The Fragrant Faust
Friday, February 10, 2017, 11:30am
The producers of Charles Gounod’s opera Faust had their work cut out for them. The opera had not done so well at its Paris debut in 1859, and now a Hanover premiere was in the works. Although many in the city and the surrounding countryside were excited about the upcoming performance, several...
A Dishonest Teacher
Thursday, February 9, 2017, 11:30am
In his 1969 memoirs, English composer Cyril Scott thought back seventy-eight years to a piano teacher who did him a great disservice, and yet played an important part in the development of his career. When he was twelve years old, Scott and his sister got a new piano teacher. She was not a...
Condemned!
Wednesday, February 8, 2017, 11:30am
The premise for the opera was unusual to say the least. The libretto by Gertrude Stein consisted of apparently random sentences and phrases that Virgil Thomson had set to distinctively American music. As the unconventional Four Saints in Three Acts approached its February 8, 1934, debut in Hartford...
The Vocal Critic
Tuesday, February 7, 2017, 11:30am
Casting an opera for the stage and casting it for the movies can be quite different, as was proved by a notable blunder at RCA. In his 1976 autobiography Cadenza: A Musical Career longtime Boston Symphony conductor Erich Leinsdorf tells of recording sessions in Rome in the late 1950s. For a...
The Rift
Monday, February 6, 2017, 11:30am
The great philosopher was a champion of the great composer until one of them tried to enter the field of the other. That’s the way conductor Hans Richter told the young pianist Ernst von Dohnányi about the rift between Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Richter, who was a close...
Pay it Forward
Friday, February 3, 2017, 11:30am
One day in 1962 world renowned violinist Isaac Stern was at the Paris workshop of celebrated lute maker Etienne Vatelot, a good friend who had written him a letter about a Chinese family of his acquaintance. Vatelot said to Stern, “They have this young boy, about six, seven years old. You should...
Pianist on Ice
Thursday, February 2, 2017, 11:30am
As the winter of 1893-94 set in, the young Russian pianist and composer Alexander Scriabin was miserable. A year earlier, he was to have undertaken a concert tour, but recurrent pain in his right hand had forced him to cancel. Doctors had prescribed a quiet sojourn in a hot southern climate, a...
The Good Times Roll
Wednesday, February 1, 2017, 11:30am
It was as if Parisians were determined to put the bad times behind them with parties that would drown out the noise of the past. The bloody labor revolt of 1848 had brought in a Second Republic opposed to most reforms. A presidential election had brought in Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the...
The Next Generation
Tuesday, January 31, 2017, 11:30am
After a grueling concert tour of Great Britain, Johann Strauss had faced a rebellious orchestra and suffered a physical breakdown. After his return to Vienna to recuperate in the winter of 1839, his shattered health and tattered finances gave him no alternative but to lie in his sickbed and hope to...
An Irresistible Force
Monday, January 30, 2017, 11:30am
Johann Strauss the Elder and his orchestra had come to London to perform for the coronation of Queen Victoria, but before playing a note, he had been hauled into court over a dispute with an unprincipled hotel proprietor. He won the case, but Strauss was compelled to pay the court costs, which was...
Crocodile Teeth
Friday, January 27, 2017, 11:30am
A sojourn in Paris was necessary for an aspiring composer, but the cost of living was high, and, toward the end of 1927, Heitor Villa-Lobos was beginning to run out of money. He needed to attract more people to the concerts of his music, and he concluded that the fastest way to do it would be with...
Almost Everybody Laughs about It
Thursday, January 26, 2017, 11:30am
In the fall of 1830, composer Frédéric Chopin left his home in Poland for a visit to Italy. When he was in Vienna he heard news of an uprising in Warsaw resisting the subservience of the Kingdom of Poland to Russia and opposing the presence of the Russian Tsar on the Polish throne. He also found...
The Command
Wednesday, January 25, 2017, 11:30am
In the 1870s Hans von Bülow was one of Europe’s great conductors and an outspoken advocate of democracy. When the Russian Musical Society asked him to direct some concerts in St. Petersburg, he found himself on a collision course with Grand Duke Constantine, president of the Russian Musical Society...
Occupational Hazards
Tuesday, January 24, 2017, 11:30am
Clara Schumann was one of Europe’s great pianists. The widow of Robert Schumann was also the closest friend of Johannes Brahms, and she wrote to him from Vienna on January 24, 1866: The financial situation here seems to be pretty bad and yet all of the concerts are well attended. I hope mine will...
The Salesman
Monday, January 23, 2017, 11:30am
Antonio Vivaldi taught at Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà, an institution for orphaned or abandoned girls, but he had further ambitions, and so he also began managing the San Angelo Theater as a producer of operas. At the same time, he was also a good salesman, and, on one occasion, he sold some...
The Experimenter
Friday, January 20, 2017, 11:30am
The work that made Edgar Varèse known internationally was Amériques. He finished it in 1921, by which time he was thirty-eight years old. What happened to all the music he wrote before it? In 1913 Varèse and his wife were living in Berlin, and, after six years of marriage, decided to separate. She...
Repentance
Thursday, January 19, 2017, 11:30am
In 1525 Cardinal Thomas Wolsey founded Cardinal College in Oxford and delegated the search for singers to John Longland, the bishop of Lincoln. Longland’s search for an instructor of a choir of sixteen boys led him to singer and composer John Taverner, who lived in the Lincolnshire village of...
Pay Attention!
Wednesday, January 18, 2017, 11:30am
People who pay to attend a music lecture don’t necessarily pay attention while it’s in progress. In 1905, music critic Michel Calvocoressi was to do his first public speaking and, due to no fault of his own, he ran into trouble right away. He was to give a lecture on Russian music at a Paris...
Blunt
Tuesday, January 17, 2017, 11:30am
Florent Schmitt was an innovative French composer whose 1907 ballet La tragédie de Salomé in some ways anticipated Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring , and the Russian composer expressed admiration for his works. His music had what someone called “an aggressive masculinity,” and when it came to...
First Hearing
Monday, January 16, 2017, 11:30am
The composer was all caught up in conducting the debut of his first really big work. For several days, Ralph Vaughan Williams had been too nervous to sleep or eat right. He was unaware of friends and musical personages in the audience–Charles Villiers Stanford and the promising composer George...
