The Judas Biographer
Monday, May 4, 2020, 11:30am
On May 4th 1908, sixty-four-year-old Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was telling a friend about a music treatise he had begun and laid aside. They spoke about the details of composing but, as the evening progressed, the composer and his friend became increasingly reflective. As a rule, Rimsky-Korsakov said...
Liszt Plays Grieg
Thursday, April 30, 2020, 11:30am
Edvard Grieg was 25 years old when he wrote his masterpiece, the Piano Concerto in A minor. One of the first to see it was Franz Liszt, who not only played it and critiqued it, but afterward offered Grieg advice to last a lifetime. The occasion came during a gathering of friends one evening in 1865...
Scandal!
Wednesday, April 29, 2020, 11:30am
His career and his family relationships were bumpy; how could his love life be any different? During his courtship of Constanze Weber, Mozart hit plenty of rough spots. He reacted to one of them in a fervent letter he wrote to Constanze on April 29, 1781: In spite of all my pleas, you’ve dumped me...
The Power Struggle
Tuesday, April 28, 2020, 11:30am
They were some of the greatest composers France had ever heard—Camille Saint-Saens, Vincent d'Indy, and Cesar Franck--and they were locked in a power struggle over fame and love. Needless to say, music also played a part in their conflict. The setting was the Société Nationale that Saint-Saens had...
The Composing Machine
Tuesday, April 28, 2020, 11:30am
Today he is best known for his technical studies such as The School of Velocity- -methodical, mechanical approaches to piano mastery. Carl Czerny was actually an extraordinarily prolific composer whose curiously mechanical way of working made his vast output possible. The English writer John Elia...
Dangerous Peace
Monday, April 27, 2020, 11:30am
George Frederick Handel wrote some of his most successful music for a peace celebration that erupted into a battle. In 1749, late in his long career, Handel wrote his Royal Fireworks Music to celebrate the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle which ended the eight-year War of Austrian Succession. England had...
The Handshake
Thursday, April 23, 2020, 11:30am
It was a brief and simple encounter but it made a big impression. In his 1952 autobiography, My Life , Alexander Gretchananoff looked back more than sixty years to his first meeting with his musical idol. In the 1880s, when Gretchaninoff was a student at the Moscow Conservatory, the celebrated...
Ravel's American Comforts
Wednesday, April 22, 2020, 11:30am
It was finally settled. The famous French composer Maurice Ravel was coming to the United States. He was shy and withdrawn but he was about to be embraced by a nation. His most immediate concern was cigarettes. Ravel smoked almost constantly and he was hooked on French Caporals. Bringing a three-...
The Composer Knight
Tuesday, April 21, 2020, 11:30am
On April 21st, 1738, between four and five o'clock in the afternoon a man appeared before the high altar of a convent in Madrid to take his vows as a knight of Santiago. He was not an adventurer or a soldier. He wasn't even Spanish by birth. He was an Italian-born composer named Domenico Scarlatti...
The Blessing of a Broken Leg
Friday, April 17, 2020, 11:30am
Sometimes a musician to make a tremendous effort just to go through with a performance. In the case of pianist Oscar Levant, a broken leg helped. In 1955 Levant had a thirty-year performing career to his credit, but in recent seasons he had become better known for his cancellations than for his...
The Orange Plan
Thursday, April 16, 2020, 11:30am
Sergei Prokofiev's previous trip to America had not gone very well. The critics had panned his piano pieces and playing as "Bolshevism in art" and "the epitome of Godless Russia." Worse, he had become known as a performer with a mechanical style. Now it was 1920 and Prokofiev came to America with a...
Steel Fingers
Wednesday, April 15, 2020, 11:30am
It had worked for Sergei Rachmaninoff. Sergei Prokofiev thought it might work for him too.
The Spiritualist
Tuesday, April 14, 2020, 11:30am
The 1921 American tour of English composer Cyril Scott was a financial and artistic success, but Scott declined an invitation to return. He explained that a second tour would interfere with his creative work. He didn't mention that he had been advised to stay away--by a spiritualist. In the 1920's...
The Ill-Tempered Accompanist
Monday, April 13, 2020, 11:30am
As if performing for the great Henri Veiuxtemps wasn’t bad enough, violinist Leopold Auer had to put up with one of the worst accompanists imaginable...
The Quarrelsome Handful
Thursday, April 9, 2020, 11:30am
They were known as "The Mighty Handful"--five 19th century Russian composers who supposedly constituted a "school" of Russian nationalist writing. But sometimes the "handful" took the shape of a fist. Two of them--Cesar Cui and Modeste Mussorgsky--became bitter adversaries. In 1874 Mussorgsky's...
The Quarrelsome Handful
Thursday, April 9, 2020, 11:30am
They were known as "The Mighty Handful"--five 19th century Russian composers who supposedly constituted a "school" of Russian nationalist writing. But sometimes the "handful" took the shape of a fist. Two of them--Cesar Cui and Modeste Mussorgsky--became bitter adversaries. In 1874 Mussorgsky's...
The Dresden Gamble
Wednesday, April 8, 2020, 11:30am
The same piece of music can draw very different reactions from city to city as Carl Maria von Weber reported from Dresden to a friend in Berlin in April 1824: “I’ve been going through a rough patch, and maybe it’s just as well that my enormous workload didn’t give me much time to think. But still I...
The Convert
Tuesday, April 7, 2020, 11:30am
One of the most influential musicians of the 1880’s and ‘90’s was the conductor and critic Hans von Bülow. He had made and broken more than one career. He was also big enough to admit when he was wrong—or when he had changed his opinion. On April 7th, 1892, von Bulow wrote to Giuseppe Verdi: “...
The Convert
Tuesday, April 7, 2020, 11:30am
One of the most influential musicians of the 1880’s and ‘90’s was the conductor and critic Hans von Bülow. He had made and broken more than one career. He was also big enough to admit when he was wrong—or when he had changed his opinion. On April 7th, 1892, von Bulow wrote to Giuseppe Verdi: “...
Our Family Honor
Monday, April 6, 2020, 11:30am
On April 6th, 1778 Leopold Mozart responded to a letter from his son Wolfgang Amadeus in Paris, hoping to prod the young genius into gainful employment.
