Grace Notes

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

The Magic Touch

Thursday, December 28, 2017, 11:30am

Canadian pianist Glenn Gould had enough quirks as it was, but a concert tour of Israel brought out even more.

He was scheduled to play Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto in Jerusalem on a cold December day, but let it be known that he had changed his mind. He and his manager had been to the hall, he said, and there was no heating in the place.

When informed that the concert had been sold out and that thousands of ticket-holders were planning to sit in the frigid hall to hear him, he replied that he was susceptible to colds. “I...

Summation

Wednesday, December 27, 2017, 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 to explaining how a contemporary, a fellow Italian composer, had been able to accomplish great things:

The intellect is a rough stone that becomes polished with effort, but not in every part. For example, a painter practices his art but is nothing as a musician. Only rarely does a Michelangelo...

The Price of a Comeback

Tuesday, December 26, 2017, 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. Representing the Paris Conservatory was composer Luigi Cherubini, who wisely stayed in the background because he had a history of crossing words with Napoleon.

But Napoleon couldn’t resist drawing out the composer. “I do not see Monsieur Cherubini,” he said, pronouncing the name in the French way, implying that Cherubini wasn’t worthy of being called an...

Christmas 1818

Monday, December 25, 2017, 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 music they had planned for Midnight Mass.

The organist, Franz Gruber, had come by his church position the hard way. He had grown up to a life of manual labor, managing to study music on the side, and had finally gotten a job as organist at the church in...

King of Kings

Friday, December 22, 2017, 11:30am

“Having just done a picture in which Jesus played a supporting role, I was dumbfounded to learn that the new film was King of Kings, in which he was the star.”

So said composer Miklós Rózsa in his autobiography about the MGM assignment that followed his Oscar-winning work on the 1959 film Ben-Hur. His first challenge was to come up with fresh music for Salome’s notorious Dance of the Seven Veils, which had been done effectively by Richard Strauss back in 1905 for his opera Salome.

When he arrived in Madrid to begin composing, Rózsa tried to talk about the dance with the screenwriter,...

The Tightrope Walker

Thursday, December 21, 2017, 11:30am

Johannes Brahms held his gruffness at bay when writing to thank Elizabet von Herzogenberg for sending some duets her husband Heinz had written, music that Brahms didn’t entirely care for. His reply also included some of his own choral songs, plus a copy of a “very special favorite”--Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen. Brahms wrote from Vienna to Elizabet in Leipzig on December 21, 1883:

Today I’ll just write two lines of thanks for your parcel full of interesting things. If I take them to the piano, I am transported to your pleasant comfortable rooms, and can distinctly hear your very sweet singing. But if,...

The Connection

Wednesday, December 20, 2017, 11:30am

After writing the librettos to operas by Mozart, Salieri, Gluck, and other prominent composers, Lorenzo Da Ponte fell on hard times and sailed for brighter prospects in America. But, after a stint as a grocer in New York led to more financial setbacks, he was again insolvent. By December 1807, without money or friends, he was desperate for a way to support his family.

He determined that New Yorkers had little interest in a teacher of Latin and Italian.

But on a whim, he entered a bookstore and asked the proprietor if he had any Italian books in stock. The...

The Nettlesome Messiah

Tuesday, December 19, 2017, 11:30am

For Christmas 1881 the Cincinnati Music Festival Association wanted to top its lackluster performance of the previous year and at the same time to upstage the festival of a rival opera company in the same city. So conductor Theodore Thomas hired the most famous prima donna of the day–Madame Adelina Patti.

Although Patti had built her career as a singer not of English oratorios, but of Italian operas, her voice had never been better. Patti was aware of the competition for her services and raised her fee to a stunning $6,000 at a time when $10,000 was a handsome annual...

A Remarkable Christmas Present

Monday, December 18, 2017, 11:30am

On December 18th, 1867, violinist Joseph Joachim was in Vienna and eager to get home to Hanover. He wrote to his wife Amalie about Christmas plans and a remarkable present for the thirteen-year-old son of Robert and Clara Schumann:

I’m getting an early start on the twenty-third, and God willing, I shall have lunch with you all on the twenty-fourth. But maybe it would be better to postpone the presents until the twenty-fifth and then we can decorate the tree together on the twenty-fourth. How I am looking forward to it! Do what you prefer about this. It’s really unfortunate...

Professionals

Friday, December 15, 2017, 11:30am

Robert Schumann did more than anyone else to make the music of Johannes Brahms known to the world. After Schumann’s death in 1856, his widow Clara continued to promote the piano music of Brahms by performing it in and around Leipzig. On December 15, 1861, just before the publication of his Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, she wrote to violinist Joseph Joachim about her most recent performances:

Dear Joachim, I must write to you today. I know you’ll rejoice with me. I was quite successful with Johannes’ Variations, and they received hearty applause, recalls, etc. The people I spoke...

An Easy Act to Follow

Thursday, December 14, 2017, 11:30am

As the new court pianist of Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III of France, Emil Waldteufel was expected to play dance music for the autumn house parties of the imperial family. The social occasions at the castle of Compiègne, fifty miles north of Paris, included not just the aristocracy, but also important personages in the arts, and enabled the royalty to enjoy the pleasure of their guests in relatively informal surroundings.

After the hunting, the woodland excursions, the procession to the dining room, dinner, and a variety of parlor games and entertainments, came dancing.

But amid the splendor and merriment,...

The Right Audience

Wednesday, December 13, 2017, 11:30am

At the close of the American Civil War, after a perilous concert tour of the Northern states, New Orleans-born composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk left the country for Latin America. He soon found himself in circumstances as difficult as those he had encountered at home, and he had to resort to an unusual trick in order to salvage a concert. He wrote in his journal in Lima, Peru, on December 13, 1865:

My fears are realized on the subject of the locality, which the partial giving way of the theater has forced me to choose, in order to continue the series of my...

The Infernal Machine

Tuesday, December 12, 2017, 11:30am

On the night of December 12, 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte was on his way to attend the first French performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. He showed up late, but he had good excuse. Someone had tried to kill him.

Seven Breton royalist insurrectionists were in on the plot to assassinate Napoleon. They attached a large wine cask to a cart, and filled the cask with gunpowder, flammable materials, and bullets, which would be ignited with a long fuse. A similar arrangement had been designed and used more than two centuries earlier by an Italian engineer who called the device a machine infernale.

Conspirator...

It Sounds All Right

Monday, December 11, 2017, 11:30am

Composer Hector Berlioz was born December 11, 1803, and cut a wide swath through music from the 1830s to the 1860s. In 1853 he became a best-selling author with Musical Evenings, a collection of reminiscences and anecdotes that reveal a good deal of Berlioz’ forceful personality and caustic sense of humor.

Berlioz tells the story of opera composer Gaspare Spontini, who had experienced some setbacks in Paris beginning in 1805, most notably the utter failure of a comic opera called The Little House which had culminated with a celebrated singer responding to hisses with “a gesture of scorn” that sparked a fracas between...

Cardboard Rocks

Friday, December 8, 2017, 11:30am

When it came to judging fellow composers Peter Tchaikovsky had strong opinions. He wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, on December 8, 1877:

I attended Wagner’s Die Valkürye. It was a wonderful production. The orchestra was excellent. The singers did everything they could to make the best of the work...all the same, it was boring. What a Don Quixote Wagner is! Why does he throw all of his strength into chasing after the unattainable when he holds in his hands the ability to draw out an ocean of musical beauty? In my opinion Wagner is a born symphonist. The man has enormous...

Faking It

Thursday, December 7, 2017, 11:30am

Moritz Hauptmann was a composer and music teacher with strong opinions about the works of his contemporaries. He was also a pianist capable of pulling off a little fraud when the occasion seemed to call for it. He was in Rome at a social gathering when he was asked to play an illegible waltz that had been mailed to an archbishop by a Madame Bertrand. In a letter written in December 1829, Hauptmann told a colleague back in Germany how he handled the situation:

I couldn’t help chuckling when I saw them all under the delusion that they were going...

This Other World

Wednesday, December 6, 2017, 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 of others are doing the same thing you are, and everyone follows his own inclinations. I don’t know where else you can find so many pianists-- so many dolts and so many virtuosi.

I came here with very few introductions...but in Stuttgart, when I received the news...

The Pianist

Tuesday, December 5, 2017, 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 with an impressive face. His fingers are long and slender but powerful. He left Germany when he was so young that he can barely understand German anymore. We spoke in French, in which he's fluent. We talked for about a half-hour, mostly about the Philharmonic Society, of which he's a member--a...

Out of the Body

Monday, December 4, 2017, 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 strange sensation that overcame him.

On the occasion I had a strange experience when for the first time in my life I had to deliver a solemn public speech. Since then I have always spoken extemporaneously, but since this was my first appearance as an...

The Unlikely Soldier

Friday, December 1, 2017, 11:30am

Anton Webern had chafed against the restraints of the conducting jobs he’d had, and yet, at the outbreak of World War I, the Austrian composer decided to work under even greater constraints--in the army. Yielding to family concerns about his poor eyesight, he trained to be a male nurse, and then, in February 1915, he volunteered for non-combatant infantry service, was accepted, and stationed near Trieste.

He took to life in the army, was transferred to various places in southeastern Europe, quickly promoted to a rank equivalent to sergeant, and put in charge of training a group of older recruits....

Parting Gift

Thursday, November 30, 2017, 11:30am

Ástor Piazzolla had gone a long way toward bringing the tango into the classical repertory and had written innovative classical music for the bandoneón, the concertina-like instrument popular in Argentine dance bands.

It was 1959. Piazzolla was in San Juan, Puerto Rico, playing at the Club Flamboyan when he received a telegram from back home in Mar del Plata, Argentina, informing him that his father had been injured in a bicycle accident. Between the night’s two shows, his fellow performers–dancers Juan Carlos Copes and Maria Nieves-- urged him to phone home for an update. He called and talked to his...

What Else Did He Know?

Wednesday, November 29, 2017, 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 November 29, 1943, demonstrated that Rubinstein’s knowledge was by no means limited to the piano.

Former Simon and Schuster editor Clifton Fadiman was the knowledgeable emcee of the show. The panelists were the urbane New York columnist Franklin P. Adams, John Kiernan, a sports columnist who could quote Shakespeare and...

The Elusive Tune

Tuesday, November 28, 2017, 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 later, Offenbach’s publisher mentioned a poor old composer named Zimmer who had brought by a score that the publisher intended to reject because the composer was an unknown.

Zimmer was due to return the next day to hear the publisher’s decision.

Offenbach became excited. “Do me a big favor,...

A Visitor Incognito

Monday, November 27, 2017, 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 by the time he and Hummel came face to face.

According to a story popular at the time, Hummel arrived in St. Petersburg, eager to see Field perform, but was disappointed to find that Field had no concert scheduled. Apparently someone had told him that the Irishman didn’t...

Home in Rome

Friday, November 24, 2017, 11:30am

As a winner of the prestigious Prix de Rome, young Claude Debussy earned the opportunity to further his musical development at the Villa Medici, but the honor was in some ways a setback.

Before he even got to Rome, Debussy was homesick for Paris, and the villa’s vast view of the city did little to lighten his spirits. His assigned room was so austere that it was known as “the Etruscan Tomb,” and the work also left him cold because he was expected to compose in a style not his own.

Debussy’s prime objective was to get back to Paris...

Caught in the Muddle

Wednesday, November 22, 2017, 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 Mamontov. He soon found that he had jumped into a maelstrom, as he wrote to a friend on November 22:

In our theater chaos reigns supreme. Nobody knows what’s supposed to happen the day after tomorrow, tomorrow, or today for that matter. There’s nobody to sing, not because we have no singers,...

Lavish in the Extreme

Tuesday, November 21, 2017, 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 operas, Farinelli brought in Europe’s best singers and commissioned new music and new librettos. But when it came to the scenery and special effects, he went all out.

In 1750 he outdid himself.

For an opera by Giovanni Battista Mele two hundred chandeliers illuminated a 41-piece orchestra tricked...

Incognito!

Monday, November 20, 2017, 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 put on with great planning and care, including clever set changes for the twenty scenes. Milhaud saw to it that the opera’s narrators–there were three of them–were dressed in 1910-vintage costumes in keeping with the period in which he had written the opera, even though he thought that the...

The Ampersand Goes

Friday, November 17, 2017, 11:30am

Librettist William S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan had collaborated off and on since 1871, but, after twenty-five years, the magic had begun to wear off, and they went their separate ways.

The separation had been in the making for a long time. Changes to Gilbert’s words had begun to unravel the partnership, but a quarrel over a carpet split it apart.

In April 1890 Gilbert refused to pay a share of expenses for new carpet in the lobby of the Savoy Theatre. He and theater manager Richard D’Oyly Carte got into a red-faced argument that ended when Gilbert stormed...

The Black Eye

Thursday, November 16, 2017, 11:30am

During the early years of the twentieth century, Charles Villiers Stanford had his hands full as the conductor of the Leeds Festival. He was not consulted about the music to be played, and so had to put up with a dreary procession of pieces by composers known as “funeralists.” He was also unsuccessful in getting more than one work by personal favorite Edward Elgar into the program. On top of that, the 1904 Festival nearly began with a disaster because of a black eye. But a tenor came to the rescue without singing a single note.

The opening work of...

Mahler's Appointment with Freud

Friday, June 22, 2018, 11:30am

It was to be a meeting of minds. The great symphonist Gustav Mahler had an appointment with the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Although he initiated it, Mahler was clearly uneasy about the meeting. He canceled three times before finally coming face to face with Freud in 1910. By the time...

Saved By a Button

Thursday, June 21, 2018, 11:30am

The Water Music , the Royal Fireworks Music , Messiah . It's possible that none of them would have been written if it hadn't been for a lucky encounter with a button. In 1704 George Frederick Handel was a 19-year-old hothead who took his music making very seriously. He was serving as harpsichordist...

An Improviser Par Excellence

Friday, June 15, 2018, 11:30am

By 1740, when Carl Philip Emanuel Bach went to Pottsdam to work for King Frederick the Great, his father, Johann Sebastian Bach, was famous throughout Europe, and King Frederick grew increasingly eager to meet the man known as "the Old Bach." In 1747 Johann Sebastian Bach, age 62, finally left...

The Rhapsody that Wouldn't Let Go

Tuesday, June 12, 2018, 11:30am

Composers have various reasons for writing--inspiration, pleasure, and money. In the case of Claude Debussy's Saxophone Rhapsody the motivation was provided by money and a persistent music-lover named Mrs. Elise Hall. Mrs. Hall was a wealthy Boston matron who had taken up the saxophone. In 1895 she...

More Than You Deserve

Monday, June 11, 2018, 11:30am

Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler

Ludwig van Beethoven was very dependent upon the good will of his publishers, but he was blunt by nature, and in a letter to Breitkopf and Hertel in June 1810, Beethoven minced no words...

Favors

Friday, June 8, 2018, 11:30am

Pianist and composer Stephen Heller had gotten to know violinist Joseph Joachim during a concert tour in England. When a friend needed a favor, Heller wrote to the influential Joachim from Paris on June 8th, 1862: “Besides the quiet sincerity and simple manners of the good men of the country I miss...

A Friend and a Liability

Thursday, June 7, 2018, 11:30am

Composer Charles Gounod was handsome, talented, and charming. He needed to make some connections in opera circles. When he met Pauline Viardot he made connections quickly, but he paid for them. In 1850 Madame Viardot was the talk of Paris music circles. Some thought she was ugly, some found her...

The Shaky Accompanist

Wednesday, June 6, 2018, 11:30am

Modeste Mussorgsky's physician had good reason to fear that the composer was in no state to participate in a concert he had arranged for the benefit of medical students. Mussorgsky was to accompany the distinguished Italian tenor Ravelli, and when on the day of the performance, the singer asked to...

That Useless Company

Tuesday, June 5, 2018, 11:30am

Sometimes even the greatest composers have to distinguish between just and unjust criticisms of their work. After a bad performance of his opera Un Ballo in Maschera , Giuseppe Verdi wrote to the producer on June 5, 1859: You were wrong to defend Un Ballo in Maschera against the attacks in the...

Paganini's Gratitude

Monday, June 4, 2018, 11:30am

Hector Berlioz and Niccolo Paganini. The passion, the extravagance, and the eccentricity of their music was a reflection of the way they lived. Berlioz wrote one of his greatest works, Harold in Italy , for Paganini, and it brought the two composers together in an extraordinary way. Paganini was...

Surviving a Russian Tour

Friday, June 1, 2018, 11:30am

Clara Schumann was one of the best-known pianists in the world. After a concert tour, she shared some of her impressions of Russia and Russian performers in a letter she wrote to Johannes Brahms from Dusseldorf on June 1st, 1854: “We attended a grand festival in the Kremlin on Easter night and I'll...

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

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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