Grace Notes

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

Could it happen today? In the early years of the twentieth century, pianist Harold Bauer was touring in Spain, traveling with a tuner, who was responsible for having Bauer’s Erard pianos sent from one venue to the next.

Toward the end of the tour, illness forced the tuner to remain behind, and Bauer had to arrange for the piano transportation himself. After a long train trip, Bauer arrived in Tarragona on the morning of his concert there. The president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer of the Philharmonic Society met him at the station.

Bauer’s first concern: “Is the piano here?”

“Everything...

The Charge

Saturday, February 28, 2015, 11:30am

Ludwig van Beethoven spent a good deal of his time concerned with music and money. A letter that he wrote to composer Ferdinand Ries on February 28, 1816, dismisses both matters quickly in order to take up a new preoccupation:

Quite some time ago I wrote to let you know that the trio and the sonata had been sent out. In my last letter, I asked you, since I still had so many expenses to cover, to make sure that Herr Birchall reimburses me for the cost, which comes to at least ten gold ducats. In any event, he got the pianoforte...

The Shaky Collaborators

Friday, February 27, 2015, 11:30am

Composer Mily Balakirev had scraped up enough money for his Free Music School to put on a series of four concerts in St. Petersburg during the winter of 1879. Colleague Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was to direct them, and before they were over, he was a nervous wreck.

One of the concerts was to include the Polovtsian Dances and other selections from Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, the catch being that Borodin hadn’t finished the opera yet, and Rimsky-Korsakov spent no end of time pleading with him to orchestrate the excerpts to be performed in the concert. Borodin taught chemistry and medical courses that...

Fantasia

Thursday, February 26, 2015, 11:30am

Paul Hindemith was a distinguished composer and music theorist whose works were banned in Germany by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in 1936. Like many of his colleagues, Hindemith went to the United States looking for a way to earn a living. By the end of February 1939 he was in Hollywood, where he visited the Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount studios hoping to find a lucrative film contract.

He pinned his highest hopes on a third visit, to Walt Disney Studios.

Disenchantment came quickly. He watched animators work on a Mickey Mouse production. “Naturally a director oversees all this to make...

For the Record

Wednesday, February 25, 2015, 11:30am

The new decade called for a new technology. So in 1920 Adrian Boult agreed for the first time to conduct a performance for a gramophone record. Boult had been signed by the American manager of His Master’s Voice, who had liked Boult’s performance at the Russian Ballet and asked him to repeat some of the program “for the record.”

Boult was to conduct the British Symphony Orchestra in recordings of A Shropshire Lad by George Butterworth and two ballet suites–The Good Humoured Ladies, based on music by Domenico Scarlatti, and Ottorino Respighi’s reworking of Rossini pieces called La Boutique Fantasque.

When Boult and...

Circumstances Beyond My Control

Tuesday, February 24, 2015, 11:30am

February 24, 1876, brought the debut of a collaboration between Norway’s greatest playwright and Norway’s greatest composer. Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, with more than an hour of music by Edvard Grieg, became a classic, but in a letter he wrote almost thirty years after the premiere in Christiania, Grieg reflected on the limitations of the first performance and the obstacles to the play’s subsequent success.

Unfortunately I didn’t get to decide at what points the music would come in and how long each piece would be. That was in the hands of the Swedish theatrical director Josephson, who was then the head...

The Peril You Overlooked

Monday, February 23, 2015, 11:30am

Albert Spalding was sixteen years old at the time of his Paris debut. He played the Violin Concerto in B minor by Saint-Saëns, the Bach Chaconne, the Romance in F by Beethoven, and the flashy Zigeunerweisen by Pablo de Sarasate. The audience, mostly invited, had nothing but compliments for the young violinist.

But Spalding had misgivings.

He realized that he received just as much praise for his run-of-the mill performances as he did for those that were truly excellent. “Sweet at first to the taste,” Spalding said later, “it eventually soured on the stomach.”

Spalding’s teacher, a man named Lefort, was a voice of dissent. He asked if...

A Revolutionary Wedding

Sunday, February 22, 2015, 11:30am

In the politically charged year of 1848 César Franck was a twenty-five-year-old pianist and composer living in Paris. When his father took him to task for wasting his time dedicating a song to one of his female students, he and his father exchanged harsh words and his father retaliated by tearing the manuscript to pieces.

Franck flew into a rage and declared his intention to move out and marry the student and leave the family to support itself--a scary prospect for his indolent father. The elder Franck alternately threatened and pleaded. He flaunted the name of a notorious wife-murderer, suggesting...

Round Two

Saturday, February 21, 2015, 11:30am

As a student at the Paris Conservatory, Hector Berlioz had experienced at least one run-in with its feisty director, Luigi Cherubini. In his autobiography, Berlioz tells of a second encounter.

He had applied for a professorship of harmony at the Conservatory and received word that Cherubini wanted to see him.

Cherubini explained that Berlioz would surely get the position, but that he had someone else in mind for it.

Berlioz offered to withdraw his application.

“No, no, that is not good,” Cherubini said, “because, you see, people would say that I was the cause of your withdrawing.”

“Then I’ll remain...

The Portent

Friday, February 20, 2015, 11:30am

Because it was politically sensitive, Giuseppe Verdi’s new opera Un ballo in maschera made the Italian censors nervous. They forced Verdi to change the action to someplace farther from home.

He chose seventeenth-century Boston. The King of Sweden became the Governor of Boston.

When Un ballo in maschera came to the United States in 1861, it was quite the rage despite some absurdities, such as Puritans holding a masked ball.

When the opera played at the Academy of Music in New York on February 20, 1861, its audience included President-elect Abraham Lincoln, who was en route from Springfield, Illinois, via Albany and New York to Washington,...

Broken Windows

Thursday, February 19, 2015, 11:30am

On February 20, 1816, a combination of miscalculations and mishaps had brought about a disastrous debut for Rossini’s operaThe Barber of Seville. At the end of the contentious first act, Rossini sat at the piano and applauded the singers, but some in the audience thought he was praising his own opera, which made them all the more volatile.

Then there was the matter of the next night’s performance.

On the day after the debut, Rossini and alto Geltrude Righetti-Giorgi sat down and went over the score, and he took out some of the things that he thought the audience had good reason to...

A Close Shave for the Barber

Wednesday, February 18, 2015, 11:30am

Giovanni Paisiello had crafted a popular opera from a play by Beaumarchais in 1782, but in 1816 Gioachino Rossini went ahead and wrote his own version of The Barber of Seville. Some Roman opera-goers were partial to the Paisiello and considered young Rossini an upstart for thinking he could improve upon it. The name change to Almaviva fooled none of the Paisiello followers, who saw at once that this was a reworking of their old favorite.

But on the night of February 20, 1816, when the curtain rose for the first performance, no one could have predicted all that would go wrong with Rossini’s opera.

Tenor Manuel Garcia as...

Sticking With It

Tuesday, February 17, 2015, 11:30am

At the age of twelve, Daniel Barenboim was a poised, accomplished pianist with three years of major concerts to his credit. In the summer of 1955, he was taking a conducting class at the Salzburg Mozarteum. The school had brought in a series of guest teachers, conductors who were working at the Salzburg Festival, each of whom would instruct the class for a day.

Among the guest teachers was the formidable George Szell, longtime conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, who had been given credit for building it into what one critic called “the world’s keenest symphonic instrument.”

Young Barenboim had...

Top Notes

Monday, February 16, 2015, 11:30am

In his memoirs Ignacy Jan Paderewski tells of a concert during which he learned a hard lesson about showmanship.

In 1890 Paderewski was making a name for himself as one of Europe’s leading pianists, but he discovered that when it came to exciting audiences, a performer needed more than musicianship. After successful performances in Paris, he was in the city of Tours participating in a concert in which he shared the billing with two singers and an actor, an arrangement that required Paderewski to regenerate his concentration and energy during the long intervals between his performances.

A lady singer began...

Oops!

Sunday, February 15, 2015, 11:30am

Many a performer has been forced to cancel a concert when the rigors of an intensive schedule led to a physical or emotional breakdown. Occasionally a concert goes awry because of a smaller problem–simple confusion.

Consider a news item in The Philadelphia Inquirer regarding the case of Thomas Zehetmair, who was slated to play Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 with the Philadelphia Orchestra on February 15, 2002. Zehetmair allowed himself plenty of time to relax during the afternoon on the day of the eight o’clock concert. Just before two o’clock, he left his hotel room and went for a walk. Somewhere along the way, he had a look at...

Lover or Priest?

Saturday, February 14, 2015, 11:30am

The lover or the priest? An incident from early in the life of Franz Liszt suggests that even as a teenager he had the impulses of both.

By the age of sixteen Liszt had long since made a name for himself as one of Europe’s great pianists. In Paris he gave lessons to members of aristocratic families, among them Caroline de Saint-Cricq the seventeen-year-old daughter of a count who was finance minister for King Charles X.

The lessons were chaperoned by Caroline’s mother, who, in her way, was apparently as charmed by Liszt as Caroline was. The Countess seems to...

I Have No Time!

Friday, February 13, 2015, 11:30am

When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s sister Nannerl chided him for not writing more often, he sent her a reply that explained where all his time had gone. He wrote on February 13, 1782:

Our father, when he has finished his duties in church, and you, when you’re through with your students, can do whatever you want for the rest of the day and write letters containing complete litanies. But not so with me. I described my routine to my father the other day and I’ll repeat it to you.

My hair is always done by six o’clock in the morning, and by seven...

There Is Just One King!

Thursday, February 12, 2015, 11:30am

On a bitingly cold morning on February 12, 1877, an orchestra of professional and amateur players waited in the dining room of the royal palace in Christiania. They were less than enthusiastic about the invitation to perform for Norway’s King Oscar II.

The king had recently heard about the success of the Symphony No. 2 in B-flat of Johan Svendsen, and had invited the composer to give a concert of his works for a few invited guests at the palace.

Dressed in white ties and tails, the shivering musicians gathered in the empty dining room where they were to perform. There was no orchestra...

The Bad Omen

Wednesday, February 11, 2015, 11:30am

In June of 1840 the director of the Apollo Theater in Rome invited Gaetano Donizetti to compose an opera for the coming season. Apparently the project was doomed from the start.

For his story Donizetti chose an old libretto, Adelia, or the Archer’s Daughter, which had been used by several other composers without much success. To suit Roman tastes a new librettist was brought in to provide a happy ending. Donizetti didn’t care for the composite result, but he set aside his doubts and put it to music.

The omens were not favorable. First there was the false rumor that the Pope...

The Fragrant Faust

Tuesday, February 10, 2015, 11:30am

The producers of Charles Gounod’s opera Faust had their work cut out for them. The opera had not done so well at its Paris debut in 1859, and now a Hanover premiere was in the works. Although many in the city and the surrounding countryside were excited about the upcoming performance, several newspaper editors expressed suspicion about a French composer daring to set Goethe’s German masterpiece to music, especially since several German composers had failed.

The cast included excellent singers, but the stage manager came up with one special effect that would make this production ofFaust memorable for everyone in the audience, including...

A Dishonest Teacher

Monday, February 9, 2015, 11:30am

In his 1969 memoirs, English composer Cyril Scott thought back seventy-eight years to a piano teacher who did him a great disservice, and yet played an important part in the development of his career.

When he was twelve years old, Scott and his sister got a new piano teacher. She was not a dishonest person, Scott recalled, but she was a dishonest teacher.

Scott had begun to play the piano before he was old enough to talk, and had long since developed his own haphazard ideas about technique. Had the new teacher been honest, Scott reflected, she would have made...

Condemned!

Sunday, February 8, 2015, 11:30am

The premise for the opera was unusual to say the least. The libretto by Gertrude Stein consisted of apparently random sentences and phrases that Virgil Thomson had set to distinctively American music.

As the unconventional Four Saints in Three Acts approached its February 8, 1934, debut in Hartford, it began to look like a miracle would be required to get it off the ground.

Since the opera required the illusion of open sky, the set designer had the low ceiling of the stage in the small theater draped in 1500 square feet of looped cellophane. The frustrated lighting designer told...

The Vocal Critic

Saturday, February 7, 2015, 11:30am

Casting an opera for the stage and casting it for the movies can be quite different, as was proved by a notable blunder at RCA.

In his 1976 autobiography Cadenza: A Musical Career longtime Boston Symphony conductor Erich Leinsdorf tells of recording sessions in Rome in the late 1950s. For a production of Puccini’s Tosca RCA executive George Marek had cast three of the great singers of the day–Zinka Milanov, Jussi Björling, and Leonard Warren. But for Madama Butterfly Marek decided to cast Anna Moffo and Cesare Valletti in the roles of the lovers Cio-Cio San and Lieutenant Pinkerton--two genuinely...

The Rift

Friday, February 6, 2015, 11:30am

The great philosopher was a champion of the great composer until one of them tried to enter the field of the other.

That’s the way conductor Hans Richter told the young pianist Ernst von Dohnányi about the rift between Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Richter, who was a close friend of the Wagner family, the relationship came to grief with bad music and hurt feelings.

Nietzsche had long been an outspoken admirer of Wagner, and was a frequent visitor to the Wagner home. One day he arrived with a manuscript–a composition of his own, a work for piano...

Charisma

Thursday, February 5, 2015, 11:30am

As an established concert pianist, Cyril Smith was accustomed to overcoming the routine obstacles that inevitably arose during performances in England. In 1937 he was invited by the British Consul to undertake a six-week swing through Denmark, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania. With the honor of his first tour of the Continent came the responsibility of representing all British musicians, which became a challenge when he encountered a remarkable piano.

By the time he arrived in the Romanian city of Cernauti, winter cold had set in with a vengeance. The piano he was to play was kept in...

Charisma

Wednesday, February 4, 2015, 11:30am

James William Davison, music critic for The Times of London, was known for his caustic dismissals of celebrated composers and performers.

But when the charismatic young pianist Arabella Goddard came to his attention, Davison changed his tune. At the age of four-and-a-half, the French-born daughter of English parents had played a fantasia at a charity concert. It was said that at seven she played for Chopin in Paris, and, at age eight, for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

Arabella was fourteen when she was playing a piece by Mendelssohn and had a memory lapse. She signaled the concert manager to...

Pay It Forward

Tuesday, February 3, 2015, 11:30am

One day in 1962 world renowned violinist Isaac Stern was at the Paris workshop of celebrated lute maker Etienne Vatelot, a good friend who had written him a letter about a Chinese family of his acquaintance. Vatelot said to Stern, “They have this young boy, about six, seven years old. You should hear him. He’s unbelievable.”

Arrangements were made for Stern to hear the Paris-born boy perform. His name was Yo-Yo Ma and his cello looked bigger than he was. Stern recalled that hearing the boy play left him “astonished, truly astonished.”

When Ma and his family emigrated to the...

Pianist on Ice

Monday, February 2, 2015, 11:30am

As the winter of 1893-94 set in, the young Russian pianist and composer Alexander Scriabin was miserable. A year earlier, he was to have undertaken a concert tour, but recurrent pain in his right hand had forced him to cancel. Doctors had prescribed a quiet sojourn in a hot southern climate, a slightly intoxicating drink of fermented camel’s milk, and swimming in the Black Sea.

From his sanatorium on the Volga, Scriabin had written to the object of his affections, sixteen-year-old Natalya Sekerina. His letters included a somewhat envious reference to a violinist suffering from hand pain who had gone...

The Good Times Roll

Sunday, February 1, 2015, 11:30am

It was as if Parisians were determined to put the bad times behind them with parties that would drown out the noise of the past. The bloody labor revolt of 1848 had brought in a Second Republic opposed to most reforms. A presidential election had brought in Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the late Emperor, who, not content to be president, had proclaimed himself emperor in 1851. With him came reforms that knocked down much of Paris for the sake of modernization. And as the 1850s progressed, opera composer Jacques Offenbach partied with the best of them, yet never forgot his...

The Next Generation

Saturday, January 31, 2015, 11:30am

After a grueling concert tour of Great Britain, Johann Strauss had faced a rebellious orchestra and suffered a physical breakdown. After his return to Vienna to recuperate in the winter of 1839, his shattered health and tattered finances gave him no alternative but to lie in his sickbed and hope to recuperate.

One afternoon he heard violin music coming from another room in the apartment. He left his bed and quietly made his way to the sound, a waltz. He eased the door open and watched silently as his fourteen-year-old son Johann fiddled in front of a mirror, giving his...

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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...

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Grace Notes

Everything is in Order

The Charge

The Shaky Collaborators

Fantasia

For the Record

Circumstances Beyond My Control

The Peril You Overlooked

A Revolutionary Wedding

Round Two

The Portent

Broken Windows

A Close Shave for the Barber

Sticking With It

Top Notes

Oops!

Lover or Priest?

I Have No Time!

There Is Just One King!

The Bad Omen

The Fragrant Faust

A Dishonest Teacher

Condemned!

The Vocal Critic

The Rift

Charisma

Charisma

Pay It Forward

Pianist on Ice

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The Next Generation

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