Grace Notes

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

Conductor Theodore Thomas wielded the baton over a massive music festival that took place in New York in May 1880, and the size of the ensemble required him to be alert with his eyes as well as his ears.

The Philharmonic Orchestra was the largest, and in his opinion, the best orchestral organization the country had ever heard. Their efforts for the year culminated in a five-day collaboration with seven choruses from New York and six other metropolitan areas--for a combined total of three thousand singers.

There were upwards of three hundred instrumentalists, all of whom had been members of...

Qualified to Enter

Thursday, April 30, 2015, 11:30am

At the age of twenty-five, Nicholas Slonimsky found out that playing the piano could save his life.

As the Russian Revolution became increasingly deadly, he became determined to emigrate to Paris. The only way to Europe was through British-occupied Constantinople, and, on the boat from Yalta, he was heartened to hear his fellow passengers say that “the outside world” had a big demand for musicians to perform in restaurants and movie theaters.

But not all of the arts were in such high demand.

When they arrived in Turkey, an interviewer questioned each refugee about his or her skills. The selection...

Scandal!

Wednesday, April 29, 2015, 11:30am

His career and his family relationships were bumpy; how could his love life be any different? During his courtship of Constanze Weber, Mozart hit plenty of rough spots. He reacted to one of them in a fervent letter he wrote to Constanze on April 29, 1781:

In spite of all my pleas, you’ve dumped me three times and told me to my face that you don’t want anything else to do with me. I–to whom it means more to lose the object of my affections than it does to you–am not sufficiently hot-headed, impulsive, and dull-witted to accept my dismissal....

Healthy Pessimism

Tuesday, April 28, 2015, 11:30am

Thanks to a decree from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Soviet music took some hard knocks in 1948. Four major composers were accused of writing “formalistic” music that didn’t serve the needs of the people, the result being that their music was blacklisted from performance.

The four were Dmitri Shostakovich, Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian, and Nikolai Miaskovsky.

The accusations were so serious that after conducting Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony for what he presumed would be the last time, Evgeny Mravinsky kissed the score and held it high above his head.

The reasons for the condemnation were nothing secret. Shostakovich...

The Cruel Reversal

Monday, April 27, 2015, 11:30am

After being ruined by competition with Opera for the Nobility, a company founded by the unruly Frederick, Prince of Wales, Handel had finally begun to reverse his losses with his oratorio Alexander’s Feast, which had been a great success of 1736.

Frederick’s company had brought in celebrated singers, mostly Italian, to sabotage him, but Handel had the advantage of local talent, a nineteen-year-old tenor named John Beard. The words for the oratorio had come from the neighborhood, too, from the respected seventeenth-century poet John Dryden. Soprano Cecilia Young rounded out the homegrown success.

In the fight of the rival opera companies,...

Royal Crush

Sunday, April 26, 2015, 11:30am

Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of George II and heir to the British throne, was so at odds with his father that he would do whatever he could to oppose him. Caught in the crush between father and son was the country’s greatest composer, George Frederick Handel.

Frederick didn’t confine his quarrel to politics. The king sponsored Handel’s opera productions at the King’s Theatre in Drury Lane, so Frederick founded a rival company, Opera for the Nobility, largely for the purpose of ruining Handel.

In 1733 Opera for the Nobility bankrolled a formidable cast of competitors, beginning with composer Nicola...

That Won't Kill Me

Saturday, April 25, 2015, 11:30am

When it came to criticism, Felix Mendelssohn could take it or dish it out. In April 1834 he wrote from Düsseldorf to his friend Ignaz Moscheles, who had been rehearsing Mendelssohn’s Fair Melusina Overture for an upcoming performance.

I agree completely with what you say about Berlioz’ Overture Les Francs Juges. It’s a prosaic shambles, although more modest in concept than some of his others...His orchestration is a horrible mishmash, such a disjointed muddle that a person should wash his hands after handling one of his scores. And besides, it really is a waste to set nothing but murder, misery, and caterwauling to music. Even if it were well...

Music for the Circumstances

Friday, April 24, 2015, 11:30am

Having heard the news of Abraham Lincoln’s death, Louis Moreau Gottschalk and some of his fellow passengers en route to San Francisco came to terms with the loss. He wrote in his journal on April 24, 1865:

We are to have a meeting on board to give official expression to the sentiments of grief, which, with merely two or three exceptions, are felt by all the passengers. I have said with merely one or two exceptions, because a lady whose opinions are Secessionist, has pushed her forgetfulness of the respect due to humanity so far as to qualify the assassination of Lincoln as...

The Assassin

Thursday, April 23, 2015, 11:30am

As the Civil War swept the eastern United States, New Orleans pianist and Union sympathizer Louis Moreau Gottschalk made a concert tour of the northern states. He then left New York on a steamship bound for San Francisco and was off the coast of California on April 23, 1865, when he wrote in his journal:

A steamer in sight! It is the Golden City, which left San Francisco two days ago. The captain comes on board, and, in the midst of questions from all passengers who crowd the staircase, hurls these words like thunderbolts: “Richmond is taken, Lee has surrendered, Lincoln is assassinated.”

The news, more...

Haughty Beauty

Wednesday, April 22, 2015, 11:30am

By the time Muzio Clementi had collected a good deal of Beethoven’s music, he was determined to bring Beethoven the man into his circle of friends. He wrote to his business partner, William Collard on April 22, 1807:

By a little management, and without committing myself, I have at last made a complete conquest of that haughty beauty,Beethoven, who first began at public places to grin and coquet with me, which of course I took care not to discourage; then slid into familiar chat, till, meeting him by chance one day in the street–“Where do you lodge?” says he; “I have not seen...

Proving Themselves

Tuesday, April 21, 2015, 11:30am

In 1930 R. Nathaniel Dett was composer and conductor for the Hampton Institute near Hampton, Virginia. The Negro school had just changed its name from Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, and the choir that Dett led to Europe that year would go even further to change the school’s image.

On April 21, en route to New York, the forty-voice choir sang for President Hoover on the White House lawn. Two days later, they were sailing third-class aboard the French steamship De Grasse. Their fellow passengers took the choir to be some kind of flamboyant “Negro show.” In his account of the tour, Dett told...

A Russian Retreat

Monday, April 20, 2015, 11:30am

English soprano Clara Novello’s prime reason for her 1839 visit to Russia was to gain the favor of the Czarina, who could prove a powerful patron, but when she arrived in St. Petersburg, the Czarina was ill. In western Europe Novello could count on great composers--Rossini, Mendelssohn, and Schumann–to promote her concerts. In Russia, without the help of the Czarina, she was on her own.

Those Russians who did befriend Novello left something to be desired. Behind the formal façades of their mansions she found foul-smelling air, and unwashed squalor. “I learned,” she wrote, “to know by the evil smells when...

The Mother-in-Law

Sunday, April 19, 2015, 11:30am

The celebrated violinist and his admirer were forty years apart in age, but they had more than music to bring them together. They had Mrs. Angelina Chapman Thorp.

The Norwegian virtuoso Ole Bull was world-famous by the time he arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1868. Tickets for his Madison concert were going for ten dollars apiece, five times what most men could hope to earn in a day. Money was of no great interest to Mrs. Thorp, though. As the wife of a wealthy lumberman from Eau Claire, she had plenty of it. She was drawn to the spectacular musicianship...

Why He Quit

Saturday, April 18, 2015, 11:30am

Two weeks after the successful debut of his oratorio The Celestial Country, composer Charles Ives did something surprising. He swore off any more public performances of his works.

The Yale graduate had benefited from the teaching of a major American composer of the day, Horatio Parker, who had done his best to bend Ives’ unorthodox ideas into the conventions of symphonic form.

Ives had been a church organist in Danbury and New Haven, Connecticut, from the age of fourteen and was well acquainted with traditional music for Sunday services, and yet he couldn’t resist the occasional foray into fresh harmonies or...

Szymanowski vs. America

Friday, April 17, 2015, 11:30am

Like many European visitors to the United States, the Polish composer Karel Szymanowski had mixed feelings about America and Americans.

One of his three traveling companions, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, was already a veteran of tours in America by January 1921 when Szymanowski sailed from Liverpool. During their last day aboard ship, the group steeled themselves with a drink before their foray into prohibition country. Szymanowski was bowled over by the skyscrapers that reminded him of medieval castles, by the lights in Times Square, and by what he called “the strange, unintentional beauty of Broadway.”

He rubbed elbows with the...

Humble But Powerful

Thursday, April 16, 2015, 11:30am

During a long concert career, English pianist Ivor Newton found that page-turners have more power than audiences realize. In a job that requires agility, quick thinking, and musicianship, they’re in a position to make or break a performance.

Newton found that, on the one hand, a dispassionate page-turner could sap his enthusiasm, and on the other, a page-turner who was too caught up in the music could distract him with heavy breathing.

During a Paris concert with cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, Newton asked the house manager to find a page-turner for him. Just as the performance was due to begin, “a...

The Shuffle

Wednesday, April 15, 2015, 11:30am

It’s not unusual for players and conductors to get slightly lost in the score during concerts, but a Boston Symphony timpanist suddenly found himself completely out of the loop during a performance of Richard Strauss’ massive Domestic Symphony.

The guest conductor for the occasion was the formidable Fritz Reiner, called the last of the conductor tyrants, who had fired so many musicians that he was later said to have dismissed two pallbearers at his own funeral. In fact, the stories about Reiner were so full of nastiness, cold sarcasm, and cruelty to musicians that during its first rehearsal with him the...

The Poet and the Prophet

Tuesday, April 14, 2015, 11:30am

Georgette Leblanc, the wife of poet Maurice Maeterlinck, expressed her “ardent desire” to sing the part of Mélisande in the opera Claude Debussy had based on Maeterlinck’s play Pelléas and Mélisande. Debussy expressed some enthusiasm for the idea, but not long afterward, Maeterlinck read in the newspaper that rehearsals for the opera were proceeding with Scottish prima donna Mary Garden as the lead.

He blew his top and vowed to stop the production.

During legal wrangling Debussy claimed that he had never outright offered the role to Leblanc, and he emerged victorious. Brandishing his cane, Maeterlinck confronted Debussy in his apartment,...

To Be or Not To Be

Monday, April 13, 2015, 11:30am

The barest encyclopedia entry implies a hard life for the English composer Havergal Brian: “Self-taught composer of 32 symphonies, five operas, and various choral works, all on a very large scale and mostly unperformed.” In 1914, believing that his wife had been unfaithful, the composer fled from Staffordshire to London hoping to make a new beginning, but only by chance did he avoid coming to a bad end.

After settling in a set of cheap rooms, he came up with a plan to compose and to make his earlier works known to critics while he looked for employment as a...

The Backwater

Sunday, April 12, 2015, 11:30am

Between the high cost of living in Sweden and supporting his wife back in Prague, BedÍich Smetana found it necessary to add to his income as the director of a music school in Göteborg, and so he accepted an invitation to become the conductor of the Göteborg Society for Practicing Classical Choral Music. The society soon joined forces with the languishing Harmonic Society, and the merger gave Smetana the chance to broaden his experience as a conductor.

Broadening the musical tastes of his musicians and audiences would not be so easy.

Smetana’s homesickness was alleviated by a fellow Czech named...

Make It a Hit

Saturday, April 11, 2015, 11:30am

Although few people in France knew it at the time, Hector Berlioz was one of the country’s great composers. In order to supplement his income, he turned to musical journalism, writing newspaper articles and commentaries, many of which combined facts with fanciful embellishments. In 1852, in another attempt to make money, he published a collection of whimsical sketches called Evenings with the Orchestra. It includes an encounter with a musical hack who makes a fortune by having “killed and skinned the works of celebrated composers.”

One day a musician named Corsino encounters the arranger Marescot dressed up in a brand-new frock...

The Curse

Friday, April 10, 2015, 11:30am

In 1935, when John Houseman needed music for a Negro Theater Project production of Macbeth, he turned to Virgil Thomson, who had recently produced Four Saints in Three Acts, an all-black opera, on Broadway. Also involved was nineteen-year-old Orson Welles. It would be a strange collaboration with an even stranger aftermath.

Set on an island resembling Haiti, this Macbeth had three witches that were real voodoo priestesses and a team of authentic African drummers, led by a genuine witch doctor named Abdul.

Thomson was to provide incidental music for the pit orchestra plus sound effects from a backstage percussion group with a bass drum,...

The Reluctant Teacher

Thursday, April 9, 2015, 11:30am

In 1874 Georges Bizet was caught up in writing what would become his masterpiece, his opera Carmen. So it’s understandable that he was preoccupied and temperamental when he had to take time out to give piano lessons. An American girl living in Paris at the time had vivid memories of the reluctant teacher.

He was supposed to come at three o’clock....We would wait, wait, wait; and I was always glad if I thought he was not coming, for I was afraid of him...Not that he ever scolded, but the way he would look at you through those eye-glasses! Our apartment had several...

Showmanship

Wednesday, April 8, 2015, 11:30am

In 1832, after attending a concert by Niccolò Paganini, twenty-year-old Franz Liszt had been inspired to raise the level of his virtuosity by applying Paganini’s violin techniques to the piano. At the same time, Paganini’s charisma made Liszt realize that showmanship would take him to even greater heights. A description of a Liszt concert of ten years later shows that the pianist had taken his lessons to heart.

On April 8, 1842, Russian critic Vladimir Stasov attended a Liszt concert at the Assembly Hall of the Nobles in St. Petersburg. He described a stage in the middle of the concert hall on...

The Master

Tuesday, April 7, 2015, 11:30am

At age twenty, Franz Liszt was already a spectacular pianist. Paris had plenty of virtuosi, but seeing a spectacular violinist perform took him to a new summit of musicianship.

In April 1832 Liszt attended a benefit concert for cholera victims. The performer was Niccolò Paganini, who, to Liszt’s way of thinking, not only played the violin better than anyone else, but played the instrument as well as it could be played, and seemed to be at one with his violin.

The stunned pianist wrote a letter to his student, Pierre Wolff, Jr., attributing to Michelangelo an utterance generally believed to have come...

The Long Struggle Back

Monday, April 6, 2015, 11:30am

Although he had established himself as one of England’s finest keyboard players and conductors, Samuel Wesley was beset by physical and emotional difficulties and often was at odds with his family. In 1816 the death of an infant son threw him into a state of depression, and while he was en route from London to Norwich to earn some money, he collapsed and had to return to London destitute.

Facing arrest and imprisonment for debt, he worked as best he could, made some money playing the organ, taught, and wrote church music, but within a few months, he was again...

Rough Play

Sunday, April 5, 2015, 11:30am

In the years leading up to World War I, concert disturbances brought on by clashing musical tastes became commonplace in Europe, and Italy was no exception.

A patron asked Alfredo Casella to conduct a concert of contemporary music in the Teatro Augusteo. He prepared works by Jean Roger-Ducasse, Albéric Magnard, the first Italian performance of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2, his own Notte di maggio, and Stravinsky’s Petrouchka--a rather risky program to put before Roman audiences of the day.

The first several pieces encountered a “glacial” reception, but Petrouchka, which had forced Casella to fight the orchestra’s resistance during rehearsals, elicited a...

The Devious Employee

Saturday, April 4, 2015, 11:30am

The most capable employee does not always make the most compliant one, as will be apparent in a letter that Mozart wrote from Vienna to his father in Salzburg on April 4, 1781, while he was employed by the Archbishop of Salzburg:

I can assure you that I was very pleased with the Viennese public yesterday when I performed at the concert for the widows of the Kartnerthor Theater. I had to begin all over again because the applause never let up. So how much do you suppose I’d make if I were to...

The Uninspired Student

Friday, April 3, 2015, 11:30am

Carl Czerny counted many great pianists among his students and at least one pianist who, apparently, was not so great, but whose uncle knew something about music and sent Czerny a letter in an effort to make the lessons go more smoothly. In 1817 Czerny received a letter from Ludwig van Beethoven:

My dear Czerny! Please be as patient as you can with our Karl, even though at the moment he may not be making as much progress as you and I would like. If you are not patient, he will do even less well because (even though he must...

Square One

Thursday, April 2, 2015, 11:30am

As World War I ended, Romanian composer Georges Enesco had two reasons to be worried.

He had turned his concert earnings over to his father to invest, thinking that the earnings would enable him to retire to the country and spend his time writing music.

The elder Enesco had invested the money in land, and the deterioration of the Romanian economy during the war had wiped out his savings. And then land reforms promised by King Ferdinand resulted in the confiscation of much of his father’s estate. Financially, Enesco was back to square one. He would have to go back...

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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

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...

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Qualified to Enter

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The Cruel Reversal

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That Won't Kill Me

Music for the Circumstances

The Assassin

Haughty Beauty

Proving Themselves

A Russian Retreat

The Mother-in-Law

Why He Quit

Szymanowski vs. America

Humble But Powerful

The Shuffle

The Poet and the Prophet

To Be or Not To Be

The Backwater

Make It a Hit

The Curse

The Reluctant Teacher

Showmanship

The Master

The Long Struggle Back

Rough Play

The Devious Employee

The Uninspired Student

Square One

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