Wednesday, May 22, 2019, 11:30am
He wrote vast dramatic symphonies but Anton Bruckner led a life that tended to be prosaic and more than a little cluttered. He didn’t look like other musicians of the 1880's. He kept his hair cut so short that many people remembered him as being bald. He wore a short jacket and voluminous trousers...
Tuesday, May 21, 2019, 3:05pm
He ‘s generally thought of as a singularly English composer, but early in his career, Ralph Vaughan Williams had trouble developing his style in England. He needed the right teacher and he found him in an unexpected place. One of Vaughan Williams' first teachers was Charles Villiers Stanford, who...
Monday, May 20, 2019, 11:30am
The Great Depression was a difficult time for most Americans, including musicians. In 1936 Virgil Thomson was a forty-year-old composer struggling for recognition and cash. His friend John Houseman recommended Thomson to a documentary filmmaker named Pare Lorenz. Lorenz had already interviewed...
Friday, May 17, 2019, 11:30am
Many fine works of art have resulted from the connection between music and painting. In his memoirs, British baritone George Henschel tells of an occasion when the two arts benefited from a third. In 1877 Henschel was attending a dinner part at the town house of Lord and Lady Airlie. The guests...
Thursday, May 16, 2019, 11:30am
Composers of concert music have enough distractions to cope with. Composers of movie music have even more. Consider the case of Bernard Hermann, one of America's leading writers of film music, when he was visiting Hollywood in 1943. Hermann and his wife were having a working lunch at the home of...
Wednesday, May 15, 2019, 11:30am
Vienna in 1787. It could be a risky place and time for a composer to make a living. And Antonio Salieri took a big risk. He disobeyed the Emperor. Salieri had recently returned from Paris where his opera Tarare had been produced. Emperor Joseph the Second ordered Salieri and his librettist Lorenzo...
Tuesday, May 14, 2019, 11:30am
You might think that conducting an orchestra would be a safe profession, but at times a conductor can fall into a life-threatening situation. So it was with Arturo Toscanini in Bologna,Italy on May 14th, 1931. Toscanini had accepted an invitation to conduct two concerts in Bologna. The purpose was...
Monday, May 13, 2019, 11:30am
New Orleans-born pianist and composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk toured the northern states during the Civil War. As he traveled through New York State he was occasionally able to forget about the war and concentrate on the two great loves of his life--music and women. In May 1864 he wrote in his...
Friday, May 10, 2019, 11:30am
Eighteen-seventy-one. It was the end of an epic in France. Years of opulence and gaiety had been blasted by the grim, disastrous Franco-Prussian War. One of the less obvious casualties was a musician huddled in an oversized coat. He was Jacques Offenbach, composer of buoyant operettas that must've...
Thursday, May 9, 2019, 11:30am
Paris Opera director Andre Messager conducted the debut of Claude Debussy's opera Pelleas and Melisande . Then he had to leave the country to fulfill other commitments. That left the direction of the opera to the second conductor, Henri-Paul Busser. A despondent Debussy wrote to Messager on May 9,...
Wednesday, May 8, 2019, 11:35am
May 8th, 1945 -- V.E. Day. Germany surrendered to the Allies, ending World War II in Europe. Composer Richard Strauss was among the many who were glad that the war was over regardless of who had won. He and his family had been suffering under the Nazi regime while living near the village of...
Tuesday, May 7, 2019, 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—...
Monday, May 6, 2019, 11:30am
In 1831 a young pianist and composer named Frederick Chopin left his native land, Poland, in order to establish himself in European musical circles. He was a popular success as a concert performer, but at times was lonely in a crowd. In Vienna in the spring of 1831 Chopin wrote in his journal: “...
Friday, May 3, 2019, 11:30am
Sooner or later every composer has to deal with a deadline. Gioacchino Rossini shared some of his trade secrets in a letter that shows his sense of humor: “Wait until the evening before the performance. Nothing stirs up a person’s enthusiasm so much as pure necessity, a copyist waiting for your...
Thursday, May 2, 2019, 11:30am
As World War II raged in Europe, English composer Arthur Bliss was director of music at the BBC. His family was in America and he was looking for a way to go to America so that he could arrange to bring them back to England. An offer of assistance came from an unexpected source via a phone call...
Wednesday, May 1, 2019, 11:35am
The 22-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had arrived in Paris to build an international reputation. He wrote to his father, Leopold, in Salzburg on May 1st, 1778: "Responding to an invitation of eight days prior, I drove to the house of the Duchesse de Chabot. I waited half an hour in a large room without any fire and as cold as ice. At last the Duchess came in. She was very polite, and implored me to excuse her piano since none of her instruments were in good order, but she asked me at least to give it a try."
Tuesday, April 30, 2019, 11:30am
Edvard Grieg was 25 years old when he wrote his masterpiece, the Piano Concerto in A minor. One of the first to see it was Franz Liszt, who not only played it and critiqued it, but afterward offered Grieg advice to last a lifetime. The occasion came during a gathering of friends one evening in 1865...
Monday, April 29, 2019, 11:30am
The same piece of music can draw very different reactions from city to city as Carl Maria von Weber reported from Dresden to a friend in Berlin in April 1824: “I’ve been going through a rough patch, and maybe it’s just as well that my enormous workload didn’t give me much time to think. But still I...
Sunday, April 28, 2019, 11:30am
Today he is best known for his technical studies such as The School of Velocity- -methodical, mechanical approaches to piano mastery. Carl Czerny was actually an extraordinarily prolific composer whose curiously mechanical way of working made his vast output possible. The English writer John Elia...
Friday, April 26, 2019, 11:30am
Peter Tchaikovsky wrote some of his best music during long trips to Italy. But even there, music and friends could put him out of sorts. To his brother Modeste he wrote from Rome in April 1890. “For two days now I've been in a bad mood to the point of despair. I've lost both my appetite and my...