his own death-warrant; he seldom had a good night and his attacks of cramp about the heart became more and more frequent.”)
The Bayreuth FestivalThe Bayreuth Festival – held in the picturesque, medieval Bavarian city of Bayreuth in southern Germany – is an annual music festival/Wagner lovefest dedicated to performing the works of Richard Wagner his very self.…
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We mark the death on February 6, 1497 – 526 years ago today – of the composer and singer Johannes Ockeghem, in Tours, France, at the age of 87 (or so). He was born circa 1410 in the French-speaking city of Saint-Ghislain in what today is Belgium, about 5 miles from the border with France.
Anonymous portrait believed to be that of Johannes Ockeghem (circa 1410-1497)The title of this post – “Johannes Ockeghem and the Oltremontani” – employs a Italian word that may not be familiar to everybody: “Oltremontani.” It’s a word that means, literally, “those from the other side of the mountains.” The mountains in question are the alps, so in fact, generally, the word refers to people “from the other side of the alps”: from northern and northwestern Europe. But when used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it meant something quite more specific than that: it referred to musicians from what today are northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg.
Johannes Ockeghem was just such an oltremontano, having been born in Belgium close to the northern border of France.
Johannes Ockeghem (circa 1410-1497)“Born circa 1410, died 1497.” Back in the fifteenth century, if someone became famous – and at the time of his death, Johannes Ockeghem was famous across Europe – their death date was (and remains) common knowledge. But for people born in the fifteenth century (and earlier), birth dates and early accounts of their lives before they became famous, well, that’s a different matter entirely. Generally, we know next to nothing about the birth dates and early lives of ordinary people born in the fifteenth century and before, and that includes Johannes Ockeghem. In fact, we’re not even sure how he spelled his name. We use “Ockeghem” today because that spelling came from a document – now lost – in which he supposedly signed his name using that spelling. But other spellings of his name include Ogkegum, Okchem, Hocquegam, and Ockegham.
Here’s some stuff we do know.
Johannes Ockeghem was considered by his contemporaries, as he is considered today, to be – along with Guillaume DuFay (circa 1397-1474), Antoine Busnois (circa 1430-1492), and Josquin Desprez (circa 1450-1521) – the greatest and most influential composer of the fifteenth century.
(For those of us who may not be familiar with the names of the oltremontani Ockeghem, DuFay, Busnois, and Desprez, I would be so bold as to suggest that they were equivalent, in their time, to the Vienna-based quartet of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert.
In terms of these Renaissance composers’ talent and impact on the history of Western music, I am not exaggerating.)
For reason’s already explained, we know nothing about Ockeghem’s early life. Like most composers of his time, he almost certainly started his musical life as a church chorister, likely in the city of Mons, a few miles east of his hometown of Saint-Ghislain.
The first documentary mention of Ockeghem’s activity as a musician date to June, 1443, when he is listed as being among the chanteurs – the singers – at the Church of Our Lady, in Antwerp. His initial fame was, indeed, as a singer: he was a basso and was reputed to have a rich, flexible, and unerringly accurate voice.
He was described by the people that knew him, including the famed humanist Erasmus, as being:
“exceptionally engaging: honest, virtuous, kind, generous, charitable, and pious.”
Ockeghem’s friend, the cleric Francesco Florio (1428-1484) described him this way in the 1470s:
“I am sure you could not dislike this man, so pleasing is the beauty of his person, so noteworthy the sobriety of his speech and of his morals, and his graciousness. He alone of all the singers is free from vice and abounding in all virtues.”
Okay: combine a brilliant singer and composer with physical beauty, a great attitude, and a long life and you have the prescription for success.
And Ockeghem was nothing if not successful.…
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Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) in Paris, circa 1955We mark the death on January 30, 1963 – exactly sixty years ago today – of the French composer and pianist Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc, in Paris. A Parisian from head to toe, he was born in the tres chic 8th arrondisement in that magnificent city on January 7, 1899. He died of a heart attack not far from where he’d been born, in his flat opposite the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris’ 6th arrondisement.
Before we can get down with the magnifique Monsieur Poulenc, we have an important event in rock ‘n’ roll history to mark.
The Beatles rooftop concert, January 30, 1969On January 30, 1969 – 54 years ago today – the Beatles, joined by the keyboard player Billy Preston, performed their final live concert. The venue was unusual: a hastily constructed stage on the rooftop of their five-story Apple Corps (their record company) headquarters, at 3 Savile Row: smack dab in the middle of the fashion district in London’s tony Mayfair neighborhood.
(I cannot resist the joke: how do you get a rock band onto a roof? You tell them the beer is on the house.)
Badaboom.
A couple of weeks before the rooftop concert eventually took place, Paul McCartney had suggested that the Beatles should perform a concert:
“in a place we’re not allowed to do it … like we should trespass, go in, set up and then get moved. Getting forcibly ejected, still trying to play your numbers, and the police lifting you.”
The shock value of such a “concert” was sure to generate awesome publicity for the Beatles just released (on January 13, 1969) Yellow Submarine album. Still, it wasn’t until January 26 – just four days before the concert – that the Beatles and their management decided to go ahead with their impromptu, rooftop recital.
No announcement of the event was made ahead of time. Instead, the Beatles and Billy Preston took their places on the rooftop stage and started playing at around 12:30 pm, smack-dab in the middle of London’s lunchtime break, with lots of people out and about. Word quickly spread that a sensational event was taking place on Savile Row, and it wasn’t the opening of a new haberdashery; after all, The Beatles had not played in public for 2½ years: not since their performance at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on August 29th, 1966.
Crowds quickly began to assemble in the surrounding streets, and in the windows and on the roofs of surrounding buildings. (So much for George Harrison’s fear that they would be performing “only for chimneys.”) Soon enough, streets became impassable and the doors to businesses blocked. Given that the blocked streets included Savile Row and Regent Street (the latter a major thoroughfare); and that the blocked businesses constituted some of the ritziest in the city, not everyone was overjoyed with the spontaneous concert. …
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Paul Leroy Robeson (1898-1976) in 1942We mark the death on January 23, 1976 – 47 years ago today – of the American bass-baritone singer, stage and screen actor, civil rights activist, professional football player, and graduate of Columbia University Law School Paul Robeson at the age of 77, in Philadelphia. Born in Princeton, New Jersey on April 9, 1898, the son of an escaped slave turned Presbyterian minister, Robeson had more intellectual, artistic, and athletic gifts and lived more lives than any 10 (20? 50? 100?) so-called “normal” people. And he had to fight for every one of those lives, growing up a black person in early twentieth century America.
“Larger than Life”
The English-language idiom “larger than life” describes people “who are better and stronger and smarter than the average Joe”: individuals imbued with characteristics and abilities far beyond those of “ordinary” human beings. Typically, the idiom is reserved for fictional characters, who are gifted with superhuman (or nearly so) qualities and abilities. The heroes, warriors, gods, and goddesses of myths and legends are, by definition, “larger than life.” Achilles, Hercules, Zeus, Odysseus, Thor, Brünnhilde (and many, many more) would all qualify.
Comic book characters and superheroes are likewise, by their nature, “larger than life.” Certain other fictional characters become larger than life thanks to their singular identity: thanks to their stature, their presence, and their flair. Love them or hate them, we remember them. For example, Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins; Cruella de Vil and Scarlet O’Hara; Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes would all qualify.
Employed judiciously, “larger than life” can also be used to describe an actual human being, providing that person’s life, abilities, personality, and accomplishments truly distinguish them from the rest of us. When used to describe an actual person, the idiom gets its power from its use of figurative license, since, in fact, it’s impossible to actually quantify the “size” of a life.
According to an entry in languagehumanities.org:
“The use of exaggeration is what gives this phrase its particular power. Especially when it is used in reference to an actual person, there can hardly be a greater compliment than to call someone “larger than life.” That is why it is usually reserved for only the most noteworthy personalities, or else its impact would be somewhat lessened.”
“Larger than life,” a physical giant among men: the larger than life Paul Robeson leading workers in singing The Star-Spangled Banner at the Moore Shipyard in Oakland, California, September of 1942Paul Robeson (1898-1976) was truly “larger than life.”
Robeson’s life as a singer, actor, athlete, intellectual, and activist; as a Black American aggressively and publicly battling racism and Jim Crow; as a socialist and, to many, a communist dupe and traitor to America defies easy telling. As such, this post is going to focus on Robeson’s preternatural talent and artistry, and will trace his life though 1933, the year he made the film, The Emperor Jones. Through interviews and archival footage, tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will briefly observe his political awakening and subsequent activism, finally focusing on the controversial but still breathtaking The Emperor Jones, “breathtaking” thanks to Robeson’s for-the-ages performance.…
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Anton Felix Schindler (1795-1864)We mark the death on January 16, 1864 – 159 years ago today – of Anton Felix Schindler, in Frankfurt, at the age of 68. Born on June 13, 1795, in the town of Medlov in today’s Czech Republic, Schindler was, for a time, Beethoven’s “factotum”: his secretary and general assistant. He was also a scoundrel and a profiteer, who after Beethoven’s death lied about his relationship with Beethoven, stole irreplaceable objects and documents from Beethoven’s estate, and falsified and destroyed many of those documents (some of which he later sold off) in order to make himself look better in the eyes of history. Boo-hoo for Schindler: the “making-himself-look-better-in-the-eyes-of-history” thing didn’t work, and today he is regarded as the patron saint of lying and thieving employees.
Among the Beethovenian documents Anton Schindler took upon himself to “remove for safekeeping” were Beethoven’s so-called “Conversation Books.”
Beethoven’s Conversation BooksLudwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) in 1803It took an agonizingly long time for Beethoven to go completely deaf. His hearing loss began in 1796, in his 26th year: a buzzing in his ears and a slow but progressive loss of high frequency hearing. By the fall of 1802, Beethoven had cut himself off from much of his world out of fear his infirmity would be discovered. Having been assaulted by doctors and the useless (and often painful) remedies they prescribed, Beethoven had come to realize that his condition was incurable and irreversible, and he considered suicide. But he survived his crisis by convincing himself that like the great man of his age – Napoleon Bonaparte (1767-1821) – he (Beethoven) would struggle against his “enemies” (fate, despair, and physical disability) and emerge victorious through his music!
Beethoven’s ear-trumpets, as displayed at the Beethoven Haus Museum in BonnBeethoven was still playing the piano in public and attempting to conduct as late as 1812. Between 1816 and 1818 he employed various ear-trumpets built for him by his erstwhile friend (and the presumed inventor of the metronome) Johann Nepomuk Mälzel (1772-1838).
Sadly, by 1818 Beethoven’s deafness had advanced to the point where the ear-trumpets had become useless.
From 1818 to 1827 (the year of his death), Beethoven carried around blank books in which friends and acquaintances could write down their side of a conversation, conversations during which Beethoven would speak out loud. Beethoven also used the books for “private” purposes: to jot down notes and ideas, drafts for letters and other documents, shopping lists, and even some brief compositional sketches. …
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Rudolf Bing (1902-1997) circa 1944We mark the birth on January 9, 1902 – 121 years ago today – of the opera impresario Rudolf Bing, in Vienna Austria. The general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1950 to 1972, Bing died in Yonkers, New York in September 1997 at the age of 95. His was a long life by any standard, but particularly by the standards of an opera impresario, whose professional livesare marked by a degree of life-threatening stress and anxiety that, perhaps, only has its equal in combat and divorce court.
ImpresarioThe term “impresario” originated in the world of Italian opera in the 1750s. Deriving from the Italian word “impresa,” which is “an enterprise or undertaking,” an impresario was that single individual who organized, financed, and produced operas (and later, concerts). It was a job similar to what a film producer does today; a high stress job not for the faint of heart or weak of bladder.
Apropos of the impresarios of his day, the great Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) wrote in reference to how he went about composing his opera overtures:
“Wait until the evening before the opening night. Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it’s the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or the prodding of an impresario tearing at his hair. In my time, all the impresarios of Italy were bald at 30.”
For our information, Rudolf Bing was bald at thirty.
At left, a bald Rudolf Bing at Glyndebourne in 1935Rudolf Bing (1902-1997)
Rudolf Franz Joseph Bing was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Vienna 121 years ago today. By his own admission a terrible student, Bing’s parents allowed him to drop out of high school (or gymnasium) at sixteen. He went to work at the prestigious Viennese bookshop of Gilhofer & Ranschburg before moving on to the shop of a bookseller named Hugo Heller, who also ran a theatrical and concert agency. By the age of 19, Bing was deeply immersed in the running of Heller’s concert operation, and he was hooked, later writing in his memoir 5000 Nights at the Opera:
“I enjoyed the atmosphere of the theater, with its nightly deadline; only journalism and the theater give you this daily excitement, and it is a poison far more habit forming than coffee or nicotine.”
(For our information, Bing grew up speaking German and English, and as such, was completely fluent in English. His two memoirs, 5000 Nights at the Opera [of 1972] and A Knight at the Opera [of 1981] were both written in English.)…
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Édith Piaf (1915-1963)We mark the birth on December 19, 1915 – 107 years ago today – of the French singer and actress Édith Piaf in the Belleville district of Paris. Born Édith Giovanna Gassion, she came to be considered France’s national chanteuse, one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century, a French combination of Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, and Billie Holiday. She died in Plascassier, near the French Riviera city of Nice, on October 10, 1963, all-too young at the age of 47.
Way Too PersonalI will be forgiven for making today’s post personal. (It’s just going to happen sometimes.)
I was first married in August of 1981. I was 27 and my betrothed was 23 at the time of our marriage. We were . . . young. Frankly, chronological years notwithstanding, I was far “younger” than my bride. Together, we made two wonderful babies: our daughter Rachel, now 36 years old, and our son Samuel, now 32. Our marriage lasted for seventeen years. Based on the frankly terrifying statistics out there, our marriage lasted considerably longer than the seven-to-eight-year average of the 50% of marriages that fail in the United States.
Three years after our breakup, I became involved with another woman, someone who was twenty years my junior. Yes, the age difference was extreme (and it did not go over well with my ex). But once again, chronological age meant nothing. Diane was an old soul, with an emotional age many decades beyond mine. She was smart, funny, and a brilliant, professional-grade flutist. I was smitten, besotted, hopelessly and forever taken with her.
We moved in together in 2000.
On September 11, 2001, our phone rang at a little after 6am Pacific Time; we were still asleep. It was my daughter Rachel, 15 years old at the time and an early riser, telling us to turn on our television. We did so and proceeded to watch – like every one of us, with our jaws hanging open – as that awful day’s events unfolded. (My parents were among the many millions who watched everything live and in real time from their apartment terrace high on New Jersey’s Palisades, overlooking the Hudson River and Manhattan.)
Looking back, it’s difficult to believe – given our present national dysfunctionality – how united we were as a nation during that post-9/11 autumn of 2001. I can only wish that we could recapture something of that spirit without first having to suffer a national trauma. …
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“The Garden State” (having been born in Brooklyn, New York, I grew up in Willingboro, New Jersey, just northeast of 75° latitude and 40° longitudeDecember 12 is a crazy day in American jazz and popular music history, a day that saw the births of five – count ‘em, five – significant musicians, three of whom have something very special in common.
Let us first recognize the birthdays of the two jazz/pop musicians who do not share this special commonality.
Joe Williams (1918-1999)We start with a big, happy birthday to the jazz singer Joe Williams, who was born on December 12, 1918, 104 years ago today. Born Joseph Goreed, he came into this world in Cordele, Georgia, and left it on March 29, 1999, in Las Vegas at the age of 80. Big Joe had a gorgeous, warm baritone voice that was as smooth as a peeled onion. Long associated with Count Basie (1904-1984) and his big band, Williams sings one of his trademark songs – Alright, Okay, You Win – with the Basie Band in the link below, recorded circa 1970.
Sheila E. (born 1957)Another big, happy birthday to the singer, drummer, and percussionist Sheila E. (“E” for Escovedo), who was born right here in Oakland, California, on December 12, 1957, 65 years ago today. Sheila Escovedo came by her musical bona fides honestly. Her father is the Latin jazz percussionist Peter (“Pete”) Escovedo (born in 1935 in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Pittsburg, California), and her Godfather was the great American Latin, Afro-Cuban, and mambo musician, songwriter, bandleader, and record producer Tito Puente (1923-2000). She is a singer of talent and a killer-fine drummer. The link below dates to 1987, with Sheila E. playing a knockout drum solo with her frequent collaborator, Prince.
And now, three more birthday babies, all with something special in common beyond the shared date of their births, and that is their roots (or “ruts”, as it might be locally pronounced) in the great Garden State of New Jersey! …
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HereWeGoAgain...It has come to pass. I have been writing these MusicHistoryMonday posts for long enough that Monday dates and events have begun to repeat. And as a result, December 5, which was a Monday in 2016, once again falls on a Monday today. Ordinarily there are enough events on any given Monday to keep me from having to deal with the same topic. But December 5 is a special date for one particularly terrible musical event, an event that demands to be revisited.
DatesThatWillLiveinInfamyWe consider: there are some dates that, for events that marked them, will live in infamy.
I would suggest that what qualifies as an “infamous date” – that is, a date we will all remember to our dying day – is generally dependent upon when one was born. For example, for someone born in the United States in 1854 (that’s 100 years before I was born), those dates of infamy might include:
Dred Scott (1795-1858) in 1857March 6, 1857: the date of the Dred Scott decision, which saw the U.S. Supreme Court rule 7-2 that an enslaved human being (Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory where slavery was prohibited was not entitled to his freedom; that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States; and that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which had declared all territories west of Missouri and north of latitude 36°30′ to be free from slavery) was unconstitutional.
Some other such infamous dates for someone born in the United States in 1854:
April 12, 1861: the opening of the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina, which initiated the American Civil War.
April 14, 1865: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who died early in the morning of April 15.
Now: for me and my generation, such “dates of infamy” would include:
November 22, 1963: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.
April 4, 1968: the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, in Memphis, Tennessee.
September 11, 2001. We all know what happened on that day.
January 6, 2021. Again, we all know what happened on that day.
For those good people who will be born in 2054, their dates of infamy will – again – reflect their own time and experience.
Mozart at 24 in 1780; detail from portrait by Johann Nepomuk della CroceHowever, there are some dates of infamy we can all agree on, whether we were born in 1854, 1954, or 2054. Among them is December 5, 1791, 231 years ago today: the day Wolfgang Mozart died in his Viennese flat at the age of 35 years, 10 months, and 9 days.
As previously observed, December 5 last fell on a Monday in 2016. My Music History Monday post for that day was entitled “Mozart: A diagnosis.” Based on contemporary reports of Mozart’s symptoms and modern interpretations of those reports and symptoms, that post offered up what is almost certainly the correct cause of Mozart’s death: a relapse of Rheumatic fever.
Today’s post – “Myths of Murder and Mayhem!” – will deal with some of the many falsehoods that came to surround Mozart’s death almost from the moment of his death!
But first, a little background.…
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Aaron Copland (1900-1990) in 1933We mark the New York premiere on November 28, 1925 – 97 years ago today – of Aaron Copland’s Music for the Theater, at a League of Composer’s concert conducted by Serge Koussevitzky at New York’s Town Hall. The actual world premiere of the piece took place eight days before, when Koussevitzky conducted Music for the Theater in Boston. But Copland was a native New Yorker and Music from the Theater is about the New York theatrical and musical world. So – and for this you’ll have to excuse me, particularly the Bean Town babies among us – the so-called “Boston Premiere” was nothing but a warmup, a preview, a promo, an hors d’oeuvre akin to trying out a Broadway play in New Haven or Philadelphia before taking it to the house, to the big time, the Apple, to the city that never sleeps, to the burg so big they had to name it twice: New York, New York!
Coming CleanWe all have to make decisions, the vast majority of which are, gratefully, relatively insignificant. (I cannot imagine having to make decisions that would affect the health and welfare of entire communities. It’s difficult enough for me to figure out what to make for dinner.) The decisions I do make are for myself and for my families: my immediate family and my Patreon family.
Here’s a decision I made for my Patreon family two weeks ago today, on November 14. You see, November 14 is one of those crazy dates when so much happened in the world of music that I was hard put to decide what to feature in that day’s Music History Monday. Check it out.
Leopold Mozart (1719-1787)On November 14, 1719, the composer, violinist, teacher, and tennis-father-supreme Leopold Mozart (father of you-know-who) was born in the German city of Augsburg.
On November 14, 1778, the composer and pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel was born in the city of Pressburg, today Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.
On November 14, 1805, the composer and pianist Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel was born in the German city of Hamburg.
On November 14, 1831, the Austrian-French composer and piano builder Ignaz Joseph Pleyel died in Paris at the age 74.
On November 14, 1900, the composer Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York.
On November 14, 1939, the composer and synthesizer virtuosa Wendy (“don’t call me ‘Walter’”) Carlos was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
On November 14, 1946, the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla died in Alta Gracia, Argentina, at the age of 69.
(And finally, on that very day two weeks ago – November 14, 2022 – the wonderful Robert Flack [born 1937) revealed that she is suffering from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and is no longer able to sing.)
Heavens: and to think that on some dates, nothing happened.
Ignaz Joseph Pleyel (1757-1831)Okay; when deciding what to write about two weeks ago on November 14, I was able to knock a couple of names off this list. My Music History Monday post for June 18, 2018, celebrated the birth of Ignaz Pleyel (1757-1831), and Music History Monday of October 17, 2022 (six weeks ago today) noted the death (and celebrated the life) of Johann Nepomuk Hummel.
As it turned out, I chose to feature Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel in my Music History Monday post of November 14 past (and my Dr. Bob Prescribes post on November 15). I was comforted in making this decision by the fact that I knew I’d be writing about the November 14 birthday boy Aaron Copland in today’s Music History Monday (and in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes as well).
Aaron Copland in New York (?)The question mark attached to the post title above is appropriate, because as a native New Yorker who lived the great bulk of his life in that singular town, we might rightly wonder when was Aaron Copland not in New York?
In fact, the title of today’s post refers to two very specific periods of Copland’s life in New York: his childhood and the period after his return to New York in 1924 after three years of study abroad, primarily with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.…
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We mark the death on November 21, 1695 – 327 years ago today – of the English composer and organist Henry Purcell, in London. He lies buried today in a place of singular honor, adjacent to the organ on which he performed in Westminster Abbey in London. He had been born there in London on (or about) September 10, 1659, making him only 36 years old when he died. But like both Mozart and Schubert after him, Purcell’s terribly premature death did not preclude him from writing a tremendous amount of music of the very highest quality. Purcell’s music – sacred and secular – utterly defined his time, a time known in British history as the Restoration. Timing I know that the realtors among us will tell us that in the end, everything is all about location, location, and location. Well, sorry to disagree but, in fact, in the end, nothing is more important than timing, timing, and timing. Hey: I love the city of Paris; it is my favorite urban location. But a successful visit to that magnificent location is dependent on timing. Had I chosen to visit in August 1348, I would have arrived simultaneously with the Black […]
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We mark the death on November 21, 1695 – 327 years ago today – of the English composer and organist Henry Purcell, in London. He lies buried today in a place of singular honor, adjacent to the organ on which he performed in Westminster Abbey in London. He had been born there in London on (or about) September 10, 1659, making him only 36 years old when he died. But like both Mozart and Schubert after him, Purcell’s terribly premature death did not preclude him from writing a tremendous amount of music of the very highest quality. Purcell’s music – sacred and secular – utterly defined his time, a time known in British history as the Restoration. Timing I know that the realtors among us will tell us that in the end, everything is all about location, location, and location. Well, sorry to disagree but, in fact, in the end, nothing is more important than timing, timing, and timing. Hey: I love the city of Paris; it is my favorite urban location. But a successful visit to that magnificent location is dependent on timing. Had I chosen to visit in August 1348, I would have arrived simultaneously with the Black […]
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We mark the birth on November 14, 1805 – 217 years ago today – of the German composer, pianist, wife, mother, and hausfrau Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, in the Hanseatic city of Hamburg. She died on May 14, 1847, all-too-young at the age of 41, at her home in the Prussian capital of Berlin. Fanny Cäcille Mendelssohn was the first child (of an eventual four) of Lea and Abraham Mendelssohn. Lea Mendelssohn took one look at her infant daughter’s hands and famously exclaimed: “Look! She has Bach fugue hands.” And that she did. The next Mendelssohn child was born three years and three months later, Fanny’s baby brother – the “genius” – Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847). “Genius” The word “genius” is so overused as to be almost useless. Nevertheless, it is necessary that we define it and then discuss an aspect its usage. Definition. Admittedly, while there is no precise, scientific way to measure and define genius, the following definition, by Walter Isaacson, will do. (Isaacson “knows” genius; his biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci are must reads.) “Genius is a characteristic of original and exceptional insight in the performance of some art or endeavor that surpasses […]
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We mark the birth on November 7, 1926 – 96 years ago today – of the dramatic coloratura soprano Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, in Sydney, Australia. She died on October 10, 2010, in Montreux, Switzerland at the age of 83. I want you all to know upfront that Joan Sutherland was the first singer on whom I had a major crush, both because of her stupendous voice (hey: she wasn’t called “La Stupenda!” for nothing) and for reasons to be described below. In this post I will be using the occasion of Ms. Sutherland’s birth to not just talk about her extraordinary talent, but to wax nostalgic, for which I trust you’ll indulge me. While that nostalgia might dominate this post, be assured that tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will be dedicated entirely to Joan Sutherland’s artistry and recordings. Records and Record Players I’m going to talk about “sound reproducing equipment” for a bit. Please: though it might, momentarily, appear that I am geeking out here, I am – in fact – not. Because for people of a certain age, our records and the gear on which we played our records were for our younger selves (and perhaps […]
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Before moving forward, the title of this post – “The Grandmother of All Drop Parties!” – demands an explanation-slash-definition. A “grandmother” is the mother of a parent, though in this usage, thank you, it is meant to indicate the ultimate example of what follows, as in “the grandmother of all drop parties.” I know you knew that. On to the important definition. A “drop party” or “release party” or “launch party” is a festive event sponsored by someone or some corporate entity to celebrate the release of a new product or service. In these here parts – meaning the San Francisco Bay Area – the most familiar sort of drop parties are those usually lavish affairs thrown by tech companies to launch new hardware or software (as opposed to underwear, overwear, everywhere, nowhere, or whatever-ware). Certainly, the pandemic put a major crimp on such parties, but I have little doubt they will be back, and that’s because they check off so many important boxes. They allow a company to celebrate itself and to entertain its employees and clients while also drawing in potential customers at the same time. They increase brand visibility and status, and presumably serve as venues […]
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Before moving on to Carl Ruggles, the featured composer of today’s post, we would offer the warmest of happy birthdays to one of the most brilliant composers of the twentieth century, who also happened to be one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met, George Crumb. He was born in Charleston, West Virginia on October 24, 1929 – 93 years ago today – and died at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Media, Pennsylvania, on February 6, 2022, at the age of 92. I offered up an appreciation of Crumb in my Music History Monday post on the occasion of his 87th birthday on October 24, 2016. We will revisit Crumb in my Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts for March 13 and 14, 2023 (yes, I plan ahead!) when we tackle his Black Angels for electric string quartet. On to the featured event for today’s post. We mark the death on October 24, 1971 – 51 years ago today – of the American composer, teacher, and painter Charles Sprague (“Carl”) Ruggles, in Bennington Vermont. Born in Marion, Massachusetts on March 11, 1876, Ruggles was 95 years old at the time of his death. C-level People […]
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Name the Composer/Pianist: he was a student of Wolfgang Mozart, Antonio Salieri, Muzio Clementi, and Joseph Haydn; friend to Franz Schubert and a friend (and rival!) of Ludwig van Beethoven; and teacher of – among many others – Carl Czerny, Ferdinand Hiller, Sigismond Thalberg, and Felix Mendelssohn; in his lifetime considered one of the greats and in ours almost entirely forgotten? With a title like that, the subject of this post better be good. And good he was! We mark the death on October 17, 1837 – 185 years ago today – of the composer and pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel in the Thuringian city Weimar. Born in Pressburg (today Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia) on November 14, 1778, Hummel was 59 years old at the time of his death. A Preliminary: What’s in a Name? Listen, the last thing in the world I want to be accused of (okay, maybe not the last thing . . .) is name shaming: making fun of someone’s name. But let’s be serious: what sort of middle name is “Nepomuk”? And it’s not just Hummel: “Nepomuk”, a name that most certainly does not ring beatific for native English speakers, was a fairly common middle […]
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We mark the birth on October 10, 1903 – 119 years ago today – of the Russian-American composer of concert music Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky. As a composer of popular music, and as a major contributor to the Great American Songbook, he is known as Vernon Duke. The Great American Songbook The Great American Songbook refers to neither a book nor a specific list of songs. Rather, the phrase encompasses the repertoire of American popular song, written between about 1915 and 1955 that are today collectively referred to as the “standards.” According to what should be the unimpeachable source, the “Great American Songbook Foundation”: The “Great American Songbook” is the canon of the most important and influential American popular songs and jazz standards from the early 20th century that have stood the test of time in their life and legacy. Often referred to as “American Standards”, the songs published during the Golden Age of this genre include those popular and enduring tunes from the 1920s to the 1950s that were created for Broadway Theater, musical theater, and Hollywood musical film.” Now, you didn’t have to be born in America to be a contributor to the Great American Songbook. In fact, some […]
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We mark the death on October 3, 1931 – 91 years ago today – of the Danish composer and violinist Carl Nielsen in Copenhagen, at the age of 66. Nielsen had what we colloquially call “a bad ticker.” He suffered his first heart attack in 1925, when he was sixty years old. A nasty series of heart attacks put him in Copenhagen’s National Hospital (the Rigshospitalet) on October 1, 1931. He died there at 12:10 am on October 3. Surrounded by his family, his last words were: “You are standing here as if you were waiting for something.” (We could take those last words a variety of ways. For example, we might assume that Nielsen, suffering from delirium, was genuinely curious as to why his entire family was gathered around his bed. But knowing Nielsen as we do – he was a salty, funny, straight-shooting person and a proud family man, married to a famous sculptress and the father of five kids – we’d like to think that Nielsen went to his death cracking an ironic joke. Not quite as ironic as Chicago’s founding guitarist and vocalist Terry Kath’s last words, “Don’t worry, it’s not loaded”, but ironic enough.) Despite […]
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We mark the death on September 26, 1945 – 77 years ago today – of the pianist, composer, and Hungarian patriot Béla Bartók. Born in what was then the Hungarian town of Nagyszentmiklós(now Sînnicolau Mare in Romania) on March 25, 1881, Bartók died – during what he called his “comfortable exile” – in New York City. Before moving on to Bartók’s “American Exile”, let’s establish –as we can from our vantage point in 2022 – his creds as a great and influential twentieth century composer! In 1961, 16 years after Bartók’s death, Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) – composer, conductor, and, in the words of his teacher Olivier Messiaen, the great insufferable one – wrote this about Bartók’s music: “The pieces most applauded are the least good; his best products are loved in their weaker aspects. His work triumphs now through its ambiguity. Ambiguity that will surely bring him insults during future evaluation. His work has not the profound unity and novelty of Webern’s or the vigorous controlled dynamism of Stravinsky’s. His language lacks interior coherence. His name will live on in the limited ensemble of his chamber music.” Boulez was not just wrong; he was snotty wrong. But the degree of […]
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“Don’t give up your day gig.” Along with “don’t eat yellow snow” and “fake it ‘til you make it”, “don’t give up your day gig” remains one of the oldest, hoariest, clichéd pieces of advice anyone can give or receive. But unless you were lucky/wise enough to heed the other greatest piece of advice any musician can receive, that being “marry rich”, “don’t give up your day gig” is still among the very best pieces of advice a musician can receive. Very few of us get our dream job right out of school; hell, very few of us ever get our dream job. All too rapidly, reality intrudes on youthful artistic idealism and no matter how much one wants to compose, or play violin, or sing, unless we can find someone willing to pay us to do so, we must all do something to make money. And then, as we get older and develop a taste for the finer things in life – like feeding, clothing, and housing our children – our day gigs become not just a matter of survival for ourselves but for those around us. Now, here and there and every now and then, someone gets very […]
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We mark the marriage on September 12, 1840 – 182 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Clara Wieck (1819-1896) to the composer and pianist Robert Schumann (1810-1856). The couple were married the day before Clara’s 21st birthday (September 13, 1840), for reasons that will be explained in detail in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post. Not for the Timid I ask: what are the most difficult things any person can attempt? To summit K2 and return alive? To win Olympic gold? To overcome addiction? To row solo across the Pacific? All tough things to accomplish, no doubt. What are the scariest things anyone can do? Swim with piranhas? Eat at a barbecue restaurant next to a cat hospital? Urinate on Mike Tyson? Scary stuff, dangerous stuff, that. But to my mind, nothing is more soul-searingly difficult-slash terrifying than one, raising children and two, staying in a first marriage. (Okay; I’ve probably told you more about my life than I intended to, but there it is.) Children are to people what water is to a house: children will find and reveal every flaw in your “structure” – your personality – while simultaneously sucking dry your money, patience, […]
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We mark the premiere on September 5, 1913 – 109 years ago today – of Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Prokofiev (1891-1953) composed the piece while still a student at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory; it was completed in April of 1913. (For our information, Prokofiev still had another year to go at the Conservatory; he didn’t graduate until May of 1914.) The concerto received its premiere – 109 years ago today – at the Vauxhall at Pavlovsk, Pavlovsk being a sprawling Imperial palace, park, garden, and summertime concert venue some 19 miles south of St. Petersburg. The orchestra was conducted by Alexander Aslanov, who for many years led the summer concert series there at Pavlovsk. The piano solo – with its spectacularly difficult piano part – was performed by the then 22-year-old Prokofiev himself. That premiere performance provoked quite an uproar from the audience. That uproar will be discussed at length in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post, which will be built around Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 2. For now, we are going to talk about what happened to the actual score of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. But first, some historical background without which there would be no […]
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We mark the birth on August 29, 1920 – 102 years ago today – of the alto saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker. The trumpet player (and one-time member of Charlie Parker’s quintet) Miles Davis (1926-1991) famously said: “You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker.” Miles Davis never minced words, and he does not mince them here. Along with Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker was (and remains) the most innovative, influential, and technically brilliant jazz musician to have yet lived. However, before moving on to Parker, we have one other piece of date-related musical business. I know, I know: I am most aware that having broached the subject of Charlie Parker, it behooves us – out of awe and respect – to get on with his story. But along with Parker’s birth, one other event occurred on this date that demands – demands! – our attention. So please, allow me this brief excursion. On this Day in Music History Stupid On August 29, 1977 – 45 years ago today – three people were arrested in Memphis after trying to steal Elvis Presley’s body. (The New York Post headline pictured above indicates that four people were […]
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We celebrate the birth on August 22, 1862 – 160 years ago today – of the French composer and pianist Claude Debussy. Born in the Paris suburb of St. Germain-en-Laye, he died in Paris on March 25, 1918, at the age of 55. Let’s tell it like it is: Monsieur Debussy was one of the great ones. For all of its sensual beauty – and Debussy did indeed compose some of the most gorgeous music ever written – his music is among the most original, revolutionary, and influential ever composed. At a time when young composers like Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and Béla Bartók (1881-1945) were casting about for new musical models, it was Debussy’s music that became their essential inspiration. Along with Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) Debussy was the most influential composer of the twentieth century. Among the radical triumvirate of Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, it was Debussy who was the “breakout” composer, the first composer to cultivate a musical language that broke free of the melodic and harmonic traditions of tonality, traditions that had governed Western music since the fifteenth century. That the musical revolution started in France is most significant, for reasons to be discussed in a […]
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We mark the opening of the so-called “Woodstock Festival” on August 15, 1969 – 53 years ago today – “so-called” for the following reasons. “Woodstock.” Even without considering the original festival that bears its name, “Woodstock”, as a placename has a homey, countryside-like quality to it. And a beautiful, quaint town it is, with a population – in 1970 – of 5714 people (it’s just about the same today). Eighty-eight miles north of New York City, within the borders of the Catskill Mountains Park, Woodstock has been a hub for musicians, writers, artists, and actors going back to the 1940s. (Even a short list of just the musicians associated with Woodstock should make our saliva run down our chins. That short list includes The Band [the members of which shared a house and two of whom – Rick Danko and Levon Helm – are buried in Woodstock Cemetery], Carla Bley, David Bowie, Jimmy Cobb, Henry Cowell, Jack DeJohnette, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Pat Metheny, Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Van Morrison, Pauline Oliveros, Graham Parker, Bonnie Raitt, Sonny Rollins, Todd Rundgren, David Sandborn, Carlos Santana, and Peter Schickele [“P.D.Q. Bach” his very self!]) The festival was created by an operation called […]
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August 8 is a great day, a signal day, an epic day for both good and bad reasons in the history of popular, rock, and jazz music. We’d observe a few of today’s date-related events before moving on to our featured story. First, with heads respectfully bowed, we would note some of those who have passed away on this date. On August 8, 1940 – 82 years ago today – the jazz clarinetist and alto saxophonist Johnny Dodds died of a heart attack in Chicago, all-too-young at the age of 48. I have known Dodds’ wonderful, blues-inspired playing since I was a teenager, because that’s when I fell under the spell of two of the greatest jazz ensembles of all time: Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, groups in which Dodds played and recorded. I wrote about Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven in Dr. Bob Prescribes on July 7, 2020. On this date in 1975 – 47 years ago today – the jazz alto saxophonist and bandleader Julian Edwin “Cannonball” Adderley also died all-too-young at the age of 46 in Gary Indiana, from a stroke. Talk about being a member of an all-time great band and making all-time […]
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We mark the death on August 1, 1784 – 238 years ago today – of the German composer and organist Wilhelm Friedemann Bach in Berlin at the age of 73. Born in the central German city of Weimar on November 22, 1710, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who from here on we will refer to as Friedemann Bach, was the second child and first son of Johann Sebastian Bach (who from this point forward we will refer to as Sebastian Bach). Friedemann Bach was a gifted musician, the equal (in my opinion) to his more famous brothers Carl Philip Emanual and Johann Christian Bach. But unlike his brothers, Friedemann harbored personal demons that poisoned his relationships with others and led to his financial ruin later in his life. We’ll discuss these issues in detail in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post, as well as the singular disaster Friedemann’s poverty eventually wrought, when he chose to the sell off so many of his father’s precious musical manuscripts, which were then lost for all time. For the remainder of this post, we’re going to shift our focus to Friedemann Bach’s only surviving child, his daughter Friederica Sophia, who was born in the Saxon city of […]
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We mark the death on July 25, 1984 – 38 years ago today – of the American Rhythm and Blues singer Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton. Born on December 11, 1926, she died in Los Angeles of both heart and liver disease brought on by alcohol abuse. According to Gillian Gaar, writing in She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll (Seal Press, 1992), during the brief period of her final illness, Thornton went from 450 pounds (Big Momma!) to 95 pounds, a weight loss of some 355 pounds. Thornton scored her one-and-only hit when, on August 13, 1952, she recorded a brand-new, 12-bar blues song by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller entitled Hound Dog. Released by Peacock Records in February 1953, Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog sold over 500,000 copies and spent fourteen weeks on the Rhythm and Blues charts, seven of those fourteen weeks at number one. Thornton’s recording is linked below: (By the way: please ignore the photo of Josephine Baker at the top of the link; Big Momma’s left leg was bigger than all of Madame Baker.) Thornton’s recording of Hound Dog was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2013 […]
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Before getting into the date specific event/discovery that drives today’s post, permit me, please, to tell the story of the greatest manuscript discovery of all time. The ancient city of Jerusalem sits at nearly 2,700 feet above sea level. Less than 15 miles south of Jerusalem sits the Dead Sea, which at 1,300 feet below sea level is the lowest point on earth. In November of 1946, three Bedouin shepherds – Muhammed edh-Dhib, his cousin Jum’a Muhammed, and his friend Khalil Musa – were looking for a stray goat (or sheep; the story shifts) around the cliffs at the northern end of the Dead Sea. According to the story they told, Muhammed edh-Dhib threw a rock into a cave on the side of a cliff, thinking the stray animal was inside and that the rock would chase it out. Instead of a hearing a frightened bleat, he heard pottery breaking. Lowering himself into the cave, he found three ancient scrolls wrapped in linen. Having climbed out of the cave and shown them to his companions, the guys went back into the cave and found four more scrolls, seven in all. They put them in a bag and, on returning […]
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We mark the death on July 11, 1937 – 85 years ago today – of the American composer and pianist George Gershwin, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Born in Brooklyn New York on September 26, 1898, Gershwin was only 38 years old at the time of his death. This is going to be an unavoidably depressing post. Dealing with anyone’s death is difficult. Dealing with the death of a young person (and damn, from where I stand, 38 is still a kid) is both difficult and tragic. When we add to that Gershwin’s dazzling talent and unlimited promise we are forced, as well, to ask “what if . . .?” George Gershwin (1898-1937) George Gershwin had it all. Tall, athletic, good-looking (in his own lantern-jawed sort of way), he was blessed with preternatural talent. As someone who had grown up poor on the streets of New York City, he was devoid of snobbery or pretense and could get along with just about anyone. He suffered no childhood trauma; he adored and was adored by his family and friends and was filled with vitality and an infectious joie de vivre. We are told that given his gifts and effusive […]
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We mark the completion on July 4, 1941 – 81 years ago today – of Igor Stravinsky’s reharmonization and orchestration of The Star-Spangled Banner. Stravinsky in America In September of 1939, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and his long-time mistress Vera de Bosset (1889-1982) arrived in the United States from their home in Paris. The couple were married in Bedford, Massachusetts six months later, on March 9, 1940. Stravinsky had come to the United States to spend the 1939-1940 academic year at Harvard University, where he was to occupy the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry and deliver six lectures on music that were that year’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. By the time the academic year ended in June of 1940, the Stravinskys, Igor and Vera, had no home to return to. Nazi Germany had occupied Paris on June 14, and France surrendered to Germany 8 days later, on June 22, 1940. The couple settled in Los Angeles in 1941 and bought a house at 1260 North Wetherly Drive, just above the Sunset Strip, in Hollywood. Stravinsky and Vera would live there for the next 29 years, until his final illness forced a move to New York City. (For […]
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Humiliation Before getting to the anniversary we are honoring in today’s Music History Monday post, it is necessary for us to contemplate the painful issue of humiliation. “Humiliation” is a consequence of unjustified shaming, as a result of which one’s social status, public image, and self-esteem are decreased, often quite significantly. Humiliation hurts; humiliation sucks. We are not, for now, going to discuss the seemingly countless ways we can (and have! and will!) be humiliated. Let us instead – for now – observe the difference between spontaneous humiliation and ritual humiliation. “Spontaneous” humiliations would be those unexpected moments of shaming, bullying, rejection, or deep embarrassment that come out of nowhere and have the emotional and physical impact of a punch to the gut. “Ritual” humiliations are different, in that we know exactly what’s coming but are powerless to stop them. Ostracism and its attendant processes – excommunication, shunning, and blackballing, whereby someone is purposely excluded from a community – is a form of ritual humiliation. “Hazing rituals” are another: those activities that purposely humiliate, degrade, and even risk physical harm to someone wanting to join a group or maintain status within a group. Then, there is – for […]
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We mark the birth on June 20, 1843 – 179 years ago today – of the Russia bass opera singer Fyodor Ignatyevich Stravinsky, in the city of Minsk, which is today the capital of Belarus but was then part of the Russian Empire. Considered one of the greatest singers of his time, Fyodor Ignatyevich has largely been forgotten because, one, he never recorded and, two, he’s been eclipsed by the fame of his son, the composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). He was born of Polish descent in the “Government (province) of Minsk”, in what had been part of Poland until 1793, when the Russian Empire sliced off and annexed a large chunk of Poland in what is euphemistically called the “second partition of Poland.” (Today, the “province of Minsk” is part of the “nation” of Belarus, which is advised to mind its P’s and Q’s, as Tsar Putin no more considers Belarus to be separate country than he does Ukraine. Not that you need me to point this out, but I’ll do it anyway: the “annexation” of Crimea in 2014 and the present attempts to destroy Ukraine and annex the Donbas demonstrate that Russian actions towards its neighbors have not changed […]
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We mark the death (the most suspicious death) on June 13, 1886 – 136 years ago today – of the ultimate Richard Wagner fanboy King Ludwig II of Bavaria. The Running Man Richard Wagner was among the least-athletic looking people to ever grace a composing studio or a conductor’s podium. Depending upon the source, he was between 5’ 3” and 5’ 5” in heights. His legs were too short for his torso, and his oversized square head was perched on an otherwise frail body. In his lifetime, an unknown wag referred to him as “that shovel-faced dwarf”, an unkind if not inaccurate description of the man. But despite his physical shortcomings, Wagner – believe it or not – could run like the wind for remarkable distances. These miracles of sustained athleticism were inspired by Wagner’s creditors and/or the law, from which Wagner was forced to flee on a regular basis. For example, in April of 1836, following the failure of his opera Das Liebesverbot (“The Ban on Love”; for your information, my spell check just tried to change “liebesverbot” to “lobster pot”).Again: in April of 1836, following the failure of his opera Das Liebesverbot in the central German city […]
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We mark the birth of Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried Wagner on June 6, 1869 – 163 years ago today – in Lucerne, Switzerland. Like the sons of so many great men groomed to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, he could never hope to measure up to or escape from his father’s shadow. Cliché We contemplate, for a moment, this thing called a “cliché.” Strictly defined, a cliché is: “an element of an artistic work, saying, or idea that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being trite or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel.” Granted. But clichés didn’t become the tiresome, oft-repeated, over-used devices that – by definition – they are without carrying within them a kernel of truth. Admittedly, some clichés express stereotypes that may (or may not) be true, but the vast majority of them are analogies that do indeed express truisms. In fact, when it comes to expressing a truism succinctly, nothing succeeds more quickly that a cliché. For example: “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” (Parenthetically, some folks would tell us that “the apple doesn’t fall […]
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We mark the premiere performance on May 30, 1962 – 60 years ago today – of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. Completed in early 1962, the War Requiem was commissioned to mark the consecration of the “new” Coventry Cathedral, which was built to replace the original fourteenth century cathedral that had been destroyed on the evening and night of November 14 and 15, 1940. Today’s post will deal entirely with the events that led up to the composition of Britten’s War Requiem: the destruction of Coventry’s Cathedral of St. Michael, the extraordinary spirit of forgiveness and redemption that came to be identified with its ruins, and the New Cathedral that was built between 1956 and 1962. We cannot appreciate the meaning and spirit of Britten’s War Requiem unless we first come to grips with the meaning and spirit of the destruction and rebirth of Coventry Cathedral. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will get into the specifics of the Requiem itself, along with a recommended recording of the piece. Coventry and its Cathedral Coventry is a city in the West Midlands of England, 95 miles north-west of London. Founded by the Romans, by the fourteenth century Coventry had become a major center […]
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We mark the premiere on May 23, 1814 – 208 years ago today – of Ludwig van Beethoven’s one-and-only opera, Fidelio, at the Kärntnertor Theater in Vienna. While Beethoven (1770-1827) had composed two preliminary versions of the opera, which had been performed in 1805 and 1806, it is this third and substantially different version that we will hear in the opera house today. It’s an odd but, in this case, an applicable idiom, “red herring.” Literally, a “red herring” is, believe it or not, a red herring (see image above): a dried and smoked herring that’s turned red due to being smoked. However, for our purposes, a “red herring” is: “something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion.” The Beethovenian red herring to which we are referring started with the German author, legal scholar, composer, music critic, and artist Ernst Theodor Amadeus (or “E. T. A.”) Hoffman (1776-1822). Hoffman wrote a lengthy and frankly worshipful appreciation of Beethoven’s instrumental music entitled “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music” in 1813, when Beethoven was in his 43rd year. In the course of […]
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We mark the opening on May 16, 1792 – 230 years ago today – of Venice’s principal opera house, the Teatro la Fenice, meaning the “The Phoenix Theater.” Excepting, perhaps, the magnificent phallus that is the Washington Monument, dedicated as it is to “The Father of Our Country,” rarely – if ever – will a building be better named than La Fenice, which has risen from the ashes three times. Background The first public opera house – the Teatro San Cassiano – opened in Venice in 1637. Public opera quickly proved to be tremendously popular and immensely profitable, and Venice – already the tourist capitol, the Las Vegas of the European world – had yet another recreational activity to offer its endless stream of visitors. By 1700, there were some twenty opera theaters operating in Venice, cranking out operas the way Hollywood cranked out movies in the pre-television glory days of the 1930s and 1940s. As the popularity of public opera spread first across Italy and then all of Europe, so opera theaters were built across Europe. No longer the singular purveyor of public opera, many of Venice’s opera houses closed, so that by 1770 only five remained. Of […]
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We mark the death on May 9, 2020 – just two years ago today – of the American musician, singer, and songwriter Richard Wayne Penniman, known universally by his stage name of “Little Richard.” Born on December 5, 1932, in Macon, Georgia, he died at his home in Tullahoma, Tennessee two years ago today from bone cancer. He was 87 years old. As a founding inductee to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, the following statement was read aloud: “He claims to be ‘the architect of rock and roll’, and history would seem to bear out Little Richard’s boast. More than any other performer—save, perhaps, Elvis Presley – Little Richard blew the lid off the Fifties, laying the foundation for rock and roll with his explosive music and charismatic persona. On record, he made spine-tingling rock and roll. His frantically charged piano playing and raspy, shouted vocals on such classics as Tutti Frutti, Long Tall Sally, and Good Golly, Miss Molly defined the dynamic sound of rock and roll.” Along with Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Ike Turner, and Bo Diddley, Little Richard was one of that handful of Black American musicians who synthesized blues, rhythm and blues […]
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We mark the death on May 2, 1864 – 158 years ago today – of the German-born opera composer Jacob Liebmann Beer, also-known-as Giacomo Meyerbeer. Born in Berlin on September 5, 1791, he died in Paris during the rehearsals for the premiere of his opera L’Africaine – “The African” – which turned out to be, no surprise then, his final opera. Let us get to know Herr/Signore/Monsieur Meyerbeer a bit even as we explore the tremendous popularity of his operas, the reasons behind that popularity, and the reasons for their fall from popularity! No Exaggeration: As Popular as Elvis Incredible though it may seem to us, here today, Meyerbeer was the Elvis Presley of nineteenth century opera. Not that he was a pelvis gyrating, groupie groping “rock star” as we understand a rock star to be today, no; but in the world of nineteenth century opera, he was the most popular musician of not just his time but of his century: the single most frequently performed opera composer of the nineteenth century. In terms of his singular international fame and his income, Meyerbeer was – more than Gioachino Rossini, more than Giuseppe Verdi, more than Richard Wagner –the […]
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We mark the premiere performance on April 25, 1926 – 96 years ago today – of Giacomo Puccini’s twelfth and final opera, Turandot. The premiere took place at Milan’s storied La Scala opera house and was conducted by Puccini’s friend (and occasional nemesis!) Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957). At the time of the premiere, Puccini himself had been dead for 17 months. And therein lies our tale. Because given the delays in creating the libretto for Turandot, Puccini’s failing health, his leaving the opera incomplete at his death, and the controversy surrounding Turandot’s subsequent completion by the composer Franco Alfano (1875-1954), itwas indeed an opera that almost didn’t happen. Giacomo Puccini was born in the Tuscan city of Lucca on December 22, 1858, and died in Brussels, Belgium on November 29, 1924, three weeks shy of his 66th birthday. Puccini’s operas remain among the most popular in the repertoire, but among the most critically controversial as well. It is a controversary we will not discuss in this post; rather, I’d direct you to Music History Monday for January 14, 2019. That post – on Puccini’s opera Tosca – wades chin-deep into the critical issues that continue to dog his work. Sometime in […]
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As begun in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, we will continue to trace what I think of as my compositional apprenticeship up to my 30th birthday, and then on to some music! California and Graduate School I arrived in Berkeley, California on September 9, 1978, to attend graduate school in music composition at the University of California, Berkeley. I moved in with a friend and Princeton classmate, a fellow composer named Eric Moe, who had started graduate school immediately after we graduated in 1976. He found us an apartment in “north side” at 1822 Francisco Street. (For our information: Berkeley is divided into three large regions: “north side”, meaning the area north of the U.C. campus; “south side”, south of the campus; and “west Berkeley”, the large area of flatlands west of the campus going down to San Francisco Bay. There is no “east” of the campus as U.C. extends east all the way to the top of the hills.) September 10, 1978 – the day after I arrived – is a day I will always remember for the following revelatory event. I got up early and decided to walk to Morrison Hall, the music building on the Berkeley campus […]
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On April 18th, 1954 – 68 freaking years ago today – the American composer, pianist, music historian, and bloviator-par-excellence Robert Michael Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York. The Teaching Company-slash-The Great Courses and My Favorite Things Since 1993, I have recorded 32 courses for The Teaching Company, rebranded as The Great Courses in 2006, and further rebranded in 2021 as “Wondrium.” (The less said about that latest rebrand, the better. To me, “Wondrium” sounds like an acne control or irritable bowel medication.) I am frequently asked “which is my favorite course.” That’s always an easy question to answer because the answer is whichever course I most recently recorded. As of today, that would be The Great Music of the 20th Century. (Sadly, it would appear that I am the only person who bears much affection for this course, as The Great Music of the 20th Century has proven to be among the least popular course I’ve recorded. A principal issue is the musical examples. The Teaching Company/The Great Courses could not afford to license the music I needed to play during the course, much of which was still under original copyright. So we hit upon the idea of providing […]
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We mark the first performance on April 11, 1727 – on what was Good Friday 295 years ago today – of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion at the St. Thomas Church (or Thomaskirche) in the Saxon city of Leipzig. The Passion was performed three more times in Bach’s lifetime, all under his direction in Leipzig: on April 15, 1729; March 30, 1736; and on March 23, 1742. Bach revised his St Matthew Passion between 1743 and 1746, and it is this revised version that we will hear in performances and recordings today. Our game plan for this post will be, one, to discuss what a “Passion” is and what the “gospels” are; two, to observe the structure and scope and make some blanket observations about the artistic quality of Bach’s St Matthew Passion; three, to discuss “the masterpiece syndrome” and some of the good and bad things that phrase implies; four, to once again venture into the unmapped minefield that is contemporary identity politics and attempt to create a meaningful context for the St Matthew Passion; and finally, five, to speculate on how the parishioners and church officials who, having filed in and taken their seats at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche […]
The post Music History Monday: St. Matthew Passion first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the birth on April 4, 1913 – 109 years ago today – of the American blues singer, songwriter, and guitar and harmonica player McKinley Morganfield. He was born in either Rolling Fork or Jug’s Corner, Mississippi. Known professionally as “Muddy Waters” (as opposed to, say “Crystal Springs”, or “Briny Deep”, or “Silty Delta”, or “Occluded H20”), Maestro Morganfield-slash-Waters died in Westmont, Illinois on April 30, 1983, at the age of 70. We will get to Muddy Waters (as we will now refer to him) in a bit. But April 4 is a busy day in music history and thus, I’d like to observe three other date-related events. We mark the birth – on April 4, 1922, exactly 100 years ago today – of the American composer Elmer Bernstein, in New York City. He died in Ojai, California, on August 18, 2004, at the age of 82. Elmer Bernstein is among my very favorite film and television composers, and he would have been the lead story today if not for the fact that my Music History Monday post for April 3, 2017, already celebrated his birthday. (I’ll own up to it: April 3 is a quiet day in music […]
The post Music History Monday: McKinley Morganfield, a.k.a. Muddy Waters first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on March 28, 1943 – 79 years ago today – of the composer, pianist, and conductor Sergei Rachmaninoff, at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was born on April 1, 1873, and thus died just four days before his 70th birthday. This post, as well as tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes, will focus on the last year of Rachmaninoff’s life, during which he lived in Beverly Hills, California. Rachmaninoff – all 6’6” of him! – was one of the great pianists of his (or any) time; an outstanding composer; and a more than able conductor (he was, for example, the conductor of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow from 1904-1906). Lucrative though performing as a pianist and conductor were, what Rachmaninoff really wanted to be was a composer (the composition bug is, as I will attest, something of a disease). As is the case with so many “working” composers – meaning composers who make the bulk of their income doing something other than composing – Rachmaninoff composed primarily during the summer months. Between 1890 and 1917 – from the ages of 17 to 44 – Rachmaninoff spent those summer months composing at his home in Ivanovka, a […]
The post Music History Monday: Sergei Rachmaninoff in California first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the birth on March 21, 1685, of Johann Sebastian Bach in the Thuringian town of Eisenach, in what today is central Germany. He died 65 years later, on July 28, 1750, in the Saxon city of Leipzig. I can hear the howling now, “Dr. B, hello, Bach was born on March 31, 1685, not March 21; March 31: it says so on Wikipedia!” Chill out and unknot those jockeys; let’s talk. Wikipedia and various other sources do indeed indicate, not incorrectly, that Bach was born on March 31. But according to the irrefutable and unassailable Bach scholar Christoff Wolff writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Sebastian Bach was born on March 21. And in fact Bach celebrated his birthday on March 21. So what gives? A Brief Contemplation of Dates (by which we do not refer to one’s social life but the calendar) Old style and new style; in style and out-of-style. It is a question of almost Talmudic complexity. We’re talking about calendars and the confusion wrought by changing calendars. In 46 BCE (two years before his conversion into a human pincushion), Julius Caesar proposed replacing what was the 10-month Roman […]
The post Music History Monday: Ludwig van Beethoven and the Legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the birth of March 14, 1681 – 341 years ago today – of the German composer Georg Philipp Telemann, in the city Magdeburg, in what today is central Germany. A contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) (both of whom Telemann numbered as good friends; Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel was both the godson and namesake of Georg Philipp Telemann), Telemann was considered in his lifetime the greatest composer living and working in Germany, with our friend Sebastian Bach well down that list. Telemann died in Hamburg on June 25, 1767, at the age of 86. Georg Philipp was the youngest of three surviving children (two boys and a girl) of Maria and Heinrich Telemann. Young Telemann came from a long line of Protestant clergymen. His mother Maria’s father was a deacon, and his father Heinrich Telemann was a Lutheran pastor (as was Heinrich’s father before him). Sadly, Heinrich Telemann died his late 30’s in 1685 when Georg Philipp was just 4 years old, and the task of raising and providing for the family fell squarely on Maria Telemann’s shoulders. Single mothers are usually, by necessity, a tough bunch, and in this Maria Telemann […]
The post Music History Monday: Georg Philipp Telemann first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
Before we go forth to encounter the “unexpected”, a quick birthday greeting to the wonderful Maurice Ravel, who was born in the southern French municipality of Ciboure on March 7, 1875: 147 years ago today. I would direct you to my Music History Monday post of December 28, 2020, a post that celebrated Ravel’s life on the anniversary of his death on December 28, 1937, at the age of 62. Happy birthdayMaestro. “Unexpected Warblers” About my choice of topic for today. Three weeks ago, on February 14 (St. Valentine’s Day), I ran a post featuring some of the most horrific love songs ever recorded. Then, last Thursday, on February 24 (a date that now joins December 7, 1941, for its infamy due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine), I ran a post entitled “Phyllis Diller, Concert Pianist: Who Knew?”, a post that celebrated the unexpected keyboard talents of Ms. Phyllis Diller (1917-2012). Today’s Music History Monday combines aspects of both of those posts, as it explores what happens when movie actors not known for being singers actually sing on film. As you might expect, the results are mixed: some of these good people will, in fact, actually surprise us (in a […]
The post Music History Monday: Unexpected Warblers first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the birth on February 28, 1876 – 146 years ago today – of the American composer and pianist John Alden Carpenter, in Chicago, Illinois. He died there in the Windy City at the age of 75, on April 26, 1951. John Alden Carpenter is certainly not a musical household name here in 2022. But 75 years ago, Carpenter was among the best known and most respected living composers, musicians (he was an outstanding pianist), and musical philanthropists in the United States. His orchestral music was regularly conducted by the likes of Walter Damrosch (who conducted the New York Symphony Orchestra), Frederick Stock (the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), Leopold Stokowski, Serge Koussevitzky (the Boston Symphony Orchestra), Fritz Reiner (the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), Artur Rodzinski (the New York Philharmonic), Pierre Monteux (the San Francisco Symphony), Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter (the New York Philharmonic), and Eugene Ormandy (the Philadelphia Orchestra). The list of great singers, musicians, and chamber groups that championed Carpenter’s music is equally impressive. Carpenter was the only American composer ever to be commissioned by Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929) and his Ballets Russes. The product of that commission was Carpenter’s third and final ballet, Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life […]
The post Music History Monday: John Alden Carpenter first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
On February 21, 2012 – ten years ago today – five members of the Russian feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot staged an unauthorized performance on the soleas [so-LAY-us] of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. (For our information, a “soleas” is the sanctuary platform in a Russian Orthodox Church.) The security personnel at the church were not pleased by this impromptu performance and quickly – within a minute – put an end to it. However, following the dictum that “anything worth doing is worth recording,” Pussy Riot recorded their “performance” for posterity; that recording is linked below: Why, oh why would these masked young women so desecrate a Russian Orthodox Cathedral? They had – to their minds – good reason. Vladimir Putin was up for re-election, and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow (who was born Vladimir Mikhailovich in 1946), had thrown the church’s support behind Putin’s re-election. Later that evening of February 21, 2012 – ten years ago today – Pussy Riot released a music video entitled “Punk Prayer – Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!” Thanks to the internet, that video circulated internationally, overnight. That video is linked below. From […]
The post Music History Monday: Courage first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
On February 14, 1992 – an even 30 years ago today – the Paramount Pictures movie Wayne’s World was released in the United States. It was both a critical and commercial success. It became the tenth highest grossing film of 1992, raking in $183,097,323 at the box office. (For our information, number one that year was Disney’s Aladdin, which brought in a most respectable $504,050,219 at the box office; that’s over half-a-billion 1992 dollars!) To this day, Wayne’s World remains the highest-grossing film based on a sketch from Saturday Night Live. (The list of such other SNL-inspired flicks includes The Blues Brothers [with John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, 1980; to be discussed in next week’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post], Coneheads [with Dan Ackroyd and Jane Curtin, 1993], It’s Pat [with Julia Sweeny, 1994], Stuart Saves his Family [with Al Franken, 1995]; and A Night at the Roxbury [with Will Ferrell, 1998].) With my own fond memories of the film, I played Wayne’s World last year for my then 12- and 14-year-old kids. Sadly, it did not go well, as the movie has not aged well. Then again, neither has Mike Myers nor yours truly. Wayne’s World featured appearances by the […]
The post Music History Monday: Worst Love Songs (A Few at Least!) first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on February 7, 1652 – 370 years ago today – of the Italian composer and Sistine Chapel singer Gregorio Allegri, in Rome. He had been born in that great and ancient city 70 years before, in 1582. Allegri is remembered today for a work he composed in the 1630s, during the reign of Pope Urban VIII, entitled Miserere mei, Deus (which means “Have mercy on me, O God”). The Miserere is a setting of Psalm 50 (Psalm 51 in Protestant Bibles). Allegri composed his Miserere specifically (and exclusively!) for use in the Sistine Chapel (the Pope’s private chapel), to be performed during the Tenebrae services of Holy Week, which occur on the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday before Easter Sunday. Allegri’s setting calls for two separate choirs, one employing five voices and the other, four voices. The choirs alternate with one another until the last part of the piece, during which they join to conclude the Miserere in nine-part polyphony. As the Miserere was performed over the years, embellishments were spontaneously added by the singers, embellishments that eventually became part of any performance but were never written down. (For our historical information: Allegri’s Miserere is often identified […]
The post Music History Monday: Gregorio Allegri, Allegri’s Miserere, and Wolfgang Mozart first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the birth on January 31, 1797 – 225 years ago today – of Franz Peter Schubert, in Vienna. He died in that city 31 years, 9 months, and 19 days later, on November 19, 1828. Franz Schubert is no stranger to Music History Monday. However, we could not let his birthday pass without a post; no way, no how. Our angle today will be to focus on those friends without whom Schubert the man and the composer could not have survived. Schubert: Image and Reality The short, pudgy Schubert was called by his friends “Schwammerl,” which means “little mushroom.” The fully-grown Schubert was 1.57 meters tall (about 5’1”) and as his portraits attest, he never lost his cherubic appearance. The following description of the adult Schubert was written by his friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner: “Schubert’s outward appearance was anything but striking. He was short of stature, with a full, round face, and was rather stout. His forehead was very beautifully domed. Because of his short sight, he always wore spectacles which he did not take off, even during sleep. Dress was a thing in which he took no interest whatsoever; consequently, he disliked going out into smart society. He […]
The post Music History Monday: With a Little Help from His Friends first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on January 24, 1473 – 549 years ago today – of the German organist, lutenist, and composer Conrad Paumann, in Munich at the age of 63. Lest I be accused of dredging up an utterly unknown musician in order to come up with a topic on an otherwise topic-shy day, let us establish the following. Born circa 1410, by the year 1447, when the 37-year-old Paumann was appointed the official organist for the city of Nuremburg, he was considered the greatest organist in all of the German speaking lands, a position Johann Sebastian Bach would occupy some 275 years later. In that year of 1447, the poet Hans Rosenplüt (1400-1460) praised Paumann as being “master of all masters” as both an instrumentalist and as a composer. According to the unimpeachable musicologist and Bach scholar Christoff Wolff: “Despite his very limited surviving output, Paumann must be considered the leading figure in 15th-century German instrumental music, known internationally not only as a virtuoso but also as a composer.” Even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – hundreds of years after his death – Paumann was still remembered as the greatest organist of his time. Writing in his Lectiones antiquae, published between 1601 and […]
The post Music History Monday: Conrad Paumann first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on January 17, 2016 – six years ago today – of the American trumpet, trombone, flugelhorn, and tuba player and teacher, Mic Gillette, of a heart attack in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Concord. Born on May 7, 1951, in Oakland, Gillette was 64 years old at the time of his death. You might not have heard of Mic Gillette, but I can assure you have heard Mr. Gillette’s playing, time and time again. He was a founding member (in 1968) of what I consider to be the single greatest funk-rock/soul/horn band ever, Oakland’s own Tower of Power. Gillette also performed and recorded extensively with two other Bay Area horn bands, Cold Blood and Sons of Champlin. As one of the most highly respected session players anywhere, Gillette has appeared on hundreds of albums, including recordings by some of the biggest names in the business, including Santana, the Rolling Stones, Sheryl Crow, Rod Stewart, Elton John, the Doobie Brothers, Quincy Jones, Jefferson Starship, Huey Lewis and the News, and Blood, Sweat & Tears. Mic Gillette was a local legend, a legend burnished by his dedication to teaching and to his family. This post is […]
The post Music History Monday: Mic Gillette, Tower of Power, and the Oaktown Sound first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the premiere on January 10, 1713 – 309 years ago today – of George Frederick Handel’s opera Teseo at the King’s/Queen’s Theater (also-known-as the “Italian Opera Theater”) on Haymarket, in London. It was the still 27-year-old Handel’s third opera composed for the London stage and it was a great success. However, its success was marred by a potentially catastrophic backstage incident after its second performance. We quote the London journal the Opera Register, which ran the following article on January 15, 1713, five days after Teseo opened. Here is the article as it originally appeared; I’ll translate the passage into contemporary English after we’ve read the original. (The punctuation, capitalization, and spelling below are all as in the original.) “Mr O. Swiny ye Manager of ye Theatre was now setting out a New Opera, Heroick. all ye Habits new & richer than ye former with 4 New Scenes, & other Decorations & Machines. Ye Tragick Opera was called Theseus. Ye Musick composed by Mr. Handel. Ye Opera being thus prepared Mr Swiny then did give out Tickets at half a Guinea each, for two Nights ye Boxes lay’d open to ye Pit. Ye House was very full these […]
The post Music History Monday: Handel Ripped Off first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the birth on January 3, 1926 – 96 years ago today – of the English record producer, arranger, conductor, composer, audio engineer, and musician Sir George Martin, the putative “Fifth Beatle.” Martin produced 13 albums and 22 singles for the Beatles between 1962 and 1970. All told, it’s a body of work that adds up to less than 10 hours of music. But here’s a case where numbers do not tell the story, because thanks to George Martin, those 9 hours-plus of recorded music revolutionized the world of popular music. Today’s post will observe just how George Martin became the Beatles’ record producer. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will explore the impact Martin had on the Beatles’ recordings and what is, in my humble opinion, his masterwork: the Love album of 2006. But first: a dinner conversation that I believe you will find most interesting. What Makes a Song “Last”? My neighbor across the street is a big, smart, outspoken man named John McGleenan. I love John. He came to the United States from Dublin, Ireland, in 1992 at the age of 24, here to make his fame and fortune. He has done both. He founded […]
The post Music History Monday: The Fifth Beatle first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the completion on December 27, 1941 – an even 80 years ago today – of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, the so-called “Leningrad Symphony.” He had begun the symphony at home in Leningrad but completed it in Kuybishev, a city today known by its original name as Samara. Located on the Volga River just west of the Ural Mountains, Kuybishev-slash-Samara was one of a number of “safe havens” set up by the Soviet government to protect its intelligentsia from the invading Nazi hordes. Background: With Friends Like These . . . On August 23, 1939, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet government signed a pact of nonaggression and friendship with Adolf Hitler’s Germany. In a secret protocol, among other things, it was agreed that the Soviet Union and Germany would, between them slice ‘n’ dice and then gobble up Poland; and that the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia would stay within the Soviet sphere of influence. In return, Stalin pledged to stay out of any war between Germany and any of the Western democracies. And so the Stalinist demon sold its soul to the Hitlerian devil. The pact stunned the world. Russia and Germany – the two great continental […]
The post Music History Monday: Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 7 first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on December 20, 1982 – 39 years ago today – of the Polish-born American pianist Arthur Rubinstein, at the age of 95. Practicing the Piano Question: does anyone really like to practice the piano? Answer: believe it or not, yes. However, we’d observe that those good people who really like to practice are – frankly – in the minority. The vast minority. Now, obviously, there is a galactic difference between the practice schedules of kids and adult hobbyists taking piano lessons and serious students of music and professional musicians. We would expect the latter – serious students and professionals – to be practice room junkies, addicted to practice and inseparable from their instruments. But this is not always the case. Which brings us to the pianist Arthur (or Artur) Rubinstein (1887-1982). Rubinstein in America, 1906 Rubinstein made his first concert tour of the United States in 1906, when he was 19 years old. It did not go particularly well. Rubinstein played his first solo recital in New York City. Henry Krehbiel (1854-1923), the famed music critic for The New York Tribune, was there and his review was scathing. How scathing I do not know, as the […]
The post Music History Monday: Arthur Rubinstein: Fake It ‘Til You Make It first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
As those who read via blog and/or listen via podcast to Music History Monday know, as often as not I’ll mention two, three, or even more date related items before getting to the “main attraction” of a particular post. However, every now and then, one of those preliminary items will take on a life of its own and demand – rather curtly I would add – to be the main attraction itself. That’s precisely what has happened today. The original title for today’s Music History Monday was An American in Paris. Here is that post’s lead: “We mark the premiere on December 13, 1928 – 93 years ago today – of George Gershwin’s orchestral work An American in Paris. The premiere took place in Carnegie Hall, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Philharmonic.” We will briefly deal with the creation and premiere of George Gershwin’s An American in Paris before moving on to the canine-related item that has stolen today’s show. Be assured, however, that we will return to An American in Paris and what was to be the meat-and-potatoes of today’s post on Thursday, December 23. A Brooklynite in Paris In the spring of 1926, George and Ira […]
The post Music History Monday: Why We Shouldn’t Bring Our Dogs to Work: A Cautionary Tale first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the disastrous concert held on December 6, 1969 – 52 years ago today – at the Altamont Speedway here in Alameda Country in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over 300,000 people attended, four of whom died that day, one of them at the hands of the so-called “security personnel.” The word “Altamont” has become synonymous with “rock concert disasters.” However, before we get to the tragic events of December 6, 1969, we would recognize an event that occurred on this day in 1975, 46 years ago today, in this edition of “This Day in Music Stupid.” On Saturday, December 6, 1975, the Reverend Charles Boykin – associate pastor and youth director of the Lakewood Baptist Church in Tallahassee, Florida – gave a talk to the young people of his church on “evil effects of rock music on youth.” Not content to just talk-the-talk, the good reverend had his charges gather up their rock ‘n’ records, including those by Elton John, the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Doors, and Neil Diamond, and burned them. Boykin claimed to have been inspired by a nameless professor at Hyles-Anderson College (an unaccredited private independent Baptist college in unincorporated Crown Point, in Lake County, Indiana), […]
The post Music History Monday: Altamont first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
Before getting to the question that drives today’s post, we would recognize five date-worthy events: a tragedy; two notable cancellations, and two notable opera performances. First, the tragedy. On November 29, 2001 – 20 years ago today – George Harrison died in Los Angeles of lung cancer at the age of 58. Born in Liverpool on February 25, 1943, Harrison was the youngest of the Beatles: just 16 years old when he joined up in 1959. Though not known for his song writing early on, Harrison’s contributions to the band’s repertoire came to rival those of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Harrison contributed four songs to the Beatles second to last album, released in November of 1968 and nicknamed “The White Album” for its plain white cover. Among those four songs is the exquisite While My Guitar Gently Weeps (the recording of which features Eric Clapton on lead guitar). Harrison’s two contributions to the Beatles’ final album – Abby Road, released in 1969 – are both rock classics: Here Comes the Sun and Something. (John Lennon declared that Something was the best song on the album, and it is the second most covered Beatles song, after Paul McCartney’s Yesterday. The […]
The post Music History Monday: What to Do About Otello? first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) in 1948 We mark the birth on November 22, 1913 – 108 years ago today – of the English composer, pianist, and conductor Edward Benjamin Britten in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on the eastern coast of England, roughly 105 miles northeast of London. He died in nearby Aldeburgh on December 4, 1976, at the age of 63.
The danger of overstatement is great when tossing around superlatives, but with Britten it’s no danger at all. He was not just the most important English composer of the twentieth century; he was quite arguably the most important English-born composer since Henry Purcell, who was born in London in 1659, 246 years before Britten. Britain composed scads of music(that’s a musical term, “scads”): orchestral music, choral music, chamber music, vocal music, and film music as well. But pride of place must go to his dramatic works: his War Requiem (of 1962) and his fifteen operas. Those operas include Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951), Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), Prodigal Son (1968), and Death in Venice (1974). Britten’s operas constitute, by any measure, the most significant body of opera composed during the twentieth century.
Britten was lucky enough to have experienced fame and fortune in his lifetime; as “Baron Britten, of Aldeburgh in the County of Suffolk,” he was the first composer ever to be granted a life peerage.
Britten’s was a rich, intense, and not uncontroversial life. This post will focus on his first 28 years: from his birth until 1941, the period that saw his “making of a composer.” Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will pick up in 1941 and will focus on Britten’s String Quartet No. 1 of 1941.…
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We will observe the first performances that occurred on this date and contemplate, as well, the nature and reality of a “first performance” in a moment. But first.
I know; I know. We collectively wait, with breaths bated, for today’s “This Day in Musical Stupid.” Sadly, aside from this very post, I have not been able to dig up any particular date-related event that would so qualify. However, I did find a brief but compelling item that qualifies under the heading, “This Day in Musical ENVY”, the envy being my own. Here’s the item.
Elvis Presley (1935-1977) and Natalie Wood (1938-1981) On November 15, 1956 – 65 years ago today – the 21-year-old Elvis Presley (1935-1977) celebrated his new-found success by buying himself a brand-new Harley Davidson motorcycle. He spent the remainder of the day tooling around Memphis on his new bike with a “friend” nestled on the seat behind him: the then 18-year-old actress, Natalie Wood (1938-1981).
Okay people: let’s put ourselves in Elvis Presley’s riding boots. Can we imagine being 21 years old, poised at the edge of phenomenal fame and fortune, buying a Harley and driving around town with Natalie Wood’s arms around you, her young, nubile body pressed up around your back? Think about it. “This Day in Envy” is right!
I will now attempt to lower my temperature.
First Performances We contemplate the nature of a “premiere”: of a “first performance.”
(Having been witness to over 50 premieres of my own, to say nothing of those of my friends and colleagues, I feel this is a subject I can address with some degree of experience.)
Can you imagine? I have never jumped from an airplane. I have never surfaced too rapidly from a deep dive. I have never been pregnant and thus have never experienced morning sickness. I have never seen Steve Bannon naked. Nevertheless, I have experienced the nausea and “the bends”-like pain unique to experiencing a premiere of my own work. (I have for decades espoused the placement of a barf-bag under the seat of any composer or playwright about to experience the special “joys” of a premiere performance.)
The older I get, the more I realize that I am no different, better, or worse than the vast majority of human beings going back as far as we please. With slight variations, I am convinced that we all feel the same (momentary) joy and (comparatively sustained) despair, grief, fleeting happiness, fear, giddiness, anxiety, paranoia, pride, embarrassment, anticipation and disappointment, love and dislike, self-love and self-loathing, etc., etc., blah and blah. If the human condition was a house, I would suggest it would be a broken down fixer-upper in need of lots of TLC.
I’ve made these blanket statements about what I perceive to be our shared “condition” in order to support the following observation: I do not believe my physical and emotional reactions to a premiere are particularly different from anyone else’s.
So here’s my personal take on creation, rehearsals, and premieres as they are experienced by composers and playwrights.…
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Abbé Maximilian Stadler (1748-1833) We mark the death on November 8, 1833 – 188 years ago today – of the Austrian pianist, composer, and Benedictine monk, Maximilian Stadler. Born on August 4, 1748, in the Austrian city of Melk, Abbé Stadler died in his adopted home city of Vienna.
Witnesses to History We contemplate “witnesses to history,” who I’m going to categorize as “chroniclers” and “bystanders”.
“Chroniclers” would be those individuals who, advertently or inadvertently, were witness to historical events which they then reported, firsthand.
John Reed (1887-1920) For example, John “Jack” Silas Reed (1887-1920). Reed was an American journalist, poet, and communist activist. A prominent World War One war correspondent, Reed was in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) immediately before during and after the Russian Revolution, which he witnessed as a member of the revolutionary inner circle. His book, Ten Days That Shook the World (published in 1919) remains, despite Reed’s parochial political leanings, a riveting, firsthand account of the October Revolution.
Then there’s the American journalist and war correspondent William Shirer (1904-1993). As the European bureau chief for CBS, Shirer was headquartered in Vienna and was a firsthand witness to the “Anschluss”, the Nazi “annexation” of Austria on March 11, 1938. He reported the Munich agreement and Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia. Having moved his headquarters to Berlin, he witnessed Hitler’s rallies and reported Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.
When the Hitlerian horde invaded Western Europe in the spring of 1940, Shirer was there. As a foreign war correspondent, he was embedded with German troops and reported firsthand on the German “Blitzkreig”, or “lightning war.” He was with the German army as it closed in on Paris and, in one of the greatest scoops of all time, managed to report the German armistice with France to the American people before it had been announced to the German people!
(Here’s how that happened. Hitler had ordered all foreign journalists back to Berlin: he wanted the Armistice covered and reported only by his own propagandistic, Nazi press cronies. Shirer got word that the foreign correspondents were to be rounded up. So early in the morning on June 22, 1940, he snuck out of his hotel and hitched a ride “with a German officer who despised Hitler” to Compiègne, where the Armistice was to be signed.
He watched and wrote:
“I am but fifty yards from [Hitler]. I have seen that face many times at the great moments of his life. But today! It is afire with scorn, anger, hate, revenge, triumph.”
Shirer phoned in his report from Paris to the CBS office in Berlin, where his call was patched through to New York. The German authorities did not know that Shirer had been on site and they additionally assumed that his report would be recorded in New York for later, prime time broadcast, which was standard operating procedure. They did not know that Shirer had previously arranged with CBS to broadcast his phone call live. And that’s how William Shirer scooped the world.…
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We mark the American operatic debut on November 1, 1954 – 67 years ago today – of “La Divina” – “the divine one” – meaning Maria Callas at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Callas performed her signature role of Norma in Vincenzo Bellini’s opera of the same name under the baton of Nicola Rescigno.
More fun in Chicago: Maria Callas after having been served papers following a performance of Madam Butterfly in Chicago, 1955. Those papers addressed a lawsuit brought by Eddy Bagarozy, who claimed to be her agent. Chasing the process server from her dressing room, she tossed the papers to the floor and proclaimed “I will not be sued! I have the voice of an angel! I have never envied great athletes or dancers, except perhaps for the income potential of the former. My (general) lack of envy stems from the all-too-brief shelf life of such careers. With rare exception – Phil Niekro, George Blanda, George Foreman, and Tom Brady come to mind – most top athletes and dancers hit their prime in their twenties. By their thirties, wear and tear and the aging process have damaged their bodies and eroded their skills and will soon enough bring their careers to an end. (Magnificent though they still are, Steph Curry [33 years old, born 1988] and LeBron James [presently still 36 years old, born 1984] are considered to be among the “old men” of their sport, that being professional basketball. An old man at 33? Please.)
What professional athletes, dancers, and musicians all have in common is that they will have begun doing what they do at a young age. The sorts of motor skills, neural connections, and musculature high-end athletes, dancers, and musicians require must be wired in and built up while the body develops. What this means is that from almost the beginning of their lives, their emotional well-being is inextricably linked to their self-identity as athletes, dancers, and musicians. And this is why I’ve never envied athletes or dancers. You see, barring a major injury or a chronic inflammatory disease like arthritis or tendonitis, musicians can continue playing their instruments at a professional level into their eighth, ninth, and even their tenth decades. But the bodies of athletes and dancers break down, and at a fairly young age they are forced by physical reality to abandon that one thing that has dominated and defined their lives to that time. For many athletes and dancers, “retirement” can mark a harrowing emotional crash and burn.
Some athletes and dancers quit while they’re on top, while others drag out their careers for as long as they can, their deteriorating skills revealed for all to see, shadows of their former selves. …
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We mark the world premiere – on October 25, 1885, 136 years ago today – of Johannes Brahms’ fourth and final symphony. Performed by the superb Meiningen Court Orchestra, the performance was conducted by Brahms himself. It went well.
We’ll get to Herr Doktor Professor Brahms in a bit. But first, some gratuitous, auto back slapping.
I began writing these Music History Monday posts in September of 2016. That was when Melanie Smith, President of San Francisco Performances (for which I am the Music-Historian-in-Residence) asked me to write some sort of regular feature for SFP’s Facebook page. Here’s the first paragraph of my first post: a celebration of the birthday of Anton Diabelli (1771-1858, as in Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations) that appeared on September 5, 2016:
“Welcome to what will become a weekly feature here on the San Francisco Performances Facebook page, ‘Music History Monday.’ (As titles go that’s about as thrilling as root canal, but it is an accurate description of the feature’s content so run with it we will.) Every Monday I will dredge up some timely, perhaps intriguing and even, if we are lucky, salacious chunk of musical information relevant to that date, or to San Francisco Performances’ concert schedule, or to . . . whatever. If on (rare) occasion these features appear a tad irreverent, well, that’s okay: we would do well to remember that cultural icons do not create and make music but rather, people do, and people can do and say the darndest things.”
(For our information, I began writing these Music History Monday posts a full two years before I signed on with Patreon.)
I will say with no small bit of pride (deadly sin though it presumably may be) that I have not missed a single Monday since, making this my 267th consecutive Music History Monday post.
Darned straight impressive.
(Although no questions, please, as to whether or not I “have a life.”)
The five-year life of this post means a couple of things. First, in less than two years, I will begin my second cycle through Monday dates. Having already plucked the low-hanging topics my first go around, I’m going to have to work a bit harder to find date-appropriate topics to write about. Second – and on these same lines – it means that I’ve already covered a lot of topical ground.…
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Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944) We mark the death on October 18, 1944 – 77 years ago today – of the composer and pianist Viktor Ullmann, in a gas chamber at the concentration and death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Last week’s Music History Monday focused on a soft-rock song entitled Je t’aime… Moi non plus by the French singer-songwriter, author, filmmaker, and actor Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991), and recorded in 1969 by Gainsbourg and the English singer, songwriter, and actress Jane Birkin (born 1946).
Musically, the song is, pardon, beaucoup de merde. Nevertheless, it climbed to number one on charts across the globe. That’s because over the course of the song, Ms. Birkin’s heavy breathing leads to a simulated orgasm at the “climax” of the song. As we observed last week, “sex sells.”
We also observed that those arbiters of morality – of which there is never a dearth – declared the song “obscene” and it was banned from radio play by hundreds (if not thousands) of radio stations. I pointed out then as I would again now: that at an “obscenity level” from one to ten, Je t’aime… rates – maybe – a 00.5, while the tragic fate of the Czechoslovakian composer Viktor Ullman (1898-1944) rates an eleven.
As has been done in the past, today’s Music History Monday is in fact a two-parter, one that will be continued and concluded in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post. Today’s post will offer up some historical background, background that addresses the “destruction” of the sovereign nation of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939, and Viktor Ullmann’s life until September 1942, at which time he was deported to the hybrid concentration camp and ghetto in the Czech town of Terezín, or what the Germans called “Theresienstadt.”…
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There was a time, in the not terribly distant past (in our days of relative musical innocence), when a little heavy breathing was all it took to get a recording banned from the airwaves. Today we celebrate just such an event.
Jane Birkin (born 1946) and Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991) On October 11, 1969 – 52 years ago today – a song entitled Je t’aime… Moi non plus, which means “I love you . . . me neither” hit number 1 on the UK singles chart. Written by the French singer-songwriter, author, filmmaker, and actor Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991) and performed on record by Gainsbourg and the English singer, songwriter, actress, and former model Jane Birkin (born 1946), the song was controversial. Because of what was considered its overtly sexual content, the song was banned by many radio stations across Europe and North America. For the first time in the history of the BBC show Top of the Pops, the show’s producers refused to broadcast Je t’aime… Moi non plus despite the fact that it was the BBC’s “Number 1” song.
Public Service Announcement
Aspects of this post and its language are going to be off-color and perhaps off-putting, particularly for those who find sexual references offensive. If you are prone to being so offended, I would humbly suggest you skip the remainder of this post and rejoin me next Monday for a post about the Austrian pianist, conductor, and composer Viktor Ullmann, who was murdered in a gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 at the age of 46. Of course, on a scale of “offensive”, what happened to Ullmann far outweighs any heavy breathing we’re liable to hear on a 45-rpm record, but when figuring out what really constitutes “obscenity,” we as a public can be funny that way. …
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Before moving on to the main topic for today’s post, I would like to announce a new feature here on Music History Monday, something called “This Day in Musical Stupid.”
I explain.
As regular readers of this post know, I will, occasionally, dedicate a post to the shenanigans and sometimes plain old idiocy of musicians as they go about their daily lives and business. More often (far more often!) than not, such antics are perpetrated by pop, rock, rap, and hip-hop “artists”, but frankly, not always. In the past, if there is a topic of genuine import on a given Monday, I would ignore such events. In the past, I have only reported them when there was nothing else to write about.
My thinking on this has changed. Why should I deny you the special pleasure that observing other people’s stupidity can give?
Exactly. So whenever I can, I will initiate a Music History Monday post with just such a date appropriate event. Here’s today’s “This Day in Musical Stupid.”
Franz Liszt (1811-1886) in 1832, at the age of 21 Just so, musicians, who are, in their own right athletes, must know their physical limits. Yes: we read about Franz Liszt (1811-1886) holing up in 1831 at the age of 20 and practicing 7, 8, 9 hours a day for six years to attain his staggering technique. But Liszt was a physical freaking freak, and his practice regimen should have destroyed him. That’s because the greatest workplace danger facing any committed musician is over-training: over-practice.
There’s not a single musical instrument that does not pose some sort(s) of physical danger to its players: lip and facial injuries; shoulder tendonitis and bursitis; back and neck injuries. But no part of the human body has a more complex skeletal and muscular structure than the hand, and it is in the hand and wrist that many of the most debilitating injuries occur, in the form of acute tendonitis caused by repetitive stress and over-exertion.
Hand and wrist tendonitis is the bane of every piano player, and pianists must measure the gain of long practice hours against the threat of real injury. Pretty much all pianists experience injury here and there, for which rest is the best prescription. But many important pianists have faced serious, career-threatening and sometimes career-ending injuries, including Robert Schumann, Gary Graffman, Leon Fleisher, Wanda Landowska, Artur Schnabel, Alexander Scriabin, Ignaz Friedman, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Clara Schumann, Glenn Gould (who, by the way, died 39 years ago today), Michel Beroff, Richard Goode, and Murray Perahia, to name but a few.…
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Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904), photographed in New York City circa 1893 We mark the arrival on September 27, 1892 – 129 years ago today – of the Bohemian-born Czech composer Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904) to the United States, here to take up the Directorship of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. He retained the directorship for 2½ years – until March of 1895 – at which time he and his family returned to Prague.
Antonin Dvořák in 1891
By 1891 – at the age of fifty – Dvořák was that rarest of living composers: successful, appreciated by a worldwide public, and relatively wealthy. Regarded by many as the second-greatest living composer after Brahms, the nationalist Czech-accent with which Dvořák’s music spoke made it, in reality, much more “popular” than Brahms’ music.
Jeanette Meyers Thurber (1850-1946) in 1894 It was Dvořák’s fame as a “nationalist” composer that brought him to the attention of a rich American woman by the name of Jeanette Meyers Thurber (1850-1946). Mrs. Thurber was the wife of a wholesale grocer and was, herself, a musician of talent, having been educated at the Paris Conservatoire.
Jeanette Thurber was one of the greatest patrons of music the United States has ever known. I would suggest that had she given her name to any of the projects with which she was involved during her 96 years, she would be as well remembered today as Andrew Carnegie, Augustus D. Juilliard, George Eastman, and Avery Fischer, to name but a few.
In 1885, Thurber personally founded The National Conservatory of Music of America in New York City. It was modeled on the Paris Conservatoire, and its avowed mission was to create:
“a national musical spirit”.
The National Conservatory was the first major conservatory founded in New York City. It shut its doors in 1930 as a result of the stock market crash and the Depression, but it shed a bright light for 45 years, providing an affordable music education to two generations of deserving students, including African Americans and the disabled. …
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Johan Julius Christian “Jean” Sibelius 1865-1957 We mark the death on September 20, 1957 – 64 years ago today – of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, in Järvenpää (yes, that’s a lot of umlauts), Finland. Born on December 8, 1865, in Hameenlinna, Finland, Sibelius was 91 years old when he died.
Scandanavia Scandinavia is the Canada of Europe: a huge, climatically challenged area of extraordinary beauty that has produced an artistic community the breadth and depth of which is way out of proportion with its relatively small population. Of course, the cynic might suggest that in such northern climes, where it’s so dark and so cold and you have to stay indoors for so much of the year, there are just so many things you can do after you’ve eaten, slept, drank, and reproduced, and playing a round of golf in February is not one of them, thus encouraging – perhaps – the production of art. Certainly, Scandinavia is a vast environment of physical extremes that challenges both the body and the soul, an environment that encourages reflection and contemplation. …
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Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) in 1945, by Yousuf Karsh We mark the death, on September 13, 1977 – 44 years ago today – of the British conductor Leopold Anthony Stokowski, in Nether Wallop, Hampshire, United Kingdom, 67.6 miles (give or take) southwest of London. Born in London on April 18 (the maestro and I share that day and month of birth) 1882, Stokowski was 95 years old when he died. He was still recording for Columbia Records at the time of his death; his contract with Columbia would have kept him in the recording studio until he was 100 years old.
I will confess that I am always a bit loath to write about and celebrate conductors. It’s not that I have anything against conductors, it’s just that so many of them spend so much of their time celebrating themselves that I feel, well, superfluous.
On just those lines, when it came to naked self-promotion and downright mythologizing, no conductor – and we mean not a one, not even Leonard Bernstein (who in many ways modelled his career on Stokowski’s) – could match Leopold Stokowski.
I’ll present a quick overview of his life and career, after which we’ll delve into those aspects of that life and career that made Stokowski such a famous and such a paradoxical figure.…
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Mozart in April 1789 by the German portrait artist Dora (Doris, Dorothea) Stock (1760-1832) We mark the premiere on September 6, 1791 – 230 years ago today – of Wolfgang Mozart’s final opera La clemenza di Tito (The Clemency [or Mercy] of Titus), K. 621. Commissioned by the Prague-based opera producer and impresario Domenico Guardasoni (circa 1731-1806), the opera received its premiere at Prague’s Estates Theater, where Mozart’s Don Giovanni had been premiered as well in October 1787. (Put a visit to Prague’s Estates Theater on your bucket list; it’s the last surviving theater in which Mozart himself performed.)
We will get into the particulars of La Clemenza di Tito in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post. For the remainder of today’s Music History Monday, we’re going to explore the special relationship Mozart had with the audience in Prague, and why he might have lived a long and fruitful life had he chosen to leave Vienna and relocate to Prague.
The city of Prague is the historic capital of the region of Bohemia and today the capitol of the Czech Republic. It’s beauty, history, and sheer magic (I know of no better word) are stunning. It is my experience that like Paris and Venice, Prague never fails to exceed expectations. Relatively untouched by World War Two (physically, at least), Prague did not have to be rebuilt after the war, as did so many other great cities of Europe.… continue reading, only on Patreon!
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Every now and again, circumstances force us to plum the tawdry here in Music History Monday. Usually, those “circumstances” are a dearth of good topics to write about; today is such a day. (In fact, there is an excellent, August 30th-associated topic we could have focused on: the completion of Shostakovich’s extremely controversial Symphony No. 9 of 1945. But, alas, I wrote about Shostakovich’s death just three weeks ago, on August 9, and as this feature is called Music History Monday and not Music History Shostakovich, we’ll have to take a pass on the Shosty 9 for now.)
My typical fallback on such otherwise event-challenged dates is to find some date related craziness in the world of popular music and then extrapolate outwards, discussing other like examples that are not date related. However, we needn’t do that for August 30, because enough crazy, pop-world merde happened on this date to easily fill a post. So here we go!
Kanye West (born 1977) (Actually, for just a moment, here we not go.
You might rightly ask, why are we celebrating – and by doing so, perhaps even in some way encouraging – the antics of pop stars here on the august pages of Patreon? For an answer, you need look no further than the troubled mind of your insecure and envious Dr. Bob. While great wealth and fame have indeed eluded me [actually, you can keep the fame, though I will take the wealth], wealth and fame have not – for example – eluded Kanye West [born 1977; a.k.a. “Yeezy”, “Ye”, “Saint Pablo”, “The Louis Vuitton Don”, and “Yeezus”], who will be discussed in today’s post. But thank heavens, Mr. West – his tremendous talent notwithstanding – is a first order jerk incapable of going very long without doing something monumentally offensive. How wonderful, then, to be able to celebrate his foibles and thus assuage my fragile ego by acknowledging my moral and ethical superiority.)
Now here we go.… continue reading, only on Patreon!
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Moritz Moszkowski (1954-1925)” in 1880 We mark the birth on August 23, 1854 – 167 years ago today – of the German-Polish composer, pianist, and teacher Moritz Moszkowski in the Prussian/Silesian city of Breslau, today the Polish city of Wrocław. He died in Paris on March 4, 1925, at the age of 70.
Moszkowski was one of the most famous pianist-composers of his time, someone who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the likes of Franz Liszt (1811-1886), Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894), Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), and Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941)
Paderewski paid his friend and fellow Pole Moszkowski the ultimate compliment when he said that:
“After Chopin [who was, and remains, the great Polish national hero] Moszkowski best understands how to write for the piano, and his writing embraces the whole gamut of piano technique.”
In the end – painfully, tragically, inevitably (or so it so often seems) – talent, success, and fame were no match for time, aging, and illness, and died in obscurity and poverty, a broken man.
Sadly and unjustly, he and his music languish in near-total obscurity today.…
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We mark the birth on August 16, 1929 – 92 years ago today – of the jazz pianist and composer William John “Bill” Evans, in Plainfield, New Jersey. He died, tragically and all-too-young on September 15, 1980 in New York City at the age of 51. Just a week before his death, Evans had completed a nine-day run (from August 31 to September 8, 1980) at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco. That run was recorded and issued on an 8-cd set entitled The Last Waltz, which will be among therecommended recordings in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post. Apropos of that appearance at the Keystone Korner, Jesse Hamlin, music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle writes: “Evans played with such fervor during that nine-day stint that his enraptured audiences would’ve found it hard to believe that his body was wasting away and that he’d be dead a week later.” All early, unnecessary deaths are tragic. Bill Evans’ death holds a special poignancy in that it was not only self-inflicted, but he had, in the end, lost his will to live. In the end, he was only able to ignore his disintegrating body while he was playing the piano. But not […]
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We mark the birth on August 16, 1929 – 92 years ago today – of the jazz pianist and composer William John “Bill” Evans, in Plainfield, New Jersey. He died, tragically and all-too-young on September 15, 1980 in New York City at the age of 51. Just a week before his death, Evans had completed a nine-day run (from August 31 to September 8, 1980) at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco. That run was recorded and issued on an 8-cd set entitled The Last Waltz, which will be among therecommended recordings in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post. Apropos of that appearance at the Keystone Korner, Jesse Hamlin, music critic for the San Francisco Chronicle writes: “Evans played with such fervor during that nine-day stint that his enraptured audiences would’ve found it hard to believe that his body was wasting away and that he’d be dead a week later.” All early, unnecessary deaths are tragic. Bill Evans’ death holds a special poignancy in that it was not only self-inflicted, but he had, in the end, lost his will to live. In the end, he was only able to ignore his disintegrating body while he was playing the piano. But not […]
The post Music History Monday: William John Evans first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on August 9, 1975 – 46 years ago today – of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich at the age of 68, in Moscow. He was born on September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg. Does Stress Kill? If stress kills, Dmitri Shostakovich should never have lived past the age of 30. In his early teens, as a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory (or what was then called, the “Petrograd” Conservatory), he and his classmates suffered severe malnutrition due to the Russian Civil War (which ran from 1917-1922). But he survived. In 1936, some eight months before his 30th birthday, he was officially purged on the orders of Joseph Stalin himself during the Great Terror. Few people expected Shostakovich to survive, least of all himself. Later admitting to having been suicidal, he lay awake at night, too terrified to sleep, waiting for the van (the feared “Black Maria”), to take him away. But he survived. In 1941, he survived the early stages of the Siege of Leningrad and in 1948, he was once again purged for writing music considered to be too modern and too personally self-expressive, music that did not subscribe to Soviet ideologic dicta. Again he […]
The post Music History Monday: Shostakovich’s Death first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on August 9, 1975 – 46 years ago today – of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich at the age of 68, in Moscow. He was born on September 25, 1906, in St. Petersburg. Does Stress Kill? If stress kills, Dmitri Shostakovich should never have lived past the age of 30. In his early teens, as a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory (or what was then called, the “Petrograd” Conservatory), he and his classmates suffered severe malnutrition due to the Russian Civil War (which ran from 1917-1922). But he survived. In 1936, some eight months before his 30th birthday, he was officially purged on the orders of Joseph Stalin himself during the Great Terror. Few people expected Shostakovich to survive, least of all himself. Later admitting to having been suicidal, he lay awake at night, too terrified to sleep, waiting for the van (the feared “Black Maria”), to take him away. But he survived. In 1941, he survived the early stages of the Siege of Leningrad and in 1948, he was once again purged for writing music considered to be too modern and too personally self-expressive, music that did not subscribe to Soviet ideologic dicta. Again he […]
The post Music History Monday: Shostakovich’s Death first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on August 2, 1978 – 43 years ago today – of the Mexican composer, pianist, conductor, music educator, and journalist Carlos Chávez at the age of 79, in Mexico City. What’s the Problem Here? Allow me, por favor, to express a pet peeve framed as a question: why has the concert music of twentieth century and early twenty-first century Central and South American composers been so rarely performed and discussed in North America? Note, please, that I qualified my pet-peeve-framed-as-a-question with the phrase “so rarely performed.” That’s because such performances are admittedly ticking up, particularly in those states bordering on Mexico: California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. However, had I broached that question before moving to California in 1978, I would have asked – based on my own admittedly spotty experience – “why is the concert music of twentieth century Central and South American composers never performed in North America?” That’s because, speaking personally, in all my years attending concerts in the great American northeast while growing up, I never, not once, ever, heard a piece of authentic Central or South American music performed. Of course there were performances here and there, but not frequently enough […]
The post Music History Monday: Carlos Chávez first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on August 2, 1978 – 43 years ago today – of the Mexican composer, pianist, conductor, music educator, and journalist Carlos Chávez at the age of 79, in Mexico City. What’s the Problem Here? Allow me, por favor, to express a pet peeve framed as a question: why has the concert music of twentieth century and early twenty-first century Central and South American composers been so rarely performed and discussed in North America? Note, please, that I qualified my pet-peeve-framed-as-a-question with the phrase “so rarely performed.” That’s because such performances are admittedly ticking up, particularly in those states bordering on Mexico: California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. However, had I broached that question before moving to California in 1978, I would have asked – based on my own admittedly spotty experience – “why is the concert music of twentieth century Central and South American composers never performed in North America?” That’s because, speaking personally, in all my years attending concerts in the great American northeast while growing up, I never, not once, ever, heard a piece of authentic Central or South American music performed. Of course there were performances here and there, but not frequently enough […]
The post Music History Monday: Carlos Chávez first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
Let us wish a happy birthday to three notable musicians, the third of whom will be the topic of today’s post. On July 26, 1785 – 236 years ago today – the composer, pianist, and teacher John Field was born in Dublin. His Nocturnes for piano powerfully influenced those of Frédéric Chopin. Field died far from home, in Moscow, on January 23, 1837, at the age of 51. We mark the birth on July 26, 1874 – 147 years ago today – of the conductor and double-bass player Serge Koussevitzky in the Russian city of Vishny Volotchok. He served as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949 and was a tireless champion of contemporary music. He founded the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts in 1937 and created the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in 1942. He died at the age of 76 in New York City on June 4, 1951. Okay: here we go. We mark the birth on July 26, 1791 – 230 years ago today – of the composer, pianist, conductor and teacher Franz Xaver Mozart, in Vienna. He died in Karlsbad, Austria at the age of 53, on July 29, 1844. He also went […]
The post Music History Monday: Franz Xaver Mozart and the Grandmother of All Shadows first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
Let us wish a happy birthday to three notable musicians, the third of whom will be the topic of today’s post. On July 26, 1785 – 236 years ago today – the composer, pianist, and teacher John Field was born in Dublin. His Nocturnes for piano powerfully influenced those of Frédéric Chopin. Field died far from home, in Moscow, on January 23, 1837, at the age of 51. We mark the birth on July 26, 1874 – 147 years ago today – of the conductor and double-bass player Serge Koussevitzky in the Russian city of Vishny Volotchok. He served as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949 and was a tireless champion of contemporary music. He founded the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts in 1937 and created the Koussevitzky Music Foundation in 1942. He died at the age of 76 in New York City on June 4, 1951. Okay: here we go. We mark the birth on July 26, 1791 – 230 years ago today – of the composer, pianist, conductor and teacher Franz Xaver Mozart, in Vienna. He died in Karlsbad, Austria at the age of 53, on July 29, 1844. He also went […]
The post Music History Monday: Franz Xaver Mozart and the Grandmother of All Shadows first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
On July 19, 1941 – 80 years ago today – the BBC World Service began using the first four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 of 1808 as a “linking” device on its broadcasts into Nazi-occupied Europe. Why the BBC chose to use music by a German-born composer, and what those four notes meant makes for quite a story. Background The European phase of World War Two began on September 1, 1939, when Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded its neighbor to the east, Poland. The invasion had been made possible just 8 days before, when the Soviet Union entered into a so-called “non-aggression” pact with Nazi Germany. It was an act that stunned the world: these two greatest enemies, these two most diametrically opposed political ideologies – fascism and communism – had made nice: Hitler and Stalin had cozied up, climbed into the sack, and done the thang with each other. Here are two of the many contemporary political cartoons that satirized the pact: The treaty was called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named for the foreign ministers, respectively, of the Soviet Union and Germany who negotiated the thing: Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop. The “planned” expiration date of the pact […]
The post Music History Monday: “V” for Victory! first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
On July 19, 1941 – 80 years ago today – the BBC World Service began using the first four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 of 1808 as a “linking” device on its broadcasts into Nazi-occupied Europe. Why the BBC chose to use music by a German-born composer, and what those four notes meant makes for quite a story. Background The European phase of World War Two began on September 1, 1939, when Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded its neighbor to the east, Poland. The invasion had been made possible just 8 days before, when the Soviet Union entered into a so-called “non-aggression” pact with Nazi Germany. It was an act that stunned the world: these two greatest enemies, these two most diametrically opposed political ideologies – fascism and communism – had made nice: Hitler and Stalin had cozied up, climbed into the sack, and done the thang with each other. Here are two of the many contemporary political cartoons that satirized the pact: The treaty was called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, named for the foreign ministers, respectively, of the Soviet Union and Germany who negotiated the thing: Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Ribbentrop. The “planned” expiration date of the pact […]
The post Music History Monday: “V” for Victory! first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on July 12, 1773 – 248 years ago today – of the German composer, flutist, and teacher Johann Joachim, or “J. J.” Quantz, in Potsdam Germany, at the age of 76. Honchos Who Can Play We contemplate the musical abilities of some national leaders. The Roman Emperor Nero (that would be Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, who lived from December 37 to June 68, when he was assasinated at the age of 30 after a 14-year reign). Nero famously played the lyre (and not the “fiddle”, which only came into existence some 1500 years after his death). Whether he actually “lyred” as Rome burned on the night of July 18 and 19, 64 we’ll never really know. What we do know is whatever other issues he had (and Nero had issues), artistic self-doubt was not among them. Anticipating his death, he paced up and down, muttering “Qualis artifex pereo” (“What an artist dies in me”). Harry Truman (1884-1972), the 33rd President of these United States, was a competent pianist. Richard Nixon (1913-1994), the 37th President of the United States, was an even more accomplished pianist than Truman, and an equally accomplished violinist (he studied both instruments from […]
The post Music History Monday: Johann Joachim Quantz and his Most Famous Student first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on July 12, 1773 – 248 years ago today – of the German composer, flutist, and teacher Johann Joachim, or “J. J.” Quantz, in Potsdam Germany, at the age of 76. Honchos Who Can Play We contemplate the musical abilities of some national leaders. The Roman Emperor Nero (that would be Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, who lived from December 37 to June 68, when he was assasinated at the age of 30 after a 14-year reign). Nero famously played the lyre (and not the “fiddle”, which only came into existence some 1500 years after his death). Whether he actually “lyred” as Rome burned on the night of July 18 and 19, 64 we’ll never really know. What we do know is whatever other issues he had (and Nero had issues), artistic self-doubt was not among them. Anticipating his death, he paced up and down, muttering “Qualis artifex pereo” (“What an artist dies in me”). Harry Truman (1884-1972), the 33rd President of these United States, was a competent pianist. Richard Nixon (1913-1994), the 37th President of the United States, was an even more accomplished pianist than Truman, and an equally accomplished violinist (he studied both instruments from […]
The post Music History Monday: Johann Joachim Quantz and his Most Famous Student first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the birth on July 5, 1918 – 103 years ago today – of the American composer George Rochberg (pronounced ROCK-berg). He died at the age of 86 on May 29, 2005. Rochberg was of that generation of composers who, having served in the military during World War Two, found himself a radically changed person and artist by the war’s end in 1945. Like other composers of his generation – Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, and György Ligeti – to name but a few – Rochberg’s aesthetic and world view were altered forever. Like the composers named above, he sought a modernist musical language relevant to what appeared to be an entirely new world. We’ll talk about the nature of much post-war modernism in just a bit; suffice it for now that it is music of daunting compositional complexity and sadly, far more often than not, unremitting ugliness. But then personal tragedy forced Rochberg to re-examine the roots and premises of his musical modernism. In 1972, with the composition of his String Quartet No. 3, Rochberg, musically reborn, re-emerged as a composer of a different sort of music with an entirely new aesthetic behind it. George […]
The post Music History Monday: George Rochberg and the Great Dilemma first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the birth on July 5, 1918 – 103 years ago today – of the American composer George Rochberg (pronounced ROCK-berg). He died at the age of 86 on May 29, 2005. Rochberg was of that generation of composers who, having served in the military during World War Two, found himself a radically changed person and artist by the war’s end in 1945. Like other composers of his generation – Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Iannis Xenakis, and György Ligeti – to name but a few – Rochberg’s aesthetic and world view were altered forever. Like the composers named above, he sought a modernist musical language relevant to what appeared to be an entirely new world. We’ll talk about the nature of much post-war modernism in just a bit; suffice it for now that it is music of daunting compositional complexity and sadly, far more often than not, unremitting ugliness. But then personal tragedy forced Rochberg to re-examine the roots and premises of his musical modernism. In 1972, with the composition of his String Quartet No. 3, Rochberg, musically reborn, re-emerged as a composer of a different sort of music with an entirely new aesthetic behind it. George […]
The post Music History Monday: George Rochberg and the Great Dilemma first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
On June 28, 1846 – 175 years ago today – Adolphe Sax patented the saxophone family as a group of eight (not seven, as is often erroneously stated) instruments. Of these eight “saxophones”, four remain in common use today: the soprano and tenor saxophones, both pitched in B-flat, and the alto and baritone saxophones, both pitched in E-flat. The invention of the saxophone was a stunning achievement. Never before or since has a single individual created an entirely new family of instruments. That’s Not Funny! In the musical world there are all sorts of jokes (nasty jokes!) that are considered stereotypically appropriate for the sorts of people that play certain instruments. Most common are viola jokes. That’s not because there’s anything inherently funny about violas or the people who play them but because violists tend to be naturally supportive, genuinely nice people, people who will usually will not fight back when joshed but rather, will smile a melancholy smile, roll their eyes, and shake their heads. Question: what’s the difference between a viola and a coffin? Answer: with the coffin, the dead person is on the inside. No respect. But other instruments and their players have their own jokes as […]
The post Music History Monday: Adolphe Sax first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
On June 28, 1846 – 175 years ago today – Adolphe Sax patented the saxophone family as a group of eight (not seven, as is often erroneously stated) instruments. Of these eight “saxophones”, four remain in common use today: the soprano and tenor saxophones, both pitched in B-flat, and the alto and baritone saxophones, both pitched in E-flat. The invention of the saxophone was a stunning achievement. Never before or since has a single individual created an entirely new family of instruments. That’s Not Funny! In the musical world there are all sorts of jokes (nasty jokes!) that are considered stereotypically appropriate for the sorts of people that play certain instruments. Most common are viola jokes. That’s not because there’s anything inherently funny about violas or the people who play them but because violists tend to be naturally supportive, genuinely nice people, people who will usually will not fight back when joshed but rather, will smile a melancholy smile, roll their eyes, and shake their heads. Question: what’s the difference between a viola and a coffin? Answer: with the coffin, the dead person is on the inside. No respect. But other instruments and their players have their own jokes as […]
The post Music History Monday: Adolphe Sax first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the premiere performance on June 21, 1868 – 153 years ago today – of Richard Wagner’s music drama The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. The performance took place at the National Theater Munich, which today is the home of the Bavarian State Opera. Conducted by Franz Liszt’s student (and son-in-law) and Wagner’s protégé Hans von Bülow, the performance was sponsored and paid for by none-other-than the mad king himself, Ludwig II of Bavaria (1885-1886). Excepting Wagner’s second complete and first performed opera Das Liebesverbot (“The Ban on Love” of 1836, a work that Wagner ultimately rejected) The Mastersingers of Nuremberg was Wagner’s one-and-only operatic comedy. Wagner and Verdi: A Brief (and Important!) Comparison For all their many and seemingly irreconcilable differences, Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi had rather more in common than we might think. They were exact contemporaries, born 4 months and 19 days apart: Wagner on May 22, 1813 (he died on February 13, 1883) and Verdi on October 10, 1813 (he died on January 27, 1901). They were the leading nineteenth-century exponents of their respective operatic traditions: Verdi Italian opera and Wagner German. They were both considered ardent patriots by their countrymen, composers who, each in his own […]
The post Music History Monday: The Mastersingers of Nuremberg first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the premiere performance on June 21, 1868 – 153 years ago today – of Richard Wagner’s music drama The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. The performance took place at the National Theater Munich, which today is the home of the Bavarian State Opera. Conducted by Franz Liszt’s student (and son-in-law) and Wagner’s protégé Hans von Bülow, the performance was sponsored and paid for by none-other-than the mad king himself, Ludwig II of Bavaria (1885-1886). Excepting Wagner’s second complete and first performed opera Das Liebesverbot (“The Ban on Love” of 1836, a work that Wagner ultimately rejected) The Mastersingers of Nuremberg was Wagner’s one-and-only operatic comedy. Wagner and Verdi: A Brief (and Important!) Comparison For all their many and seemingly irreconcilable differences, Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi had rather more in common than we might think. They were exact contemporaries, born 4 months and 19 days apart: Wagner on May 22, 1813 (he died on February 13, 1883) and Verdi on October 10, 1813 (he died on January 27, 1901). They were the leading nineteenth-century exponents of their respective operatic traditions: Verdi Italian opera and Wagner German. They were both considered ardent patriots by their countrymen, composers who, each in his own […]
The post Music History Monday: The Mastersingers of Nuremberg first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on June 14, 1994 – 27 years ago today – of the composer, songwriter, conductor, and arranger Enrico Nicola “Henry” Mancini in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of seventy. Known primarily for his film and television scores, Mancini received twenty Grammy Awards and four Oscars. Today’s Music History Monday and Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts are conceived as a single large unit. Here’s how they will play out. Henry Mancini was the most influential American film composer of his generation. He was also the outstanding composer of what is now called the “modern Hollywood film score.” Today’s post will dwell on what constitutes the “modern Hollywood film score”, how it evolved, why it evolved, and why Mancini is considered its supreme representative. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will offer up Mancini’s biography along with the recommended discs, which feature his best-known works, including his Oscar-winning songs Moon River and Days of Wine and Roses, and his scores to Peter Gunn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and The Pink Panther, among many others. My Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts for February 8 and 9 of this year, respectively, dealt with the life and music of […]
The post Music History Monday: Henry Mancini first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on June 14, 1994 – 27 years ago today – of the composer, songwriter, conductor, and arranger Enrico Nicola “Henry” Mancini in Beverly Hills, California, at the age of seventy. Known primarily for his film and television scores, Mancini received twenty Grammy Awards and four Oscars. Today’s Music History Monday and Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts are conceived as a single large unit. Here’s how they will play out. Henry Mancini was the most influential American film composer of his generation. He was also the outstanding composer of what is now called the “modern Hollywood film score.” Today’s post will dwell on what constitutes the “modern Hollywood film score”, how it evolved, why it evolved, and why Mancini is considered its supreme representative. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will offer up Mancini’s biography along with the recommended discs, which feature his best-known works, including his Oscar-winning songs Moon River and Days of Wine and Roses, and his scores to Peter Gunn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and The Pink Panther, among many others. My Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts for February 8 and 9 of this year, respectively, dealt with the life and music of […]
The post Music History Monday: Henry Mancini first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
On June 7, 1727 – 294 years ago today – a long-running feud between the sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni broke out into open warfare – a screaming, hair-pulling, dress-ripping physical altercation on stage, in London – during a performance of Giovanni Bonancini’s opera Astianatte (of 1725). After pulling the “ladies” apart and dragging them from the stage, not only was the remainder of the performance cancelled but the remainder of George Frederick Handel’s Royal Academy of Music opera season as well! (FYI: Sources are in disagreement as to whether this brouhaha took place on Tuesday, June 6 or Wednesday, June 7, 1727. Obviously, I’ve chosen to run with the latter date.) Here’s what happened. The Italian operatic soprano Francesca Cuzzoni was born in Parma on April 2, 1696, and died on June 19, 1778 in Bologna. In 1718, at the age of 22, she made her Venetian operatic debut: the equivalent today of making a La Scala or Metropolitan Opera debut. By 1723 – the year she made her London debut – Cuzzoni was one of the most celebrated singers in all of Europe. Then as now, star singers ruled the operatic roost, and London’s greatest opera impresario […]
The post Music History Monday: When Opera Singers Misbehave first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
On June 7, 1727 – 294 years ago today – a long-running feud between the sopranos Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni broke out into open warfare – a screaming, hair-pulling, dress-ripping physical altercation on stage, in London – during a performance of Giovanni Bonancini’s opera Astianatte (of 1725). After pulling the “ladies” apart and dragging them from the stage, not only was the remainder of the performance cancelled but the remainder of George Frederick Handel’s Royal Academy of Music opera season as well! (FYI: Sources are in disagreement as to whether this brouhaha took place on Tuesday, June 6 or Wednesday, June 7, 1727. Obviously, I’ve chosen to run with the latter date.) Here’s what happened. The Italian operatic soprano Francesca Cuzzoni was born in Parma on April 2, 1696, and died on June 19, 1778 in Bologna. In 1718, at the age of 22, she made her Venetian operatic debut: the equivalent today of making a La Scala or Metropolitan Opera debut. By 1723 – the year she made her London debut – Cuzzoni was one of the most celebrated singers in all of Europe. Then as now, star singers ruled the operatic roost, and London’s greatest opera impresario […]
The post Music History Monday: When Opera Singers Misbehave first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death, on May 31, 1809 – 212 years ago today – of the incomparable Joseph Haydn, at his home in Vienna at Kleine Steingasse 73 (today, the address is Haydngasse 19). At the time of his death, he was 77 years old and was, without any doubt, the most popular and beloved composer in the Western world. Franz Joseph Haydn was born on March 31, 1732 in the Austrian town of Rohrau. He was as self-made a person as any we’ll ever meet. A choirboy at St. Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna, he was booted out onto the mean streets of Vienna when his voice changed at the age of 16 and left entirely to his own devices. He subsisted in a Viennese garret, giving lessons and playing the violin in dance bands while he taught himself to compose. To indulge the cliché, the young dude attended the school of hard knocks and managed to graduate summa cum laude. He slowly climbed the Viennese musical ladder and in 1761 – at the age of 29 – took up a position with the Esterházy family, a fabulously wealthy family of Hungarian nobles. His position was that of Vice-Kapellmeister – […]
The post Music History Monday: Haydn’s Death and His Final Road Trip first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death, on May 31, 1809 – 212 years ago today – of the incomparable Joseph Haydn, at his home in Vienna at Kleine Steingasse 73 (today, the address is Haydngasse 19). At the time of his death, he was 77 years old and was, without any doubt, the most popular and beloved composer in the Western world. Franz Joseph Haydn was born on March 31, 1732 in the Austrian town of Rohrau. He was as self-made a person as any we’ll ever meet. A choirboy at St. Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna, he was booted out onto the mean streets of Vienna when his voice changed at the age of 16 and left entirely to his own devices. He subsisted in a Viennese garret, giving lessons and playing the violin in dance bands while he taught himself to compose. To indulge the cliché, the young dude attended the school of hard knocks and managed to graduate summa cum laude. He slowly climbed the Viennese musical ladder and in 1761 – at the age of 29 – took up a position with the Esterházy family, a fabulously wealthy family of Hungarian nobles. His position was that of Vice-Kapellmeister – […]
The post Music History Monday: Haydn’s Death and His Final Road Trip first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the premiere on May 24, 1803 – 218 years ago today – of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major, Op. 47. When published in 1805, it was dedicated to the French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer, and has been known as the “Kreutzer Sonata” ever since. However, it was originally dedicated to the famed violinist George Bridgetower, who, along with Beethoven, premiered the work 218 years ago today. How and why George Bridgetower originally received and then lost the dedication of the sonata makes for quite a story! General Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte (1763-1844) was an extraordinary character, the only of Napoleon Bonaparte’s generals to achieve any post-Napoleonic success on his own: he reigned as King of Norway and Sweden from 1818-1844. (Not bad for the son of a tailor from the nowheresville city of Pau in southwestern France!) In February of 1798, long before he became King of Sweden and Norway (where he was known as “Charles/Carl XIV John”), the young and Hollywood good-looking Bernadotte was appointed the French minister to the Habsburg Emperor in Vienna. He didn’t last long in the job; Napoleon himself referred to Bernadotte as being “somewhere between hotheaded and crazy”, but he […]
The post Music History Monday: George Bridgetower, Louis van Beethoven, Rodolphe Kreutzer, and a Sonata for Violin! first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the premiere on May 24, 1803 – 218 years ago today – of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9 in A major, Op. 47. When published in 1805, it was dedicated to the French violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer, and has been known as the “Kreutzer Sonata” ever since. However, it was originally dedicated to the famed violinist George Bridgetower, who, along with Beethoven, premiered the work 218 years ago today. How and why George Bridgetower originally received and then lost the dedication of the sonata makes for quite a story! General Jean Baptiste Jules Bernadotte (1763-1844) was an extraordinary character, the only of Napoleon Bonaparte’s generals to achieve any post-Napoleonic success on his own: he reigned as King of Norway and Sweden from 1818-1844. (Not bad for the son of a tailor from the nowheresville city of Pau in southwestern France!) In February of 1798, long before he became King of Sweden and Norway (where he was known as “Charles/Carl XIV John”), the young and Hollywood good-looking Bernadotte was appointed the French minister to the Habsburg Emperor in Vienna. He didn’t last long in the job; Napoleon himself referred to Bernadotte as being “somewhere between hotheaded and crazy”, but he […]
The post Music History Monday: George Bridgetower, Louis van Beethoven, Rodolphe Kreutzer, and a Sonata for Violin! first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the birth, on May 17, 1866 – 155 years ago today – of the French composer and provocateur Erik Alfred-Leslie Satie. He was born in the ancient port town of Honfleur, situated in Normandy at the mouth of the Seine River on the English Channel, roughly 100 miles northwest of Paris. According to a brief biographical snippet found on the internet, Satie was: “Known for his eccentricities and verbal virtuosity.” Oh my goodness, that’s not even a hundredth of it! This post is dedicated to Satie’s life and personality. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes will delve more deeply into his music, specifically his masterwork, Socrate, of 1918. A preemptive apologia. There will be sections in this post that will drop names faster than a flock of gulls does guano. That’s okay; Satie lived and worked in Paris during a period called the Belle Époque, during which the city was home to a concentration of talent – artistic, literary, and musical – perhaps unparalleled in human history before or since. On the Fringe Satie followed his own drummer from almost the beginning of his life. Her lost his mother to illness in 1872, when he was just six. He moved […]
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We mark the birth, on May 17, 1866 – 155 years ago today – of the French composer and provocateur Erik Alfred-Leslie Satie. He was born in the ancient port town of Honfleur, situated in Normandy at the mouth of the Seine River on the English Channel, roughly 100 miles northwest of Paris. According to a brief biographical snippet found on the internet, Satie was: “Known for his eccentricities and verbal virtuosity.” Oh my goodness, that’s not even a hundredth of it! This post is dedicated to Satie’s life and personality. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes will delve more deeply into his music, specifically his masterwork, Socrate, of 1918. A preemptive apologia. There will be sections in this post that will drop names faster than a flock of gulls does guano. That’s okay; Satie lived and worked in Paris during a period called the Belle Époque, during which the city was home to a concentration of talent – artistic, literary, and musical – perhaps unparalleled in human history before or since. On the Fringe Satie followed his own drummer from almost the beginning of his life. Her lost his mother to illness in 1872, when he was just six. He moved […]
The post Music History Monday: The Making of an Eccentric: Erik Satie first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the deadly riot on May 10, 1849 – 172 years ago today – that took place at the Astor Place Opera House in New York City. Between 22 and 31 people were killed and many hundreds more injured, in a riot that pitted immigrants and members of the working class against the wealthy elite who controlled the city’s police and militia. Gala Openings, Class War, and Opera (and Theater) in the United States We’ve all seen pictures of the things; I imagine some of us have even attended them: opera galas. In San Francisco (where the San Francisco Opera is second only to the Metropolitan Opera in terms of its budget and number of performances), the season opening opera gala is the major social event for those fine people who “do” major social events. Tickets for the gala cost a small fortune. For the men, black tie is de rigueur; for the women, off-the-shoulder gowns, freshly coiffed hair, and tons of jewelry are, but of course. As best as I can tell, the social point of the gala is to be perceived as a member of the exclusive club that is “high society”: to be seen and to […]
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We mark the deadly riot on May 10, 1849 – 172 years ago today – that took place at the Astor Place Opera House in New York City. Between 22 and 31 people were killed and many hundreds more injured, in a riot that pitted immigrants and members of the working class against the wealthy elite who controlled the city’s police and militia. Gala Openings, Class War, and Opera (and Theater) in the United States We’ve all seen pictures of the things; I imagine some of us have even attended them: opera galas. In San Francisco (where the San Francisco Opera is second only to the Metropolitan Opera in terms of its budget and number of performances), the season opening opera gala is the major social event for those fine people who “do” major social events. Tickets for the gala cost a small fortune. For the men, black tie is de rigueur; for the women, off-the-shoulder gowns, freshly coiffed hair, and tons of jewelry are, but of course. As best as I can tell, the social point of the gala is to be perceived as a member of the exclusive club that is “high society”: to be seen and to […]
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May 3 is a date rich in birthdays for American popular music. Let us acknowledge three of them before moving on to the particular birthday that has inspired this post. On May 3, 1919 – 102 years ago today – the American folk singer and songwriter Pete Seeger was born in New York City. Seeger was the prototypical American folk-singing, left-wing social activist. A man and musician allied with the working class and workers’ rights, he was blacklisted during the McCarthy Era only to re-emerge as an important singer of protest music in the 1960s in the service of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the civil rights movement, international disarmament, the environment, and whatever might be considered the “counterculture” at any given time. As a prominent voice and songwriter on the radio in the 1940s and founding member of the Weavers (in 1948), Seeger created a body of music that remains the backbone of the folk repertoire, including such songs as Where Have All the Flowers Gone, If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song), Kisses Sweeter Than Wine and Turn! Turn! Turn! He died an American legend on January 27, 2014 at the age of 94. On May 3, 1933 […]
The post Music History Monday: The Word’s the Thing: Betty Comden and Adolph Green first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
May 3 is a date rich in birthdays for American popular music. Let us acknowledge three of them before moving on to the particular birthday that has inspired this post. On May 3, 1919 – 102 years ago today – the American folk singer and songwriter Pete Seeger was born in New York City. Seeger was the prototypical American folk-singing, left-wing social activist. A man and musician allied with the working class and workers’ rights, he was blacklisted during the McCarthy Era only to re-emerge as an important singer of protest music in the 1960s in the service of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the civil rights movement, international disarmament, the environment, and whatever might be considered the “counterculture” at any given time. As a prominent voice and songwriter on the radio in the 1940s and founding member of the Weavers (in 1948), Seeger created a body of music that remains the backbone of the folk repertoire, including such songs as Where Have All the Flowers Gone, If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song), Kisses Sweeter Than Wine and Turn! Turn! Turn! He died an American legend on January 27, 2014 at the age of 94. On May 3, 1933 […]
The post Music History Monday: The Word’s the Thing: Betty Comden and Adolph Green first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the arrival in New York City on April 26, 1891 – 130 years ago today – of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. He had come to America to conduct his own music and to help inaugurate Carnegie Hall (on May 5, 1891) by conducting his own Coronation Festival Overture. Tchaikovsky at Fifty Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 in the Russian town Votkinsk, roughly 630 miles east of Moscow. He might have started his life in the sticks, but he didn’t stay there, and by the age of fifty – in 1890 – he was one of the most beloved composers in the world and a Russian national hero. Photographs taken at the time depict a balding, grey haired and bearded man seemingly well advanced of fifty years, though in this, appearances can be deceiving. At the age of fifty Tchaikovsky was at the very top of his musical game and at the apogee of his fame. A single anecdote will suffice for his stature among contemporary Russian artists. During the winter of 1889, Tchaikovsky met a young medical-student-turned-writer at his brother Modest’s house named Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). At the time of their meeting Tchaikovsky expressed admiration […]
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We mark the arrival in New York City on April 26, 1891 – 130 years ago today – of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. He had come to America to conduct his own music and to help inaugurate Carnegie Hall (on May 5, 1891) by conducting his own Coronation Festival Overture. Tchaikovsky at Fifty Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 in the Russian town Votkinsk, roughly 630 miles east of Moscow. He might have started his life in the sticks, but he didn’t stay there, and by the age of fifty – in 1890 – he was one of the most beloved composers in the world and a Russian national hero. Photographs taken at the time depict a balding, grey haired and bearded man seemingly well advanced of fifty years, though in this, appearances can be deceiving. At the age of fifty Tchaikovsky was at the very top of his musical game and at the apogee of his fame. A single anecdote will suffice for his stature among contemporary Russian artists. During the winter of 1889, Tchaikovsky met a young medical-student-turned-writer at his brother Modest’s house named Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). At the time of their meeting Tchaikovsky expressed admiration […]
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We mark the posthumous premiere on April 19, 1936 – 85 years ago today – of Alban Berg’s breathtaking Violin Concerto. Its score bears a double dedication: “To Louis Krasner” (1903-1995; Krasner was the violinist who commissioned and premiered the concerto) and “To the Memory of an Angel” (the significance of which will be explained in due time). Albano Maria Johannes Berg was born in Vienna on February 9, 1885. He died there 50 years later, on December 24, 1935. Berg was born into a highly cultured family that travelled in the highest circle of Vienna’s cultural elite, at a time when Vienna was home to a staggering amount of talent. Berg numbered among his friends Gustav and Alma Mahler, the writers Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) and Karl Kraus (1874-1936); the architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933); and the artists Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980). Among others. That’s quite a crew. A tall (he grew to be 6’5” in height), gangly, shy child, the young Berg was more interested in literature than music. A few elementary piano lessons aside, Berg had no formal musical training whatsoever until 1904, when he was 19. That was when he began composition lessons with the […]
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We mark the posthumous premiere on April 19, 1936 – 85 years ago today – of Alban Berg’s breathtaking Violin Concerto. Its score bears a double dedication: “To Louis Krasner” (1903-1995; Krasner was the violinist who commissioned and premiered the concerto) and “To the Memory of an Angel” (the significance of which will be explained in due time). Albano Maria Johannes Berg was born in Vienna on February 9, 1885. He died there 50 years later, on December 24, 1935. Berg was born into a highly cultured family that travelled in the highest circle of Vienna’s cultural elite, at a time when Vienna was home to a staggering amount of talent. Berg numbered among his friends Gustav and Alma Mahler, the writers Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) and Karl Kraus (1874-1936); the architect Adolf Loos (1870-1933); and the artists Gustav Klimt (1862-1918) and Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980). Among others. That’s quite a crew. A tall (he grew to be 6’5” in height), gangly, shy child, the young Berg was more interested in literature than music. A few elementary piano lessons aside, Berg had no formal musical training whatsoever until 1904, when he was 19. That was when he began composition lessons with the […]
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We mark the death on April 12, 1814 – 207 years ago today – of the English music historian and composer Charles Burney, in London. One rarely achieves much fame or fortune as a music historian; you can trust me on this; it’s something I know about firsthand. Nevertheless, Dr. Burney (he was awarded an honorary Doctor of music degree from Oxford) achieved a bit of both fame and fortune in his lifetime and immortality since. That’s because he didn’t just write blogs or record podcasts about music history; it’s because he lived it. Lots more on this once we (quickly) get through his biographical preliminaries. He was born on April 7, 1726 in the market town of Shrewsbury, some 150 miles northwest of London. (For our information, Shrewsbury was, as well, the hometown of Charles Darwin.) The artistic gene was in the family: Burney’s father James was a musician, dancer, and portrait painter. Young Charles was trained on the organ, harpsichord, violin and in composition. For three years he was apprenticed in London with Thomas Arne (1710-1778), the most important English-born composer of theater music in the eighteenth century. (Many of us might not have heard of Arne, but […]
The post Music History Monday: Dr. Burney first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on April 12, 1814 – 207 years ago today – of the English music historian and composer Charles Burney, in London. One rarely achieves much fame or fortune as a music historian; you can trust me on this; it’s something I know about firsthand. Nevertheless, Dr. Burney (he was awarded an honorary Doctor of music degree from Oxford) achieved a bit of both fame and fortune in his lifetime and immortality since. That’s because he didn’t just write blogs or record podcasts about music history; it’s because he lived it. Lots more on this once we (quickly) get through his biographical preliminaries. He was born on April 7, 1726 in the market town of Shrewsbury, some 150 miles northwest of London. (For our information, Shrewsbury was, as well, the hometown of Charles Darwin.) The artistic gene was in the family: Burney’s father James was a musician, dancer, and portrait painter. Young Charles was trained on the organ, harpsichord, violin and in composition. For three years he was apprenticed in London with Thomas Arne (1710-1778), the most important English-born composer of theater music in the eighteenth century. (Many of us might not have heard of Arne, but […]
The post Music History Monday: Dr. Burney first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the premiere on April 5, 1803 – 218 years ago today – of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor at a public concert held at the Theater-an-der-Wien, in Vienna. Beethoven was the piano soloist and conducted the Theater-an-der-Wien Orchestra from the piano. The title of this post – “Three’s the Charm” – is meant in no way to diminish Beethoven’s piano concerti nos. 1 and 2. Rather, it would indicate that this third concerto, completed when Beethoven was 32 years old, is the first piano concerto of his compositional maturity and is thus packed with the sorts of modernity and expressive range that the phrase “Beethoven’s maturity” implies. Beethoven’s “Akademies” In the Vienna of Beethoven’s time, public concerts – to which anyone could “subscribe” (that is, buy a ticket in advance) – were called “Akademies”. When a composer staged an Akademie, the concert was additionally referred to as a “benefit” in that the profits went directly into the pocket of the composer. Staging a benefit concert was a big deal, though not without risk. It was a “big deal” because such concerts were usually the only way for a composer to put his music before the […]
The post Music History Monday: “Three’s the Charm” first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the premiere on April 5, 1803 – 218 years ago today – of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor at a public concert held at the Theater-an-der-Wien, in Vienna. Beethoven was the piano soloist and conducted the Theater-an-der-Wien Orchestra from the piano. The title of this post – “Three’s the Charm” – is meant in no way to diminish Beethoven’s piano concerti nos. 1 and 2. Rather, it would indicate that this third concerto, completed when Beethoven was 32 years old, is the first piano concerto of his compositional maturity and is thus packed with the sorts of modernity and expressive range that the phrase “Beethoven’s maturity” implies. Beethoven’s “Akademies” In the Vienna of Beethoven’s time, public concerts – to which anyone could “subscribe” (that is, buy a ticket in advance) – were called “Akademies”. When a composer staged an Akademie, the concert was additionally referred to as a “benefit” in that the profits went directly into the pocket of the composer. Staging a benefit concert was a big deal, though not without risk. It was a “big deal” because such concerts were usually the only way for a composer to put his music before the […]
The post Music History Monday: “Three’s the Charm” first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the funeral of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) on March 29, 1827 – 194 years ago today – in Vienna. It was a grand affair; tens of thousands of people lined the route of the funeral cortege. The funeral itself was attended by Viennese luminaries of every stripe, from the aristocracy to such composers as Franz Shubert, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and Carl Czerny. Speaking strictly for myself, Beethoven’s virus-compromised 250th birthday celebration continues to rankle. As I have previously stated (with tiresome regularity, I fear), it is my intention to continue that celebration, which should have concluded on the occasion of his 250th birthday on December 16, 2020, well into 2021. Just so: my Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts for the next two weeks will feature the B-man and his music. This is all good. Funerals in Vienna The Viennese have traditionally had a “thing” about funerals. Far from being merely ritualized grief or memorials to those who have passed, traditional Viennese funerals – elaborate affairs with their grand caskets, long, parade-like processions and impassioned, theatrical eulogies – seem as much like Mardi Gras parades as they do “funerals.” Vienna even has a funeral museum, called […]
The post Music History Monday: Beethoven’s Funeral first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the funeral of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) on March 29, 1827 – 194 years ago today – in Vienna. It was a grand affair; tens of thousands of people lined the route of the funeral cortege. The funeral itself was attended by Viennese luminaries of every stripe, from the aristocracy to such composers as Franz Shubert, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and Carl Czerny. Speaking strictly for myself, Beethoven’s virus-compromised 250th birthday celebration continues to rankle. As I have previously stated (with tiresome regularity, I fear), it is my intention to continue that celebration, which should have concluded on the occasion of his 250th birthday on December 16, 2020, well into 2021. Just so: my Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts for the next two weeks will feature the B-man and his music. This is all good. Funerals in Vienna The Viennese have traditionally had a “thing” about funerals. Far from being merely ritualized grief or memorials to those who have passed, traditional Viennese funerals – elaborate affairs with their grand caskets, long, parade-like processions and impassioned, theatrical eulogies – seem as much like Mardi Gras parades as they do “funerals.” Vienna even has a funeral museum, called […]
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We mark the birth on March 22, 1930 – 91 years ago today – and the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Alive and we trust well, living in his brownstone townhouse in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood on the East Side of Midtown (also the home of the Chrysler Building and the United Nations), we can only hope that Maestro Sondheim is spending the day doing what he does best: writing a song. What a wonderful coincidence: for the second week in a row, I get to write about one of my favorite subjects: the American musical theater. Last week it was the team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe and their masterwork, My Fair Lady. In today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes, I get to write about Stephen Sondheim. What a pleasure!An upfront statement. Stephen Joshua Sondheim has lived a long, complex, incredibly productive and well-documented life. To attempt to tell his entire story in one or two 2500-word blog/podcasts can only trivialize his life story and his work. So instead, today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts will tell the painful story of his early life and explore the mentorships and experiences […]
The post Music History Monday: Stephen Sondheim: The Making of a Theatrical Life, Part One first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the birth on March 22, 1930 – 91 years ago today – and the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Alive and we trust well, living in his brownstone townhouse in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood on the East Side of Midtown (also the home of the Chrysler Building and the United Nations), we can only hope that Maestro Sondheim is spending the day doing what he does best: writing a song. What a wonderful coincidence: for the second week in a row, I get to write about one of my favorite subjects: the American musical theater. Last week it was the team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe and their masterwork, My Fair Lady. In today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes, I get to write about Stephen Sondheim. What a pleasure!An upfront statement. Stephen Joshua Sondheim has lived a long, complex, incredibly productive and well-documented life. To attempt to tell his entire story in one or two 2500-word blog/podcasts can only trivialize his life story and his work. So instead, today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts will tell the painful story of his early life and explore the mentorships and experiences […]
The post Music History Monday: Stephen Sondheim: The Making of a Theatrical Life, Part One first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the opening performance on March 15, 1956 – 65 years ago today – of the Broadway musical My Fair Lady at the Mark Hellinger Theater, which was located at 237 West 51st Street in mid-town Manhattan, New York City. (For our information, since 1989, the theater has been the home of the Times Square Church.) Originally starring Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, and Stanley Holloway, this first Broadway production of My Fair Lady (there have been four Broadway revivals) ran for what was then a record-breaking 2717 performances – for 6½ years! – until September 29, 1962. (Because we all want to know: the current record holder is Phantom of the Opera, which opened on January 26, 1988 and continues to run at the Majestic Theater. Currently suspended due to the pandemic, the Broadway production of Phantom has thus far racked up an astonishing 13,370 performances. Whoa!) My Fair Lady is routinely called “the perfect musical”, and who are we to argue with that appraisal? Speaking for myself, I saw that first Broadway production in April of 1962; attendance was my eighth birthday present. Though Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, and Stanley Holloway had long before left the show, it […]
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We mark the opening performance on March 15, 1956 – 65 years ago today – of the Broadway musical My Fair Lady at the Mark Hellinger Theater, which was located at 237 West 51st Street in mid-town Manhattan, New York City. (For our information, since 1989, the theater has been the home of the Times Square Church.) Originally starring Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, and Stanley Holloway, this first Broadway production of My Fair Lady (there have been four Broadway revivals) ran for what was then a record-breaking 2717 performances – for 6½ years! – until September 29, 1962. (Because we all want to know: the current record holder is Phantom of the Opera, which opened on January 26, 1988 and continues to run at the Majestic Theater. Currently suspended due to the pandemic, the Broadway production of Phantom has thus far racked up an astonishing 13,370 performances. Whoa!) My Fair Lady is routinely called “the perfect musical”, and who are we to argue with that appraisal? Speaking for myself, I saw that first Broadway production in April of 1962; attendance was my eighth birthday present. Though Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison, and Stanley Holloway had long before left the show, it […]
The post Music History Monday: My Fair Lady and the Making of a Partnership first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on March 8, 1869 – 152 years ago today – of the French composer and conductor Hector Berlioz, in Paris at the age of 65. We will use this anniversary of Berlioz’ death for a two-day Berlioz wallow. Today’s Music History Monday post will frame Berlioz as a founding member of the Romantic movement and will tell a wonderful story that conveys to us much of what we need to know about Berlioz the man: his passion, his impulsiveness, and in the end, his good sense. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will delve more deeply into his biography and his proclivity for compositional gigantism, using his Requiem Mass of 1837 as an example. Background: The Romantic Era Cult (really, fetish) of Individual Expression An idealized image of the middle-class “individual” dominated the thought and art of the second half of the eighteenth century, a period generally referred to as the Enlightenment and, in music history, the Classical Era. This Enlightenment elevation of an idealized “individual person” saw its political denouement in the French Revolution (1789-1795) and its musical denouement in Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) and the subsequent Romantic era cult of individual expression. Whereas Classical era […]
The post Music History Monday: Dressed to Kill first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on March 8, 1869 – 152 years ago today – of the French composer and conductor Hector Berlioz, in Paris at the age of 65. We will use this anniversary of Berlioz’ death for a two-day Berlioz wallow. Today’s Music History Monday post will frame Berlioz as a founding member of the Romantic movement and will tell a wonderful story that conveys to us much of what we need to know about Berlioz the man: his passion, his impulsiveness, and in the end, his good sense. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will delve more deeply into his biography and his proclivity for compositional gigantism, using his Requiem Mass of 1837 as an example. Background: The Romantic Era Cult (really, fetish) of Individual Expression An idealized image of the middle-class “individual” dominated the thought and art of the second half of the eighteenth century, a period generally referred to as the Enlightenment and, in music history, the Classical Era. This Enlightenment elevation of an idealized “individual person” saw its political denouement in the French Revolution (1789-1795) and its musical denouement in Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) and the subsequent Romantic era cult of individual expression. Whereas Classical era […]
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We mark the death on March 1, 2015 – six years ago today – of the American jazz producer and founder of Riverside Records and Milestone Records Orrin Keepnews, in El Cerrito California, but a couple of stones’ throws from where I’m writing this blog. Born in da Bronx on March 2, 1923, Keepnews died one day before what would have been his 92nd birthday. Keepnews remains one of those indispensable people who made entire careers possible, who protected and respected musicians in an often-vicious artistic environment, who labored in the background and was thus someone whose contributions are often overlooked. Well, not here; not today. We will get to Mr. Keepnews in a moment. But first: March 1st is one of those “feast days” during which so much stuff happened in music history that any number of anniversaries or events could have occupied the bulk of today’s post. As I would never forgive myself for not mentioning at least some of them, here we go. We mark the birth on March 1, 1810 – 221 years ago today – of the miraculous Frédéric François Chopin in Żelazowa Wola, Poland, not far from Warsaw. He died, all-too-young 39 years later, […]
The post Music History Monday: Orrin Keepnews: With Great Respect and Appreciation first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the death on March 1, 2015 – six years ago today – of the American jazz producer and founder of Riverside Records and Milestone Records Orrin Keepnews, in El Cerrito California, but a couple of stones’ throws from where I’m writing this blog. Born in da Bronx on March 2, 1923, Keepnews died one day before what would have been his 92nd birthday. Keepnews remains one of those indispensable people who made entire careers possible, who protected and respected musicians in an often-vicious artistic environment, who labored in the background and was thus someone whose contributions are often overlooked. Well, not here; not today. We will get to Mr. Keepnews in a moment. But first: March 1st is one of those “feast days” during which so much stuff happened in music history that any number of anniversaries or events could have occupied the bulk of today’s post. As I would never forgive myself for not mentioning at least some of them, here we go. We mark the birth on March 1, 1810 – 221 years ago today – of the miraculous Frédéric François Chopin in Żelazowa Wola, Poland, not far from Warsaw. He died, all-too-young 39 years later, […]
The post Music History Monday: Orrin Keepnews: With Great Respect and Appreciation first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the premiere on February 22, 1878 – 143 years ago today – of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor in a concert of the Russian Musical Society in Moscow, under the baton of Nicolai Rubinstein. The story of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 and the two women that inspired it is a fascinating one, a story that desperately wants to be told in some detail. Therefore, I am stretching it across two posts: today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes. Tchaikovsky at 37 Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) celebrated his 37th birthday on May 7, 1877. He was a man with many secrets and many fears: a cross-dressing homosexual with a penchant for teenaged boys living and working in one of the most homophobic societies ever: Tsarist Russia. Not surprisingly given his sexuality and the dangers it created for him, Tchaikovsky was over-sensitive to a fault, given to anxiety attacks, extended bouts of weeping, deep self-loathing and dependence on alcohol and tobacco. At the time of his 37th birthday Tchaikovsky was living in Moscow (where he taught at the Moscow Conservatory) and had begun sketching his fourth symphony. It was at this moment in time that – […]
The post Music History Monday: Tchaikovsky: Two Women and a Symphony first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the premiere on February 22, 1878 – 143 years ago today – of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor in a concert of the Russian Musical Society in Moscow, under the baton of Nicolai Rubinstein. The story of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 and the two women that inspired it is a fascinating one, a story that desperately wants to be told in some detail. Therefore, I am stretching it across two posts: today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes. Tchaikovsky at 37 Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) celebrated his 37th birthday on May 7, 1877. He was a man with many secrets and many fears: a cross-dressing homosexual with a penchant for teenaged boys living and working in one of the most homophobic societies ever: Tsarist Russia. Not surprisingly given his sexuality and the dangers it created for him, Tchaikovsky was over-sensitive to a fault, given to anxiety attacks, extended bouts of weeping, deep self-loathing and dependence on alcohol and tobacco. At the time of his 37th birthday Tchaikovsky was living in Moscow (where he taught at the Moscow Conservatory) and had begun sketching his fourth symphony. It was at this moment in time that – […]
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February 15 is one of those crazy days during which so much happened in the world of music that we are de facto forced to wonder if there is some metaphysical explanation for why this date should be a nexus of musical-historical activity! In an attempt to answer that question, I have probed. Ouch. Here is some of what I have found. February 15 is the 46th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. As of today, 319 days remain until the end of the year (320 days in leap years). It was on this day in 506 that Khosrau II was crowned as the last great Sassanian king (or “shah”) of Persia. Whoa. Was that a feather that just knocked me over? On this day in 706, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian II (668-711) had his predecessors, the Emperors Leontios and Tiberios III publicly executed in the Hippodrome of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul). Now, lest we think that Justinian II was just a disrespectful welp, offing his predecessors on a whim, we’d observe that back in 695 the 27-year-old Justinian II had been deposed and, adding nasal insult to injury, had his nose cut off (thus his nickname, “Justinian Rhinotmetos”, meaning […]
The post Music History Monday: What a Day! first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
February 15 is one of those crazy days during which so much happened in the world of music that we are de facto forced to wonder if there is some metaphysical explanation for why this date should be a nexus of musical-historical activity! In an attempt to answer that question, I have probed. Ouch. Here is some of what I have found. February 15 is the 46th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. As of today, 319 days remain until the end of the year (320 days in leap years). It was on this day in 506 that Khosrau II was crowned as the last great Sassanian king (or “shah”) of Persia. Whoa. Was that a feather that just knocked me over? On this day in 706, the Byzantine Emperor Justinian II (668-711) had his predecessors, the Emperors Leontios and Tiberios III publicly executed in the Hippodrome of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul). Now, lest we think that Justinian II was just a disrespectful welp, offing his predecessors on a whim, we’d observe that back in 695 the 27-year-old Justinian II had been deposed and, adding nasal insult to injury, had his nose cut off (thus his nickname, “Justinian Rhinotmetos”, meaning […]
The post Music History Monday: What a Day! first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We celebrate the birth on February 8, 1932 – 89 years ago today – of the American composer, conductor, pianist and trombonist John Towner Williams, in the neighborhood of Flushing, in the New York City borough of Queens. Williams must be regarded as among the greatest film composers of all time and is without a doubt the most successful in terms of awards garnered and dollars earned. Let’s do the numbers, if only to get them out of the way. To date, John Williams has created the scores for 8 of the 25 highest grossing films in American box office history. His 115(!) film scores include those for: The Reivers (1969) The Poseidon Adventure (1972) The Long Goodbye (1973) The Paper Chase (1973) Earthquake (1974) The Towering Inferno (1974) The Eiger Sanction (1975) Jaws (1975) The Missouri Breaks (1976) Midway (1976) Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) E. T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982) The Witches of Eastwick (1987) Empire of the Sun (1987) Born on the Fourth of July (1989) Hook (1991) JFK (1991) Schindler’s List (1993) Sabrina (1995) Seven Years in Tibet (1997) Amistad (1997) Saving Private Ryan (1998) Angela’s Ashes (1999) Minority Report (2002) The Terminal (2004) […]
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We celebrate the birth on February 8, 1932 – 89 years ago today – of the American composer, conductor, pianist and trombonist John Towner Williams, in the neighborhood of Flushing, in the New York City borough of Queens. Williams must be regarded as among the greatest film composers of all time and is without a doubt the most successful in terms of awards garnered and dollars earned. Let’s do the numbers, if only to get them out of the way. To date, John Williams has created the scores for 8 of the 25 highest grossing films in American box office history. His 115(!) film scores include those for: The Reivers (1969) The Poseidon Adventure (1972) The Long Goodbye (1973) The Paper Chase (1973) Earthquake (1974) The Towering Inferno (1974) The Eiger Sanction (1975) Jaws (1975) The Missouri Breaks (1976) Midway (1976) Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) E. T. the Extra Terrestrial (1982) The Witches of Eastwick (1987) Empire of the Sun (1987) Born on the Fourth of July (1989) Hook (1991) JFK (1991) Schindler’s List (1993) Sabrina (1995) Seven Years in Tibet (1997) Amistad (1997) Saving Private Ryan (1998) Angela’s Ashes (1999) Minority Report (2002) The Terminal (2004) […]
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There are times I crave spicy – I mean really spicy – food. (Speaking of which: I knew a guy at university from San Antonio – we belonged to the same “eating club’ which was our version of fraternities – who put Tabasco Sauce on everything: cereal, peanut butter sandwiches, vanilla ice cream, I kid you not; everything. Next to Berto, who was a professional-grade consumer of capsaicin, I am merely a hobbyist. Then again, I never saw Berto consume a Carolina Reaper or a Trinidad Scorpion, hot peppers that both exceed 2 million Scoville heat units, making them 40% as hot as military-grade pepper spray.) But back to me, and my occasional but necessary consumption of Serrano peppers, Vietnamese Chili Garlic Sauce, and Calabrian chili peppers. Do I like having my mouth turned into a flaming pit of hell? No, well, but maybe . . . Do I enjoy having the mucus membranes in my sinuses go haywire? Not particularly, but. . . Is it fun having my eyes tear and turn red? Um. Do I like when all of this happens? And now the awful truth: I don’t just like it, I love it. And there it is: […]
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There are times I crave spicy – I mean really spicy – food. (Speaking of which: I knew a guy at university from San Antonio – we belonged to the same “eating club’ which was our version of fraternities – who put Tabasco Sauce on everything: cereal, peanut butter sandwiches, vanilla ice cream, I kid you not; everything. Next to Berto, who was a professional-grade consumer of capsaicin, I am merely a hobbyist. Then again, I never saw Berto consume a Carolina Reaper or a Trinidad Scorpion, hot peppers that both exceed 2 million Scoville heat units, making them 40% as hot as military-grade pepper spray.) But back to me, and my occasional but necessary consumption of Serrano peppers, Vietnamese Chili Garlic Sauce, and Calabrian chili peppers. Do I like having my mouth turned into a flaming pit of hell? No, well, but maybe . . . Do I enjoy having the mucus membranes in my sinuses go haywire? Not particularly, but. . . Is it fun having my eyes tear and turn red? Um. Do I like when all of this happens? And now the awful truth: I don’t just like it, I love it. And there it is: […]
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We mark the world premiere – on January 25, 1909 – 112 years ago today – of Ricard Strauss’ opera Elektra at the Semperoper, the opera house of the Sächsische Staatsoper – the Saxon State Opera – in Dresden. Today acknowledged as one of the masterworks of the operatic repertoire, the premiere of Elektra uncorked a degree of critical controversy equaled only by Strauss’ own opera Salome in 1905 and Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1913. If I were to ask you who was the most famous and controversial living composer in 1909, who would you name? Gustav Mahler, born in 1860? No: Mahler was then best known as a conductor and a composer of long and rarely performed symphonies. Igor Stravinsky, born in 1882? No: Stravinsky didn’t appear on Europe’s artistic radar until 1910, when his ballet The Firebird was premiered in Paris on June 25th of that year. Arnold Schoenberg, born 1874? In 1909, Schoenberg was hardly known outside of his native Vienna, and many (if not most) of those Viennese who did know his music considered him a crackpot; okay, a talented crackpot. You know where this is going. The most famous, controversial, and (not […]
The post Music History Monday: When Richard Strauss was “Modernity”: ‘Salome’ and ‘Elektra’ first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the world premiere – on January 25, 1909 – 112 years ago today – of Ricard Strauss’ opera Elektra at the Semperoper, the opera house of the Sächsische Staatsoper – the Saxon State Opera – in Dresden. Today acknowledged as one of the masterworks of the operatic repertoire, the premiere of Elektra uncorked a degree of critical controversy equaled only by Strauss’ own opera Salome in 1905 and Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in 1913. If I were to ask you who was the most famous and controversial living composer in 1909, who would you name? Gustav Mahler, born in 1860? No: Mahler was then best known as a conductor and a composer of long and rarely performed symphonies. Igor Stravinsky, born in 1882? No: Stravinsky didn’t appear on Europe’s artistic radar until 1910, when his ballet The Firebird was premiered in Paris on June 25th of that year. Arnold Schoenberg, born 1874? In 1909, Schoenberg was hardly known outside of his native Vienna, and many (if not most) of those Viennese who did know his music considered him a crackpot; okay, a talented crackpot. You know where this is going. The most famous, controversial, and (not […]
The post Music History Monday: When Richard Strauss was “Modernity”: ‘Salome’ and ‘Elektra’ first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
January is usually a concert-heavy month, following, as it does, the holiday-heavy month of December. In a non-COVID environment, theaters thrive in the cold and early darkness of January, as folks look for something to do while they wait out the winter in anticipation of warmer, longer days and baseball season. January 18th is particularly notable for concerts that have taken place on this date, concerts that with one glaring exception I personally would have been thrilled to attend. Stuck at home as we presently are thanks to you-know-what, let us live vicariously through these January 18 concerts, even as we anticipate – hungrily, hopefully – the soon-enough-to-be attended concerts of January 2022. We will focus primarily on the first of these concerts – the premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, The Nose – after which we’ll do a quick prance through five other January 18-specific concert events of note. The Nose We mark the premiere performance on January 18, 1930 – 91 years ago today – of Dmitri Shostakovich’s first opera, The Nose, which was performed by the Maly Opera Theater in Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg). Completed in 1928 when Shostakovich was just 22 years old, The Nose is based […]
The post Music History Monday: Concerts I Would Like to Have Attended (and One I am Glad to have Missed!) first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
January is usually a concert-heavy month, following, as it does, the holiday-heavy month of December. In a non-COVID environment, theaters thrive in the cold and early darkness of January, as folks look for something to do while they wait out the winter in anticipation of warmer, longer days and baseball season. January 18th is particularly notable for concerts that have taken place on this date, concerts that with one glaring exception I personally would have been thrilled to attend. Stuck at home as we presently are thanks to you-know-what, let us live vicariously through these January 18 concerts, even as we anticipate – hungrily, hopefully – the soon-enough-to-be attended concerts of January 2022. We will focus primarily on the first of these concerts – the premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera, The Nose – after which we’ll do a quick prance through five other January 18-specific concert events of note. The Nose We mark the premiere performance on January 18, 1930 – 91 years ago today – of Dmitri Shostakovich’s first opera, The Nose, which was performed by the Maly Opera Theater in Leningrad (today’s St. Petersburg). Completed in 1928 when Shostakovich was just 22 years old, The Nose is based […]
The post Music History Monday: Concerts I Would Like to Have Attended (and One I am Glad to have Missed!) first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the first performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet on January 11, 1940 – 81 years ago today – by the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad, what today is St. Petersburg. Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891 in Ukraine. He attended the St. Petersburg Conservatory as both a pianist and composer and graduated in 1914, first in his class. His rise to fame as both a pianist and composer was meteoric, and by 1917, the 26-year-old Prokofiev had come to be considered among Russia’s very best and brightest. Unfortunately, that’s also when current events had their way him. By 1917, World War One had been raging for three years. As the only son of a widow, Prokofiev had not been called up into the Russian army; a good thing, considering that four million Russians died in combat between 1914 and 1917. Violent frustration over the Russian war effort led Czar Nicholas II to abdicate on March 2, 1917. An armed insurrection brought Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party to power in November of 1917, and the Russian Civil War began. The Civil War would last for five horrific years and kill an additional 9 million Russians. In 1918, deciding […]
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We mark the first performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet on January 11, 1940 – 81 years ago today – by the Kirov Ballet in Leningrad, what today is St. Petersburg. Prokofiev was born on April 23, 1891 in Ukraine. He attended the St. Petersburg Conservatory as both a pianist and composer and graduated in 1914, first in his class. His rise to fame as both a pianist and composer was meteoric, and by 1917, the 26-year-old Prokofiev had come to be considered among Russia’s very best and brightest. Unfortunately, that’s also when current events had their way him. By 1917, World War One had been raging for three years. As the only son of a widow, Prokofiev had not been called up into the Russian army; a good thing, considering that four million Russians died in combat between 1914 and 1917. Violent frustration over the Russian war effort led Czar Nicholas II to abdicate on March 2, 1917. An armed insurrection brought Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party to power in November of 1917, and the Russian Civil War began. The Civil War would last for five horrific years and kill an additional 9 million Russians. In 1918, deciding […]
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What July 4th is for Americans; what Bastille Day on July 14th is for the French; what St. Patrick’s Day on March 17th is for the Irish, and what the Black-Necked Crane Festival on November 11th is for the Bhutanese, so January 4th is for fans of rock ‘n’ roll: a day when so much stuff happened as to enshrine it as a major, rock ‘n’ roll holiday! What, pray tell, happened on this day? Thank you for asking. Elvis Presley and Sam Philips It was on January 4, 1954 – 67 years ago today – that Elvis Presley, four days short of his 20th birthday (on January 8), came to the attention of the record producer and founder of Sun Records, Sam Phillips (1923-2003). It was the singular event that vaulted Elvis to stardom. Here’s what happened. On this day in 1954, Elvis made his second visit to the studios of the Memphis Recording Studio, which shared an office with Sun Records. On his first visit – six months before, on July 18, 1953 – Presley had recorded two songs (at his expense) on a two-sided, 10-inch acetate disc, claiming that the recording was a “gift for his mother.” […]
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What July 4th is for Americans; what Bastille Day on July 14th is for the French; what St. Patrick’s Day on March 17th is for the Irish, and what the Black-Necked Crane Festival on November 11th is for the Bhutanese, so January 4th is for fans of rock ‘n’ roll: a day when so much stuff happened as to enshrine it as a major, rock ‘n’ roll holiday! What, pray tell, happened on this day? Thank you for asking. Elvis Presley and Sam Philips It was on January 4, 1954 – 67 years ago today – that Elvis Presley, four days short of his 20th birthday (on January 8), came to the attention of the record producer and founder of Sun Records, Sam Phillips (1923-2003). It was the singular event that vaulted Elvis to stardom. Here’s what happened. On this day in 1954, Elvis made his second visit to the studios of the Memphis Recording Studio, which shared an office with Sun Records. On his first visit – six months before, on July 18, 1953 – Presley had recorded two songs (at his expense) on a two-sided, 10-inch acetate disc, claiming that the recording was a “gift for his mother.” […]
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We mark the death on December 28, 1937 – 83 years ago today – of the French composer and pianist Maurice Ravel, in Paris, at the age of 62. We will get to the magnifique and formidable Monsieur Ravel in a moment, but first, we’ve a birthday to acknowledge. We mark the birth on December 28, 1896 – 124 years ago today – of the American composer and teacher Roger Huntingdon Sessions, in Brooklyn New York. He died, at the age of 88, on March 16, 1985, in Princeton, New Jersey. I myself never studied with Roger Sessions; he had retired from the Princeton faculty in 1965, while I was in attendance from 1972 to 1976. Nevertheless, the “old man” cut a wide swath on campus. And why the heck not? A multiple Pulitzer Prize winner; friend of Arnold Schoenberg, Aaron Copland, and Thomas Mann; Norton Fellow at Harvard: there was hardly an American musical event that took place during the twentieth century that Sessions wasn’t in some way involved with. While I never studied with Sessions, I did indeed study with his protégé Andrew Welsh Imbrie (1921-2007) when I was a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley; […]
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We mark the death on December 28, 1937 – 83 years ago today – of the French composer and pianist Maurice Ravel, in Paris, at the age of 62. We will get to the magnifique and formidable Monsieur Ravel in a moment, but first, we’ve a birthday to acknowledge. We mark the birth on December 28, 1896 – 124 years ago today – of the American composer and teacher Roger Huntingdon Sessions, in Brooklyn New York. He died, at the age of 88, on March 16, 1985, in Princeton, New Jersey. I myself never studied with Roger Sessions; he had retired from the Princeton faculty in 1965, while I was in attendance from 1972 to 1976. Nevertheless, the “old man” cut a wide swath on campus. And why the heck not? A multiple Pulitzer Prize winner; friend of Arnold Schoenberg, Aaron Copland, and Thomas Mann; Norton Fellow at Harvard: there was hardly an American musical event that took place during the twentieth century that Sessions wasn’t in some way involved with. While I never studied with Sessions, I did indeed study with his protégé Andrew Welsh Imbrie (1921-2007) when I was a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley; […]
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We mark and celebrate two composers born on this date. Zdeněk Fibich was born on December 21, 1850; 170 years ago today. Frank Zappa was born on December 21, 1940, 80 years ago today. The two had more in common with each other than just a name that started with the letter “z”. They were both eclectic composers, who brought to bear in their music a wide variety of influences, influences that were deemed “incompatible” by their critics. Oh yes, their “critics”: as composers, both Fibich and Zappa were controversial. They both suffered from poor health and they both died young: Fibich at 49 and Zappa at 52. Frank Vincent Zappa was born on this date in 1940 in Baltimore, Maryland, the eldest of four children in an Italian-American family. Zappa’s father Francis was a defense-industry scientist, and as such the family lived a peripatetic existence: Baltimore, then to Florida; back to Maryland; then to Monterey, California; Claremont, California; El Cajon, California; San Diego, California; and finally, in 1956 (when Zappa was sixteen) to Lancaster, California, an aerospace and farming community in the Antelope Valley, in the Mojave Desert, near Edwards Airforce Base. The young Frank Zappa was chronically ill; […]
The post Music History Monday: The Top “ZZ’s” – Frank Zappa and Zdeněk Fibich first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark and celebrate two composers born on this date. Zdeněk Fibich was born on December 21, 1850; 170 years ago today. Frank Zappa was born on December 21, 1940, 80 years ago today. The two had more in common with each other than just a name that started with the letter “z”. They were both eclectic composers, who brought to bear in their music a wide variety of influences, influences that were deemed “incompatible” by their critics. Oh yes, their “critics”: as composers, both Fibich and Zappa were controversial. They both suffered from poor health and they both died young: Fibich at 49 and Zappa at 52. Frank Vincent Zappa was born on this date in 1940 in Baltimore, Maryland, the eldest of four children in an Italian-American family. Zappa’s father Francis was a defense-industry scientist, and as such the family lived a peripatetic existence: Baltimore, then to Florida; back to Maryland; then to Monterey, California; Claremont, California; El Cajon, California; San Diego, California; and finally, in 1956 (when Zappa was sixteen) to Lancaster, California, an aerospace and farming community in the Antelope Valley, in the Mojave Desert, near Edwards Airforce Base. The young Frank Zappa was chronically ill; […]
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We mark the premiere performance on December 14, 1925 – 95 years ago today – of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck in Berlin, conducted by Erich Kleiber. That premiere performance was preceded by 137 rehearsals. Wozzeck was, and remains, one of the great masterworks of the twentieth century. Johann Franz Wozzeck, the title character of Berg’s opera, is described as being: “Thirty years and seven months old, militia man and fusilier in the second regiment, second battalion, fourth company; uneducated, uncomprehending.” Wozzeck is slowly being driven insane by those around him, something we become aware of early in the first act. Composed in greatest part during and immediately after World War One, Johann Franz Wozzeck’s incipient madness reflects not just the eroding mind of a doomed soldier but a doomed generation as well. According to the musicology Professor Glenn Watkins of the University of Michigan: “Wozzeck’s growing madness is as vivid a projection of impending world doom as any to come out of the Great War.” Berg’s opera is based on a play based on a real-life person: a confessed murderer named Johann Christian Woyzeck (W-o-y-z-e-c-k). This Woyzeck was a Leipzig-born wigmaker and barber who later enlisted in the army. In […]
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We mark the premiere performance on December 14, 1925 – 95 years ago today – of Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck in Berlin, conducted by Erich Kleiber. That premiere performance was preceded by 137 rehearsals. Wozzeck was, and remains, one of the great masterworks of the twentieth century. Johann Franz Wozzeck, the title character of Berg’s opera, is described as being: “Thirty years and seven months old, militia man and fusilier in the second regiment, second battalion, fourth company; uneducated, uncomprehending.” Wozzeck is slowly being driven insane by those around him, something we become aware of early in the first act. Composed in greatest part during and immediately after World War One, Johann Franz Wozzeck’s incipient madness reflects not just the eroding mind of a doomed soldier but a doomed generation as well. According to the musicology Professor Glenn Watkins of the University of Michigan: “Wozzeck’s growing madness is as vivid a projection of impending world doom as any to come out of the Great War.” Berg’s opera is based on a play based on a real-life person: a confessed murderer named Johann Christian Woyzeck (W-o-y-z-e-c-k). This Woyzeck was a Leipzig-born wigmaker and barber who later enlisted in the army. In […]
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Prince Josef Lobkowitz and Some Number One Songs That Will Live in Infamy! We have three items on our calendar-driven agenda today, which also happens to be the 79th anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. One of these items is a birth; one of them is a recording session; and one of them notes some songs that will live in infamy! We begin with the recording session. On December 7, 1967 – 53 years ago today – Otis Ray Redding, Jr. (1941-1967) entered the recording studio of Stax Records in Memphis Tennessee and recorded (Sittin’ On) The Dock of The Bay. Redding had written the first verse of the song while staying on a houseboat at Waldo Point, in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Sausalito (which I am presently looking at as I write this from across the Bay in Oakland). The song went on to become his greatest hit, something – tragically – the 26-year-old Redding never lived to see; he was killed in an airplane crash just three days after the recording date, on December 10, 1967. Redding’s whistling at the conclusion of the song, just before […]
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Prince Josef Lobkowitz and Some Number One Songs That Will Live in Infamy! We have three items on our calendar-driven agenda today, which also happens to be the 79th anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. One of these items is a birth; one of them is a recording session; and one of them notes some songs that will live in infamy! We begin with the recording session. On December 7, 1967 – 53 years ago today – Otis Ray Redding, Jr. (1941-1967) entered the recording studio of Stax Records in Memphis Tennessee and recorded (Sittin’ On) The Dock of The Bay. Redding had written the first verse of the song while staying on a houseboat at Waldo Point, in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Sausalito (which I am presently looking at as I write this from across the Bay in Oakland). The song went on to become his greatest hit, something – tragically – the 26-year-old Redding never lived to see; he was killed in an airplane crash just three days after the recording date, on December 10, 1967. Redding’s whistling at the conclusion of the song, just before […]
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We mark the death on November 30, 1954 – 66 years ago today – of the German conductor and composer Gustav Heinrich Ernst Martin Wilhelm Furtwängler, who was one of the most important and controversial musicians of the twentieth century. We will talk all about Maestro Furtwängler in just a moment. But first: November 30 is a busy day in music history, and we have some important births and deaths to mark. We mark the birth on November 30, 1813 – 207 years ago today – of the French pianist, composer, and teacher Charles-Valentin Alkan in Paris. Alkan was a great piano virtuoso and an equally great oddball, who composed some of the most impossibly virtuosic piano music ever put to paper. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will celebrate Alkan and his Grande Sonata, Op. 33; his Sonatine, Op. 61; and his “Twelve etudes in all the minor keys” Op. 39, No. 12, an etude entitled “Aesop’s Feast”. The following three November 30th oriented entries all deal with musicians who made a profound impression on me growing up in the 1960s. Long before “Weird Al” Yankovic (born 1959) created satirical songs parodying pop culture, there was Allan Sherman, who was […]
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We mark the death on November 30, 1954 – 66 years ago today – of the German conductor and composer Gustav Heinrich Ernst Martin Wilhelm Furtwängler, who was one of the most important and controversial musicians of the twentieth century. We will talk all about Maestro Furtwängler in just a moment. But first: November 30 is a busy day in music history, and we have some important births and deaths to mark. We mark the birth on November 30, 1813 – 207 years ago today – of the French pianist, composer, and teacher Charles-Valentin Alkan in Paris. Alkan was a great piano virtuoso and an equally great oddball, who composed some of the most impossibly virtuosic piano music ever put to paper. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will celebrate Alkan and his Grande Sonata, Op. 33; his Sonatine, Op. 61; and his “Twelve etudes in all the minor keys” Op. 39, No. 12, an etude entitled “Aesop’s Feast”. The following three November 30th oriented entries all deal with musicians who made a profound impression on me growing up in the 1960s. Long before “Weird Al” Yankovic (born 1959) created satirical songs parodying pop culture, there was Allan Sherman, who was […]
The post Music History Monday: Furtwängler first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
Before getting on to our central topic for today’s post – naughty, naughty musicians – we need to give a shoutout to the great Spanish composer and conductor Manuel de Falla who was born on November 23, 1876 – 144 years ago today – in the Andalucían port city of Cadiz. We will celebrate de Falla tomorrow in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post, which will focus on his ballet El amor brujo (meaning “The Magician Love”) of 1915, and the Carlos Saura movie of the same title (from 1986) based of de Falla’s ballet. On to today’s feature presentation, Musicians Behaving Badly. On November 23, 1956 – 64 years ago today – a sheet metal worker named Louis Balint was arrested after attacking the King – Elvis Presley – in Toledo, Ohio. Here’s what happened. On November 22, 1956, Elvis Presley and his band played two shows in Toledo’s Sports Arena. Elvis’ fame and popularity had skyrocketed since his first two appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show just a few weeks before, on September 9 and October 28, 1956. Along with the concerts, November 22, 1956 was an auspicious day for Elvis and his fans in Toledo, as that was […]
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Before getting on to our central topic for today’s post – naughty, naughty musicians – we need to give a shoutout to the great Spanish composer and conductor Manuel de Falla who was born on November 23, 1876 – 144 years ago today – in the Andalucían port city of Cadiz. We will celebrate de Falla tomorrow in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post, which will focus on his ballet El amor brujo (meaning “The Magician Love”) of 1915, and the Carlos Saura movie of the same title (from 1986) based of de Falla’s ballet. On to today’s feature presentation, Musicians Behaving Badly. On November 23, 1956 – 64 years ago today – a sheet metal worker named Louis Balint was arrested after attacking the King – Elvis Presley – in Toledo, Ohio. Here’s what happened. On November 22, 1956, Elvis Presley and his band played two shows in Toledo’s Sports Arena. Elvis’ fame and popularity had skyrocketed since his first two appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show just a few weeks before, on September 9 and October 28, 1956. Along with the concerts, November 22, 1956 was an auspicious day for Elvis and his fans in Toledo, as that was […]
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It was on November 16, 1848 – 172 years ago today – that Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) performed his final concert. It was given at a benefit ball held in London’s Guildhall, staged to raise money for Polish exiles. Chopin, 38-years-old, was desperately ill. And although he lived another 11 months, he was never to perform again. Frédéric François Chopin (born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin) was a quintessential Romantic figure: a restless man of genius; a forlorn lover who could never settle down; a prodigy whose music and piano playing enchanted his listeners from the time he was an adolescent; someone whose muse demanded that he work in a white heat for days at a time despite his physical frailty and dismal health. He was a consumptive at a time when consumption (that is, tuberculosis) was considered that most “romantic” of illnesses, the “disease of genius”. Of course, if you actually had tuberculosis, you didn’t consider it “romantic” at all; you were too busy trying not to cough your lungs out and to just freaking breathe. Chopin himself had no patience for the entire Romantic trip and claimed to be disgusted with the artistic precepts and pretentions of Romanticism, which he considered self-indulgent […]
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It was on November 16, 1848 – 172 years ago today – that Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849) performed his final concert. It was given at a benefit ball held in London’s Guildhall, staged to raise money for Polish exiles. Chopin, 38-years-old, was desperately ill. And although he lived another 11 months, he was never to perform again. Frédéric François Chopin (born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin) was a quintessential Romantic figure: a restless man of genius; a forlorn lover who could never settle down; a prodigy whose music and piano playing enchanted his listeners from the time he was an adolescent; someone whose muse demanded that he work in a white heat for days at a time despite his physical frailty and dismal health. He was a consumptive at a time when consumption (that is, tuberculosis) was considered that most “romantic” of illnesses, the “disease of genius”. Of course, if you actually had tuberculosis, you didn’t consider it “romantic” at all; you were too busy trying not to cough your lungs out and to just freaking breathe. Chopin himself had no patience for the entire Romantic trip and claimed to be disgusted with the artistic precepts and pretentions of Romanticism, which he considered self-indulgent […]
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We mark the first complete performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 on November 9, 1901 – 119 years ago today – in Moscow. Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) was the piano soloist. The performance was conducted by his cousin: the pianist, conductor and composer Alexander Siloti (1863-1945). Before moving on to Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto and the compelling story behind it, we’ve an utterly irresistible anniversary to note. It was on this day in 1974 – 46 years ago today – that the unthinkable occurred onstage at the New York City Opera, and no, I’m not talking about copulating dogs during the Act I party scene of Rigoletto. The opera being performed was Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in Maschera (“The Masked Ball”) of 1859. In the starring role of Riccardo was the Italian-American tenor Michele Molese. Molese was a mainstay of the New York City Opera, and over the years he appeared there in almost every leading tenor role in the standard repertoire. He was known, particularly, as being among Beverly Sills’ favorite leading men, and together they appeared in new productions of, among other operas, Manon (by Jules Massenet, 1884), Faust (Charles Gounod, 1859), and Lucia di Lammermoor (Gaetano Donizetti, […]
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We mark the first complete performance of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 on November 9, 1901 – 119 years ago today – in Moscow. Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) was the piano soloist. The performance was conducted by his cousin: the pianist, conductor and composer Alexander Siloti (1863-1945). Before moving on to Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto and the compelling story behind it, we’ve an utterly irresistible anniversary to note. It was on this day in 1974 – 46 years ago today – that the unthinkable occurred onstage at the New York City Opera, and no, I’m not talking about copulating dogs during the Act I party scene of Rigoletto. The opera being performed was Giuseppe Verdi’s Un ballo in Maschera (“The Masked Ball”) of 1859. In the starring role of Riccardo was the Italian-American tenor Michele Molese. Molese was a mainstay of the New York City Opera, and over the years he appeared there in almost every leading tenor role in the standard repertoire. He was known, particularly, as being among Beverly Sills’ favorite leading men, and together they appeared in new productions of, among other operas, Manon (by Jules Massenet, 1884), Faust (Charles Gounod, 1859), and Lucia di Lammermoor (Gaetano Donizetti, […]
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I’m doing something today that I have never done before in Music History Monday and which, I hope, I will never have to do again. November 2 is not a day bereft of musical events. For example, November 2, 1739 saw the birth, in Vienna, of the composer and violinist Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, who was a friend of Beethoven’s and who went on to become the concertmaster of the Esterhazy Orchestra. November 2, 1752 saw the birth of Count Andrey Kirillovich Razumovsky in St. Petersburg. In 1792, Count Razumovsky became the Russian Ambassador to the Austrian Court in Vienna. It was as a resident of Vienna that he formed his own house string quartet and commissioned Beethoven to compose three quartets for his “Razumovsky String Quartet” (those quartets would be Op. 59, nos. 1, 2, and 3). Beethoven further immortalized Razumovsky by dedicating both his Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6 to the Count. On this day in 1984, the Reverend Marvin Gaye Sr. was given a suspended six-year sentence and probation for shooting and killing his son, the singer and songwriter Marvin Gaye (1939-1984). Initially charged with first degree murder, the charges were reduced to voluntary manslaughter when it […]
The post Music History Monday: Shostakovich and His String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110 first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
I’m doing something today that I have never done before in Music History Monday and which, I hope, I will never have to do again. November 2 is not a day bereft of musical events. For example, November 2, 1739 saw the birth, in Vienna, of the composer and violinist Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, who was a friend of Beethoven’s and who went on to become the concertmaster of the Esterhazy Orchestra. November 2, 1752 saw the birth of Count Andrey Kirillovich Razumovsky in St. Petersburg. In 1792, Count Razumovsky became the Russian Ambassador to the Austrian Court in Vienna. It was as a resident of Vienna that he formed his own house string quartet and commissioned Beethoven to compose three quartets for his “Razumovsky String Quartet” (those quartets would be Op. 59, nos. 1, 2, and 3). Beethoven further immortalized Razumovsky by dedicating both his Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6 to the Count. On this day in 1984, the Reverend Marvin Gaye Sr. was given a suspended six-year sentence and probation for shooting and killing his son, the singer and songwriter Marvin Gaye (1939-1984). Initially charged with first degree murder, the charges were reduced to voluntary manslaughter when it […]
The post Music History Monday: Shostakovich and His String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110 first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the riot that occurred on October 26, 1958 – 62 years ago today – when Bill Haley and his Comets played a concert at Berlin’s Sportpalast to an audience of some 7000 people. Signs of trouble had occurred at Haley’s first two German concerts on the previous two evenings, the first one in Hamburg and the next in Essen. But no one could have anticipated the mayhem in Berlin, where some 500 rock ‘n’ rollers and police staged a fist-and-stick battle during the show. Five policemen were badly beaten, six audience members severely injured, while damages to the venue amounted to over 50,000 Deutsche Marks. Both the East and West German authorities reacted with outrage. The West Berlin senate banned all future rock ‘n’ roll concerts. In East Germany, Neues Deutschland, the official Communist Party organ, condemned Haley in a front-page editorial for: “turning the youth of the land of Bach and Beethoven into raging beasts.” (With all due respect we would observe that just a few years before, “the youth of the land of Bach and Beethoven” had indeed behaved like raging beasts.) The newspapers in both East and West Berlin agreed that the Haley riots were: […]
The post Music History Monday: Musical Riots and Assorted Mayhem first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the riot that occurred on October 26, 1958 – 62 years ago today – when Bill Haley and his Comets played a concert at Berlin’s Sportpalast to an audience of some 7000 people. Signs of trouble had occurred at Haley’s first two German concerts on the previous two evenings, the first one in Hamburg and the next in Essen. But no one could have anticipated the mayhem in Berlin, where some 500 rock ‘n’ rollers and police staged a fist-and-stick battle during the show. Five policemen were badly beaten, six audience members severely injured, while damages to the venue amounted to over 50,000 Deutsche Marks. Both the East and West German authorities reacted with outrage. The West Berlin senate banned all future rock ‘n’ roll concerts. In East Germany, Neues Deutschland, the official Communist Party organ, condemned Haley in a front-page editorial for: “turning the youth of the land of Bach and Beethoven into raging beasts.” (With all due respect we would observe that just a few years before, “the youth of the land of Bach and Beethoven” had indeed behaved like raging beasts.) The newspapers in both East and West Berlin agreed that the Haley riots were: […]
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On October 19, 1814 – 206 years ago today – Franz Schubert composed his first masterwork, the song Gretchen am Spinnrade – “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel” – for solo voice and piano, on a text by Johann von Goethe. Schubert was 17 years old. It is an enduring and, in the end, unanswerable question: how many songs did Franz Schubert compose? It’s not that various sources haven’t tried to answer the question. For example, according to volume twenty of the Schubert Gesamptausgabe (“complete edition”), a massive project completed in the 1890s, Schubert composed 603 songs. According to the Belgian musicologist and Schubert scholar Reinhard van Hoorickx (1918-1997), writing in his Thematic Catalog of Schubert’s Works: New Additions, Corrections and Notes (published in1976), Schubert composed 660 songs. Not to be outdone, the English Schubert scholar, Maurice John Edwin Brown writing in his Essays on Schubert (Macmillan, 1966), claims that Schubert composed 708 songs. FYI, in a lecture I gave at San Francisco’s Herbst Theater on February 25, 2003 entitled “Schubert: On the Wings of His Songs” I indicated that he had composed 637 songs. (I know I wouldn’t have made that number up, but presently, I can’t for the life of […]
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On October 19, 1814 – 206 years ago today – Franz Schubert composed his first masterwork, the song Gretchen am Spinnrade – “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel” – for solo voice and piano, on a text by Johann von Goethe. Schubert was 17 years old. It is an enduring and, in the end, unanswerable question: how many songs did Franz Schubert compose? It’s not that various sources haven’t tried to answer the question. For example, according to volume twenty of the Schubert Gesamptausgabe (“complete edition”), a massive project completed in the 1890s, Schubert composed 603 songs. According to the Belgian musicologist and Schubert scholar Reinhard van Hoorickx (1918-1997), writing in his Thematic Catalog of Schubert’s Works: New Additions, Corrections and Notes (published in1976), Schubert composed 660 songs. Not to be outdone, the English Schubert scholar, Maurice John Edwin Brown writing in his Essays on Schubert (Macmillan, 1966), claims that Schubert composed 708 songs. FYI, in a lecture I gave at San Francisco’s Herbst Theater on February 25, 2003 entitled “Schubert: On the Wings of His Songs” I indicated that he had composed 637 songs. (I know I wouldn’t have made that number up, but presently, I can’t for the life of […]
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We mark the birth on October 12, 1872 – 148 years ago today – of the English composer, conductor, folksong collector and teacher Ralph (R-A-L-P-H, pronounced “Rayf”) Vaughan Williams in the village of Down Ampney, in the Cotswold district of Gloucester, 75 miles west of London. He died in London at the age of 85, on August 26, 1958. A confession: I came to the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams fairly late in my life. Sure, like most of us, I had heard his “greatest hits”; there was a time that when listening to a “Classical” radio station you couldn’t go a day without hearing one of them: the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910); The Lark Ascending (1914); and his Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934). But it wasn’t until I was researching and writing my Teaching Company/Great Courses survey The Symphony (which was recorded in October 2003) that I made a comprehensive study of his works, in this case, his symphonies. I was floored, and not for the first time – and I pray to heaven, not for the last – I experienced revelation: this fantastic repertoire, this whole new world of wonderful music that had been there […]
The post Music History Monday: And Please, Don’t Call Me “Ralph”! first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the birth on October 12, 1872 – 148 years ago today – of the English composer, conductor, folksong collector and teacher Ralph (R-A-L-P-H, pronounced “Rayf”) Vaughan Williams in the village of Down Ampney, in the Cotswold district of Gloucester, 75 miles west of London. He died in London at the age of 85, on August 26, 1958. A confession: I came to the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams fairly late in my life. Sure, like most of us, I had heard his “greatest hits”; there was a time that when listening to a “Classical” radio station you couldn’t go a day without hearing one of them: the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910); The Lark Ascending (1914); and his Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934). But it wasn’t until I was researching and writing my Teaching Company/Great Courses survey The Symphony (which was recorded in October 2003) that I made a comprehensive study of his works, in this case, his symphonies. I was floored, and not for the first time – and I pray to heaven, not for the last – I experienced revelation: this fantastic repertoire, this whole new world of wonderful music that had been there […]
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We mark the premiere performance on October 5, 1762 – 258 years ago today – of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice at the Burgtheater in Vienna, in the presence of Empress Maria Theresa her very self. The history of opera is not unlike the history of the movies or television: it is a medium of great artistic and intellectual potential cyclically debased by its potential for huge monetary gain. The first operas, composed between roughly 1600 and 1640 were courtly entertainments called “drammi per musica”: “dramas with music.” And that’s precisely what they were: stage dramas in which words and actions were deepened a gazillion-fold by setting them to music. Such entertainments were literate and sophisticated, and the great master of the genre was Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643). … Continue Reading – Only on Patreon! Listen on the Music History Monday Podcast Robert Greenberg Courses On Sale Now
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We mark the premiere performance on October 5, 1762 – 258 years ago today – of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice at the Burgtheater in Vienna, in the presence of Empress Maria Theresa her very self. The history of opera is not unlike the history of the movies or television: it is a medium of great artistic and intellectual potential cyclically debased by its potential for huge monetary gain. The first operas, composed between roughly 1600 and 1640 were courtly entertainments called “drammi per musica”: “dramas with music.” And that’s precisely what they were: stage dramas in which words and actions were deepened a gazillion-fold by setting them to music. Such entertainments were literate and sophisticated, and the great master of the genre was Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643). … Continue Reading – Only on Patreon! Listen on the Music History Monday Podcast Robert Greenberg Courses On Sale Now
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We mark the premiere performance – on September 28, 1918 – 102 years ago today – of Gustav Holst’s The Planets in Queen’s Hall, London, under the baton of Adrian Boult. To hear Holst (1874-1934) tell it, The Planets became an albatross around his neck; a monkey on his back; a large, gnarly grain of sand in his skivvies: it made him internationally famous and remained so popular that nothing he composed for the remainder of his life ever came close to approaching its popularity. Holst went to his grave believing that as far as the public was concerned, he was hardly more than a one-hit wonder. As a composer and a man, Holst presents us with something of an enigma. In The Planets, we hear a composer of great passion, ecstatic joy, ethereal lyricism, and stunning violence. In its massive, seven-movement design, The Planets has no real precedent; it is quite original. Likewise, Holst’s compositional merging of Wagnerian expressive oomph, English folk song, and Hindu mysticism set him apart from every other English composer of his time. (Four our info, Holst was a student of Sanskrit literature who, among other Hindu-inspired works, set to music hymns from the Rig […]
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We mark the premiere performance – on September 28, 1918 – 102 years ago today – of Gustav Holst’s The Planets in Queen’s Hall, London, under the baton of Adrian Boult. To hear Holst (1874-1934) tell it, The Planets became an albatross around his neck; a monkey on his back; a large, gnarly grain of sand in his skivvies: it made him internationally famous and remained so popular that nothing he composed for the remainder of his life ever came close to approaching its popularity. Holst went to his grave believing that as far as the public was concerned, he was hardly more than a one-hit wonder. As a composer and a man, Holst presents us with something of an enigma. In The Planets, we hear a composer of great passion, ecstatic joy, ethereal lyricism, and stunning violence. In its massive, seven-movement design, The Planets has no real precedent; it is quite original. Likewise, Holst’s compositional merging of Wagnerian expressive oomph, English folk song, and Hindu mysticism set him apart from every other English composer of his time. (Four our info, Holst was a student of Sanskrit literature who, among other Hindu-inspired works, set to music hymns from the Rig […]
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On September 21, 1962 – 58 years ago today – the composer Igor Stravinsky returned to Russia for the first time in 48 years: he had been gone since 1914. Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882 in the tony summer resort town of Oranienbaum (today known as Lomonosov) on the Gulf of Finland, about 25 miles from St. Petersburg. His father Fyodor Ignatievich Stravinsky (1843-1902) was a well-known opera singer – a bass (oh, how the Russians love their bass singers!) – with the Kyiv Opera and Mariinsky Theater there in Peter. The Stravinsky family was of Russian-Polish heritage, descended, we are told by biographer Steven Walsh: “from a long line of Polish grandees, senators and landowners.” Stravinsky’s mother Anna Kirillovna Stravinskaya (born Kholodovskaya, 1854-1939) was from Kiev, and came from a family hardly less distinguished than her husband’s: landowners from the governing class of 19th century Russia. She numbered among her ancestors distinguished politicians, military officers, noblemen and noblewomen. Igor Stravinsky grew up in St. Petersburg with his three brothers (two older, one younger), his mother and father, and the servants (as many as five or six), in a large, eight-room, second-story flat at No. 66 […]
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On September 21, 1962 – 58 years ago today – the composer Igor Stravinsky returned to Russia for the first time in 48 years: he had been gone since 1914. Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882 in the tony summer resort town of Oranienbaum (today known as Lomonosov) on the Gulf of Finland, about 25 miles from St. Petersburg. His father Fyodor Ignatievich Stravinsky (1843-1902) was a well-known opera singer – a bass (oh, how the Russians love their bass singers!) – with the Kyiv Opera and Mariinsky Theater there in Peter. The Stravinsky family was of Russian-Polish heritage, descended, we are told by biographer Steven Walsh: “from a long line of Polish grandees, senators and landowners.” Stravinsky’s mother Anna Kirillovna Stravinskaya (born Kholodovskaya, 1854-1939) was from Kiev, and came from a family hardly less distinguished than her husband’s: landowners from the governing class of 19th century Russia. She numbered among her ancestors distinguished politicians, military officers, noblemen and noblewomen. Igor Stravinsky grew up in St. Petersburg with his three brothers (two older, one younger), his mother and father, and the servants (as many as five or six), in a large, eight-room, second-story flat at No. 66 […]
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We mark the birth on September 14, 1737 – 283 years ago today – of the composer, organist, and violinist Johann Michael Haydn, in the western Austrian town of Rohrau. (Rohrau lies about 20 miles west of today’s capital of Slovakia – Bratislava – a city called Pressburg in Haydn’s day.) Forgive me a classic/stupid question-and-answer: Question: “what’s that guy doing in the corner?” Answer: “he’s Haydn”. Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck. You’ll notice that in answering that question, we’ll naturally assume that the “Haydn” in the corner is Franz Joseph Haydn, as if there are no other Haydns out there whose existence we might need to account for. Did any of us, even for a moment, stop to consider whether that “Haydn” could have been Michael Haydn? And there it is, in that most convenient of nutshells, yet another example of life’s inherent unfairness: when one sibling, no matter how talented, is overshadowed by an even more talented brother or sister. There are so many examples! Continue Reading, only on Patreon! Listen on the Music History Monday Podcast Robert Greenberg Courses On Sale Now
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We mark the birth on September 14, 1737 – 283 years ago today – of the composer, organist, and violinist Johann Michael Haydn, in the western Austrian town of Rohrau. (Rohrau lies about 20 miles west of today’s capital of Slovakia – Bratislava – a city called Pressburg in Haydn’s day.) Forgive me a classic/stupid question-and-answer: Question: “what’s that guy doing in the corner?” Answer: “he’s Haydn”. Nyuck, nyuck, nyuck. You’ll notice that in answering that question, we’ll naturally assume that the “Haydn” in the corner is Franz Joseph Haydn, as if there are no other Haydns out there whose existence we might need to account for. Did any of us, even for a moment, stop to consider whether that “Haydn” could have been Michael Haydn? And there it is, in that most convenient of nutshells, yet another example of life’s inherent unfairness: when one sibling, no matter how talented, is overshadowed by an even more talented brother or sister. There are so many examples! Continue Reading, only on Patreon! Listen on the Music History Monday Podcast Robert Greenberg Courses On Sale Now
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We mark the birth on September 7, 1726 – 294 years ago today – of the composer and chess master (properly, the “unofficial” world chess champion!) François-André Danican Philidor. In my Dr. Bob Prescribes post for Tuesday, September 1 (all of last week), we observed that the composer and conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli died all-too young of a heart attack (while conducting a performance of Aida in Berlin), on April 20, 2001, at the age of 54. We further observed that he died two days before he was to receive a Laurea in Archeology – a bachelor’s degree in archeology – from the Università La Sapienza in Rome. Finally, we observed that among Sinopoli’s publications is a book entitled Masterpieces of Greek Ceramics from the Sinopoli Collection. Ah: “the Sinopoli Collection.” So, either he was himself a collector or he grew up with a family collection of Greek ceramics. Was he, then, just a hobbyist, a passionate collector, or something more? We would observe that hobbyists do not generally suffer the rigors of attaining a bachelor’s degree at the age of 54 just because they like to collect stuff. No: Giuseppe Sinopoli would appear to be that fairly rare, world-class professional […]
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We mark the birth on September 7, 1726 – 294 years ago today – of the composer and chess master (properly, the “unofficial” world chess champion!) François-André Danican Philidor. In my Dr. Bob Prescribes post for Tuesday, September 1 (all of last week), we observed that the composer and conductor Giuseppe Sinopoli died all-too young of a heart attack (while conducting a performance of Aida in Berlin), on April 20, 2001, at the age of 54. We further observed that he died two days before he was to receive a Laurea in Archeology – a bachelor’s degree in archeology – from the Università La Sapienza in Rome. Finally, we observed that among Sinopoli’s publications is a book entitled Masterpieces of Greek Ceramics from the Sinopoli Collection. Ah: “the Sinopoli Collection.” So, either he was himself a collector or he grew up with a family collection of Greek ceramics. Was he, then, just a hobbyist, a passionate collector, or something more? We would observe that hobbyists do not generally suffer the rigors of attaining a bachelor’s degree at the age of 54 just because they like to collect stuff. No: Giuseppe Sinopoli would appear to be that fairly rare, world-class professional […]
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According to “This Day in Music.com”, on August 31, 2006 – 14 years ago today – the Times of London ran an article on the sometimes outright whacko-crazy demands made by rock stars when on tour. Today we’ll live vicariously through a few of these rockers and see what sort of extravagance we too could command if we were among their number. But first, let us mark three worthy birthdays and one death. On August 31, 1879 – 141 years ago today – the composer, pianist, and muse Alma Maria Schindler was born in Vienna; she died in New York City on December 11, 1964. Had Ms. Schindler been born 100 years later, in 1976 rather that 1886, she would almost certainly be a professional composer today with a career of very much of her own. But alas and alack, the time and place of her birth forced her to find self-realization through the many men in her life, three of whom she actually married: the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler (1860-1911); the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius (1883-1969); and the author Franz Werfel (1890-1945). That this extraordinarily talented and literate woman should be best remembered for the men she slept […]
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According to “This Day in Music.com”, on August 31, 2006 – 14 years ago today – the Times of London ran an article on the sometimes outright whacko-crazy demands made by rock stars when on tour. Today we’ll live vicariously through a few of these rockers and see what sort of extravagance we too could command if we were among their number. But first, let us mark three worthy birthdays and one death. On August 31, 1879 – 141 years ago today – the composer, pianist, and muse Alma Maria Schindler was born in Vienna; she died in New York City on December 11, 1964. Had Ms. Schindler been born 100 years later, in 1976 rather that 1886, she would almost certainly be a professional composer today with a career of very much of her own. But alas and alack, the time and place of her birth forced her to find self-realization through the many men in her life, three of whom she actually married: the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler (1860-1911); the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius (1883-1969); and the author Franz Werfel (1890-1945). That this extraordinarily talented and literate woman should be best remembered for the men she slept […]
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It was on August 24, 1975 – 45 years ago today – that Queen began recording Bohemian Rhapsody at Rockfield Studio No. 1 in Monmouth, Wales. It would take a total of three weeks to record the song. We are told that Freddie Mercury had “mentally prepared the song beforehand” and thus he directed the sessions. We are also told that Mercury, along with fellow bandmembers Brian May and Roger Taylor, sang their vocal parts pretty much non-stop for “ten to twelve hours a day”, resulting, in the end, in 180-plus separate overdubs (to say nothing for sore throats and hoarse voices!). I Confess I have been accused of being a critical Pollyanna, of heaping praise on every work and performance I write about; of employing such adjectives as “brilliant”, and “amazing”, and “outstanding”, and “singular”, and “awesome”, and “astonishing”, and “extraordinary” to a frankly tiresome degree. To such accusations I stand guilty as charged. Here’s the thing (or “things”, as the case may be). First, my formal training is in music composition, not musicology. I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, a “musicologist” (though I am occasionally billed as such by good people who do not […]
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It was on August 24, 1975 – 45 years ago today – that Queen began recording Bohemian Rhapsody at Rockfield Studio No. 1 in Monmouth, Wales. It would take a total of three weeks to record the song. We are told that Freddie Mercury had “mentally prepared the song beforehand” and thus he directed the sessions. We are also told that Mercury, along with fellow bandmembers Brian May and Roger Taylor, sang their vocal parts pretty much non-stop for “ten to twelve hours a day”, resulting, in the end, in 180-plus separate overdubs (to say nothing for sore throats and hoarse voices!). I Confess I have been accused of being a critical Pollyanna, of heaping praise on every work and performance I write about; of employing such adjectives as “brilliant”, and “amazing”, and “outstanding”, and “singular”, and “awesome”, and “astonishing”, and “extraordinary” to a frankly tiresome degree. To such accusations I stand guilty as charged. Here’s the thing (or “things”, as the case may be). First, my formal training is in music composition, not musicology. I am not, nor have I ever claimed to be, a “musicologist” (though I am occasionally billed as such by good people who do not […]
The post Music History Monday: Bohemian Rhapsody first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
On August 17, 1876 – 144 years ago today – Richard Wagner’s music drama Götterdämmerung (“Twilight of the Gods”) received its premiere in his newly-opened “Festival Theater” in Bayreuth, Germany. That performance of Götterdämmerung brought to its conclusion the first production of Wagner’s epic four evening tetralogy, The Ring of the Niebelung. Let’s say it up front because it needs to be said. That performance concluded what was and remains the greatest single undertaking in the history of Western music: not just Wagner’s writing and composition of the four music dramas that make up The Ring, but of the construction and opening of Wagner’s great shrine to himself: his custom-built Festival Theater in the Bavarian city of Bayreuth. The Conception and the Creation of The Ring of the Nibelung On May 16, 1849, an arrest warrant was issued by the Dresden police for the 36-year-old Richard Wagner (1813-1883). He was charged with treason due to his actions in the just terminated Dresden uprising, a charge that carried with it the death penalty. The warrant read as follows: “Wagner is of medium stature, has brown hair, an open forehead; eyebrows, brown; eyes, grayish blue; nose and mouth, proportioned; chin, round, and […]
The post Music History Monday: The Miracle at Bayreuth! first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
On August 17, 1876 – 144 years ago today – Richard Wagner’s music drama Götterdämmerung (“Twilight of the Gods”) received its premiere in his newly-opened “Festival Theater” in Bayreuth, Germany. That performance of Götterdämmerung brought to its conclusion the first production of Wagner’s epic four evening tetralogy, The Ring of the Niebelung. Let’s say it up front because it needs to be said. That performance concluded what was and remains the greatest single undertaking in the history of Western music: not just Wagner’s writing and composition of the four music dramas that make up The Ring, but of the construction and opening of Wagner’s great shrine to himself: his custom-built Festival Theater in the Bavarian city of Bayreuth. The Conception and the Creation of The Ring of the Nibelung On May 16, 1849, an arrest warrant was issued by the Dresden police for the 36-year-old Richard Wagner (1813-1883). He was charged with treason due to his actions in the just terminated Dresden uprising, a charge that carried with it the death penalty. The warrant read as follows: “Wagner is of medium stature, has brown hair, an open forehead; eyebrows, brown; eyes, grayish blue; nose and mouth, proportioned; chin, round, and […]
The post Music History Monday: The Miracle at Bayreuth! first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the completion, on August 10, 1788 – 232 years ago today – of Mozart’s Symphony in C major, catalogued by Ludwig Köchel as K. 551 and nicknamed the “Jupiter”. It was Mozart’s final symphony, a towering, innovative masterwork, the greatest symphony ever composed to its time and by any standard of measure one of a handful of greatest symphonies ever composed. That it took Mozart all of 16 days to commit it to paper defies our imaginations. That it was composed back-to-back with the luminous, transcendentally lyric Symphony in E-flat major and the tragic, gut-busting Symphony in G Minor in something under a total of eight weeks beggars our belief. Finally, that Mozart managed this mind-blowing compositional feat while under a black cloud of grief, physical ill-health, and mounting financial disaster is just, well, inconceivable. Let’s add a bit more head-shaking information to the mix. At the same time he was composing these last three symphonies, Mozart was composing a number of other works as well! He completed his Trio for piano, violin and cello in E Major, K. 542 on June 22, 1788 and the Trio in C Major, K. 548, on July 14; he finished his […]
The post Music History Monday: Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony and the Summer of 1788 first appeared on Robert Greenberg.
We mark the completion, on August 10, 1788 – 232 years ago today – of Mozart’s Symphony in C major, catalogued by Ludwig Köchel as K. 551 and nicknamed the “Jupiter”. It was Mozart’s final symphony, a towering, innovative masterwork, the greatest symphony ever composed to its time and by any standard of measure one of a handful of greatest symphonies ever composed. That it took Mozart all of 16 days to commit it to paper defies our imaginations. That it was composed back-to-back with the luminous, transcendentally lyric Symphony in E-flat major and the tragic, gut-busting Symphony in G Minor in something under a total of eight weeks beggars our belief. Finally, that Mozart managed this mind-blowing compositional feat while under a black cloud of grief, physical ill-health, and mounting financial disaster is just, well, inconceivable. Let’s add a bit more head-shaking information to the mix. At the same time he was composing these last three symphonies, Mozart was composing a number of other works as well! He completed his Trio for piano, violin and cello in E Major, K. 542 on June 22, 1788 and the Trio in C Major, K. 548, on July 14; he finished his […]
The post Music History Monday: Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony and the Summer of 1788 first appeared on Robert Greenberg.