Grace Notes

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

One night in 1887 William James, the celebrated psychologist, and George Henschel, the English composer and conductor, arrived at a rundown house on Rutland Street in Boston. With them was singer Nettie Huxley, whose mischievous expression was at odds with the somber purpose of the visit--to communicate with the dead.

An elderly man in a black frock coat led them into a dim, musty, gas-lit room where a few others waited. An emaciated, humpbacked girl of about sixteen wrung hymn tunes out of a wheezing parlor organ.

The man in black lectured the group on the necessity of seriousness, saying...

Surprise!

Wednesday, October 30, 2019, 11:30am

October 31 was Mozart’s name-day–the feast day of Saint Wolfgang, for whom Mozart was named--and when the day came around in 1781, the twenty-five-year-old composer was in for a surprise. A few days afterward he wrote from Vienna to his father Leopold in Salzburg:

Just as I was going to write to you, a mob of celebrating friends overwhelmed me. At twelve o’clock I drove out to Baroness Waldstadten at Leopoldstadt, where I spent my name day. At eleven o’clock at night I was treated to a performance of my serenade for two clarinets, two horns, and two bassoons that...

The Offensive

Tuesday, October 29, 2019, 11:30am

Joseph Haydn had suffered long enough while employed by Prince Nikolaus II of Esterháza a musical poseur said to have the disposition of “an Asian despot.” He put up with lack of respect and low pay, but in 1796, when the Prince’s administrator sent Haydn a letter expecting him to pay the debts of his niece’s wasteful husband, Haydn went on the offensive:

By the letter sent to me and the enclosure of the worthy Economic Administrator of his Serene Highness Prince Esterházy, I discern that because Luegmayer is unable to pay his debt, I am condemned to pay it...

The Status Symbol

Monday, October 28, 2019, 11:30am

Over the course of more than thirty years, Joseph Haydn had worked for three princes of the Esterházy family. The fourth one was a force to be reckoned with–and so was Haydn.

Prince Nikolaus II said that he liked music, but many musicians claimed that he didn’t know much about it. By 1794, when Nikolaus became the head of the powerful Esterházy family, Haydn had become one of the most famous and respected composers in Europe.

The prince was not impressed though.

It wasn’t that Nikolaus didn’t care for the arts; far from it. He commissioned famous painters and sculptors...

We Are Barbarians Up Here

Friday, October 25, 2019, 11:30am

At the end of October 1897 English composer Frederick Delius was nervous. He was in Norway to conduct music he had written for Gunnar Heiberg’s play, The Council of the People. The play satirized the Norwegian parliament and Norwegian pomp in general, and Delius had made his music suitably caustic, but he was jittery about conducting. He spent several days practicing in front of the mirror in his hotel room.

On opening night, he peeked through the heavy velvet curtains and was startled to discover that most in the audience were apparently university students, known for their fervent patriotism.

With...

Used!

Thursday, October 24, 2019, 11:30am

While he was in Paris for performances of his opera Il Trovatore, Giuseppe Verdi took time to attend to some urgent business. On October 21, 1855, he wrote a fervent letter about the need to get international copyright protection for his works, which were being pirated in England because there was no treaty between the country of his citizenship–the Duchy of Parma–and England.

He had been advised to change his citizenship to English, French, or Piedmontese in order to gain copyright protection, but instead he appealed to the government of Parma to enter into a copyright treaty with the English....

Robbed

Wednesday, October 23, 2019, 11:30am

In his memoirs Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov gives us a close and colorful look at his fellow composer, Alexander Borodin:

I always thought it strange that certain ladies...who apparently were admirers of Borodin’s talent as a composer, relentlessly hauled him to all kinds of charitable committees, harnessed him to the office of treasurer and so on, and in so doing, robbed him of the time which he could have used for creating wonderful, artistic musical works. Thanks to the charitable folderol, his time was frittered away on minutiae that could have been taken care of by those who were not a Borodin....

A Dream Come True

Tuesday, October 22, 2019, 11:30am

It’s not unusual for musicians to have nightmares about things going wrong during performances. It is unusual for one of those nightmares to come true, but it happened to an organist named Elizabeth Harbison David.

In 1907 David was to accompany a performance by soprano Ernestine Schumann-Heink in a performance of songs and arias from Frederick Converse’s new oratorio Job in a big auditorium in Ocean Grove, New Jersey. On the night before the performance, David dreamed that the organ was “a strange affair with pipes reaching to the ceiling and consoles on either side.” In her dream she cried...

Very Original Instruments

Monday, October 21, 2019, 11:30am

After performing a concert together in the 1990s, violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and guitarists Sérgio and Odair Assad were eager to collaborate again, and when Sérgio expressed an interest in recording a CD of Gypsy music, Salerno-Sonnenberg jumped at the chance.

Little did she know that playing two of the instruments would be so painful.

The recording session in Aspen in July 1998 covered demanding works by familiar composers--Brahms, Liszt, Saint-Saëns, and Ravel--and Salerno-Sonnenberg skillfully integrated her violin, a much louder instrument than the guitar, in a way that achieved the right balance.

But Sérgio Assad’s setting of the Spanish folk...

Stars That Entertain Unseen Audiences

Friday, October 18, 2019, 11:30am

“Some people grow; others just swell.” It was a popular saying in the 1920s when radio was becoming all the rage, making stars overnight. Some of them, already established on stage, brought their egos with them to the airwaves. In 1923 Thomas Cowan, an announcer at New York radio station WJZ, described an encounter with Madame Margaret Namara of the Chicago Grand Opera Company.

After her success as Thais at the Manhattan Opera House in New York, Namara offered to broadcast a repeat performance on WJZ. She came over to the studio three days beforehand because she wanted her...

Starting Over

Thursday, October 17, 2019, 11:30am

By 1770 Charles Burney had come a long way from his exploitive apprenticeship working for composer Thomas Arne. He had become a distinguished and discriminating music critic and historian. During his travels on the Continent, he collected stories from the lives of celebrated composers and performers. Among them was the account of a gifted young singer named František Benda whose voice changed, requiring him to strike out in search of a new musical career:

Being now deprived of all hope of gaining a livelihood by singing, and unable to bear the thought of becoming a burden to his relations, he...

The Cherokee and the Bantu

Wednesday, October 16, 2019, 11:30am

At the age of twenty-six, Felix Mendelssohn was already well known throughout Europe. In 1835, during a visit to Leipzig, he became acquainted with a young Polish émigré who was rapidly making a name for himself. Mendelssohn wrote to his sister in Berlin on October 16, full of enthusiasm after a day spent with Frédéric Chopin:

He intended to stay for just one day so we spent it together in music. I cannot deny that lately I have found that you by no means do him justice in your judgment of his talents. Maybe he wasn’t in the mood to...

Red Spin

Tuesday, October 15, 2019, 11:30am

In 1927 Joseph Schillinger organized and directed the first jazz orchestra in Russia. Schillinger was an academician and a scientist, and so it’s not surprising that the Russian debut of symphonic jazz took place not in a theater or a dance hall, but in the State Academic Choir Hall in Moscow.

Schillinger prefaced the concert with a scholarly lecture entitled “The Jazz Band and Music of the Future.” At a time when the new Stalinist regime was quick to crack down on any art that smacked of privilege, Schillinger was careful to put the right spin on the program notes...

The Americanization

Monday, October 14, 2019, 11:30am

The Guns of Navarone, The Thing from Another World, Friendly Persuasion, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, High Noon–those classics and more than a hundred other Hollywood movies bear the stamp of composer Dimitri Tiomkin, a Russian émigré who developed a flair for writing American music. He was thirty-one years old before he first set foot in the United States. The year was 1925. Tiomkin was a concert pianist who had been lured to New York by an impresario promising great wealth. There was just one catch.

When he arrived in New York, Tiomkin and a fellow pianist named Raskov discovered...

I Quit!

Friday, October 11, 2019, 11:30am

The job was good, the pay quite nice, and the employer friendly, so in 1717 Johann Sebastian Bach accepted the position of conductor of the music staff for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. The only catch: Bach already had a job and he needed to get out of it.

For nine years Bach had put up with the tension and irritations of the court at Weimar, where two quarrelsome noblemen, Duke Wilhelm Ernst and his nephew and heir, Ernst August, made life difficult. When Bach had defied the uncle by arranging a performance at the castle of the nephew, the old...

A Force for Change

Thursday, October 10, 2019, 11:30am

Allegro, Andante, Adagio, Presto. We take the venerable tempo indications for granted today. Beethoven did not, as becomes apparent in a letter he wrote to a fellow composer and conductor in 1817:

I am ecstatic that you share my opinions about our tempo indications, which originated in the barbarous age of music. For example, what can be more ridiculous than Allegro, which means “cheerful,” and how far we often are from the sense of that tempo, to the extent that the actual piece means the opposite of the indication....For my part, I’ve been considering giving up those silly descriptive terms–Allegro,...

Awkward Encounters

Wednesday, October 9, 2019, 11:30am

In the summer of 1907 Spanish pianist and composer Manuel de Falla piled up his meager savings and went to Paris in the hope of breaking into the international music scene. He was in for some setbacks.

The jobs he had arranged fell through, and, after playing piano with a traveling pantomime company, he scraped by in Paris by teaching piano and harmony students. “I’m more and more glad that I decided to leave Madrid,” he wrote a friend. “There was no future for me there.”

He set about introducing himself to the city’s major musical figures, but summer was...

Faint Praise

Tuesday, October 8, 2019, 11:30am

In October 1928 Russian Ballet director Serge Diaghilev wanted the famous Vaslav Nijinsky to endorse dancer Serge Lifar, and he went to great lengths to get a little praise.

An advantage: Diaghilev and Nijinsky had been lovers. A disadvantage: Nijinksky had suffered a nervous breakdown back in 1919 and had been in and out of institutions ever since. But as one of Diaghilev’s friends said of him, “He likes people to admire his musicians, his painters, and particularly, his boys and girls of the ballet company. And he doesn’t really care if the admirer is the Bey of Tunis or...

Praise or Parody?

Monday, October 7, 2019, 11:30am

Russian audiences were cool to Dmitri Shostakovich’s Twelfth Symphony during its first performances in October 1961, and according to one account, they had good reason: It was a desperate last-minute substitute for a symphony that was too dangerous.

Shostakovich associate Lev Lebedinsky tells the story this way:

Shostakovich had long chafed under the restrictions of life in the Soviet Union and couldn’t resist writing a symphony that made subtle fun of Vladimir Lenin, the revered founder of the Soviet state. Lebedinsky tried to talk Shostakovich out of writing the satire, saying that such a symphony would be too dangerous and...

Last Laugh

Friday, October 4, 2019, 11:30am

In his autobiography, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf couldn’t resist passing along a story that suggests how seriously eighteenth-century Venetians took their music.

The famous castrato Guadagni had given three fine performances in an opera that was a particular favorite of Venetians. But after an argument with the impresario, he decided to sabotage the opera by pretending to forget his part. After two appeals from audience representatives, Guadagni howled instead of singing and stood stock still instead of acting. Dittersdorf expressed his bewilderment:

Who would not have thought that the audience would run him off the stage with rotten apples and...

Second Thoughts

Thursday, October 3, 2019, 11:30am

Although he had never conducted any of William Walton’s music, Thomas Beecham suggested that the young composer write a concerto for violist Lionel Tertis. Walton wrote the concerto and sent it to Tertis, who thought that Walton’s music was a little too farfetched, and turned it down.

A friend at the BBC suggested that Walton invite German composer Paul Hindemith to play the first performance of the concerto. With financial assistance from poet Siegfried Sassoon, the cash-strapped Walton went to Baden-Baden to issue the invitation personally. He was delighted when Hindemith agreed to play it as his solo debut in...

Dear Baroness

Wednesday, October 2, 2019, 11:30am

The world’s greatest composer was feeling giddy when he wrote Baroness von Waldstadten with a special request on October 2, 1782:

I can say truthfully that I am a happy and an unhappy man–unhappy since the night when I saw your ladyship at the ball with your hair so beautifully coiffed–because–gone is my peace of mind! Nothing but sighs and groans! During the rest of the time I spent at the hall I did not dance–I skipped. Dinner was all ordered, but I did not eat, I scarfed. During the night, instead of sleeping gently and sweetly, I slept like...

Spite and Neglect

Tuesday, October 1, 2019, 11:30am

In memoirs he began in 1910 and never finished, composer Karl Goldmark looked back six decades to his early experiences as a struggling violinist. After a brief inglorious career as a draftee in a war between Austria and Hungary, the eighteen-year-old musician settled in the town of Ödenburg. His playing wasn’t always appreciated.

On October 1, 1848, I joined the orchestra of the Ödenburg Theater as one of the first violins at a monthly salary of eight florins. In order to have the opportunity to play in public, I needed a dress coat. I paid three florins a month for...

Breaking Through

Monday, September 30, 2019, 11:30am

Seventeen-year-old Johannes Brahms was determined to become a composer, and so in 1850 when Robert Schumann came to Hamburg for a visit, Brahms got up his courage and sent a parcel of his music to Schumann’s hotel. The result was discouraging. The parcel came back unopened.

Two years later Brahms traveled to Weimar to meet piano wizard Franz Liszt. Liszt was living in lavish style at the palace of his mistress, surrounded by a throng of students and other admirers. Poverty had forced Brahms to play piano in some of Hamburg’s most tawdry entertainment houses. He found the luxurious surroundings...

A Minor Detail

Friday, September 27, 2019, 11:30am

Franz Lehár was enthusiastic again. Having made his fortune at the age of thirty-five with his 1905 operetta The Merry Widow, the Hungarian composer had gone through a fallow stretch during World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now, in 1925, he had found a tenor, Richard Tauber, who inspired him, and a book that seemed tailor-made to be adapted into an operetta.

The book was called Paganini. It was by an anonymous author and it told of the great violinist’s struggle with love and artistry. The manager of Berlin’s Künstlertheater was quick to offer the usual...

Not To Be

Thursday, September 26, 2019, 11:30am

When celebrated Czech composer Antonín Dvořák stepped onto the pier in New York on September 26, 1892, he was welcomed as the future discoverer of American music. During his two-and-a-half-year tenure as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, Americans got to hear a variety of his works and he wrote some of his most important music.

But during his lifetime, an important part of his music never got a hearing in America—opera.

Dvořák did what he could. The founder of the National Conservatory, Mrs. Jeanette Thurber, was so ardent in her appreciation of opera that...

The Split

Wednesday, September 25, 2019, 11:30am

In the fall of 1931 a Berlin producer thought that a theater version of the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny could bring in good money during hard times.

Composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertold Brecht made the going rough. During rehearsals, as they made cuts in the opera, Weill argued on behalf of his music, Brecht on behalf of his words. Their quarrels got so hot that their attorneys came into the theater and threatened each other. When a press photographer took a picture of Brecht standing next to Weill, Brecht knocked the camera out...

American Reverses

Tuesday, September 24, 2019, 11:30am

On September 24, 1902, Pietro Mascagni sailed for New York with an opera company that he had assembled hastily for an American tour. He would discover some old truths in the New World.

When Mascagni and his wife arrived in New York they received a warm welcome from thousands of cheering Italians who accompanied them up Broadway. The next day, reality set in.

Arriving at the Metropolitan Opera House, Mascagni found two orchestras waiting for him–the one he had brought from Italy and an American orchestra that had been rounded up by the Musical Union, which demanded that Mascagni’s orchestra...

Turnabout

Monday, September 23, 2019, 11:30am

The celebrated conductor Sir Thomas Beecham was known for the practical jokes he played on performers. How well would he take it when a performer put one over on him?

In the fall of 1935 Beecham was holding auditions for a season at London’s Covent Garden and a long tour through the country, which would include a revival of Puccini’s La Boheme. A few years earlier, soprano Dora Labbette had won Beecham’s admiration singing in Handel’s Messiah under his direction, and now she wanted to have her operatic debut.

She decided to audition in disguise.

She put on a bright...

That's All I Ask

Friday, September 20, 2019, 11:30am

On September 20, 1850, Richard Wagner shared his aspirations with critic Theodor Uhlig, writing from Zurich about the key to achieving his latest artistic goal:

What’s needed to accomplish the best, most decisive and important project that I can take on in the current circumstances, and to bring to fruition what I consider my life work, is a sum of perhaps 10,000 Thalers.

If I had that kind of money to work with, this is what I would do. Here, where I have a position and where the situation isn’t too bad, I’d have a makeshift theater of planks and...

The Elusive Tune

Thursday, November 28, 2019, 11:30am

Composer Jacques Offenbach had eight bars of a tune running through his head--a waltz that his mother had sung to him as a lullaby. Offenbach’s father overheard him humming it and told him that it was by a once-promising young composer named Zimmer, who had suddenly dropped out of sight. Sometime...

A Visitor Incognito

Wednesday, November 27, 2019, 11:30am

In 1822 the most famous touring pianist in Europe was Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who had been a child prodigy so impressive that at the age of seven he became a live-in student of Mozart’s. Hummel’s closest rival was Irish-born pianist John Field, who had been living in Russia for nearly twenty years...

Passed By

Tuesday, November 26, 2019, 11:30am

With the help of publisher John Stark, Scott Joplin made his name with a succession of genteel, lilting ragtime piano pieces, beginning with the million-seller Maple Leaf Rag in 1899. By 1911 he felt that he was in a position to create an entirely new kind of music, an American opera dealing with...

Tug of War

Monday, November 25, 2019, 11:30am

The celebrated Austrian cellist Emanuel Feuermann didn’t care for recording, so he probably came into the Columbia session with a bad attitude, and the effort to make a record of Haydn’s Concerto in D went awry from the start. It was November 1935. The conductor was Malcolm Sargent who was...

Caught in the Muddle

Friday, November 22, 2019, 11:30am

He would later become known as one of the twentieth century’s great pianists and composers, but in 1897, at the age of twenty-four, Sergei Rachmaninoff jumped at the chance to be the assistant conductor to one Eugene Esposito in a new private opera company opened in Moscow by a tycoon named...

Lavish in the Extreme

Thursday, November 21, 2019, 11:30am

At the court of Spain’s King Ferdinand V and Queen Maria Barbara, the famed Italian castrato Farinelli was such a royal favorite that he could have influenced Spain’s politics, but he preferred to make his mark on the country’s musical life–and that he did with a vengeance. As the director of court...

Incognito!

Wednesday, November 20, 2019, 11:30am

Back in 1910 Darius Milhaud had written an opera called La Brebis égarée , and although he was aware of its youthful flaws, he did not object in November 1923 when the Paris Opéra-Comique decided to produce it. The experience would give him some of his most sincere audience response. The opera was...

A Voice From The Crowd

Tuesday, November 19, 2019, 11:30am

On November 19, 1916, celebrated conductor Arturo Toscanini was at the Augusteo Theater in Rome to conduct the first of three concerts. The program included two pieces by Wagner— Forest Murmurs from Siegfried and the funeral music from Götterdämmerung . On previous occasions, the orchestra had...

Too Lonely!

Monday, November 18, 2019, 11:30am

In the fall of 1886 Gustav Mahler was the director of the Leipzig Opera house. In a letter that he wrote to his friend Friedrich Löhr, he spoke of positive experiences with composer Karl Reinecke and pianist Anton Rubinstein. He spoke in less positive terms of his relationship with Leipzig Opera...

Festival or Funeral?

Friday, November 15, 2019, 11:30am

Charles Villiers Stanford was described by a contemporary as “vibrant, untiring, and humorous,” traits that put him at odds with the organizers of the Leeds Festivals in the first years of the twentieth century. Stanford became the conductor of the Leeds Philharmonic in 1898, but had his conflicts...

A Natural Solution

Thursday, November 14, 2019, 11:30am

Although American pianist and composer Edward MacDowell would soon come to grief in his dealings with administrators at Columbia University, he had a strong rapport with his students, in part because he broke down the barriers of formality. Perhaps the same shyness that made MacDowell a reluctant...

The Assistant

Wednesday, November 13, 2019, 11:30am

As assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic twenty-five-year-old Leonard Bernstein was to sit in on all rehearsals and learn the scores well enough to be able to conduct them in place of Artur Rodzinski or any guest conductor. On November 13, 1943, as he attended the Town Hall recital of a...

Keep Your Day Job

Tuesday, November 12, 2019, 11:30am

Thomas Gainsborough was one of England’s great painters. He thought that he could become a fine musician too. One friend had grave doubts. In the 1770s Henry Angelo and his wife hosted gatherings that brought together various kinds of artists. In memoirs he wrote in 1830, he recalled that...

A Simple Twist of Fate

Monday, November 11, 2019, 11:30am

In 1916 Spanish composer Enrique Granados was in New York for the world premiere of his opera Goyescas . The opera ends with a tragic duel in which the protagonist dies in the arms of his beloved. By a simple twist of fate, Granados would soon experience a real-life tragedy every bit as poignant...

More Than They Bargained For

Friday, November 8, 2019, 11:30am

As a child pianist, Erich Wolfgang Korngold had impressed Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. By 1934, when the composer came to Hollywood, he wasn’t about to let a movie producer tell him how to do his job. Hal Wallis had brought Korngold to town for Warner Brothers, to tailor the music of Felix...

The Congressman and the Conductor

Thursday, November 7, 2019, 11:30am

In 1938 twenty-six-year-old Erich Leinsdorf was in New York building a career as a conductor for the Metropolitan Opera when his visa expired, requiring him to return to Austria. For professional and personal reasons, it was a bad time to go home. Young Leinsdorf had risen quickly in the ranks of...

Saved!

Wednesday, November 6, 2019, 11:30am

On November 6, 1891, Peter Tchaikovsky had just conducted his new symphonic poem Voyevode in a Moscow concert arranged by his young editor Alexander Siloti. The applause seemed restrained, and when Tchaikovsky came back into the artists’ greenroom, he destroyed the manuscript and told the attendant...

Viva L'America!

Tuesday, November 5, 2019, 11:30am

Ruggiero Leoncavallo was hoping to revive his career with a conducting contract or a commission for an opera when he agreed to undertake an American tour in the fall of 1906. He traveled with plenty of company–seven singers and the 75-piece La Scala orchestra–and all of them were in for a tough...

American Enlightenment

Monday, November 4, 2019, 11:30am

Pianist Henri Herz was dismissed by Robert Schumann as a mere “stenographer,” but in the 1830s he was the most fashionable and sensational keyboard player in Paris. In 1845, when he wanted big money to bankroll his new piano manufacturing firm, Herz headed for America. In his book My Trips to...

The Latest from Paris

Friday, November 1, 2019, 11:30am

At the beginning of November 1853, Franz Liszt wrote from Weimar to violinist Joseph Joachim in Hanover about musical discoveries he had made during a recent visit to Paris: As for news from Paris, I have none except for the vigorous rehearsing of Meyerbeer’s new opera L’Étoile du Nord at the Opéra...

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