Grace Notes

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

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...

I Feel Sorry for All of Them

Wednesday, January 14, 2015, 11:30am

In his 1928 autobiography John Philip Sousa describes a concert in which he felt that he had to make a statement.

On January 14, 1792, Joseph Haydn wrote from London to Luigia Polzelli in Italy a letter that gives some insight into the rough-and-tumble music business:

My dearest Polzelli! I received your letter just now and I’m answering it right away. I’m relieved to hear that you’re in good health and that you’ve found a position in a little theater, not so much because of the money as for the experience. I wish you the greatest success; above all, a...

The Meanest Thing in My Life

Tuesday, January 13, 2015, 11:30am

In his 1928 autobiography John Philip Sousa describes a concert in which he felt that he had to make a statement.

During San Francisco’s midwinter fair in January 1894, the Sousa band was asked to perform in conjunction with Scheel’s Imperial Orchestra, which had been playing in a large auditorium to meager audiences, even as the Sousa organization was drawing crowds by the thousand.

The concert was to consist of two pieces by the combined ensembles, two by the ensembles playing separately, and two by soloists from each ensemble. Sousa met with Fritz Scheel, conductor of the Imperial Orchestra, who,...

We Should Hear More

Monday, January 12, 2015, 11:30am

He was a composer and he was a critic. So sooner or later Deems Taylor would face a conflict of interest, and, when the moment arrived, he had to figure out a graceful way to review his own piece of music.

Henry Hadley had recently been appointed the associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and, being an American composer himself, Hadley wanted to include in each concert he conducted at least one work by a living American composer. In 1922, when the New York Philharmonic became the orchestra in residence for the city’s first outdoor summer concert series, he...

Parting Waves, Parting Ways

Sunday, January 11, 2015, 11:30am

In his 1824 biography of the composer, Stendhal describes an 1818 performance in Naples of Gioachino Rossini’s opera Moses in Egypt. Stendhal was leery of the opera, thinking that he might be setting himself up to see a musical version of the Inquisition.

Due to no fault of Rossini’s, the experience turned out to be much more light-hearted--too light-hearted.

Stendhal was quite taken with the overture, but when the curtain rose on the Plague of Darkness, he burst out laughing at the sight of “wretched little groups of Egyptians” praying furiously as they bumbled around in the dimness of the vast stage....

The Price of Originality

Saturday, January 10, 2015, 11:30am

Not yet nineteen years old, Francis Poulenc was already one of France’s promising new composers, but in January 1918, with World War I consuming manpower, France had a more immediate need for soldiers, and young Poulenc would find the two occupations a strange mix.

From the start, Poulenc was at odds with military life. He was wealthy, pampered, and flippant, and within a few months, overstaying a leave in Paris, he pulled a ten-day term in a military prison. He wrote to influential friends, hoping for help, but maintained some sense of humor, asking one friend to spread the word...

You Want to Be a Musician?

Friday, January 9, 2015, 11:30am

In 1831 a performance of Rossini’s Otello convinced thirteen-year-old Charles Gounod that he wanted to be a composer. “I was haunted, possessed,” he said later. “I wanted to write an Otello myself!”

He poured his energy into writing music. His studies suffered. “I was kept in school,” he recalled, “given extra work, imprisoned, et cetera, et cetera.” All of which just made him more determined. He put his best effort into his schoolwork, but only for the sake of later being free to write music. To his mother he announced his decision to become a composer. Although she was a pianist and had given...

Mozart's Delayed Homecoming

Thursday, January 8, 2015, 11:30am

Leopold Mozart had been chasing his son, Wolfgang Amadeus, all over Europe--with letters demanding that the twenty-two-year-old come home to Salzburg, where important business opportunities waited--and waited. Christmas passed, then New Year's Day, and still no Mozart. On January 8th, 1779, the young genius wrote to his father from Munich:

I assure you, my dearest father, that from the bottom of my heart I am looking forward to returning to you (if not to Salzburg) since your last letter convinces me that you know me better than before! Never was there any reason other than this doubt for my long delay in coming...

The Gentle Approach

Wednesday, January 7, 2015, 11:30am

Dimitri Mitropoulos had conducted the Minneapolis Symphony in 1937 in a concert that had turned the usually staid audience into “an excited mob.” Now he was back as its music director and everyone was wondering if the magic would hold.

A Minneapolis reviewer had described Mitropoulos’ conducting as “punching the air barehanded” and “a weird repertoire of frenzied gestures and scowls and grimaces that registered every emotion from terror to ecstasy.”

The reviewer went on to say that the resulting music was full of “great thought and abiding spirit” and the audience agreed. Just days after Mitropoulos’ guest appearance in...

Memory

Tuesday, January 6, 2015, 11:30am

According to piano virtuoso Ignacy Jan Paderewski, in addition to stamina, dexterity, and an ear for music, a concert performer needs a good memory. During the early years of his career, he found out that memory can take more than one form.

In 1890, for a French colleague, Paderewski agreed on short notice to give a concert of French music. He agreed to play two concertos and a dozen short pieces–all of which he had to learn in the course of two weeks.

By the day of the concert he had learned all of the pieces and could play them all...

Sweet Reward

Monday, January 5, 2015, 11:30am

Twenty-first century neurologists have determined that the pleasure a musician derives from playing the climax of a composition compares with the enjoyment of eating chocolate. If they’re right, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf had a double reason to remember a reward he received as a young violinist.

In 1761 Dittersdorf was accompanying the famous composer Christoph Willibald Gluck to Bologna, one of the music capitals of Europe. Years later, when Dittersdorf dictated his autobiography, he recalled an occasion when his playing brought him a particularly sweet return.

A distinguished musician of the day, Giovanni Battista Martini, asked the young violinist to...

Not Good Enough

Sunday, January 4, 2015, 11:30am

The young man was one of the most handsome in Boston, seemingly a classical Greek statue that had come to life and put on modern clothes.

He was also spoiled, and all efforts to make him work had failed. An attempt to turn him into a journalist had sent him to India, from which he returned more handsome and more unemployed than ever.

His aunt, poet Julia Ward Howe, famous for writing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, thought that music might be a good career for the young man. After all, he had a pleasant baritone voice and enjoyed singing...

The Elusive Moment

Saturday, January 3, 2015, 11:30am

Although he enjoyed living in Paris, English composer Frederick Delius was restless and unable to concentrate. He was working on a piano concerto, but had hit an impasse. Thirteen years earlier he had made a musical breakthrough at Solano Grove, his father’s orange plantation on the banks of the St. Johns River in Florida. Now, in the winter of 1897, hoping for a second flash of inspiration, he decided to return.

His motive was partly economic. Delius was struggling for financial independence, and, although a series of freezes had destroyed the citrus industry in northern Florida, farmers had turned to...

We Need a Mirror

Friday, January 2, 2015, 11:30am

On January 2, 1875, Edvard Grieg wrote about what would become his best known music to author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. He was not altogether enthusiastic:

Peer Gynt has turned out the way you said it would. It looms over me like a bad dream, and there’s no way I can be done with it until spring. It was the need for money–or, to be more exact, the offer of money–that motivated me. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it, but the thought of travel and visions of great beauty dangled before me.

Now I could be so lowdown as to wish that your...

The New Year's Gift

Thursday, January 1, 2015, 11:30am

Robert and Clara Schumann started the New Year with high hopes. They had earned so little in 1845 that Christmas had amounted to no more than lighting the tree and giving the children a few little trinkets. They had been unable to afford anything for each other.

But they had arranged a promising all-Schumann concert in Leipzig, and they had invested heavily in it. On New Year’s night, 1846, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra would play Schumann’s First Symphony, and Clara was to solo in a performance of his new Piano Concerto in A minor. The conductor would be none other than Felix...

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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...

Sibelius' Prank

Thursday, July 21, 2016, 11:30am

Jean Sibelius enjoyed proving his musicianship but he wasn't always receptive when others tried to prove theirs. One day when Sibelius was a young musician living in Berlin, he was running short of cash and he made a bet with some fellow Finns that they could pass as popular musicians. Sibelius and...

The Innovator

Tuesday, July 19, 2016, 11:30am

He was a major innovator in the insurance industry. He created the concept of estate planning and introduced the idea of training schools for insurance agents. When it came to composing music Charles Ives was also a mover and shaker, but followers were few. In 1910, a business acquaintance talked...

The Masterpiece

Monday, July 18, 2016, 11:30am

Peter Tchaikovsky had reservations about his fellow Russian composers, but great respect for a contemporary from France—George Bizet, composer of Carmen. In a letter to his brother Modeste he wrote on July 18", 1880: “To refresh myself last night I played Carmen from start to finish and all my...

The Stradella Scandel

Friday, July 15, 2016, 11:30am

Alessandro Stradella was one of the 17th century's finest composers --and one of its most threatened. An incident from the year 1677 is typical of Stradella's dangerous life. The composer was living in Venice, having fled Rome because of a scandal that had arisen over his attempt to embezzle money...

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Grace Notes

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

I Feel Sorry for All of Them

The Meanest Thing in My Life

We Should Hear More

Parting Waves, Parting Ways

The Price of Originality

You Want to Be a Musician?

Mozart's Delayed Homecoming

The Gentle Approach

Memory

Sweet Reward

Not Good Enough

The Elusive Moment

We Need a Mirror

The New Year's Gift

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