Music

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March 3, 2014 - 11:30am

In 1875 audiences at the Opéra-Comique in Paris were among the most conservative in Europe, and so it was probably too much to hope that they would take kindly to the novel production they were seeing and hearing on the night of March 3. The day had begun auspiciously for...

The Downside

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March 2, 2014 - 11:30am

Wealth, fame, and acclaim–Joseph Haydn enjoyed them all during a sojourn in London arranged by Johann Peter Salomon. But there was a downside according to a letter he wrote to Maria von Genzinger in Vienna on March 2, 1792: I must confess to Your Grace that this is very embarrassing...

Everything is in Order

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March 1, 2014 - 11:30am

Could it happen today? In the early years of the twentieth century, pianist Harold Bauer was touring in Spain, traveling with a tuner, who was responsible for having Bauer’s Erard pianos sent from one venue to the next. Toward the end of the tour, illness forced the tuner to remain...

Box Set Reveals Legacy Of Wisconsin's Paramount Records

February 27, 2014 - 3:06pm

It’s a fair question. In the early 20th Century, how did a furniture company from Wisconsin create a record label that managed to develop one of the greatest musical rosters of all time?

The answer? The desire to make a few bucks and a whole lot of luck.

The record label in question is Paramount Records and the story began in the beginning of the last century.

As part of its furniture business, the Wisconsin Chair Co., located at the time in Port Washington, began manufacturing phonograph cabinets.

Dean Blackwood, co-founder of Revenant Records, said that the Wisconsin Chair Co. began producing...

The Shaky Collaborators

Updated:

February 27, 2014 - 11:30am

Composer Mily Balakirev had scraped up enough money for his Free Music School to put on a series of four concerts in St. Petersburg during the winter of 1879. Colleague Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was to direct them, and before they were over, he was a nervous wreck. One of the concerts...

Fantasia

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February 26, 2014 - 11:30am

Paul Hindemith was a distinguished composer and music theorist whose works were banned in Germany by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in 1936. Like many of his colleagues, Hindemith went to the United States looking for a way to earn a living. By the end of February 1939 he was...

Curious Wisconsin - The Rise And Fall Of Paramount Records

February 27, 2014 - 3:06pm

How did a Wisconsin chair company end up creating a record label that boasted one of the most impressive line-up of artists of all time? In today's Curious Wisconsin, two brothers discuss the rise and fall of Paramount Records.

Circumstances Beyond My Control

Updated:

February 24, 2014 - 11:30am

February 24, 1876, brought the debut of a collaboration between Norway’s greatest playwright and Norway’s greatest composer. Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, with more than an hour of music by Edvard Grieg, became a classic, but in a letter he wrote almost thirty years after the premiere in Christiania, Grieg...

A Revolutionary Wedding

Updated:

February 22, 2014 - 11:30am

In the politically charged year of 1848 César Franck was a twenty-five-year-old pianist and composer living in Paris. When his father took him to task for wasting his time dedicating a song to one of his female students, he and his father exchanged harsh words and his father retaliated by...

The Portent

Updated:

February 20, 2014 - 12:59pm

Because it was politically sensitive, Giuseppe Verdi’s new opera Un ballo in maschera made the Italian censors nervous. They forced Verdi to change the action to someplace farther from home. He chose seventeenth-century Boston. The King of Sweden became the Governor of Boston. When Un ballo in maschera came to...

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Too Much to Hope For

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Everything is in Order

Box Set Reveals Legacy Of Wisconsin's Paramount Records

The Shaky Collaborators

Fantasia

Curious Wisconsin - The Rise And Fall Of Paramount Records

Circumstances Beyond My Control

A Revolutionary Wedding

The Portent

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