Grace Notes

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

The Meanest Thing in My Life

Monday, January 13, 2020, 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 to meager audiences, even as the Sousa organization was drawing crowds by the thousand.

The concert was to consist of two pieces by the combined ensembles, two by the ensembles playing separately, and two by soloists from each ensemble. Sousa met with Fritz Scheel, conductor of the Imperial Orchestra, who,...

The Price of Originality

Friday, January 10, 2020, 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 odds with military life. He was wealthy, pampered, and flippant, and within a few months, overstaying a leave in Paris, he pulled a ten-day term in a military prison. He wrote to influential friends, hoping for help, but maintained some sense of humor, asking one friend to spread the word...

You Want to Be a Musician?

Thursday, January 9, 2020, 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, “given extra work, imprisoned, et cetera, et cetera.” All of which just made him more determined. He put his best effort into his schoolwork, but only for the sake of later being free to write music. To his mother he announced his decision to become a composer. Although she was a pianist and had given...

Mozart's Delayed Homecoming

Wednesday, January 8, 2020, 11:30am

Leopold Mozart had been chasing his son, Wolfgang Amadeus, all over Europe--with letters demanding that the twenty-two-year-old come home to Salzburg, where important business opportunities waited--and waited. Christmas passed, then New Year's Day, and still no Mozart. On January 8th, 1779, the young genius wrote to his father from Munich:

I assure you, my dearest father, that from the bottom of my heart I am looking forward to returning to you (if not to Salzburg) since your last letter convinces me that you know me better than before! Never was there any reason other than this doubt for my long delay in coming...

The Gentle Approach

Tuesday, January 7, 2020, 11:30am

Dimitri Mitropoulos had conducted the Minneapolis Symphony in 1937 in a concert that had turned the usually staid audience into “an excited mob.” Now he was back as its music director and everyone was wondering if the magic would hold.

A Minneapolis reviewer had described Mitropoulos’ conducting as “punching the air barehanded” and “a weird repertoire of frenzied gestures and scowls and grimaces that registered every emotion from terror to ecstasy.”

The reviewer went on to say that the resulting music was full of “great thought and abiding spirit” and the audience agreed. Just days after Mitropoulos’ guest appearance in...

Memory

Monday, January 6, 2020, 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 short notice to give a concert of French music. He agreed to play two concertos and a dozen short pieces–all of which he had to learn in the course of two weeks.

By the day of the concert he had learned all of the pieces and could play them...

The Elusive Moment

Friday, January 3, 2020, 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. Johns River in Florida. Now, in the winter of 1897, hoping for a second flash of inspiration, he decided to return.

His motive was partly economic. Delius was struggling for financial independence, and, although a series of freezes had destroyed the citrus industry in northern Florida, farmers had turned to...

We Need a Mirror

Thursday, January 2, 2020, 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 was the need for money–or, to be more exact, the offer of money–that motivated me. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but the thought of travel and visions of great beauty dangled before me.

Now I could be so lowdown as to wish that your...

The New Year's Gift

Wednesday, January 1, 2020, 11:30am

Robert and Clara Schumann started the New Year with high hopes. They had earned so little in 1845 that Christmas had amounted to no more than lighting the tree and giving the children a few little trinkets. They had been unable to afford anything for each other.

But they had arranged a promising all-Schumann concert in Leipzig, and they had invested heavily in it. On New Year’s night, 1846, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra would play Schumann’s First Symphony, and Clara was to solo in a performance of his new Piano Concerto in A minor. The conductor would be none other than Felix...

A New Year's Eve Ball

Tuesday, December 31, 2019, 11:30am

London diarist Samuel Pepys was twenty-eight before he tried dancing for the first time, and he wrote that it was something “I did wonder to see myself to do.”

Not long afterward, on New Year’s Eve 1662, he attended a royal ball, after which he wrote of his enthusiasm about the lively dances of the day and the elegant skill of King Charles II and his fellow revelers:

First to the Duke’s chamber, where I saw him and the Duchess at supper, and thence into the room where the Ball was to be, crammed with fine ladies, the greatest of the...

The Right Season

Monday, December 30, 2019, 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 Vivaldi concertos in an upcoming concert. Kaufman was reluctant. He had never heard of the four concertos known collectively as The Four Seasons.

Two days later Kaufman got a call from Samuel Josefowitz, the co-owner of Concert Hall Records, wondering if Kaufman could record some concertos for solo instrument and small orchestra during a...

Summation

Friday, December 27, 2019, 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 to explaining how a contemporary, a fellow Italian composer, had been able to accomplish great things:

The intellect is a rough stone that becomes polished with effort, but not in every part. For example, a painter practices his art but is nothing as a musician. Only rarely does a Michelangelo...

The Price of a Comeback

Thursday, December 26, 2019, 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. Representing the Paris Conservatory was composer Luigi Cherubini, who wisely stayed in the background because he had a history of crossing words with Napoleon.

But Napoleon couldn’t resist drawing out the composer. “I do not see Monsieur Cherubini,” he said, pronouncing the name in the French way, implying that Cherubini wasn’t worthy of being called an...

Christmas 1818

Wednesday, December 25, 2019, 11:30am

December 25th, 1818, was a red-letter day for Christmas music large and small.

According to legend, mice had damaged the organ in St. Nicholas’ church in the Bavarian village of Oberndorf, causing it to break down on Christmas Eve. The setback forced the organist and the parish priest to scrap the music they had planned for Midnight Mass.

The organist, Franz Gruber, had come by his church position the hard way. He had grown up to a life of manual labor, managing to study music on the side, and had finally gotten a job as organist at the church in...

The Contest

Tuesday, December 24, 2019, 11:30am

On December 24, 1781, Austrian Emperor Joseph II had two celebrated keyboard players in his Vienna palace and he couldn’t resist setting them against each other in an unusual competition. This is what Mozart wrote to his father about the contest that pitted him against Muzio Clementi:

A word about Clementi. He’s a first-rate harpsichord player, period. He has a very nimble right hand. His strong suit is thirds. But aside from that he doesn’t have a penny’s worth of taste or sensitivity. He’s a mere mechanic.

After we had spent enough time on the formalities, the Emperor declared that...

A Gift from the Magi

Monday, December 23, 2019, 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 was scheduled to be broadcast on December 24, and, as Halloween passed, Menotti still hadn’t come up with an idea. During a gloomy ramble through the Metropolitan Museum he caught sight of the painting The Adoration of the Kings by Hieronymus Bosch, and, as he studied it, he was reminded of...

The Connection

Friday, December 20, 2019, 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, without money or friends, he was desperate for a way to support his family.

He determined that New Yorkers had little interest in a teacher of Latin and Italian.

But on a whim, he entered a bookstore and asked the proprietor if he had any Italian books in stock. The...

The Nettlesome Messiah

Thursday, December 19, 2019, 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 Patti.

Although Patti had built her career as a singer not of English oratorios, but of Italian operas, her voice had never been better. Patti was aware of the competition for her services and raised her fee to a stunning $6,000 at a time when $10,000 was a handsome annual...

A Remarkable Christmas Present

Wednesday, December 18, 2019, 11:30am

On December 18th, 1867, violinist Joseph Joachim was in Vienna and eager to get home to Hanover. He wrote to his wife Amalie about Christmas plans and a remarkable present for the thirteen-year-old son of Robert and Clara Schumann:

I’m getting an early start on the twenty-third, and God willing, I shall have lunch with you all on the twenty-fourth. But maybe it would be better to postpone the presents until the twenty-fifth and then we can decorate the tree together on the twenty-fourth. How I am looking forward to it! Do what you prefer about this. It’s really unfortunate...

Stop the Presses!

Tuesday, December 17, 2019, 11:30am

At the end of 1784, when Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach found out that his new cantata was going to cost a lot more than expected, he fired off an urgent letter to the printer:

The contents of your last letter all but made me sick. Oh, how beholden I would have been to you if only you had let me know sooner about the size of my cantata in print. In any event, I ask that as soon as you receive this letter, you stop printing my cantata.

People here have made promises that they have not kept. You have not...

Out of the Jaws of Victory

Monday, December 16, 2019, 11:30am

Perhaps it was an omen. Wagner had agreed to accept the dedication of Anton Bruckner’s new symphony. They had spent a day together, drinking beer and talking music. It was one of the happiest days of Bruckner’s life--until he forgot which symphony he was supposed to dedicate–the second or the third?

After a little maneuvering, Bruckner determined that it was the third, a symphony in D minor that would become the Wagner Symphony.

Bruckner had conducted his second symphony in Vienna in October 1873, and it was well received by audience and critics alike. But in 1875, Vienna Philharmonic...

The Right Audience

Friday, December 13, 2019, 11:30am

At the close of the American Civil War, after a perilous concert tour of the Northern states, New Orleans-born composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk left the country for Latin America. He soon found himself in circumstances as difficult as those he had encountered at home, and he had to resort to an unusual trick in order to salvage a concert. He wrote in his journal in Lima, Peru, on December 13, 1865:

My fears are realized on the subject of the locality, which the partial giving way of the theater has forced me to choose, in order to continue the series of my...

The Infernal Machine

Thursday, December 12, 2019, 11:30am

On the night of December 12, 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte was on his way to attend the first French performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. He showed up late, but he had good excuse. Someone had tried to kill him.

Seven Breton royalist insurrectionists were in on the plot to assassinate Napoleon. They attached a large wine cask to a cart, and filled the cask with gunpowder, flammable materials, and bullets, which would be ignited with a long fuse. A similar arrangement had been designed and used more than two centuries earlier by an Italian engineer who called the device a machine infernale.

Conspirator...

It Sounds All Right

Wednesday, December 11, 2019, 11:30am

Composer Hector Berlioz was born December 11, 1803, and cut a wide swath through music from the 1830s to the 1860s. In 1853 he became a best-selling author with Musical Evenings, a collection of reminiscences and anecdotes that reveal a good deal of Berlioz’ forceful personality and caustic sense of humor.

Berlioz tells the story of opera composer Gaspare Spontini, who had experienced some setbacks in Paris beginning in 1805, most notably the utter failure of a comic opera called The Little House which had culminated with a celebrated singer responding to hisses with “a gesture of scorn” that sparked a fracas between...

A Different Kind of Virtuoso

Tuesday, December 10, 2019, 12:00am

In the 1920s the Berlin home of operetta composer Oscar Straus became the gathering place of the brightest people in Europe. Entrepreneurs, theatrical managers, actors, statesmen, scientists, and musicians mingled--sometimes with amusing results.

A regular visitor to the Straus home was Albert Einstein. The great physicist and Straus sometimes talked for hours, and when asked what they were discussing, Straus quipped that the conversation was relatively difficult, “I want to talk about mathematics and astronomy all the time,” Straus said, “and he wants to talk about music, but somehow we always bring our parallel lines together in the end.”

As...

The Rebellious Prince

Monday, December 9, 2019, 11:30am

King Frederick the Great of Prussia was one of the great patrons of music, but in his early years he suffered for his art–and so did others.

His father, Friedrich the First, was so steeped in military matters that he tried to squelch young Frederick’s fondness for the fine arts. The prince was supervised constantly, and when he dared to stray from his father’s prescribed routine, the punishment was both verbal and physical.

Despite the dangers, and with the help of his mother and sister, Frederick read forbidden books and played flute duets with a servant. In 1730, at the...

This Other World

Friday, December 6, 2019, 11:30am

Twenty-one-year old Frédéric Chopin was discovering a galaxy of famous musicians of the day when he wrote to a friend back in Poland in December 1831:

Paris is whatever you want it to be. You can entertain yourself, be bored, laugh, cry, do whatever you want and nobody notices you because thousands of others are doing the same thing you are, and everyone follows his own inclinations. I don’t know where else you can find so many pianists-- so many dolts and so many virtuosi.

I came here with very few introductions...but in Stuttgart, when I received the news...

The Pianist

Thursday, December 5, 2019, 11:30am

In December 1815 composer Giacomo Meyerbeer was in London visiting celebrated composers and performers. When it came to pianists, he was most impressed by a fellow German who had settled in London, Johann Baptiste Cramer. In his journal Meyerbeer wrote:

Cramer is in his forties, a big, sturdy man with an impressive face. His fingers are long and slender but powerful. He left Germany when he was so young that he can barely understand German anymore. We spoke in French, in which he's fluent. We talked for about a half-hour, mostly about the Philharmonic Society, of which he's a member--a...

Out of the Body

Wednesday, December 4, 2019, 11:30am

Some people are said to have the ability to see themselves as if from a distance. Richard Wagner was one of them. He delivered an address at a ceremony marking the relocation of the remains of composer Carl Maria von Weber from London to Dresden in December 1844. In his autobiography, he wrote of a strange sensation that overcame him.

On the occasion I had a strange experience when for the first time in my life I had to deliver a solemn public speech. Since then I have always spoken extemporaneously, but since this was my first appearance as an...

Uh-oh!

Tuesday, December 3, 2019, 11:30am

In his 1952 memoir My Life, Russian émigré composer Alexander Gretchaninoff tells how simple carelessness nearly resulted in disaster.

In 1925 the composer and his wife were living in Paris. He went to Rome to conduct two concerts, the second of which was to include his Third Symphony and excerpts from his opera Dobrinya Nikititch. During the night before the first rehearsal, Gretchaninoff began to feel nervous. He slipped away from a reception to go back to his hotel for a last-minute look at the wind instrument parts. He was shocked to find that he had brought the wrong music....

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A Dubious Honor

Friday, March 6, 2020, 11:30am

Jean Sibelius must've had mixed feelings. He had been commissioned to compose a cantata for a solemn state occasion--the Finnish celebration of the coronation of Czar Nicholas the Second. It was a major opportunity for the young composer, but as a Finnish nationalist he had no desire to glorify the...

The Irresistible Bandleader

Thursday, March 5, 2020, 11:30am

At the sight of the grim-looking procession peasants ran for their lives. In that part of Romania and Hungary robbers were everywhere and these appeared to be some of the worst. They were actually a band 0f 34 young musicians who had fallen on hard times, had nearly had their instruments...

The Joke That Became Famous

Wednesday, March 4, 2020, 11:30am

Some musical works are written from inspiration, some for money. Ignaz Jan Paderweski wrote his famous Minuet as a practical joke. An elderly doctor named Chalubinski had befriended the 26-year-old Paderewski. and often invited the young pianist to his house in Warsaw. The doctor and a writer...

The Violinist Revolutionary

Tuesday, March 3, 2020, 11:30am

He was a composer and one of the finest violinists of the 18th century, but the times he lived in forced Joseph Boulogne to set aside music and embrace revolution. He was the son of a French government official and an African woman from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. For a time the family...

Truth or Legend?

Monday, March 2, 2020, 11:30am

Truth or legend? Either way, one story about Archangelo Corelli has come down from generation to generation, from Corelli’s time to our own. The story takes place about 1709, when Corelli was at the height of his reputation as a composer and a violinist. It goes like this. The King of Naples...

The Charge

Friday, February 28, 2020, 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

Thursday, February 27, 2020, 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...

Fantasia

Wednesday, February 26, 2020, 11:30am

Paul Hindemith was a distinguished composer and music theorist whose works were banned in Germany by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in 1936. Like many of his colleagues, Hindemith went to the United States looking for a way to earn a living. By the end of February 1939 he was in Hollywood...

For the Record

Tuesday, February 25, 2020, 11:30am

The new decade called for a new technology. So in 1920 Adrian Boult agreed for the first time to conduct a performance for a gramophone record. Boult had been signed by the American manager of His Master’s Voice, who had liked Boult’s performance at the Russian Ballet and asked him to repeat some...

Circumstances Beyond My Control

Monday, February 24, 2020, 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...

Round Two

Friday, February 21, 2020, 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

Thursday, February 20, 2020, 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...

Frederick the Great

Thursday, February 20, 2020, 11:30am

Whether in battle or art, Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, loved all kinds of deception. In 1743 or so, during a lull between wars, Frederick got back to importing talent for his various musical ensembles. One of his potential recruits, something of a quack, was Jaques de Vaucanson, who had...

Broken Windows

Wednesday, February 19, 2020, 11:30am

On February 20, 1816, a combination of miscalculations and mishaps had brought about a disastrous debut for Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville. At the end of the contentious first act, Rossini sat at the piano and applauded the singers, but some in the audience thought he was praising his own...

A Close Shave for the Barber

Tuesday, February 18, 2020, 11:30am

Giovanni Paisiello had crafted a popular opera from a play by Beaumarchais in 1782, but in 1816 Gioachino Rossini went ahead and wrote his own version of The Barber of Seville. Some Roman opera-goers were partial to the Paisiello and considered young Rossini an upstart for thinking he could improve...

Sticking With It

Monday, February 17, 2020, 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...

Lover or Priest?

Friday, February 14, 2020, 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!

Thursday, February 13, 2020, 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...

There Is Just One King!

Wednesday, February 12, 2020, 11:30am

On a bitingly cold morning on February 12, 1877, an orchestra of professional and amateur players waited in the dining room of the royal palace in Christiania. They were less than enthusiastic about the invitation to perform for Norway’s King Oscar II. The king had recently heard about the success...

Bad Omens

Tuesday, February 11, 2020, 12:45pm

In June of 1840 the director of the Apollo Theater in Rome invited Gaetano Donizetti to compose an opera for the coming season. Apparently the project was doomed from the start. For his story Donizetti chose an old libretto, Adelia, or the Archer’s Daughter, which had been used by several other...

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Grace Notes

The Meanest Thing in My Life

The Price of Originality

You Want to Be a Musician?

Mozart's Delayed Homecoming

The Gentle Approach

Memory

The Elusive Moment

We Need a Mirror

The New Year's Gift

A New Year's Eve Ball

The Right Season

Summation

The Price of a Comeback

Christmas 1818

The Contest

A Gift from the Magi

The Connection

The Nettlesome Messiah

A Remarkable Christmas Present

Stop the Presses!

Out of the Jaws of Victory

The Right Audience

The Infernal Machine

It Sounds All Right

A Different Kind of Virtuoso

The Rebellious Prince

This Other World

The Pianist

Out of the Body

Uh-oh!

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