Grace Notes

Norman Gilliland gives the stories behind the struggle to create great music.

At the age of twenty-six, Felix Mendelssohn was already well known throughout Europe. In 1835, during a visit to Leipzig, he became acquainted with a young Polish émigré who was rapidly making a name for himself. Mendelssohn wrote to his sister in Berlin on October 16, full of enthusiasm after a day spent with Frédéric Chopin:

He intended to stay for just one day so we spent it together in music. I cannot deny that lately I have found that you by no means do him justice in your judgment of his talents. Maybe he wasn’t in the mood to...

Red Spin

Tuesday, October 15, 2019, 11:30am

In 1927 Joseph Schillinger organized and directed the first jazz orchestra in Russia. Schillinger was an academician and a scientist, and so it’s not surprising that the Russian debut of symphonic jazz took place not in a theater or a dance hall, but in the State Academic Choir Hall in Moscow.

Schillinger prefaced the concert with a scholarly lecture entitled “The Jazz Band and Music of the Future.” At a time when the new Stalinist regime was quick to crack down on any art that smacked of privilege, Schillinger was careful to put the right spin on the program notes...

The Americanization

Monday, October 14, 2019, 11:30am

The Guns of Navarone, The Thing from Another World, Friendly Persuasion, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, High Noon–those classics and more than a hundred other Hollywood movies bear the stamp of composer Dimitri Tiomkin, a Russian émigré who developed a flair for writing American music. He was thirty-one years old before he first set foot in the United States. The year was 1925. Tiomkin was a concert pianist who had been lured to New York by an impresario promising great wealth. There was just one catch.

When he arrived in New York, Tiomkin and a fellow pianist named Raskov discovered...

I Quit!

Friday, October 11, 2019, 11:30am

The job was good, the pay quite nice, and the employer friendly, so in 1717 Johann Sebastian Bach accepted the position of conductor of the music staff for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. The only catch: Bach already had a job and he needed to get out of it.

For nine years Bach had put up with the tension and irritations of the court at Weimar, where two quarrelsome noblemen, Duke Wilhelm Ernst and his nephew and heir, Ernst August, made life difficult. When Bach had defied the uncle by arranging a performance at the castle of the nephew, the old...

A Force for Change

Thursday, October 10, 2019, 11:30am

Allegro, Andante, Adagio, Presto. We take the venerable tempo indications for granted today. Beethoven did not, as becomes apparent in a letter he wrote to a fellow composer and conductor in 1817:

I am ecstatic that you share my opinions about our tempo indications, which originated in the barbarous age of music. For example, what can be more ridiculous than Allegro, which means “cheerful,” and how far we often are from the sense of that tempo, to the extent that the actual piece means the opposite of the indication....For my part, I’ve been considering giving up those silly descriptive terms–Allegro,...

Awkward Encounters

Wednesday, October 9, 2019, 11:30am

The jobs he had arranged fell through, and, after playing piano with a traveling pantomime company, he scraped by in Paris by teaching piano and harmony students. “I’m more and more glad that I decided to leave Madrid,” he wrote a friend. “There was no future for me there.”

He set about introducing himself to the city’s major musical figures, but summer was...

Faint Praise

Tuesday, October 8, 2019, 11:30am

In October 1928 Russian Ballet director Serge Diaghilev wanted the famous Vaslav Nijinsky to endorse dancer Serge Lifar, and he went to great lengths to get a little praise.

An advantage: Diaghilev and Nijinsky had been lovers. A disadvantage: Nijinksky had suffered a nervous breakdown back in 1919 and had been in and out of institutions ever since. But as one of Diaghilev’s friends said of him, “He likes people to admire his musicians, his painters, and particularly, his boys and girls of the ballet company. And he doesn’t really care if the admirer is the Bey of Tunis or...

Praise or Parody?

Monday, October 7, 2019, 11:30am

Russian audiences were cool to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Twelfth Symphony during its first performances in October 1961, and according to one account, they had good reason: It was a desperate last-minute substitute for a symphony that was too dangerous.

Shostakovich associate Lev Lebedinsky tells the story this way:

Shostakovich had long chafed under the restrictions of life in the Soviet Union and couldn’t resist writing a symphony that made subtle fun of Vladimir Lenin, the revered founder of the Soviet state. Lebedinsky tried to talk Shostakovich out of writing the satire, saying that such a symphony would be too dangerous and...

Last Laugh

Friday, October 4, 2019, 11:30am

In his autobiography, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf couldn’t resist passing along a story that suggests how seriously eighteenth-century Venetians took their music.

The famous castrato Guadagni had given three fine performances in an opera that was a particular favorite of Venetians. But after an argument with the impresario, he decided to sabotage the opera by pretending to forget his part. After two appeals from audience representatives, Guadagni howled instead of singing and stood stock still instead of acting. Dittersdorf expressed his bewilderment:

Who would not have thought that the audience would run him off the stage with rotten apples and...

Second Thoughts

Thursday, October 3, 2019, 11:30am

Although he had never conducted any of William Walton’s music, Thomas Beecham suggested that the young composer write a concerto for violist Lionel Tertis. Walton wrote the concerto and sent it to Tertis, who thought that Walton’s music was a little too farfetched, and turned it down.

A friend at the BBC suggested that Walton invite German composer Paul Hindemith to play the first performance of the concerto. With financial assistance from poet Siegfried Sassoon, the cash-strapped Walton went to Baden-Baden to issue the invitation personally. He was delighted when Hindemith agreed to play it as his solo debut in...

Dear Baroness

Wednesday, October 2, 2019, 11:30am

The world’s greatest composer was feeling giddy when he wrote Baroness von Waldstadten with a special request on October 2, 1782:

I can say truthfully that I am a happy and an unhappy man–unhappy since the night when I saw your ladyship at the ball with your hair so beautifully coiffed–because–gone is my peace of mind! Nothing but sighs and groans! During the rest of the time I spent at the hall I did not dance–I skipped. Dinner was all ordered, but I did not eat, I scarfed. During the night, instead of sleeping gently and sweetly, I slept like...

Spite and Neglect

Tuesday, October 1, 2019, 11:30am

In memoirs he began in 1910 and never finished, composer Karl Goldmark looked back six decades to his early experiences as a struggling violinist. After a brief inglorious career as a draftee in a war between Austria and Hungary, the eighteen-year-old musician settled in the town of Ödenburg. His playing wasn’t always appreciated.

On October 1, 1848, I joined the orchestra of the Ödenburg Theater as one of the first violins at a monthly salary of eight florins. In order to have the opportunity to play in public, I needed a dress coat. I paid three florins a month for...

Breaking Through

Monday, September 30, 2019, 11:30am

Seventeen-year-old Johannes Brahms was determined to become a composer, and so in 1850 when Robert Schumann came to Hamburg for a visit, Brahms got up his courage and sent a parcel of his music to Schumann’s hotel. The result was discouraging. The parcel came back unopened.

Two years later Brahms traveled to Weimar to meet piano wizard Franz Liszt. Liszt was living in lavish style at the palace of his mistress, surrounded by a throng of students and other admirers. Poverty had forced Brahms to play piano in some of Hamburg’s most tawdry entertainment houses. He found the luxurious surroundings...

A Minor Detail

Friday, September 27, 2019, 11:30am

Franz Lehár was enthusiastic again. Having made his fortune at the age of thirty-five with his 1905 operetta The Merry Widow, the Hungarian composer had gone through a fallow stretch during World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now, in 1925, he had found a tenor, Richard Tauber, who inspired him, and a book that seemed tailor-made to be adapted into an operetta.

The book was called Paganini. It was by an anonymous author and it told of the great violinist’s struggle with love and artistry. The manager of Berlin’s Künstlertheater was quick to offer the usual...

Not To Be

Thursday, September 26, 2019, 11:30am

When celebrated Czech composer Antonín Dvořák stepped onto the pier in New York on September 26, 1892, he was welcomed as the future discoverer of American music. During his two-and-a-half-year tenure as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, Americans got to hear a variety of his works and he wrote some of his most important music.

But during his lifetime, an important part of his music never got a hearing in America—opera.

Dvořák did what he could. The founder of the National Conservatory, Mrs. Jeanette Thurber, was so ardent in her appreciation of opera that...

The Split

Wednesday, September 25, 2019, 11:30am

In the fall of 1931 a Berlin producer thought that a theater version of the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny could bring in good money during hard times.

Composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertold Brecht made the going rough. During rehearsals, as they made cuts in the opera, Weill argued on behalf of his music, Brecht on behalf of his words. Their quarrels got so hot that their attorneys came into the theater and threatened each other. When a press photographer took a picture of Brecht standing next to Weill, Brecht knocked the camera out...

American Reverses

Tuesday, September 24, 2019, 11:30am

On September 24, 1902, Pietro Mascagni sailed for New York with an opera company that he had assembled hastily for an American tour. He would discover some old truths in the New World.

When Mascagni and his wife arrived in New York they received a warm welcome from thousands of cheering Italians who accompanied them up Broadway. The next day, reality set in.

Arriving at the Metropolitan Opera House, Mascagni found two orchestras waiting for him–the one he had brought from Italy and an American orchestra that had been rounded up by the Musical Union, which demanded that Mascagni’s orchestra...

Turnabout

Monday, September 23, 2019, 11:30am

The celebrated conductor Sir Thomas Beecham was known for the practical jokes he played on performers. How well would he take it when a performer put one over on him?

In the fall of 1935 Beecham was holding auditions for a season at London’s Covent Garden and a long tour through the country, which would include a revival of Puccini’s La Boheme. A few years earlier, soprano Dora Labbette had won Beecham’s admiration singing in Handel’s Messiah under his direction, and now she wanted to have her operatic debut.

She decided to audition in disguise.

She put on a bright...

That's All I Ask

Friday, September 20, 2019, 11:30am

On September 20, 1850, Richard Wagner shared his aspirations with critic Theodor Uhlig, writing from Zurich about the key to achieving his latest artistic goal:

What’s needed to accomplish the best, most decisive and important project that I can take on in the current circumstances, and to bring to fruition what I consider my life work, is a sum of perhaps 10,000 Thalers.

If I had that kind of money to work with, this is what I would do. Here, where I have a position and where the situation isn’t too bad, I’d have a makeshift theater of planks and...

Maggots

Thursday, September 19, 2019, 11:30am

Charles Jennens assembled the texts for five of Handel’s oratorios, including Messiah, but a letter that turned up more than two hundred years after he wrote it shows that he did not hesitate to make fun of the great composer.

In 1738 Jennens and Handel were working on the oratorio Saul. Jennens wrote to the Earl of Guernsey on September 19, after a visit to the composer.

“Mr. Handel’s head is more full of maggots than ever,” he reported.

The first “maggot,” he said, was a “very queer” keyboard instrument that made the sound of hammers hitting anvils, with which...

Master or Student?

Wednesday, September 18, 2019, 11:30am

In the fall of 1824 pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles was in Berlin, where he became acquainted with the family of fifteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn’s parents were concerned about the boy’s future, fearful that he would suddenly pass into obscurity, as many other talented children had done. Moscheles had no doubts about Felix’s future, but the boy’s parents required repeated reassurances.

Time and again, Mendelssohn’s parents asked Moscheles to give piano lessons to the boy, but Moscheles was evasive, confiding in his diary, “He doesn’t need lessons, and if he wants to pick up something new from me, he can...

Prime Minister of Opera

Tuesday, September 17, 2019, 11:30am

“The only Italians here that merit attention are two musicians.” So wrote the French Ambassador to Spain in 1746. He went on to say that one of the two was harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti and the other was a singer named Farinelli.

Farinelli had been born Carlo Broschi in Naples in 1705. When he was a boy, an errant blow from a horse’s hoof had caused him to be castrated for medical reasons. In a time when the voices of castrati were considered especially beautiful, young Carlo appropriated the name of a prosperous Italian family and took to the stage.

He...

Falling Star

Monday, September 16, 2019, 11:30am

The thirty-three-year-old pianist was as brilliant as ever. He treated his audience in Besançon to unequaled performances of Bach’s B-flat major Partita, Mozart’s Sonata in A minor, Schubert’s G- flat major and E-flat major Impromptus, and thirteen of Chopin’s fourteen Waltzes.

He left out the second Chopin waltz because he was too exhausted to play it. He substituted a transcription of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” The young pianist and his audience were aware that this would likely be his last concert.

His name was Dinu Lipatti, and he had been thrilling listeners for thirty years. Music was in...

A Good Catch

Friday, September 13, 2019, 11:30am

In 1764 Leopold Mozart was in London with his family, including his nine-year-old son, Wolfgang Amadeus. Money worries were never far from his mind. On September 13 he wrote to his landlord and banker back in Salzburg:

You’ve probably deduced that I’ll spend the entire winter here at least, and that, God willing, I’ll make my major profits of several thousand gulden. I’m now in a city that no one at our Salzburg court has ever yet dared to visit, and which, perhaps, no one will ever again visit. All or nothing.

We have come to our long journey’s...

Versatile Enough

Thursday, September 12, 2019, 11:30am

The string quartet is a curiosity, a series of short dances for three violins and cello to be played on open strings. It’s attributed to Benjamin Franklin, and since he was so versatile, it’s tempting to assume that Franklin would also turn his attention to composing music.

Franklin played the harp, the guitar, and something called the glass dulcimer, but his best known contribution to music was his improvement of the so-called musical glasses. The instrument had become popular in Europe by 1746, when Christoph Willibald Gluck performed in London a “concerto on 26 drinking glasses tuned with spring water,”...

When It Mattered Most

Wednesday, September 11, 2019, 11:30am

Rick Rescorla was a soldier, not a musician. But he knew the power of music and he put it to work when it mattered most.

He was born in Cornwall in 1939. Some of his earliest memories were of Cornish songs, but American culture was also in the air as American troops stationed in England prepared for the invasion of German-occupied Europe.

As he grew up, Rescorla was less than a model student, mediocre in literature, undistinguished in music.

He was supposed to have a music lesson each week, a bout with a recorder still damp from use in the...

A Polite Reply

Tuesday, September 10, 2019, 11:30am

Although Hector Berlioz was capable of stinging irony, when he received a pointed letter from Richard Wagner, his reply was the essence of graciousness. On September 10, 1855, he wrote from Paris to Wagner in Switzerland:

Your letter gave me great pleasure. You’re quite right to deplore my ignorance of the German language, and as to what you said about the impossibility of my understanding your works, I’ve struggled with it many a time. The flower of expression almost always withers under the weight of translation, however delicate the translation may be. There are accents in true music that demand...

Free Spirits

Monday, September 9, 2019, 11:30am

In 1904 nineteen-year-old Alban Berg entered the Austrian civil service as an accountant, keeping tabs on the sale of pigs and the productivity of distilleries, but he was most devoted to classes in music theory taught by the innovative Arnold Schoenberg.

Like Berg, Schoenberg had been forced by poverty to leave school at sixteen to become a bank clerk. Schoenberg had forfeited that job by signing a customer into the account books under the name L. van Beethoven.

When an aunt died and left Berg’s mother a modest inheritance, Berg ended his stint as a government accountant by absolving all...

Missing!

Friday, September 6, 2019, 11:30am

On September 4, 1915, a New York Times headline broke the story: Godowsky Missing. And so began one of the strangest disappearances in music history.

The celebrated Polish pianist Leopold Godowsky had been working at a fever pitch to complete a set of thirty piano adaptations for the Arts Publication Society Progressive Series of Piano Lessons. A series of interruptions at home had made the work slow going. On September 1 Godowsky had left home in Avon, New Jersey, telling his wife that he was taking the train into New York to deposit $1000 in the bank. Godowsky was wearing...

Smoke-Filled Rooms

Thursday, September 5, 2019, 11:30am

Although he wrote a sublime German Requiem, Johannes Brahms knew all about the earthly–and earthy--side of music.

Brahms grew up in Hamburg in the 1840s in a family so poor that he had to go to work at the age of thirteen. Because he had remarkable talent, young Brahms had no trouble finding jobs playing the piano in local taverns and restaurants, and he soon became so popular that proprietors would call him away from home at all hours to play at dances for free drinks and a little money.

His mother, who also had gone to work at the...

The Cherokee and the Bantu

Wednesday, October 16, 2019, 11:30am

Red Spin

Tuesday, October 15, 2019, 11:30am

The Americanization

Monday, October 14, 2019, 11:30am

The Guns of Navarone, The Thing from Another World, Friendly Persuasion, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, High Noon– those classics and more than a hundred other Hollywood movies bear the stamp of composer Dimitri Tiomkin, a Russian émigré who developed a flair for writing American music. He was...

I Quit!

Friday, October 11, 2019, 11:30am

A Force for Change

Thursday, October 10, 2019, 11:30am

Allegro, Andante, Adagio, Presto. We take the venerable tempo indications for granted today. Beethoven did not, as becomes apparent in a letter he wrote to a fellow composer and conductor in 1817: I am ecstatic that you share my opinions about our tempo indications, which originated in the...

Awkward Encounters

Wednesday, October 9, 2019, 11:30am

In the summer of 1907 Spanish pianist and composer Manuel de Falla piled up his meager savings and went to Paris in the hope of breaking into the international music scene. He was in for some setbacks. The jobs he had arranged fell through, and, after playing piano with a traveling pantomime...

Faint Praise

Tuesday, October 8, 2019, 11:30am

In October 1928 Russian Ballet director Serge Diaghilev wanted the famous Vaslav Nijinsky to endorse dancer Serge Lifar, and he went to great lengths to get a little praise. An advantage: Diaghilev and Nijinsky had been lovers. A disadvantage: Nijinksky had suffered a nervous breakdown back in 1919...

Praise or Parody?

Monday, October 7, 2019, 11:30am

Last Laugh

Friday, October 4, 2019, 11:30am

In his autobiography, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf couldn’t resist passing along a story that suggests how seriously eighteenth-century Venetians took their music. The famous castrato Guadagni had given three fine performances in an opera that was a particular favorite of Venetians. But after an...

Second Thoughts

Thursday, October 3, 2019, 11:30am

Dear Baroness

Wednesday, October 2, 2019, 11:30am

The world’s greatest composer was feeling giddy when he wrote Baroness von Waldstadten with a special request on October 2, 1782: I can say truthfully that I am a happy and an unhappy man–unhappy since the night when I saw your ladyship at the ball with your hair so beautifully coiffed–because–gone...

Spite and Neglect

Tuesday, October 1, 2019, 11:30am

Breaking Through

Monday, September 30, 2019, 11:30am

A Minor Detail

Friday, September 27, 2019, 11:30am

Franz Lehár was enthusiastic again. Having made his fortune at the age of thirty-five with his 1905 operetta The Merry Widow , the Hungarian composer had gone through a fallow stretch during World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now, in 1925, he had found a tenor, Richard...

Not To Be

Thursday, September 26, 2019, 11:30am

The Split

Wednesday, September 25, 2019, 11:30am

In the fall of 1931 a Berlin producer thought that a theater version of the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny could bring in good money during hard times. Composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertold Brecht made the going rough. During rehearsals, as they made cuts in the opera, Weill...

American Reverses

Tuesday, September 24, 2019, 11:30am

On September 24, 1902, Pietro Mascagni sailed for New York with an opera company that he had assembled hastily for an American tour. He would discover some old truths in the New World. When Mascagni and his wife arrived in New York they received a warm welcome from thousands of cheering Italians...

Turnabout

Monday, September 23, 2019, 11:30am

The celebrated conductor Sir Thomas Beecham was known for the practical jokes he played on performers. How well would he take it when a performer put one over on him? In the fall of 1935 Beecham was holding auditions for a season at London’s Covent Garden and a long tour through the country, which...

That's All I Ask

Friday, September 20, 2019, 11:30am

On September 20, 1850, Richard Wagner shared his aspirations with critic Theodor Uhlig, writing from Zurich about the key to achieving his latest artistic goal: What’s needed to accomplish the best, most decisive and important project that I can take on in the current circumstances, and to bring to...

Maggots

Thursday, September 19, 2019, 11:30am

Charles Jennens assembled the texts for five of Handel’s oratorios, including Messiah , but a letter that turned up more than two hundred years after he wrote it shows that he did not hesitate to make fun of the great composer. In 1738 Jennens and Handel were working on the oratorio Saul . Jennens...

Search form

The Ideas Network

Program Schedule

Program Notes

NPR News & Classical Network

Program Schedule

Music Playlists

All Classical Network

Program Schedule

Music Playlists

Grace Notes

Subscribe To WPR Newsletters