Friday, December 6, 2019, 11:30am
Twenty-one-year old Frédéric Chopin was discovering a galaxy of famous musicians of the day when he wrote to a friend back in Poland in December 1831: Paris is whatever you want it to be. You can entertain yourself, be bored, laugh, cry, do whatever you want and nobody notices you because thousands...
Thursday, December 5, 2019, 11:30am
In December 1815 composer Giacomo Meyerbeer was in London visiting celebrated composers and performers. When it came to pianists, he was most impressed by a fellow German who had settled in London, Johann Baptiste Cramer. In his journal Meyerbeer wrote: Cramer is in his forties, a big, sturdy man...
Wednesday, December 4, 2019, 11:30am
Some people are said to have the ability to see themselves as if from a distance. Richard Wagner was one of them. He delivered an address at a ceremony marking the relocation of the remains of composer Carl Maria von Weber from London to Dresden in December 1844. In his autobiography, he wrote of a...
Tuesday, December 3, 2019, 11:30am
In his 1952 memoir My Life, Russian émigré composer Alexander Gretchaninoff tells how simple carelessness nearly resulted in disaster. In 1925 the composer and his wife were living in Paris. He went to Rome to conduct two concerts, the second of which was to include his Third Symphony and excerpts...
Monday, December 2, 2019, 11:30am
In 1943, at Lindy’s Restaurant in Manhattan, Marc Blitzstein introduced twenty-five-year-old Leonard Bernstein to twenty-nine-year-old Morton Gould. The two composers had plenty in common. For a time, their careers ran parallel courses and then they collided. Gould was well known in musical circles...
Friday, November 29, 2019, 11:30am
Arthur Rubinstein was one of the twentieth century’s greatest pianists He didn’t begin speaking until he was three, but began playing the piano at age two, and so it’s reasonable to assume that the piano was his whole life. But an appearance on radio’s popular quiz show Information Please on...
Thursday, November 28, 2019, 11:30am
Composer Jacques Offenbach had eight bars of a tune running through his head--a waltz that his mother had sung to him as a lullaby. Offenbach’s father overheard him humming it and told him that it was by a once-promising young composer named Zimmer, who had suddenly dropped out of sight. Sometime...
Wednesday, November 27, 2019, 11:30am
In 1822 the most famous touring pianist in Europe was Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who had been a child prodigy so impressive that at the age of seven he became a live-in student of Mozart’s. Hummel’s closest rival was Irish-born pianist John Field, who had been living in Russia for nearly twenty years...
Tuesday, November 26, 2019, 11:30am
With the help of publisher John Stark, Scott Joplin made his name with a succession of genteel, lilting ragtime piano pieces, beginning with the million-seller Maple Leaf Rag in 1899. By 1911 he felt that he was in a position to create an entirely new kind of music, an American opera dealing with...
Monday, November 25, 2019, 11:30am
The celebrated Austrian cellist Emanuel Feuermann didn’t care for recording, so he probably came into the Columbia session with a bad attitude, and the effort to make a record of Haydn’s Concerto in D went awry from the start. It was November 1935. The conductor was Malcolm Sargent who was...
Friday, November 22, 2019, 11:30am
He would later become known as one of the twentieth century’s great pianists and composers, but in 1897, at the age of twenty-four, Sergei Rachmaninoff jumped at the chance to be the assistant conductor to one Eugene Esposito in a new private opera company opened in Moscow by a tycoon named...
Thursday, November 21, 2019, 11:30am
At the court of Spain’s King Ferdinand V and Queen Maria Barbara, the famed Italian castrato Farinelli was such a royal favorite that he could have influenced Spain’s politics, but he preferred to make his mark on the country’s musical life–and that he did with a vengeance. As the director of court...
Wednesday, November 20, 2019, 11:30am
Back in 1910 Darius Milhaud had written an opera called La Brebis égarée , and although he was aware of its youthful flaws, he did not object in November 1923 when the Paris Opéra-Comique decided to produce it. The experience would give him some of his most sincere audience response. The opera was...
Tuesday, November 19, 2019, 11:30am
On November 19, 1916, celebrated conductor Arturo Toscanini was at the Augusteo Theater in Rome to conduct the first of three concerts. The program included two pieces by Wagner— Forest Murmurs from Siegfried and the funeral music from Götterdämmerung . On previous occasions, the orchestra had...
Monday, November 18, 2019, 11:30am
In the fall of 1886 Gustav Mahler was the director of the Leipzig Opera house. In a letter that he wrote to his friend Friedrich Löhr, he spoke of positive experiences with composer Karl Reinecke and pianist Anton Rubinstein. He spoke in less positive terms of his relationship with Leipzig Opera...
Friday, November 15, 2019, 11:30am
Charles Villiers Stanford was described by a contemporary as “vibrant, untiring, and humorous,” traits that put him at odds with the organizers of the Leeds Festivals in the first years of the twentieth century. Stanford became the conductor of the Leeds Philharmonic in 1898, but had his conflicts...
Thursday, November 14, 2019, 11:30am
Although American pianist and composer Edward MacDowell would soon come to grief in his dealings with administrators at Columbia University, he had a strong rapport with his students, in part because he broke down the barriers of formality. Perhaps the same shyness that made MacDowell a reluctant...
Wednesday, November 13, 2019, 11:30am
As assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic twenty-five-year-old Leonard Bernstein was to sit in on all rehearsals and learn the scores well enough to be able to conduct them in place of Artur Rodzinski or any guest conductor. On November 13, 1943, as he attended the Town Hall recital of a...
Tuesday, November 12, 2019, 11:30am
Thomas Gainsborough was one of England’s great painters. He thought that he could become a fine musician too. One friend had grave doubts. In the 1770s Henry Angelo and his wife hosted gatherings that brought together various kinds of artists. In memoirs he wrote in 1830, he recalled that...
Monday, November 11, 2019, 11:30am
In 1916 Spanish composer Enrique Granados was in New York for the world premiere of his opera Goyescas . The opera ends with a tragic duel in which the protagonist dies in the arms of his beloved. By a simple twist of fate, Granados would soon experience a real-life tragedy every bit as poignant...