Friday, May 4, 2018, 11:30am
No one doubted that Domenico Dragonetti was one of the greatest bass players the world had ever seen. There was some disagreement, however, as to whether he was a true eccentric or just a performer with a sense of promotion and a highly developed sense of humor. Dragonetti left his hometown, Venice...
Thursday, May 3, 2018, 11:30am
It began the way many love stories have begun ever since young men began giving music lessons to young women. In 1910, a wealthy St. Petersburg family, the Meshcherkys, welcomed nineteen-year-old Sergei Prokofiev into their musical gatherings as an alternative to the straight-laced young men in...
Wednesday, May 2, 2018, 11:30am
In 1904, when cellist Pablo Casals undertook his first American tour, he had to rely upon a manager to keep track of his money. The manager told Casals that he could get bigger fees if he would wear a hairpiece. Casals had no interest in that kind of superficiality, and so the manager sent out...
Tuesday, May 1, 2018, 11:30am
Conductor Theodore Thomas wielded the baton over a massive music festival that took place in New York in May 1880, and the size of the ensemble required him to be alert with his eyes as well as his ears. The Philharmonic Orchestra was the largest, and in his opinion, the best orchestral...
Friday, April 27, 2018, 11:30am
After being ruined by competition with Opera for the Nobility, a company founded by the unruly Frederick, Prince of Wales, Handel had finally begun to reverse his losses with his oratorio Alexander’s Feast , which had been a great success of 1736. Frederick’s company had brought in celebrated...
Thursday, April 26, 2018, 11:30am
Frederick, Prince of Wales, son of George II and heir to the British throne, was so at odds with his father that he would do whatever he could to oppose him. Caught in the crush between father and son was the country’s greatest composer, George Frederick Handel. Frederick didn’t confine his quarrel...
Wednesday, April 25, 2018, 11:30am
When it came to criticism, Felix Mendelssohn could take it or dish it out. In April 1834 he wrote from Düsseldorf to his friend Ignaz Moscheles, who had been rehearsing Mendelssohn’s Fair Melusina Overture for an upcoming performance. I agree completely with what you say about Berlioz’ Overture Les...
Tuesday, April 24, 2018, 11:30am
Having heard the news of Abraham Lincoln’s death, Louis Moreau Gottschalk and some of his fellow passengers en route to San Francisco came to terms with the loss. He wrote in his journal on April 24, 1865: We are to have a meeting on board to give official expression to the sentiments of grief,...
Monday, April 23, 2018, 11:30am
As the Civil War swept the eastern United States, New Orleans pianist and Union sympathizer Louis Moreau Gottschalk made a concert tour of the northern states. He then left New York on a steamship bound for San Francisco and was off the coast of California on April 23, 1865, when he wrote in his...
Friday, April 20, 2018, 11:30am
English soprano Clara Novello’s prime reason for her 1839 visit to Russia was to gain the favor of the Czarina, who could prove a powerful patron, but when she arrived in St. Petersburg, the Czarina was ill. In western Europe Novello could count on great composers--Rossini, Mendelssohn, and...
Thursday, April 19, 2018, 11:30am
The celebrated violinist and his admirer were forty years apart in age, but they had more than music to bring them together. They had Mrs. Angelina Chapman Thorp. The Norwegian virtuoso Ole Bull was world-famous by the time he arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1868. Tickets for his Madison concert...
Wednesday, April 18, 2018, 11:30am
Two weeks after the successful debut of his oratorio The Celestial Country , composer Charles Ives did something surprising. He swore off any more public performances of his works. The Yale graduate had benefited from the teaching of a major American composer of the day, Horatio Parker, who had...
Tuesday, April 17, 2018, 11:30am
Like many European visitors to the United States, the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski had mixed feelings about America and Americans. One of his three traveling companions, the pianist Arthur Rubinstein, was already a veteran of tours in America by January 1921 when Szymanowski sailed from...
Monday, April 16, 2018, 11:30am
During a long concert career, English pianist Ivor Newton found that page-turners have more power than audiences realize. In a job that requires agility, quick thinking, and musicianship, they’re in a position to make or break a performance. Newton found that, on the one hand, a dispassionate page-...
Friday, April 13, 2018, 11:30am
The barest encyclopedia entry implies a hard life for the English composer Havergal Brian: “Self-taught composer of 32 symphonies, five operas, and various choral works, all on a very large scale and mostly unperformed.” In 1914, believing that his wife had been unfaithful, the composer fled from...
Thursday, April 12, 2018, 11:30am
Between the high cost of living in Sweden and supporting his wife back in Prague, BedÍich Smetana found it necessary to add to his income as the director of a music school in Göteborg, and so he accepted an invitation to become the conductor of the Göteborg Society for Practicing Classical Choral...
Wednesday, April 11, 2018, 11:30am
Although few people in France knew it at the time, Hector Berlioz was one of the country’s great composers. In order to supplement his income, he turned to musical journalism, writing newspaper articles and commentaries, many of which combined facts with fanciful embellishments. In 1852, in another...
Tuesday, April 10, 2018, 11:30am
In 1935, when John Houseman needed music for a Negro Theater Project production of Macbeth , he turned to Virgil Thomson, who had recently produced Four Saints in Three Acts , an all-black opera, on Broadway. Also involved was nineteen-year-old Orson Welles. It would be a strange collaboration with...
Monday, April 9, 2018, 11:30am
In 1874 Georges Bizet was caught up in writing what would become his masterpiece, his opera Carmen. So it’s understandable that he was preoccupied and temperamental when he had to take time out to give piano lessons. An American girl living in Paris at the time had vivid memories of the reluctant...
Friday, April 6, 2018, 11:30am
Although he had established himself as one of England’s finest keyboard players and conductors, Samuel Wesley was beset by physical and emotional difficulties and often was at odds with his family. In 1816 the death of an infant son threw him into a state of depression, and while he was en route...
