Grace Notes

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

They Wouldn't Stop!

Thursday, March 29, 2018, 11:30am

A great composer isn’t always a great conductor, even when leading a performance of his own music. That was the upshot of an extraordinary occurrence involving Claude Debussy.

In 1909 Debussy was in London to conduct several of his works at Queen’s Hall. He was delighted to be there, thinking that Londoners appreciated his music even more than Parisians did. He received a warm welcome, and his English counterpart, Henry Wood, had rehearsed the orchestra thoroughly before Debussy’s arrival.

The concert included the second of Debussy’s Nocturnes, a movement called Fêtes, suitable for such a festive occasion, a piece in...

I Don't Know How You Do It

Wednesday, March 28, 2018, 11:30am

Lehman Engel was a successful composer and music director for the stage in New York, but when the United States entered World War II, he took a less predictable job as a yeoman, third class, in the Navy.

Engel was put in charge of organizing a symphonic concert band at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. He got in touch with draft boards around the country and rounded up some of the finest instrumentalists in the world.

The largest group performed weekly concerts in a modern auditorium and worked with some of the top soloists of the day. But a...

A Mass in Time of War

Tuesday, March 27, 2018, 11:30am

Dissatisfied with the quality of teaching at the Paris Conservatory, Vincent d’Indy and two colleagues had founded the Schola Cantorum in 1894 as a way of raising the standard of music education in France.

He was not about to let anything close it down, including a German bombardment.

In March of 1918, as World War I began to turn against them, the Germans launched a last-ditch offensive along the entire Western front, putting more and more pressure on Paris. From seventy-five miles away, they pounded the French capital with giant howitzers known as “Big Berthas” and rattled the city further...

Depend on Yourself

Monday, March 26, 2018, 11:30am

He was determined and innovative and, at twenty-two, California-born Henry Cowell was also trying to establish his musical reputation. His mentor, John Varian, who was quite a nonconformist himself, advised young Cowell that “you will have to depend on yourself and very few other musicians to develop your music...you will have to forget the public and their demands altogether and only write to your best idea.”

It was the summer of 1919 and Cowell the innovator took some of his music to an unlikely appraiser, the famous neo-romantic pianist and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who had just moved to Menlo Park....

Spontaneous Inspiration

Friday, March 23, 2018, 11:30am

For Spanish pianist and composer Enrique Granados, writing music was mostly a matter of the moment. He was not one to work out a formal scheme for an extended composition, but when inspiration struck, he was impulsive and completely absorbed until he had turned his feelings into notes.

A variety of situations could spark his inventiveness. Granados’ student Frank Marshall was turning the pages as Granados played a recent piece called El pelele when it became clear that Granados was playing something other than what was in the manuscript. The audience thought the piece was wonderful and insisted on hearing...

Sweet and Sour

Thursday, March 22, 2018, 11:30am

Portrait of opera composer Johann Christian Bach

The popularity of his music was waning and he was in debt and ailing, but during his last days, John Bach enjoyed life.

After twenty years of eclipse, the eleventh son of Johann Sebastian Bach had restored his reputation as an opera composer by succeeding with La Clemenza di Scipione. His friend Thomas Gainsborough painted a portrait of the composer, showing a dynamic man in his mid-forties.

Each spring Bach went with the Court of George III to their palace at Kew to the southwest of London. In 1781 the diversions there included afternoon boat processions on the Thames that...

One of a Kind

Wednesday, March 21, 2018, 11:30am

In 1774 Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach wrote a description for a biographer of his late father Johann Sebastian:

The first thing he would do when trying out an organ was to joke, “Above all, I have to find out whether the organ has good lungs.” He’d pull out all the stops and play in as many voices as possible, making the organ builders turn white with fear. The precise tuning of the instruments and of the whole orchestra got his undivided attention. No one could tune and quill his instruments to suit him. He did everything himself.

He had a...

From the Ashes

Tuesday, March 20, 2018, 11:30am

Georg Solti’s career as an opera conductor was nipped in the bud in 1938 when German troops marched across the Austrian border, making life unsafe in Hungary. Solti left Hungary for the security of Switzerland, where he conducted two more opera performances. For the duration of World War II, with conducting jobs scarce, he got by as a pianist, hoping all the while to get back to leading an orchestra.

As the war in Europe came to a close, he learned that a friend, Hungarian-American pianist Edward Kilényi, was helping the U.S. Army to rebuild musical life in Munich. With...

What They Lack

Monday, March 19, 2018, 11:30am

In 1859 composer Georges Bizet was a twenty-year-old student studying in Rome. He had already written a masterful Symphony in C, a major sacred work, and his comic opera Don Procopio, and he had strong opinions about his fellow composers. He wrote to his mother in Paris on March 19:

You attribute to feeble libretti the string of failures that has plagued our best writers for the past several years. You’re right. But there’s another reason. Not one of those writers has a well-rounded talent. Some of them—Massé, for example, fall short when it comes to style and a grand design. Others—including David, I...

Respect Me!

Friday, March 16, 2018, 11:30am

By the time the Venice debut of Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Beatrice di Tenda finally took place, it was a month overdue, and winning over an impatient audience was not easy.

Librettist Felice Romani was part of the problem. He was slow to deliver and, apparently, stood Bellini up at least once, because the composer wrote to him:

Dear Romani, having worked like a dog, I assure you that it is too cruel for me to come all the way to your house only to find that you are not there. Since we agreed that I’ll always be there by four...

Composer, Conductor, Confrontation

Thursday, March 15, 2018, 11:30am

Photo of composer and conductor Serge Koussevitzky

Serge Koussevitzky had studied conducting with the great Arthur Nikisch, founded his own orchestra in Moscow in 1909, and published the music of several prominent composers of the day, so he had reason to feel that he had some control over the way the music was performed.

One of the composers whose music he had published was Alexander Scriabin, who invested his works with an intensity verging on religion, so it was inevitable that the two would clash.

An omen of future discord came in 1911, during rehearsals of Scriabin’s symphonic poem Prometheus. Scriabin’s original idea was to accompany the...

Burning Ambition

Wednesday, March 14, 2018, 11:30am

Photo of Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen

After the success of his Second Symphony in Germany, Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen received encouragement from a representative of Leipzig publisher C.F. Peters, who thought that a third symphony would be lucrative for both of them. In the fall of 1882, after several years had passed without Svendsen producing the symphony, the representative sent him a reminder, to which Svendsen replied that he would be honored to have his new symphony published by Peters—as soon as he could get around to writing it.

Sometime in the winter of 1883, Svendsen wrote the symphony.

Then he ran into a serious problem....

Taking the Blame

Tuesday, March 13, 2018, 11:30am

In the late 1830s and early ’40s Gaetano Donizetti had gone through years of grief and bad health. In 1843 his comic opera Don Pasquale became an instant international success, and a year later Donizetti wrote another opera, Caterina Cornaro. When it failed, he was quick to take the blame. He wrote to a friend:

A fiasco! Then let it be a fiasco! People are saying that the music of Caterina Cornaro is not mine or that I wrote it in my sleep or that I wrote it to wreak revenge against the management. No!

I accept complete responsibility, failure,...

First Concert

Monday, March 12, 2018, 11:30am

At the age of twenty-seven, Karl Goldmark decided that it was time for him to make his mark as a composer, and so he arranged a concert devoted entirely to his own works.

His colleagues in the Carl Theater in Vienna promised in writing to donate their services. Goldmark recruited an ensemble of instrumentalists and singers and lined up a soloist to sing a ballad. When he had gotten commitments from several singers with the Court Opera Company, he sent out notices advertising the concert and the names of the performers.

Then a setback came in the form of professional...

The Indian Life

Friday, March 9, 2018, 11:30am

By the beginning of 1911 Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni had been traveling and performing in America for more than a year, and he was still adjusting to life in the New World. He was often uninspired, but he wrote to his wife about occasional flashes of enthusiasm. On March 9, 1911, Busoni wrote from Kansas City:

I’ve had to play with fever and pain, and last night was the first time since March fourth that I’ve had enough of a night’s rest.

Now it’s improved somewhat. The weather is so pretty that it’s possible to sit with the...

Like Bolts of Lightning

Thursday, March 8, 2018, 11:30am

He was one of the most famous men in Europe, and even though he was feeling unwell, Niccolò Paganini had come to Berlin to perform. The audience of nine hundred or so included Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia, and all the royal family.

Writing four days later, on March 8, 1829, Adolph Bernhard Marx, the editor of a major German music periodical, was still enthralled:

The man seemed to be enchanted and he had an enchanting effect, not just on me or on this or that person, but on everyone. He came onstage and launched at once into the...

Radio Won't Wait

Wednesday, March 7, 2018, 11:30am

According to its producer, The Ford Sunday Evening Hour was a way for radio audiences “to feel cultured without really being so.” Beginning in 1934 it provided classical music, popular opera arias, familiar ballads, and hymns. Henry Ford hired most of the Detroit Symphony as the house orchestra. The conductors were some of the best--Sir John Barbirolli and Fritz Reiner. The soloists were the finest, although, in the case of pianist Myra Hess, the encounter with radio was not graceful.

Hess was booked to play Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor for a March 7, 1937, broadcast. A representative...

The Challenge

Tuesday, March 6, 2018, 11:30am

By 1754 Francesco Geminiani was known throughout Europe as a composer of concertos. When he was approached by the director of a Paris theater to write theater music, Geminiani took up the challenge.

The Enchanted Forest was a pantomime based on episodes from Torquato Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered–a subject that lent itself to splashy special effects, the most exciting that the art of painting and the science of machinery could bring to bear.

The producers kept the plot simple. The story followed events on the Plain of Sharon, near Jerusalem, with scenes set in a Jerusalem mosque and in the camp of a Christian army. In their...

The Pauper

Monday, March 5, 2018, 11:30am

Young André Gretry led the life of a character from Dickens. He was the son of a poor church musician in the city of Liège, Belgium. About 1750, at the age of nine, he became a choir boy, a position that required him to walk a mile each way to attend six services a day. One morning, when he arrived late for the five o’clock service, he was forced to remain on his knees for two hours. In order to avoid further punishment, young Gretry made a routine of leaving for church at three in the morning, summer and winter, and sitting outside the...

The Downside

Friday, March 2, 2018, 11:30am

Wealth, fame, and acclaim – Joseph Haydn enjoyed them all during a sojourn in London arranged by Johann Peter Salomon. But there was a downside according to a letter he wrote to Maria von Genzinger in Vienna on March 2, 1792:

I must confess to Your Grace that this is very embarrassing and that on some days I’m downhearted, especially because, for the following reasons, I cannot send Your Grace the symphony dedicated to you:

First, because I plan to alter the last movement of it and to improve it because it’s too weak compared to the first. I was...

Everything is in Order

Thursday, March 1, 2018, 11:30am

Could it happen today? In the early years of the twentieth century, pianist Harold Bauer was touring in Spain, traveling with a tuner, who was responsible for having Bauer’s Erard pianos sent from one venue to the next.

Toward the end of the tour, illness forced the tuner to remain behind, and Bauer had to arrange for the piano transportation himself. After a long train trip, Bauer arrived in Tarragona on the morning of his concert there. The president, vice-president, secretary, and treasurer of the Philharmonic Society met him at the station.

Bauer’s first concern: “Is the piano here?”

“Everything...

The Charge

Wednesday, February 28, 2018, 11:30am

Ludwig van Beethoven spent a good deal of his time concerned with music and money. A letter that he wrote to composer Ferdinand Ries on February 28, 1816, dismisses both matters quickly in order to take up a new preoccupation:

Quite some time ago I wrote to let you know that the trio and the sonata had been sent out. In my last letter, I asked you, since I still had so many expenses to cover, to make sure that Herr Birchall reimburses me for the cost, which comes to at least ten gold ducats. In any event, he got...

The Shaky Collaborators

Tuesday, February 27, 2018, 11:30am

Composer Mily Balakirev had scraped up enough money for his Free Music School to put on a series of four concerts in St. Petersburg during the winter of 1879. Colleague Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was to direct them, and before they were over, he was a nervous wreck.

One of the concerts was to include the Polovtsian Dances and other selections from Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor, the catch being that Borodin hadn’t finished the opera yet, and Rimsky-Korsakov spent no end of time pleading with him to orchestrate the excerpts to be performed in the concert. Borodin taught chemistry and medical...

Fantasia

Monday, February 26, 2018, 11:30am

Paul Hindemith was a distinguished composer and music theorist whose works were banned in Germany by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in 1936. Like many of his colleagues, Hindemith went to the United States looking for a way to earn a living. By the end of February 1939 he was in Hollywood, where he visited the Twentieth Century Fox and Paramount studios hoping to find a lucrative film contract.

He pinned his highest hopes on a third visit, to Walt Disney Studios.

Disenchantment came quickly. He watched animators work on a Mickey Mouse production. “Naturally a director oversees all this to make...

The Peril You Overlooked

Friday, February 23, 2018, 11:30am

Albert Spalding was sixteen years old at the time of his Paris debut. He played the Violin Concerto in B minor by Saint-Saëns, the Bach Chaconne, the Romance in F by Beethoven, and the flashy Zigeunerweisen by Pablo de Sarasate. The audience, mostly invited, had nothing but compliments for the young violinist.

But Spalding had misgivings.

He realized that he received just as much praise for his run-of-the mill performances as he did for those that were truly excellent. “Sweet at first to the taste,” Spalding said later, “it eventually soured on the stomach.”

Spalding’s teacher, a man named Lefort,...

A Revolutionary Wedding

Thursday, February 22, 2018, 11:30am

Photo of pianist and composer César Franck

In the politically charged year of 1848 César Franck was a twenty-five-year-old pianist and composer living in Paris. When his father took him to task for wasting his time dedicating a song to one of his female students, he and his father exchanged harsh words and his father retaliated by tearing the manuscript to pieces.

Franck flew into a rage and declared his intention to move out and marry the student and leave the family to support itself--a scary prospect for his indolent father. The elder Franck alternately threatened and pleaded. He flaunted the name of a notorious wife-murderer, suggesting...

Round Two

Wednesday, February 21, 2018, 11:30am

As a student at the Paris Conservatory, Hector Berlioz had experienced at least one run-in with its feisty director, Luigi Cherubini. In his autobiography, Berlioz tells of a second encounter.

He had applied for a professorship of harmony at the Conservatory and received word that Cherubini wanted to see him.

Cherubini explained that Berlioz would surely get the position, but that he had someone else in mind for it.

Berlioz offered to withdraw his application.

“No, no, that is not good,” Cherubini said, “because, you see, people would say that I was the cause of your withdrawing.”

“Then I’ll remain...

The Money Back Guarantee

Tuesday, February 20, 2018, 11:30am

The following letter to Giuseppe Verdi in 1872 shows that to be a composer is to expose oneself to criticism from anyone and everyone:

Much Honored Signor Verdi,

“On the second of this month I went to Padua, lured by the sensation caused by your opera Aida. I was so intrigued that I was in my seat—number 120--half an hour before the performance began. I admired the sets. I enjoyed hearing the excellent singers, and I did everything I could not to let a single thing slip by me.

“When the opera ended I asked myself if I was satisfied...

Broken Windows

Monday, February 19, 2018, 11:30am

On February 20, 1816, a combination of miscalculations and mishaps had brought about a disastrous debut for Rossini’s operaThe Barber of Seville. At the end of the contentious first act, Rossini sat at the piano and applauded the singers, but some in the audience thought he was praising his own opera, which made them all the more volatile.

Then there was the matter of the next night’s performance.

On the day after the debut, Rossini and alto Geltrude Righetti-Giorgi sat down and went over the score, and he took out some of the things that he thought the audience had good reason to...

Top Notes

Friday, February 16, 2018, 11:30am

In his memoirs Ignacy Jan Paderewski tells of a concert during which he learned a hard lesson about showmanship.

In 1890 Paderewski was making a name for himself as one of Europe’s leading pianists, but he discovered that when it came to exciting audiences, a performer needed more than musicianship. After successful performances in Paris, he was in the city of Tours participating in a concert in which he shared the billing with two singers and an actor, an arrangement that required Paderewski to regenerate his concentration and energy during the long intervals between his performances.

A lady singer began...

Too Much of a Good Thing

Friday, July 6, 2018, 11:30am

Was it too much of a good thing? He was born with the best musical heritage imaginable and his talent was considerable, but Wilhelm Friedemann Bach fell short of everyone's expectations. He was the first-born son of Johann Sebastian Bach, and that in itself may have proved a handicap. Friedemann...

The Summer Job

Thursday, July 5, 2018, 11:30am

In the 1920s the most reliable way for a young composer to make money was to teach--without being too picky about the quality of the students. When twenty-five-year-old Aaron Copland had a chance to make money by performing in a trio at a Pennsylvania summer resort, he took it. Copland was working...

A Versatile Tune

Wednesday, July 4, 2018, 11:30am

The song began humbly and rose to great heights over the course of 150 years. Our story begins in London in 1780 with a social club named after a fun-loving Roman poet said to have died at 86 from choking on a grape seed. Most of the members of the Anacreontic Society were amateur musicians, though...

Sad Thoughts from Paris

Tuesday, July 3, 2018, 11:30am

In 1778, 22 year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had gone with his mother to Paris, hoping to enhance his international reputation. He had gone reluctantly, and once he got there, he found one obstacle after another. On July 3, he wrote to his father in Salzburg: "I have very painful and sad news to...

Stravinsky's Star-Spangled Banner

Monday, July 2, 2018, 11:30am

Igor Stravinsky had been living the in the United States for two years and he wanted to make a patriotic gesture. But America didn't exactly appreciate Stravinsky's gift-an arrangement of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Two Things gave Stravinsky the idea of writing the arrangement. A composer who...

Villa-Lobos Plays the Guitar for Segovia

Friday, June 29, 2018, 11:30am

It was only natural that Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos would write for the guitar. And maybe it was inevitable that he would meet the world's greatest guitarist, Andres Segovia. But exactly what happened at that first meeting is not so certain because Villa-Lobos and Segovia gave sharply...

Always the Critic

Thursday, June 28, 2018, 11:30am

"Who could not win the mistress wooed the maid." So said Alexander Pope, suggesting that critics are failed, envious artists.

The Gamble

Wednesday, June 27, 2018, 11:30am

In June 1907 Franz Lehár had a good reason to be nervous about the London debut of his operetta The Merry Widow . Too late, he had found out that the male lead couldn't sing. The casting for the performance had been a gamble by London producer George Edwards, who had chosen a popular comic actor...

Upstaged at the White House

Tuesday, June 26, 2018, 11:30pm

The playing was some of the finest in the world. But on this particular occasion in 1986, Vladimir Horowitz was to be upstaged by the President and first lady of the United States. The East Room of the White House was packed with musicians and political figures. Horowitz was being honored for his...

Scottish Novel, Italian Opera

Monday, June 25, 2018, 11:30am

The 38-year-old composer was gambling that his new opera would succeed where others were failing. Gaetano Donizetti was pinning his hopes on a hastily written opera based not on an Italian subject but on a Scottish novel.

Mahler's Appointment with Freud

Friday, June 22, 2018, 11:30am

It was to be a meeting of minds. The great symphonist Gustav Mahler had an appointment with the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Although he initiated it, Mahler was clearly uneasy about the meeting. He canceled three times before finally coming face to face with Freud in 1910. By the time...

Saved By a Button

Thursday, June 21, 2018, 11:30am

The Water Music , the Royal Fireworks Music , Messiah . It's possible that none of them would have been written if it hadn't been for a lucky encounter with a button. In 1704 George Frederick Handel was a 19-year-old hothead who took his music making very seriously. He was serving as harpsichordist...

Too Political

Wednesday, June 20, 2018, 11:30am

In June 1866 the Russian composer Mily Balakirev was in Prague, attempting to arrange a performance of Mikhail Glinka's opera A Life for the Czar. Things had gone badly. His efforts had been interrupted by a war between Austria and Prussia. Six months later the war was over and Balakirev was in...

A Dangerous Homecoming

Tuesday, June 19, 2018, 11:30pm

In 1866 Mily Balakirev was asked to go to Prague to arrange a production of Mikhail Glinka's opera A Life for the Czar. He was to have the greatest adventure of his life--getting home. Balakirev set out in June and had just arrived in Prague when war broke out between Austria and Prussia. Balakirev...

Engrave This in Your Head

Monday, June 18, 2018, 11:30pm

Vincenzo Bellini had strong ideas about what an opera should do. And he could be very forceful in trying to get his ideas across to others. For example, he wrote to a librettist in June 1834:

An Improviser Par Excellence

Friday, June 15, 2018, 11:30am

By 1740, when Carl Philip Emanuel Bach went to Pottsdam to work for King Frederick the Great, his father, Johann Sebastian Bach, was famous throughout Europe, and King Frederick grew increasingly eager to meet the man known as "the Old Bach." In 1747 Johann Sebastian Bach, age 62, finally left...

Musical Diversions for the President

Thursday, June 14, 2018, 11:30am

Eighteen-fifty nine. America was on the brink of Civil War and the weary president of the United States needed music to divert him from the big troubles. The music in the White House of James Buchanan varied considerably. One of the year’s biggest hits was Ullman’s Opera Troupe and its prima donna...

They Barely Understand Me

Wednesday, June 13, 2018, 11:30am

June 13th, 1865. New Orleans-born pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk was making a concert tour of the American West. Traveling through Nevada he wrote in his journal: “The first rays of day light up our faces--dirty, dust-covered, our eyes swollen from lack of sleep, etc. We arrive at Dutch Flat, a...

The Rhapsody that Wouldn't Let Go

Tuesday, June 12, 2018, 11:30am

Composers have various reasons for writing--inspiration, pleasure, and money. In the case of Claude Debussy's Saxophone Rhapsody the motivation was provided by money and a persistent music-lover named Mrs. Elise Hall. Mrs. Hall was a wealthy Boston matron who had taken up the saxophone. In 1895 she...

More Than You Deserve

Monday, June 11, 2018, 11:30am

Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven by Joseph Karl Stieler

Ludwig van Beethoven was very dependent upon the good will of his publishers, but he was blunt by nature, and in a letter to Breitkopf and Hertel in June 1810, Beethoven minced no words...

Search form

The Ideas Network

Program Schedule

Program Notes

NPR News & Classical Network

Program Schedule

Music Playlists

All Classical Network

Program Schedule

Music Playlists

Grace Notes

Subscribe To WPR Newsletters