Music

Classical Music

The 38-year-old composer was gambling that his new opera would succeed where others were failing. Gaetano Donizetti was pinning his hopes on a hastily written opera based not on an Italian subject but on a Scottish novel. By 1835 Donizetti believed that the state of opera in Naples was in...

Bull of the Frontier

June 23, 2013 - 3:07pm

What he lacked in musical training the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull made up for in power and enthusiasm. In the mid-nineteenth century Bull spent a good deal of time in the United States. One day he was traveling down the Mississippi on a steamboat. As he sat reading a newspaper,...

Mahler's Appointment with Freud

June 22, 2013 - 3:01pm

It was to be a meeting of minds. The great symphonist Gustav Mahler had an appointment with the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Although he initiated it, Mahler was clearly uneasy about the meeting. He canceled three times before finally coming face to face with Freud in 1910. By the...

Saved by a Button

June 21, 2013 - 2:56pm

The Water Music, the Royal Fireworks Music, Messiah. It's possible that none of them would have been written if it hadn't been for a lucky encounter with a button. In 1704 George Frederick Handel was a 19-year-old hothead who took his music making very seriously. He was serving as harpsichordist...

Reconciliation

June 7, 2013 - 11:36am

Arthur Friedheim was worried. His former teacher and longtime friend, Franz Liszt, had promised a pupil a concert appearance at the 1886 Carlsruhe Music Festival. Friedheim considered the pupil a disaster, but, perhaps because the young woman in question was a protégé of Empress Augusta of Prussia, Liszt saw fit...

The Riot

May 29, 2013 - 12:18pm

The Champs-Elysees Theater. May 29th, 1913. One of the most notorious premieres in classical music is about to occur. Pierre Monteux is about to conduct the first performance of Igor Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring. The wife of dancer and choreographer Vaslev Nijinksy has heard bits of the music...

D'Indy's Quest

May 24, 2013 - 11:18am

In 1872, 22-year-old Vincent d’Indy went to Germany hoping to meet three of his musical idols—Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, and Johannes Brahms. As a way to break the ice, he took with him a manuscript of a work called Redemption by his mentor Cesar Franck. He found Liszt at work...

The Grocer Librettist

May 23, 2013 - 11:27am

New York, 1805. The Italian, at age 56, was a little old to be starting a second career as a grocer, but Lorenzo Da Ponte had a compelling reason for abandoning poetry and music and coming to the New World. He wanted to stay out of prison. Even the brightest...

The Family Tradition

May 17, 2013 - 9:45am

In his autobiography Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach states that “In composition and keyboard playing I had no teacher other than my father.” When the time came to carry on the family tradition of music making, Emanuel Bach would face some challenges. He probably began his keyboard lessons around 1720, at...

Distractions

May 16, 2013 - 11:26am

Composers of concert music have enough distractions to cope with. Composers of movie music have even more. Consider the case of Bernard Herrmann, one of America's leading writers of film music, when he was visiting Hollywood in 1943. Herrmann and his wife were having a working lunch at the home...

Menu

Listen Live

Program Schedule

Program Notes

Program Schedule

Music Playlists

Program Schedule

Music Playlists

Classical Music

Scottish Novel, Italian Opera

Bull of the Frontier

Mahler's Appointment with Freud

Saved by a Button

Reconciliation

The Riot

D'Indy's Quest

The Grocer Librettist

The Family Tradition

Distractions

Search form

The Ideas Network

Program Schedule

Program Notes

NPR News & Classical Network

Program Schedule

Music Playlists

All Classical Network

Program Schedule

Music Playlists

Classical Music

Subscribe To WPR Newsletters