Grace Notes

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

When celebrated Czech composer Antonín Dvořák stepped onto the pier in New York on September 26, 1892, he was welcomed as the future discoverer of American music. During his two-and-a-half-year tenure as the director of the National Conservatory of Music in New York, Americans got to hear a variety of his works and he wrote some of his most important music.

But during his lifetime, an important part of his music never got a hearing in America—opera.

Dvořák did what he could. The founder of the National Conservatory, Mrs. Jeanette Thurber, was so ardent in her appreciation of opera that...

The Split

Monday, September 25, 2017, 11:30am

In the fall of 1931 a Berlin producer thought that a theater version of the opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny could bring in good money during hard times.

Composer Kurt Weill and playwright Bertold Brecht made the going rough. During rehearsals, as they made cuts in the opera, Weill argued on behalf of his music, Brecht on behalf of his words. Their quarrels got so hot that their attorneys came into the theater and threatened each other. When a press photographer took a picture of Brecht standing next to Weill, Brecht knocked the camera out...

Money Sings

Friday, September 22, 2017, 11:30am

In the fall of 1974 soprano Kiri Te Kanawa was cast in the role of Marguerite in a Covent Garden production of Charles Gounod’s opera Faust. An American philanthropist had offered £500,000 for the staging of his favorite work.

The money came with a string attached. The part of Mephistopheles had to be performed by the donor’s favorite bass, American Norman Treigle. Treigle arrived in London late, looking pale and malnourished, and called in sick before his first rehearsal, saying that he had hurt his foot while getting out of bed in his hotel room.

Te Kanawa was not exactly...

First, the Money

Thursday, September 21, 2017, 11:30am

In memoirs he wrote in 1896, conductor Luigi Arditi recalls a situation in which a stubborn baritone named Novara pursued his demand for money all the way into a performance.

Novara had agreed to sing the part of Rocco for three performances of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio with the understanding that, like everyone else in the company, he would be paid in advance.

His payment for the first performance went well enough, but on the second night he had to go to a lot of trouble to get paid, and so Novara made it clear that he would not sing the...

That's All I Ask

Wednesday, September 20, 2017, 11:30am

On September 20, 1850, Richard Wagner shared his aspirations with critic Theodor Uhlig, writing from Zurich about the key to achieving his latest artistic goal:

What’s needed to accomplish the best, most decisive and important project that I can take on in the current circumstances, and to bring to fruition what I consider my life work, is a sum of perhaps 10,000 Thalers.

If I had that kind of money to work with, this is what I would do. Here, where I have a position and where the situation isn’t too bad, I’d have a makeshift theater of planks and...

Maggots

Tuesday, September 19, 2017, 11:30am

Charles Jennens assembled the texts for five of Handel’s oratorios, including Messiah, but a letter that turned up more than two hundred years after he wrote it shows that he did not hesitate to make fun of the great composer.

In 1738 Jennens and Handel were working on the oratorio Saul. Jennens wrote to the Earl of Guernsey on September 19, after a visit to the composer.

“Mr. Handel’s head is more full of maggots than ever,” he reported.

The first “maggot,” he said, was a “very queer” keyboard instrument that made the sound of hammers hitting anvils, with which...

Master or Student?

Monday, September 18, 2017, 11:30am

In the fall of 1824 pianist and composer Ignaz Moscheles was in Berlin, where he became acquainted with the family of fifteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn’s parents were concerned about the boy’s future, fearful that he would suddenly pass into obscurity, as many other talented children had done. Moscheles had no doubts about Felix’s future, but the boy’s parents required repeated reassurances.

Time and again, Mendelssohn’s parents asked Moscheles to give piano lessons to the boy, but Moscheles was evasive, confiding in his diary, “He doesn’t need lessons, and if he wants to pick up something new from me, he can...

And There Was Music

Friday, September 15, 2017, 11:30am

After graduating from Oxford, Hubert Parry was bound for a business career in London, although money-making was not as interesting to him as music-making. In September of 1870 he couldn’t resist a final burst of freedom. He wrote about it in his diary:

I spent a quiet time studying manuscript music, practicing, and shooting till the end of September. The time was specially noticeable for an adventurous trip which Ernest and I took in two canoes from Over Bridge to Sharpness Point on the Severn, wherein we met with various fortune; being cast upon banks and quicksands, narrowly escaping destruction...

A Slight Breach of Decorum

Thursday, September 14, 2017, 11:30am

By the 1950s Ralph Vaughan Williams was a heavyset, craggy-faced monument to solid British music and decorum, so he must have presented quite a contrast with the guest conductor at a choral competition that took place at the base of the 2^nd Battalion Welsh Guards. Vaughan Williams had been invited to judge the event and had carefully rehearsed the choirs.

Presiding over the event was Dame Clara Novello Davies, who had composed a song for the occasion. For the performance of it, she had gone all out.

The commanding officer, Colonel Price, recalled that as the curtains parted, Madame Clara...

A Good Catch

Wednesday, September 13, 2017, 11:30am

In 1764 Leopold Mozart was in London with his family, including his nine-year-old son, Wolfgang Amadeus. Money worries were never far from his mind. On September 13 he wrote to his landlord and banker back in Salzburg:

You’ve probably deduced that I’ll spend the entire winter here at least, and that, God willing, I’ll make my major profits of several thousand gulden. I’m now in a city that no one at our Salzburg court has ever yet dared to visit, and which, perhaps, no one will ever again visit. All or nothing.

We have come to our long journey’s...

Versatile Enough

Tuesday, September 12, 2017, 11:30am

The string quartet is a curiosity, a series of short dances for three violins and cello to be played on open strings. It’s attributed to Benjamin Franklin, and since he was so versatile, it’s tempting to assume that Franklin would also turn his attention to composing music.

Franklin played the harp, the guitar, and something called the glass dulcimer, but his best known contribution to music was his improvement of the so-called musical glasses. The instrument had become popular in Europe by 1746, when Christoph Willibald Gluck performed in London a “concerto on 26 drinking glasses tuned with spring water,”...

When It Mattered Most

Monday, September 11, 2017, 11:30am

Rick Rescorla was a soldier, not a musician. But he knew the power of music and he put it to work when it mattered most.

He was born in Cornwall in 1939. Some of his earliest memories were of Cornish songs, but American culture was also in the air as American troops stationed in England prepared for the invasion of German-occupied Europe.

As he grew up, Rescorla was less than a model student, mediocre in literature, undistinguished in music.

He was supposed to have a music lesson each week, a bout with a recorder still damp from use in the...

Pure Persistence

Friday, September 8, 2017, 11:30am

For music, it was the worst of times. In September 1940, as German planes began bombing London, the main thing on everyone’s minds was survival, and yet an important part of surviving was music.

At Queen’s Hall, after audiences for several performances were kept away by alerts that ran far into the night, conductor Sir Henry Wood was forced to announce that the popular Proms concerts would have to be suspended. Before long, there was no nighttime classical music in London.

The National Gallery and a few other places continued daytime concerts, but the advent of daytime raids required crowds...

The Mystery Remains

Thursday, September 7, 2017, 11:30am

Polish piano virtuoso Leopold Godowsky had disappeared.

On September 4, 1915, Godowsky left his home in Avon, New Jersey, telling his wife, Frieda, that he was going to New York to deposit $1000 in the bank. When he failed to come home, Frieda contacted the police, who determined that Godowsky had never been to the bank, although he had been to his hairdresser and had left saying that he was on his way to Pennsylvania Station to take the train back to New Jersey.

Godowsky had been missing for five days when events took a darker turn. A friend remembered...

Missing!

Wednesday, September 6, 2017, 11:30am

On September 4, 1915, a New York Times headline broke the story: Godowsky Missing. And so began one of the strangest disappearances in music history.

The celebrated Polish pianist Leopold Godowsky had been working at a fever pitch to complete a set of thirty piano adaptations for the Arts Publication Society Progressive Series of Piano Lessons. A series of interruptions at home had made the work slow going. On September 1 Godowsky had left home in Avon, New Jersey, telling his wife that he was taking the train into New York to deposit $1000 in the bank. Godowsky was wearing...

Smoke-Filled Rooms

Tuesday, September 5, 2017, 11:30am

Although he wrote a sublime German Requiem, Johannes Brahms knew all about the earthly–and earthy--side of music.

Brahms grew up in Hamburg in the 1840s in a family so poor that he had to go to work at the age of thirteen. Because he had remarkable talent, young Brahms had no trouble finding jobs playing the piano in local taverns and restaurants, and he soon became so popular that proprietors would call him away from home at all hours to play at dances for free drinks and a little money.

His mother, who also had gone to work at the...

The Misfit

Monday, September 4, 2017, 11:30am

As a composer he mastered vast thundering symphonies and sublime sacred choral works, but as a man Anton Bruckner was awkward and bumbling, especially with women.

When it came to the fair sex, the lifelong bachelor was a man of impulses. Once, while visiting a town to give an organ recital, he saw a beautiful girl in church. The next morning he asked for permission to marry her.

During a vacation in the Alps he was working on his Sixth Symphony, which shows no particular influence of the lofty mountains, but the diary he kept sports a long list of...

The Subversive

Friday, September 1, 2017, 11:30am

Eugene Luening had come through some hard times, and in 1908 he accepted a one-year appointment as director of the Music Department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He soon found that he would have to give up some of his freedom, but he never gave up his sense of humor.

When his young sons asked Luening what he would be doing in his new position, he replied that he would recruit an orchestra of eighty-five and a chorus of 300 from the university students to produce Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “We’ll do it on the lake,” he...

The Maelstrom

Thursday, August 31, 2017, 11:30am

The situation did not look good. The opera had the benefit of an ingenious librettist and a brilliant composer and yet, as the August 31, 1928, debut approached, few would have given more than two cents for The Threepenny Opera.

By midnight of opening day a visitor to the Berlin theater found the stage “filled with shouting people wildly gesticulating, yelling at each other,” their only point of agreement coming in the form of threats to the director, who reacted by shouting them down. “Smoke filled the air,” the visitor observed. “Crumpled papers, empty bottles and broken coffee cups littered...

Domestic Strife

Wednesday, August 30, 2017, 11:30am

His family life was a good deal less harmonious than his music. This is Mozart writing from Vienna to his father Leopold in Salzburg at the end of August 1782:

You want to know how I can flatter myself that I'll be the music master for the Princess? Well, Salieri can't teach her to play the clavier! He can only try to hamper me by recommending somebody else, and it's entirely possible that he's doing just that!

On the other hand, the Emperor knows me, and the last time the Princess was in Vienna, she would have been happy to...

The Hornet

Tuesday, August 29, 2017, 11:30am

Carl Maria von Weber had admired the lyrical poetry of Helmina von Chézy, and when the Vienna theater commissioned him to write an opera, he asked her to write the libretto. For her story, Chézy chose “The Tale of the Virtuous Euryanthe,” which was based on the timeworn device of a wager about a woman’s virtue.

The rambling, complicated, supernatural plot defied staging. After eleven revisions, Weber diverted himself with performances of his recent success, Der Freischütz, in Prague and Vienna. When he returned home to Dresden, he took walks in the woods, repeating Chézy’s poetry in an effort to...

A Tough Act To Follow

Monday, August 28, 2017, 11:30am

By the age of twenty-five, Johann Nepomuk Hummel already had a career that would’ve been the envy of a much older musician. As a child he had lived with Mozart and taken free keyboard lessons from him for two years. By the age of thirteen he had given a concert tour of Europe. He had just written a groundbreaking trumpet concerto.

It was 1804. Haydn was retiring as Kapellmeister for Prince Esterházy in Eisenstadt, and he recommended the young pianist to be his replacement.

The job turned into one of the greatest struggles of Hummel’s life.

Replacing Haydn was the...

Occupation and Liberation

Friday, August 25, 2017, 11:30am

During the German occupation of Paris, French musicians had to make a choice: perform for the enemy or risk all by remaining loyal to the Resistance and refusing. Among those who dared to refuse was organist and composer Jean Langlais.

Langlais thought it was particularly gratifying that the liberation of Paris by Allied troops came on August 25 since that was the feast day of St. Louis, the patron saint of the city. But liberation on that day in 1944 was dangerous. The city was still infested with rooftop snipers as the Germans retreated. Langlais described a performance that could...

An Emotional Maelstrom

Thursday, August 24, 2017, 11:30am

By the time he was in his thirties, composer Jules Massenet avoided public performances of his operas because the excitement was more than his nerves could take. In 1875, at the debut of his music for the mystical play Eve, he was in for a set of surprises that would throw the high-strung Frenchman into an emotional maelstrom.

Massenet had been heartened by what he described as “the superb general rehearsal,” which he had attended only because the theater was empty. Even so, during the debut he waited in a small café nearby as a friend brought him progress reports....

Repressed Delight

Wednesday, August 23, 2017, 11:30am

Because young Charles Burney admired the music of Thomas Arne, he was excited to meet him when Arne returned to London in August 1744 after two years in Dublin. He was all the more delighted when Arne offered to accept him as a student, tuition free.

A legal contract bound the eighteen-year-old Burney to Arne for seven years.

In exchange for room and board and learning his trade, Burney was expected to transcribe the music that Arne wrote for the Drury Lane theater, to teach it to the minor performers, to give lessons to Arne’s students, and to play in...

Surviving the Queen of Sheba

Tuesday, August 22, 2017, 11:30am

Karl Goldmark had poured his best efforts into his opera The Queen of Sheba and had high hopes for it. He was in for some shocks.

He submitted it to the Vienna Court Opera for the 1873 season. The Queen of Sheba went to the directors of the Court Opera, who took a dim view of it. They were already critics and rivals of Goldmark.

Next the opera went to the institution’s three conductors. One of them complained about its discords. The second, a frail old man, said that he was too sick to look at such a novel and...

Second Notice

Monday, August 21, 2017, 11:30am

As if the money problems weren’t bad enough, now Heinrich Schütz had to put up with disrespect. For thirty-five years he had been music director for Johann Georg, Elector of Saxony, and now, in 1652, the sixty-seven-year-old Schütz wanted to retire, but the signs were not good.

The elector had fallen on hard times, and salary payments to his court musicians had fallen behind. More than once, Schütz had written eloquently on their behalf, asking for some kind of financial relief. He wrote of a highly-respected bass singer, long in the service of the court, who had been forced to...

Wrestling With The Medium

Friday, August 18, 2017, 11:30am

In 1950 Gian Carlo Menotti directed the film version of his opera The Medium in Rome–his first film directing assignment. The crew also included a conductor who had never recorded a note of music and a cast of singers who had never seen a film studio.

“It would be highly inaccurate to say that I enjoyed making my first film,” Menotti said almost thirty years later. “I missed all along the spontaneity of the stage and its immediacy of expression.” He came to think of the camera as “a merciless Medusa that petrifies all freshness before it.”

So he rarely...

The Music Seeker

Thursday, August 17, 2017, 11:30am

English music critic Edward Holmes set out for the Continent in 1827, eager to experience the cultural excitement in cities where great composers had lived. When he reached Vienna, he was in for some surprises. He wrote in his travelogue:

At the smaller theaters in the Leopold Stadt and the Joseph Stadt nothing in a musical way is produced worth notice, though a Kapellmeister is there employed to beat the time to songs which are in the regular Astley and Sadler’s Wells style.

My English proprieties were somewhat scandalized at finding a number of young ladies introduced on the...

The Breakthrough

Wednesday, August 16, 2017, 11:30am

In 1841 Anglo-Irish composer Michael Balfe was down on his luck. He was in Paris, about to finish an opera tailor-made for soprano Giulia Grisi, when arrangements fell through, leaving him with little but his music and his optimism to sustain him.

Pierre Erard of the piano manufacturing firm offered to lend his salon for a benefit concert devoted entirely to Balfe’s music. He went on to say that he would invite various influential personages from the Paris musical establishment.

The “Grande Concert Balfe” attracted a full house of those expecting to be entertained by the failure of an Englishman...

Not Good Enough

Thursday, January 4, 2018, 11:30am

The young man was one of the most handsome in Boston, seemingly a classical Greek statue that had come to life and put on modern clothes. He was also spoiled, and all efforts to make him work had failed. An attempt to turn him into a journalist had sent him to India, from which he returned more...

The Elusive Moment

Wednesday, January 3, 2018, 11:30am

Although he enjoyed living in Paris, English composer Frederick Delius was restless and unable to concentrate. He was working on a piano concerto, but had hit an impasse. Thirteen years earlier he had made a musical breakthrough at Solano Grove, his father’s orange plantation on the banks of the St...

We Need a Mirror

Tuesday, January 2, 2018, 11:30am

On January 2, 1875, Edvard Grieg wrote about what would become his best known music to author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. He was not altogether enthusiastic: Peer Gynt has turned out the way you said it would. It looms over me like a bad dream, and there’s no way I can be done with it until spring. It...

The New Year's Gift

Monday, January 1, 2018, 11:30am

Robert and Clara Schumann started the New Year with high hopes. They had earned so little in 1845 that Christmas had amounted to no more than lighting the tree and giving the children a few little trinkets. They had been unable to afford anything for each other. But they had arranged a promising...

The Humpty-Dumpty Concerto

Friday, December 29, 2017, 11:30am

The two sisters from Baltimore so impressed Max Bruch with their performance of his Fantasy for Two Pianos that he agreed to write a two-piano concerto for them. Writing it would be relatively easy, putting it back together would be the hard part. When Ottilie and Rose Sutro asked Bruch to write...

The Magic Touch

Thursday, December 28, 2017, 11:30am

Canadian pianist Glenn Gould had enough quirks as it was, but a concert tour of Israel brought out even more. He was scheduled to play Beethoven’s Second Piano Concerto in Jerusalem on a cold December day, but let it be known that he had changed his mind. He and his manager had been to the hall, he...

Summation

Wednesday, December 27, 2017, 11:30am

As the year 1842 ended, Gaetano Donizetti was nominated to become a corresponding member of the prestigious French Academy. Coming at the twilight of his career, his acceptance speech was an opportunity for the composer to sum up his philosophy of music. He devoted a significant part of his remarks...

The Price of a Comeback

Tuesday, December 26, 2017, 11:30am

On December 12, 1800, Napoleon had survived an assassination attempt in Paris, and although a number of bystanders were killed by the explosive device known as “the infernal machine,” a deputation from Paris societies and corporations waited to congratulate the First Consul on his escape...

Christmas 1818

Monday, December 25, 2017, 11:30am

December 25th, 1818, was a red-letter day for Christmas music large and small. According to legend, mice had damaged the organ in St. Nicholas’ church in the Bavarian village of Oberndorf, causing it to break down on Christmas Eve. The setback forced the organist and the parish priest to scrap the...

King of Kings

Friday, December 22, 2017, 11:30am

“Having just done a picture in which Jesus played a supporting role, I was dumbfounded to learn that the new film was King of Kings , in which he was the star.” So said composer Miklós Rózsa in his autobiography about the MGM assignment that followed his Oscar-winning work on the 1959 film Ben-Hur...

The Tightrope Walker

Thursday, December 21, 2017, 11:30am

Johannes Brahms held his gruffness at bay when writing to thank Elizabet von Herzogenberg for sending some duets her husband Heinz had written, music that Brahms didn’t entirely care for. His reply also included some of his own choral songs, plus a copy of a “very special favorite”--Georges Bizet’s...

The Connection

Wednesday, December 20, 2017, 11:30am

After writing the librettos to operas by Mozart, Salieri, Gluck, and other prominent composers, Lorenzo Da Ponte fell on hard times and sailed for brighter prospects in America. But, after a stint as a grocer in New York led to more financial setbacks, he was again insolvent. By December 1807,...

The Nettlesome Messiah

Tuesday, December 19, 2017, 11:30am

For Christmas 1881 the Cincinnati Music Festival Association wanted to top its lackluster performance of the previous year and at the same time to upstage the festival of a rival opera company in the same city. So conductor Theodore Thomas hired the most famous prima donna of the day–Madame Adelina...

A Remarkable Christmas Present

Monday, December 18, 2017, 11:30am

On December 18th, 1867, violinist Joseph Joachim was in Vienna and eager to get home to Hanover. He wrote to his wife Amalie about Christmas plans and a remarkable present for the thirteen-year-old son of Robert and Clara Schumann: I’m getting an early start on the twenty-third, and God willing, I...

Professionals

Friday, December 15, 2017, 11:30am

Robert Schumann did more than anyone else to make the music of Johannes Brahms known to the world. After Schumann’s death in 1856, his widow Clara continued to promote the piano music of Brahms by performing it in and around Leipzig. On December 15, 1861, just before the publication of his...

An Easy Act to Follow

Thursday, December 14, 2017, 11:30am

As the new court pianist of Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III of France, Emil Waldteufel was expected to play dance music for the autumn house parties of the imperial family. The social occasions at the castle of Compiègne, fifty miles north of Paris, included not just the aristocracy, but also...

The Right Audience

Wednesday, December 13, 2017, 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

Tuesday, December 12, 2017, 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

Monday, December 11, 2017, 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...

Cardboard Rocks

Friday, December 8, 2017, 11:30am

When it came to judging fellow composers Peter Tchaikovsky had strong opinions. He wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, on December 8, 1877: I attended Wagner’s Die Valkürye. It was a wonderful production. The orchestra was excellent. The singers did everything they could to make the best of...

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