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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
Friday, May 18, 2018, 11:30am
Ludwig van Beethoven is said to have proposed marriage to Therese Malfatti, a supposition supported by the tender tone of a letter he wrote to her in May 1810. He referred first to something he had sent her, quite possibly a copy of a piano piece dedicated to her, later to become famous as Für...
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,...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
