Thursday, February 20, 2020, 11:30am
Whether in battle or art, Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, loved all kinds of deception. In 1743 or so, during a lull between wars, Frederick got back to importing talent for his various musical ensembles. One of his potential recruits, something of a quack, was Jaques de Vaucanson, who had...
Thursday, January 16, 2020, 11:30am
The composer was all caught up in conducting the debut of his first really big work. For several days, Ralph Vaughan Williams had been too nervous to sleep or eat right. He was unaware of friends and musical personages in the audience–Charles Villiers Stanford and the promising composer George...
Wednesday, January 15, 2020, 11:30am
Poetry had prompted William Walton to write the music for Façade, but the provocative melodrama propelled the young composer into some very prosaic situations. The poet, Edith Sitwell, had goaded the reluctant Walton into the project. Her brother Osbert came up with the idea of reciting the words...
Tuesday, January 14, 2020, 11:30am
In his 1928 autobiography John Philip Sousa describes a concert in which he felt that he had to make a statement. On January 14, 1792, Joseph Haydn wrote from London to Luigia Polzelli in Italy a letter that gives some insight into the rough-and-tumble music business: My dearest Polzelli! I...
Monday, January 13, 2020, 11:30am
In his 1928 autobiography John Philip Sousa describes a concert in which he felt that he had to make a statement. During San Francisco’s midwinter fair in January 1894, the Sousa band was asked to perform in conjunction with Scheel’s Imperial Orchestra, which had been playing in a large auditorium...
Friday, January 10, 2020, 11:30am
Not yet nineteen years old, Francis Poulenc was already one of France’s promising new composers, but in January 1918, with World War I consuming manpower, France had a more immediate need for soldiers, and young Poulenc would find the two occupations a strange mix. From the start, Poulenc was at...
Thursday, January 9, 2020, 11:30am
In 1831 a performance of Rossini’s Otello convinced thirteen-year-old Charles Gounod that he wanted to be a composer. “I was haunted, possessed,” he said later. “I wanted to write an Otello myself!” He poured his energy into writing music. His studies suffered. “I was kept in school,” he recalled...
Wednesday, January 8, 2020, 11:30am
Leopold Mozart had been chasing his son, Wolfgang Amadeus, all over Europe--with letters demanding that the twenty-two-year-old come home to Salzburg, where important business opportunities waited--and waited. Christmas passed, then New Year's Day, and still no Mozart. On January 8th, 1779, the...
Tuesday, January 7, 2020, 11:30am
Dimitri Mitropoulos had conducted the Minneapolis Symphony in 1937 in a concert that had turned the usually staid audience into “an excited mob.” Now he was back as its music director and everyone was wondering if the magic would hold. A Minneapolis reviewer had described Mitropoulos’ conducting as...
Monday, January 6, 2020, 11:30am
According to piano virtuoso Ignacy Jan Paderewski, in addition to stamina, dexterity, and an ear for music, a concert performer needs a good memory. During the early years of his career, he found out that memory can take more than one form. In 1890, for a French colleague, Paderewski agreed on...
Friday, January 3, 2020, 11:30am
Although he enjoyed living in Paris, English composer Frederick Delius was restless and unable to concentrate. He was working on a piano concerto, but had hit an impasse. Thirteen years earlier he had made a musical breakthrough at Solano Grove, his father’s orange plantation on the banks of the St...
Thursday, January 2, 2020, 11:30am
On January 2, 1875, Edvard Grieg wrote about what would become his best known music to author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. He was not altogether enthusiastic: Peer Gynt has turned out the way you said it would. It looms over me like a bad dream, and there’s no way I can be done with it until spring. It...
Wednesday, January 1, 2020, 11:30am
Robert and Clara Schumann started the New Year with high hopes. They had earned so little in 1845 that Christmas had amounted to no more than lighting the tree and giving the children a few little trinkets. They had been unable to afford anything for each other. But they had arranged a promising...
Tuesday, December 31, 2019, 11:30am
London diarist Samuel Pepys was twenty-eight before he tried dancing for the first time, and he wrote that it was something “I did wonder to see myself to do.” Not long afterward, on New Year’s Eve 1662, he attended a royal ball, after which he wrote of his enthusiasm about the lively dances of the...
Monday, December 30, 2019, 11:30am
“I think they’re very interesting. You should learn them.” So said conductor Alfredo Antonini to violinist Louis Kaufman in the autumn of 1947. The Columbia Broadcasting System’s music director had just said much the same thing in the hope that Kaufman would perform the distinctive 200-year-old...
Friday, December 27, 2019, 11:30am
As the year 1842 ended, Gaetano Donizetti was nominated to become a corresponding member of the prestigious French Academy. Coming at the twilight of his career, his acceptance speech was an opportunity for the composer to sum up his philosophy of music. He devoted a significant part of his remarks...
Thursday, December 26, 2019, 11:30am
On December 12, 1800, Napoleon had survived an assassination attempt in Paris, and although a number of bystanders were killed by the explosive device known as “the infernal machine,” a deputation from Paris societies and corporations waited to congratulate the First Consul on his escape...
Wednesday, December 25, 2019, 11:30am
December 25th, 1818, was a red-letter day for Christmas music large and small. According to legend, mice had damaged the organ in St. Nicholas’ church in the Bavarian village of Oberndorf, causing it to break down on Christmas Eve. The setback forced the organist and the parish priest to scrap the...
Tuesday, December 24, 2019, 11:30am
On December 24, 1781, Austrian Emperor Joseph II had two celebrated keyboard players in his Vienna palace and he couldn’t resist setting them against each other in an unusual competition. This is what Mozart wrote to his father about the contest that pitted him against Muzio Clementi: A word about...
Monday, December 23, 2019, 11:30am
Back in 1939 NBC producer Samuel Chotzinoff had commissioned Gian Carlo Menotti to write an opera for radio. In 1951 he commissioned a second opera from Menotti, this time for the up-and-coming medium of television. Although he accepted the commission, Menotti was not fast to fulfill it. The opera...
