The producers of Charles Gounod’s opera Faust had their work cut out for them. The opera had not done so well at its Paris debut in 1859, and now a Hanover premiere was in the works. Although many in the city and the surrounding countryside were excited about the upcoming performance, several newspaper editors expressed suspicion about a French composer daring to set Goethe’s German masterpiece to music, especially since several German composers had failed.

The cast included excellent singers, but the stage manager came up with one special effect that would make this production of Faust memorable for everyone in the audience, including King George of Hanover, who was blind.

During the third act, Siebel, a young man in love with Marguerite, is gathering flowers in her garden and asks them to carry his message of love, but, cursed by Mephistopheles, the flowers wither in his hands. Siebel runs to a nearby shrine and dips his hands in holy water, and the flowers he picks now remain fresh.

As the curtain rose on Act III of the Hanover performance, the fragrance of flowers wafted from the stage and filled the entire theater. Attending that night was violinist Leopold Auer, who recalled the impact many years later:

The effect of this faint breeze of fragrance was magical. Throughout the love duo, the artificial flowers on the stage, bound by Mephisto’s spell and obeying his command, thus intoxicated not only the lovers but the entire audience as well. This scene assured the success of the work. I have often wondered why so natural and charming an effect has not been employed in other similar scenes–in the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, which takes place in the garden of the Capulets, for instance, or in the second act of Parsifal, where the Flower-Maidens dance in Klingsor’s enchanted gardens.

But maybe the fragrant special effect had a charm as ephemeral as the flowers in Gounod’s Faust.

When he was twelve years old, Scott and his sister got a new piano teacher. She was not a dishonest person, Scott recalled, but she was a dishonest teacher.

Scott had begun to play the piano before he was old enough to talk, and had long since developed his own haphazard ideas about technique. Had the new teacher been honest, Scott reflected, she would have made him go through the rigors of five-finger exercises for three months, during which he would be forbidden to play anything else on the piano. That was the only approach that would have enabled him to strengthen his fingers and get rid of bad habits.

Instead, she let him go on playing as he had been, when both of them knew that he was only making a show of playing well and would never improve if he went on that way.

So it went for two years. Then Scott had the first great pianistic experience of his life.

His teacher persuaded Scott’s mother to let him go to nearby Liverpool for a Sunday afternoon concert by the famous Ignacy Jan Paderewski. The virtuoso was at the height of his powers, and he played with such effect that Scott resolved at once to become a musician. He emulated his new idol, right down to the mop-haired look that was the Polish pianist’s trademark.

Within a year, studies in Germany began to mold him into one of the most original writers of twentieth century music.

So while Cyril Scott’s teacher didn’t make him a great pianist after two years of lessons, during a single concert, she did set him on the path to becoming one of England’s great composers.

The premise for the opera was unusual to say the least. The libretto by Gertrude Stein consisted of apparently random sentences and phrases that Virgil Thomson had set to distinctively American music.

As the unconventional Four Saints in Three Acts approached its February 8, 1934, debut in Hartford, it began to look like a miracle would be required to get it off the ground.

Since the opera required the illusion of open sky, the set designer had the low ceiling of the stage in the small theater draped in 1500 square feet of looped cellophane. The frustrated lighting designer told her in blunt terms how difficult it was to light, but she refused to listen. She, in turn, had concerns that the skin color of the black performers would clash with her stage and costume colors.

In order to keep their discussions private, Thomson, director John Houseman, and choreographer Frederick Ashton occasionally resorted to conversing in French.

Frustrated by mistakes in the score, hot-tempered conductor Alexander Smallens shouted at Ashton, who stalked out of the theater, but came back as soon as he discovered that the outside temperature was fifteen below zero.

Opening night turned out so well that, two weeks later, the opera went to the 1,400-seat Forty-Fourth Street Theater for a four-week Broadway run.

But just fifty hours before curtain time, a New York City fire marshal put a stop to everything when he cut a strip of the cellophane, lit a match to it, and condemned the set.

A young man from the theater staff suggested coating the entire set and all of the props with a new fire-resistant chemical called water glass. Everything onstage drooped and rich colors paled beneath a thick swath of smelly goo that baked under the bright lights, but the show went on, even as little globs of baked water glass fell to the stage with a sound like falling rain.

By the time he arrived in the Romanian city of Cernauti, winter cold had set in with a vengeance. The piano he was to play was kept in an unheated room in a music shop, tuned just before the concert, and then brought into the warmth of the opera house. When Smith began playing, it became apparent that an hour or two of heat had stretched the strings enough to drop the pitch three semitones. The first piece was in C major, but sounded like A major.

The result was what Smith termed “an agonizing evening.”

The last piece on the program was a polonaise by contemporary composer Arthur Bliss, and Smith recalled that “this very modern composition sounded like nothing on earth on my flat piano.” The performance was not the desired representation of British music and musicians.

When the end of the concert finally came, the entire audience stood up and hissed.

Smith beat a retreat to the exit, but in the wings somebody intercepted him and pushed him back onto the stage. Even though he sympathized with the displeased crowd, or mob as it now seemed to be, Smith said that he had no desire to go back out and face them again. Then someone explained that the audience wasn’t hissing, but shouting “Bis!” by which they meant “Encore!” So with mixed emotions, Smith returned to do battle with the piano again.

Cyril Smith tells the story in his 1958 reminiscence Duet for Three Hands.

One day in 1962 world renowned violinist Isaac Stern was at the Paris workshop of celebrated lute maker Etienne Vatelot, a good friend who had written him a letter about a Chinese family of his acquaintance. Vatelot said to Stern, “They have this young boy, about six, seven years old. You should hear him. He’s unbelievable.”

Arrangements were made for Stern to hear the Paris-born boy perform. His name was Yo-Yo Ma and his cello looked bigger than he was. Stern recalled that hearing the boy play left him “astonished, truly astonished.”

When Ma and his family emigrated to the United States, Stern asked the great American cellist Leonard Rose to listen to Ma play, and Rose was fast to take him on as a student. During his studies with Rose, Ma learned important lessons about performing, bow-arm technique and practice habits in particular. Stern listened to him again and got high-powered artist manager Sol Hurok to sign him up.

In 1977, with violinist Shlomo Mintz and pianist Yefim Bronfman, Ma played the Beethoven Triple Concerto with the New York Youth Orchestra in Carnegie Hall. Years later Stern still remembered the cellist’s “turn of phrase and mastery of his instrument that were unsurpassed then or now, and an instantaneous and infectious communicativeness with his audience.” He recalled that musicians in the audience would “turn around and smile with delight at one another as they heard the phrases flow forth with beauty and ease from his cello.”

After the performance, Stern thought back forty years to a favor the great conductor Pierre Monteux had done for him. He wrote letters to five major conductors asking them to consider inviting Yo-Yo Ma to play as a soloist. All five did invite him, and after the first rehearsal, all five signed Yo-Yo Ma for a return engagement.

Isaac Stern tells the story in his 1999 autobiography My First 79 Years.