The Meanest Thing in My Life
Friday, January 13, 2017, 11:30am
In his 1928 autobiography John Philip Sousa describes a concert in which he felt that he had to make a statement. During San Francisco’s midwinter fair in January 1894, the Sousa band was asked to perform in conjunction with Scheel’s Imperial Orchestra, which had been playing in a large auditorium...
We Should Hear More
Thursday, January 12, 2017, 11:30am
He was a composer and he was a critic. So sooner or later Deems Taylor would face a conflict of interest, and, when the moment arrived, he had to figure out a graceful way to review his own piece of music. Henry Hadley had recently been appointed the associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic...
Parting Waves, Parting Ways
Wednesday, January 11, 2017, 11:30am
In his 1824 biography of the composer, Stendhal describes an 1818 performance in Naples of Gioachino Rossini’s opera Moses in Egypt. Stendhal was leery of the opera, thinking that he might be setting himself up to see a musical version of the Inquisition. Due to no fault of Rossini’s, the...
The Price of Originality
Tuesday, January 10, 2017, 11:30am
Not yet nineteen years old, Francis Poulenc was already one of France’s promising new composers, but in January 1918, with World War I consuming manpower, France had a more immediate need for soldiers, and young Poulenc would find the two occupations a strange mix. From the start, Poulenc was at...
You Want to be a Musician?
Monday, January 9, 2017, 11:30am
In 1831 a performance of Rossini’s Otello convinced thirteen-year-old Charles Gounod that he wanted to be a composer. “I was haunted, possessed,” he said later. “I wanted to write an Otello myself!” He poured his energy into writing music. His studies suffered. “I was kept in school,” he recalled...
Memory
Friday, January 6, 2017, 11:30am
According to piano virtuoso Ignacy Jan Paderewski, in addition to stamina, dexterity, and an ear for music, a concert performer needs a good memory. During the early years of his career, he found out that memory can take more than one form. In 1890, for a French colleague, Paderewski agreed on...
Sweet Reward
Thursday, January 5, 2017, 11:30am
Twenty-first century neurologists have determined that the pleasure a musician derives from playing the climax of a composition compares with the enjoyment of eating chocolate. If they’re right, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf had a double reason to remember a reward he received as a young violinist...
Not Good Enough
Wednesday, January 4, 2017, 11:30am
The young man was one of the most handsome in Boston, seemingly a classical Greek statue that had come to life and put on modern clothes. He was also spoiled, and all efforts to make him work had failed. An attempt to turn him into a journalist had sent him to India, from which he returned more...
The Elusive Moment
Tuesday, January 3, 2017, 11:30am
Although he enjoyed living in Paris, English composer Frederick Delius was restless and unable to concentrate. He was working on a piano concerto, but had hit an impasse. Thirteen years earlier he had made a musical breakthrough at Solano Grove, his father’s orange plantation on the banks of the St...
We Need a Mirror
Monday, January 2, 2017, 11:30am
On January 2, 1875, Edvard Grieg wrote about what would become his best known music to author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. He was not altogether enthusiastic: Peer Gynt has turned out the way you said it would. It looms over me like a bad dream, and there’s no way I can be done with it until spring. It...
The Right Season
Friday, December 30, 2016, 11:30am
“I think they’re very interesting. You should learn them.” So said conductor Alfredo Antonini to violinist Louis Kaufman in the autumn of 1947. The Columbia Broadcasting System’s music director had just said much the same thing in the hope that Kaufman would perform the distinctive 200-year-old...
The Humpty-Dumpty Concerto
Thursday, December 29, 2016, 11:30am
The two sisters from Baltimore so impressed Max Bruch with their performance of his Fantasy for Two Pianos that he agreed to write a two-piano concerto for them. Writing it would be relatively easy, putting it back together would be the hard part. When Ottilie and Rose Sutro asked Bruch to write...
The Magic Touch
Wednesday, December 28, 2016, 11:30am
Canadian pianist Glenn Gould had enough quirks as it was, but a concert tour of Israel brought out even more. He was scheduled to play Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto in Jerusalem on a cold December day, but let it be known that he had changed his mind. He and his manager had been to the hall, he...
Summation
Tuesday, December 27, 2016, 11:30am
As the year 1842 ended, Gaetano Donizetti was nominated to become a corresponding member of the prestigious French Academy. Coming at the twilight of his career, his acceptance speech was an opportunity for the composer to sum up his philosophy of music. He devoted a significant part of his remarks...
The Price of a Comeback
Monday, December 26, 2016, 11:30am
On December 12, 1800, Napoleon had survived an assassination attempt in Paris, and although a number of bystanders were killed by the explosive device known as “the infernal machine,” a deputation from Paris societies and corporations waited to congratulate the First Consul on his escape...
A Gift from the Magi
Friday, December 23, 2016, 11:30am
Back in 1939 NBC producer Samuel Chotzinoff had commissioned Gian Carlo Menotti to write an opera for radio. In 1951 he commissioned a second opera from Menotti, this time for the up-and-coming medium of television. Although he accepted the commission, Menotti was not fast to fulfill it. The opera...
King of Kings
Thursday, December 22, 2016, 11:30am
“Having just done a picture in which Jesus played a supporting role, I was dumbfounded to learn that the new film was King of Kings , in which he was the star.” So said composer Miklós Rózsa in his autobiography about the MGM assignment that followed his Oscar-winning work on the 1959 film Ben-Hur...
The Tightrope Walker
Wednesday, December 21, 2016, 11:30am
Johannes Brahms held his gruffness at bay when writing to thank Elizabet von Herzogenberg for sending some duets her husband Heinz had written, music that Brahms didn’t entirely care for. His reply also included some of his own choral songs, plus a copy of a “very special favorite”--Georges Bizet’s...
The Connection
Tuesday, December 20, 2016, 11:30am
After writing the librettos to operas by Mozart, Salieri, Gluck, and other prominent composers, Lorenzo Da Ponte fell on hard times and sailed for brighter prospects in America. But, after a stint as a grocer in New York led to more financial setbacks, he was again insolvent. By December 1807,...
The Nettlesome Messiah
Monday, December 19, 2016, 11:30am
For Christmas 1881 the Cincinnati Music Festival Association wanted to top its lackluster performance of the previous year and at the same time to upstage the festival of a rival opera company in the same city. So conductor Theodore Thomas hired the most famous prima donna of the day–Madame Adelina...