The Black Eye
Wednesday, November 16, 2016, 11:30am
During the early years of the twentieth century, Charles Villiers Stanford had his hands full as the conductor of the Leeds Festival. He was not consulted about the music to be played, and so had to put up with a dreary procession of pieces by composers known as “funeralists.” He was also...
Festival or Funeral?
Tuesday, November 15, 2016, 11:30am
Charles Villiers Stanford was described by a contemporary as “vibrant, untiring, and humorous,” traits that put him at odds with the organizers of the Leeds Festivals in the first years of the twentieth century. Stanford became the conductor of the Leeds Philharmonic in 1898, but had his conflicts...
A Natural Solution
Monday, November 14, 2016, 11:30am
Although American pianist and composer Edward MacDowell would soon come to grief in his dealings with administrators at Columbia University, he had a strong rapport with his students, in part because he broke down the barriers of formality. Perhaps the same shyness that made MacDowell a reluctant...
A Simple Twist of Fate
Friday, November 11, 2016, 11:30am
In 1916 Spanish composer Enrique Granados was in New York for the world premiere of his opera Goyescas . The opera ends with a tragic duel in which the protagonist dies in the arms of his beloved. By a simple twist of fate, Granados would soon experience a real-life tragedy every bit as poignant...
Making Do
Thursday, November 10, 2016, 11:30am
By the late 1940s Georges Enesco had long since established a world reputation as a composer and conductor. As he entered his mid-sixties, he would have to fall back on a third ability, and the going would not be easy. World War II had taken its toll on Enesco’s sizeable nest egg. As a patriotic...
Jubilee
Wednesday, November 9, 2016, 11:30am
Fifty years after the publication of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Oberto, an Italian newspaper proposed a Verdi Jubilee. The seventy-five-year-old composer responded to the idea in a letter to publisher Giulio Ricordi on November 9, 1888, thinking for a moment that the superstar of the age, soprano...
More Than They Bargained For
Tuesday, November 8, 2016, 11:30am
As a child pianist, Erich Wolfgang Korngold had impressed Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. By 1934, when the composer came to Hollywood, he wasn’t about to let a movie producer tell him how to do his job. Hal Wallis had brought Korngold to town for Warner Brothers, to tailor the music of Felix...
The Congressman and the President
Monday, November 7, 2016, 11:30am
In 1938 twenty-six-year-old Erich Leinsdorf was in New York building a career as a conductor for the Metropolitan Opera when his visa expired, requiring him to return to Austria. For professional and personal reasons, it was a bad time to go home. Young Leinsdorf had risen quickly in the ranks of...
American Enlightenment
Friday, November 4, 2016, 11:30am
Pianist Henri Herz was dismissed by Robert Schumann as a mere “stenographer,” but in the 1830s he was the most fashionable and sensational keyboard player in Paris. In 1845, when he wanted big money to bankroll his new piano manufacturing firm, Herz headed for America. In his book My Trips to...
Picaresque
Thursday, November 3, 2016, 11:30am
Soldier, gambler, churchman, author, womanizer—Giacomo Casanova was all of them, and a musician whose misadventures matched his headlong lifestyle. At twenty-one he was a mediocre violinist in Venice’s San Samuele theater, later describing himself as “a menial journeyman of a sublime art in which,...
Great Battle, Great Victory
Wednesday, November 2, 2016, 11:30am
Composer Hector Berlioz thought big and fought big, as becomes apparent in this letter he wrote to his sister on November 2, 1840: I've just put on a festival at the Paris Opéra. I conducted 450 instrumentalists and singers in selections from my Requiem.... A couple of weeks earlier there had been...
Great Battle, Great Victory
Wednesday, November 2, 2016, 11:30am
Composer Hector Berlioz thought big and fought big, as becomes apparent in this letter he wrote to his sister on November 2, 1840: I've just put on a festival at the Paris Opéra. I conducted 450 instrumentalists and singers in selections from my Requiem.... A couple of weeks earlier there had been...
The Latest from Paris
Tuesday, November 1, 2016, 11:30am
At the beginning of November 1853, Franz Liszt wrote from Weimar to violinist Joseph Joachim in Hanover about musical discoveries he had made during a recent visit to Paris: As for news from Paris, I have none except for the vigorous rehearsing of Meyerbeer’s new opera L’Étoile du Nord at the Opéra...
The Seance
Monday, October 31, 2016, 11:30am
One night in 1887 William James, the celebrated psychologist, and George Henschel, the English composer and conductor, arrived at a rundown house on Rutland Street in Boston. With them was singer Nettie Huxley, whose mischievous expression was at odds with the somber purpose of the visit–to...
The Reluctant Conductor
Thursday, October 27, 2016, 11:30am
Aram Khachaturian was nervous. In the 1930s and ’40s he had made a name for himself as one of the Soviet Union’s foremost composers. He had long wanted to conduct, but in 1950, when he was invited to conduct a performance of some of his music, he hesitated. “At least come to the rehearsals,” he was...
Why the Music Stopped
Wednesday, October 26, 2016, 11:30am
John Ireland wrote plenty of music before and after, but in the chronology of his works, the year 1928 was fallow, and with good reason. He was recovering from his marriage. For some time, one of Ireland’s more talented piano students was not up to her usual standard. Her name was Dorothy Phillips...
We ARe Barbarians Up Here
Tuesday, October 25, 2016, 11:30am
At the end of October 1897 English composer Frederick Delius was nervous. He was in Norway to conduct music he had written for Gunnar Heiberg’s play, The Council of the People. The play satirized the Norwegian parliament and Norwegian pomp in general, and Delius had made his music suitably caustic...
Used!
Monday, October 24, 2016, 11:30am
While he was in Paris for performances of his opera Il Trovatore, Giuseppe Verdi took time to attend to some urgent business. On October 21, 1855, he wrote a fervent letter about the need to get international copyright protection for his works, which were being pirated in England because there was...
A Marvel of Modern Technology
Thursday, October 20, 2016, 11:30am
The grand new theater was one of New York’s proudest buildings. The Hippodrome was the work of Frederick Thompson and Elmer Dundy, who had created the Luna Park amusement area at Coney Island. It stood on Sixth Avenue between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth streets. Its auditorium had 5,300 seats, and...
Win a Prize, Lose a Treasure
Wednesday, October 19, 2016, 11:30am
Itzhak Perlman had just won a spot in the finals of the 1964 Leaventritt Contest, and his teachers at Juilliard wanted him to go into the final round of the competition with the best violin available. He couldn’t afford to buy a first-rate instrument, so they arranged for him to borrow a valuable...