Tuesday, March 13, 2018, 11:30am
In the late 1830s and early ’40s Gaetano Donizetti had gone through years of grief and bad health. In 1843 his comic opera Don Pasquale became an instant international success, and a year later Donizetti wrote another opera, Caterina Cornaro . When it failed, he was quick to take the blame. He...
Monday, March 12, 2018, 11:30am
At the age of twenty-seven, Karl Goldmark decided that it was time for him to make his mark as a composer, and so he arranged a concert devoted entirely to his own works. His colleagues in the Carl Theater in Vienna promised in writing to donate their services. Goldmark recruited an ensemble of...
Friday, March 9, 2018, 11:30am
By the beginning of 1911 Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni had been traveling and performing in America for more than a year, and he was still adjusting to life in the New World. He was often uninspired, but he wrote to his wife about occasional flashes of enthusiasm. On March 9, 1911,...
Thursday, March 8, 2018, 11:30am
He was one of the most famous men in Europe, and even though he was feeling unwell, Niccolò Paganini had come to Berlin to perform. The audience of nine hundred or so included Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia, and all the royal family. Writing four days later, on March 8, 1829, Adolph...
Wednesday, March 7, 2018, 11:30am
According to its producer, The Ford Sunday Evening Hour was a way for radio audiences “to feel cultured without really being so.” Beginning in 1934 it provided classical music, popular opera arias, familiar ballads, and hymns. Henry Ford hired most of the Detroit Symphony as the house orchestra...
Tuesday, March 6, 2018, 11:30am
By 1754 Francesco Geminiani was known throughout Europe as a composer of concertos. When he was approached by the director of a Paris theater to write theater music, Geminiani took up the challenge. The Enchanted Forest was a pantomime based on episodes from Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered– a...
Monday, March 5, 2018, 11:30am
Young André Gretry led the life of a character from Dickens. He was the son of a poor church musician in the city of Liège, Belgium. About 1750, at the age of nine, he became a choir boy, a position that required him to walk a mile each way to attend six services a day. One morning, when he arrived...
Friday, March 2, 2018, 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 and that on...
Thursday, March 1, 2018, 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 behind, and...
Wednesday, February 28, 2018, 11:30am
Ludwig van Beethoven spent a good deal of his time concerned with music and money. A letter that he wrote to composer Ferdinand Ries on February 28, 1816, dismisses both matters quickly in order to take up a new preoccupation: Quite some time ago I wrote to let you know that the trio and the sonata...
Tuesday, February 27, 2018, 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 was to include...
Monday, February 26, 2018, 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 in Hollywood...
Friday, February 23, 2018, 11:30am
Albert Spalding was sixteen years old at the time of his Paris debut. He played the Violin Concerto in B minor by Saint-Saëns, the Bach Chaconne, the Romance in F by Beethoven, and the flashy Zigeunerweisen by Pablo de Sarasate. The audience, mostly invited, had nothing but compliments for the...
Thursday, February 22, 2018, 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 tearing...
Wednesday, February 21, 2018, 11:30am
As a student at the Paris Conservatory, Hector Berlioz had experienced at least one run-in with its feisty director, Luigi Cherubini. In his autobiography, Berlioz tells of a second encounter. He had applied for a professorship of harmony at the Conservatory and received word that Cherubini wanted...
Tuesday, February 20, 2018, 11:30am
The following letter to Giuseppe Verdi in 1872 shows that to be a composer is to expose oneself to criticism from anyone and everyone: Much Honored Signor Verdi, “On the second of this month I went to Padua, lured by the sensation caused by your opera Aida. I was so intrigued that I was in my seat—...
Monday, February 19, 2018, 11:30am
On February 20, 1816, a combination of miscalculations and mishaps had brought about a disastrous debut for Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville. At the end of the contentious first act, Rossini sat at the piano and applauded the singers, but some in the audience thought he was praising his own...
Friday, February 16, 2018, 11:30am
In his memoirs Ignacy Jan Paderewski tells of a concert during which he learned a hard lesson about showmanship. In 1890 Paderewski was making a name for himself as one of Europe’s leading pianists, but he discovered that when it came to exciting audiences, a performer needed more than musicianship...
Thursday, February 15, 2018, 11:30am
Many a performer has been forced to cancel a concert when the rigors of an intensive schedule led to a physical or emotional breakdown. Occasionally a concert goes awry because of a smaller problem–simple confusion. Consider a news item in The Philadelphia Inquirer regarding the case of Thomas...
Wednesday, February 14, 2018, 11:30am
The lover or the priest? An incident from early in the life of Franz Liszt suggests that even as a teenager he had the impulses of both. By the age of sixteen Liszt had long since made a name for himself as one of Europe’s great pianists. In Paris he gave lessons to members of aristocratic families...
