Grace Notes

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

Music of the Future

Monday, August 26, 2019, 11:30am

One of the last letters by Rossini shows that the seventy-six-old composer was keenly aware of the latest trends in music–and had strong opinions about them. Referring to composers touting “music of the future,” he wrote to a friend on August 26, 1868:

There is no such thing as progress or decadence in the latest novelties. They are sterile inventions, the product of perseverance rather than inspiration. Once and for all, let them find the courage to throw off convention and embrace with light hearts and complete confidence those aspects of Italian music that are divine and genuinely charming–simple melody and variety of rhythm.

If our young colleagues follow these principles they will achieve the fame they desire and their compositions will have the long life enjoyed by those of our predecessors–Marcello, Palestrina, and Pergolesi, which is certainly fated for today’s celebrities–Mercadante, Bellini, Donizetti, and Verdi.

You’ve no doubt noticed that I’ve intentionally left out the word imitation for the benefit of young composers in that I’ve referred only to melody and rhythm. I will remain forever steadfast in my belief that Italian music–vocal music in particular–is entirely ideal and expressive, never imitative, as certain materialist philosophers suggest. Permit me to assert that the feelings of the heart may be expressed but not imitated.

If imitation is accompanied by elevated artistic feeling and a touch of genius–with which nature is not generous–then even though genius rebels against the rules, it will be as it has always been, in a single gesture, the creator of beauty!

Repressed Delight

Friday, August 23, 2019, 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 various orchestras. During Lent of 1745, Arne also farmed Burney out to perform in oratorios for Handel.

Whatever money Burney and his fellow students made went to Arne, but in the excitement of getting to know some of England’s great composers, performers, and actors, Burney didn’t mind.

But as he became more and more driven to develop his abilities as a composer and to make a name for himself, Burney found that his initial “inexpressible delight” began to wear thin. He wrote later that Arne’s pettiness made life all the more frustrating. He recalled:

He was so selfish and unprincipled, that finding me qualified to transcribe music, teach, and play in public, all which I could do before I was connected with him, he never wished I should advance further in the art. And besides not teaching or allowing me time to study and practice, he locked up all the books in his possession, by the perusal of which I could improve myself.

Burney also discovered that Arne was so consumed by lust that he couldn’t pass a woman on the street without trying to seduce her.

In 1746, with five years of subservience still ahead of him, Burney met the high-living Fulke Greville, who bought his apprenticeship from Arne.

Free from the grip of an oppressive master, Charles Burney developed into one of the great music historians of all time.

Surviving the Queen of Sheba

Thursday, August 22, 2019, 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 difficult composition. He promptly proved his point by dying.

“I had this consolation,” Goldmark quipped. “My score was not responsible for his death.”

The third conductor liked the opera but wasn’t influential enough to push it.

Along the way, the Vienna newspapers caught wind of the opera and began to clamor for its production. Facing dwindling receipts, the Director-General of the opera, Prince Hohenlohe, decided that The Queen of Sheba might be just what the doctor ordered. Told that the director was balking at the idea of putting it on, he declared, “I will break his neck if he doesn’t produce the opera.”

It proceeded on a limited budget. By the time of the dress rehearsal the singers were worn out. The thing dragged on for four hours in a half-empty house.

“In a word,” Goldmark recalled. “The performance was as heavy as lead. Nothing seemed to go; everything we tried failed.”

The Prince asked Goldmark to come into his box. “For God’s sake,” he said, “you’ve got to chop the opera down to size. It’s impossible to produce the way it is.”

The next night Goldmark and some of the directors went to a restaurant to gather strength for the cutting. There at the table the frazzled Karl Goldmark fainted dead away.

Second Notice

Wednesday, August 21, 2019, 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 pawn his clothes and now “paces about his house like a beast in the forest.”

But now Schütz was finding his reputation under attack. On August 21, 1653, he wrote to several court patrons, voicing his dismay at having been commanded to pick up the mundane responsibility of providing music for the regular Sunday services. He was supposed to share the chore with the crown prince’s music director, one Giovanni Andrea Bontempi, whom Schütz described as “a man a third my age and castrated to boot,” and to compete with him for the approval of biased and largely unqualified audiences and judges.

Two days later, Schütz wrote to the elector’s son, the crown prince, to defend himself against the accusation that he employed too many Italian musicians. The rapid promotions of the Italians and the fact that they were Catholics serving in a Lutheran court, was stirring up resentment among the German musicians. More than a little resentful himself, Schütz pointed out that most of the Italians had been hired by the crown prince.

And so it went for several years, with the defensiveness and the pleas for money becoming increasingly strident, until 1656, when Johann Georg died, and his son, Johann Georg II, allowed arrangements that eased the plight of the court musicians and enabled Heinrich Schütz to retire in comfort.

That Terrible Year

Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 11:30am

In 1869 Emperor Napoleon III launched three music competitions in Paris, and Jules Massenet was fast to enter all three. The contenders were to write music for the cantata Prometheus, the opéra-comique Le Florentin, and the opera La Coupe de Roi de Thule.

Massenet won nothing.

Camille Saint-Saëns had won the cantata competition. He knew that Massenet had competed and had been considered for the opera prize but had been passed over late in the judging. He said to Massenet, “There are so many good and beautiful things in your score that I have just written to Weimar to see if your work can’t be performed there.”

Composer Ambroise Thomas introduced Massenet to Michel Carré, who had worked on the librettos for his operas Mignon and Hamlet. Carré gave Massenet a libretto called Méduse.

From the summer of 1869 to the spring of 1870 Massenet labored on the opera, and soon after it was finished, Carré made an appointment to meet him at the Paris Opéra. His plan was to tell the director that Massenet’s work should be produced and that he would provide the money to make it happen. Massenet saw the future brighten before him.

At their meeting, Carré took his leave with the words, “Until we meet again on the stage of the Opéra.”

Massenet’s joy lasted until the next morning, when the newspapers announced the declaration of war between France and Germany.

Massenet never saw Carré again. His hopes for a production in Weimar were crushed, and in the upheaval to follow, any production at the Paris Opéra was also out of the question.

Massenet joined the army. When he wrote his memoirs, he skipped over what he called “that utterly terrible year,” saying, “I do not want to make such cruel hours live again.”

During the thirty years to follow, Massenet would reuse much of his thousand pages of languishing orchestration in the composition of subsequent works.

How To Listen

Monday, August 19, 2019, 11:30am

As a critic, Michel Calvocoressi appreciated an analytical mind, so he particularly admired composer Vincent d’Indy, the author of Treatise of Composition.

One of the things he liked most about d’Indy was the apparent contradictions in his thinking.

Calvocoressi found it intriguing that within the space of just four years, d’Indy could have written both the sensuous, unabashed Symphony on a French Mountain Air and the cerebral, constrained First String Quartet. Similarly, he said, at times d’Indy endorsed the headlong, emotionally charged music of Liszt, and at others he seemed to disapprove of it.

Calvocoressi concluded that d’Indy was having trouble making up his mind between feeling and reason. Hearing d’Indy talking about Claude Debussy’s Pelléas and Mélisande, Calvocoressi determined that what he was saying didn’t tally with what he had written about the work.

He pressed d’Indy about the apparent inconsistency and was surprised by the answer.

“Oh! You see, two very different points of view are possible,” d’Indy said. “The first time I heard Pelléas and Mélisande, I listened to it as to ‘music’ in the ordinary sense of the word, to ‘music’ as I conceive it. As such, it meant very little to me.”

He went on to say that, after thinking about it some more, he concluded that he had been wrong, and should have listened to Debussy’s work as something completely different and new.

“So I went to hear it again,” he continued, “and in that new light I was able to admire it.”

In his article, d’Indy had written that Pelléas and Mélisande was neither an opera nor a lyric drama because music played a subordinate role in it, much the way illuminations in medieval manuscripts enhance the all-important text.

Calvocoressi deduced that d’Indy’s reason had led him to approve of Pelléas and Mélisande, and that his feelings were the source of his appreciation for the music of Liszt.

The Breakthrough

Friday, August 16, 2019, 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 rash enough to put together an entire program of his own works.

As Balfe played the piano and sang in his light baritone with an ensemble of volunteer musicians, one piece after another provoked encores. “His music was sparkling,” wrote one audience member, “and flashed like a splendid brilliant that gives out radiant colors from a thousand facets, and astonishes and captivates by its beauty.”

At breakfast the next morning Balfe was interrupted by a mysterious visitor cloaked and wrapped as if for winter. He refused to give his name, but refused to leave until Balfe had seen him.

“You are Balfe,” he said. “I am Scribe, and I’ve come to ask you to write an opera with me.”

Eugène Scribe, the librettist for operas by Rossini, Auber, Meyerbeer, Cherubini, and other major composers, had attended Balfe’s concert the previous night.

Balfe agreed at once. As he worked, his wife made sure that he saw none of the sarcastic journal speculations about the Englishman who was writing an opera for Parisian audiences.

Although it has since been forgotten, the opera, called The Wellsprings of Love, suited the tastes of the time. It was so successful that some of the doubters were quick to point out the French elements of Balfe’s musical training, and King Louis Philippe had a special gold medal struck in his honor.

Excellence or Precedence

Thursday, August 15, 2019, 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 many years.

On the other hand, Fanelli’s work wasn’t as polished as those of his three more famous contemporaries.

Antheil asked Fanelli’s widow if the three composers had ever visited Fanelli and borrowed his scores.

“Oh, yes,” was the answer. Young Debussy had been very enthusiastic about her husband’s work.

Antheil faced a dilemma. He felt obligated to write the promised article, but who in Paris would want to read that the city’s most beloved composers had borrowed from a foreigner? And was touting the less-inspired music of Fanelli worth incurring the wrath of Parisians?

He wrote a wishy-washy article about Fanelli without mentioning the borrowed scores.

A few days after it came out, he found at his hotel room door a calling card wrapped in a handbill advertising a cure for sexual impotency. The card was from Fanelli’s son and, in French terms, the insult implied by the handbill was a challenge to a duel.

Antheil felt his temper boil, and, being an expert marksman, he decided to go out and fight.

As he passed the concierge, she asked if he had gotten the card, and went on to explain that to keep it clean, she had wrapped it in the first thing at hand.

As he thought about the “true worth” of Ernest Fanelli, a relieved George Antheil concluded that “art is not a matter of precedence, but of excellence.”

Mutual Admiration

Wednesday, August 14, 2019, 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 manifest itself.

“It is I,” Debussy assured the Spaniard. “It is I myself.”

In an effort to get a conversation going, Falla said that he had always liked French music.

“Well, I haven’t,” said Debussy.

Having been notified by composer Paul Dukas that “a little Spaniard dressed all in black” was coming to see him, Debussy asked Falla to play his opera La vide breve on the piano. Debussy listened attentively to the whole thing and had good things to say about it.

The two became good friends. After seven years in Paris, Falla returned to Spain and entered the most productive stage of his composing career. In 1920, not long after Debussy’s death, Falla wrote an article for the Revue Musicale in Paris in which he alluded to a reciprocal relationship between the music of Spain and France, saying that Debussy

Unquestionably, I venture to say, unconsciously, created Spanish music the likes of which aroused the envy of many who knew her all too well. He crossed the border only once, and stayed for a few hours in San Sebastian to attend a bullfight—little enough experience indeed. But he retained a vivid memory of the unique light in the bullring, the amazing contrast between the side flooded by sunlight and the one in shadow…

“He has paid us back so generously,” Falla concluded, “that it is Spain who is today the debtor.”

Turning Point

Tuesday, August 13, 2019, 11:30am

Even during his career as a civil servant in the French Ministry of the Interior, Emmanuel Chabrier was never far from thoughts of music. He wrote piano pieces and entertained his friends with playing so wild that he reminded one witness of an enraged bull.

And yet there was a deeply serious side to Chabrier that became apparent in 1880 when he attended a Wagner opera at Bayreuth. Composer Henri Duparc recalled:

You can scarcely imagine how much it meant to him to be hearing Tristan, which he didn’t know then, and was almost afraid to get to know, as if some inner voice was warning that it was going to transform his entire life. There had been some excellent performances in Munich, and I had gone to hear the first; it was on a Sunday, and I was so excited that I went back to Paris to persuade a few friends to come for the second performance the next Sunday.

One of those friends was Chabrier, whom I went to see at the Ministry. He hesitated for quite a while, and raised a lot of objections; but apparently I was able to convince him, and at last he promised to come along with us.

Everyone was delighted, because that meant that the journey would be entertaining...He was so overcome by the opera that, although he was usually so gay and chipper, he left us after the performance and shut himself up in his room. You know, until then he didn’t intend to devote himself entirely to music; Tristan made him realize his true vocation, and by the time he returned from Munich he had made his decision.

Although Wagner inspired Chabrier to quit his civil service job and devote himself to music, Chabrier soon joined a growing line of French composers determined to break away from Wagner’s influence and write music that was inherently Gallic.

Escape

Monday, August 12, 2019, 11:30am

Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů was in Paris in June 1940 when German armies entered the city. He left the city in a hurry, leaving behind his manuscripts and most of his personal possessions. He and his wife fled south to keep one step ahead of the Germans, and the experience made him feel that “a great vacuum had opened into which all humanity was being drawn.”

In Aix-en-Province he tried to make up for lost time, composing a fantasia and a toccata for piano. When he applied for an American visa at the United States consulate, the consul asked him for proof that he was an artist, and Martinů was at a loss for words but blurted out, without any knowledge that it was true, that he was on a list of artists blacklisted by the Nazis. Calling his bluff, the consul pulled out a book and began searching for the composer’s name. As Martinů stood breathless, waiting for the worst, the consul nodded and said, “Yes, you are down here” and sent him straight to an office to receive his American visa.

Arranging for transportation to America required almost daily travel to and from Marseilles. Martinů bought the last sheets of music paper available in the city and during the long train rides, sketched a sinfonia that he completed in November while bundled in his coat and gloves in an unheated room.

While the French Vichy government dithered about granting crucial exit visas and the paperwork for a Spanish transit visa dragged, the Martinůs’ boat sailed from Lisbon. Martinů diverted himself by writing a cheerful sonata da camera and planned other works, and eventually his patience and perseverance paid off. Three months later, Bohuslav Martinů and his wife arrived at last in the New World--a place where he could compose in safety.

Pulling It Together

Friday, August 9, 2019, 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. Then he ordered that all of the rehearsal conductor’s score markings be erased. Excepting only the cellists, he demanded that everyone stand to play. He chased an unsatisfactory musician all the way out to the street.

The first performance went well, but at one point Klemperer walked among the orchestra members. He grabbed a forgetful cellist by the arm and yelled, “E-flat major!”

The following three concerts came across hurried and heavy-handed. The New School did not invite him back.

But the Federal Music Project, a Depression-era program for employing musicians, invited Klemperer to conduct the New York City Symphony Orchestra, which he whipped into shape for a favorable rendition of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, although their performance of Klemperer’s turgid choral work Trinity came across as a bewildering hodgepodge.

Klemperer showed up for a second concert in stale dress clothes smeared with chocolate and read a long rambling defense against an accusation that he was programming works by anti-Semitic composers.

Despite the incidents, the concert and the one to follow were successes, and Klemperer was engaged to conduct four more performances in Carnegie Hall.

But his resistance to employing a full orchestra for a performance of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll led Klemperer to boycott one of the concerts, and from then on, the discredited musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic was also unemployable in New York.

Doctor's Orders

Thursday, August 8, 2019, 11:30am

In August 1889, as the great Hungarian violinist Leopold Auer was on his way from St. Petersburg to Bayreuth to hear two Wagner operas for the first time, he came down with what was diagnosed as malaria. Not one to let illness get in his way, he continued on to Bayreuth.

He and a friend began with Die Walküre, after which Auer’s illness flared up so much that he sent for a doctor, who prescribed several days of bed rest.

Auer was reluctant to comply. Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger were to be conducted by the foremost Wagner interpreters of the day–Hans Richter and Felix Mottl, who had personally set aside tickets for him.

He decided to attend Tristan and Isolde, but the music seemed slow to him, and even key moments in the opera seemed to drag. The heat in the hall was stifling, and he felt a headache coming on. By the time the curtain finally came down, his chest and head seemed to be on fire. He hurried outside for fresh air and caught sight of a friend, cellist David Popper, who hailed the house doctor. After a cursory examination, he, too, recommended bed rest.

But Auer felt compelled to go back for the second act, during which he felt even worse. “I was suffering such tortures,” he wrote in his memoirs, “that I felt like shouting to Tristan and Isolde to hurry up and finish their love duet as quickly as possible so that I could go home to bed.”

After a second examination, the doctor said that Auer might have typhoid fever, and only after twelve days did he authorize Auer to get out of bed--to continue his cure at mineral baths in Bohemia.

Before Auer departed, a rumor circulated through the hotel that “a dying Russian” in one of the rooms had made a killing on the sale of his tickets.

The Transformation

Wednesday, August 7, 2019, 11:30am

The burgeoning career of teenaged cellist Janos Starker had come to a rough halt when World War II broke out in Europe. As German and Russian troops vied for control of Budapest and American planes laid down a carpet of bombs, Starker’s music had lost priority to a fight for survival.

In November 1945, a few months after the end of the war, when Starker was in Bucharest to perform, he was invited to visit composer Georges Enesco.

Starker had never met Enesco, but he had heard Romanian musicians praising his violin virtuosity with something akin to reverence. The venerable composer lived in a grand house in the city. Bent and soft-spoken, he welcomed Starker into his studio, and after a few questions about Starker and his life, suggested that they play some Brahms together. The celebrated violinist brought out the score of the E minor cello sonata and sat at the piano, and they played through it.

When they had finished, Enesco said, “I still remember hearing Brahms playing it.” Then, without music, he began the F major sonata and Starker joined in. At the end of the performance, Enesco remarked that he had played it with Pablo Casals twenty years ago. “His playing was stunning,” Enesco said. He invited Starker to come back the next day, when he’d be playing three Beethoven violin sonatas with some friends.

Starker joined about a dozen elegantly-dressed guests for the occasion. After tuning, Enesco and his pianist began to play Beethoven’s Spring Sonata. Starker was shocked. As Enesco scratched and sawed, out of tune, the young cellist gritted his teeth and tried to put his mind somewhere else.

Then, suddenly, as if some kind of inner conflict had ended, Enesco began playing like someone else entirely, a master with a beautiful tone and exquisite phrasing.

In his memoirs, Starker wrote, “It was probably the only time in my life that listening to music has brought tears to my eyes.”

The Most Personal

Tuesday, August 6, 2019, 11:30am

“The last thing on my mind was that it would have wide appeal.” So said Andrew Lloyd Webber of the requiem he wrote in 1984. The composer of wildly successful musicals wrote his requiem in response to several deeply-felt experiences.

In 1978 the director of arts programs at the BBC had approached Lloyd Webber with the idea of writing a requiem for the victims of violence in Northern Ireland. His experience with requiems was limited but powerful: At the age of thirteen he had attended the first London performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, and three years before that, the Westminster Abbey memorial service for Ralph Vaughan Williams had left a lasting impression on him.

In 1982, when his father died, Lloyd Webber returned to the idea of writing a requiem. Four months later a young journalist friend was killed by an IRA bomb in Harrods Department Store. The composer was further moved by a New York Times report about a Cambodian boy who had been forced by terrorists to kill his sister.

The resulting requiem was described as “a rough barbaric score with moments of great tenderness.” The “Pie Jesu” from it hit the British Top Ten and became the only single issued by the HMV Classics department, prompting the astonished composer to remark, “When I wrote Starlight Express I really worked hard to produce something that would contain a collection of pop singles, and they all failed. This thing comes out in Latin and in ten days it’s at Number Three.”

At the same time, Andrew Lloyd Webber said that the Requiem was the most personal of his scores, and for its world premiere in New York he insisted on flying in the same singers who had participated in the recording–his wife Sarah Brightman, boy treble Paul Miles-Kingston, Placido Domingo–and the entire Winchester Cathedral Choir.

Bodyguards

Monday, August 5, 2019, 11:30am

When Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter came to America, his government took no chances on losing him.

In 1960, when he arrived in New York for the first time, Richter was accompanied by a bodyguard named Anatoly, a young veteran of the NKVD, the Soviet security service. Anatoly was pleasant enough, but he was supervised by another bodyguard named Byelotserkovsky, who was always bossing him around. “Follow him; keep an eye on him,” Byelotserkovsky would say repeatedly to his young charge, “Listen to what he says. See who he meets,”

One day when Richter was leaving the Art Institute of Chicago, he found Anatoly hiding behind the door. “It’s him,” said the flustered young bodyguard. “He’s the one who sent me. It was him!”

And Byelotserkovsky didn’t stop at pestering Anatoly. He made a habit of saying to Richter, “Your job is to perform,” the implication being that to take in any of the American scenery or culture would be unacceptable.

One day, at the end of a rehearsal of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto with the Boston Orchestra, Richter was so moved by the orchestra’s playing that he kissed the hand of conductor Charles Munch. Afterward, Byelotserkovsky vented his disapproval. “How can a Soviet artist sink so low as to kiss the hand of a foreign conductor?” he complained. And when they were invited to the home of Russian émigré Efrem Zimbalist, Byelotserkovsky tried to persuade the aging violinist to return to Russia, where he’d be offered a fine apartment–and a lavish funeral.

On a later trip to America, Richter’s escort was a former director of the Leningrad Philharmonic, who persuaded concert organizers to give expensive gifts to Richter which he would intercept and keep for himself. Richter put his foot down and, from then on, his “guardian angels” gave him no more trouble.

Tenuous Encounters

Friday, August 2, 2019, 11:30am

The two composers would be major forces in late nineteenth-century music and great friends, but not before some preliminary missteps.

In 1857 Camille Saint-Saëns began seeing small notices announcing Paris performances by an unknown Russian named Anton Rubinstein. Rubinstein was unknown in Paris for a very good reason–he avoided press coverage. His Paris debut took place in an elegant hall–without a single paying listener in attendance.

With power and artistry, Rubinstein wowed his first audience, and for his next performance the hall was, as Saint-Saëns put it, “crammed to suffocation.” In his memoirs, Saint-Saëns gushed, “I was bowled over, chained to the chariot of the conqueror!”

Despite his admiration, Saint-Saëns avoided meeting the great pianist. The twenty-two-year-old was terrified at the prospect, despite Rubinstein’s reputation for kindness and gentility. For a year, mutual friends continued to invite Saint-Saëns to meet Rubinstein, but Saint-Saëns turned them down. The following year, though, during Rubinstein’s next visit to Paris, Saint-Saëns finally got up his courage for an introduction and the two hit if off at once.

They got together often to play flamboyant piano duets. Saint-Saëns was taken not only with Rubinstein’s artistry, but also with his lack of jealousy when it came to his fellow musicians. Rubinstein invited Saint-Saëns to conduct some of his orchestral works with Rubinstein as the pianist. Again reluctant, Saint-Saëns eventually agreed, and found the experience to be his primary education as a conductor.

It was a baptism by fire because Rubinstein paid no attention to the orchestra and sometimes drowned them out, forcing Saint-Saëns to follow him by watching his hands. And Rubinstein provided scores that were marked up beyond comprehension because he found it amusing to see Saint-Saëns conduct his way into and out of trouble.

During later Paris visits, the bold, broad-shouldered Anton Rubinstein and the shy, delicate Camille Saint-Saëns became almost inseparable friends.

Entangling Alliances

Thursday, August 1, 2019, 11:30am

Richard Strauss admired the music of Richard Wagner, and so he felt honored in 1893 when he received an invitation from Wagner’s widow Cosima to conduct during the consummate Wagnerian event, the Bayreuth Festival.

But the honor would come with strings attached.

Part of Cosima’s motive for the invitation came from the formation of a rival festival in nearby Munich. The director of the Munich festival put it into direct competition with Bayreuth by announcing a new production of Wagner’s Lohengrin, the same opera Bayreuth had presented on its season’s opening night.

The Munich director also invited Strauss to conduct two of their operas.

His willingness to work with the competition put Strauss at odds with Cosima’s increasingly resentful son Siegfried, a composer who also did some conducting. Strauss was not reluctant to voice his criticisms of Cosima and her family. He and Siegfried had a quarrel about artistic control that prompted Strauss to break off his association with the Wagners. Cosima asked that Strauss not return to Bayreuth as a conductor.

In August 1896 he did return--as an audience member--to hear Siegfried conduct Wagner’s Ring Cycle for the first time, and he found the Wagners amiable, although he thought that Siegfried’s conducting was awful.

Siegfried rekindled the animosity by publishing a letter in which he stated that the ultimate authority in the theater at Bayreuth was the stage director, who got to give orders to the director. Strauss took the letter as a personal insult.

But despite his break with the Wagners and his condemnation of Bayreuth as “the ultimate pigsty,” Strauss remained steadfast in his admiration of Wagner’s music and saw the festival as its greatest safeguard, in fact, the consummate safeguard of all German art. And in 1933, after the deaths of Siegfried and Cosima, when the invitation came to conduct again at Bayreuth, neither the needs of his own music nor the grim Nazi politics of the times kept him from accepting it.

Tell Me When It’s Over

Wednesday, July 31, 2019, 11:30am

Many audience members at classical music concerts are not sure when to applaud. Even in the most sophisticated and controlled circumstances, premature applause can create an awkward break in a performance. One person who knew first-hand was President John F. Kennedy.

According to Kennedy social secretary Letitia Baldrige, on more than one occasion during East Room concerts at the White House, Kennedy was uncertain as to whether a concert was over and found himself clapping at the wrong time. Even when he was following a printed program he had trouble keeping up with the procession of movements within a single work.

The resourceful social secretary hit on a plan.

The distinguished violinist Isaac Stern was scheduled to perform, and Baldrige worked out a code by which she could subtly inform the President that each piece was about to end. As the last piece of the Stern concert was about to end, she would open the central door to the East Room from the outside, about two inches, just enough for the president to glimpse Baldrige’s rather prominent nose.

The code worked brilliantly during the Stern performance and the two used it for every other concert. As soon as Kennedy saw that the door was ajar, he knew that the last piece had begun. He would wait for the applause, join in enthusiastically, take Mrs. Kennedy by the arm, and escort the honored audience members to the stage to congratulate the musicians.

Both John and Jackie Kennedy were very impressed with Baldrige’s musical knowledge and sophistication, but she had a secret.

She knew even less about classical music than they did. During each concert she had one of the White House Social Aides stay with her at the door, an aide who was a capable musician and could cue her when it was time to cue the President.

The Crossroads

Tuesday, July 30, 2019, 11:30am

On July 30, 1830, Robert Schumann wrote from Heidelberg to his mother in Zwickau about the crossroads he had reached:

My entire life has been a twenty-year struggle between poetry and prose or, if you prefer, between music and law. In things practical my ideals were just as high as they were in art. My ideal was, in fact, to have a practical influence, and I hoped to wrestle in a broad arena. But what’s the likelihood of that, particularly in Saxony, for a commoner with no powerful patron or fortune and no real fondness for the begging and scraping that are part of a legal career!

At Leipzig I was oblivious to plans for the future. I went my merry way, dreaming and hanging around and really doing nothing of value. Since I got here I’ve done more work, but in both places my attachment to art just keeps getting deeper and deeper. Now I’ve come to the crossroads and I think with terror: Which way do I go now?

If I follow my instinct it will lead me to art, and I believe that’s the right path. But, in fact–and don’t take this wrong, I say lovingly and in a whisper–it always seemed to me that you were blocking my way in that direction for worthy maternal reasons that are as clear to me as they are to you: the “uncertain future” and “unreliable livelihood” as we used to call it.

But what’s going to happen now? The most tormenting thought a man can have is the prospect of an unhappy, lifeless, and superficial future of his own making. On the other hand, though, it’s not easy to choose a way of life that’s at odds with one’s early upbringing and disposition. It requires patience, confidence, and fast training.

I’m still in the youth of my imagination, capable of being cultivated and ennobled by art, and I believe that with hard work, patience, and a good teacher, I’ll be the match of any pianist

In Love with Life

Monday, July 29, 2019, 11:30am

Peter Tchaikovsky never met his patron Nadezhda von Meck, but in the summer of 1880 he stayed at her estate in Ukraine, and he wrote her a letter expressing his pleasure at two aspects of life there:

At sunset I had tea and then wandered alone by the steep bank of the stream behind the deer park, and drank in all the deep delight of the forest at sundown and freshness of the evening air. Such moments, though, helped us to bear with patience the many minor grievances of existence. They make us in love with life. We are promised eternal happiness, immortal existence, but we do not realize it, nor shall we perhaps attain it. But if we are worthy of it, and if it is really eternal, we shall soon learn to enjoy it. Meanwhile, one wishes to live, in order to experience again such moments....

Today I intended to leave for Simaki, but as I write to you a terrific storm is raging, and it is evidently going to be a wet day, so perhaps I shall remain here....

Dear friend, today I have committed a kind of burglary in your house, and I will confess my crime. There was no key to the bookcase in the drawing room next to your bedroom, but I saw that it contained some new books which interested me greatly. Even Marcel could not find the key, so it occurred to me to try the one belonging to the cupboard near my room, and it opened the bookcase at once. I took out Byron, and Martinov’s Moscow. Don’t worry, all of your books and music remain untouched. To quiet Marcel’s conscience...I gave him a memorandum of what I have taken, and before I leave I will return to him the books and music to put back in their proper order.

A Disturbing, Chaotic Life

Friday, July 26, 2019, 11:30am

After a heavy bombardment, Vienna had fallen to Napoleon’s army on May 10,1809, and life became difficult for the city’s residents. In a letter to Leipzig publisher Breitkopf and Hertel, Beethoven wrote on July 26:

You are quite wrong to assume that things have been going well for me. The truth is, we’ve passed through a heavy concentration of misery. Since the fourth of May I’ve produced very little coherent work, no more than a fragment here and there. The entire course of events has affected me body and soul. Nor can I give myself over to the enjoyment of country life, which is so crucial for me. My position, only recently attained, rests on a shaky foundation. Even in the short time I’ve had it, not all of the promises made to me have been kept. From one of my patrons, Prince Kinsky, I have yet to receive a single farthing, just at a time when the money is most necessary.

Heaven only knows what’s going to happen. I’ll probably have to change my residence. The confiscations are to begin today.

What a disturbing, chaotic life I see all around me–nothing but drums, cannons, and human misery of all kinds. My present situation again forces me to bargain with you. So I am inclined to think that you could surely send me 250 gulden at the current rate for the three major works. Be assured that by no means do I consider this an excessive sum, and right now I really need it because I can’t count on what was promised me in my certificate of appointment. So write to me and let me know if you will accept this offer. For the Mass alone I could get a fee of 100 gulden at the current rate.

You know that in matters of this kind I’m always forthright with you.

Last Visitor at Troldhaugen

Thursday, July 25, 2019, 11:30am

Australian pianist and composer Percy Grainger grew up hearing the piano pieces of Edvard Grieg, and by the time he was in his twenties he had put the Norwegian “in the firmament of my compositional stars.” He had no idea that the admiration was mutual.

A friend of Grieg’s had shown him Grainger’s settings of Irish and Welsh folksongs. Grieg liked them so much that he sent a signed photograph of himself inscribed “To Percy Grainger with thanks for your splendid choruses.”

Two years later, in May 1906, Grieg was in London, where his wife Nina was to give two concerts of his music at Queen’s Hall. The Griegs were the guests of a financier, but the “Miniature Viking” as he was known, was not one to mingle lightly. He spent much of the time sitting in the hall wearing his hat and coat, not saying much of anything to anyone. When his host asked him if there was any musician in London he’d like to meet, Grieg said, “No, thank you, I feel so weak and sick that I just want to get the concerts over with and go home.” Then, as an afterthought, he added, “There is one person I’d like to meet–this young Australian composer Percy Grainger.”

Grainger was invited over for dinner. The twenty-four-year-old and the sixty-three-year-old hit it off right away, partly because Grainger spoke Norwegian. He gave a sparkling performance of Grieg’s Peasant Dances, recent pieces unappreciated in Norway. Grieg invited the young Australian to visit him at his summer villa, Troldhaugen.

On the evening of July 25,1907, Grainger arrived. Grieg had been laid low by asthma, sleeplessness, and hallucinations. Grainger’s presence brought him around. He proposed a grand concert tour for the next year.

Grainger was the last guest at Troldhaugen. Three weeks after his departure, Grieg was on his way to England for the Leeds Festival when he became ill and died.

Transformed into Singing Voices

Wednesday, July 24, 2019, 11:30am

In July 1825 Franz Schubert was traveling through Upper Austria, enjoying mountain scenery and the company of friends. From the picturesque city of Steyr he wrote to his parents:

In Steyreck we stayed with Countess Wiessenwolf, who is a great admirer of my humble self, owns everything I have written, and sings many of the things very beautifully too.

The Walter Scott songs impressed her so favorably that she made it patently clear that she would not object at all if I were to dedicate them to her. But as far as they are concerned, I intend to break with the customary publishing procedure, which brings in so little profit. I feel that these songs, since they bear the celebrated name of Scott, are likely to pique more interest, and—if I add the English text—should make my name better known in England too. If any honest dealing were possible with these infernal publishers. But the wise an beneficent regulations of our Government have seen to it that the artist shall remain the eternal slave of these wretched money-grubbers….

I have come across my compositions all over Upper Austria, but especially in the monasteries at St. Florian and at Kremsmünster, where, with the assistance of an excellent pianist, I gave a very successful recital of my Variations and Marches fro four hands. The Variations from my new Sonata for two hands met with special enthusiasm. I played them alone and not without success, for several people assured me that under my fingers the keys were transformed into singing voices, which, if true, pleases me a good deal because I can’t stand the blasted hacking of the instrument to which even first-rate pianists are addicted. It pleases neither the ear nor the heart.

Desperate Departure

Tuesday, July 23, 2019, 11:30am

Sir Henry Wood was one of England’s most distinguished conductors of the early twentieth century. In 1888, though, he was a nineteen-year-old student whose departure from the Royal Academy of Music was anything but dignified. He told the story in his 1938 autobiography.

During the Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace in London, Wood heard his ideal of the great organist–W.T. Best–play a newly-edited concerto in B-flat with an elaborate and complicated cadenza upon which Wood had been working for some weeks with the intention of playing it at one of the Royal Academy concerts. Wood’s performance of the concerto was scheduled for a Friday rehearsal. After the first few bars, the principal of the Academy turned to an organ student and said, “You can conduct this. You are an organist and should know Handel’s concertos.”

It turned out that the student had never conducted before. As a result the orchestra bogged down several times in the first movement–much to Wood’s disgust, because he had expected the principal to conduct, and thought that the merits or deficiencies of his playing would be judged by his performance under the direction of an expert. Getting angrier by the moment, he went through the first and second movements and began the third. In his wry way, Wood described what happened next:

When we came to the finale, although the principal was doing his best in dumb-show to keep conductor and orchestra together, I completely lost my temper, jumped off the seat, and fled from the hall. It was not until I had gone some distance that I realized I had left my hat and coat behind. For all I knew, they are there now. Perhaps they kept them as a memento of my bad temper?

Sir Henry remarked that he undoubtedly had completed his musical education by then anyway, and added that despite his desperate departure, he and the principal of the Academy remained lifelong friends.

The Accused

Monday, July 22, 2019, 11:30am

At the end of World War II in Europe solid facts were almost as hard to come by as solid food. In Allied-occupied Vienna the distinguished Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi suddenly found his career threatened by a rumor.

During the war Dohnányi had done what little he could to help the victims of the German regime, signing his name to petitions to free concentration camp prisoners and refusing to obey laws limiting the number of Jews who could be employed at the Hungarian Academy of Music. He had disbanded the Budapest Philharmonic rather than following orders to fire the Jewish members of the orchestra.

So in the summer of 1945, on the day before he was to conduct a performance at the Salzburg Festival, Dohnányi was shocked to receive a letter from Salzburg stating that the performance had been canceled because of allegations that Dohnányi was a war criminal.

The accusation appeared to be the work of musicians in Russian-occupied Hungary, who viewed his return as a threat to their own professional ambitions. Among them was a man freed from a concentration camp through Dohnányi’s anonymous influence.

“I will fight them,” Dohnányi told his wife. “You know I like to fight. The greater the injustice, the more I shall defend myself against it.”

Armed with a supportive letter from a sympathetic American colonel, he went to Salzburg to see the American officer in authority, who promised to give Dohnányi a chance to clear himself, but first put on a radio announcement repeating the war crimes charge against him. When Dohnányi finally confronted his accuser, the officer refused to discuss the accusation.

Most of a year would pass before the composer’s efforts and those of persistent friends would be able to go over the officer’s head and secure a certificate by which all four Occupation powers in Austria gave Ernst von Dohnányi permission once again to appear on stage.

Dohnányi’s wife Ilona tells the story in the 2002 biography Dohnányi, a Song of Life.

Monster

Friday, July 19, 2019, 11:30am

American bandleader Patrick Gilmore came to England to recruit performers for a giant concert to be part of a World Peace Jubilee. Gilmore had in mind an ensemble of 20,000 that would “whip creation” in size and sound.

Not everyone was thrilled by the so-called “monster concerts” that swept through nineteenth-century America. One participant, singer Erminia Rudersdorff, wrote to critic Joseph Bennett from Springfield, Massachusetts, on July 19, 1872:

Altogether the festival has been a terrible humbug and failure. It was a hideous nightmare, and all are awaking, and trying to believe it never took place. A.B. will tell you of my own glorious successes, and of that never-to-be-forgotten scene when I sang “God Save the Queen.” It is my almost only pleasant recollection, for what do I care for all my other encores and recalls in such a place?

But that frantic recall, that rising of the mass to wave their handkerchiefs and hats, their insistence upon an encore, and that shout for England when I brought on Dan Godfrey to play for my encore, I shall never forget. It was the best thing at the Jubilee, although Gilmore spoiled the beginning by making the organ play the first part twice over. The chorus came in, and it was awful till I came to the rescue. Godfrey can tell you of that scene.

The real Bostonians were immensely disgusted with this big show. All the gentlemen’s houses were shut up, and all real musicians left the city. The Music Committee were never once called, and Gilmore and his private secretary made the programs.

Such programs! See what John Dwight says. Upon my word, had I not my £1500 in my pocket (my only excuse) I should never hold up my head again for having been concerned in such a “thing.” Dear Mr. Bennett, such gigantic outbursts are really and truly distressing!...There was great discontent among the chorus, and he will never get them together again. Thank God.

The Elusive Muse

Friday, July 19, 2019, 11:30am

Although he was one of the world’s great composers, Giacomo Puccini sometimes despaired as he searched for the subject of his next opera. Two years after the success of his 1910 masterpiece La Fanciulla del West, he considered basing an opera on another American subject, Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. He tinkered with the idea of using the fragmentary novel A Florentine Tragedy by Oscar Wilde. He thought about working with George du Maurier’s wildly successful 1894 Gothic novel Trilby, which in 1896 had become the first book to be adapted for film.

In a letter to Luigi Illica, who had written the librettos of three of his greatest operas, Puccini confided his difficulties and aspirations:

I still want to make people weep: That’s what it’s all about. But do you think it’s easy? It’s extremely difficult, dear Illica. First of all, where is a person to look for a subject? And will our imagination find one that’s universal and enduring? We don’t have to take off in completely new directions nor do we bend over backwards to come up with something original. Love and grief were born with the world, and we who have passed the half-century mark are familiar with both of them.

So we have to find a story that grips us with its poetry and its love and grief, and inspires us enough to make an opera of it. But I repeat to you (not that I doubt you in the least–not ever!) I feel a little shaken in my faith and it begins to abandon me!

Do you think that during all this time (since the final note of Fanciulla) I have sat with my hands folded in my lap? I have tried everything and anything....I feel tired and in despair.

Five years later, Puccini would produce his next opera, La Rondine, which would lead to a burst of creativity that would carry him through his final years.

No Excuses

Thursday, July 18, 2019, 11:30am

English violist William Primrose made a policy of never making excuses for his performances, no matter how difficult the circumstances surrounding them.

While he was a member of the prestigious London String Quartet, the ensemble was scheduled to perform at New York’s Town Hall. The program included works that had particularly hard viola parts–the B-flat Quartet by Brahms and the Debussy quartet.

Before the concert, Primrose stepped outside to relax. While taking in the fresh spring air, he decided that a cigarette would be just the thing, so he lit a match. But he neglected to close the cover, and the whole book of matches went up like a torch, giving his left hand a severe burn.

He hurried to a drugstore to kill the pain and got some medication that made the hand feel somewhat better, but the stuff was so sticky that when he played, the ball of his left thumb kept getting stuck to the viola. The process of getting his thumb stuck and unstuck was so noisy that Primrose could imagine everyone in the audience, back row critics included, squirming at the sound of it.

The friction against a burn between his first and second fingers caused him considerable suffering every time he played a half step.

Nonetheless, at the post-concert reception, he received nothing but praise and congratulations for his execution of the difficult viola parts.

But cellist Warwick Evans took him to task for being rude, especially while talking to the ladies at the reception. “You’ve had your left hand stuck in your pocket all evening,” he said.

Primrose reminded him about the burn and explained that he wasn’t trying to hide it for appearance’s sake, but because he didn’t want people to think of it as an excuse and deduce that the performance wasn’t as good as it might have been under better circumstances.

Primrose tells the story in his 1978 memoir Walk on the North Side.

The Children

Tuesday, July 16, 2019, 11:30am

It was to be a combination of youthful innocence and Celtic grief. When the London Sinfonietta commissioned a work from John Tavener, the composer found his atmosphere in the brooding landscape of Ireland, his structure in the traditional requiem, and poignant symbolism in children’s games.

Tavener built his work around the story of a girl named Jenny Jones who is forced by her peers to pass from life to death. From a book about singing games, Tavener learned that hopscotch was originally a representation of the soul’s progress through life to death, from Purgatory to Paradise. His composition, to be called Celtic Requiem, would be a theater piece for children that would include a game of hopscotch played on the stage. Also included would be a swing because swinging games were once part of extended rituals intended to gain the release of souls from Purgatory.

Children and their games representing death would be in the foreground of the Requiem. In the background would be two contrasting adult responses to death–a forthright Irish balladeer and the ritual of the Catholic Church.

From the nearby village of Little Missenden, Tavener recruited sixteen children, ranging in age from seven to eleven.

During the debut in London’s Festival Hall on July 16, 1969, the audience in the packed auditorium scarcely noticed the more traditional forces on the stage–the orchestral players and the adult singers. They were looking at the children, who whispered to each other as they passed through the audience on their way to the stage.

The Requiem unfolded with a mixture of games, poetry, twisted nursery rhymes, and a dizzying blend of music that included scat singing and electric guitar, all in the structure of a traditional requiem mass. At the end, four giant spinning tops hummed magically as the singing of the retreating children faded into the distance. Then the tops keeled over, leaving the audience in silence that was broken by a long ovation.