Maggots
Monday, September 19, 2016, 11:30am
Charles Jennens assembled the texts for five of Handel’s oratorios, including Messiah , but a letter that turned up more than two hundred years after he wrote it shows that he did not hesitate to make fun of the great composer. In 1738 Jennens and Handel were working on the oratorio Saul . Jennens...
Falling Star
Friday, September 16, 2016, 11:30am
The thirty-three-year-old pianist was as brilliant as ever. He treated his audience in Besançon to unequaled performances of Bach’s B-flat major Partita, Mozart’s Sonata in A minor, Schubert’s G- flat major and E-flat major Impromptus, and thirteen of Chopin’s fourteen Waltzes. He left out the...
And There Was Music
Thursday, September 15, 2016, 11:30am
After graduating from Oxford, Hubert Parry was bound for a business career in London, although money-making was not as interesting to him as music-making. In September of 1870 he couldn’t resist a final burst of freedom. He wrote about it in his diary: I spent a quiet time studying manuscript music...
A Slight Breach of Decorum
Wednesday, September 14, 2016, 11:30am
By the 1950s Ralph Vaughan Williams was a heavyset, craggy-faced monument to solid British music and decorum, so he must have presented quite a contrast with the guest conductor at a choral competition that took place at the base of the 2 nd Battalion Welsh Guards. Vaughan Williams had been invited...
A Good Catch
Tuesday, September 13, 2016, 11:30am
In 1764 Leopold Mozart was in London with his family, including his nine-year-old son, Wolfgang Amadeus. Money worries were never far from his mind. On September 13 he wrote to his landlord and banker back in Salzburg: You’ve probably deduced that I’ll spend the entire winter here at least, and...
Versatile Enough
Monday, September 12, 2016, 11:30am
The string quartet is a curiosity, a series of short dances for three violins and cello to be played on open strings. It’s attributed to Benjamin Franklin, and since he was so versatile, it’s tempting to assume that Franklin would also turn his attention to composing music. Franklin played the harp...
Free Spirits
Friday, September 9, 2016, 11:30am
In 1904 nineteen-year-old Alban Berg entered the Austrian civil service as an accountant, keeping tabs on the sale of pigs and the productivity of distilleries, but he was most devoted to classes in music theory taught by the innovative Arnold Schoenberg. Like Berg, Schoenberg had been forced by...
Pure Persistence
Thursday, September 8, 2016, 11:30am
For music, it was the worst of times. In September 1940, as German planes began bombing London, the main thing on everyone’s minds was survival, and yet an important part of surviving was music. At Queen’s Hall, after audiences for several performances were kept away by alerts that ran far into the...
The Mystery Remains
Wednesday, September 7, 2016, 11:30am
Polish piano virtuoso Leopold Godowsky had disappeared. On September 4, 1915, Godowsky left his home in Avon, New Jersey, telling his wife, Frieda, that he was going to New York to deposit $1000 in the bank. When he failed to come home, Frieda contacted the police, who determined that Godowsky had...
Missing!
Tuesday, September 6, 2016, 11:30am
On September 4, 1915, a New York Times headline broke the story: Godowsky Missing. And so began one of the strangest disappearances in music history. The celebrated Polish pianist Leopold Godowsky had been working at a fever pitch to complete a set of thirty piano adaptations for the Arts...
Smoke-Filled Rooms
Monday, September 5, 2016, 11:30am
Although he wrote a sublime German Requiem , Johannes Brahms knew all about the earthly–and earthy--side of music. Brahms grew up in Hamburg in the 1840s in a family so poor that he had to go to work at the age of thirteen. Because he had remarkable talent, young Brahms had no trouble finding jobs...
First Impressions
Friday, September 2, 2016, 11:30am
Russian pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff would eventually become an American citizen, but his first impression of America and America’s first impression of him were not entirely promising. By 1909 Rachmaninoff was enough of an international celebrity to follow in the path of many famous...
The Subversive
Thursday, September 1, 2016, 11:30am
Eugene Luening had come through some hard times, and in 1908 he accepted a one-year appointment as director of the Music Department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He soon found that he would have to give up some of his freedom, but he never gave up his sense of humor. When his young...
The Maelstrom
Wednesday, August 31, 2016, 11:30am
The situation did not look good. The opera had the benefit of an ingenious librettist and a brilliant composer and yet, as the August 31, 1928, debut approached, few would have given more than two cents for The Threepenny Opera. By midnight of opening day a visitor to the Berlin theater found the...
Domestic Strife
Tuesday, August 30, 2016, 11:30am
His family life was a good deal less harmonious than his music. This is Mozart writing from Vienna to his father Leopold in Salzburg at the end of August 1782: You want to know how I can flatter myself that I'll be the music master for the Princess? Well, Salieri can't teach her to play the clavier...
The Hornet
Monday, August 29, 2016, 11:30am
Carl Maria von Weber had admired the lyrical poetry of Helmina von Chézy, and when the Vienna theater commissioned him to write an opera, he asked her to write the libretto. For her story, Chézy chose “The Tale of the Virtuous Euryanthe,” which was based on the timeworn device of a wager about a...
Music of the Future
Friday, August 26, 2016, 11:30am
One of the last letters by Rossini shows that the seventy-six-old composer was keenly aware of the latest trends in music–and had strong opinions about them. Referring to composers touting “music of the future,” he wrote to a friend on August 26, 1868: There is no such thing as progress or...
Occupation and Liberation
Thursday, August 25, 2016, 11:30am
During the German occupation of Paris, French musicians had to make a choice: perform for the enemy or risk all by remaining loyal to the Resistance and refusing. Among those who dared to refuse was organist and composer Jean Langlais. Langlais thought it was particularly gratifying that the...
An Emotional Maelstrom
Wednesday, August 24, 2016, 11:30am
By the time he was in his thirties, composer Jules Massenet avoided public performances of his operas because the excitement was more than his nerves could take. In 1875, at the debut of his music for the mystical play Eve, he was in for a set of surprises that would throw the high-strung Frenchman...
Repressed Delight
Tuesday, August 23, 2016, 11:30am
Because young Charles Burney admired the music of Thomas Arne, he was excited to meet him when Arne returned to London in August 1744 after two years in Dublin. He was all the more delighted when Arne offered to accept him as a student, tuition free. A legal contract bound the eighteen-year-old...