Friday, May 2, 2014, 12:00pm
In 1904, when cellist Pablo Casals undertook his first American tour, he had to rely upon a manager to keep track of his money. The manager told Casals that he could get bigger fees if he would wear a hairpiece. Casals had no interest in that kind of superficiality, and so the manager sent out...
Thursday, May 1, 2014, 11:45am
Conductor Theodore Thomas wielded the baton over a massive music festival that took place in New York in May 1880, and the size of the ensemble required him to be alert with his eyes as well as his ears. The Philharmonic Orchestra was the largest, and in his opinion, the best orchestral...
Wednesday, April 30, 2014, 11:45am
At the age of twenty-five, Nicholas Slonimsky found out that playing the piano could save his life. As the Russian Revolution became increasingly deadly, he became determined to emigrate to Paris. The only way to Europe was through British-occupied Constantinople, and, on the boat from Yalta, he...
Tuesday, April 29, 2014, 11:15am
His career and his family relationships were bumpy; how could his love life be any different? During his courtship of Constanze Weber, Mozart hit plenty of rough spots. He reacted to one of them in a fervent letter he wrote to Constanze on April 29, 1781: In spite of all my pleas, you’ve...
Monday, April 28, 2014, 11:30am
Thanks to a decree from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Soviet music took some hard knocks in 1948. Four major composers were accused of writing “formalistic” music that didn’t serve the needs of the people, the result being that their music was blacklisted from...
Thursday, April 24, 2014, 11:45am
Having heard the news of Abraham Lincoln’s death, Louis Moreau Gottschalk and some of his fellow passengers en route to San Francisco came to terms with the loss. He wrote in his journal on April 24, 1865: We are to have a meeting on board to give official expression to the sentiments of...
Wednesday, April 23, 2014, 11:45am
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...
Monday, April 21, 2014, 11:30am
In 1930 R. Nathaniel Dett was composer and conductor for the Hampton Institute near Hampton, Virginia. The Negro school had just changed its name from Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, and the choir that Dett led to Europe that year would go even further to change the school’s image...
Sunday, April 20, 2014, 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...
Saturday, April 19, 2014, 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...
Sunday, April 6, 2014, 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...
Saturday, April 5, 2014, 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, Alb...
Friday, April 4, 2014, 11:30pm
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...
Thursday, April 3, 2014, 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:...
Wednesday, April 2, 2014, 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...
Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 11:30am
Not everyone appreciated the jokes, and English conductor Thomas Beecham had plenty of them up his sleeve. In 1909 Beecham took his newly-founded symphony orchestra on tour, and within weeks it was notorious among railway officials. Whenever the orchestra’s train pulled into or out of a...
Monday, March 31, 2014, 11:30am
The riots that erupted in Paris after the 1913 debut of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring made the ballet famous, but that year of musical chaos didn’t begin with Stravinsky. Two months before the Paris debacle, the same sort of thing had already happened in response to an orchestral...
Sunday, March 30, 2014, 11:00am
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,...
Saturday, March 29, 2014, 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,...
Friday, March 28, 2014, 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...
