Tuesday, August 5, 2014, 11:30am
When Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter came to America, his government took no chances on losing him. In 1960, when he arrived in New York for the first time, Richter was accompanied by a bodyguard named Anatoly, a young veteran of the NKVD, the Soviet security service. Anatoly was pleasant enough...
Monday, August 4, 2014, 11:30am
Claude Debussy wanted to prove that he could write something completely different from his opera Pelléas and Mélisande –a wish that drew him into the dark corridors of The House of Usher. Debussy had been attracted to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe for several years, saying,...
Sunday, August 3, 2014, 11:30am
Richard Wagner and his wife Minna had fled Riga, Latvia, and come to Paris to escape their debts, but the French capital also held promise for an opera composer, and Wagner managed to complete two of his operas, Rienzi and The Flying Dutchman while he was there. And yet, after spending 1840-1 there...
Saturday, August 2, 2014, 11:30am
The two composers would be major forces in late nineteenth-century music and great friends, but not before some preliminary missteps. In 1857 Camille Saint-Saëns began seeing small notices announcing Paris performances by an unknown Russian named Anton Rubinstein. Rubinstein was unknown in Paris...
Friday, August 1, 2014, 11:30am
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...
Thursday, July 31, 2014, 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...
Wednesday, July 30, 2014, 11:30am
On July 30, 1830, Robert Schumann wrote from Heidelberg to his mother in Zwickau about the crossroads he had reached: My entire life has been a twenty-year struggle between poetry and prose or, if you prefer, between music and law. In things practical my ideals were just as high as they were in art...
Tuesday, July 29, 2014, 11:30am
Peter Tchaikovsky never met his patron Nadezhda von Meck, but in the summer of 1880 he stayed at her estate in Ukraine, and he wrote her a letter expressing his pleasure at two aspects of life there: At sunset I had tea and then wandered alone by the steep bank of the stream behind the deer park,...
Monday, July 28, 2014, 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...
Sunday, July 27, 2014, 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...
Saturday, July 26, 2014, 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...
Friday, July 25, 2014, 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...
Thursday, July 24, 2014, 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...
Wednesday, July 23, 2014, 11:30am
Sir Henry Wood was one of England’s most distinguished conductors of the early twentieth century. In 1888, though, he was a nineteen-year-old student whose departure from the Royal Academy of Music was anything but dignified. He told the story in his 1938 autobiography. During the Handel Festival...
Monday, July 21, 2014, 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...
Sunday, July 20, 2014, 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,...
Saturday, July 19, 2014, 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...
Friday, July 18, 2014, 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...
Thursday, July 17, 2014, 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...
Wednesday, July 16, 2014, 11:30am
It was to be a combination of youthful innocence and Celtic grief. When the London Sinfonietta commissioned a work from John Tavener, the composer found his atmosphere in the brooding landscape of Ireland, his structure in the traditional requiem, and poignant symbolism in children’s games...
