Music

Amazon.com Widgets

Mahler's Appointment with Freud

June 22, 2013 - 3:01pm

It was to be a meeting of minds. The great symphonist Gustav Mahler had an appointment with the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Although he initiated it, Mahler was clearly uneasy about the meeting. He canceled three times before finally coming face to face with Freud in 1910. By the...

Saved by a Button

June 21, 2013 - 2:56pm

The Water Music, the Royal Fireworks Music, Messiah. It's possible that none of them would have been written if it hadn't been for a lucky encounter with a button. In 1704 George Frederick Handel was a 19-year-old hothead who took his music making very seriously. He was serving as harpsichordist...

Too Political

June 20, 2013 - 2:49pm

In June 1866 the Russian composer Mily Balakirev was in Prague, attempting to arrange a performance of Mikhail Glinka's opera A Life for the Czar. His efforts had been interrupted by a war between Austria and Prussia. Six months later the war was over and Balakirev was in Prague again...

Satie the Ardent Suitor

June 17, 2013 - 2:29pm

Eric Satie is known for the eccentricity of his music. That eccentricity was only a reflection of the odd way in which the composer conducted his life--including his love life. Satie is known to have had an affair with only one woman--and it's possible that he could not have survived--or...

The Dynamic Hugo Wolf

June 16, 2013 - 2:25pm

The Austrian composer Hugo Wolf was brilliant if erratic. A letter he wrote to a friend on June 16th, 1890 shows that he was dynamic, whether he was talking about music or the weather: "The publisher skips over the proposal to share profits as if it were unimportant. He enlarges...

Musical Diversions for the President

June 15, 2013 - 2:20pm

In 1859 America was on the brink of Civil War and the weary president of the United States needed music to divert him from the big troubles. The music in the White House of James Buchanan varied considerably. One of the year’s biggest hits was Ullman’s Opera Troupe and its...

An Improvisor Par Excellence

June 14, 2013 - 2:06pm

By 1740, when Carl Philip Emanuel Bach went to Pottsdam to work for King Frederick the Great, his father, Johann Sebastian Bach, was famous throughout Europe, and King Frederick grew increasingly eager to meet the man known as "the Old Bach." In 1747 Johann Sebastian Bach, age 62, finally left...

The Rhapsody that Wouldn't Let Go

June 12, 2013 - 1:57pm

Composers have various reasons for writing--inspiration, pleasure, and money. In the case of Claude Debussy's Saxophone Rhapsody the motivation was provided by money and a persistent music-lover named Mrs. Elise Hall. Mrs. Hall was a wealthy Boston matron who had taken up the saxophone. In 1895 she commissioned Debussy to...

Driving Each Other Crazy

June 10, 2013 - 11:51am

Sir Thomas Beecham was known for his practical jokes, but when Arthur Rubinstein played one on him, the celebrated conductor was not amused. One hot morning, as they rehearsed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in G in the Hollywood Bowl, both Beecham and Rubinstein were in a bad mood. The piano was...

Fun While It Lasted

June 9, 2013 - 1:53pm

As World War I spread through Europe, the famous Australian-born pianist and composer Percy Grainger described himself variously as a conscientious objector or a coward. He had arrived in New York from London as the United States was entering the war. He bought a saxophone. Because of what friends considered...