Grace Notes

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

Australian pianist and composer Percy Grainger grew up hearing the piano pieces of Edvard Grieg, and by the time he was in his twenties he had put the Norwegian “in the firmament of my compositional stars.” He had no idea that the admiration was mutual.

A friend of Grieg’s had shown him Grainger’s settings of Irish and Welsh folksongs. Grieg liked them so much that he sent a signed photograph of himself inscribed “To Percy Grainger with thanks for your splendid choruses.”

Two years later, in May 1906, Grieg was in London, where his wife Nina was to give two...

Transformed into Singing Voices

Thursday, July 24, 2014, 11:30am

In July 1825 Franz Schubert was traveling through Upper Austria, enjoying mountain scenery and the company of friends. From the picturesque city of Steyr he wrote to his parents:

In Steyreck we stayed with Countess Wiessenwolf, who is a great admirer of my humble self, owns everything I have written, and sings many of the things very beautifully too.

The Walter Scott songs impressed her so favorably that she made it patently clear that she would not object at all if I were to dedicate them to her. But as far as they are concerned, I intend to break...

Desperate Departure

Wednesday, July 23, 2014, 11:30am

Sir Henry Wood was one of England’s most distinguished conductors of the early twentieth century. In 1888, though, he was a nineteen-year-old student whose departure from the Royal Academy of Music was anything but dignified. He told the story in his 1938 autobiography.

During the Handel Festival at the Crystal Palace in London, Wood heard his ideal of the great organist–W.T. Best–play a newly-edited concerto in B-flat with an elaborate and complicated cadenza upon which Wood had been working for some weeks with the intention of playing it at one of the Royal Academy concerts. Wood’s performance of the concerto...

Communication Failure

Monday, July 21, 2014, 11:30am

The Liverpool Philharmonic Society had suffered from a shaky performance of Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Athalie, and when a blistering review prompted the infirm conductor to resign, the Society invited German composer Max Bruch to take over the helm. Bruch accepted the job. An oversight would make him regret the decision.

Bruch had already served as a guest conductor for the Society, leading successful performances of his own oratorios in 1877 and ’78, and so he had good reason to trust that his permanent appointment as Musical Director would be equally harmonious, and in the spring of 1880 he left...

The Desirable Ordeal

Sunday, July 20, 2014, 11:30am

Attending the Bayreuth Festival became all the rage for musicians in the late nineteenth century. The annual tribute to Wagner’s operas drew performers and composers from all over the world. But it took a toll on its attendees, as composer Hugo Wolf wrote to Melanie Köchert on July 20, 1891:

Fortunately the first performance is over. I nodded off from time to time during Acts 1 and 3, and I’m just glad that I was able to take in most of the work. Bayreuth has put me in the worst of moods, and I’m not about to surrender myself again...

Monster

Saturday, July 19, 2014, 11:30am

American bandleader Patrick Gilmore came to England to recruit performers for a giant concert to be part of a World Peace Jubilee. Gilmore had in mind an ensemble of 20,000 that would “whip creation” in size and sound.

Not everyone was thrilled by the so-called “monster concerts” that swept through nineteenth-century America. One participant, singer Erminia Rudersdorff, wrote to critic Joseph Bennett from Springfield, Massachusetts, on July 19, 1872:

Altogether the festival has been a terrible humbug and failure. It was a hideous nightmare, and all are awaking, and trying to believe it never took place. A.B. will tell you...

No Excuses

Friday, July 18, 2014, 11:30am

English violist William Primrose made a policy of never making excuses for his performances, no matter how difficult the circumstances surrounding them.

While he was a member of the prestigious London String Quartet, the ensemble was scheduled to perform at New York’s Town Hall. The program included works that had particularly hard viola parts–the B-flat Quartet by Brahms and the Debussy quartet.

Before the concert, Primrose stepped outside to relax. While taking in the fresh spring air, he decided that a cigarette would be just the thing, so he lit a match. But he neglected to close the cover, and...

The Elusive Muse

Thursday, July 17, 2014, 11:30am

Although he was one of the world’s great composers, Giacomo Puccini sometimes despaired as he searched for the subject of his next opera. Two years after the success of his 1910 masterpiece La Fanciulla del West, he considered basing an opera on another American subject, Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. He tinkered with the idea of using the fragmentary novel A Florentine Tragedy by Oscar Wilde. He thought about working with George du Maurier’s wildly successful 1894 Gothic novel Trilby, which in 1896 had become the first book to be adapted for film.

In a letter to Luigi Illica, who...

The Children

Wednesday, July 16, 2014, 11:30am

It was to be a combination of youthful innocence and Celtic grief. When the London Sinfonietta commissioned a work from John Tavener, the composer found his atmosphere in the brooding landscape of Ireland, his structure in the traditional requiem, and poignant symbolism in children’s games.

Tavener built his work around the story of a girl named Jenny Jones who is forced by her peers to pass from life to death. From a book about singing games, Tavener learned that hopscotch was originally a representation of the soul’s progress through life to death, from Purgatory to Paradise. His composition, to be...

I Am Sure To Die Here

Tuesday, July 15, 2014, 11:30am

Inspired by the musical experiments of his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern was starting to write works that broke new ground. But being an avant garde composer didn’t earn Webern a living, and so he did his best to support himself as an opera conductor.

A spring holiday in 1909 enabled him to write his modestly titled Five Movements for String Quartet, which broke sharply with tradition by emphasizing short, often explosive, phrases and color instead of striving for an overarching connectedness and a sense of a home key.

It was not the sort of thing that would attract many...

The Ironical Genius

Monday, July 14, 2014, 11:30am

On July 14, 1836, Felix Mendelssohn wrote from Frankfurt to his mother and his sister Rebecca in Berlin about the cultural and geographical landscape:

Early yesterday I went to see Ferdinand Hiller, and sitting there I found none other than Rossini. Big, fat, and in a sunny mood. I know very few men who can be as amusing and clever as he is when he feels like it. He kept us laughing the whole time. I promised that the Cecilia Association would sing the B minor Mass for him and several other works by Sebastian Bach. It will be all...

Roads Not Taken

Sunday, July 13, 2014, 11:30am

Malcolm Arnold’s music for David Lean’s 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai earned him an Oscar, but he described composing it as one of the worst jobs he’d ever had.

He had only ten days to write thirty-five minutes of music for an enormous orchestra that included three marimbas, a large section of untuned percussion, and a military band. He wrote through the night as couriers waited to carry the score to the copyists. “It gave all the people working on it a very great headache,” Arnold recalled, adding that he was “lucky to be alive the way...

The Guest of Honor

Saturday, July 12, 2014, 11:30am

One of the highlights of composer Victor Herbert’s life was a music festival that took place in Zurich in 1882. Herbert, a young cellist with the Royal Orchestra of Stuttgart, was among those chosen to attend. The five-day event was largely a tribute to Franz Liszt, who had fostered the careers of many composers to follow, ranging from the celebrated Richard Wagner to a dazzling new American pianist named Edward MacDowell.

The first four days of the festival included formal and informal performances by various composers and performers Liszt had championed, plus a presentation of his oratorio The Legend of...

A Concert for Summer

Friday, July 11, 2014, 11:30am

During a tour of Europe, Boston hymnist and music educator Lowell Mason was enchanted by an outdoor concert that took place near Berlin at an Elbe resort called Linchen Erben. In his journal for July 11, 1837, he described a radiant summer evening in which the music and the surroundings blended perfectly.

He described a house with several acres of grounds, walks, shade, and groves, and tables and seating for several hundred amid booths, tents, and small houses. Wandering about the lawns were men, women, and children “of all sizes” and many dogs. Many of the men were smoking pipes...

A Summer Song

Thursday, July 10, 2014, 11:30am

In the summer of 1876, English baritone and composer George Henschel was vacationing on the German island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea. The day after his arrival, Johannes Brahms came up to visit him, and Brahms led Henschel to music in an unexpected place.

On July 10 Henschel bought a hammock and hung it between two trees in a beech forest with a view of the sea. “We both managed to climb into it simultaneously, an amusing, though by no means easy task to accomplish,” Henschel recalled.

Henschel remembered an idle hour or two as Brahms, in a cheerful...

The Surreptitious Composer

Wednesday, July 9, 2014, 11:30am

At the age of twelve, Edward Elgar had his debut as a composer–much to his father’s displeasure.

Elgar’s father was a piano tuner and a dealer in sheet music. Young Edward grew up surrounded by scores, and at an early age he became fascinated by the process of turning a printed page into music. The child could improvise on the piano and organ, but he became eager to demonstrate his powers as a composer, and the 1869 Three Choirs festival gave him the chance to do just that.

The annual event, which rotated from his hometown in Worcester to Hereford...

It

Tuesday, July 8, 2014, 11:30am

In 1941, as Europe waged war, Gerald Finzi wanted to do something for the war effort.

He was offered a job at the BBC that he described as “the usual sort of thing, where one would have been involved with a little music and much, much office work, concert agency, and all the BBC schmozzle!” He turned it down, saying “I would really prefer to be in the army than do that sort of thing.”

Soon afterward, Finzi joined the Ministry of War Transport, where he was put in charge of South American Shipping. He expressed his enthusiasm to his...

Unforeseen Advantages

Monday, July 7, 2014, 11:30am

In 1941, as Europe waged war, Gerald Finzi wanted to do something for the war effort.

Soon afterward, Finzi joined the Ministry of War Transport, where he was put in charge of South American Shipping. He expressed his enthusiasm to his...

Sour Success

Sunday, July 6, 2014, 11:30am

With the acclaimed debut of his First Symphony just a few weeks behind him, Dmitri Shostakovich was in for a different experience when it played elsewhere. On July 6, 1926, the nineteen-year-old composer wrote from Ukraine to his mother in Leningrad about a performance by an orchestra in Kharkov.

The concert took place in a garden. As the conductor prepared to start, some nearby dogs began barking. The longer he waited, the louder they barked, much to the merriment of the audience. When the symphony finally got underway, the trumpeter botched his opening phrase and the bassoonist chimed in with...

The Day Job

Saturday, July 5, 2014, 11:30am

When violinist Leopold Auer was a little-known Düsseldorf concertmaster, he managed to line up a performance in Wiesbaden, a big step toward a solo career. With new confidence, he put up in one of the town’s best hotels and wasted no time going to the casino, where he ran into an acquaintance, the famous violinist Henri Wieniawski.

Wieniawski confided to Auer that he had a sure-fire gambling system. He and Moscow Conservatory director Nikolai Rubinstein had come from St. Petersburg and had recently worked the system in Caen, with such certainty that he expected to break the casino at any...

Music and More

Friday, July 4, 2014, 11:30am

Although his disabilities made William Billings of Boston unsuited for service as a soldier during the American Revolution, he made a lasting contribution to the cause in the form of song.

By 1770, when he wrote his collection New England Psalm Singer, tensions were already high between American colonists and their English rulers. As a composer, Billings had been affected by the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 and 1770, which raised the cost of paper. Massachusetts instituted a policy of barring the importation of all goods subject to the duties, and so a combination of...

Taking It in Stride

Thursday, July 3, 2014, 11:30am

How did Hector Berlioz cope with the pressures of life as a composer and conductor? With a lively sense of humor. It comes out in a letter he wrote from London to Theodore Ritter on July 3, 1855.

A ghastly rehearsal at Exeter Hall yesterday. Glover’s cantata in a piquant style, but difficult, and I was sweating enough to engorge the gutters in the Strand, and the finale of my Harold in Italy, a ferocious concerto by Henselt played by Mr. Klindworth in a free style, which kept me dancing on a slack rope for an hour, and Cooper, our...

The Outsider

Wednesday, July 2, 2014, 11:30am

George Gershwin had come to write an opera about the inhabitants of Folly Island, South Carolina, but in June 1934, when he arrived for a five-week stay, he wasn’t ready for what he found.

Folly Island was not the kind of vacation spot he was used to. “It looks like a battered old South Sea Island,” he wrote to his mother. The urbane composer, used to the rapid whirl of Manhattan, found himself ten miles away from the nearest telephone. Instead of traffic he was seeing crabs and giant turtles. Instead of car horns and rumbling subways he heard the...

Sometimes Cannons Are Enough

Tuesday, July 1, 2014, 11:30am

When Peter Tchaikovsky described his 1812 Overture as “noisy,” he had no idea how loud–and dangerous--it could get.

In 1998, more than a hundred years after Tchaikovsky wrote and disdained his overture, the Seattle Times carried the remarkable story of Paolo Esperanza. Esperanza was the bass trombonist with the Simphonica Mayor de Uruguay. He was performing in an outdoor children’s concert and hoped to add a little excitement to the sixteen cannon shots that punctuate the finale of the 1812. His good intentions were unaccompanied by good physics.

Esperanza decided to add to Tchaikovsky’s pyrotechnics by inserting a large firecracker,...

Unacceptable Conditions

Monday, June 30, 2014, 11:30am

Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck wanted to marry, and when Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck, raised objections, most of them having to do with money, Schumann wrote to a Leipzig attorney named Einert on June 30, 1839:

A few weeks ago, to our surprise, Clara received his written permission with certain conditions, which I hope will not give you the wrong impression of me:

1. That we should not live in Saxony during his lifetime, but that I should make an effort to earn as much elsewhere as I do through editing a musical paper here.

2. That he should keep...

None of These Men Will Compare

Sunday, June 29, 2014, 11:30am

At the age of twenty-three, Robert Schumann was a keen judge of his fellow pianists, and he got to know most of the virtuosi in Leipzig not long after his arrival in the city. But he was most impressed by one of his students, a thirteen-year-old prodigy, and he wrote about her in a letter to his mother in June 1833:

Now that I am acquainted with all the principal virtuosi except Hummel, I’m beginning to realize that my own achievements were once considerable. These great people, instead of offering us something new or original, as we expect, are too...

A Whimsical Beginning

Saturday, June 28, 2014, 11:30am

Felix Mendelssohn never wrote a significant opera, but, while trying to, he kept his good spirits. On June 28, 1834, he wrote a whimsical letter to librettist Karl Klingemann. At the top of the page the gifted composer--and painter–drew a cartoon of noisy trumpets and kettledrums.

Here you have a fanfare for the beginning of the opera. Have you really begun it? Send me right away the first line at least, or better still, everything that’s done. In all seriousness, my dear boy, I am very grateful to you and I beg you to stay with it now, so that...

Into the Smoke

Friday, June 27, 2014, 11:30am

On June 27, 1847, Giuseppe Verdi was in London, hoping to further the cause of his operas, when he wrote to Giuseppina Appiani:

Glory to the sun, which I have always loved so much, but which I now worship, since I’ve been dwelling in this fog and smoke, which chokes me and blinds my spirit! Nonetheless, what a magnificent city! It has things that stop you in your tracks. But the climate ruins all the beauties. Oh, if only there were a Neapolitan sky here, you’d have no need to wish for Paradise.

I have yet to begin the rehearsals...

A Summer Prank

Thursday, June 26, 2014, 11:30am

Muzio Clementi was one of the most diverse musicians of his time. He was a celebrated pianist. He manufactured and sold pianos. He was a major composer. He was a publisher. And if one account is true, Clementi was also focused to a fault.

In his memoirs, oboist William Parke wrote of a hot summer day in 1796 and an outing during which Clementi and a cellist named John Crosdill went swimming while visiting the estate of the Earl of Pembroke. Hearing of Clementi’s absent-mindedness, Crosdill decided to test it. While Clementi continued to swim, Crosdill sneaked off with his...

Shifting Allegiance

Wednesday, June 25, 2014, 11:30am

Although he was born in Glasgow of an English mother, Eugène d’Albert never considered himself an Englishman. His father, who was a ballet master in London’s King’s Theatre and at Covent Garden, was German-born, but was of French and Italian descent, and had among his forebears two eighteenth-century composers, Giuseppe Matteo Alberti and Domenico Alberti.

If young d’Albert had a constant in his life, it was probably music. His first teacher was his father, who, apparently, was quite effective because at the age of twelve the boy won a scholarship to the new National Training School for Music, where his...

Dueling Harpsichords

Friday, December 4, 2015, 11:30am

Thomas Roseingrave was one the best harpsichordists in Ireland. In December 1709 he received permission from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin to travel to Italy to expand his musicianship. But in Venice his career nearly ground to a halt when he encountered a keyboard phenomenon the likes of...

The Broken Friendship

Thursday, December 3, 2015, 11:30am

In the 1890's, Ernest Chausson and Claude Debussy were two of France's most important composers. They had in common the cause of music that was distinctively French. Then they had a falling-out. It's not certain when Chausson and Debussy first met, although their names were first linked...

The Lives of the Bolshoi

Wednesday, December 2, 2015, 11:30am

The Bolshoi Theater in Moscow is a focal point of Russian culture. It was a long time coming. One catastrophe after another set back Moscow's efforts to have a permanent musical theater. The story begins in 1776 when Prince Urusov, a devotee of dramatic art, secured a ten-year government...

The Clairvoyant Composer

Tuesday, December 1, 2015, 11:30am

Although she had no formal education, she composed seventy-seven songs, blending words and music so well that they are still being sung eight centuries later. Hildegard of Bingen's inspiration came from a remarkable source -- her visions. Hildegard was born in the German duchy of Franconia in...

The Most Powerful Critic

Monday, November 30, 2015, 11:30am

The most important supporter of Mikhail Glinka's opera Ivan Susanin was also his most powerful critic -- not one to be argued with. Glinka explains in his memoirs: "Maybe because I had gone swimming in the sea on my last visit to Peterhof in the summer, I felt tremors around my heart and I...

The Street Singers

Thursday, November 26, 2015, 11:30am

At what point does a songwriter's work become public property? Stephen Foster found out that people very quickly got their own ideas about how one of his songs should sound. In November 1858 Foster, his wife, his daughter and his niece left Pittsburgh on the steamboat Ida May , hound for...

Debussy's Parsifal

Wednesday, November 25, 2015, 11:30am

In the 1890's many French composers had a love-hate relationship with the music of Wagner. Among them was Claude Debussy. In 1892 he took time out from writing his opera Pelleas and Melissande in order to perform his piano transcription of Wagner's Parsifal. A friend described Debussy's...

An Immortal Dinner

Tuesday, November 24, 2015, 11:30am

The home of Anna and Adolf Brodsky was no ordinary place. One day when Johannes Brahms was paying a visit, practicing the piano, the doorbell rang and who should be there but a second guest, Peter Tchaikovsky. Apparently Tchaikovsky didn't particularly like the music he was hearing and he was...

The Premonition

Monday, November 23, 2015, 11:30am

Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf was not superstitious but he had no way to account for the strange touch that saved his life when he was twenty-one years old. In his autobiography he tells the story, which comes from 1759: One snowy winter Dittersdorf had been giving violin lessons to a young courtier...

Deliver Us from It Soon!

Sunday, November 22, 2015, 11:30am

A great piece of music can fall flat unless it has a worthy place for performances, as Bedrich Smetana wrote in a newspaper column of 1864: "Boosters declare, ‘Thank God we have a provisional theater!’ But let's pray to God to deliver us from it soon! How on earth can we...

Take It Away!

Saturday, November 21, 2015, 11:30am

In the fall of 1920 Darius Milhaud had reason to be proud. His symphonic suite Protee was to be performed at an important concert. It had been chosen by the conductor, Gabriel Pierne, to share the program with a new work by Arthur Honegger. The twenty-eight year-old Milhaud had his misgivings...

The Widow Spy

Friday, November 20, 2015, 11:30am

Benjamin Britten's popular work A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra of 1945 takes its theme from Henry Purcell's music for the play Abdelazar, or the Moor's Revenge, produced in 1695. The play was the work of a remarkable woman named Aphra Behn. Much of Aphra Behn's life...

Father Mozart Fires Back

Thursday, November 19, 2015, 11:30am

. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had written to his father Leopold in Salzburg, enthusiastic about works he planned to compose for performers in Mannheim. Young Mozart reported that he might even be appointed to an important position. Leopold replied in a pointed letter on November 19", 1778: “...

A Celebrity in America

Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 11:30am

By November 1891, when the Polish virtuoso Ignacy Jan Paderewski paid his first visit to America, he had all the stuff of a world celebrity -- brilliant technique, abundant energy, and the ability to charm his American hosts. Paderewski was renowned as a composer and a performer by the time he...

Malcolm Arnold's Musical Jokes

Tuesday, November 17, 2015, 11:30am

Whimsy and humor run through much of the music of Malcolm Arnold--not surprisingly since the English composer always enjoyed a good joke. As a student at the Royal Academy of Music, Arnold got attention, if not approval, by stuffing fish down the organ pipes in the Great Hall. Although his parents...

A Musical Revolution

Monday, November 16, 2015, 11:30am

On November 16th, 1777, Christoph Wilibald Gluck was steeped in operatic intrigues launched by his rivals. He wrote to the Countess van Fries. “Never had a more terrible and hotly contested battle been waged than the one I began with my opera Armide. The conspiracies against Iphigenee, Orfeo...

Caruso's Big Audition

Friday, November 13, 2015, 11:30am

The twenty-four-year old tenor was determined to have the part of Rodolfo La Boheme. To get it, he went to see the composer, Giacomo Puccini. He had volunteered to play the part for living expenses, a mere fifteen lire a day instead of the thousand being offered established singers. But the theater...

Mozart's Mannheim Hopes

Thursday, November 12, 2015, 11:30am

November 12", 1778. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote to his father in Salzburg: “Mannheim loves me as much as I love Mannheim. And I'm not absolutely sure, but I think that I may yet win an appointment here. Here, not in Munich. Because my hunch is that the Elector will be happy to...

Composer in the Trenches

Wednesday, November 11, 2015, 11:30am

George Butterworth had enjoyed significant success as a composer, but he found a cause that led him to abandon music. He enlisted as a soldier in World War I. Like many composers, Butterworth was originally headed for a career in law. But he inherited a love for music from his mother, who was a...

Love Letters from London

Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 11:30am

Hector Berlioz is considered a romantic composer. His letters reveal that he was also a romantic man. For example, here's one he wrote from London to a fellow musician on November 10th, 1847: "Would you believe that in St. Petersburg I fell in love, truly and absurdly, with a member of...

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