Grace Notes

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

Richard Strauss admired the music of Richard Wagner, and so he felt honored in 1893 when he received an invitation from Wagner’s widow Cosima to conduct during the consummate Wagnerian event, the Bayreuth Festival.

But the honor would come with strings attached.

Part of Cosima’s motive for the invitation came from the formation of a rival festival in nearby Munich. The director of the Munich festival put it into direct competition with Bayreuth by announcing a new production of Wagner’s Lohengrin, the same opera Bayreuth had presented on its season’s opening night.

The Munich director also invited Strauss to conduct...

Tell Me When It's Over

Monday, July 31, 2017, 11:30am

Many audience members at classical music concerts are not sure when to applaud. Even in the most sophisticated and controlled circumstances, premature applause can create an awkward break in a performance. One person who knew first-hand was President John F. Kennedy.

According to Kennedy social secretary Letitia Baldrige, on more than one occasion during East Room concerts at the White House, Kennedy was uncertain as to whether a concert was over and found himself clapping at the wrong time. Even when he was following a printed program he had trouble keeping up with the procession of movements within a single...

The Daring Recitalist

Friday, July 28, 2017, 11:30am

Just after the turn of the twentieth century, as he arrived to play in a Western mining town, English pianist Harold Bauer was in for a culture clash.

He traveled with Pop Bacon, a piano tuner who knew him well and warned him, “These people don’t understand sarcasm and they don’t like it.” He suggested that using it might prompt some large person to punch the pianist.

The town was, to Bauer’s way of thinking, “very wealthy and very crude.” The Opera House was packed to capacity and rang with the banging of seats being turned down as ushers hawked...

Milestone or Millstone?

Thursday, July 27, 2017, 11:30am

Ravel had Bolero, Rachmaninoff had his Prelude in C-sharp minor, and Constant Lambert had The Rio Grande–a work so popular that it overshadowed everything else he wrote. Like Ravel and Rachmaninoff, Lambert came to resent the public’s partiality to one of his works above all others. Unlike them, Lambert became best known for what is probably his best piece of music.

Lambert came from an aristocratic London background and early on was drawn to American jazz. In 1927 a poem by Sacheverell Sitwell inspired the twenty-two-year-old Lambert to write a work for solo piano, chorus, and an orchestra without woodwinds....

A Disturbing, Chaotic Life

Wednesday, July 26, 2017, 11:30am

After a heavy bombardment, Vienna had fallen to Napoleon’s army on May 10,1809, and life became difficult for the city’s residents. In a letter to Leipzig publisher Breitkopf and Hertel, Beethoven wrote on July 26:

You are quite wrong to assume that things have been going well for me. The truth is, we’ve passed through a heavy concentration of misery. Since the fourth of May I’ve produced very little coherent work, no more than a fragment here and there. The entire course of events has affected me body and soul. Nor can I give myself over to the enjoyment of...

Last Visitor at Troldhaugen

Tuesday, July 25, 2017, 11:30am

Australian pianist and composer Percy Grainger grew up hearing the piano pieces of Edvard Grieg, and by the time he was in his twenties he had put the Norwegian “in the firmament of my compositional stars.” He had no idea that the admiration was mutual.

A friend of Grieg’s had shown him Grainger’s settings of Irish and Welsh folksongs. Grieg liked them so much that he sent a signed photograph of himself inscribed “To Percy Grainger with thanks for your splendid choruses.”

Two years later, in May 1906, Grieg was in London, where his wife Nina was to give two...

Transformed into Singing Voices

Monday, July 24, 2017, 11:30am

In July 1825 Franz Schubert was traveling through Upper Austria, enjoying mountain scenery and the company of friends. From the picturesque city of Steyr he wrote to his parents:

In Steyreck we stayed with Countess Wiessenwolf, who is a great admirer of my humble self, owns everything I have written, and sings many of the things very beautifully too.

The Walter Scott songs impressed her so favorably that she made it patently clear that she would not object at all if I were to dedicate them to her. But as far as they are concerned, I intend to break...

Communication Failure

Friday, July 21, 2017, 11:30am

The Liverpool Philharmonic Society had suffered from a shaky performance of Mendelssohn’s incidental music to Athalie, and when a blistering review prompted the infirm conductor to resign, the Society invited German composer Max Bruch to take over the helm. Bruch accepted the job. An oversight would make him regret the decision.

Bruch had already served as a guest conductor for the Society, leading successful performances of his own oratorios in 1877 and ’78, and so he had good reason to trust that his permanent appointment as Musical Director would be equally harmonious, and in the spring of 1880 he left...

The Desirable Ordeal

Thursday, July 20, 2017, 11:30am

Attending the Bayreuth Festival became all the rage for musicians in the late nineteenth century. The annual tribute to Wagner’s operas drew performers and composers from all over the world. But it took a toll on its attendees, as composer Hugo Wolf wrote to Melanie Köchert on July 20, 1891:

Fortunately the first performance is over. I nodded off from time to time during Acts 1 and 3, and I’m just glad that I was able to take in most of the work. Bayreuth has put me in the worst of moods, and I’m not about to surrender myself again...

Monster

Wednesday, July 19, 2017, 11:30am

American bandleader Patrick Gilmore came to England to recruit performers for a giant concert to be part of a World Peace Jubilee. Gilmore had in mind an ensemble of 20,000 that would “whip creation” in size and sound.

Not everyone was thrilled by the so-called “monster concerts” that swept through nineteenth-century America. One participant, singer Erminia Rudersdorff, wrote to critic Joseph Bennett from Springfield, Massachusetts, on July 19, 1872:

Altogether the festival has been a terrible humbug and failure. It was a hideous nightmare, and all are awaking, and trying to believe it never took place. A.B. will tell you...

No Excuses

Tuesday, July 18, 2017, 11:30am

English violist William Primrose made a policy of never making excuses for his performances, no matter how difficult the circumstances surrounding them.

While he was a member of the prestigious London String Quartet, the ensemble was scheduled to perform at New York’s Town Hall. The program included works that had particularly hard viola parts–the B-flat Quartet by Brahms and the Debussy quartet.

Before the concert, Primrose stepped outside to relax. While taking in the fresh spring air, he decided that a cigarette would be just the thing, so he lit a match. But he neglected to close the cover, and...

The Elusive Muse

Monday, July 17, 2017, 11:30am

Although he was one of the world’s great composers, Giacomo Puccini sometimes despaired as he searched for the subject of his next opera. Two years after the success of his 1910 masterpiece La Fanciulla del West, he considered basing an opera on another American subject, Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. He tinkered with the idea of using the fragmentary novel A Florentine Tragedy by Oscar Wilde. He thought about working with George du Maurier’s wildly successful 1894 Gothic novel Trilby, which in 1896 had become the first book to be adapted for film.

In a letter to Luigi Illica, who...

The Ironical Genius

Friday, July 14, 2017, 11:30am

On July 14, 1836, Felix Mendelssohn wrote from Frankfurt to his mother and his sister Rebecca in Berlin about the cultural and geographical landscape:

Early yesterday I went to see Ferdinand Hiller, and sitting there I found none other than Rossini. Big, fat, and in a sunny mood. I know very few men who can be as amusing and clever as he is when he feels like it. He kept us laughing the whole time. I promised that the Cecilia Association would sing the B minor Mass for him and several other works by Sebastian Bach. It will be all...

Roads Not Taken

Thursday, July 13, 2017, 11:30am

Malcolm Arnold’s music for David Lean’s 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai earned him an Oscar, but he described composing it as one of the worst jobs he’d ever had.

He had only ten days to write thirty-five minutes of music for an enormous orchestra that included three marimbas, a large section of untuned percussion, and a military band. He wrote through the night as couriers waited to carry the score to the copyists. “It gave all the people working on it a very great headache,” Arnold recalled, adding that he was “lucky to be alive the way...

The Guest of Honor

Wednesday, July 12, 2017, 11:30am

One of the highlights of composer Victor Herbert’s life was a music festival that took place in Zurich in 1882. Herbert, a young cellist with the Royal Orchestra of Stuttgart, was among those chosen to attend. The five-day event was largely a tribute to Franz Liszt, who had fostered the careers of many composers to follow, ranging from the celebrated Richard Wagner to a dazzling new American pianist named Edward MacDowell.

The first four days of the festival included formal and informal performances by various composers and performers Liszt had championed, plus a presentation of his oratorio The Legend of...

A Concert for Summer

Tuesday, July 11, 2017, 11:30am

During a tour of Europe, Boston hymnist and music educator Lowell Mason was enchanted by an outdoor concert that took place near Berlin at an Elbe resort called Linchen Erben. In his journal for July 11, 1837, he described a radiant summer evening in which the music and the surroundings blended perfectly.

He described a house with several acres of grounds, walks, shade, and groves, and tables and seating for several hundred amid booths, tents, and small houses. Wandering about the lawns were men, women, and children “of all sizes” and many dogs. Many of the men were smoking pipes...

A Summer Song

Monday, July 10, 2017, 11:30am

In the summer of 1876, English baritone and composer George Henschel was vacationing on the German island of Rügen in the Baltic Sea. The day after his arrival, Johannes Brahms came up to visit him, and Brahms led Henschel to music in an unexpected place.

On July 10 Henschel bought a hammock and hung it between two trees in a beech forest with a view of the sea. “We both managed to climb into it simultaneously, an amusing, though by no means easy task to accomplish,” Henschel recalled.

Henschel remembered an idle hour or two as Brahms, in a cheerful...

Unforeseen Advantages

Friday, July 7, 2017, 11:30am

In 1941, as Europe waged war, Gerald Finzi wanted to do something for the war effort.

He was offered a job at the BBC that he described as “the usual sort of thing, where one would have been involved with a little music and much, much office work, concert agency, and all the BBC schmozzle!” He turned it down, saying “I would really prefer to be in the army than do that sort of thing.”

Soon afterward, Finzi joined the Ministry of War Transport, where he was put in charge of South American Shipping. He expressed his enthusiasm to his...

Sour Success

Thursday, July 6, 2017, 11:30am

With the acclaimed debut of his First Symphony just a few weeks behind him, Dmitri Shostakovich was in for a different experience when it played elsewhere. On July 6, 1926, the nineteen-year-old composer wrote from Ukraine to his mother in Leningrad about a performance by an orchestra in Kharkov.

The concert took place in a garden. As the conductor prepared to start, some nearby dogs began barking. The longer he waited, the louder they barked, much to the merriment of the audience. When the symphony finally got underway, the trumpeter botched his opening phrase and the bassoonist chimed in with...

The Day Job

Wednesday, July 5, 2017, 11:30am

When violinist Leopold Auer was a little-known Düsseldorf concertmaster, he managed to line up a performance in Wiesbaden, a big step toward a solo career. With new confidence, he put up in one of the town’s best hotels and wasted no time going to the casino, where he ran into an acquaintance, the famous violinist Henri Wieniawski.

Wieniawski confided to Auer that he had a sure-fire gambling system. He and Moscow Conservatory director Nikolai Rubinstein had come from St. Petersburg and had recently worked the system in Caen, with such certainty that he expected to break the casino at any...

Music and More

Tuesday, July 4, 2017, 11:30am

Although his disabilities made William Billings of Boston unsuited for service as a soldier during the American Revolution, he made a lasting contribution to the cause in the form of song.

By 1770, when he wrote his collection New England Psalm Singer, tensions were already high between American colonists and their English rulers. As a composer, Billings had been affected by the Stamp Act of 1765 and the Townshend Acts of 1767 and 1770, which raised the cost of paper. Massachusetts instituted a policy of barring the importation of all goods subject to the duties, and so a combination of...

Taking It in Stride

Monday, July 3, 2017, 11:30am

How did Hector Berlioz cope with the pressures of life as a composer and conductor? With a lively sense of humor. It comes out in a letter he wrote from London to Theodore Ritter on July 3, 1855.

A ghastly rehearsal at Exeter Hall yesterday. Glover’s cantata in a piquant style, but difficult, and I was sweating enough to engorge the gutters in the Strand, and the finale of my Harold in Italy, a ferocious concerto by Henselt played by Mr. Klindworth in a free style, which kept me dancing on a slack rope for an hour, and Cooper, our...

Unacceptable Conditions

Friday, June 30, 2017, 11:30am

Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck wanted to marry, and when Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck, raised objections, most of them having to do with money, Schumann wrote to a Leipzig attorney named Einert on June 30, 1839:

A few weeks ago, to our surprise, Clara received his written permission with certain conditions, which I hope will not give you the wrong impression of me:

1. That we should not live in Saxony during his lifetime, but that I should make an effort to earn as much elsewhere as I do through editing a musical paper here.

2. That he should keep...

None of These Men Will Compare

Thursday, June 29, 2017, 11:30am

At the age of twenty-three, Robert Schumann was a keen judge of his fellow pianists, and he got to know most of the virtuosi in Leipzig not long after his arrival in the city. But he was most impressed by one of his students, a thirteen-year-old prodigy, and he wrote about her in a letter to his mother in June 1833:

Now that I am acquainted with all the principal virtuosi except Hummel, I’m beginning to realize that my own achievements were once considerable. These great people, instead of offering us something new or original, as we expect, are too...

A Whimsical Beginning

Wednesday, June 28, 2017, 11:30am

Felix Mendelssohn never wrote a significant opera, but, while trying to, he kept his good spirits. On June 28, 1834, he wrote a whimsical letter to librettist Karl Klingemann. At the top of the page the gifted composer--and painter–drew a cartoon of noisy trumpets and kettledrums.

Here you have a fanfare for the beginning of the opera. Have you really begun it? Send me right away the first line at least, or better still, everything that’s done. In all seriousness, my dear boy, I am very grateful to you and I beg you to stay with it now, so that...

Into the Smoke

Tuesday, June 27, 2017, 11:30am

On June 27, 1847, Giuseppe Verdi was in London, hoping to further the cause of his operas, when he wrote to Giuseppina Appiani:

Glory to the sun, which I have always loved so much, but which I now worship, since I’ve been dwelling in this fog and smoke, which chokes me and blinds my spirit! Nonetheless, what a magnificent city! It has things that stop you in your tracks. But the climate ruins all the beauties. Oh, if only there were a Neapolitan sky here, you’d have no need to wish for Paradise.

I have yet to begin the rehearsals...

A Summer Prank

Monday, June 26, 2017, 11:30am

Muzio Clementi was one of the most diverse musicians of his time. He was a celebrated pianist. He manufactured and sold pianos. He was a major composer. He was a publisher. And if one account is true, Clementi was also focused to a fault.

In his memoirs, oboist William Parke wrote of a hot summer day in 1796 and an outing during which Clementi and a cellist named John Crosdill went swimming while visiting the estate of the Earl of Pembroke. Hearing of Clementi’s absent-mindedness, Crosdill decided to test it. While Clementi continued to swim, Crosdill sneaked off with his...

Even One Note

Friday, June 23, 2017, 11:30am

It wasn’t that Pablo Casals was always kind. After all, the fiery-tempered Spaniard had once punished a double-dealing manager with some rough turns in a revolving door. But when it came to judging students, the celebrated cellist could be gentle almost to a fault.

In the late 1920s he was staying at the Berlin home of Francesco von Mendelssohn, a distant relative of composer Felix Mendelssohn, who invited up-and-coming cellist Gregor Piatigorsky to come over and meet Casals and another guest, the young pianist Rudolph Serkin.

Casals said that he always enjoyed meeting young, talented musicians. He wanted to hear...

The Missing Ingredient

Thursday, June 22, 2017, 11:30am

In 1889, one M. P. Byelyayev decided to promote Russian music at the Paris Universal Exposition. He arranged for two symphonic concerts of Russian music at the Tocadéro Hall to be conducted by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Also participating would be a pianist named Lavrov and the impressive young composer Alexander Glazunov, who would be represented on the program by his second symphony and a symphonic poem.

The French orchestra was excellent and the music included some of the best new works Russia had to offer--including Rimsky-Korsakov’s own Antar Symphony and major compositions by Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Borodin, among others.

The audience...

No Conductor in the World

Wednesday, June 21, 2017, 11:30am

During the summer of 1921 Igor Stravinsky was in London, where his Symphonies of Wind Instruments was to be performed for the first time as part of a program conducted by the distinguished Serge Koussevitsky. Stravinsky dedicated the work to the memory of Claude Debussy, but he didn’t expect any great popular success with the symphony because he had written it to appeal to the intellect rather than attempting to please his audience by playing on the emotions. He later described the work as “an austere ritual” that consisted of “short litanies” between groups of instruments that didn’t provide any...

More Than They Bargained For

Wednesday, November 8, 2017, 11:30am

As a child pianist, Erich Wolfgang Korngold had impressed Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. By 1934, when the composer came to Hollywood, he wasn’t about to let a movie producer tell him how to do his job. Hal Wallis had brought Korngold to town for Warner Brothers, to tailor the music of Felix...

The Congressman and the Conductor

Tuesday, November 7, 2017, 11:30am

In 1938 twenty-six-year-old Erich Leinsdorf was in New York building a career as a conductor for the Metropolitan Opera when his visa expired, requiring him to return to Austria. For professional and personal reasons, it was a bad time to go home. Young Leinsdorf had risen quickly in the ranks of...

Saved!

Monday, November 6, 2017, 11:30am

On November 6, 1891, Peter Tchaikovsky had just conducted his new symphonic poem Voyevode in a Moscow concert arranged by his young editor Alexander Siloti. The applause seemed restrained, and when Tchaikovsky came back into the artists’ greenroom, he destroyed the manuscript and told the attendant...

Picaresque

Friday, November 3, 2017, 11:30am

Soldier, gambler, churchman, author, womanizer—Giacomo Casanova was all of them, and a musician whose misadventures matched his headlong lifestyle. At twenty-one he was a mediocre violinist in Venice’s San Samuele theater, later describing himself as “a menial journeyman of a sublime art in which,...

The Latest from Paris

Wednesday, November 1, 2017, 11:30am

At the beginning of November 1853, Franz Liszt wrote from Weimar to violinist Joseph Joachim in Hanover about musical discoveries he had made during a recent visit to Paris: As for news from Paris, I have none except for the vigorous rehearsing of Meyerbeer’s new opera L’Étoile du Nord at the Opéra...

The Séance

Tuesday, October 31, 2017, 11:30am

One night in 1887 William James, the celebrated psychologist, and George Henschel, the English composer and conductor, arrived at a rundown house on Rutland Street in Boston. With them was singer Nettie Huxley, whose mischievous expression was at odds with the somber purpose of the visit--to...

Surprise!

Monday, October 30, 2017, 11:30am

October 31 was Mozart’s name-day–the feast day of Saint Wolfgang, for whom Mozart was named--and when the day came around in 1781, the twenty-five-year-old composer was in for a surprise. A few days afterward he wrote from Vienna to his father Leopold in Salzburg: Just as I was going to write to...

The Reluctant Conductor

Friday, October 27, 2017, 11:30am

Aram Khachaturian was nervous. In the 1930s and ’40s he had made a name for himself as one of the Soviet Union’s foremost composers. He had long wanted to conduct, but in 1950, when he was invited to conduct a performance of some of his music, he hesitated. “At least come to the rehearsals,” he was...

Why the Music Stopped

Thursday, October 26, 2017, 11:30am

John Ireland wrote plenty of music before and after, but in the chronology of his works, the year 1928 was fallow, and with good reason. He was recovering from his marriage. For some time, one of Ireland’s more talented piano students was not up to her usual standard. Her name was Dorothy Phillips...

We Are Barbarians Up Here

Wednesday, October 25, 2017, 11:30am

At the end of October 1897 English composer Frederick Delius was nervous. He was in Norway to conduct music he had written for Gunnar Heiberg’s play, The Council of the People. The play satirized the Norwegian parliament and Norwegian pomp in general, and Delius had made his music suitably caustic...

Used!

Tuesday, October 24, 2017, 11:30am

While he was in Paris for performances of his opera Il Trovatore, Giuseppe Verdi took time to attend to some urgent business. On October 21, 1855, he wrote a fervent letter about the need to get international copyright protection for his works, which were being pirated in England because there was...

Robbed

Monday, October 23, 2017, 11:30am

In his memoirs Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov gives us a close and colorful look at his fellow composer, Alexander Borodin: I always thought it strange that certain ladies...who apparently were admirers of Borodin’s talent as a composer, relentlessly hauled him to all kinds of charitable committees,...

A Marvel of Modern Technology

Friday, October 20, 2017, 11:30am

The grand new theater was one of New York’s proudest buildings. The Hippodrome was the work of Frederick Thompson and Elmer Dundy, who had created the Luna Park amusement area at Coney Island. It stood on Sixth Avenue between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth streets. Its auditorium had 5,300 seats, and...

Win a Prize, Lose a Treasure

Thursday, October 19, 2017, 11:30am

Itzhak Perlman had just won a spot in the finals of the 1964 Leaventritt Contest, and his teachers at Juilliard wanted him to go into the final round of the competition with the best violin available. He couldn’t afford to buy a first-rate instrument, so they arranged for him to borrow a valuable...

Stars That Entertain Unseen Audiences

Wednesday, October 18, 2017, 11:30am

“Some people grow; others just swell.” It was a popular saying in the 1920s when radio was becoming all the rage, making stars overnight. Some of them, already established on stage, brought their egos with them to the airwaves. In 1923 Thomas Cowan, an announcer at New York radio station WJZ,...

Starting Over

Tuesday, October 17, 2017, 11:30am

By 1770 Charles Burney had come a long way from his exploitive apprenticeship working for composer Thomas Arne. He had become a distinguished and discriminating music critic and historian. During his travels on the Continent, he collected stories from the lives of celebrated composers and...

The Cherokee and the Bantu

Monday, October 16, 2017, 11:30am

At the age of twenty-six, Felix Mendelssohn was already well known throughout Europe. In 1835, during a visit to Leipzig, he became acquainted with a young Polish émigré who was rapidly making a name for himself. Mendelssohn wrote to his sister in Berlin on October 16, full of enthusiasm after a...

Collision Course

Friday, October 13, 2017, 11:30am

In the early days of radio someone decided that it would be a good idea to time orchestral performances. The results were surprising to most conductors, and put two of the greatest on a collision course. In 1949 Leonard Bernstein was a young up-and-coming conductor and an avid listener to records...

The New World

Thursday, October 12, 2017, 11:30am

On October 12, 1892, newly arrived in the New World, Czech composer Antonín DvoÍák wrote from New York to a friend in Moravia about his first impressions of America: After being in quarantine for just a little while we arrived safely in the promised land. The view from Sandy Hook, the harbor town...

I Quit!

Wednesday, October 11, 2017, 11:30am

The job was good, the pay quite nice, and the employer friendly, so in 1717 Johann Sebastian Bach accepted the position of conductor of the music staff for Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. The only catch: Bach already had a job and he needed to get out of it. For nine years Bach had put up with the...

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