Grace Notes

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

The Fireworks Orchestra

Wednesday, April 1, 2015, 11:30am

Not everyone appreciated the jokes, and English conductor Thomas Beecham had plenty of them up his sleeve.

In 1909 Beecham took his newly-founded symphony orchestra on tour, and within weeks it was notorious among railway officials. Whenever the orchestra’s train pulled into or out of a station, orchestra members threw lighted firecrackers onto the track, startling passengers and porters alike. The practice reached its climax in Birmingham, when the first cellist used a time fuse to set off a giant firecracker under a baggage trolley just before the train pulled out. The blast was so big that the...

The Contented Listener

Monday, March 30, 2015, 11:30am

Although London conductor Henry Wood had led orchestras through all kinds of difficulties, he wasn’t quite prepared for an engagement with the Queen’s Hall Orchestra at the Hippodrome in 1909.

Wood first noticed the problem during rehearsal. “I noticed an appalling smell of fish,” he recalled. He wondered where it was coming from, especially since it got worse as the rehearsal went on. At the end of the rehearsal Wood sought out the manager for an explanation.

“Oh yes,” the manager said. “That’s the sea-lion.”

Wood must have thought he was speaking a foreign language. “The sea-lion?” he repeated. “What...

They Wouldn't Stop!

Sunday, March 29, 2015, 11:30am

A great composer isn’t always a great conductor, even when leading a performance of his own music. That was the upshot of an extraordinary occurrence involving Claude Debussy.

In 1909 Debussy was in London to conduct several of his works at Queen’s Hall. He was delighted to be there, thinking that Londoners appreciated his music even more than Parisians did. He received a warm welcome, and his English counterpart, Henry Wood, had rehearsed the orchestra thoroughly before Debussy’s arrival.

The concert included the second of Debussy’s Nocturnes, a movement called Fêtes, suitable for such a festive occasion, a piece in...

I Don't Know How You Do It

Saturday, March 28, 2015, 11:30am

Lehman Engel was a successful composer and music director for the stage in New York, but when the United States entered World War II, he took a less predictable job as a yeoman, third class, in the Navy.

Engel was put in charge of organizing a symphonic concert band at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. He got in touch with draft boards around the country and rounded up some of the finest instrumentalists in the world.

The largest group performed weekly concerts in a modern auditorium and worked with some of the top soloists of the day. But a...

A Mass in Time of War

Friday, March 27, 2015, 11:30am

Dissatisfied with the quality of teaching at the Paris Conservatory, Vincent d’Indy and two colleagues had founded the Schola Cantorum in 1894 as a way of raising the standard of music education in France.

He was not about to let anything close it down, including a German bombardment.

In March of 1918, as World War I began to turn against them, the Germans launched a last-ditch offensive along the entire Western front, putting more and more pressure on Paris. From seventy-five miles away, they pounded the French capital with giant howitzers known as “Big Berthas” and rattled the city further...

Depend on Yourself

Thursday, March 26, 2015, 11:30am

He was determined and innovative and, at twenty-two, California-born Henry Cowell was also trying to establish his musical reputation. His mentor, John Varian, who was quite a nonconformist himself, advised young Cowell that “you will have to depend on yourself and very few other musicians to develop your music...you will have to forget the public and their demands altogether and only write to your best idea.”

It was the summer of 1919 and Cowell the innovator took some of his music to an unlikely appraiser, the famous neo-romantic pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who had just moved to Menlo Park....

The Bitter Ballet Battle

Wednesday, March 25, 2015, 11:30am

The celebrated French composers were not getting along. In 1924 Francis Poulenc received good reviews for his ballet Les Biches and so did his friend Georges Auric shortly afterward for his ballet Les Fâcheux. Most vocal among their admirers was Louis Laloy, who had been a good friend of the late Claude Debussy.

Enter a fourth composer, Erik Satie, a generation older than Auric and Poulenc, and a sworn enemy of Laloy’s. He sent a letter to Poulenc warning him to have nothing to do with Laloy.

He closed it with a compliment to Poulenc: “Don’t forget that you are...

Doubtful Loyalty

Tuesday, March 24, 2015, 11:30am

During the Civil War, New Orleans-born pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk was a Union sympathizer. During a concert tour of the northern states he wrote in his journal on March 24, 1864:

Concert at Washington. The President of the United States and his lady are to be there. I have reserved seats for them in the first row. The Secretary of State, Mr. Seward, accompanies them. Mrs. Lincoln has a very ordinary countenance. Lincoln is remarkably ugly, but has an intelligent air, and his eyes have a remarkable expression of goodness and mildness. After an encore I played my fantasia, The Union,...

Spontaneous Inspiration

Monday, March 23, 2015, 11:30am

For Spanish pianist and composer Enrique Granados, writing music was mostly a matter of the moment. He was not one to work out a formal scheme for an extended composition, but when inspiration struck, he was impulsive and completely absorbed until he had turned his feelings into notes.

A variety of situations could spark his inventiveness. Granados’ student Frank Marshall was turning the pages as Granados played a recent piece called El pelele when it became clear that Granados was playing something other than what was in the manuscript. The audience thought the piece was wonderful and insisted on hearing it again,...

Sweet and Sour

Sunday, March 22, 2015, 11:30am

The popularity of his music was waning and he was in debt and ailing, but during his last days, John Bach enjoyed life.

After twenty years of eclipse, the eleventh son of Johann Sebastian Bach had restored his reputation as an opera composer by succeeding with La Clemenza di Scipione. His friend Thomas Gainsborough painted a portrait of the composer, showing a dynamic man in his mid-forties.

Each spring Bach went with the Court of George III to their palace at Kew to the southwest of London. In 1781 the diversions there included afternoon boat processions on the Thames that accompanied the...

One of a Kind

Saturday, March 21, 2015, 11:30am

In 1774 Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote a description for a biographer of his late father Johann Sebastian:

The first thing he would do when trying out an organ was to joke, “Above all, I have to find out whether the organ has good lungs.” He’d pull out all the stops and play in as many voices as possible, making the organ builders turn white with fear. The precise tuning of the instruments and of the whole orchestra got his undivided attention. No one could tune and quill his instruments to suit him. He did everything himself.

He had a perfect...

From the Ashes

Friday, March 20, 2015, 11:30am

Georg Solti’s career as an opera conductor was nipped in the bud in 1938 when German troops marched across the Austrian border, making life unsafe in Hungary. Solti left Hungary for the security of Switzerland, where he conducted two more opera performances. For the duration of World War II, with conducting jobs scarce, he got by as a pianist, hoping all the while to get back to leading an orchestra.

As the war in Europe came to a close, he learned that a friend, Hungarian-American pianist Edward Kilényi, was helping the U.S. Army to rebuild musical life in Munich. With...

What They Lack

Thursday, March 19, 2015, 11:30am

In 1859 composer Georges Bizet was a twenty-year-old student studying in Rome. He had already written a masterful Symphony in C, a major sacred work, and his comic opera Don Procopio, and he had strong opinions about his fellow composers. He wrote to his mother in Paris on March 19:

You attribute to feeble libretti the string of failures that has plagued our best writers for the past several years. You’re right. But there’s another reason. Not one of those writers has a well-rounded talent. Some of them—Massé, for example, fall short when it comes to style and a grand design. Others—including David, I...

Water Music

Wednesday, March 18, 2015, 11:30am

Louis Spohr was an innovative musician, the first in London to use a baton to conduct an orchestra. He might have wished it was a magic wand during an incident in Vienna.

In his autobiography Spohr tells of emerging from a rehearsal at the Theater an der Wien during a heavy downpour and finding the street to his house flooded as the Wien River and the Danube overflowed. He doubled back long enough to grab his violin case and returned to a street now knee-deep in flood waters.

At home, his landlord’s family was racing to the top floor loft...

He's As Good As They Say

Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 11:30am

Francesco Geminiani spent much of the 1730s in London and Paris, giving concerts and selling, or attempting to sell, subscriptions to a proposed book of music instruction. In 1737 he went to Dublin and stayed for three years. It was probably inevitable that he would meet the greatest of Irish harpers, Turlough O’Carolan. According to Joseph C. Walker, writing in 1789, Geminiani couldn’t resist conducting an experiment:

And it is a fact well ascertained, that the fame of Carolan having reached the ears of an eminent Italian music-master in Dublin, he put his abilities to a severe test and the...

Respect Me!

Monday, March 16, 2015, 11:30am

By the time the Venice debut of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Beatrice di Tenda finally took place, it was a month overdue, and winning over an impatient audience was not easy.

Librettist Felice Romani was part of the problem. He was slow to deliver and, apparently, stood Bellini up at least once, because the composer wrote to him:

Dear Romani, having worked like a dog, I assure you that it is too cruel for me to come all the way to your house only to find that you are not there. Since we agreed that I’ll always be there by four at the...

Composer, Conductor, Confrontation

Sunday, March 15, 2015, 11:30am

Serge Koussevitzky had studied conducting with the great Arthur Nikisch, founded his own orchestra in Moscow in 1909, and published the music of several prominent composers of the day, so he had reason to feel that he had some control over the way the music was performed.

One of the composers whose music he had published was Alexander Scriabin, who invested his works with an intensity verging on religion, so it was inevitable that the two would clash.

An omen of future discord came in 1911, during rehearsals of Scriabin’s symphonic poem Prometheus. Scriabin’s original idea was to accompany the performance with...

Burning Ambition

Saturday, March 14, 2015, 11:30am

After the success of his Second Symphony in Germany, Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen received encouragement from a representative of Leipzig publisher C.F. Peters, who thought that a third symphony would be lucrative for both of them. In the fall of 1882, after several years had passed without Svendsen producing the symphony, the representative sent him a reminder, to which Svendsen replied that he would be honored to have his new symphony published by Peters—as soon as he could get around to writing it.

Sometime in the winter of 1883, Svendsen wrote the symphony.

Then he ran into a serious problem....

Taking the Blame

Friday, March 13, 2015, 11:30am

In the late 1830s and early ’40s Gaetano Donizetti had gone through years of grief and bad health. In 1843 his comic opera Don Pasquale became an instant international success, and a year later Donizetti wrote another opera, Caterina Cornaro. When it failed, he was quick to take the blame. He wrote to a friend:

A fiasco! Then let it be a fiasco! People are saying that the music of Caterina Cornaro is not mine or that I wrote it in my sleep or that I wrote it to wreak revenge against the management. No!

I accept complete responsibility, failure, and blame. Why should I have had...

First Concert

Thursday, March 12, 2015, 11:30am

At the age of twenty-seven, Karl Goldmark decided that it was time for him to make his mark as a composer, and so he arranged a concert devoted entirely to his own works.

His colleagues in the Carl Theater in Vienna promised in writing to donate their services. Goldmark recruited an ensemble of instrumentalists and singers and lined up a soloist to sing a ballad. When he had gotten commitments from several singers with the Court Opera Company, he sent out notices advertising the concert and the names of the performers.

Then a setback came in the form of professional...

Don't Ever Leave It!

Wednesday, March 11, 2015, 11:30am

Like many a great musician before him, Argentine composer Ástor Piazzolla went to Paris to take lessons from the celebrated Nadia Boulanger. Although his lessons with her went on for less than four months, long after they were over, he would declare that he owed her “absolutely everything.”

He was born on March 11, 1921, and so was already thirty-three years old when he came to take his first lesson from Boulanger. She had tutored some of the greatest composers of the twentieth century, and she spoke of them without awe. She dismissed a package in the mail as the latest work...

What If He Had Written Today

Tuesday, March 10, 2015, 11:30am

Felix Mendelssohn is sometimes credited with re-introducing the music of Bach in the nineteenth century, thereby establishing the current practice of performing vintage music in concerts. A letter his father wrote to him from Berlin on March 10, 1835, mentions Mendelssohn’s teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter as an early advocate of Bach and describes a controversy that arose about new performances of old music:

Zelter was the first person on whom Bach’s light clearly dawned because he got to know the works through his activity as a music collector, and, as an artist, shared his knowledge with others. His musical performances on Fridays...

The Indian Life

Monday, March 9, 2015, 11:30am

By the beginning of 1911 Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni had been traveling and performing in America for more than a year, and he was still adjusting to life in the New World. He was often uninspired, but he wrote to his wife about occasional flashes of enthusiasm. On March 9, 1911, Busoni wrote from Kansas City:

I’ve had to play with fever and pain, and last night was the first time since March fourth that I’ve had enough of a night’s rest.

Now it’s improved somewhat. The weather is so pretty that it’s possible to sit with the window wide open and...

Like Bolts of Lightning

Sunday, March 8, 2015, 11:30am

He was one of the most famous men in Europe, and even though he was feeling unwell, Niccolò Paganini had come to Berlin to perform. The audience of nine hundred or so included Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia, and all the royal family.

Writing four days later, on March 8, 1829, Adolph Bernhard Marx, the editor of a major German music periodical, was still enthralled:

The man seemed to be enchanted and he had an enchanting effect, not just on me or on this or that person, but on everyone. He came onstage and launched at once into the Ritornelle, in which he conducted the...

Radio Won't Wait

Saturday, March 7, 2015, 11:30am

According to its producer, The Ford Sunday Evening Hour was a way for radio audiences “to feel cultured without really being so.” Beginning in 1934 it provided classical music, popular opera arias, familiar ballads, and hymns. Henry Ford hired most of the Detroit Symphony as the house orchestra. The conductors were some of the best--Sir John Barbirolli and Fritz Reiner. The soloists were the finest, although, in the case of pianist Myra Hess, the encounter with radio was not graceful.

Hess was booked to play Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor for a March 7, 1937, broadcast. A representative of the Ford Motor Company suggested...

The Challenge

Friday, March 6, 2015, 11:30am

By 1754 Francesco Geminiani was known throughout Europe as a composer of concertos. When he was approached by the director of a Paris theater to write theater music, Geminiani took up the challenge.

The Enchanted Forest was a pantomime based on episodes from Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered–a subject that lent itself to splashy special effects, the most exciting that the art of painting and the science of machinery could bring to bear.

The producers kept the plot simple. The story followed events on the Plain of Sharon, near Jerusalem, with scenes set in a Jerusalem mosque and in the camp of a Christian army. In their...

The Pauper

Thursday, March 5, 2015, 11:30am

Young André Gretry led the life of a character from Dickens. He was the son of a poor church musician in the city of Liège, Belgium. About 1750, at the age of nine, he became a choir boy, a position that required him to walk a mile each way to attend six services a day. One morning, when he arrived late for the five o’clock service, he was forced to remain on his knees for two hours. In order to avoid further punishment, young Gretry made a routine of leaving for church at three in the morning, summer and winter, and sitting outside the...

The Payoff

Wednesday, March 4, 2015, 11:30am

Felix Mendelssohn conducted the Düsseldorf revival of Luigi Cherubini’s opera The Water Carrier. A letter that he wrote to his father on March 4, 1834, shows how hard he worked to get the performance right:

A good performance in the Düsseldorf theater does not find its way to the general public–in fact rarely beyond the Düsseldorfers themselves. But if I succeed in thrilling and rousing my own feelings and those of everybody in the house who’s in favor of good music, that’s worthwhile too.

The week leading up to the performance of The Water Carrier was exhausting. Every day we had two long rehearsals, nine or ten hours...

Too Much to Hope For

Tuesday, March 3, 2015, 11:30am

In 1875 audiences at the Opéra-Comique in Paris were among the most conservative in Europe, and so it was probably too much to hope that they would take kindly to the novel production they were seeing and hearing on the night of March 3.

The day had begun auspiciously for composer Georges Bizet. The Journal Official announced that he had been appointed chevalier of the Legion of Honor. Then some wag started the rumor that the authorities had awarded the honor in the morning because they wouldn’t have the nerve to bestow it after that night’s debut of Bizet’s scandalous opera Carmen, the sordid story of...

The Downside

Monday, March 2, 2015, 11:30am

Wealth, fame, and acclaim–Joseph Haydn enjoyed them all during a sojourn in London arranged by Johann Peter Salomon. But there was a downside according to a letter he wrote to Maria von Genzinger in Vienna on March 2, 1792:

I must confess to Your Grace that this is very embarrassing and that on some days I’m downhearted, especially because, for the following reasons, I cannot send Your Grace the symphony dedicated to you:

First, because I plan to alter the last movement of it and to improve it because it’s too weak compared to the first. I was convinced of it myself, and so was the...

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Stars That Entertain Unseen Audiences

Tuesday, October 18, 2016, 11:30am

“Some people grow; others just swell.” It was a popular saying in the 1920s when radio was becoming all the rage, making stars overnight. Some of them, already established on stage, brought their egos with them to the airwaves. In 1923 Thomas Cowan, an announcer at New York radio station WJZ,...

Starting Over

Monday, October 17, 2016, 11:30am

By 1770 Charles Burney had come a long way from his exploitive apprenticeship working for composer Thomas Arne. He had become a distinguished and discriminating music critic and historian. During his travels on the Continent, he collected stories from the lives of celebrated composers and...

I Feel Lost Already

Friday, October 14, 2016, 11:30am

The Guns of Navarone, The Thing from Another World, Friendly Persuasion, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, High Noon– those classics and more than a hundred other Hollywood movies bear the stamp of composer Dimitri Tiomkin, a Russian émigré who developed a flair for writing American music. He was...

Collision Course

Thursday, October 13, 2016, 11:30am

In the early days of radio someone decided that it would be a good idea to time orchestral performances. The results were surprising to most conductors, and put two of the greatest on a collision course. In 1949 Leonard Bernstein was a young up-and-coming conductor and an avid listener to records...

The New World

Tuesday, October 11, 2016, 11:30am

On October 12, 1892, newly arrived in the New World, Czech composer Antonín DvoÍák wrote from New York to a friend in Moravia about his first impressions of America: After being in quarantine for just a little while we arrived safely in the promised land. The view from Sandy Hook, the harbor town...

I Quit!

Tuesday, October 11, 2016, 11:30am

The job was good, the pay quite nice, and the employer friendly, so in 1717 Johann Sebastian Bach accepted the position of conductor of the music staff for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. The only catch: Bach already had a job and he needed to get out of it. For nine years Bach had put up with the...

A Force for Change

Monday, October 10, 2016, 11:30am

Allegro, Andante, Adagio, Presto. We take the venerable tempo indications for granted today. Beethoven did not, as becomes apparent in a letter he wrote to a fellow composer and conductor in 1817: I am ecstatic that you share my opinions about our tempo indications, which originated in the...

Farewell Again

Thursday, October 6, 2016, 11:30am

Adelina Patti was one of the most celebrated sopranos in the history of music, but that didn’t put her above the barbs thrown by New York Evening Post critic Henry T. Finck. Finck had several misgivings about Patti, most of them having little to do with her singing, which he described as “so...

I Am Sick of it All!

Wednesday, October 5, 2016, 11:30am

After receiving an invitation to write a choral work for the 1898 Leeds Festival, Edward Elgar began work on his cantata Caractacus . His inspiration would have to carry him past a series of obstacles, including his own pessimism. He decided on a story about an ancient British hero, but the man...

Last Laugh

Tuesday, October 4, 2016, 11:30am

In his autobiography, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf couldn’t resist passing along a story that suggests how seriously eighteenth-century Venetians took their music. The famous castrato Guadagni had given three fine performances in an opera that was a particular favorite of Venetians. But after an...

Second Thoughts

Monday, October 3, 2016, 11:30am

Although he had never conducted any of William Walton’s music, Thomas Beecham suggested that the young composer write a concerto for violist Lionel Tertis. Walton wrote the concerto and sent it to Tertis, who thought that Walton’s music was a little too farfetched, and turned it down. A friend at...

Breaking Through

Friday, September 30, 2016, 11:30am

Seventeen-year-old Johannes Brahms was determined to become a composer, and so in 1850 when Robert Schumann came to Hamburg for a visit, Brahms got up his courage and sent a parcel of his music to Schumann’s hotel. The result was discouraging. The parcel came back unopened. Two years later Brahms...

Second Expedition

Thursday, September 29, 2016, 11:30am

During his first sojourn in America, composer Karel Szymanowski had accomplished little more than strengthening his identity as a Polish composer. Nonetheless, in 1921 a friend convinced him that a second visit would be more productive since new contacts there might lead to important performances...

The Joker and the Queen

Wednesday, September 28, 2016, 11:30am

If a story from the 1690s is true, composer Henry Purcell was so self-assured that he dared to play a joke on Queen Mary. Purcell had been commissioned to compose music for the queen’s birthday, the assigned verses being praise of King William’s bravery and the queen’s virtues. Apparently thinking...

A Minor Detail

Tuesday, September 27, 2016, 11:30am

Franz Lehár was enthusiastic again. Having made his fortune at the age of thirty-five with his 1905 operetta The Merry Widow , the Hungarian composer had gone through a fallow stretch during World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now, in 1925, he had found a tenor, Richard...

Not To Be

Monday, September 26, 2016, 11:30am

When celebrated Czech composer Antonín Dvořák stepped onto the pier in New York on September 26, 1892, he was welcomed as the future discoverer of American music. During his two-and-a-half-year tenure as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, Americans got to hear a variety...

Turnabout

Friday, September 23, 2016, 11:30am

The celebrated conductor Sir Thomas Beecham was known for the practical jokes he played on performers. How well would he take it when a performer put one over on him? In the fall of 1935 Beecham was holding auditions for a season at London’s Covent Garden and a long tour through the country, which...

Money Sings

Thursday, September 22, 2016, 11:30am

In the fall of 1974 soprano Kiri Te Kanawa was cast in the role of Marguerite in a Covent Garden production of Charles Gounod’s opera Faust . An American philanthropist had offered £500,000 for the staging of his favorite work. The money came with a string attached. The part of Mephistopheles had...

First, the Money

Wednesday, September 21, 2016, 11:30am

In memoirs he wrote in 1896, conductor Luigi Arditi recalls a situation in which a stubborn baritone named Novara pursued his demand for money all the way into a performance. Novara had agreed to sing the part of Rocco for three performances of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio with the understanding that...

That's All I Ask

Tuesday, September 20, 2016, 11:30am

On September 20, 1850, Richard Wagner shared his aspirations with critic Theodor Uhlig, writing from Zurich about the key to achieving his latest artistic goal: What’s needed to accomplish the best, most decisive and important project that I can take on in the current circumstances, and to bring to...

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Grace Notes

The Fireworks Orchestra

The Contented Listener

They Wouldn't Stop!

I Don't Know How You Do It

A Mass in Time of War

Depend on Yourself

The Bitter Ballet Battle

Doubtful Loyalty

Spontaneous Inspiration

Sweet and Sour

One of a Kind

From the Ashes

What They Lack

Water Music

He's As Good As They Say

Respect Me!

Composer, Conductor, Confrontation

Burning Ambition

Taking the Blame

First Concert

Don't Ever Leave It!

What If He Had Written Today

The Indian Life

Like Bolts of Lightning

Radio Won't Wait

The Challenge

The Pauper

The Payoff

Too Much to Hope For

The Downside

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