Making Do
Monday, November 10, 2014, 11:30am
By the late 1940s Georges Enesco had long since established a world reputation as a composer and conductor. As he entered his mid-sixties, he would have to fall back on a third ability, and the going would not be easy. World War II had taken its toll on Enesco’s sizeable nest egg. As a...
Jubilee
Sunday, November 9, 2014, 11:30am
Fifty years after the publication of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Oberto, an Italian newspaper proposed a Verdi Jubilee. The seventy-five-year-old composer responded to the idea in a letter to publisher Giulio Ricordi on November 9, 1888, thinking for a moment that the superstar of the age, soprano...
More Than They Bargained For
Saturday, November 8, 2014, 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...
The Congressman and the Conductor
Friday, November 7, 2014, 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!
Thursday, November 6, 2014, 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...
Viva L'America!
Wednesday, November 5, 2014, 11:30am
Ruggiero Leoncavallo was hoping to revive his career with a conducting contract or a commission for an opera when he agreed to undertake an American tour in the fall of 1906. He traveled with plenty of company–seven singers and the 75-piece La Scala orchestra–and all of them were in for...
American Enlightenment
Tuesday, November 4, 2014, 11:30am
Pianist Henri Herz was dismissed by Robert Schumann as a mere “stenographer,” but in the 1830s he was the most fashionable and sensational keyboard player in Paris. In 1845, when he wanted big money to bankroll his new piano manufacturing firm, Herz headed for America. In his book My...
Picaresque
Monday, November 3, 2014, 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...
The Latest From Paris
Saturday, November 1, 2014, 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...
The Séance
Friday, October 31, 2014, 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!
Thursday, October 30, 2014, 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...
The Reluctant Conductor
Monday, October 27, 2014, 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...
Why the Music Stopped
Sunday, October 26, 2014, 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...
We Are Barbarians Up Here
Saturday, October 25, 2014, 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...
Used
Friday, October 24, 2014, 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
Thursday, October 23, 2014, 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...
Very Original Instruments
Tuesday, October 21, 2014, 11:30am
After performing a concert together in the 1990s, violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and guitarists Sérgio and Odair Assad were eager to collaborate again, and when Sérgio expressed an interest in recording a CD of Gypsy music, Salerno-Sonnenberg jumped at the chance. Little did she...
A Marvel of Modern Technology
Monday, October 20, 2014, 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...
Win a Prize, Lose a Treasure
Sunday, October 19, 2014, 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...
Stars That Entertain Unseen Audiences
Saturday, October 18, 2014, 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...
