The Indian Life
Thursday, March 9, 2017, 11:30am
By the beginning of 1911 Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni had been traveling and performing in America for more than a year, and he was still adjusting to life in the New World. He was often uninspired, but he wrote to his wife about occasional flashes of enthusiasm. On March 9, 1911,...
Like Bolts of Lightning
Wednesday, March 8, 2017, 11:30am
He was one of the most famous men in Europe, and even though he was feeling unwell, Niccolò Paganini had come to Berlin to perform. The audience of nine hundred or so included Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia, and all the royal family. Writing four days later, on March 8, 1829, Adolph...
Radio Won't Wait
Tuesday, March 7, 2017, 11:30am
According to its producer, The Ford Sunday Evening Hour was a way for radio audiences “to feel cultured without really being so.” Beginning in 1934 it provided classical music, popular opera arias, familiar ballads, and hymns. Henry Ford hired most of the Detroit Symphony as the house orchestra...
The Challenge
Monday, March 6, 2017, 11:30am
By 1754 Francesco Geminiani was known throughout Europe as a composer of concertos. When he was approached by the director of a Paris theater to write theater music, Geminiani took up the challenge. The Enchanted Forest was a pantomime based on episodes from Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered– a...
The Riotous Debut of Stravinsky
Friday, March 3, 2017, 11:30am
The riots that erupted in Paris after the 1913 debut of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring made the ballet famous, but that year of musical chaos didn’t begin with Stravinsky. Two months before the Paris debacle, the same sort of thing had already happened in response to an orchestral concert in...
Too Much to Hope For
Friday, March 3, 2017, 11:30am
In 1875 audiences at the Opéra-Comique in Paris were among the most conservative in Europe, and so it was probably too much to hope that they would take kindly to the novel production they were seeing and hearing on the night of March 3. The day had begun auspiciously for composer Georges Bizet...
The Downside
Thursday, March 2, 2017, 11:30am
Wealth, fame, and acclaim – Joseph Haydn enjoyed them all during a sojourn in London arranged by Johann Peter Salomon. But there was a downside according to a letter he wrote to Maria von Genzinger in Vienna on March 2, 1792: I must confess to Your Grace that this is very embarrassing and that on...
Everything is in Order
Wednesday, March 1, 2017, 11:30am
Could it happen today? In the early years of the twentieth century, pianist Harold Bauer was touring in Spain, traveling with a tuner, who was responsible for having Bauer’s Erard pianos sent from one venue to the next. Toward the end of the tour, illness forced the tuner to remain behind, and...
The Charge
Tuesday, February 28, 2017, 11:30am
Ludwig van Beethoven spent a good deal of his time concerned with music and money. A letter that he wrote to composer Ferdinand Ries on February 28, 1816, dismisses both matters quickly in order to take up a new preoccupation: Quite some time ago I wrote to let you know that the trio and the sonata...
The Shaky Collaborators
Monday, February 27, 2017, 11:30am
Composer Mily Balakirev had scraped up enough money for his Free Music School to put on a series of four concerts in St. Petersburg during the winter of 1879. Colleague Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was to direct them, and before they were over, he was a nervous wreck. One of the concerts was to include...
Circumstances Beyond My Control
Friday, February 24, 2017, 11:30am
February 24, 1876, brought the debut of a collaboration between Norway’s greatest playwright and Norway’s greatest composer. Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, with more than an hour of music by Edvard Grieg, became a classic, but in a letter he wrote almost thirty years after the premiere in...
The Peril You Overlooked
Thursday, February 23, 2017, 11:30am
Albert Spalding was sixteen years old at the time of his Paris debut. He played the Violin Concerto in B minor by Saint-Saëns, the Bach Chaconne, the Romance in F by Beethoven, and the flashy Zigeunerweisen by Pablo de Sarasate. The audience, mostly invited, had nothing but compliments for the...
A Revolutionary Wedding
Wednesday, February 22, 2017, 11:30am
In the politically charged year of 1848 César Franck was a twenty-five-year-old pianist and composer living in Paris. When his father took him to task for wasting his time dedicating a song to one of his female students, he and his father exchanged harsh words and his father retaliated by tearing...
Round Two
Tuesday, February 21, 2017, 11:30am
As a student at the Paris Conservatory, Hector Berlioz had experienced at least one run-in with its feisty director, Luigi Cherubini. In his autobiography, Berlioz tells of a second encounter. He had applied for a professorship of harmony at the Conservatory and received word that Cherubini wanted...
The Portent
Monday, February 20, 2017, 11:30am
Because it was politically sensitive, Giuseppe Verdi’s new opera Un ballo in maschera made the Italian censors nervous. They forced Verdi to change the action to someplace farther from home. He chose seventeenth-century Boston. The King of Sweden became the Governor of Boston. When Un ballo in...
Sticking With It
Friday, February 17, 2017, 11:30am
At the age of twelve, Daniel Barenboim was a poised, accomplished pianist with three years of major concerts to his credit. In the summer of 1955, he was taking a conducting class at the Salzburg Mozarteum. The school had brought in a series of guest teachers, conductors who were working at the...
Top Notes
Thursday, February 16, 2017, 11:30am
In his memoirs Ignacy Jan Paderewski tells of a concert during which he learned a hard lesson about showmanship. In 1890 Paderewski was making a name for himself as one of Europe’s leading pianists, but he discovered that when it came to exciting audiences, a performer needed more than musicianship...
Oops!
Wednesday, February 15, 2017, 11:30am
Many a performer has been forced to cancel a concert when the rigors of an intensive schedule led to a physical or emotional breakdown. Occasionally a concert goes awry because of a smaller problem–simple confusion. Consider a news item in The Philadelphia Inquirer regarding the case of Thomas...
Lover or Priest?
Tuesday, February 14, 2017, 11:30am
The lover or the priest? An incident from early in the life of Franz Liszt suggests that even as a teenager he had the impulses of both. By the age of sixteen Liszt had long since made a name for himself as one of Europe’s great pianists. In Paris he gave lessons to members of aristocratic families...
I Have No Time!
Monday, February 13, 2017, 11:30am
When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s sister Nannerl chided him for not writing more often, he sent her a reply that explained where all his time had gone. He wrote on February 13, 1782: Our father, when he has finished his duties in church, and you, when you’re through with your students, can do whatever...
