Music

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New York, 1805. The Italian, at age 56, was a little old to be starting a second career as a grocer, but Lorenzo Da Ponte had a compelling reason for abandoning poetry and music and coming to the New World. He wanted to stay out of prison. Even the brightest...

Bruckner's Clutter

May 22, 2013 - 11:01am

He wrote vast dramatic symphonies but Anton Bruckner led a life that tended to be prosaic and more than a little cluttered. He didn’t look like other musicians of the 1880's. He kept his hair cut so short that many people remembered him as being bald. He wore a short...

The Man I Was Looking For

May 21, 2013 - 11:38am

He ‘s generally thought of as a singularly English composer, but early in his career, Ralph Vaughan Williams had trouble developing his style in England. He needed the right teacher and he found him in an unexpected place. One of Vaughan Williams' first teachers was Charles Villiers Stanford, who favored...

The Plow that Broke the Plains

May 20, 2013 - 11:08am

The Great Depression was a difficult time for most Americans, including musicians. In 1936 Virgil Thomson was a forty-year-old composer struggling for recognition and cash. His friend John Houseman recommended Thomson to a documentary film maker named Pare Lorenz. Lorenz had already interviewed other composers, including Aaron Copland, by the...

Telemann's Runaway Wife

May 19, 2013 - 11:56am

Composer George Philip Telemann had lived a long, productive life, but on the home frontevents had taken some unhappy turns and he consoled himself with two loves--poetry and plants. Telemann's unfortunate home life was publicized by a theater scandal that broke in Hamburg. A play was being planned that would...

Liszt in the Lap of Luxury

May 18, 2013 - 10:49am

In 1876 Franz Liszt was on his way from Hanover to Weimar, but he was making the trip in a leisurely, glamorous way. He stopped over at Loo Castle near Utrecht in Holland. On May 18th he wrote to a friend in Weimar: I already asked you from Hanover to...

The Family Tradition

May 17, 2013 - 9:45am

In his autobiography Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach states that “In composition and keyboard playing I had no teacher other than my father.” When the time came to carry on the family tradition of music making, Emanuel Bach would face some challenges. He probably began his keyboard lessons around 1720, at...

Distractions

May 16, 2013 - 11:26am

Composers of concert music have enough distractions to cope with. Composers of movie music have even more. Consider the case of Bernard Herrmann, one of America's leading writers of film music, when he was visiting Hollywood in 1943. Herrmann and his wife were having a working lunch at the home...

Faces to Make One-Miss Notes

May 13, 2013 - 11:35am

New Orleans-born pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk toured the northern states during the Civil War. As he traveled through New York State he was occasionally able to forget about the war and concentrate on the two great loves of his life--music and women. In May 1864 he wrote in...

An Unlikely Ally

May 12, 2013 - 11:26am

The Frenchman Gabriel Faure was inclined to write refined, soft-spoken music. In 1908 one of his staunchest supporters was a composer of outgoing, often dissonant pieces -- the Spaniard Isaac Albeniz. Faure was born on May 12th, 1845. He was 15 years Albeniz' senior, but Albeniz had been a dazzling...