Out of the Jaws of Victory
Monday, December 16, 2019, 11:30am
Perhaps it was an omen. Wagner had agreed to accept the dedication of Anton Bruckner’s new symphony. They had spent a day together, drinking beer and talking music. It was one of the happiest days of Bruckner’s life--until he forgot which symphony he was supposed to dedicate–the second or the third...
The Right Audience
Friday, December 13, 2019, 11:30am
At the close of the American Civil War, after a perilous concert tour of the Northern states, New Orleans-born composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk left the country for Latin America. He soon found himself in circumstances as difficult as those he had encountered at home, and he had to resort to an...
The Infernal Machine
Thursday, December 12, 2019, 11:30am
On the night of December 12, 1800, Napoleon Bonaparte was on his way to attend the first French performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. He showed up late, but he had good excuse. Someone had tried to kill him. Seven Breton royalist insurrectionists were in on the plot to assassinate Napoleon...
It Sounds All Right
Wednesday, December 11, 2019, 11:30am
Composer Hector Berlioz was born December 11, 1803, and cut a wide swath through music from the 1830s to the 1860s. In 1853 he became a best-selling author with Musical Evenings , a collection of reminiscences and anecdotes that reveal a good deal of Berlioz’ forceful personality and caustic sense...
A Different Kind of Virtuoso
Tuesday, December 10, 2019, 12:00am
In the 1920s the Berlin home of operetta composer Oscar Straus became the gathering place of the brightest people in Europe. Entrepreneurs, theatrical managers, actors, statesmen, scientists, and musicians mingled--sometimes with amusing results. A regular visitor to the Straus home was Albert...
The Rebellious Prince
Monday, December 9, 2019, 11:30am
King Frederick the Great of Prussia was one of the great patrons of music, but in his early years he suffered for his art–and so did others. His father, Friedrich the First, was so steeped in military matters that he tried to squelch young Frederick’s fondness for the fine arts. The prince was...
This Other World
Friday, December 6, 2019, 11:30am
Twenty-one-year old Frédéric Chopin was discovering a galaxy of famous musicians of the day when he wrote to a friend back in Poland in December 1831: Paris is whatever you want it to be. You can entertain yourself, be bored, laugh, cry, do whatever you want and nobody notices you because thousands...
The Pianist
Thursday, December 5, 2019, 11:30am
In December 1815 composer Giacomo Meyerbeer was in London visiting celebrated composers and performers. When it came to pianists, he was most impressed by a fellow German who had settled in London, Johann Baptiste Cramer. In his journal Meyerbeer wrote: Cramer is in his forties, a big, sturdy man...
Out of the Body
Wednesday, December 4, 2019, 11:30am
Some people are said to have the ability to see themselves as if from a distance. Richard Wagner was one of them. He delivered an address at a ceremony marking the relocation of the remains of composer Carl Maria von Weber from London to Dresden in December 1844. In his autobiography, he wrote of a...
Uh-oh!
Tuesday, December 3, 2019, 11:30am
In his 1952 memoir My Life, Russian émigré composer Alexander Gretchaninoff tells how simple carelessness nearly resulted in disaster. In 1925 the composer and his wife were living in Paris. He went to Rome to conduct two concerts, the second of which was to include his Third Symphony and excerpts...
Offended
Monday, December 2, 2019, 11:30am
In 1943, at Lindy’s Restaurant in Manhattan, Marc Blitzstein introduced twenty-five-year-old Leonard Bernstein to twenty-nine-year-old Morton Gould. The two composers had plenty in common. For a time, their careers ran parallel courses and then they collided. Gould was well known in musical circles...
What Else Did He Know?
Friday, November 29, 2019, 11:30am
Arthur Rubinstein was one of the twentieth century’s greatest pianists He didn’t begin speaking until he was three, but began playing the piano at age two, and so it’s reasonable to assume that the piano was his whole life. But an appearance on radio’s popular quiz show Information Please on...
The Elusive Tune
Thursday, November 28, 2019, 11:30am
Composer Jacques Offenbach had eight bars of a tune running through his head--a waltz that his mother had sung to him as a lullaby. Offenbach’s father overheard him humming it and told him that it was by a once-promising young composer named Zimmer, who had suddenly dropped out of sight. Sometime...
A Visitor Incognito
Wednesday, November 27, 2019, 11:30am
In 1822 the most famous touring pianist in Europe was Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who had been a child prodigy so impressive that at the age of seven he became a live-in student of Mozart’s. Hummel’s closest rival was Irish-born pianist John Field, who had been living in Russia for nearly twenty years...
Passed By
Tuesday, November 26, 2019, 11:30am
With the help of publisher John Stark, Scott Joplin made his name with a succession of genteel, lilting ragtime piano pieces, beginning with the million-seller Maple Leaf Rag in 1899. By 1911 he felt that he was in a position to create an entirely new kind of music, an American opera dealing with...
Tug of War
Monday, November 25, 2019, 11:30am
The celebrated Austrian cellist Emanuel Feuermann didn’t care for recording, so he probably came into the Columbia session with a bad attitude, and the effort to make a record of Haydn’s Concerto in D went awry from the start. It was November 1935. The conductor was Malcolm Sargent who was...
Caught in the Muddle
Friday, November 22, 2019, 11:30am
He would later become known as one of the twentieth century’s great pianists and composers, but in 1897, at the age of twenty-four, Sergei Rachmaninoff jumped at the chance to be the assistant conductor to one Eugene Esposito in a new private opera company opened in Moscow by a tycoon named...
Lavish in the Extreme
Thursday, November 21, 2019, 11:30am
At the court of Spain’s King Ferdinand V and Queen Maria Barbara, the famed Italian castrato Farinelli was such a royal favorite that he could have influenced Spain’s politics, but he preferred to make his mark on the country’s musical life–and that he did with a vengeance. As the director of court...
Incognito!
Wednesday, November 20, 2019, 11:30am
Back in 1910 Darius Milhaud had written an opera called La Brebis égarée , and although he was aware of its youthful flaws, he did not object in November 1923 when the Paris Opéra-Comique decided to produce it. The experience would give him some of his most sincere audience response. The opera was...
A Voice From The Crowd
Tuesday, November 19, 2019, 11:30am
On November 19, 1916, celebrated conductor Arturo Toscanini was at the Augusteo Theater in Rome to conduct the first of three concerts. The program included two pieces by Wagner— Forest Murmurs from Siegfried and the funeral music from Götterdämmerung . On previous occasions, the orchestra had...