Grace Notes

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

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, the guitar, and something called the glass dulcimer, but his best known contribution to music was his improvement of the so-called musical glasses. The instrument had become popular in Europe by 1746, when Christoph Willibald Gluck performed in London a “concerto on 26 drinking glasses tuned with spring water,”...

When It Mattered Most

Thursday, September 11, 2014, 11:30am

Rick Rescorla was a soldier, not a musician. But he knew the power of music and he put it to work when it mattered most.

He was born in Cornwall in 1939. Some of his earliest memories were of Cornish songs, but American culture was also in the air as American troops stationed in England prepared for the invasion of German-occupied Europe.

As he grew up, Rescorla was less than a model student, mediocre in literature, undistinguished in music.

He was supposed to have a music lesson each week, a bout with a recorder still damp from use in the...

A Polite Reply

Wednesday, September 10, 2014, 11:30am

Although Hector Berlioz was capable of stinging irony, when he received a pointed letter from Richard Wagner, his reply was the essence of graciousness. On September 10, 1855, he wrote from Paris to Wagner in Switzerland:

Your letter gave me great pleasure. You’re quite right to deplore my ignorance of the German language, and as to what you said about the impossibility of my understanding your works, I’ve struggled with it many a time. The flower of expression almost always withers under the weight of translation, however delicate the translation may be. There are accents in true music that demand...

Free Spirits

Tuesday, September 9, 2014, 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 poverty to leave school at sixteen to become a bank clerk. Schoenberg had forfeited that job by signing a customer into the account books under the name L. van Beethoven.

When an aunt died and left Berg’s mother a modest inheritance, Berg ended his stint as a government accountant by absolving all...

Pure Persistence

Monday, September 8, 2014, 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 night, conductor Sir Henry Wood was forced to announce that the popular Proms concerts would have to be suspended. Before long, there was no nighttime classical music in London.

The National Gallery and a few other places continued daytime concerts, but the advent of daytime raids required crowds...

The Mystery Remains

Sunday, September 7, 2014, 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 never been to the bank, although he had been to his hairdresser and had left saying that he was on his way to Pennsylvania Station to take the train back to New Jersey.

Godowsky had been missing for five days when events took a darker turn. A friend remembered...

Missing!

Saturday, September 6, 2014, 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 Publication Society Progressive Series of Piano Lessons. A series of interruptions at home had made the work slow going. On September 1 Godowsky had left home in Avon, New Jersey, telling his wife that he was taking the train into New York to deposit $1000 in the bank. Godowsky was wearing...

Smoke-Filled Rooms

Friday, September 5, 2014, 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 playing the piano in local taverns and restaurants, and he soon became so popular that proprietors would call him away from home at all hours to play at dances for free drinks and a little money.

His mother, who also had gone to work at the...

The Misfit

Thursday, September 4, 2014, 11:30am

As a composer he mastered vast thundering symphonies and sublime sacred choral works, but as a man Anton Bruckner was awkward and bumbling, especially with women.

When it came to the fair sex, the lifelong bachelor was a man of impulses. Once, while visiting a town to give an organ recital, he saw a beautiful girl in church. The next morning he asked for permission to marry her.

During a vacation in the Alps he was working on his Sixth Symphony, which shows no particular influence of the lofty mountains, but the diary he kept sports a long list of...

An Ensemble of Excuses

Wednesday, September 3, 2014, 11:30am

In 1886 American composer Horatio Parker had been hoping for a performance of his string quartet by an important Boston ensemble. When the performance fell through, his colleague George Whitefield Chadwick wrote a cheerful letter explaining what had gone wrong:

In the first place, Kneisel gave me an excuse for not playing your Quartet that so many people wanted to hear the Brahms Sextet that he was obliged to put it on the program to the exclusion of the great American work! And in the second, Brother Gericke told the astute critic of the Transcript that he was so exhausted...

First Impressions

Tuesday, September 2, 2014, 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 performers who had done well in America, a prosperous nation hungry for European culture and willing to pay top dollar for it, and yet Rachmaninoff had his misgivings about his three-month concert tour of the New World.

Many of them would be justified.

The critics were not particularly impressed by Rachmaninoff and his music. Richard...

The Subversive

Monday, September 1, 2014, 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 sons asked Luening what he would be doing in his new position, he replied that he would recruit an orchestra of eighty-five and a chorus of 300 from the university students to produce Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “We’ll do it on the lake,” he...

The Maelstrom

Sunday, August 31, 2014, 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 stage “filled with shouting people wildly gesticulating, yelling at each other,” their only point of agreement coming in the form of threats to the director, who reacted by shouting them down. “Smoke filled the air,” the visitor observed. “Crumpled papers, empty bottles and broken coffee cups littered...

Domestic Strife

Saturday, August 30, 2014, 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! He can only try to hamper me by recommending somebody else, and it's entirely possible that he's doing just that!

On the other hand, the Emperor knows me, and the last time the Princess was in Vienna, she would have been happy to...

The Hornet

Friday, August 29, 2014, 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 woman’s virtue.

The rambling, complicated, supernatural plot defied staging. After eleven revisions, Weber diverted himself with performances of his recent success, Der Freischütz, in Prague and Vienna. When he returned home to Dresden, he took walks in the woods, repeating Chézy’s poetry in an effort to...

A Tough Act To Follow

Thursday, August 28, 2014, 11:30am

By the age of twenty-five, Johann Nepomuk Hummel already had a career that would’ve been the envy of a much older musician. As a child he had lived with Mozart and taken free keyboard lessons from him for two years. By the age of thirteen he had given a concert tour of Europe. He had just written a groundbreaking trumpet concerto.

It was 1804. Haydn was retiring as Kapellmeister for Prince Esterházy in Eisenstadt, and he recommended the young pianist to be his replacement.

The job turned into one of the greatest struggles of Hummel’s life.

Replacing Haydn was the...

The Bluff

Wednesday, August 27, 2014, 11:30am

One summer day, circa 1760, young Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf rushed in late to perform in a concert for his employer, a prince who took a dim view of tardiness.

On top of that, he had to fill in for the ailing leader, but he impressed the prince and his guest, the Venetian ambassador, with his performance, which he followed by improvising an accompaniment to the singing of the ambassador’s wife.

The ambassador told the prince that, as a professor of violin himself, he’d like to hear Dittersdorf play a solo. With a sinking feeling, Dittersdorf realized that in his...

Music of the Future

Tuesday, August 26, 2014, 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 decadence in the latest novelties. They are sterile inventions, the product of perseverance rather than inspiration. Once and for all, let them find the courage to throw off convention and embrace with light hearts and complete confidence those aspects of Italian music that are divine and genuinely charming–simple melody...

Occupation and Liberation

Monday, August 25, 2014, 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 liberation of Paris by Allied troops came on August 25 since that was the feast day of St. Louis, the patron saint of the city. But liberation on that day in 1944 was dangerous. The city was still infested with rooftop snipers as the Germans retreated. Langlais described a performance that could...

An Emotional Maelstrom

Sunday, August 24, 2014, 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 into an emotional maelstrom.

Massenet had been heartened by what he described as “the superb general rehearsal,” which he had attended only because the theater was empty. Even so, during the debut he waited in a small café nearby as a friend brought him progress reports....

Repressed Delight

Saturday, August 23, 2014, 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 Burney to Arne for seven years.

In exchange for room and board and learning his trade, Burney was expected to transcribe the music that Arne wrote for the Drury Lane theater, to teach it to the minor performers, to give lessons to Arne’s students, and to play in...

Surviving the Queen of Sheba

Friday, August 22, 2014, 11:30am

Karl Goldmark had poured his best efforts into his opera The Queen of Sheba and had high hopes for it. He was in for some shocks.

He submitted it to the Vienna Court Opera for the 1873 season. The Queen of Sheba went to the directors of the Court Opera, who took a dim view of it. They were already critics and rivals of Goldmark.

Next the opera went to the institution’s three conductors. One of them complained about its discords. The second, a frail old man, said that he was too sick to look at such a novel and...

Second Notice

Thursday, August 21, 2014, 11:30am

As if the money problems weren’t bad enough, now Heinrich Schütz had to put up with disrespect. For thirty-five years he had been music director for Johann Georg, Elector of Saxony, and now, in 1652, the sixty-seven-year-old Schütz wanted to retire, but the signs were not good.

The elector had fallen on hard times, and salary payments to his court musicians had fallen behind. More than once, Schütz had written eloquently on their behalf, asking for some kind of financial relief. He wrote of a highly-respected bass singer, long in the service of the court, who had been forced to...

That Terrible Year

Wednesday, August 20, 2014, 11:30am

In 1869 Emperor Napoleon III launched three music competitions in Paris, and Jules Massenet was fast to enter all three. The contenders were to write music for the cantata Prometheus, the opéra-comique Le Florentin, and the opera La Coupe de Roi de Thule.

Massenet won nothing.

Camille Saint-Saëns had won the cantata competition. He knew that Massenet had competed and had been considered for the opera prize but had been passed over late in the judging. He said to Massenet, “There are so many good and beautiful things in your score that I have just written to Weimar to see...

How To Listen

Tuesday, August 19, 2014, 11:30am

As a critic, Michel Calvocoressi appreciated an analytical mind, so he particularly admired composer Vincent d’Indy, the author of Treatise of Composition.

One of the things he liked most about d’Indy was the apparent contradictions in his thinking.

Calvocoressi found it intriguing that within the space of just four years, d’Indy could have written both the sensuous, unabashed Symphony on a French Mountain Air and the cerebral, constrained First String Quartet. Similarly, he said, at times d’Indy endorsed the headlong, emotionally charged music of Liszt, and at others he seemed to disapprove of it.

Calvocoressi concluded that d’Indy was having...

Wrestling With The Medium

Monday, August 18, 2014, 11:30am

In 1950 Gian Carlo Menotti directed the film version of his opera The Medium in Rome–his first film directing assignment. The crew also included a conductor who had never recorded a note of music and a cast of singers who had never seen a film studio.

“It would be highly inaccurate to say that I enjoyed making my first film,” Menotti said almost thirty years later. “I missed all along the spontaneity of the stage and its immediacy of expression.” He came to think of the camera as “a merciless Medusa that petrifies all freshness before it.”

So he rarely...

The Music Seeker

Sunday, August 17, 2014, 11:30am

English music critic Edward Holmes set out for the Continent in 1827, eager to experience the cultural excitement in cities where great composers had lived. When he reached Vienna, he was in for some surprises. He wrote in his travelogue:

At the smaller theaters in the Leopold Stadt and the Joseph Stadt nothing in a musical way is produced worth notice, though a Kapellmeister is there employed to beat the time to songs which are in the regular Astley and Sadler’s Wells style.

My English proprieties were somewhat scandalized at finding a number of young ladies introduced on the...

The Breakthrough

Saturday, August 16, 2014, 11:30am

In 1841 Anglo-Irish composer Michael Balfe was down on his luck. He was in Paris, about to finish an opera tailor-made for soprano Giulia Grisi, when arrangements fell through, leaving him with little but his music and his optimism to sustain him.

Pierre Erard of the piano manufacturing firm offered to lend his salon for a benefit concert devoted entirely to Balfe’s music. He went on to say that he would invite various influential personages from the Paris musical establishment.

The “Grande Concert Balfe” attracted a full house of those expecting to be entertained by the failure of an Englishman...

Excellence or Precedence

Friday, August 15, 2014, 11:30am

During his sojourn in Paris in the 1920s, composer George Antheil decided to investigate a claim made by his teacher back in Philadelphia. It alleged that Debussy, Ravel, and Satie had stolen their impressionistic technique from a largely forgotten Italian composer named Ernest Fanelli.

Antheil tracked down the composer’s widow and grown son and daughter. Posing as a critic eager to write an article about the composer’s “true worth,” he received the family’s cordial invitation to have a good look at Fanelli’s music.

He discovered that the claim was true—Fanelli had anticipated the technique of Debussy, Ravel, and Satie by...

Mutual Admiration

Thursday, August 14, 2014, 11:30am

In the early twentieth century, many Spanish composers traveled to France for training, and a fair number of French composers went to Spain for inspiration. The friendship of Manuel de Falla and Claude Debussy is a prime example.

When Falla arrived in Paris from Madrid in 1907, he soon met a host of celebrated musicians from various countries.

The most renowned of them all was Claude Debussy, whom Falla failed to recognize at first because he was dressed more like a sailor than a famous composer, but it didn’t take long for the Frenchman’s well-known sardonic sense of humor to...

Orange Plantation Composer

Thursday, January 28, 2016, 11:30am

“That man has music in his mind, but when he sets it down it’s almost impossible to play it.” So said an American friend of a young English composer named Frederick Delius. It’s not surprising that Delius’ music was unusual. He had found his calling in a very unusual...

The Young Critic

Wednesday, January 27, 2016, 11:30am

The brilliant but playful young composer had traveled with his father to Italy. The plan--to lay the foundation for a European reputation. On the eve of his fourteenth birthday, January 27 th , 1760, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was in Milan. To his 18-year-old sister Nannerl in Salsburg he wrote:...

Chopin in High Society

Tuesday, January 26, 2016, 11:30am

At age 21 Polish composer Frederick Chopin left his native country, little knowing that the departure would be permanent. Within a year he was a great success in Paris as a pianist and teacher. But he retained his modesty and good humor in a letter to a friend back home: “I have gotten into...

The Wedding March

Monday, January 25, 2016, 11:30am

One 19th century masterpiece brilliantly expresses the English character even though it was written before the composer had ever been to England. As a boy, Felix Mendelssohn experienced the English personality through the plays of Shakespeare. Using the latest German translations, his family often...

In the Presence of Greatness

Friday, January 22, 2016, 11:30am

On the night of January 22, 1937, the Greek conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos gave the fourth of five dazzling concerts in Boston. Particularly impressed was a young Harvard student whose life was about to be changed by the performances. During three previous concerts, Mitropoulos had impressed...

The Devil's Trill

Thursday, January 21, 2016, 11:30am

For centuries the violin was been thought of as an instrument of the devil. In 1770 the English music historian Charles Burney came across the remarkable story of "the Devil's Trill." Burney's primary interest was contemporary music, and he was disappointed to arrive in Padua a...

The Runaway Horn Player

Wednesday, January 20, 2016, 11:30am

For two centuries it was fashionable for composers to have Italian names. But fashion wasn’t the first thing on the mind of composer Jan Vaclav Stich when he changed his name. He wanted to avoid having his front teeth knocked out. Stich was born in 1740 into a family of Czech peasants who...

Why Bother To Get Up?

Tuesday, January 19, 2016, 11:30am

Gioacchino Rossini was one of the most active opera composers of all time, but according to one of his contemporaries he was notoriously lazy. During the winter of 1813 Rossini was lodging at a cheap inn in Venice. He was composing in bed to avoid paying for a fire. He was just finishing a duet...

Indoor and Outdoor Culture at the White House

Friday, January 15, 2016, 11:30am

Although the President was a noted outdoorsman, he also he enjoyed the subtleties of chamber music. And sometimes the wild and the refined met cheek to jowl in the White House of Theodore Roosevelt. When he came into office in 1901, Roosevelt brought a new sophistication to music making in the...

The Dangerous Host

Thursday, January 14, 2016, 11:30am

Music making can be hard enough for those whose instruments are mainstays of the orchestra. For harmonica-player Larry Adler the early years were tough--and a little scary. In 1928 or so, at age 14, Adler left his home in Baltimore to audition in a New York harmonica band. Adler played the Poet and...

War and Peace at the Opera

Wednesday, January 13, 2016, 11:30am

Leo Tolstoy enjoyed opera but he also enjoyed making fun of it. In his novel War and Peace, in a scene set in 1811, we see the opera through the eyes of 19-year-old Natasha Rostova and it becomes a strange and amusing spectacle: "In the center of the stage sat some girls in red bodices and...

Handel's Fighting Prima Donna

Tuesday, January 12, 2016, 11:30am

The evening of January 12 th , 1723, was one of the most remarkable in London theatrical history. On that night Handel’s opera Ottone premiered, and the star was soprano Francesca Cuzzoni—a force to be reckoned with. She had arrived from Italy the previous December, already a celebrated...

Weber & the Wrong Bottle

Monday, January 11, 2016, 11:30am

In 1804 Carl Maria von Weber was a 17-year-old composer and singer with little conducting experience. He was invited to lead the theater orchestra in Breslau, and accepted the position in part because he hoped that its modest salary would enable him to support his father, an unsuccessful engraver...

The Cure

Friday, January 8, 2016, 11:30am

One night in 1994 72-year-old pianist Abbey Simon and his wife were in The Hague, crossing a street in a rainstorm when an inattentive driver smashed into them. Simon’s wife was badly injured. His own injuries were not life threatening, but he had four broken fingers. The pianist’s...

The Beethoven Conspiracies

Thursday, January 7, 2016, 11:30am

Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler

Beethoven is said to have described composing as ten percent talent and ninety percent work. On January 7 th , 1809 he wrote from Vienna to his publisher in Leipzig suggesting that the hardest work comes after composing. “I am forced through intrigues and conspiracies and dirty tricks of all...

Varese & the Apache

Wednesday, January 6, 2016, 11:30am

Edgar Varese dared to challenge traditional notions of harmony. His early years in Paris also required considerable daring and were less than harmonious. At the turn of the century, Varese’s colleges in Paris acted as his bodyguards as he went home from rehearsals in a rough part of the city...

A Dangerous Reward

Tuesday, January 5, 2016, 11:30am

In 1853 the famed contralto Marietta Alboni was about to give a farewell concert and the manager of New York's Broadway Theater was desperate to have her perform on his stage. He approached conductor Luigi Arditi and asked him to convince the star to sing the part of Norma at his theater. As a...

The Frozen Train

Monday, January 4, 2016, 11:30am

In January 1864 New Orleans-born pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk was on a train, making a concert tour of the northern states. Stalled near Harvard, Illinois, and worn by war and weather, he found comfort where he could, as he relates in his diary: "Even though I had spent the night with my...

Haydn's New Year

Friday, January 1, 2016, 11:30am

It was the beginning of a New Year and a grand adventure for Franz Joseph Haydn. On January 1st, 1791, he left Calais for London, where he was to conduct his latest symphonies for English audiences. He wrote to a friend in Vienna: "My arrival set off a big commotion throughout the city, and I...

A Musical Misadventure

Thursday, December 31, 2015, 11:30am

One of the most influential men of nineteenth-century music was fictitious. Kappellmeister Johannes Kreisler was a character invented by novelist E.T.A. Hoffmann. In one story, he tells of a Burgundy-soaked encounter with a group of musical dilettantes: "The baron, an antique tenor, came up to...

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