Grace Notes

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

The crossing from Europe to New York left Igor Stravinsky with hours to fill and so he prevailed upon cellist Gregor Piatigorsky to work with him on a cello and piano transcription of his ballet Suite Italienne. Violinist Nathan Milstein also had some time on his hands and so he came along and watched as Piatigorsky made daring suggestions and defended them as Stravinsky listened.

One of Piatigorsky’s most brilliant effects came about by accident.

Tea was served aboard the SS Rex at 4:45, and Milstein and Piatigorsky attended regularly, enjoying the company of various attractive young women who were...

The Million Dollar Trio

Wednesday, May 30, 2018, 11:30am

Pianist Arthur Rubinstein, cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, and violinist Jascha Heifetz drew huge admiring crowds at Ravinia, and the newly-formed threesome was so successful that one critic referred to them as “The Million Dollar Trio.”

Rubinstein disliked the nickname so much that he couldn’t wait to drop out of the ensemble, but when RCA invited the trio to make a recording of their concert repertory, he agreed to...

The Shortcut

Tuesday, May 29, 2018, 11:30am

In the spring of 1592 John Bull left London for Bristol, leaving his work as organist at the prestigious Chapel Royal to a subordinate. In a curious way, his leave of absence would provide a great opportunity to an undistinguished musician named William Phelps.

For reasons unknown, Bull took his time getting back to London, riding north through Gloucestershire, perhaps stealing a bit of a vacation from his employer, Queen Elizabeth, who was known to keep a short leash on her favorite musicians. He seems to have been on his way to visit friends in Worcester when he took the...

The Magician, the Musician, & the President

Monday, May 28, 2018, 11:30am

Would the composer and the president catch on to the trick? In 1914, at an evening’s entertainment for the German Sailors Home and the Magicians Club of London, after the Ritz Carlton orchestra’s performances of excerpts of Puccini operas, the agenda moved on to the great magician Houdini.

Houdini began with some simple close-up illusions–changing the colors of silk handkerchiefs and turning water into wine, and he noticed that sitting next to composer Victor Herbert was a very intent Theodore Roosevelt. He was sure that the former president had been able to see through every trick–so far.

The magician proposed...

A Team Effort

Friday, May 25, 2018, 11:30am

In the spring of 1782, Mozart was a busy twenty-six-year-old composer with music and matrimony on his mind. On May 25 he wrote from Vienna to his father Leopold in Salzburg, and the letter was a team effort between Mozart and his intended. Mozart wrote:

This time I really do need to steal a moment, so that you don’t have to wait too long for a letter. Tomorrow our first concert takes place in the Augarten, and at half past eight, Martin will be bringing me in a carriage and we still have to make six visits, which I
...

The Wayward Bach

Thursday, May 24, 2018, 11:30am

Johann Sebastian Bach fathered four sons who became prominent composers, but he had other musical children, including a black sheep named Johann Gottfried Bernhard.

In 1736, when a position opened for an organist at St. Mary’s in Mülhausen, Bach put in a good word for the twenty-year-old Bernhard, who was impressive enough at his audition to get the job.

Much like his father thirty years earlier, young Bernhard had a way of annoying church officials. One of them complained that his overlong preludes cut short the time available for the services, and another warned, “If Bach continues to play this...

A Pleasant Interlude

Wednesday, May 23, 2018, 11:30am

As one of Europe’s leading composers and performers, Felix Mendelssohn was also an astute judge of the talents of others, including his best friends. On May 23, 1834, he wrote to his mother of an encounter at a Music Festival in Aix-la-Chapelle after a rehearsal of Handel’s oratorio Deborah:

Who should trip right into my arms but Ferdinand Hiller, who was so glad to see me that he almost hugged me to death. He had come from Paris to hear the oratorio, and Chopin had skipped out on his students to come with him, and so we met again.

Now I had everything...

The Wrong Answer

Tuesday, May 22, 2018, 11:30am

One day in the 1770s the Prince of Asturias was eager to hear the latest quintet by Luigi Boccherini, and with a simple lapse of tact the composer turned the honor into a catastrophe.

The story might well have been exaggerated for the sake of good gossip, but the confrontation between the composer and the prince was clearly tense enough to leave a lasting impression.

According to the story, the prince began to play the first violin part of the quintet and found it extremely monotonous, the notes do si,do si alternating on and on for half a page. The prince launched into his...

Vampires

Monday, May 21, 2018, 11:30am

In his 1978 reminiscence My Many Years, pianist Arthur Rubinstein describes an early confrontation with the innovative composer Igor Stravinsky.

Just after World War I, Rubinstein and the cash-strapped Stravinsky were in a Paris recording studio. The composer asked the pianist, “Did you play in your concerts my Piano Rag Music?”

Rubinstein replied that, while he was proud to own the manuscript of it, the piece didn’t suit his preference for music of “the old era.” He added that it was written “for percussion rather than for my kind of piano.”

Stravinsky argued that Rubinstein didn’t understand the piece. To demonstrate, he...

Such a Marvelous Gift

Friday, May 18, 2018, 11:30am

Ludwig van Beethoven is said to have proposed marriage to Therese Malfatti, a supposition supported by the tender tone of a letter he wrote to her in May 1810. He referred first to something he had sent her, quite possibly a copy of a piano piece dedicated to her, later to become famous as Für Elise:

In this letter, beloved Therese, you are receiving what I promised you, and, in fact, if it weren’t for some very powerful hindrances, you’d be receiving even more, if only to prove that I always do more for my friends than I promise. I have every confidence...

The Only Problem

Thursday, May 17, 2018, 11:30am

It looked like a lucky break or a big favor done for one composer by two others. The National Society of Music in Paris was putting on a major concert and composer Vincent d’Indy asked Ernest Chausson to withdraw one of his pieces from the program in order to make room for a work by a newcomer, Maurice Ravel.

Ravel aspired to write an opera based on A Thousand and One Nights, and his first orchestral piece, Shéhérazade, was to be the overture for it. For the big concert of May 17, 1899, Ravel provided detailed program notes describing the structure and story of the overture.

D’Indy was...

Some of It Seems to Have Turned Out Well

Wednesday, May 16, 2018, 11:30am

It was as if a floodgate had opened. Suddenly composer Henry Cowell was immersed in music. He rehearsed a band, taught musicianship to about 200 students a day, corrected papers and correspondence course lessons, played the flute and the violin, wrote a book on melody, and composed. The burst of productivity was perhaps not unusual, but the workplace was. Henry Cowell was an inmate of San Quentin.

In 1936, after being convicted of engaging in homosexual activities, Cowell entered the largest prison in a penal system rated the second worst in the country.

As he awaited sentencing he worked in...

First and Last, a Composer

Tuesday, May 15, 2018, 11:30am

Although he came from a musical family, Swedish composer Franz Berwald had trouble fitting into the musical scene in Stockholm, so in the spring of 1829 he pursued his art in Berlin, where he wound up in a profession that had little to do with operas and symphonies.

In Berlin a friend introduced Berwald to Felix Mendelssohn, who was politely unenthusiastic about Berwald’s new opera and didn’t particularly care for Berwald either.

Before long Berwald was broke, but he somehow borrowed enough to pursue his second great interest–orthopedics. He opened a clinic in Berlin, specializing in the treatment of spinal...

Too Much to Ask

Monday, May 14, 2018, 11:30am

Although Antal Dorati would become a world famous conductor, he was a ten-year-old pianist in 1916, when he first encountered his musical idol, and, thanks to his father’s excessive enthusiasm, the occasion called for a hasty retreat.

Dorati’s father was a violinist in the Budapest Philharmonic, and the boy grew up with a keen awareness of Hungarian classical music. The luminaries of the day were Zoltán Kodály, Leo Weiner, and–the giant of them all–Béla Bartók....

You Are Playing That Wrong

Friday, May 11, 2018, 11:30am

Pianist Harold Bauer had never heard of the young woman dancing at the home of an acquaintance and took no notice of her name. But he watched with fascination as she gestured and posed to the sound of familiar classical music. He had never seen a performance quite like it. Her gestures seemed to illustrate the dynamics of the music, and he hit upon the idea of letting his gestures at the piano bring forth corresponding dynamics in the music.

His first efforts to bring tone out of gesture were ridiculous, but he persisted and eventually used the approach whenever...

Why They Really Built The Railroad

Thursday, May 10, 2018, 11:30am

The celebration marking the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad on May 10, 1869, was about uniting a country torn by Civil War, but long before that event, French composer Hector Berlioz suggested, tongue in cheek, why Americans were really so eager to unite east and west by rail. In his 1852 bestseller Evenings with the Orchestra, a character assures a friend that it was all about music, and about one performer in particular.

We simple Europeans had thought it was to be built just to facilitate the travel of the explorers of the New El Dorado. We were wrong. Quite the contrary, the idea...

Resurrection

Wednesday, May 9, 2018, 11:30am

In 1965, twelve years after his last stage appearance, virtuoso pianist Vladimir Horowitz felt again the urge to “communicate directly” with the audience. He decided to perform at Carnegie Hall.

The sixty-one-year-old Horowitz worried about being physically up to resuming his concert career and feared that his memory would fail him during a performance. He selected a new Steinway, had it delivered to the hall, and practiced for a couple of months without committing himself to scheduling a concert. Finally he settled on Sunday, May 9.

He worried that not many young people would come to the recital, and he insisted that...

The Catalyst

Tuesday, May 8, 2018, 11:30am

During the course of a long career, Malcolm Arnold developed a reputation as a composer of classical music and film scores with a strong current of humor, but during the dark days of World War II, he struggled with tragedy.

In 1941, as war raged in Europe, Arnold’s brother Philip, a pilot in the Royal Air Force, was reported missing, and, after several months, confirmed dead. Arnold continued to work as a musician until 1944, when a second blow made him alter his course.

In the summer of 1943 Arnold’s wife Sheila became pregnant, and in January a girl, Kate,...

Our Poet

Monday, May 7, 2018, 11:30am

On May 7, 1783, Mozart got around to writing from Vienna to his father in Salzburg a letter in which he introduced the man who would collaborate with him on some of the greatest operas ever written.

I have looked at a least a hundred libretti or more, but I have barely found a single one that’s satisfactory, by which I mean that so many changes would have to be made here and there that even if a poet would try to make them it would be easier for him to start from scratch with a new text–which indeed is always the...

Slightly Different

Friday, May 4, 2018, 11:30am

No one doubted that Domenico Dragonetti was one of the greatest bass players the world had ever seen. There was some disagreement, however, as to whether he was a true eccentric or just a performer with a sense of promotion and a highly developed sense of humor.

Dragonetti left his hometown, Venice, in 1794, having gotten a paid leave of absence to perform for a year with the King’s Theatre orchestra in London. He quickly became famous in England and obtained a four-year extension of his leave. He overstayed his extension by forty-eight years.

He never married and had no...

Love in Time of War

Thursday, May 3, 2018, 11:30am

It began the way many love stories have begun ever since young men began giving music lessons to young women. In 1910, a wealthy St. Petersburg family, the Meshcherkys, welcomed nineteen-year-old Sergei Prokofiev into their musical gatherings as an alternative to the straight-laced young men in uniform who were prospective suitors to their elder daughter Talya.

Before long, Prokofiev became attracted, not to Talya, but to her fourteen-year-old sister Nina.

In the spring of 1914 Prokofiev was giving piano lessons to Nina, and a romance developed. Prokofiev likened their relationship to the long-forbidden love between composer Robert Schumann and his...

Managing the Manager

Wednesday, May 2, 2018, 11:30am

In 1904, when cellist Pablo Casals undertook his first American tour, he had to rely upon a manager to keep track of his money. The manager told Casals that he could get bigger fees if he would wear a hairpiece. Casals had no interest in that kind of superficiality, and so the manager sent out press releases explaining that the Spanish virtuoso had gone bald so young because of favoring so many female admirers with locks of his hair.

Although Casals had never liked handling cash, he had a keen eye for counting it in a ledger. His agents set...

Large Scale

Tuesday, May 1, 2018, 11:30am

Conductor Theodore Thomas wielded the baton over a massive music festival that took place in New York in May 1880, and the size of the ensemble required him to be alert with his eyes as well as his ears.

The Philharmonic Orchestra was the largest, and in his opinion, the best orchestral organization the country had ever heard. Their efforts for the year culminated in a five-day collaboration with seven choruses from New York and six other metropolitan areas--for a combined total of three thousand singers.

There were upwards of three hundred instrumentalists, all of whom had been members of...

The Cruel Reversal

Friday, April 27, 2018, 11:30am

After being ruined by competition with Opera for the Nobility, a company founded by the unruly Frederick, Prince of Wales, Handel had finally begun to reverse his losses with his oratorio Alexander’s Feast, which had been a great success of 1736.

Frederick’s company had brought in celebrated singers, mostly Italian, to sabotage him, but Handel had the advantage of local talent, a nineteen-year-old tenor named John Beard. The words for the oratorio had come from the neighborhood, too, from the respected seventeenth-century poet John Dryden. Soprano Cecilia Young rounded out the homegrown success.

In the fight of the rival opera companies,...

Royal Crush

Thursday, April 26, 2018, 11:30am

Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of George II and heir to the British throne, was so at odds with his father that he would do whatever he could to oppose him. Caught in the crush between father and son was the country’s greatest composer, George Frederick Handel.

Frederick didn’t confine his quarrel to politics. The king sponsored Handel’s opera productions at the King’s Theatre in Drury Lane, so Frederick founded a rival company, Opera for the Nobility, largely for the purpose of ruining Handel.

In 1733 Opera for the Nobility bankrolled a formidable cast of competitors, beginning with composer Nicola...

That Won't Kill Me

Wednesday, April 25, 2018, 11:30am

When it came to criticism, Felix Mendelssohn could take it or dish it out. In April 1834 he wrote from Düsseldorf to his friend Ignaz Moscheles, who had been rehearsing Mendelssohn’s Fair Melusina Overture for an upcoming performance.

I agree completely with what you say about Berlioz’ Overture Les Francs Juges. It’s a prosaic shambles, although more modest in concept than some of his others...His orchestration is a horrible mishmash, such a disjointed muddle that a person should wash his hands after handling one of his scores. And besides, it really is a waste to set nothing but murder, misery, and caterwauling to music. Even if it were well...

Music for the Circumstances

Tuesday, April 24, 2018, 11:30am

Having heard the news of Abraham Lincoln’s death, Louis Moreau Gottschalk and some of his fellow passengers en route to San Francisco came to terms with the loss. He wrote in his journal on April 24, 1865:

We are to have a meeting on board to give official expression to the sentiments of grief, which, with merely two or three exceptions, are felt by all the passengers. I have said with merely one or two exceptions, because a lady whose opinions are Secessionist, has pushed her forgetfulness of the respect due to humanity so far as to qualify the assassination...

The Assassin

Monday, April 23, 2018, 11:30am

As the Civil War swept the eastern United States, New Orleans pianist and Union sympathizer Louis Moreau Gottschalk made a concert tour of the northern states. He then left New York on a steamship bound for San Francisco and was off the coast of California on April 23, 1865, when he wrote in his journal:

A steamer in sight! It is the Golden City, which left San Francisco two days ago. The captain comes on board, and, in the midst of questions from all passengers who crowd the staircase, hurls these words like thunderbolts: “Richmond is taken, Lee has surrendered, Lincoln is assassinated.”

The news, more...

A Russian Retreat

Friday, April 20, 2018, 11:30am

English soprano Clara Novello’s prime reason for her 1839 visit to Russia was to gain the favor of the Czarina, who could prove a powerful patron, but when she arrived in St. Petersburg, the Czarina was ill. In western Europe Novello could count on great composers--Rossini, Mendelssohn, and Schumann–to promote her concerts. In Russia, without the help of the Czarina, she was on her own.

Those Russians who did befriend Novello left something to be desired. Behind the formal façades of their mansions she found foul-smelling air, and unwashed squalor. “I learned,” she wrote, “to know by the evil smells...

The Mother-in-Law

Thursday, April 19, 2018, 11:30am

The celebrated violinist and his admirer were forty years apart in age, but they had more than music to bring them together. They had Mrs. Angelina Chapman Thorp.

The Norwegian virtuoso Ole Bull was world-famous by the time he arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1868. Tickets for his Madison concert were going for ten dollars apiece, five times what most men could hope to earn in a day. Money was of no great interest to Mrs. Thorp, though. As the wife of a wealthy lumberman from Eau Claire, she had plenty of it. She was drawn to the spectacular musicianship...

The Special Effect

Thursday, May 31, 2018, 11:30am

The crossing from Europe to New York left Igor Stravinsky with hours to fill and so he prevailed upon cellist Gregor Piatigorsky to work with him on a cello and piano transcription of his ballet Suite Italienne. Violinist Nathan Milstein also had some time on his hands and so he came along and...

The Million Dollar Trio

Wednesday, May 30, 2018, 11:30am

They were three of the world’s most formidable musicians, and in 1949 they were invited to perform together during a series of four concerts in Chicago’s Ravinia Park. Their togetherness would be short-lived. Pianist Arthur Rubinstein, cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, and violinist Jascha Heifetz drew...

The Shortcut

Tuesday, May 29, 2018, 11:30am

The Magician, the Musician, & the President

Monday, May 28, 2018, 11:30am

A Team Effort

Friday, May 25, 2018, 11:30am

The Wayward Bach

Thursday, May 24, 2018, 11:30am

Johann Sebastian Bach fathered four sons who became prominent composers, but he had other musical children, including a black sheep named Johann Gottfried Bernhard. In 1736, when a position opened for an organist at St. Mary’s in Mülhausen, Bach put in a good word for the twenty-year-old Bernhard,...

A Pleasant Interlude

Wednesday, May 23, 2018, 11:30am

The Wrong Answer

Tuesday, May 22, 2018, 11:30am

One day in the 1770s the Prince of Asturias was eager to hear the latest quintet by Luigi Boccherini, and with a simple lapse of tact the composer turned the honor into a catastrophe. The story might well have been exaggerated for the sake of good gossip, but the confrontation between the composer...

Vampires

Monday, May 21, 2018, 11:30am

In his 1978 reminiscence My Many Years, pianist Arthur Rubinstein describes an early confrontation with the innovative composer Igor Stravinsky. Just after World War I, Rubinstein and the cash-strapped Stravinsky were in a Paris recording studio. The composer asked the pianist, “Did you play in...

Such a Marvelous Gift

Friday, May 18, 2018, 11:30am

The Only Problem

Thursday, May 17, 2018, 11:30am

Some of It Seems to Have Turned Out Well

Wednesday, May 16, 2018, 11:30am

First and Last, a Composer

Tuesday, May 15, 2018, 11:30am

Too Much to Ask

Monday, May 14, 2018, 11:30am

You Are Playing That Wrong

Friday, May 11, 2018, 11:30am

Why They Really Built The Railroad

Thursday, May 10, 2018, 11:30am

Resurrection

Wednesday, May 9, 2018, 11:30am

In 1965, twelve years after his last stage appearance, virtuoso pianist Vladimir Horowitz felt again the urge to “communicate directly” with the audience. He decided to perform at Carnegie Hall. The sixty-one-year-old Horowitz worried about being physically up to resuming his concert career and...

The Catalyst

Tuesday, May 8, 2018, 11:30am

Our Poet

Monday, May 7, 2018, 11:30am

On May 7, 1783, Mozart got around to writing from Vienna to his father in Salzburg a letter in which he introduced the man who would collaborate with him on some of the greatest operas ever written. I have looked at a least a hundre d libretti or more, but I have barely found a single one that’s...

Slightly Different

Friday, May 4, 2018, 11:30am

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