Grace Notes

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

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...

An Irresistible Force

Friday, January 30, 2015, 11:30am

Johann Strauss the Elder and his orchestra had come to London to perform for the coronation of Queen Victoria, but before playing a note, he had been hauled into court over a dispute with an unprincipled hotel proprietor. He won the case, but Strauss was compelled to pay the court costs, which was no easy feat since his valet had meanwhile absconded with all of Strauss' cash.

Strauss had no alternative but to sell some of his new pieces to a London publisher.

Even as his prospects improved, his experiences were mixed. At the Russian embassy, he and his musicians...

Insult to Injury

Thursday, January 29, 2015, 11:30am

Was it the crowning of the new king, George II, or something in the air that made London audiences tire of Italian music, operas in particular, in 1727? Whatever it was, George Frederick Handel pressed on in spite of it and continued to produce operas until he and his backers ran out of money. As receipts dwindled, the quality of the audiences fell, too. After competing sopranos got into a fistfight during a performance of Handel’sAstinatte, genteel theater-goers retreated at the first sign of trouble, leaving the theater to those whose pleasure in music was second to their enjoyment of a...

Rebound

Wednesday, January 28, 2015, 11:30am

Six days after the Hamburg debut of his First Piano Concerto, on January 28, 1859, Johannes Brahms wrote an assessment to violinist Joseph Joachim in Leipzig:

Dearest Friend–Even though I’m still quite stunned by the sublime delights that have assaulted my eyes and ears for the last few days via the sight and sound of the wise men of our musical town, I will force this hard and pointed steel pen to tell you how it happened that my concerto has been here a brilliant and decisive–failure.

First off I have to say that it was really done very well. I...

Crocodile Teeth

Tuesday, January 27, 2015, 11:30am

A sojourn in Paris was necessary for an aspiring composer, but the cost of living was high, and, toward the end of 1927, Heitor Villa-Lobos was beginning to run out of money. He needed to attract more people to the concerts of his music, and he concluded that the fastest way to do it would be with some powerful publicity.

The Brazilian decided to play up his exotic origins. To critic Lucie Mardrus he gave a long interview in which he told a remarkable story.

The resulting article appeared soon after a concert of his music. It was called “The...

Almost Everybody Laughs About It

Monday, January 26, 2015, 11:30am

In the fall of 1830, composer Frédéric Chopin left his home in Poland for a visit to Italy. When he was in Vienna he heard news of an uprising in Warsaw resisting the subservience of the Kingdom of Poland to Russia and opposing the presence of the Russian Tsar on the Polish throne. He also found that something of a musical revolution had occurred in Vienna. On January 26, 1831, Chopin wrote to a friend in Warsaw.

In all senses, the obstacles in my way are much greater now. It’s not just that an ongoing series of bad pianoforte concerts...

The Command

Sunday, January 25, 2015, 11:30am

In the 1870s Hans von Bülow was one of Europe’s great conductors and an outspoken advocate of democracy. When the Russian Musical Society asked him to direct some concerts in St. Petersburg, he found himself on a collision course with Grand Duke Constantine, president of the Russian Musical Society, the brother of the Czar.

Arriving at the Marble Palace, Bülow was presented to the Grand Duke by cellist Charles Davidoff and treated to a performance that included the Grand Duke playing the cello. Was the music less than noble or was one of his nervous headaches coming on? For whatever...

Occupational Hazards

Saturday, January 24, 2015, 11:30am

Clara Schumann was one of Europe’s great pianists. The widow of Robert Schumann was also the closest friend of Johannes Brahms, and she wrote to him from Vienna on January 24, 1866:

The financial situation here seems to be pretty bad and yet all of the concerts are well attended. I hope mine will be too! My first one is on Saturday the 27th, the second on February 1st. I would be most grateful if you’d send me your Horn Trio, which I want to play on February 4th at Hellmesberger’s. He seemed to pounce on it right away and...

The Salesman

Friday, January 23, 2015, 11:30am

Antonio Vivaldi taught at Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà, an institution for orphaned or abandoned girls, but he had further ambitions, and so he also began managing the San Angelo Theater as a producer of operas.

At the same time, he was also a good salesman, and, on one occasion, he sold some music to a visitor and then made a pitch for a way to make some extra money out of it.

Johann Friedrich Armand von Uffenbach had made a big hit with Vivaldi’s Opus 3 concertos in 1713 when he had introduced them to some fellow amateur musicians in...

The Guide

Thursday, January 22, 2015, 11:30am

As organist and choirmaster at St. Luke’s Church in the Chelsea section of London, John Ireland was known for nurturing the talent of singers and instrumentalists who came up through the ranks. He was also known for being a fierce disciplinarian who was not above shouting expletives at erring choristers during practices.

No wonder a boy in one of Ireland’s choirs was a bundle of nerves when the unthinkable happened. Sometime around 1912, Charles Markes was to sing a solo in a work by Mendelssohn, the fervent boy soprano plea “Oh God, hear my cry!”

When the big moment came,...

Solos, Choirs, and Ghosts

Wednesday, January 21, 2015, 11:30am

As the March 14 Florence debut of his opera Macbeth approached, Giuseppe Verdi was becoming more and more concerned about the details of its production. Impresario Antonio Lanari had written to him about some of the finer points of hiring soloists and chorus members, which began to get into personalities. On January 21, 1847, Verdi wrote back:

When you receive the music you will see that there are two choruses of paramount importance, so don’t be frugal about the number of singers and you’ll be happy with the result. In particular, notice that the witches are always to be divided into three...

Experimenter

Tuesday, January 20, 2015, 11:30am

The work that made Edgar Varèse known internationally was Amériques. He finished it in 1921, by which time he was thirty-eight years old. What happened to all the music he wrote before it?

In 1913 Varèse and his wife were living in Berlin, and, after six years of marriage, decided to separate. She left for a theater career in Paris, leaving him to tie up some loose ends before heading to Paris and on to Prague to conduct a concert before returning to Berlin in the autumn. He put his furniture and all but two of his scores and part of his...

Repentance

Monday, January 19, 2015, 11:30am

In 1525 Cardinal Thomas Wolsey founded Cardinal College in Oxford and delegated the search for singers to John Longland, the bishop of Lincoln. Longland’s search for an instructor of a choir of sixteen boys led him to singer and composer John Taverner, who lived in the Lincolnshire village of Tattershall. But Taverner said he was reluctant because he was already making a good living where he was and had “a good marriage which he should lose” if he moved to Oxford.

Longland suggested that Wolsey hire somebody from his own household and drew up a description of the desired candidate...

Pay Attention!

Sunday, January 18, 2015, 11:30am

People who pay to attend a music lecture don’t necessarily pay attention while it’s in progress. In 1905, music critic Michel Calvocoressi was to do his first public speaking and, due to no fault of his own, he ran into trouble right away. He was to give a lecture on Russian music at a Paris theatrical institution, and he started with a double disadvantage. The date of his lecture was moved up, and he was to stand in for the famous actor André Antoine.

Calvocoressi asked an actor friend to give him some pointers on the art of lecturing. One...

Blunt

Saturday, January 17, 2015, 11:30am

Florent Schmitt was an innovative French composer whose 1907 ballet La tragédie de Salomé in some ways anticipated Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, and the Russian composer expressed admiration for his works.

His music had what someone called “an aggressive masculinity,” and when it came to judging the music of others, Schmitt could be just as blunt.

American composer Daniel Gregory Mason had great respect for Schmitt and thought his music better than that of Claude Debussy. He met Schmitt just once but came away with an impression of an outspoken and unabashed critic.

They attended a Sunday afternoon concert in a stuffy...

First Hearing

Friday, January 16, 2015, 11:30am

The composer was all caught up in conducting the debut of his first really big work. For several days, Ralph Vaughan Williams had been too nervous to sleep or eat right. He was unaware of friends and musical personages in the audience–Charles Villiers Stanford and the promising composer George Butterworth among them–all of them in Leeds for the performance of A Sea Symphony.

The timpanist offered helpful advice to calm Vaughan Williams’ nerves. “Give us a square four to the bar and we’ll do the rest.” The baritone, waiting with the composer before the performance and equally nervous, was less encouraging when...

The Façade

Thursday, January 15, 2015, 11:30am

Poetry had prompted William Walton to write the music for Façade, but the provocative melodrama propelled the young composer into some very prosaic situations.

The poet, Edith Sitwell, had goaded the reluctant Walton into the project. Her brother Osbert came up with the idea of reciting the words through a kind of megaphone inserted through a curtain.

The first rehearsal took place on a January night in 1922 in a brightly-lit drawing room made all the more cheerful by light reflected from deep snow. But the performers were in no mood to appreciate the setting. They were “puzzled and rather angry with...

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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...

Surviving the Queen of Sheba

Monday, August 22, 2016, 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...

How To Listen

Friday, August 19, 2016, 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...

Wrestling With The Medium

Thursday, August 18, 2016, 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...

The Music Seeker

Wednesday, August 17, 2016, 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...

The Breakthrough

Tuesday, August 16, 2016, 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...

Excellence or Precedence

Monday, August 15, 2016, 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...

Independent

Thursday, August 11, 2016, 11:30am

He was a master organist and player of the early keyboard known as the virginal. John Bull was one of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite musicians. Like her, he knew what he wanted and persisted in pursuing it, but he paid a heavy price. According to the account of a contemporary, Bull would have gotten a...

The Earthquake

Wednesday, August 10, 2016, 11:30am

Louis Spohr had heard unflattering things about the famous Sistine Chapel choir performances of the Miserere by the seventeenth-century composer Gregorio Allegri, but he was eager to judge for himself. After a visit to Rome, he wrote in his journal for August 10, 1817: These simple sequences of...

Pulling It Together

Tuesday, August 9, 2016, 11:30am

Having left Germany with his family in 1933, Otto Klemperer had landed a job as musical director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, only to have his eccentricities wreck his reputation in the city and force his resignation. An invitation to conduct a series of Bach concerts at the New School for...

Doctor's Orders

Monday, August 8, 2016, 11:30am

In August 1889, as the great Hungarian violinist Leopold Auer was on his way from St. Petersburg to Bayreuth to hear two Wagner operas for the first time, he came down with what was diagnosed as malaria. Not one to let illness get in his way, he continued on to Bayreuth. He and a friend began with...

The Unappreciative Guest

Friday, August 5, 2016, 11:30am

Theirs was one of the great friendships in musical history. In July 1859 Clara Schumann wrote to Johannes Brahms about people she had encountered in her musical adventures: "At last I can find a quiet moment for you, dear Johannes. Two days ago, I spent all day with Hiller. He played a large...

Mendelssohn’s Summer Cooler

Thursday, August 4, 2016, 11:30am

On August 4th, 1834 Felix Mendelssohn was affected by the summer weather. He wrote to his parents from Dusseldorf: “For the past week, during which we’ve had heavy storms and muggy air, I felt so drained that I was unable to do anything all day long. Worst of all, I can’t compose, which irks me no...

Grieg's Rambunctious Move

Wednesday, August 3, 2016, 11:30am

Occasionally an artist becomes too popular for his own good. In his autobiography, Edvard Grieg tells about trying to find a place to put up a hut where he could work undisturbed by his public. He built on a secluded hill overlooking a fjord, to which there was no visible path, hoping to be free...

Amazing Speed

Friday, July 29, 2016, 11:30am

Although he was one of America's finest composers of piano music, Edward MacDowell was a reluctant performer. A long-time friend described MacDowell's playing: "As he never felt quite sure that what he was composing was worthwhile, so in the matter of playing in public he was so self-distrustful...

The Biggest Challenge

Thursday, July 28, 2016, 11:30am

In the spring of 1565 composer Giovanni da Palestrina was nervous. He was facing the biggest challenge of his career--one that put his reputation and his livelihood at risk. Cardinals at an ecumenical council had recommended a new approach to church music. Two of them had commissioned Palestrina to...

Sibyl

Friday, July 22, 2016, 11:30am

On a summer evening in 1887 Jules Massenet was about to escape from a tedious party when a young American woman approached him. She would soon make her mark on his personal life and his career. Her name was Sibyl Sanderson. She was a 22-year-old heiress from Sacramento, California and extremely...

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Grace Notes

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

The Good Times Roll

The Next Generation

An Irresistible Force

Insult to Injury

Rebound

Crocodile Teeth

Almost Everybody Laughs About It

The Command

Occupational Hazards

The Salesman

The Guide

Solos, Choirs, and Ghosts

Experimenter

Repentance

Pay Attention!

Blunt

First Hearing

The Façade

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