Wednesday, January 24, 2018, 11:30am
Clara Schumann was one of Europe’s great pianists. The widow of Robert Schumann was also the closest friend of Johannes Brahms, and she wrote to him from Vienna on January 24, 1866: The financial situation here seems to be pretty bad and yet all of the concerts are well attended. I hope mine will...
Tuesday, January 23, 2018, 11:30am
Antonio Vivaldi taught at Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà, an institution for orphaned or abandoned girls, but he had further ambitions, and so he also began managing the San Angelo Theater as a producer of operas. At the same time, he was also a good salesman, and, on one occasion, he sold some...
Monday, January 22, 2018, 11:30am
As organist and choirmaster at St. Luke’s Church in the Chelsea section of London, John Ireland was known for nurturing the talent of singers and instrumentalists who came up through the ranks. He was also known for being a fierce disciplinarian who was not above shouting expletives at erring...
Friday, January 19, 2018, 11:30am
In 1525 Cardinal Thomas Wolsey founded Cardinal College in Oxford and delegated the search for singers to John Longland, the bishop of Lincoln. Longland’s search for an instructor of a choir of sixteen boys led him to singer and composer John Taverner, who lived in the Lincolnshire village of...
Thursday, January 18, 2018, 11:30am
People who pay to attend a music lecture don’t necessarily pay attention while it’s in progress. In 1905, music critic Michel Calvocoressi was to do his first public speaking and, due to no fault of his own, he ran into trouble right away. He was to give a lecture on Russian music at a Paris...
Wednesday, January 17, 2018, 11:30am
Florent Schmitt was an innovative French composer whose 1907 ballet La tragédie de Salomé in some ways anticipated Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring , and the Russian composer expressed admiration for his works. His music had what someone called “an aggressive masculinity,” and when it came to...
Tuesday, January 16, 2018, 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...
Monday, January 15, 2018, 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...
Friday, January 12, 2018, 11:30am
He was a composer and he was a critic. So sooner or later Deems Taylor would face a conflict of interest, and, when the moment arrived, he had to figure out a graceful way to review his own piece of music. Henry Hadley had recently been appointed the associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic...
Thursday, January 11, 2018, 11:30am
In his 1824 biography of the composer, Stendhal describes an 1818 performance in Naples of Gioachino Rossini’s opera Moses in Egypt. Stendhal was leery of the opera, thinking that he might be setting himself up to see a musical version of the Inquisition. Due to no fault of Rossini’s, the...
Wednesday, January 10, 2018, 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...
Tuesday, January 9, 2018, 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...
Monday, January 8, 2018, 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...
Friday, January 5, 2018, 11:30am
Twenty-first century neurologists have determined that the pleasure a musician derives from playing the climax of a composition compares with the enjoyment of eating chocolate. If they’re right, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf had a double reason to remember a reward he received as a young violinist...
Thursday, January 4, 2018, 11:30am
The young man was one of the most handsome in Boston, seemingly a classical Greek statue that had come to life and put on modern clothes. He was also spoiled, and all efforts to make him work had failed. An attempt to turn him into a journalist had sent him to India, from which he returned more...
Wednesday, January 3, 2018, 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...
Tuesday, January 2, 2018, 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...
Monday, January 1, 2018, 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...
Friday, December 29, 2017, 11:30am
The two sisters from Baltimore so impressed Max Bruch with their performance of his Fantasy for Two Pianos that he agreed to write a two-piano concerto for them. Writing it would be relatively easy, putting it back together would be the hard part. When Ottilie and Rose Sutro asked Bruch to write...
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...
