Grace Notes

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

When It Mattered Most

Monday, September 11, 2017, 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...

Pure Persistence

Friday, September 8, 2017, 11:30am

For music, it was the worst of times. In September 1940, as German planes began bombing London, the main thing on everyone’s minds was survival, and yet an important part of surviving was music.

At Queen’s Hall, after audiences for several performances were kept away by alerts that ran far into the night, conductor Sir Henry Wood was forced to announce that the popular Proms concerts would have to be suspended. Before long, there was no nighttime classical music in London.

The National Gallery and a few other places continued daytime concerts, but the advent of daytime raids required crowds...

The Mystery Remains

Thursday, September 7, 2017, 11:30am

Polish piano virtuoso Leopold Godowsky had disappeared.

On September 4, 1915, Godowsky left his home in Avon, New Jersey, telling his wife, Frieda, that he was going to New York to deposit $1000 in the bank. When he failed to come home, Frieda contacted the police, who determined that Godowsky had never been to the bank, although he had been to his hairdresser and had left saying that he was on his way to Pennsylvania Station to take the train back to New Jersey.

Godowsky had been missing for five days when events took a darker turn. A friend remembered...

Missing!

Wednesday, September 6, 2017, 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

Tuesday, September 5, 2017, 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 Misfit

Monday, September 4, 2017, 11:30am

As a composer he mastered vast thundering symphonies and sublime sacred choral works, but as a man Anton Bruckner was awkward and bumbling, especially with women.

When it came to the fair sex, the lifelong bachelor was a man of impulses. Once, while visiting a town to give an organ recital, he saw a beautiful girl in church. The next morning he asked for permission to marry her.

During a vacation in the Alps he was working on his Sixth Symphony, which shows no particular influence of the lofty mountains, but the diary he kept sports a long list of...

The Subversive

Friday, September 1, 2017, 11:30am

Eugene Luening had come through some hard times, and in 1908 he accepted a one-year appointment as director of the Music Department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He soon found that he would have to give up some of his freedom, but he never gave up his sense of humor.

When his young sons asked Luening what he would be doing in his new position, he replied that he would recruit an orchestra of eighty-five and a chorus of 300 from the university students to produce Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “We’ll do it on the lake,” he...

The Maelstrom

Thursday, August 31, 2017, 11:30am

The situation did not look good. The opera had the benefit of an ingenious librettist and a brilliant composer and yet, as the August 31, 1928, debut approached, few would have given more than two cents for The Threepenny Opera.

By midnight of opening day a visitor to the Berlin theater found the stage “filled with shouting people wildly gesticulating, yelling at each other,” their only point of agreement coming in the form of threats to the director, who reacted by shouting them down. “Smoke filled the air,” the visitor observed. “Crumpled papers, empty bottles and broken coffee cups littered...

Domestic Strife

Wednesday, August 30, 2017, 11:30am

His family life was a good deal less harmonious than his music. This is Mozart writing from Vienna to his father Leopold in Salzburg at the end of August 1782:

You want to know how I can flatter myself that I'll be the music master for the Princess? Well, Salieri can't teach her to play the clavier! He can only try to hamper me by recommending somebody else, and it's entirely possible that he's doing just that!

On the other hand, the Emperor knows me, and the last time the Princess was in Vienna, she would have been happy to...

The Hornet

Tuesday, August 29, 2017, 11:30am

Carl Maria von Weber had admired the lyrical poetry of Helmina von Chézy, and when the Vienna theater commissioned him to write an opera, he asked her to write the libretto. For her story, Chézy chose “The Tale of the Virtuous Euryanthe,” which was based on the timeworn device of a wager about a woman’s virtue.

The rambling, complicated, supernatural plot defied staging. After eleven revisions, Weber diverted himself with performances of his recent success, Der Freischütz, in Prague and Vienna. When he returned home to Dresden, he took walks in the woods, repeating Chézy’s poetry in an effort to...

A Tough Act To Follow

Monday, August 28, 2017, 11:30am

By the age of twenty-five, Johann Nepomuk Hummel already had a career that would’ve been the envy of a much older musician. As a child he had lived with Mozart and taken free keyboard lessons from him for two years. By the age of thirteen he had given a concert tour of Europe. He had just written a groundbreaking trumpet concerto.

It was 1804. Haydn was retiring as Kapellmeister for Prince Esterházy in Eisenstadt, and he recommended the young pianist to be his replacement.

The job turned into one of the greatest struggles of Hummel’s life.

Replacing Haydn was the...

Occupation and Liberation

Friday, August 25, 2017, 11:30am

During the German occupation of Paris, French musicians had to make a choice: perform for the enemy or risk all by remaining loyal to the Resistance and refusing. Among those who dared to refuse was organist and composer Jean Langlais.

Langlais thought it was particularly gratifying that the liberation of Paris by Allied troops came on August 25 since that was the feast day of St. Louis, the patron saint of the city. But liberation on that day in 1944 was dangerous. The city was still infested with rooftop snipers as the Germans retreated. Langlais described a performance that could...

An Emotional Maelstrom

Thursday, August 24, 2017, 11:30am

By the time he was in his thirties, composer Jules Massenet avoided public performances of his operas because the excitement was more than his nerves could take. In 1875, at the debut of his music for the mystical play Eve, he was in for a set of surprises that would throw the high-strung Frenchman into an emotional maelstrom.

Massenet had been heartened by what he described as “the superb general rehearsal,” which he had attended only because the theater was empty. Even so, during the debut he waited in a small café nearby as a friend brought him progress reports....

Repressed Delight

Wednesday, August 23, 2017, 11:30am

Because young Charles Burney admired the music of Thomas Arne, he was excited to meet him when Arne returned to London in August 1744 after two years in Dublin. He was all the more delighted when Arne offered to accept him as a student, tuition free.

A legal contract bound the eighteen-year-old Burney to Arne for seven years.

In exchange for room and board and learning his trade, Burney was expected to transcribe the music that Arne wrote for the Drury Lane theater, to teach it to the minor performers, to give lessons to Arne’s students, and to play in...

Surviving the Queen of Sheba

Tuesday, August 22, 2017, 11:30am

Karl Goldmark had poured his best efforts into his opera The Queen of Sheba and had high hopes for it. He was in for some shocks.

He submitted it to the Vienna Court Opera for the 1873 season. The Queen of Sheba went to the directors of the Court Opera, who took a dim view of it. They were already critics and rivals of Goldmark.

Next the opera went to the institution’s three conductors. One of them complained about its discords. The second, a frail old man, said that he was too sick to look at such a novel and...

Second Notice

Monday, August 21, 2017, 11:30am

As if the money problems weren’t bad enough, now Heinrich Schütz had to put up with disrespect. For thirty-five years he had been music director for Johann Georg, Elector of Saxony, and now, in 1652, the sixty-seven-year-old Schütz wanted to retire, but the signs were not good.

The elector had fallen on hard times, and salary payments to his court musicians had fallen behind. More than once, Schütz had written eloquently on their behalf, asking for some kind of financial relief. He wrote of a highly-respected bass singer, long in the service of the court, who had been forced to...

Wrestling With The Medium

Friday, August 18, 2017, 11:30am

In 1950 Gian Carlo Menotti directed the film version of his opera The Medium in Rome–his first film directing assignment. The crew also included a conductor who had never recorded a note of music and a cast of singers who had never seen a film studio.

“It would be highly inaccurate to say that I enjoyed making my first film,” Menotti said almost thirty years later. “I missed all along the spontaneity of the stage and its immediacy of expression.” He came to think of the camera as “a merciless Medusa that petrifies all freshness before it.”

So he rarely...

The Music Seeker

Thursday, August 17, 2017, 11:30am

English music critic Edward Holmes set out for the Continent in 1827, eager to experience the cultural excitement in cities where great composers had lived. When he reached Vienna, he was in for some surprises. He wrote in his travelogue:

At the smaller theaters in the Leopold Stadt and the Joseph Stadt nothing in a musical way is produced worth notice, though a Kapellmeister is there employed to beat the time to songs which are in the regular Astley and Sadler’s Wells style.

My English proprieties were somewhat scandalized at finding a number of young ladies introduced on the...

The Breakthrough

Wednesday, August 16, 2017, 11:30am

In 1841 Anglo-Irish composer Michael Balfe was down on his luck. He was in Paris, about to finish an opera tailor-made for soprano Giulia Grisi, when arrangements fell through, leaving him with little but his music and his optimism to sustain him.

Pierre Erard of the piano manufacturing firm offered to lend his salon for a benefit concert devoted entirely to Balfe’s music. He went on to say that he would invite various influential personages from the Paris musical establishment.

The “Grande Concert Balfe” attracted a full house of those expecting to be entertained by the failure of an Englishman...

Excellence or Precedence

Tuesday, August 15, 2017, 11:30am

During his sojourn in Paris in the 1920s, composer George Antheil decided to investigate a claim made by his teacher back in Philadelphia. It alleged that Debussy, Ravel, and Satie had stolen their impressionistic technique from a largely forgotten Italian composer named Ernest Fanelli.

Antheil tracked down the composer’s widow and grown son and daughter. Posing as a critic eager to write an article about the composer’s “true worth,” he received the family’s cordial invitation to have a good look at Fanelli’s music.

He discovered that the claim was true—Fanelli had anticipated the technique of Debussy, Ravel, and Satie by...

Mutual Admiration

Monday, August 14, 2017, 11:30am

In the early twentieth century, many Spanish composers traveled to France for training, and a fair number of French composers went to Spain for inspiration. The friendship of Manuel de Falla and Claude Debussy is a prime example.

When Falla arrived in Paris from Madrid in 1907, he soon met a host of celebrated musicians from various countries.

The most renowned of them all was Claude Debussy, whom Falla failed to recognize at first because he was dressed more like a sailor than a famous composer, but it didn’t take long for the Frenchman’s well-known sardonic sense of humor to...

Independent

Friday, August 11, 2017, 11:30am

He was a master organist and player of the early keyboard known as the virginal. John Bull was one of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite musicians. Like her, he knew what he wanted and persisted in pursuing it, but he paid a heavy price.

According to the account of a contemporary, Bull would have gotten a doctorate in music at Oxford, “had he not met with clowns and rigid Puritans that could not endure church music.” And so Bull applied to pursue the degree at Cambridge, which, through an administrative change, later led to the Oxford degree he wanted.

In 1597, on...

The Earthquake

Thursday, August 10, 2017, 11:30am

Louis Spohr had heard unflattering things about the famous Sistine Chapel choir performances of the Miserere by the seventeenth-century composer Gregorio Allegri, but he was eager to judge for himself. After a visit to Rome, he wrote in his journal for August 10, 1817:

These simple sequences of harmony, almost entirely in triads, this blending and sustaining of the voices, sometimes building to the loudest forte, at another fading away into the softest pianissimo; the constant and lengthened sustaining of single notes to an extent attainable only by the lungs of a castrato, and then in particular, the soft introduction...

Pulling It Together

Wednesday, August 9, 2017, 11:30am

Having left Germany with his family in 1933, Otto Klemperer had landed a job as musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, only to have his eccentricities wreck his reputation in the city and force his resignation.

An invitation to conduct a series of Bach concerts at the New School for Social Research offered him a chance to pull his career back together, but Klemperer made life difficult for everyone, including himself.

Arriving only a few days before the first performance, he took out what appeared to be a revolver, actually a squirt gun, and put it on his desk....

The Price of Originality

Friday, August 4, 2017, 11:30am

Claude Debussy wanted to prove that he could write something completely different from his opera Pelléas and Mélisande–a wish that drew him into the dark corridors of The House of Usher.

Debussy had been attracted to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe for several years, saying, “I’ll have to find its equivalent in music.” He began with Poe’s satirical story The Devil in the Belfry, planning to have the devil whistle instead of sing, with most of the vocal roles going to members of a crowd. As his satirical idea developed, Debussy decided to include a companion piece for contrast–The...

Why I Left Paris

Thursday, August 3, 2017, 11:30am

Richard Wagner and his wife Minna had fled Riga, Latvia, and come to Paris to escape their debts, but the French capital also held promise for an opera composer, and Wagner managed to complete two of his operas, Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman while he was there. And yet, after spending 1840-1 there, Wagner was eager to leave the city known for its free lifestyle, as he reports in his autobiography:

My own painful experiences and my disgust for all the mockery of that kind of life, once so attractive to me and yet so foreign to my upbringing, had...

The Daring Recitalist

Friday, July 28, 2017, 11:30am

Just after the turn of the twentieth century, as he arrived to play in a Western mining town, English pianist Harold Bauer was in for a culture clash.

He traveled with Pop Bacon, a piano tuner who knew him well and warned him, “These people don’t understand sarcasm and they don’t like it.” He suggested that using it might prompt some large person to punch the pianist.

The town was, to Bauer’s way of thinking, “very wealthy and very crude.” The Opera House was packed to capacity and rang with the banging of seats being turned down as ushers hawked...

Milestone or Millstone?

Thursday, July 27, 2017, 11:30am

Ravel had Bolero, Rachmaninoff had his Prelude in C-sharp minor, and Constant Lambert had The Rio Grande–a work so popular that it overshadowed everything else he wrote. Like Ravel and Rachmaninoff, Lambert came to resent the public’s partiality to one of his works above all others. Unlike them, Lambert became best known for what is probably his best piece of music.

Lambert came from an aristocratic London background and early on was drawn to American jazz. In 1927 a poem by Sacheverell Sitwell inspired the twenty-two-year-old Lambert to write a work for solo piano, chorus, and an orchestra without woodwinds....

Communication Failure

Friday, July 21, 2017, 11:30am

The Liverpool Philharmonic Society had suffered from a shaky performance of Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Athalie, and when a blistering review prompted the infirm conductor to resign, the Society invited German composer Max Bruch to take over the helm. Bruch accepted the job. An oversight would make him regret the decision.

Bruch had already served as a guest conductor for the Society, leading successful performances of his own oratorios in 1877 and ’78, and so he had good reason to trust that his permanent appointment as Musical Director would be equally harmonious, and in the spring of 1880 he left...

The Desirable Ordeal

Thursday, July 20, 2017, 11:30am

Attending the Bayreuth Festival became all the rage for musicians in the late nineteenth century. The annual tribute to Wagner’s operas drew performers and composers from all over the world. But it took a toll on its attendees, as composer Hugo Wolf wrote to Melanie Köchert on July 20, 1891:

Fortunately the first performance is over. I nodded off from time to time during Acts 1 and 3, and I’m just glad that I was able to take in most of the work. Bayreuth has put me in the worst of moods, and I’m not about to surrender myself again...

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,...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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