Grace Notes

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

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 journal:

A steamer in sight! It is the Golden City, which left San Francisco two days ago. The captain comes on board, and, in the midst of questions from all passengers who crowd the staircase, hurls these words like thunderbolts: “Richmond is taken, Lee has surrendered, Lincoln is assassinated.”

The news, more...

A Russian Retreat

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 Schumann–to promote her concerts. In Russia, without the help of the Czarina, she was on her own.

Those Russians who did befriend Novello left something to be desired. Behind the formal façades of their mansions she found foul-smelling air, and unwashed squalor. “I learned,” she wrote, “to know by the evil smells...

The Mother-in-Law

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 were going for ten dollars apiece, five times what most men could hope to earn in a day. Money was of no great interest to Mrs. Thorp, though. As the wife of a wealthy lumberman from Eau Claire, she had plenty of it. She was drawn to the spectacular musicianship...

Why He Quit

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 done his best to bend Ives’ unorthodox ideas into the conventions of symphonic form.

Ives had been a church organist in Danbury and New Haven, Connecticut, from the age of fourteen and was well acquainted with traditional music for Sunday services, and yet he couldn’t resist the occasional foray into fresh harmonies...

Szymanowski vs. America

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 Liverpool. During their last day aboard ship, the group steeled themselves with a drink before their foray into prohibition country. Szymanowski was bowled over by the skyscrapers that reminded him of medieval castles, by the lights in Times Square, and by what he called “the strange, unintentional beauty of Broadway.”

He rubbed elbows with the...

Humble But Powerful

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-turner could sap his enthusiasm, and on the other, a page-turner who was too caught up in the music could distract him with heavy breathing.

During a Paris concert with cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, Newton asked the house manager to find a page-turner for him. Just as the performance was due to begin, “a...

To Be or Not To Be

Friday, April 13, 2018, 11:30am

Photo of English composer Havergal Brian

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 Staffordshire to London hoping to make a new beginning, but only by chance did he avoid coming to a bad end.

After settling in a set of cheap rooms, he came up with a plan to compose and to make his earlier works known to critics while he looked for employment as a...

The Backwater

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 Music. The society soon joined forces with the languishing Harmonic Society, and the merger gave Smetana the chance to broaden his experience as a conductor.

Broadening the musical tastes of his musicians and audiences would not be so easy.

Smetana’s homesickness was alleviated by a fellow Czech named...

Make It a Hit

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 attempt to make money, he published a collection of whimsical sketches called Evenings with the Orchestra. It includes an encounter with a musical hack who makes a fortune by having “killed and skinned the works of celebrated composers.”

One day a musician named Corsino encounters the arranger Marescot dressed up in a brand-new...

The Curse

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 an even stranger aftermath.

Set on an island resembling Haiti, this Macbeth had three witches that were real voodoo priestesses and a team of authentic African drummers, led by a genuine witch doctor named Abdul.

Thomson was to provide incidental music for the pit orchestra plus sound effects from a backstage percussion group...

The Reluctant Teacher

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 teacher.

He was supposed to come at three o’clock....We would wait, wait, wait; and I was always glad if I thought he was not coming, for I was afraid of him...Not that he ever scolded, but the way he would look at you through those eye-glasses! Our apartment had several...

The Long Struggle Back

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 from London to Norwich to earn some money, he collapsed and had to return to London destitute.

Facing arrest and imprisonment for debt, he worked as best he could, made some money playing the organ, taught, and wrote church music, but within a few months, he was again...

Rough Play

Thursday, April 5, 2018, 11:30am

In the years leading up to World War I, concert disturbances brought on by clashing musical tastes became commonplace in Europe, and Italy was no exception.

A patron asked Alfredo Casella to conduct a concert of contemporary music in the Teatro Augusteo. He prepared works by Jean Roger-Ducasse, Albéric Magnard, the first Italian performance of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe Suite No. 2, his own Notte di maggio, and Stravinsky’s Petrouchka--a rather risky program to put before Roman audiences of the day.

The first several pieces encountered a “glacial” reception, but Petrouchka, which had forced Casella to fight the orchestra’s resistance...

The Devious Employee

Wednesday, April 4, 2018, 11:30am

The most capable employee does not always make the most compliant one, as will be apparent in a letter that Mozart wrote from Vienna to his father in Salzburg on April 4, 1781, while he was employed by the Archbishop of Salzburg:

I can assure you that I was very pleased with the Viennese public yesterday when I performed at the concert for the widows of the Kartnerthor Theater. I had to begin all over again because the applause never let up. So how much do you suppose I’d make if I were to give a concert of my own...

The Uninspired Student

Tuesday, April 3, 2018, 11:30am

Carl Czerny counted many great pianists among his students and at least one pianist who, apparently, was not so great, but whose uncle knew something about music and sent Czerny a letter in an effort to make the lessons go more smoothly. In 1817 Czerny received a letter from Ludwig van Beethoven:

My dear Czerny! Please be as patient as you can with our Karl, even though at the moment he may not be making as much progress as you and I would like. If you are not patient, he will do even less well because (even though he must...

Square One

Monday, April 2, 2018, 11:30am

As World War I ended, Romanian composer Georges Enesco had two reasons to be worried.

He had turned his concert earnings over to his father to invest, thinking that the earnings would enable him to retire to the country and spend his time writing music.

The elder Enesco had invested the money in land, and the deterioration of the Romanian economy during the war had wiped out his savings. And then land reforms promised by King Ferdinand resulted in the confiscation of much of his father’s estate. Financially, Enesco was back to square one. He would have to go back...

The Contented Listener

Friday, March 30, 2018, 11:30am

Although London conductor Henry Wood had led orchestras through all kinds of difficulties, he wasn’t quite prepared for an engagement with the Queen’s Hall Orchestra at the Hippodrome in 1909.

Wood first noticed the problem during rehearsal. “I noticed an appalling smell of fish,” he recalled. He wondered where it was coming from, especially since it got worse as the rehearsal went on. At the end of the rehearsal Wood sought out the manager for an explanation.

“Oh yes,” the manager said. “That’s the sea-lion.”

Wood must have thought he was speaking a foreign language. “The sea-lion?” he repeated. “What...

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,...

How Veracini Broke His Leg

Monday, August 13, 2018, 11:30am

Music making was highly competitive in the Baroque era. We have two accounts of Francesco Maria Veracini's last days at the court in Dresden. Both of them spell disaster. Veracini was a world-famous violinist. He had come from Florence hoping to get a high-paying position at the Dresden court...

Christ Suffered More Than You

Friday, August 10, 2018, 11:30am

On August 10th, 1842 Mikhail Glinka and a few friends passed a pleasant evening playing a first run-through of his opera Russlan and Ludmilla. When the full-scale debut took place, the experience was not so congenial--as Glinka reports in his memoirs. During rehearsals it became clear that cuts...

A Simple & Private Wedding

Thursday, August 9, 2018, 11:30am

The pianist and composer Percy Grainger liked to do things in a big way. He was a showman, an eccentric, maybe even a madman when it came to music--and his own wedding. The Australian-born Grainger had been in the United States for some time when the Swedish poet and painter Ella Viola Strom agreed...

The Request

Wednesday, August 8, 2018, 11:30am

It began as a congenial summer evening, but it didn't end that way. Franz Schubert and some fellow musicians had walked over to a suburb of Vienna to taste a new wine that Schubert liked. They moved on to a tavern and afterwards to a coffeehouse where they whiled away the hours with hot punch and a...

The Opera War

Tuesday, August 7, 2018, 11:30am

For the 1883 American season music agent James Mapelson wanted to beat out a new competing opera company so he dared to bring together two of the most tempermental singers in the world. He would soon find out that his biggest problem was not his competitor, but his two divas. Mapelson already had a...

The Mangled Serenade

Monday, August 6, 2018, 11:30am

It was no ordinary singing club. Its members paraded through the streets accompanied by fifty to a hundred bodyguards. The extra muscle was necessary. When rival clubs clashed, they did more than sing--they fought. America was being pulled apart by sectionalism, and the 1856 presidential contest...

The Concert Storm

Friday, August 3, 2018, 11:30am

In 1852 the American educator Lowell Mason was traveling through Europe observing and reporting on musical life there. On the third of August he attended a concert of orchestral and choral music in Düsseldorf. He reported that music had to wait for a more powerful force: The rehearsal being closed...

Fundamental Differences

Thursday, August 2, 2018, 11:30am

The 1930s composer best knew Erich Wolfgang Korngold for his popular Hollywood film scores. His friend Arnold Schoenberg was known--or notorious--for his avante garde musical experiments. Korngold's son George recalled one lively argument between the two. Despite their differences, Krongold was...

The Most Musical

Wednesday, August 1, 2018, 11:30am

He's been described as the most musical of all U.S. presidents, but Harry S. Truman was as outspoken about his musical tastes and abilities as he was about everything else. Truman had always taken to music [With the encouragement of his mother, he took piano lessons from the time he was eight until...

The Inconsiderate Duke

Tuesday, July 31, 2018, 11:30am

The year 1778 was a difficult one for Mozart. At age 22 he had gone to Paris to bolster his international reputation. During his stay in the French capital his mother died, and when he finally was able to turn back to business he found that his reputation as a child prodigy was getting in the way...

The Crystal Palace

Monday, July 30, 2018, 11:30am

Violinist Joseph Joachim was one of the best, and he performed all over Europe. He learned where to play and where not to play, as he wrote in a letter to Clara Schumann from London at the end of July 1858: I don't think ti's very kind or trustful of you to suspect me of going on a tour for money...

Words You Can Understand

Friday, July 27, 2018, 11:30am

In the spring of 1561 the Santa Maria Maggiore church in Rome hired a new choirmaster. His name was Giovanni Perluigi da Palestrina, and his abilities as a composer of church music would become legendary. Santa Maria Maggiore had a down-to-earth problem that persists in many church choirs today. It...

Dvorak Goes to the Fair

Thursday, July 26, 2018, 11:30am

In the summer of 1893 the great Bohemian composer Antonin Dvorak paid a celebrated visit to the Bohemian community of Spillville, Iowa. It was a peaceful sojourn during which Dvorak made a side trip to a vortex of chaos known as the World's Columbian Exposition Quadricentennial in Chicago. The "...

The Literary Critic

Wednesday, July 25, 2018, 11:30am

Peter Tchaikovsky had nothing but praise for the French music of his time. He valued George Bizet's opera Carmen above anything produced by the Russian national school, and he was so taken with Jules Massenet's opera Maria Madeleine that he wrote a duet based on words by Tolstoi to a tune inspired...

The Boy Who Dared

Tuesday, July 24, 2018, 11:30am

The young soloist had made up his mind. He was going to play Beethoven's Violin Concerto with the New York Symphony-even though the conductor and the New York music critics scoffed at the idea. When push came to shove, they all gave way for Yehudi Menuhin. The year was 1927. Walter Damrosch was...

Respect for a Master

Monday, July 23, 2018, 11:30am

By 1750, Francesco Geminiani had been in England off and on for more than 35 years. He had become known as one of Europe's finest composers and violinists. Running short of money, he decided to conduct a benefit concert at Covent Garden. Unfortunately, conducting was not his strong suit, but his...

The Concert from Hell

Friday, July 20, 2018, 11:30am

Call it the concert from hell. In his autobiography, Louis Spohr tells of a performance that got off to a bad start and hit the skids to disaster. It happened during a German tour in 1811. Before the concert a wealthy amateur treated the musicians to a lavish evening of dinner and champagne. The...

The Innovator

Thursday, July 19, 2018, 11:30am

He was a major innovator in the insurance industry. He created the concept of estate planning and introduced the idea of training schools for insurance agents. When it came to composing music Charles Ives was also a mover and shaker, but followers were few. In 1910, a business acquaintance talked...

The Masterpiece

Wednesday, July 18, 2018, 11:30am

Peter Tchaikovsky had reservations about his fellow Russian composers, but great respect for a contemporary from France—George Bizet, composer of Carmen. In a letter to his brother Modeste he wrote on July 18", 1880: “To refresh myself last night I played Carmen from start to finish and all my...

The Theft

Tuesday, July 17, 2018, 11:30am

Musicians are never far from the possibility of a professional catastrophe. But when it became known that composer Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst suffered from an incurable illness, his friend, violinist Joseph Joachim, participated in a benefit concert for Ernst. Then came a second blow, which Ernst...

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