Grace Notes

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

Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck wanted to marry, and when Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck, raised objections, most of them having to do with money, Schumann wrote to a Leipzig attorney named Einert on June 30, 1839:

A few weeks ago, to our surprise, Clara received his written permission with certain conditions, which I hope will not give you the wrong impression of me:

1. That we should not live in Saxony during his lifetime, but that I should make an effort to earn as much elsewhere as I do through editing a musical paper here.

2. That he should keep...

None of These Men Will Compare

Monday, June 29, 2015, 11:30am

At the age of twenty-three, Robert Schumann was a keen judge of his fellow pianists, and he got to know most of the virtuosi in Leipzig not long after his arrival in the city. But he was most impressed by one of his students, a thirteen-year-old prodigy, and he wrote about her in a letter to his mother in June 1833:

Now that I am acquainted with all the principal virtuosi except Hummel, I’m beginning to realize that my own achievements were once considerable. These great people, instead of offering us something new or original, as we expect, are too...

A Whimsical Beginning

Sunday, June 28, 2015, 11:30am

Felix Mendelssohn never wrote a significant opera, but, while trying to, he kept his good spirits. On June 28, 1834, he wrote a whimsical letter to librettist Karl Klingemann. At the top of the page the gifted composer--and painter–drew a cartoon of noisy trumpets and kettledrums.

Here you have a fanfare for the beginning of the opera. Have you really begun it? Send me right away the first line at least, or better still, everything that’s done. In all seriousness, my dear boy, I am very grateful to you and I beg you to stay with it now, so that...

Into the Smoke

Saturday, June 27, 2015, 11:30am

On June 27, 1847, Giuseppe Verdi was in London, hoping to further the cause of his operas, when he wrote to Giuseppina Appiani:

Glory to the sun, which I have always loved so much, but which I now worship, since I’ve been dwelling in this fog and smoke, which chokes me and blinds my spirit! Nonetheless, what a magnificent city! It has things that stop you in your tracks. But the climate ruins all the beauties. Oh, if only there were a Neapolitan sky here, you’d have no need to wish for Paradise.

I have yet to begin the rehearsals...

A Summer Prank

Friday, June 26, 2015, 11:30am

Muzio Clementi was one of the most diverse musicians of his time. He was a celebrated pianist. He manufactured and sold pianos. He was a major composer. He was a publisher. And if one account is true, Clementi was also focused to a fault.

In his memoirs, oboist William Parke wrote of a hot summer day in 1796 and an outing during which Clementi and a cellist named John Crosdill went swimming while visiting the estate of the Earl of Pembroke. Hearing of Clementi’s absent-mindedness, Crosdill decided to test it. While Clementi continued to swim, Crosdill sneaked off with his...

Shifting Allegiance

Thursday, June 25, 2015, 11:30am

Although he was born in Glasgow of an English mother, Eugène d’Albert never considered himself an Englishman. His father, who was a ballet master in London’s King’s Theatre and at Covent Garden, was German-born, but was of French and Italian descent, and had among his forebears two eighteenth-century composers, Giuseppe Matteo Alberti and Domenico Alberti.

If young d’Albert had a constant in his life, it was probably music. His first teacher was his father, who, apparently, was quite effective because at the age of twelve the boy won a scholarship to the new National Training School for Music, where his...

The Impoverished Romantic

Wednesday, June 24, 2015, 11:30am

Félicien David is remembered as one of France’s great romantic composers. At the age of twenty-one, he already had a strong sense of romanticism and the hardships that came with trying to make a living from it.

In 1831 David was writing a comic opera, but his financial situation was no laughing matter. He had just lost the financial support of his uncle and was penniless in Paris. David managed to find a few students in harmony and piano, and fell in love with one of them, which left him “dreaming, timid, wondering, and more than a little confused,” according...

Even One Note

Tuesday, June 23, 2015, 11:30am

It wasn’t that Pablo Casals was always kind. After all, the fiery-tempered Spaniard had once punished a double-dealing manager with some rough turns in a revolving door. But when it came to judging students, the celebrated cellist could be gentle almost to a fault.

In the late 1920s he was staying at the Berlin home of Francesco von Mendelssohn, a distant relative of composer Felix Mendelssohn, who invited up-and-coming cellist Gregor Piatigorsky to come over and meet Casals and another guest, the young pianist Rudolph Serkin.

Casals said that he always enjoyed meeting young, talented musicians. He wanted to hear...

The Missing Ingredient

Monday, June 22, 2015, 11:30am

In 1889, one M. P. Byelyayev decided to promote Russian music at the Paris Universal Exposition. He arranged for two symphonic concerts of Russian music at the Tocadéro Hall to be conducted by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Also participating would be a pianist named Lavrov and the impressive young composer Alexander Glazunov, who would be represented on the program by his second symphony and a symphonic poem.

The French orchestra was excellent and the music included some of the best new works Russia had to offer--including Rimsky-Korsakov’s own Antar Symphony and major compositions by Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Borodin, among others.

The audience...

No Conductor in the World

Sunday, June 21, 2015, 11:30am

During the summer of 1921 Igor Stravinsky was in London, where his Symphonies of Wind Instruments was to be performed for the first time as part of a program conducted by the distinguished Serge Koussevitsky. Stravinsky dedicated the work to the memory of Claude Debussy, but he didn’t expect any great popular success with the symphony because he had written it to appeal to the intellect rather than attempting to please his audience by playing on the emotions. He later described the work as “an austere ritual” that consisted of “short litanies” between groups of instruments that didn’t provide any...

Very Exaggerated

Saturday, June 20, 2015, 11:30am

Erik Satie was well known for his eccentricity by June 1920 when his ballet La Belle Excentrique turned up on the stage of the Théatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. He had a devoted following among composers and other artists in the know, but was all too familiar with the complaints of audiences and the barbs of critics, one of whom he had battled with his fists and walking stick.

Elizabeth Toulemon, known to friends as Elise and as Caryathis onstage, was to do the dancing. After several false starts in her search for a costume, she asked Jean Cocteau to...

The Trouble with the Movies

Friday, June 19, 2015, 11:30am

At the age of twenty-two, composer Benjamin Britten learned some important lessons about composing–by going to the movies.

The year was 1935, and a producer working for the British government film unit asked Britten to write music for a series of documentaries. Already working for the unit were some of the great literary luminaries of Britten’s generation--W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Christopher Isherwood. An added benefit for Britten was the discipline that came with having to work quickly to specifications, even when inspiration was lacking.

Britten also learned how to write for small ensembles and how to create unusual musical...

Achilles Heel

Thursday, June 18, 2015, 11:30am

Bringing his opera Savanarola to the stage was an uphill struggle for English composer Charles Villiers Stanford. The premiere was set for London’s Covent Garden as part of the German Opera season, on June 18, 1884, but when the lead soprano pulled out of the performance, it had to be postponed for nine days. A replacement soprano couldn’t master the part and also backed out, leaving Stanford to muster what optimism he could, even as he weighed the alternatives–hazard a bad performance or postpone again and risk losing credibility with the public.

The production was postponed again.

A third soprano...

Why I Took The Job

Wednesday, June 17, 2015, 11:30am

Did doubts about the job’s merit prompt Antonio Vasselli to take his brother-in-law to task for accepting a position in Vienna? Or was he more concerned about losing an Italian composer to the Austrian Emperor at a time when Italians were asserting their national identity? One way or the other, Gaetano Donizetti felt compelled to justify himself.

With enthusiasm he had written to a friend in June 1842, just before his appointment was confirmed:

You should know (and this is a secret for now and I implore you to keep it one) that I was called to Court to find...

The Human Flood

Tuesday, June 16, 2015, 11:30am

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, June 16, 1863. New Orleans pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk found himself in one of the most dangerous places in the world as a Confederate invasion of the North spread panic in the streets. He wrote in his journal:

One train leaves at five o’clock , another left at two o’clock. I doubt the one promised us can accommodate the constantly increasing crowd of four or five thousand persons which presses into and around the station. Litters are provided for the sick. Many are occupied by wounded soldiers who will not be left here. Immense trains of...

Advances

Monday, June 15, 2015, 11:30am

In June 1852, chronically destitute Richard Wagner wrote from Zurich to the influential Franz Liszt in Weimar:

Dearest of friends, a request! I am working hard and hoping to finish the poem of my Valkyrie within two weeks. Then I’ll be in urgent need for some kind of relaxation, such as a holiday, all the more so since I’d rather not finish my final poetic work, the great prelude, here in Zurich, where the sameness of these familiar surroundings oppresses me, and tedious visits tend to put me in a bad mood. I need to go up into the Alps...

A Rare Specimen

Sunday, June 14, 2015, 11:30am

A friend had played the joke on Dmitri Shostakovich. Given the opportunity, Shostakovich couldn’t resist perpetrating it on a conductor he found irritating.

Shostakovich grew up during the early years of the Soviet state. When he was about twenty he and some friends were obligated to take a test on Marxism-Leninism. Taking the test ahead of them was a young academician named Ivan Ivanovich Sollertinsky who reported that the test questions were incredibly hard. He said, for example, that the examiners wanted to know how Sophocles exemplified a materialist tendency. Young Shostakovich and his friends were scared to death until...

The Necessary Detachment

Saturday, June 13, 2015, 11:30am

In his memoirs, violist William Primrose reported that during moments of crisis a certain detachment and a well-developed sense of humor saved him from disaster. At such times, he felt a curious sensation of viewing things from the outside. But if the situation became desperate enough, he was inclined to “giggle inwardly,” and had to struggle to keep the giggle from becoming audible.

A performance of Bartók’s complex Viola Concerto was particularly challenging. Primrose was soloing with a major American orchestra led by a celebrated conductor. The rehearsals had gone well, and the concerto went along smoothly–up to the forty-first...

Remembrance

Friday, June 12, 2015, 11:30am

After their 1989 concert tour of Japan, marimba player Keiko Abe and recorder virtuoso Walter van Hauwe went to the Columbia studio in Tokyo to produce a CD of the repertory they had played.

When van Hauwe arrived for the last day of recording, he was obviously depressed. When Abe asked him what was wrong, he explained that his wife was very sick. She had already been in the hospital when van Hauwe had flown to Japan for the tour, but her illness had since become much worse.

Abe suggested that he return to Holland at once. She could explain...

Budget Cuts

Thursday, June 11, 2015, 11:30am

Czarina Catherine the Great was a big spender. When she wanted music she brought in the best performers and composers. In 1787 she brought in composer Domenico Cimarosa for what would prove a rocky sojourn in Russia.

The Czarina was eager to audition her new music master, and shortly after his arrival in St. Petersburg, she asked him to sing while accompanying himself on the harpsichord. He passed with flying colors and was deemed worthy of teaching the two grand dukes who were the sons of the heir to the throne.

She was less impressed by one of Cimarosa’s first...

Driving Each Other Crazy

Wednesday, June 10, 2015, 11:30am

Sir Thomas Beecham was known for his practical jokes, but when Arthur Rubinstein played one on him, the celebrated conductor was not amused.

One hot morning, as they rehearsed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in G in the Hollywood Bowl, both Beecham and Rubinstein were in a bad mood. The piano was at the edge of the shell, and after playing the opening phrase of the concerto, Rubinstein settled in for the duration of the long orchestral section to follow. Beecham became increasingly impatient with the orchestra, stopped them after every bar, and singled out one musician after another for criticism, making...

Fun While It Lasted

Tuesday, June 9, 2015, 11:30am

As World War I spread through Europe, the famous Australian-born pianist and composer Percy Grainger described himself variously as a conscientious objector or a coward. He had arrived in New York from London as the United States was entering the war. Because of what friends considered his unpatriotic attitude, he couldn’t go back to England. So he took a perfectly logical next step.

He bought a saxophone.

On June 9, 1917, he walked to Fort Totten and enlisted as a bandsman in the U.S. Army. He was fitted for a uniform, his billowy hair was cut to military specifications, and...

The Bullet

Monday, June 8, 2015, 11:30am

Composer Georges Onslow was a master of the string quintet, and he applied that mastery to one of the most remarkable string quintets ever written–a description of an accident that nearly took his life.

Onslow was born in France in 1784 to a father banished from England because of a homosexual scandal. Onslow spent much of his youth in London receiving the education of a gentleman, and became a capable cellist. After two years of travel in Germany and Austria he began composing, specializing in string quintets for two violins, viola, and two cellos.

The quintet that most fascinated his...

Reconciliation

Sunday, June 7, 2015, 11:30am

Arthur Friedheim was worried. His former teacher and longtime friend, Franz Liszt, had promised a pupil a concert appearance at the 1886 Carlsruhe Music Festival. Friedheim considered the pupil a disaster, but, perhaps because the young woman in question was a protégé of Empress Augusta of Prussia, Liszt saw fit to go ahead and put her on the program.

At a time of competing musical factions, Friedheim was concerned that a bad performance would be a setback for the festival and for the cause of innovative music. He pleaded with Liszt to reconsider, but to no avail.

He argued with...

Khachaturian

Saturday, June 6, 2015, 11:30am

Young Aram Khachaturian had aptitude and a strong desire to study music. At the age of nineteen he was gambling that they would be enough to get him into a first-rate music school. Khachaturian was born on June 6, 1903, in Tiflis, in the Republic of Georgia, where he grew up improvising Armenian folk songs on the piano. He was a biology student when he heard his first symphony orchestra in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth, a performance that he said “shook him to the depths.”

Khachaturian’s closest advisor at the time...

Master of the Comeback

Friday, June 5, 2015, 11:30am

Fritz Kreisler was a master of the comeback, large and small. After World War I, the Austrian violinist had to win back his American audiences, and did so by playing concert after concert with irresistible virtuosity and taste. In 1935, when he admitted that many of the Baroque masterpieces he played were actually his own compositions, he rode out the scandal by defending his actions in the press and continuing to perform. His resilience was put to the test again in 1941 when he stepped off a New York curb and was hit by a truck.

After nearly a month...

Water Power

Thursday, June 4, 2015, 11:30am

Debt-ridden and feeling battered by his critics, Jean Sibelius liked the offer from America. Composer Horatio Parker was offering him $1,200 to participate in Yale University’s Norfolk Festival, at which he would conduct his new symphonic poem The Oceanides and a few of his shorter works.

Five weeks later Sibelius was on a steamship bound for New York, revising the poem as he got more and more experience with the sea.

At the first Carnegie Hall rehearsal, festival organizer Carl Stoeckel had the impression that the orchestra found The Oceanides perplexing, but he was impressed at how rapidly each successive...

Good Intentions

Wednesday, June 3, 2015, 11:30am

The road to disaster was paved with good intentions. In 1915 or ’16 famed pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff came to the St. Petersburg Conservatory to perform a benefit concert for the widow of composer Alexander Scriabin. Not everyone appreciated the gesture, and a notable musician who attempted a compliment caused a rift that lasted for years.

Rachmaninoff’s entire concert consisted of works by the late composer, but some difference of opinion arose as to just how his music should sound. In one of the front rows of the hall an assortment of people chatted and whispered throughout the performance. One of...

Discord

Tuesday, June 2, 2015, 11:30am

He joined the Nazi Party in 1935 and closed his letters with Heil Hitler, but in 1939 conductor Herbert von Karajan began a dramatic break with Hitler’s government.

At thirty-one, Karajan was the musical idol of Germany, especially among the young. He was particularly successful in 1938 with a State Opera performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

On June 2, 1939, he conducted two performances of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger with the Berlin Opera. The first of them was a State Gala in honor of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. Karajan won praise from all for the clarity of the music, his...

Rabin

Monday, June 1, 2015, 11:30am

The violinist had achieved spectacular feats of virtuosity as a child, but as a young adult he had been shaken by a series of personal and professional difficulties, and now he was dependent upon a powerful sedative that helped him to cope with his latest crisis–the fear of falling off the front of the stage.

During his years as a child prodigy, Michael Rabin had said more than once that nervousness was never a problem for him, but by the time he was in his mid-twenties, he had begun taking “the little yellow pills” to quell the anxiety he had...

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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...

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Unacceptable Conditions

None of These Men Will Compare

A Whimsical Beginning

Into the Smoke

A Summer Prank

Shifting Allegiance

The Impoverished Romantic

Even One Note

The Missing Ingredient

No Conductor in the World

Very Exaggerated

The Trouble with the Movies

Achilles Heel

Why I Took The Job

The Human Flood

Advances

A Rare Specimen

The Necessary Detachment

Remembrance

Budget Cuts

Driving Each Other Crazy

Fun While It Lasted

The Bullet

Reconciliation

Khachaturian

Master of the Comeback

Water Power

Good Intentions

Discord

Rabin

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