Wednesday, March 28, 2018, 11:30am
Lehman Engel was a successful composer and music director for the stage in New York, but when the United States entered World War II, he took a less predictable job as a yeoman, third class, in the Navy. Engel was put in charge of organizing a symphonic concert band at the Great Lakes Naval...
Tuesday, March 27, 2018, 11:30am
Dissatisfied with the quality of teaching at the Paris Conservatory, Vincent d’Indy and two colleagues had founded the Schola Cantorum in 1894 as a way of raising the standard of music education in France. He was not about to let anything close it down, including a German bombardment. In March of...
Monday, March 26, 2018, 11:30am
He was determined and innovative and, at twenty-two, California-born Henry Cowell was also trying to establish his musical reputation. His mentor, John Varian, who was quite a nonconformist himself, advised young Cowell that “you will have to depend on yourself and very few other musicians to...
Friday, March 23, 2018, 11:30am
For Spanish pianist and composer Enrique Granados, writing music was mostly a matter of the moment. He was not one to work out a formal scheme for an extended composition, but when inspiration struck, he was impulsive and completely absorbed until he had turned his feelings into notes. A variety of...
Thursday, March 22, 2018, 11:30am
The popularity of his music was waning and he was in debt and ailing, but during his last days, John Bach enjoyed life. After twenty years of eclipse, the eleventh son of Johann Sebastian Bach had restored his reputation as an opera composer by succeeding with La Clemenza di Scipione. His friend...
Wednesday, March 21, 2018, 11:30am
In 1774 Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote a description for a biographer of his late father Johann Sebastian: The first thing he would do when trying out an organ was to joke, “Above all, I have to find out whether the organ has good lungs.” He’d pull out all the stops and play in as many voices as...
Tuesday, March 20, 2018, 11:30am
Georg Solti’s career as an opera conductor was nipped in the bud in 1938 when German troops marched across the Austrian border, making life unsafe in Hungary. Solti left Hungary for the security of Switzerland, where he conducted two more opera performances. For the duration of World War II, with...
Monday, March 19, 2018, 11:30am
In 1859 composer Georges Bizet was a twenty-year-old student studying in Rome. He had already written a masterful Symphony in C , a major sacred work, and his comic opera Don Procopio , and he had strong opinions about his fellow composers. He wrote to his mother in Paris on March 19: You attribute...
Friday, March 16, 2018, 11:30am
By the time the Venice debut of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Beatrice di Tenda finally took place, it was a month overdue, and winning over an impatient audience was not easy. Librettist Felice Romani was part of the problem. He was slow to deliver and, apparently, stood Bellini up at least once,...
Thursday, March 15, 2018, 11:30am
Serge Koussevitzky had studied conducting with the great Arthur Nikisch, founded his own orchestra in Moscow in 1909, and published the music of several prominent composers of the day, so he had reason to feel that he had some control over the way the music was performed. One of the composers whose...
Wednesday, March 14, 2018, 11:30am
After the success of his Second Symphony in Germany, Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen received encouragement from a representative of Leipzig publisher C.F. Peters, who thought that a third symphony would be lucrative for both of them. In the fall of 1882, after several years had passed without...
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...
