Exploring Music History with Professor Robert Greenberg one Monday at a time. Every Monday Robert Greenberg explores some timely, perhaps intriguing and even, if we are lucky, salacious chunk of musical information relevant to that date, or to … whatever. If on (rare) occasion these features appear a tad irreverent, well, that’s okay: we would do well to remember that cultural icons do not create and make music but rather, people do, and people can do and say the darndest things.
Music History Monday: An American in Paris
Aug 26, 2024
We mark the London premiere on August 26, 1952 – 72 years ago today – of the film “An American in Paris.” With music by George Gershwin (1898-1937), directed by Vincente Minnelli, starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, and Oscar Levant, the flick won six Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture. While the film actually opened in New York City on October 4, 1951, this London premiere offers us all the excuse we need to examine both the film and the music that inspired it, George Gershwin’s programmatic orchestral work, An American in Paris.
Here’s how we’re going to proceed. Today’s Music History Monday post will deal specifically with Gershwin’s An American in Paris, a roughly 21-minute workfor orchestra composed in 1928.
Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will feature the 1951 film of the same name, focusing on (and excerpting) four of its musical numbers.
Statement
George Gershwin (1898-1937) on the cover of Time magazine, July 20, 1925
George Gershwin is among the handful of greatest composers ever born in the United States. His death at the age of 38 (of a brain tumor) should be considered an artistic tragedy on par with the premature deaths of Schubert (at 31), Mozart (at 35), and Chopin (at 39).
He was born Jacob Gershovitz (though his birth certificate reads “Jacob Gershwine”), the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, on September 26, 1898. He was born at home, in a flat at 242 Snediker Avenue in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.
(In 1963, a bronze plaque commemorating Gershwin’s birth was affixed to the building. By the 1970s, the neighborhood had fallen on very hard times: the plaque was stolen – it is still MIA – and the building vandalized. It burned down in 1987, and all that remains today of this once thriving neighborhood of immigrants is a blighted area of warehouses and junkyards.)
Rarely has a major composer begun his life in an artistically less promising manner. Tall, athletic, and charismatic, Gershwin was the leader of his various tenement gangs, playing street ball, roller skating everywhere, and engaging in petty crime. By his own admission, he cared nothing for music until he was ten, when George’s parents Morris and Rose bought his elder brother Ira a piano. But it was George who attacked the thing, with an intensity and precocity that shocked everyone. …
This will be my final Music History Monday podcast and post. I have been writing Music History Monday for exactly eight years – since September 5, 2016 – during which I have created over 400 of them. It’s been a wonderful run, and now it’s time for me to return to writing music. From here on out, my blogging and vlogging will take on the character of a personal journal punctuated with generalized and editorial commentary, all of which will be accessible through my Patreon subscription site at Patreon.com/RobertGreenbergMusic.
Music History Monday: Serge Pavlovich Diaghilev
Aug 19, 2024
Serge (or Sergei) Diaghilev (1872-1929) in 1916
We mark the death on August 19, 1929 – 95 years ago today – of the Russian impresario, patron, art critic, and founder of the Ballets Russes Serge (or “Sergei”) Pavlovich Diaghilev, in Venice. Born in the village of Selishchi roughly 75 miles southeast of St. Petersburg on March 31, 1872, he was 57 years old when he died.
Movers and Shakers
Serge Diaghilev was one of the great movers-and-shakers of all time. In a letter to his stepmother written in 1895, the 23-year-old Diaghilev described himself with astonishing honesty and no small bit of prescience, given the way his life went on the develop:
“I am firstly a great charlatan, though con brio [meaning vivacious and spirited!]; secondly, a great charmer; thirdly I have any amount of cheek [meaning chutzpah; moxie; nerve!]; fourthly, I am a man with a great quantity of logic, but with very few principles; fifthly, I think I have no real gifts. All the same, I think I have found my true vocation – being a patron of the arts. I have all that is necessary except the money – but that will come.”
Diaghilev at 17, circa 1889
Serge Diaghilev’s audacious and spectacular career was intertwined completely with the audacious and spectacular career of one Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). Without Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky would never have become STRAVINSKY: the enfant terrible of Western music in the years before World War One. Without Diaghilev, Stravinsky would never have seen his career reborn and finances recover after the war. Conversely, without Stravinsky, Diaghilev might have made his mark but not his legend. Consequently, I’m going to dedicate this post to not just Monsieur Diaghilev, but to his discovery of and ongoing relationship with Igor Stravinsky!
Music History Monday: Giovanni Gabrieli and the Miracle That is Venice!
Aug 12, 2024
Giovanni Gabrieli (circa 1555-1612)
We mark the death on August 12, 1612 – 412 years ago today – of the composer Giovanni Gabrieli. Born in Venice circa 1555, he grew up and spent his professional life in that glorious city, and died there as a result of complications from a kidney stone.
Gabrieli’s magnificent, soul-stirring music went a long way towards helping to define the expressive exuberance of what we now identify as Baroque era music. The impact and influence of his music was ginormous, an impact and influence that culminated a century later in the German High Baroque music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)!
To a degree beyond any other composer before or after him, Gabrieli’s music has come to be identified with his hometown of Venice, in particular the acoustically unique Venetian performance venues for which so much of his music was composed.
It is necessary, then, for us to spend some time in Venice, if only to get some inkling of what makes this singularly remarkable city so spiritually, artistically, and architecturally unique; and why Gabrieli’s music is uniquely Venetian.…
Music History Monday: The First Professional Composer
Aug 05, 2024
Easy Times!
We’ve been having a good time, an easy time here at Music History Monday these last few weeks. Five of our last six MHM posts have featured fairly recent musical events from the “popular” side of the musical aisle. Music History Monday for June 24 focused on Disco; on July 1, the invention and marketing of Sony’s Walkman; on July 8, the American crooner Steve Lawrence (who was born, as I know you recall, Sidney Liebowitz); on July 22, Taylor Swift; and on July 29, Cass Elliot (born Ellen Naomi Cohen).
Today we get back to the historicalrepertoire. But let me assure you: the composer we will focus on was as ground-breaking as Sony’s Walkman; his music as gorgeous as the silken voices of Steve Lawrence and Cass Elliot; his rhythmic sensibilities as sharply honed as those of the Bee Gees and Taylor Swift (though, to my knowledge, a concert of his music never simulated a magnitude 2.3 earthquake in downtown Seattle, as did Ms. Swift’s on July 22, 2023).
“Portrait of a Young Man” (1432) by Jan van Eyck; possibly Guillaume Du Fay (1397-1474)
Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Guillaume Du Fay!
We celebrate the birth on August 5, 1397 – 627 years ago today – of the composer Guillaume Du Fay. He was, by every standard, one of the greatest composers to have ever lived and was admired as such in his own lifetime.
Guillaume Du Fay as The FirstProfessional Composer
Writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the Venezuelan -American musicologist, conductor, and composer Alejandro Enrique Planchart observes that:
“Before Du Fay’s time, the concept of a “composer” – that is, a musician whose primary occupation is composition [and not a priest, choir master, or teacher] – was largely unfamiliar in Europe. The emergence of musicians who focused on composition above other musical endeavors arose in the 15th century, and was exemplified by Du Fay.”
Early Life
He was born in the Flemish (today Belgian) town of Bersele (today spelled Beersel), just south of Brussels. He died 77 years later, on November 27, 1474, just across the border in northern France in the city of Cambrai.…
Music History Monday: Cass Elliot and the Making of an Urban Legend
Jul 29, 2024
We mark the death of Cass Elliot on July 29, 1974 – 50 years ago today – in an apartment at No. 9 Curzon Street in London’s Mayfair District. Born on September 19, 1941, she was just 32 years old at the time of her death.
Cass Elliot (born Ellen Naomi Cohen); 1941-1974
Brief Biography
Cass Elliot was born Ellen Naomi Cohen in Baltimore, Maryland. According to her biography, “all four of her grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants.”
The Pale of Settlement
(Parenthetically, I grew up hearing that all four of my great-grandparents were, likewise, from “Russia,” which created a misunderstanding that I carried around with me until my twenties. As it turns out, in this case, “from Russia” actually means from the Pale of Settlement, that part of the western region of the Russian Empire where Jews were allowed to live. Today, the territory that encompassed the Pale includes all of Belarus and Moldova, much of Ukraine and Lithuania, part of Latvia, and only a small area of what is today the western Russian Federation.)
It was while she was in high school that Ellen Cohen was bitten by the musical theater bug and began calling herself “Cass Elliot.” Ms. Elliot’s parents fully expected her to go to college, so we can all imagine their . . . “surprise” when she dropped out of high school just before graduation and moved to New York City, there to pursue her dream to be an actor!
Cass Elliot’s acting career never quite got off the ground. (Yes, she was part of a touring production of The Music Man, but her one-and-only shot at the bigtime came and went when she lost the part of Miss Marmelstein in the Broadway show I Can Get it for You Wholesale to an up-and-comer named Barbra Streisand.)
It was as a singer that Cass Elliot made her mark. She had a clear, strong, distinctive voice and a charismatic stage presence to go along with her 300-pound “figure.” In 1963 she helped form a progressive folk trio called the Big 3 which recorded two albums and appeared on The Tonight Show, Hootenanny, and The Danny Kaye Show. In 1964, the Big 3 became a quartet called the Mugwumps. Finally, in 1965, Cass Elliot and fellow Mugwump member Denny Dougherty joined the husband/wife team of John and Michelle Phillips to become the Mamas and the Papas.…
Music History Monday: Shake, Rattle, and Roll
Jul 22, 2024
Taylor Swift (born 1989)
Only July 22, 2023 – one year ago today – Taylor Swift (born 1989; she has, according to Forbes, a present net worth of $1.3 billion) literally “shook up” Seattle: her concerts in that city shook the ground with such violence that it registered as a magnitude 2.3 earthquake. (As if to prove that the “Swiftquake” at her first show was no fluke, her second show in Seattle also registered a 2.3 on the Richter Scale.)
Talk about shake, rattle, and roll!
A necessary acknowledgement before kicking things off: as entertainers go, there is no one on the planet who is presently more overexposed than Taylor Swift.
No one, I mean, not even Englebert Humperdinck (born Arnold George Dorsey, 1936) in his prime, heaven bless him.
Yet here I am, seemingly jumping on the Swifty bandwagon, writing about she-who-does-not-need-to-be-spoken-of-ever-again. My reason for doing so has nothing to do with Taylor Swift herself but rather, the nature of the geology on which my house, neighborhood, city, and region of Northern California (NoCal) rests.
“Earthquake Country”: San Francisco, April 1906
I live in what is euphemistically called “earthquake country,” at the edge of where the North American tectonic plate borders the Pacific plate. These plates are moving at approximately the speed of a growing fingernail in opposite directions. The Pacific Plate is moving north; the North American Plate is moving south. The immediate area where the plates meet is called the fault zone or the fracture zone, because the bedrock adjacent to the plates is filled with faults – fractures – where the rock has given way due to the movement of the plates against each other.
Like them or not (and I would hazard to guess that most people and animals do not like them), earthquakes are an almost everyday occurrence up and down the Pacific coast. So like it or not, most folks who live on the fault lines – especially home owners, who have to bolt their homes to the ground using technologies unknown outside of earthquake country, whose families keep survival supplies and have emergency plans in case of a Big One – know more about earthquakes and fault lines than they’d like to.…
Music History Monday: An Indispensable Person
Jul 15, 2024
Indispensability
The title of this blog – “An Indispensable Person” – might be considered controversial. That’s because any number of very smart people would argue that there is, in fact, so such thing as an “indispensable person.”
According to both Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt:
“There is no indispensable man.”
Said President John F. Kennedy:
“Nobody’s indispensable.”
Observed the redoubtable Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970):
“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”
And there we have it: there is a school of thought that states without equivocation that “No one, absolutely no one, no matter how anyone has painted someone’s existence or value, is indispensable.”
It’s a school of thought that I do not attend. That’s because based on my reading of history, there are indeed certain individuals without whom certain positive historical endscould not have been achieved. Here are four obvious examples.
James Thomas Flexner entitled his superb biography of George Washington The Indispensable Man (Plume, 1974; currently published by Back Bay Books). Flexner was correct in so titling his book, because George Washington (1732-1799) was, in fact, an indispensable person. Without his leadership and indomitable will, the American Revolution would have quickly unraveled and been lost. And without Washington, the American presidency and with it, the nascent American democracy, would very likely have devolved into autocracy, perhaps even monarchy. (This book should be required reading for a certain six members of our current not-terribly-Supreme Court, who need – desperately – to be reminded of what the Founders intended and what moral greatness look like.)
We should all be loath to even consider what the United States would look like today if not for the indispensable moral guidance and eloquence of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). As for the twentieth century, the world as we know it would not exist, and the forces of darkness might very well have triumphed, without the indispensable Winston Churchill (1874-1965) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945).
(As for the overly politically and socially sensitive among us: yes, yes, I am aware that these are all white, Protestant men; one of them a slave owner [Washington]; one of them an imperialist [Churchill]; and three of them members of the wealthy, ruling class [Washington, Churchill, and Roosevelt]. So what? Does that information in any way reduce their contributions to humanity?)
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (left) and President Franklin D. Roosevelt together at the White House on May 24, 1943
The Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) pinpointed the traits that leaders require to make them “indispensable”:
“Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.”
Okay: some perspective as we observe the obvious: the indispensable people of, say, the world of potash-mining; of lip-gloss manufacturing; and of shipping palette design may not be as well-known and their impact on humanity not as universal as Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt. But in terms of their fields, they are indispensable people as well. Yo: without Howard T. Hallowell (1877-1955), who patented the first shipping palette in 1924 (he called it a “Lift Truck Platform”), the American trucking industry might never have gotten off the ground in the manner it did. Long live Howard T. Hallowell, the indispensable person of the shipping palette!
Carl Czerny (1791-1827) in 1833
Another Unsung Hero! Another Indispensable Person!
We mark the death on July 15, 1857 – 167 years ago today – of the Austrian composer, pianist, chronicler of Beethoven, and teacher Carl Czerny. For all his various and extraordinary contributions, Czerny must be considered an indispensable person to Western music during the first half of the nineteenth century!
I would hazard that some might think that I’m stretching the “indispensable-thing” just a tad by including Carl Czerny on a list that just featured George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Howard T. Hallowell. But no, I’m not.…
Music History Monday: What’s in a Name?
Jul 08, 2024
We mark the birth on July 8, 1935 – 89 years ago today – of the American Grammy and Emmy Award-winning singer, actor, and comedian Steve Lawrence, in Brooklyn, New York. He died just four months ago, on March 7, 2024, in Los Angeles.
Steve Lawrence (1935-2024)
Steve Lawrence, one might ask? Have potential topics for Music History Monday become so depleted that after nearly eight years (my first such blog was posted on September 9, 2016) I’ve been reduced to profiling baritone-voiced male pop singers of the second half of the twentieth century? Who’s next: Dean Martin? Perry Como? Andy Williams? Tom Jones? Jack Jones? Vic Damone? Al Martino? Robert Goulet?
And what of it, I would rather AGGRESSIVELY ASK IN RESPONSE? Over the years, I’ve profiled the likes of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Tony Bennett, Otis Redding, and Chubby Checker, among others. SO WHY NOT STEVE LAWRENCE?
Okay, I will admit that there is an ulterior motive here, and we’ll get to that ulterior motive behind this profile of Maestro Lawrence in due time. But first, permit me, please, to reminisce.
“Fitting In”
As I have mentioned more than once, I was born and spent my first years in that Olduvai Gorge of American ethnicity (pronounced “et-nicity”): the New York City borough of Brooklyn. Three of my four grandparents were born there as well (the fourth – my paternal grandfather – was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey but moved to Brooklyn as a toddler and grew up there). Both of my parents and my stepmother were born in Brooklyn and grew up in Brooklyn.
That’s a lot of freaking Brooklyn.
While I grew up in the New Jersey ‘burbs and was shaped by the lower middle-class suburban experience of the 1950s and 1960s, my grandparents and parents were all New Yorkers to the bone, and were shaped by the dual experience of growing up in Brooklyn and by being the children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants from Belarus. That meant maintaining something of their ethnic and religious identity while, paradoxically, at the same time, trying to blend in – to assimilate – and be, as my paternal grandfather Sidney would say, “real Yankees!”
When my extended family got together, you could count on certain conversations to always take place. The alte kaker (meaning the old men; literally “old poopers”) would play pinochle and complain about politicians, taxes, the stock market, the weather, and the New York Mets. Boring and predictable. It was the women of my mother’s and grandmothers’ generations whose conversations I would eavesdrop on, because they were interesting and they were funny. (If they saw me listening, they’d start speaking in Yiddish, so I’d have to keep my distance and look as if I wasn’t listening to them at all.)
I recall their conversations as representing gossip and innuendo raised to high art, conversations more often than not fixated on other women: who was married to the worst/best husband (sometimes the same thing: “he slaps her around, but he makes a BUCK”); who had the best/worst clothes and jewelry, and what they paid for their best/worst clothing and jewelry; who was too fat or too thin (these were Jewish ladies, so it was indeed possible to be “too thin”); who wore too much makeup and who wore too little; whose teeth needed fixing and hair needed cutting and/or coloring; who was drinking too much and popping diet pills (meaning methamphetamines, which were legal at the time); who was sexless and who was shtupping the mailman; etc. The comments I enjoyed the most were about the people I knew: my girl cousins, some of whom were these ladies’ daughters. This one needs to go on a diet, that one needs a nose-job; this one needs to see a dermatologist, that one has to dress more appropriately; this one needs to do something with her hair, that one needs braces.
Genuine compliments for anyone were few and far between, though the greatest compliment that these women could bestow on any fellow female is burned into my memory:
“She could pass.”
“She could pass”: meaning, she could pass for a goy, for not being Jewish. The beneficiary of such a compliment would be slim (but not, God forbid, skinny); her hair and teeth would be straight; her skin would be clear, her accent undetectable, and her nose a button.
Sidney Liebowitz
Which – finally! – brings us back to Steve Lawrence. He was indeed born Sidney Liebowitz, in Brooklyn, on July 8, 1935. He came by his musical bona fides honestly: his father, Max Liebowitz was a cantor (a professional singer and prayer leader) at Temple Beth Sholom Tomchei Harav in Brooklyn; his mother Anna (born Gelb), was a homemaker.…
Music History Monday: The Sony Walkman: A Triumph and a Tragedy!
Jul 01, 2024
The original Sony Walkman, model TPS-L2
We mark the introduction on July 1, 1979 – 45 years ago today – of the Sony Walkman. The Walkman was the first entirely portable, high-fidelity (or at least fairly high-fidelity) audio cassette player, a revolutionary device that allowed a user to listen to entire albums anywhere, anytime. Introduced initially in Japan, the higher-ups at Sony expected to sell 5000 units a month for the first six months after its release. Instead, they sold 30,000 units in the first month alone and then – then – sales exploded. All told, Sony has sold over 400 million Walkmen (“Walkmans”?) in cassette, CD, mini-disc, and digital file versions, and Sony remained the market leader among portable music players until the introduction of Apple’s iPod on October 23, 2001.
For Sony the Walkman was a commercial triumph. For consumers, it was a technological game-changer. But for humanity, taken as widely as we please, it can (and will!) be argued that the “portable music player” – or PMP – has been an unmitigated disaster, a tragedy that has served to increasingly isolate human beings from one another in a manner unique in our history.
A Walkman ad from 1979, inadvertently promoting individual isolation and the death of public interaction
Headphones and Earbuds
Growing up, my maternal grandparents lived in a pre-War apartment building at 82nd and Riverside Drive in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (or just Lincoln Center) was just 16 blocks to the south, a 16.3-acre complex between 66th and 62nd Streets. Lincoln Center’s Library & Museum of the Performing Arts opened in 1965, and I remember my grandmother taking me and my brother Steve down to see it. Actually, I don’t just “remember” the visit; it is etched forever in my 11-year-old memory because of what happened there.
There was a large, open area filled with small, circular tables on which were built in record turntables. As I recall, each of these circular tables had four stereo headphones plugged in around the turntable. One would go up to a counter, request a particular record, and then sit down and listen to it through the headphones.
I had never listened to music through over-the-ear headphones (stereo or otherwise) before that visit, and I still remember the amazement I felt: I’d never, ever experienced such sonic fidelity; I’d never imagined that recorded music could sound so fantastic. And because I was listening through over-the-ear headphones, most of the ambient noise in the room was blocked out, effectively isolating me and allowing me to focus strictly on the music. I don’t remember what my grandmother did to drag me away from that turntable, whether she used a leather sap, a fire hose, the jaws-of-life or, more likely, the promise of ice cream on the way back to her apartment. Whatever; because of those stereo headphones, I had experienced musical high-fidelity for the first time in my life, and I was hooked.
To this day, I have a number of excellent over-the-ear headphones, and when I really must “listen” for recorded detail, I will listen through one of them. (FYI: I will not use earbuds, as I can’t tolerate the sensation of something shoved into my ear canal. Too bad for me.)
To the point. The immersive experience provided by headphones – by broadcasting directly into our ears while isolating us from ambient sound – is seductive. But at what point might the isolating aspect of the headphone/earbud experience become a less-than-positive thing? The advent of PMPs – be they Walkmen, iPods, or smartphones – has allowed two generations of listeners to isolate themselves from the world around them, often to the point of near total disengagement. …
One sort of Boogie Fever: Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989) cuttin’ the rug at New York’s Studio 54, circa 1978
On June 24, 1374 – 650 years ago today – the men, women, and children of the Rhineland city of Aachen began to dash out of their houses and into the streets, where – inexplicably, compulsively, and uncontrollably – they began to twist and twirl, jump and shake, writhe and twitch until they dropped from exhaustion or, in some cases, just plain dropped dead. It was a real-life disco inferno, true boogie-fever stuff: the first (but not the last) major occurrence of what would come to be known as the “dancing plague (or mania)” or “choreomania,” which soon enough spread across Europe.
There had been small outbreaks of the “dancing plague” before, going back as far as the seventh century. An outbreak in the thirteenth century – in 1237 – saw a group of children jump and dance all the way from Erfurt to Arnstadt in what today is central Germany, a distance of some 13 miles. It was an event that is believed to have inspired the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
But the outbreak in Aachen 650 years ago today was big. Before it was over, thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children had taken to the streets as the “dancing plague” spread from the western German cities of Aachen, Cologne, Metz, and Stuttgart; to the Belgian cities of Hainaut, Utrecht, Tongeren; then across France, the Netherlands, and finally, back into Germany!
Another sort of Boogie Fever. The authorities typically had music played during outbreaks of dancing plague, as it was believed to somehow “cure” the mania; painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1638), after drawings by his father.
This gigantic outbreak came to be referred to as “St. John’s Dance,” though at other times and in other places it was called “St. Vitus’ Dance.” (These names were coined based on the assumption that the dancing plague was the result of a curse cast by either St. John the Baptist or St. Vitus, St. John having been beheaded by Herod Antipas between 28 and 36 CE and St. Vitus martyred in 303 during the persecution of Christians by the co-ruling Roman Emperors Diocletian and Maximian.)
Writing in his book The Black Death and the Dancing Mania, the German physician and medical writer Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker (1795-1850) describes St. John’s Dance this way:
“They formed circles hand in hand and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack.”…
John Taylor McClure (1929-2014; bottom left) with Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971; bottom right”) in the recording studio on July 20, 1964
We mark the death on June 17, 2014 – an even 10 years ago today – of the Grammy Award winning American record producer and Director of Columbia Masterworks Recordings John Taylor McClure. McClure was born in Rahway, New Jersey on June 28, 1929, and died in Belmont Vermont at the age of 84, 11 days short of his 85th birthday.
Record Producers
The title of this post says it all: “Unsung Heroes.” It is my experience that unless someone has personally been involved in creating a recording, it’s pretty much impossible to appreciate the amount of work a producer puts into the process and the degree to which the producers’ own musical taste, musical proclivities, and musicality influence the final product. The front of a record jacket or CD case might bear the image of a composer or performer, and the producer’s name might appear in the tiniest of print on the lower left-hand corner of the back of the jacket, but in fact – in terms of their singular impact on a recording – the producer should, by all rights, be pictured on the front of the album side-by-side with whomever else the producer deems worthy of joining them.
Over the years, I’ve featured a few of the most important record producers of the post-World War Two era. Thus far, I’ve written about the opera record producer John Royds Culshaw (1924-1980; Dr. Bob Prescribes, March 24, 2020); the Beatles’ record producer and so-called “Fifth Beatle” George Martin (1926-2016; Music History Monday January 3, 2022, and Dr. Bob Prescribes January 4, 2022); and the jazz record producer Orrin Keepnews (1923-2015; Music History Monday, March 21, 2021).
Today we add John McClure to this august list.
The Job of a Record Producer
Here’s how The Recording Academy (formally the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, or NARAS) defines a record producer:
“The person who has overall creative and technical control of the entire recording project, and the individual recording sessions that are part of that project. He or she is present in the recording studio or at the location recording and works directly with the artist and engineer. The producer makes creative and aesthetic decisions that realize both the artist’s and label’s goals in the creation of musical content. Other duties include but are not limited to keeping budgets and schedules, adhering to deadlines, hiring musicians, singers, studios and engineers, overseeing other staffing needs and editing.”
(And editing. I trust we all realize that expert editing will make [and bad editing break] almost every musical and literary enterprise. From book editors and newspaper editors; to television and film editors; to radio producers and record producers, it is the editors/producers that are, in the end, responsible for shaping and delivering the final product that goes out to the public.)
When it comes to making a recording, then, the producer is the chief, the chef, the Jefe, the top dog, the Geeter-with-the-Heater, the Big-Boss-with-the-Hot-Sauce: that single person responsible for every aspect of a recording, from hiring the players to running the recording sessions to supervising the editing to choosing the cover art!
Having said all that, we should also be aware that the exact job of a record producer will vary depending upon the genre of music involved (meaning operas, concert music, rock/pop/country/hip-hop, or jazz) and whether the recording is made in a studio or live, in front of an audience.
John McClure (right) and Georg Solti (1912-1997)
A concert music record producer (like today’s featured producer, John McClure) is working from a script: a composer’s score. Whether a producer is partnered up with a conductor and an orchestra, or a string quartet, or a solo pianist, or whatever, said producer’s job is to present that conductor’s, that quartet’s, or that pianist’s interpretation of the score in as flattering a sonic environment as possible. In a studio, such a recording will typically be done in multiple takes. In the case of a live performance, multiple performances will typically contribute bits and pieces to the final – edited – recorded product.
A producer of opera recordings is also dealing with a script: again, with a composer’s score. But they must also cope with a vastly greater number of moving parts than a concert music record producer: not just instrumentalists but solo singers and, not unusually, choruses as well. But even more than all of the moving parts, an opera recording producer must deal with the egos of the singers, meaning that such a producer must have the calm, steady nerves of a brain surgeon and the diplomatic skills of Kofi Annan.…
Music History Monday: Let Us Quaff from the Cup: Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde
Jun 10, 2024
The real-life married couple Ludwig and Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld as Tristan and Isolde at the first performance of Tristan und Isolde on June 10, 1865
On June 10, 1865 – 159 years ago today – Richard Wagner’s magnificent and groundbreaking music drama Tristan und Isolde received its premiere in Munich under the baton of Hans von Bülow (whose wife, Cosima Liszt von Bülow, Wagner was enthusiastically shtupping at the same time).
Oh Goodness; Did I Just Write That?
I did.
I know, right? Here I am, introducing Tristan und Isolde – one of the most awesome, incredible works of art ever created – and I still couldn’t resist a cheap dig at Wagner the person. As we have discussed in the past and will do so again, the same personality flaws that made Richard Wagner an often despicable narcissist allowed him the conceit to reject the operatic clichés and conventions of his time and to create a body of dramatic musical art unfathomable in its originality, beauty, dramatic power, and imagination. Of course, had he not been the towering genius he was, and had he not risked everything – including his sanity, over and over again – to create his unparalleled body of work, well, he would just have been another loathsome crank, writing nasty letters to newspaper editors and shouting at people in the street.
But he was a towering genius, and he did create a singularly stunning body of work, a body of work we all deserve to revel in. So revel we shall, with the satisfying understanding that our pleasure in Wagner’s music affords him no monetary profit or emotional gratification at all, given that he’s been dead since February 13, 1883.
Richard Wagner (1813-1883) in 1860
Our gameplan. This post will indeed discuss Tristan und Isolde; it’s basic story line and its origins. But this post will deal primarily with the cliché but inescapable “Wagner Problem”: how to reconcile Wagner the “man” with Wagner the “artist,” and how to allow ourselves to accept the man while reveling in the artist!
Meanwhile, my Dr. Bob Prescribes posts for June 11 and 18 will feature my favorite DVD recording of Tristan und Isolde and, as such, will be all about Tristan und Isolde, all the time!
Don’t Call it an Opera!!!
Tristan und Isolde is a three-act music drama, or what Wagner himself called “eine Handlung” (which means “a drama” or“an action”). By his mid-career, Wagner outright refused to use the word “opera” except as a pejorative, claiming that the word represented the debased musical stage works of everyone not named “Richard Wagner.” Tristan und Isolde’s libretto (or “poem,” as Wagner would have us call it) was written and its music composed by Wagner between 1855 and 1859.
Wagner based his “poem” on a twelfth-century romance entitled Tristan by Gottfried von Strassburg, who died circa 1210. Wagner’s poem tells the story of two presumed “enemies” – the Irish princess Isolde and the Cornish (southern English) knight Tristan – who presumably fall madly in love only when they are duped into drinking a love potion. (Many modern observers – yours truly included – believe that this “love potion” is in fact a placebo, likely of high alcohol content – Bacardi 151, for example – a drink that allows Tristan and Isolde to, like, finally get in touch with their feelings and admit that they’ve actually loved each other for years.) Unfortunately, their love for each other is illicit (Isolde is due to marry the King of Cornwall, an old dude named “Marke”) and “unconsummated” (despite their very best efforts, T and I never manage to “do the dirty,” perhaps because they just can’t stop singing about how much they love each other). In the end, Tristan is cut down by a fellow knight of Cornwall and Isolde, on watching Tristan die, expires over his now dead body in an orgasmic haze.
Critics of Tristan und Isolde have referred to Wagner’s linked infatuation with sex and death as “perfumed obscenity” and its orgasmic and deathly conclusion as “snuff opera.”
Those nattering nabobs of critical negativism aside, I will happily argue that Tristan und Isolde is Wagner’s single greatest work. There’s nothing else even remotely like it in the repertoire.…
Music History Monday: Ludwig von Köchel and the Seemingly Impossible Task
Jun 03, 2024
Ludwig Alois Friedrich Ritter (“Ritter” meaning “Knight”) von Köchel” (18900-1877)
We mark the death on June 3, 1877 – 147 years ago today – of the Austrian lawyer, botanist, geologist, teacher, writer, publisher, composer, and “musicologist” Ludwig Alois Friedrich Ritter (“Ritter” meaning “Knight”) von Köchel, of cancer, in Vienna. Born on January 14, 1800, he was 77 years old at the time of his death.
Ludwig Köchel and the Archduke
Herr Köchel wasn’t born a “Ritter” – a “knight” – a “von” – with all the privileges and perks that such a title brought. Rather, he was born to the middle class in the Lower Austrian town of Krems an der Donau (meaning “At the junction of the Kremas and Danube Rivers”) some 43 miles west of Vienna. Smart and ambitious, he studied law in Vienna and went on to earn a Ph.D. in 1827, at the age of 27.
Köchel was a polymath, someone who knew a lot about a lot of things. As such, despite having a law degree, he chose a career as a teacher. But he was not just any teacher, and he didn’t teach just any students. For 15 years, Köchel was the tutor to the four sons of Archduke Charles of Austria.
This requires a wee bit of discussion/explanation.
Archduke Charles of Austria (1771-1847) in 1819
Archduke Charles Louis John Joseph Laurentius of Austria, Duke of Teschen (1771-1847) was an Austrian field-marshal, the third son of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II and the grandson of the Empress Maria Theresa. He was the nephew of both Emperor Joseph II (of Amadeus fame) and Marie Antoinette (of “oops, has anyone seen my noggin?” fame).
In a virtual sea of Austrian military incompetence against Napoleon, Archduke Charles stands out as the best Habsburg general officer of the Napoleonic era, and arguably the best commander ever produced by the House of Habsburg in its 636-year run (from 1282 until 1918). According to Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington (1769-1852), Archduke Charles was:
“the greatest general of his time.”
This, then, is the man who chose Ludwig Köchel to educate his four sons. Köchel lived with and worked with the Archduke’s boys for 15 years, from 1827 to 1842 (from the time Köchel was 27 years of age to 42). It would appear that everyone was satisfied with Köchel’s teaching, because upon his departure in 1842, he was rewarded by the archduke with a knighthood and life-time pension large enough to guarantee that he’d never have to “work” for a living again.…
Music History Monday: “Inappropriate”
May 27, 2024
There Must Be Something in the Air
Have any of you done – or anticipate doing – anything particularly foolish today, anything particularly inappropriate?
If you do, know that you will be in good company. Perhaps it’s the angle of the sun; perhaps it’s something in the air or water, because as dates go, May 27 is ripe with musical stories and actions that we shall deem as being “inappropriate.”
For example.
Coventry Evening Telegraph May 26, 1964: “In May of 1964, eleven 16-year-old boys were suspended from Woodlands Comprehensive School, Coventry, for having Mick Jagger haircuts. They were told by the Head of School, Donald Thompson, that they could return once they’d cut their hair.”
On May 27, 1964 – 60 years ago today – four of the eleven 16-year-old boys suspended fromWoodlands Comprehensive School in Coventry, UK, for having Mick Jagger haircuts complied with their headmaster’s demand that they cut their hair, and returned to school. The other seven lads put their hair (or at least the allegiance to Mick Jagger!) before their schooling and remained suspended. According to an article in the Coventry Evening Telegraph:
“their headmaster Mr. Donald Thompson has said that he would not object if they returned to school with a ‘neat Beatle cut.’
Mr. Thompson told the Coventry Evening Telegraph today that he was not against boys having modern hair styles, but he did object to the ‘scruffy, long hair style of the Rolling Stones with hair curling into the nape of the neck and over their ears.’”
Thompson’s anti-Jagger, anti-Stones, pro-neatly-shorn hairdecree was handed down about a month after the President of the UK’s National Federation of Hairdressers declared that the Rolling Stones’ haircuts were “the worst” of all their rock ‘n’ roll colleagues. He then added:
“One of them [no doubt referring to Keith Richards] looks as if he has a feather duster on his head.”
Oh my goodness, how worried everyone was about hair in the 1960s! Was it inappropriate for the parents of those eleven suspended boys to send their kids to school in violation of what was a stated “hair code policy?” Yes, it was inappropriate of them. Was it inappropriate for the headmaster to indefinitely suspend those children at the end of the school year? Yes, doubly inappropriate. At least those boys weren’t yet wearing their pants down around their knees, as they might do so today. Triply inappropriate.
Speaking of INAPPROPRIATE
The Sex Pistols in 1977: every parent’s worst nightmare
On May 27, 1977 – 47 years ago today – the Sex Pistols released their single, God Save the Queen,in the UK.
Now, if you thought I was going to label the Sex Pistols’ “song” God Save the Queen as being “inappropriate,” you are incorrect. Insipid? Yes. Artless? Surely. Ridiculous? Of course: it’s the freaking Sex Pistols, for heaven’s sake, the lowest, bottom-feeding punkers of the punks.
What was inappropriate was the reaction of the “establishment” to the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen and the degree to which that reaction made the song a cause célèbres. You see, after its release, the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen was instantly banned from British TV and radio stations. Many of the workers in UK record pressing plants refused to even manufacture the record, and many UK record shops simply refused to stock and sell it.
We should all know what happens when this sort of spontaneous censorship occurs, and that’s exactly what did happen. The single sold 200,000 copies in one week, making it the No. 2 hit on the UK charts, just behind Rod Stewart’s I Don’t Want to Talk About It.
No. 2 on the charts, for what amounts to a total piece of musical merde. But certain rumors continue to circulate, rumors that have never been confirmed nor denied: that the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen was actually No. 1 on the UK charts, but the British Phonographic Industry – the trade association that controls the UK charts – conspired to keep it out of the top slot. If true, that would have been most inappropriate!…
Music History Monday: A Difficult Life
May 20, 2024
Gaston Leroux’s Paris Opera House (today the Palais Leroux) in 1875, the year of its inauguration
Before we get to the principal topic of today’s post, we must note an operatic disaster that had nothing to do with singers or the opera being performed on stage. Rather, it was a disaster that inspired Gaston Leroux to write the novel The Phantom of the Opera, which was published in 1909.
On May 20, 1896 – 128 years ago today – a counterweight helping to hold up the six-ton chandelier at Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House fell into the audience during a performance of Étienne-Joseph Floquet’s opera Hellé (composed in 1779). We don’t know how the opera performance was going, but the counterweight was a big hit: one woman in the audience was killed and a number of other audience members were badly injured.
Installing the six-ton chandelier
The disaster was covered by a reporter for the Parisian daily Le Matin named Gaston Leroux (1868-1927). The accident – to say nothing for the Paris Opera House itself and the lake beneath it – made quite an impression on Monsieur Leroux.
About that underground “lake.” Writing in The New York Times on January 24, 2023, Sam Lubell tells us that:
“When digging the foundations [for the Paris Opera House], workers hit a hidden arm of the Seine, causing water to flood the site. It was impossible to remove all the water, so crews had to contain it with a massive concrete reservoir with a vaulted ceiling from which water is still pumped today. The so-called lake was dramatized by Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom of the Opera, who made it the stomping grounds of the Phantom. [Christopher Mead, author of Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera: Architectural Empathy and the Renaissance of French Classicism] was mesmerized by [the opera house house]. ‘You can see why it inspired Leroux,’ he said. ‘You could invent a whole world there.’”
Which, of course, is precisely what Gaston Leroux did.
Onwards to the star attraction of today’s post!
Clara Schumann in 1857, age 38
With our heads bowed, we mark the death – 128 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Clara Wieck Schumann, who died of a stroke at the age of 76 on May 20, 1896.
She was among the great pianists of her time, a child prodigy whose performances were described with awe by her adult contemporaries. She was a composer of outstanding promise, who – for reasons we will discuss in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post – never had the opportunity to fulfill that promise. She was the compositional muse for her fiancé and husband, Robert Schumann (1810-1856), and the spiritual muse of her best friend, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897). Most of all she was a survivor: someone whose life reads like some endlessly tragic Victorian novel, only without the “happy ending” tacked on at the end.
No One Escapes This Life Unscathed, But When it Came to Clara . . .
Next time one of us gets into a self-pitying funk (at which I am a particular virtuoso), during which we stand convinced that our personal lives represent the very nadir of human existence, I would recommend that we think of Clara Schumann and her life as a cautionary tale, as an example of how very badly things can go if fate is not on one’s side. If such reflection doesn’t temper our own self-absorbed misery, frankly nothing will.…
Music History Monday: What Day is Today?
May 13, 2024
World Cocktail Day! Whoever wrote the copy for this notice was clearly well into their third, perhaps fourth cocktail
We recognize May 13th as being, among other “days” here in the United States, National Frog Jumping Day, Leprechaun Day, International Hummus Day, National Crouton Day, and – wait for it – World Cocktail Day!
National Days, Weeks, and Months!
Who creates these damned things?
We’ll get to that in a moment. But first, let’s distinguish between a national holiday and a national day (or week or month).
In the United States, national (or “federal”) holidays are designated by Congress and/or the President. There are presently a total of ten national/federal holidays, meaning that federal employees get to take the day off. However, anyone can declare a national day (or week or month). The trick is getting enough people to buy into the “day” that it actually gains some traction and has some meaning. Such national days are created by advocacy groups; lobbying groups; industry groups; government bodies; even individuals.
A different sort of “cocktail” day, May 13 is also National Fruit Cocktail Day!
According to the “National Day Calendar,” today, May 13, 2024, is – along with those “days” listed at the top of this post – National Women’s Checkup Day; National Fruit Cocktail Day; and National Apple Pie Day. May 13 of this year is also the first day of Bike to Work Week; of Dementia Awareness Week; Water Savings Week; American Craft Beer Week; National Salvation Army Week; National Stationary Week; and National Smile Month.
I am oh-so-tempted to call this list of promotional idiocy, well, idiocy. But that today is both World Cocktail Day and the first day of American Craft Beer Week has gratefully given us the hook for both today’s Music History Monday post and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post: the drinking habits of some of our favorite composers, and drinking songs we should all know (and love).
A Disclaimer and a Necessary, Pre-emptive Point
First the disclaimer. While I like my dry, gin martinis as much as the next guy – hell, probably a lot more than the next guy – I am in no way promoting the consumption of alcohol in this post, especially in excess. Rather, as is my usual m.o., my goal is to render as human as I can composers who are otherwise pedestalized and, as such, de-humanized.
And now the necessary point. Today, some of us tend to be very judgmental about the regular consumption of alcohol. And no wonder: given its potentially addictive nature and sometimes adverse effects on our bodies, moods, and minds, it is – for many people – nothing less than poison. But for most of us it is a great pleasure in a life otherwise in short supply of such.
Now please: in the centuries prior to the twentieth, alcoholic beverages were more than merely recreation fluids but lifesavers as well, as the dearth of clean drinking water necessitated the consumption of far more alcohol than many of us, today, would consider healthy. But given the choice, say, between a mug of ale or a pilsner glass of cholera-infected water, I do believe every one of us would choose the ale every time.
There’s a tendency, then – today – to call all sort of historical figures “alcoholics,” despite the fact that the word and the concept behind it only came in to being in 1852. Today, we can read that Mozart was an alcoholic, Beethoven was an alcoholic, Schubert was an alcoholic; Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, etc.: all alcoholics.
Please.
Drinkers? Yes. But we must (and will) be careful about who we call an “alcoholic,” especially if they lived at a time when alcoholic beverages were among the only safe ways to consume fluid.…
Music History Monday: The Evolution of Western Pop Music: USA (1960-2010)
May 06, 2024
We mark the public release, on May 6, 2015 – nine years ago today – of a scientific/statistical study published by The Royal Society Open Science Journal, a study entitled “The Evolution of Western Pop Music: USA (1960-2010).”
Royal Society Open Science
Scoff not, my friends: this was, in fact, a high-end study conducted (and written up) by four high-end scientists: Dr. Matthias Mauch, of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, whose current professional title is “Research Manager for Recommender Systems and Music Intelligence at Apple Music”; Dr. Robert M. MacCallum, who teaches in the Division of Life Sciences at Imperial College, London; Dr. Mark Levy, a former research assistant at the Centre for Digital Music at the University of London and for the last three years a principal research scientist at Apple, where he researches potential future applications of machine learning to music creation and listening; and finally, Armand M. Leroi, a professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College in London.
Scary fine creds on display here: up, down, and sideways.
The study’s abstract is as follows. I figure it’s better to get it directly from the quartet of Mauch, MacCallum, Levy, and Leroi than to offer up a watered down and abbreviated version of the abstract by yours truly.
“In modern societies, cultural change seems ceaseless. The flux of fashion is especially obvious for popular music. While much has been written about the origin and evolution of pop, most claims about its history are anecdotal rather than scientific in nature. To rectify this, we investigate the US Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010. Using music information retrieval and text-mining tools, we analyze the musical properties of approximately 17,000 recordings that appeared in the charts and demonstrate quantitative trends in their harmonic and timbral properties. We then use these properties to produce an audio-based classification of musical styles and study the evolution of musical diversity and disparity, testing, and rejecting, several classical theories of cultural change. Finally, we investigate whether pop musical evolution has been gradual or punctuated. We show that, although pop music has evolved continuously, it did so with particular rapidity during three stylistic ‘revolutions’ around 1964, 1983 and 1991. We conclude by discussing how our study points the way to a quantitative science of cultural change.”
Fascinating, yes?
Methodology
The actual paper – “The Evolution of Western Pop Music: USA (1960-2010)” – is rather lengthy; 4614 words (FYI: I let my computer do the word count). Overall, the paper is characterized by the sort of technical jargon we would expect to find in a scientific journal. For example: in the course of their introduction, the authors lay out their methodology as follows.
“We adopted an approach inspired by recent advances in text-mining. We began by measuring our songs for a series of quantitative audio features, 12 descriptors of tonal content and 14 of timbre. These were then discretized into ‘words’ resulting in a harmonic lexicon (H-lexicon) of chord changes, and a timbral lexicon (T-lexicon) of timbre clusters. To relate the T-lexicon to semantic labels in plain English [“plain English”; if only!], we carried out expert annotations. The musical words from both lexica were then combined into 8+8=16 ‘topics’ using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). LDA is a hierarchical generative model of a text-like corpus, in which every document (here: song) is represented as a distribution over a number of topics, and every topic is represented as a distribution over all possible words (here: chord changes from the H-lexicon, and timbre clusters from the T-lexicon). We obtain the most likely model by means of probabilistic inference. Each song, then, is represented as a distribution over eight harmonic topics (H-topics) that capture classes of chord changes (e.g. ‘dominant-seventh chord changes’) and eight timbral topics (T-topics) that capture particular timbres (e.g. ‘drums, aggressive, percussive’, ‘female voice, melodic, vocal’, derived from the expert annotations), with topic proportions q. These topic frequencies were the basis of our analyses.”
Got that?
Okay: I am so, so sorry I made you read that; really, I am. But it was necessary to show you why we aren’t going to get into the details of the study but rather, fairly quickly cut to the study’s conclusions which are, to my mind, of no small interest, methodology aside!…
John Wayne as Genghis Kahn (1956); not one of his finest cinematic moments
We mark the birth of The Duke on April 29, 1899 – 125 years ago today – in Washington D.C.
By “The Duke,” we are not here referring to the actor John Wayne (who was born on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa), but rather, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, one of the greatest songwriters and composers ever to be born in the United States.
Aside from their shared nickname, it would appear that the only thing Duke Ellington had in common with John Wayne was that they both suffered from lung cancer. In Ellington’s case, cancer killed him at the age of 75 on May 24, 1974, at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City (and not at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, as is inexplicably claimed on certain web sites!).
Born in Washington D.C., he grew up at 2129 Ida Place (now Ward Place) NW, in the district’s West End neighborhood. His father, James Edward Ellington, worked as a blueprint maker for the Navy Department and on occasion as a butler, sometimes at the White House. His mother, Daisy (born Kennedy) was the daughter of formerly enslaved people. Theirs was a musical household; both of Ellington’s parents played piano. (We are told that James Edward Ellington preferred to play arrangements of operatic arias, while Daisy preferred the semi-classical parlor songs that were popular with the middle and upper middle classes at the time.)
Ellington as a child
And let us make no mistake; the Ellingtons were indeed of the upper middle class: sophisticated, educated, upwardly mobile, proud of their racial heritage and unwilling to allow their children to be limited by the Jim Crow laws of the time. According to Studs Terkel, writing in his book Giants of Jazz (The New Press, 2nd edition, 2002):
“Daisy [Ellington] surrounded her son with dignified women to reinforce his manners and teach him elegance. His childhood friends noticed that his casual, offhand manner and dapper dress gave him the bearing of a young nobleman.”
It was that noble bearing that prompted Ellington’s high school friend Edgar McEntee to come up with the nickname that Ellington wore so very well for so very long. According to Ellington himself:
“I think he [Edgar McEntee] felt that in order for me to be eligible for his constant companionship, I should have a title. So he called me Duke.”)
For the young Ellington, piano lessons were a must; it was, for children of his generation (and mine as well!) an inevitable childhood rite-of-passage. Having said that, like so many red-blooded American kids, Ellington preferred baseball, at which he excelled. In his autobiography he recalled that:
“President [Theodore] Roosevelt would come on his horse sometimes, and stop and watch us play.”
(For our information: Ellington’s love of the game ran deep, and his first paying job was selling peanuts at Washington Senators games.)
(Because we all should know: the Senators, also-known-as the “Nationals,” played in D.C. from 1901 to 1960. It was in 1960 that the team broke the collective hearts of its District fans and moved to Minnesota, there to become the “Minnesota Twins”: “twins” as in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.)
Ellington’s first piano teacher was the spectacularly named Marietta Clinkscales (OMG; who could make such a name up?). As a teenager, he took up ragtime piano and studied harmony, though as a teen his growing love of music shared equal time with a real talent for painting and design. …
Music History Monday Replay: “The Empress” – Bessie Smith
Apr 15, 2024
I am writing this post from my hotel room in what is presently (but sadly, not for long) warm and sunny Vienna. As I mentioned last week, I will be here for eight days acting as “color commentator” for a musical tour of the city sponsored by Wondrium (a.k.a. The Teaching Company/The Great Courses). I also indicated, one, that I would keep you up-to-date on the trip with near-daily posts, and two, that Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes will be rather truncated while I am here.
We mark the birth on April 15, 1894 – 130 years ago today – of the American contralto and blues singers Bessie Smith. Appropriately nicknamed “The Empress,” Bessie Smith remains one of the most significant and influential musicians ever born in the United States. Well, it just so happens that we celebrated Maestra Smith birthday in my Music History Monday post of April 15, 2019, and I will thus be excused for directing your attention to that post through the button below:
Music History Monday: The Guy Who Wrote the “Waltz”
Apr 08, 2024
Anton Diabelli (1781-1858)
We mark the death on April 8, 1858 – 166 years ago today – of the Austrian composer, editor, and music publisher Anton Diabelli in Vienna, at the age of 76. Born on September 5, 1781, his enduring fame is based on a waltz of his composition that became the basis for Beethoven’s epic Diabelli Variations for piano.
Quick Work
We are, fairly or unfairly, going to make rather quick work of Herr Diabelli. That’s because, with all due respect, what I really want to write about is Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.
There’s a powerful ulterior motive at work here as well. In a field of great recordings, my numero uno favorite Diabelli Variations is the recording made by the Milan-born Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini in 1998 and released by Deutsche Grammophon in 2000. Pollini passed away at the age of 82, on March 23, 2024: 16 days ago. As such, we will honor Maestro Pollini in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes even as we celebrate his unequaled performance of Beethoven’s variations.
Anton Diabelli (1781-1858)
Despite his Italian surname, Anton Diabelli was Austrian born-and-bred.
He was born in Mattsee, a market town just outside of Salzburg. He was a musical child, and typical of almost every musically talented boy of his time and place (and by “place” we’re referring to Catholic Europe), he was musically schooled as a chorister in a boys’ choir, in Diabelli’s case at the Salzburg Cathedral (where he almost certainly studied composition with Joseph Haydn’s younger brother, Michael Haydn [1737-1806]).
By the time he was 19 years old – in 1800 – Diabelli had composed a number of large-scale works, including six masses. It was in that year that Diabelli, who had been trained for the priesthood, was packed off to the monastery at Raitenhaslach, in the southeastern German state of Bavaria. …
Important Programming Note
A scheduling note before I leave you. I will be in Vienna leading a tour starting on April 13, which – sadly – will preclude me from posting Music History Monday Podcasts on April 15 and 22. I will, however, be posting daily reports from Vienna on my Patreon site. I would be remiss, then, if I didn’t invite everyone who is not already a subscribing member to join me at Patreon and partake in the fun.
Music History Monday: Bob Dylan: Nobel Laureate
Apr 01, 2024
Bob Dylan (born 1941) in 2017
On April 1, 2017 – 7 years ago today – Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, 1941) was awarded his Nobel Prize in Literature in a private ceremony held at an undisclosed location in Stockholm, Sweden. At the ceremony, Dylan received his gold Nobel Prize medal and his Nobel diploma. The cash prize of eight million Swedish kronor (837,000 euros, or $891,000) was not handed over to Dylan at the time, as he was required to give a lecture before receiving the cash. That lecture was recorded and then released some 9 weeks later, on June 5, 2017.
The private award ceremony was attended by twelve members of the Swedish Academy, that organization tasked with choosing the recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature. According to Sara Danius, the academy’s permanent secretary, a good time was had by all:
“Spirits were high. Champagne was had.”
Sara Danius in 2017
Ms. Danius went on to describe the occasion in a bit more detail:
“Quite a bit of time was spent looking closely at the gold medal, in particular the beautifully crafted back, an image of a young man sitting under a laurel tree who listens to the Muse. Taken from Virgil’s Aeneid, the inscription reads: ‘Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes,’ loosely translated as ‘And they who bettered life on earth by their newly found mastery’.”
We would observe that the announcement of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize was made nearly six months before, on October 16, 2016. Dylan, who was performing in Las Vegas, was immediately informed. However, in the days that followed, he failed to return any of the phone calls he received from the Swedish Academy. Neither did Dylan make any public comment or statement about the prize to the press. No one knew if he intended to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, where prize winners were to receive their awards from Swedish King Carl XVI and where they were then expected to give a speech.
In reference to not hearing even a peep from Bob Dylan, a member of the Swedish Academy, the writer Per Wastberg, said on Swedish television:
“This is an unprecedented situation.”
He then criticized Dylan as being:
“Impolite and arrogant.”
We don’t imagine Per Wastberg’s opinion changed much when, after over a week, Dylan’s people finally communicated with the Swedish Academy, informing them that he could not attend the award ceremony on December 10 due to “previous commitments,” as if he’d been invited to play a round of golf.
When Dylan finally did show up to accept his award, on April 1, 2017 – seven years ago today – he honored those champagne-swilling academy members by showing up in a hoodie under a leather jacket. And lest you think he ventured to Stockholm specifically to receive his prize, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. Rather, Stockholm was the first stop on a long-planned European concert tour, so a visit to the Swedish Academy was conveniently booked between the first and second concerts of the tour. …
Music History Monday: The Towering Inferno
Mar 25, 2024
Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) circa 1890
We mark the birth on March 25, 1867 – 157 years ago today – of the cellist and conductor Arturo Toscanini, in the city of Parma, in what was then the Kingdom of Italy. He died, at the age of 89, on January 16, 1957, at his home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, in New York City.
(Properly embalmed and, we trust, adequately chilled, his no-doubt well-dressed corpse was shipped off to Milan, Italy, where he was entombed in the Cimitero Monumentale. His epitaph features his own words, words he spoke in 1926 after conducting the posthumous premiere of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, which had been left unfinished at Puccini’s death:
“Qui finisce l’opera, perché a questo punto il maestro è morto.” (“Here the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died.”)
The Toscanini family tomb at the Monumental Cemetery of Milan
What Made Toscanini So Special
Arturo Toscanini lived a long life, and he lived it to the hilt. Firmly in the public eye from the age of 19 (in 1886) until his death in 1957, he travelled everywhere, seemed to have performed with everyone, and had more affairs than Hugh Heffner had bunnies. This is my subtle way of saying that even the most cursory examination of his life is far, far beyond the purview of a 2300-word post. Consequently, we will focus today on the two aspects of Toscanini’s career that made Toscanini special and that together created the Toscanini legend: his revolutionary (at the time) style of conducting and his incendiary, Vesuvian temper.
In tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post, we will pick back up with Maestro Toscanini, first with his breakthrough performance on June 30, 1886 (when as the principal cellist in a travelling opera company he was called upon to conduct Aida in Rio de Janeiro in the middle what amounted to an audience riot) and then with recordings made and tantrums thrown during his final gig, with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in New York City.
The First “Modern” Conductor
Toscanini in 1885, at the age of 18
As a conductor, Toscanini was a literalist. At the time he broke in as a conductor in 1886, at the age of 19 (to instant acclaim on the part of audiences and performers!), conductors typically treated the scores they conducted as vehicles for their personal self-expression and self-aggrandizement. For those conductors, that meant milking every piece of music they performed for as much expressive Sturm und Drang, and Schmerz und Angst as was possible. If such conducting meant constantly speeding up and slowing down in a manner not indicated in the score, so be it; if it meant exaggerating the dynamics, so be it; if it meant playing movements at speeds vastly different from those indicated by the composer, so be it; and if it meant altering a composer’s indicated instrumentation, yes: so be it as well.
It was said that hearing Toscanini conduct a familiar work – be it an opera by Puccini or a symphony by Beethoven – was like seeing a familiar painting cleaned and restored: with centuries of grime stripped away, viewers could experience and revel in its original colors for the first time. …
Music History Monday: Fake It ‘til You Make It
Mar 18, 2024
Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), painted in 1896 by Ilya Repin
We mark the birth of the Russian composer Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov on March 18, 1844: 180 years ago today. Born in the Russian town of Tikhvin – roughly 120 miles east of St. Petersburg – Rimsky-Korsakov died at the age of 64, on June 21, 1908, on his estate near the Russian town of Luga, about 85 miles south of St. Petersburg
Fake It ‘til You Make It
Like most kids growing up, I had various assumptions about grownups (i.e. “adults”). As someone who has now – presumably – been an adult for very nearly a half of a century, I have learned that my assumptions – a few of which I’ve listed below – were all crazy wrong.
Assumption one: at around 21, we cross the line into adulthood.
Wrong. There are no such “lines”; we’re all changing, all the time.
Assumption two: adults are emotionally mature.
Wrong. Physically, yes, I’m pushing seventy. Emotionally? I’m roughly fifteen. On a good day.
Assumption three: adults know what they’re doing.
Really? Adults only “know” what they’re doing (if they ever learn what their “doing” at all) after they’ve been doing it for decades. Until then, they are apprentices, “learning on the job,” which are nice ways of saying “faking it”!
Growing up, I had no concept of this. I just assumed that once you got to a certain age, you actually knew what you were doing.
The Purnell School, Pottersville, New Jersey, main entrance
Silly me. I was disabused of that bit of foolishness as soon as I entered the job market when, at the age of 23, I was hired as the music teacher at a now defunct, all-girls’ private high school in Pottersville, New Jersey called the Purnell School. Oh sure, I thought I had it all together at the time, but in retrospect I didn’t know Scheiße from Shinola (which was a brand of shoe polish that was popular during the first decades of the twentieth century).
In retrospect, my “apprenticeship” as a teacher – that period that saw me “fake it ‘til I made it” – lasted some 5 years. This doesn’t mean that I ever stopped learning on the job; hopefully, I’ll never stop getting better at what I do. It only means that it took me around 5 years to achieve what today I consider to be a passing competence at teaching.
And so it was as well for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.…
Music History Monday: An Opera Profane and Controversial: Verdi’s Rigoletto
Mar 11, 2024
We mark the first performance on March 11, 1851 – 173 years ago today – of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto at Venice’s storied Teatro la Fenice: The Phoenix Theater.
Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) in 1852, a year after the premiere of Rigoletto
We set the scene.
The year was 1849. Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (1813-1901) was – at the age of 36 – the most famous and popular composer of opera living and working in Italy.
Living in his hometown of Busseto, in the Parma region of northern Italy, Verdi spent the last days of 1849 and the first weeks of 1850 considering future opera projects. He sat down and drew up a list of stories that captured his interest, a list filled with literary masterworks old and new. At the top of the list were Shakespeare’s King Lear, Hamlet, and The Tempest. There was Kean, by Alexander Dumas pere and Victor Hugo’s Marion Delorme, Ruy Blas, and Le Roi s’amuse (“The King’s Jester”). Among other works on the list were Lord George Gordon Byron’s Cain; Jean Baptiste Racine’s Phedre; Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s A Secret Grievance, a Secret Revenge; Vicomte Francois Rene de Chateaubriand’s Atala; and Count Vittorio Alfieri’s Filippo (which would eventually become the opera Don Carlo).
Stifellio
Francesco Maria Piave (1810-1876)
Narrowing things down more than just a bit, Verdi wrote the librettist Francesco Maria Piave (1810-1876) at his home in Venice and asked him – per favore – to prepare a draft scenario for Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse,(“The King’s Jester”). Piave consented to do so, and additionally suggested some other possible texts, including a play by the French dramatists Émile Souvestre and Eugène Bourgeois entitled Stifellio.
Verdi and Piave went ahead with Stifellio, which was Verdi’s 16th (of 27) operas. It received its premiere on November 16, 1850, at the Teatro Grande in the city of Trieste, in the north-eastern corner of Italy.
To say that Stifellio has a controversial plot is a major understatement. It’s a drama about a Protestant minister who leaves his home to preach, during which time his lonely wife takes a lover. Having confessed her infidelity, the opera reaches its climax as the preacher forgives her adultery while delivering a sermon from his pulpit. All in all, it was a most unusual subject for an opera composed and performed in Catholic Italy.
Just days before Stifellio’s opening, the local censors in Trieste exercised their “prerogative” and savaged the opera, cutting out whole sections of what they called “offensive text.”
Those poor, offended censors hardly knew where to start! OMG, the protagonists were Protestant! Actual verses from the Bible were sung onstage! An adulterous woman was portrayed sympathetically, and then – then – she was forgiven by her husband! Various pieces of religious paraphernalia were used as props! By the time the censors had finished with it, little of Stifellio was left untouched. Verdi was apoplectic, and he accused the censors of having “castrated” his opera. Somehow, Verdi, Piave, and the cast managed to stitch together what was left and went on with the show. It was nothing short of a miracle that Stifellio wasn’t a complete flop. It was only a partial flop, because its sympathetic audience – including the critics – were aware of its 11th hour demolition.
It’s important that we know something of Stifellio’s fate, because when censors threatened Verdi’s next project – Rigoletto – Verdi was prepared to go to war!…
Music History Monday: Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Some Myths Debunked
Mar 04, 2024
“Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1843-1893), circa 1875, at the time he was composing Swan Lake
We mark the first performance of the ballet Swan Lake on March 4, 1877: 147 years ago today. Premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, with music by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), choreography by the Czech-born dance master Julius Reisinger (1828-1892), and its music performed by the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, the first performance of Swan Lake landed with an epic THUD, meaning not good.
Pretty much every aspect of the ballet was critically blasted. The vast majority of the critics present found Tchaikovsky’s score to be far too “complex” for a ballet; one critic called it:
“too noisy, too ‘Wagnerian,” and too symphonic.”
A visiting correspondent by the name of Tyler Grant called the ballet:
“utter hogwash, unimaginative and altogether unmemorable.”
Now, admittedly, there were some problems with that premiere performance.
For example.
Anna Sobeshchanskaya (1842-1918
The famed Russian prima ballerina Anna Sobeshchanskaya (1842-1918) was originally cast in the role of Odette – the “white swan” – the star and heroine of the ballet. She may also have been slated to dance the role of the villainous Black Swan, Odile; today it is common practice for the same ballerina to perform the parts of both Odette and Odile. However, it is now believed that the ballet had originally called for two different dancers to dance the parts.
Whatever the case, the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina – Anna Sobeshchanskaya – was to star in the original production of Swan Lake. And then, out of the blue, she was suddenly removed from the cast and replaced by an entirely inferior dancer named Pelageya Karpakova (who was also known as Polina Karpakova)!
What happened?
Apparently, a major figure in the Russian government (who has remained nameless over the years, a testament to his power!) had Sobeshchanskaya black-balled (or “black-swanned,” as it were) and bounced from the ballet. This government big-wig and Sobeshchanskaya had been having an affair (seedy but true; this is how ballet worked in France and Russia, where aristocrats took as their lovers ballerinas), and he had rewarded her prowess-in-the-sack and loyalty towards him with some very expensive jewelry. Having received the jewelry, Madame Sobeshchanskaya turned around and married a fellow dancer and sold the bling for cash.
A lot of cash, leaving her erstwhile fat-cat boyfriend unhappy.
And so it was up to a lesser and likely under-rehearsed dancer to negotiate the virtuosic part of Odette at the premiere, a part that had been created for Anna Sobeshchanskaya. As the replacement, Pelageya Karpakova’s performance did not go well.
Then there were the issues surrounding the score Tchaikovsky composed for this, his first ballet.
He was, frankly, an odd choice to be commissioned by the Imperial Theaters in 1875 to compose Swan Lake. Okay, he was an accomplished composer with three symphonies under his belt, but in Russia, ballets were usually composed by specialists who wrote nothing but dance music. Such dance music was generally characterized by glaringly obvious and easily followed “oom-pah-pah” type rhythmic accentuation tricked out with simple melodies set in even phrases. Along came Tchaikovsky, who composed for ballet the way he composed for the symphony hall, writing music in which the groupings of beats are not always obvious and phrases that are not always even; music replete with countermelodies and polyphony, thematic development, and long-range key relationships; music that did not merely accompany the dancers but that deepened the dramatic and emotional action being depicted on stage.
Tchaikovsky did not set out to be a “revolutionary” when it came to Russian ballet music, but that’s what he was, and it was only after his death that his “symphonic” ballets came to be acclaimed as the compositional masterworks that they are. But in his lifetime, Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores were considered to be “problematic.” …
Music History Monday: Too Late to Matter for Georges Bizet, though Better Late Than Never for the Rest of Us
Feb 26, 2024
George Bizet (1838-1875) in 1875
We mark the premiere on February 26, 1935 – 89 years ago today – of Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C. The premiere took place in Basel, Switzerland, in a performance conducted by Felix Weingartner (1863-1942). Bizet (1838-1875) never heard the symphony performed; he had died in the Paris suburbs in 1875 at the age of 36, a full 60 years before Weingartner’s premiere of his symphony. Bizet’s Symphony in C, considered today to be a masterwork, was only “discovered” in the archives of the Paris Conservatoire in 1933, 78 years after its composition in 1855!
What If
We contemplate a short list of those great (or potentially great) composers who died before their fortieth birthday. Henry Purcell (dead at 36), Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (26), Wolfgang Mozart (35), Vincenzo Bellini (33), Frédéric Chopin (39), Felix Mendelssohn (38), Lili Boulanger (24), Juan Arriaga (19), and George Gershwin (who died at the age of 38). We should all deeply regret their early passing, not just because of the inherent tragedy of dying so young but because it is impossible not to think about what these composers might have accomplished had they at least lived Beethoven’s life span (56 years), or Sebastian Bach’s (65 years), or Richard Strauss’ (85 years), or Elliott Carter’s (103 years), or Leo Ornstein’s (106 years; though some say 109!).
Leo Ornstein (1892/1895-2002) in 1981, looking darned good for his age; Ornstein’s exact date of birth is unknown, with various sources claiming 1892, 1893 or 1895
Admittedly, not everyone wonders about what those short-lived composers might have accomplished had they lived longer lives. For example, apropos of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann (who himself didn’t live a particularly long life; 1810-1856) wrote:
“It is pointless to guess at what more Schubert might have achieved. He did enough; and let them be honored who have striven and accomplished as he did.”
Rather more recently, the pianist András Schiff (born 1953) said that:
“Schubert lived a very short life, but it was a very concentrated life. In 31 years, he [composed] more than other people would in 100 years, and it is needless to speculate what he could have written had he lived another 50 years. It’s irrelevant, just like with Mozart.”
Schubert (1797-1828) in 1825, three years before his death at the age of 31
At very least, I would accuse Messrs. Schumann and Schiff of being intellectual party-poopers, by denying themselves the joys of speculation. But I also believe their assertions that speculation is “pointless,” “needless,” and “irrelevant” to be downright wrong.
Why “wrong”? Because speculating on “what if” allows us to formulate alternative outcomes, alternative outcomes that in the end help us to recognize and process more deeply what actually did happen.
(Of course, if the American theoretical physicist and string theorist Brian Greene is correct, and we live in a “quilted multiverse,” then any possible event will occur an infinite number of times in an infinite number of parallel universes. If this is true, there is no such thing as “speculation,” as anything we might “speculate upon” will already have occurred or will occur in some universe or another!)
Back to our cozy, home universe. To my mind, far from being merely sport, speculating on possible outcomes allows us to sharpen our understanding of what actually did happen, and to appreciate as well the incredible web of interactive cause-and-effect that characterizes the progress of time.
For example. What if Georges Bizet had lived another thirty years, until 1905, and had died at the age of 67? He might very well have decided to compose another symphony, or another two symphonies, or another three symphonies, or whatever. Based on what we now know to be his Symphony in C, those subsequent symphonies would almost certainly have been terrific works. Had Bizet lived even a few more months, the fame and fortune that just eluded him in his lifetime (more on this in a bit) would have been his for the taking, and a work like the Symphony in C would likely not have languished in an archive for all those years.
Idle speculation? Yes. But it helps us to understand just how special Bizet’s Symphony in C really is and just how unfair was its fate.…
Music History Monday: Frankie and Johnny, and Helen and Lee
Feb 19, 2024
I am aware that Valentine’s Day is already 5 days past, but darned if the romantic warm ‘n’ fuzzies aren’t still lingering with me like a rash from poison oak. As such, I will be excused for offering up what I will admit is a belated, but nevertheless Valentine’s Day-related post.
Gratitude
We should all be grateful that the following Valentine’s Day-related post is not on the lines of those blogs I wrote in 2010 and 2011, blogs written for various websites in my attempt to drum up sales for my Great Courses/Teaching Company Courses. For example, I wrote a couple of Valentine’s Day-themed blogs in 2011, one for Huffpost and the other for J-Date, as in “Jewish-Dating.” For those posts – entitled “Romantic Music” – I was tasked with recommending appropriately “romantic” music for an intimate, tête-à-tête Valentine’s Day evening. This is how they began:
“Fresh flowers, chilled champagne, and a candlelight dinner for two; the stereotypical trappings of a successful Valentine’s Day evening. But the sensual menu is still incomplete: smell, taste, touch, and sight are covered, but proper sound is still wanting.
Yes indeed, music, the purported feast of the gods, the indispensable aural lubricant for romance, must be chosen and chosen well.”
OMG; gag me with not just a spoon but an industrial-sizedladle. BTW, I will not waste your time with the music I recommended except to observe that it consisted of all the usual suspects, saccharine music for a Hallmark Holiday.
One song that wasn’t on my list back then but would surely be on it today is one that reflects the cynicism with which I now hold the entire St. Valentine’s Day trip. That song is Frankie and Johnny.
The Leighton Brothers, Frank (on the left, 1880-1927) and Bert (1877-1964)
Frankie and Johnny
There are so many different versions of the song Frankie and Johnny that to this day, no one is precisely sure who originally wrote it. (Writing in 1962, a musicologist named Bruce Redfern Buckley unearthed 291 different versions of Frankie and Johnny!) The version we are most familiar with today was created by the Leighton Brothers (Frank and Bert) along with the then well-known folk musician Ren Shields (1868-1913) in 1908.
The lyric of the song tells the lurid tale of a prostitute named Frankie and her wayward boyfriend, Johnny. Here are the first nine of the song’s thirteen verses.
“Frankie and Johnny were lovers,
O Lordy, how they could love.
They swore to be true to each other,
Just as true as the stars above.
He was her man but he done her wrong.
Frankie and Johnny went walking,
Johnny had a brand new suit.
Frankie paid a hundred dollars,
Just to make her man look cute.
He was her man but he done her wrong.
Johnny said, “I’ve got to leave you,
But I won't be very long.
Don’t you wait up for me, honey,
Nor worry while I’m gone.”
He was her man but he done her wrong.
Frankie went down to the corner,
Stopped in to buy her some beer.
Says to the fat bartender,
“Has my Johnny man been here?”
He was her man but he done her wrong.
“Well, I ain’t going to tell you no story,
Ain’t going to tell you no lie.
Johnny went by ‘bout an hour ago,
With a girl named Nellie Bly.
He is your man but he’s doing you wrong.”
Frankie went home in a hurry,
She didn’t go there for fun.
She hurried home to get ahold
Of Johnny's shootin’ gun.
He was her man but he’s doing her wrong.
Frankie took a cab at the corner,
Says, driver step on this cab.
She was just a desperate woman,
Getting’ two-timed by her man.
He was her man but he’s doin’ her wrong.
Frankie got out at south Clark Street,
Looked in a window, so high.
Saw Johnny, man, a lovin’ up,
That high-brow Nellie Bly.
He was her man but he done her wrong.
Johnny saw Frankie a-comin’,
Out the back door he did scoot.
But Frankie took aim with her pistol,
And the gun went roota-toot-toot.
He was her man but he done her wrong.”
Ah, romance, don’t you think?
Now that’s a Valentine’s Day-appropriate love song! No flowers and carb-loaded chocolates but rather, genuine passion and three .44 caliber slugs!
The song was inspired by an actual event that took place in an apartment building at 212 Targee Street in St. Louis, Missouri’s red-light district. At 2am on the morning of October 15, 1899, a 22-year-old prostitute named Frankie Baker (1876-1952) shot and killed her lover and pimp, the 17-year-old Allen (or “Albert”) Britt.…
Music History Monday: Unauthorized Use
Feb 12, 2024
February 12 is one of those remarkable days in music history, remarkable for all the notable events that took place on this day. So: before getting to our featured topic, let us acknowledge some of those events and share some links to previous Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts that dealt with those events.
Carl Czerny (1791-1857)
On this day in 1812, Beethoven’s student (and friend), the Austrian composer, pianist, and teacher Carl Czerny (1791-1857) performed as the soloist in the premiere of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, the “Emperor.” Czerny was the subject of Music History Monday on July 15, 2019.
We wish a heartfelt farewell to the German pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who died on this date in Cairo, Egypt in 1894, at the age of 64. Von Bülow was the subject of both Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes just last month, on January 8 and 9,respectively.
Birthday greetings to the American composer Roy Harris (1898-1979), who was born on this date in 1898 in Chandler, Oklahoma. Harris and his Symphony No. 3 were featured in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post on April 9, 2019.
On February 12, 1924 – exactly 100 years ago today – George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue received its premiere at Aeolian Hall in New York City. Gershwin (1898-1937), accompanied by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, played the solo piano part. George Gershwin and his music have been featured regularly on my Patreon page, including Music History Monday on July 11, 2022; and in Dr. Bob Prescribes posts on October 20, 2020, and January 5, 2021.
Finally, we mark the death on February 12, 1959, of the American composer George Antheil (1900-1959) at the age 58, in New York City. Antheil was the subject of Music History Monday on July 8, 2019.
With no further ado, it is – finally – time to move on to today’s topic!
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) in 1792, by John Hoppner and commissioned in 1791 by the future British King George IV when he was the Prince of Wales
On February 12, 1797 – 227 years ago today –– Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in C Major, Op. 76, No. 3, nicknamed “Emperor” reputedly received its premiere. The quartet’s nickname – “Emperor” – stems from the hymn tune Haydn employed in its second movement theme and variations, a hymn Haydn had composed just a few months before and which was adopted as the Austrian national anthem in 1797.
This elegant and stately hymn, through a route most circuitous (a route that will be detailed in a bit), eventually became the national anthem of Nazi Germany (an anthem that began with the words Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, or “Germany, Germany above all else”).
Had Joseph Haydn – who was a kind, considerate, gentle, optimistic, old-world man of peace and good-will – had even an inkling that a depraved, criminal regime was going to adopt his hymn as its anthem (and as a result forever link his hymn with that regime), he would likely first have vomited and then burned the manuscript of the hymn and every copy he could get his hands on.
The Nazi’s adoption of Haydn’s hymn for its own, political ends, was neither the first nor last example of something we call, today, “unauthorized use.”…
Music History Monday: Getting Back to Work!
Feb 05, 2024
Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (1813-1901) in 1887
On February 5, 1887 – 137 years ago today – Giuseppe Verdi’s 25th and second-to-last opera, Otello, received its premiere at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan. The premiere was the single greatest triumph in Verdi’s sensational career. But it was a premiere – and an opera – that was a long time coming.
Background
He was born on October 10, 1813, in the sticks: in the tiny village of Le Roncole, in the northern Italian province of Parma.
Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, received its premiere at the Teatroalla Scala in Milan in November 1839, when Verdi was 26 years old. Oberto was a modest success – it received 13 performances – and based on its success, the management at La Scala offered Verdi a contract to compose three more operas. Verdi had begun his second opera – a comedy called A King for a Day – when catastrophe struck: he lost his wife and two young children to disease during a horrific, 20-month span between 1839 and 1840. Rendered nearly insane by the deaths, Verdi nevertheless battled through his grief and managed to complete A King for a Day. The opera received its premiere on September 5, 1840; it was booed off the stage and its run was cancelled on the spot after that one performance. For Verdi, the experience was excruciatingly painful, and it’s one he never forgot. Twenty years later, still mad as hell, Verdi wrote:
“[The audience] abused the opera of a poor, sick young man, harassed by the pressure of the schedule and heartsick and torn by horrible misfortune! Oh, if the audience then had – I do not say applauded, but had borne that opera in silence – I would not have had the words to thank them. Today, I accept the public; I accept its whistles, on the condition that I am not asked to give back anything in exchange for its applause.”
Verdi in 1839, as painted by Giuseppe Molentini
From that night in September of 1840 to the end of his life, over sixty years later, Verdi’s personal relationship with the public was set in his own mind, and, as far as Verdi was concerned, it was not an affectionate relationship. He later wrote that as a result of the fiasco:
“At 26, I knew what ‘the public’ meant. From then on, successes have never made the blood rush to my head, and fiascos have never discouraged me. If I went on with this unfortunate career, it was because at 26 it was too late for me to do anything else.”
Verdi was a tough, taciturn, straight-talking, no-nonsense man to begin with. The loss of his family and the failure of A King for a Day made him doubly (triply? quadruply?) so. Still, with the help and support of La Scala’s director, Bartolomeo Merelli, Verdi continued to battle through his grief over his family and rage over the fiasco that was A King for a Day to compose his third opera, entitled Nabucco. Nabucco, which received its premiereon March 9, 1842 (also at La Scala) was a smash hit from which Verdi never looked back.
Verdi in 1842, at the age of 29
The Galley Slave
No composer ever worked harder than did Giuseppe Verdi. In the 14 years between 1839 and 1853, he composed nineteen operas. Verdi called these his “galley slave years” because he worked like one: 16 to 18 hours a day, always under deadline, endlessly harried by librettists, producers, singers, critics, and conductors; always emotionally depressed and physically ill with some bug or another.
According to Verdi, he hated the whole stinkin’ opera trip, and as early as 1845 – at the age of just 32 – he was already thinking about retiring. On November 5, 1845, he wrote to a friend in Rome:
“Thanks for remembering your poor friend, condemned to continually scribbling notes. God save the ears of every good Christian from having to listen to them! How am I, physically and spiritually? Physically I am well, but my mind is black, always black, and will be so until I have finished with this career that I hate.”
Retirement at Last!
Verdi in 1842, at the age of 29
As it turned out, it wasn’t until late 1875 that the now 62-year-old Verdi, still in his prime and at the top of his game, dropped his thunderbolt and did the unthinkable: he informed his nearest and dearest – his second wife, his friends, and his publisher – that as a composer he was through. After 24 operas and one Requiem, Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was done, finito. When his great friend Clarina Maffei told him that he had a moral obligation to compose, Verdi wrote:
“Are you serious about my moral obligation to compose? No, you’re joking, since you know as well as I that the account is settled.”
We mark the premiere on January 29, 1781 – 243 years ago today – of Wolfgang Mozart’s opera Idomeneo, Re di Creta (“Idomeneo, King of Crete”). With a libretto by Giambattista Varesco (1735-1805), which was adapted from a French story by Antoine Danchet (1671-1748), itself based on a play written in 1705 by the French tragedian Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1674 -1762; that’s a lot of writing credits!), Idomeneo received its premiere at the CuvilliésTheatre in Munich, Germany. Idomeneo was a hit, and it constitutes not just Mozart’s first operatic masterwork but, by consensus, the single greatest Italian-language opera seria ever composed!
Setting the Biographical Scene
The complete Mozart family portrait painted by Johann Nepomuk della Croce in 1780. Wolfgang is at the center; his sister Maria Anna (known as Nannerl) is on the left and his father Leopold on the right. The painting on the wall at center depicts Wolfgang’s mother, Anna Maria, who died in Paris in 1778.
On January 15th, 1779, the 23-year-old Wolfgang Mozart returned home to Salzburg after having been away for 15 months. His trip, which had taken him primarily to Mannheim and Paris, had been both a professional and personal disaster. He had left Salzburg with his mother, filled with high hopes, high spirits, and dreams of finding a permanent job and romance. He returned without his mother (who had died in Paris), without a job, without any money, and without the young woman he had met and fallen in love with during the trip (one Aloysia Weber), who had rejected his proposal of marriage and sent him packing.
In returning – at his father Leopold’s insistence – to Salzburg and the dreaded employ of Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo (to say nothing for the life of chastity required by both his father and the archbishop!), Mozart was painfully aware that he was wasting his time, his talent, and his testosterone. And he was furious about it.
By 1780, the now 24-year-old Mozart was both personally and professionally suffocating there in Salzburg. He desperately wanted out and despaired that life was passing him by.
More than anything, Mozart wanted to compose opera (something that was difficult to do in Salzburg, given that the archbishop had closed all the theaters!). Mozart was, at his core, a person of the theater and lived for everything the opera theater entailed. He wrote:
“I have only to hear an opera discussed, I have only to sit in a theater, hear the orchestra tuning their instruments – oh, I am quite beside myself at once.”
The Stars Align
As the old line goes, “sometimes, it’s not just what you know but who you know that matters!”
In 1780, that line applied very nicely to Mozart, for which we all must be grateful. Because it was thanks to his own, hard-won personal contacts that he received the commission for Idomeneo, a commission that changed not only Mozart’s life but the very history of Western music, taken as widely as we please.…
Music History Monday: Johannes Brahms, Piano Concerto No. 1
Jan 22, 2024
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) in 1858
We mark the premiere on January 22, 1859 – 165 years ago today – of Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, in the German city of Hanover.
No other work by Brahms caused him such effort; never before or after did he so agonize over a piece, working and reworking it over and over again.
Background
On October 1, 1853, the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms showed up at the door of Robert and Clara Schumann’s house in Düsseldorf, in the Rhineland. At the time, Brahms was pretty much a complete unknown outside of his hometown of Hamburg. He was visiting the Schumann’s at the behest of the violinist and conductor Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) who, although only two years older than Brahms, was already world famous.
Physically, the young Brahms looked virtually nothing like the bearded, portly, cigar-smoking, bear-like dude of his later years; at twenty he was described as being:
“a shy, awkward, nearsighted young man, blonde, delicate, almost wispy, boyish in appearance as well as in manner (the beard was still 22 years away) and with a voice whose high pitch was a constant embarrassment to him.”
Clara (1819-1896) and Robert Schumann (1810-1856) circa 1850
This 20-year-old kid might not have looked like our familiar image of Brahms, but his extraordinary talents as a composer and pianist were already there, and in spades. He performed some his early music for Robert and Clara and they were, very simply, gob smacked.
That evening Clara wrote in her journal:
“Here is one who comes as if sent from God! He played us sonatas and scherzos of his own, all of them rich in fantasy, depth of feeling and mastery of form. Robert could see no reason to suggest any changes. A great future lies before him, for when he comes to the point of writing for orchestra, then he will have found the true medium for his imagination.”
Robert’s diary entry that night was rather more abbreviated:
“Visit from Brahms (a genius).”
Brahms stayed with the Schumanns for a full month, and bonded with them like a wad of gum to the bottom of your high tops. …
On January 15, 1972 – 52 years ago today – Don McLean’s folk-rock song American Pie began what would eventually be a four-week stay at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The song made the singer, songwriter, and guitarist Don McLean (born 1945) very famous and very rich, and it is considered by many to be one of the greatest songs ever written.
Don McLean (born 1945) in 1972
No One is Perfect
Not a one of us is perfect, and that goes double/triple/quadruple for me. I eat ice cream right out of the carton before putting it back in the freezer, and will guzzle club soda and tonic water out of the bottle before putting it back in the fridge. I will lick a knife with cream cheese or peanut butter on it, lest any of it go to waste, and I will observe my personal ten-to-fifteen second rule when I drop food on the floor (providing one of the cats hasn’t gotten to it first).
I don’t always turn my socks right-side-out before putting them in the washing machine, and I have been known to forget to water the plants even when I’ve been reminded to do so. (Regarding the freaking plants: the heck with them if they don’t have a sense of humor; besides, do I ever ask them to make me a drink?).
(FYI: I routinely introduce myself to house plants as “Agent Orange.” You can actually hear them shrivel.)
I would add in my favor that I always put the seat down and replace the toilet paper roll; I floss every day; hang up my towel; immediately put my dirty clothes in the hamper; and never, ever, leave dirty dishes on the counter or in the sink.
What, you ask, has prompted this bit of confession, which might very well be considered TMI by many (if not most) of you?
Here’s why. By admitting to some of my many flaws, I am attempting to pre-emptively head off your criticism of me, criticism for disparaging a rock ‘n’ roll song considered by many to be an icon, a classic, one of the greatest songs of the rock ‘n’ roll era (an era now some 70 years in age!).
The song I am referring to is none-other-than Don McLean’s American Pie.
Freddie Mercury (second from left, as if you need me to tell you) and Queen in 1977
We’ve Been Down This Road Before
This is not the first time I’ve proven myself aesthetically imperfect by offering up a less-than-positive critical evaluation of a presumably “classic” rock ‘n’ roll song. (Yes: I typically prefer to take a high critical road here on Patreon, but sometimes that’s just not possible.) Such a thing happened in my Music History Monday post of August 24, 2020, a post that “celebrated” what was then the 45th anniversary of Freddie Mercury and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.
I admitted then and will admit now that I have always considered Bohemian Rhapsody to be among the most overrated things in contemporary popular culture, right up there with Tik Tok, air pods, anime, and Cardi B.
In that post I observed that Bohemian Rhapsody was never considered, by its creator(s), to be anything other than nonsense.
According to Freddie Mercury’s friend, the DJ and television personality Kenny Everett (who played a key role in promoting Bohemian Rhapsody on his radio show), the song’s lyrics have no meaning whatsoever. According to Everett, Freddie Mercury told him that the words were simply “random rhyming nonsense.”
Producer Roy Thomas Baker (born 1946, center) with Queen in 1975
Bohemian Rhapsody’s producer Roy Thomas Baker recalled in 1999:
“Bohemian Rhapsody was totally insane, but we enjoyed every minute of it. It was basically a joke, but a successful joke . . . We never stopped laughing.”
However, being declared a “joke” by its author and producer has not stopped the listening public and the critical community from turning Bohemian Rhapsody into a defining masterwork, a philosophical tract of generational import, a song considered by many critics and fans alike to be among the greatest rock ‘n’ roll songs of all time, a song that routinely polls in the top five of “greatest songs of all time.” And lest we forget: in 2012, the readers of Rolling Stone magazine voted Freddie Mercury’s performance of Bohemian Rhapsody to be “the greatest in rock history.”
And so my post of August 24, 2020, critical of Bohemian Rhapsody, drew the righteous anger of many of my patrons.
Music History Monday: Pianist, Conductor, Composer, and a Cuckold for the Ages
Jan 08, 2024
Hans Guido von Bülow (1830-1894), circa 1875
We mark the birth on January 8, 1830 – 196 years ago today – of the German pianist, conductor, composer, and cuckold, Hans Guido von Bülow. Born in the Saxon capital of Dresden, he died in a hotel in Cairo, Egypt, on February 12, 1894, at the age of 64.
Poor Hans von Bülow. He was one of the top pianists and conductors of his time. His career was closely associated with some of the greatest composers of all time, including Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Famous for his devastating wit and ability to turn a phrase, it was Bülow who coined the alliterative trio of “Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.” Sadly, for all of his many accomplishments and deserved renown, he remains best known today (in no small measure because of scandal-mongering sensationalists like myself) as one of the great cuckolds of all time, right up there with myself (cuckolded by my college girlfriend Maureen Makler and an Israeli guy named Avi Luzon); Eddie Fisher (cuckolded by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), and Henry VIII (cuckolded, or so we are told, by Ann Boleyn and a wide assortment of various courtiers and hangers-on).
Bummer all the way around, Hans, just bummer.
(Listen: to make up for this gracelessly scandalous post and to give Herr von Bülow some of the respect he is due, tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will feature Alan Walker’s superb biography of the man’s life, a life that should not be defined solely by the betrayal of his wife, Cosima Liszt von Bülow, and his erstwhile “friend,” Richard Wagner!)
Hans von Bülow (1830-1894)
Bülow circa 1850, at the age of 20
He was born into the noble “House of Bülow,” an ancient German/Danish family whose members have, over the centuries, been entitled Freiherr (meaning Baron); Graf (meaning Count); and even Fürst (meaning Prince).
Growing up in Dresden, Bülow began formal piano lessons at the age of nine and quickly established himself as a major prodigy. In 1844, at the age of 14, he and his mother moved to Leipzig, where he enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory, founded just a year before by Felix Mendelssohn. It was there that Hans studied with the highly regarded pedant Louis Plaidy. In 1845, at the of 15, Bülow took his piano lessons with Friedrich Wieck. (Wieck was the father of Clara Wieck-Schumann, eventual father-in-law of Robert Schumann, and the piano teacher who ruined Robert Schumann’s right hand!)
Hans von Bülow was as intellectually precocious as he was musically precocious. Unfortunately, the physical package that contained these gifts was . . . wanting. Writes Alan Walker:
“As a child von Bülow was a weakling. According to his mother he succumbed to ‘brain fever’ five times and was continually in the care of doctors. [For our information, ‘Brain Fever’ is defined as ‘an acute nervous breakdown and/or temporary insanity, due to extreme emotional distress.’] Bülow was ravaged by headaches, which struck him down whenever the problems of life overwhelmed him. He also became self-conscious about his personal appearance; his short stature, high forehead, and slightly bulging eyes caused him embarrassment. Eventually, he learned to protect himself from the imagined hostility of the world by his trenchant use of language, which became the scourge of his enemies and the despair of his friends.”
Hans von Bülow in his adulthood; there is no mistaking him for George Clooney
In a story that has become as cliché as a movie character setting fire to a building and walking away in slow motion, Hans’ parents (that would be the novelist Karl Eduard von Bülow and Franziska Elisabeth Stoll von Berneck) demanded that he forego a career in music and instead, study law. In 1848, at the age of 18, Hans was packed off to the Leipzig University Law School. In 1849, he transferred to the University of Berlin. While on his way to Berlin, Bülow stopped in Weimar to visit the great Franz Liszt, who he had met when he was a child back in Dresden and with whom he’d corresponded, on and off, for years.
The visit changed Hans von Bülow’s life. Liszt and Bülow began what became their life-long mutual admiration society. Among other things, Bülow heard Franz Liszt conduct the premiere of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin there in Weimar and for Bülow, that was that. His nascent “career” as a lawyer evaporated like a puddle in Death Valley.
With Liszt’s encouragement, Bülow visited and introduced himself to Richard Wagner (1813-1883), who was living, at the time, in Zurich, Switzerland. Then – with Wagner’s encouragement – Hans served as an apprentice conductor in a number of theaters there in Zurich, getting his first taste of the seductive power of the baton. Finally, in June 1851, von Bülow returned to Weimar, where he became Liszt’s first great piano student.
Franz Liszt (1811-1886) in 1847
According to Liszt and Bülow’s biographer Alan Walker:
“Liszt’s admiration for the talents of his young pupil was unbounded, and he came to regard him as his true heir in piano playing.”
As Liszt’s “heir,” in 1857 Hans von Bülow received from his master two great gifts: the fruits of Liszt’s artistry and that of his loins. On January 27, 1857, Bülow was tasked with giving the premiere performance – in Berlin – of what is arguably Liszt’s greatest solo piano work: his Piano Sonata in B minor. As for Liszt’s loins, on August 18, 1857, Franz Liszt gave Hans von Bülow the hand of his second child – his daughter Cosima – in marriage. For both Hans and Cosima, it was to be a marriage from hell. …
Music History Monday: Shostakovich Symphony No. 13
Dec 18, 2023
On December 18, 1962 – 61 years ago today – Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 received its premiere in Moscow. The symphony stirred up a proverbial hornet’s nest of controversy, and we’re not talking here about your everyday hornet, but rather, those gnarly ‘n’ gnasty Asian Giant Hornets!
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich (1906-1975) in 1962
It was a symphonic premiere that almost didn’t take place, though, in the end, the show did go on. Nevertheless, the authorities (the Soviet authorities, notable for their heavy blue serge suits, vodka breaths, and deficient senses of humor) did everything in their power to squash the symphony out of existence. In this they failed miserably, and Shostakovich’s Thirteenth is today acknowledged as not just one of Shostakovich’s supreme masterworks but as one of the most musically and politically important works composed during the twentieth century.
A Good Communist
During the late 1950s, Shostakovich was increasingly used by the Soviet authorities as a sort of artistic “figure head,” meant to represent the supposedly “free” Soviet intelligentsia. In 1960, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) – decided to make the 54-year-old Shostakovich the chairman of the newly founded RSFSR, the Russian Union of Composers. It was a huge honor, and Shostakovich felt that it was a position that would make him, finally and for all time, unassailable, untouchable, unpurgeable and, of equal importance, would guarantee the safety and success of his two now-grown children, Galina (24 years old) and Maxim (22 years old). However, there was a catch: to take the position, Shostakovich had to join the Communist Party, something he had long-sworn he would never, ever, under any circumstances, do. Well, he did join the Communist Party, telling his friends that he signed the necessary papers while under the influence of alcohol, SUI, “signing under the influence.” For months afterwards, Shostakovich was – no exaggeration – literally hysterical with self-loathing. The musicologist, folklorist, and friend of Shostakovich Lev Lebedinsky recalled:
“I will never forget some of the things he said that night [before his induction into the Party], sobbing hysterically: ‘I’m scared to death of them’; ‘You don’t know the whole truth’; ‘From childhood I’ve always had to do things I didn’t want to do’; ‘I’ve been a whore, and always will be a whore.’
He often lashed at himself in strong words.”
And so, kicking and screaming, Shostakovich joined the Soviet Communist Party. For all the world, he was the picture of a good and obedient Communist apparatchik. Again, according to the previously quoted Lev Lebedinsky:
“Without fail he attended every possible ridiculous meeting of the Supreme Soviet, every plenary session, every political gathering; he even took part in the AGITPROP [agitation/propaganda] car rally. In other words, he eagerly took part in events that he himself described as ‘torture by boredom.’ He sat there like a puppet, applauding when the others applauded. Once I remember him clapping eagerly after Khrennikov had made a speech in which he made some offensive remarks about Shostakovich!’ ‘Why did you clap when you were being criticized?’ I asked. He hadn’t even noticed!
What moved him was not a lack of principles, but [fear]. Take his attack on Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. It is well known that Shostakovich sympathized with both of them. So God only knows what possessed him to put his signature on that filthy slander of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. Nobody forced him to do it. Afterwards he cursed himself, saying that he’d never forgive himself for having done it.”
The Thaw
While all of this was happening, the nature of Soviet suppression was actually changing for the better.
Nikita Khrushchev (left) (1894-1971 and Josef Stalin (1878-1953), circa 1937
Joseph Stalin – the “great leader and teacher” and truly, one of the worst people ever to have lived – died on March 5, 1953. He was succeeded as “First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” by Nikita Khrushchev. In 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin as being “savage, half-mad and power-crazed” in his famous “secret speech.” Delivered to the 20th Party Congress in February of 1956, the speech was, in fact, anything but secret.
Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin initiated a period called the “Thaw,” during which domestic repression and censorship in the Soviet bloc were scaled back, at least until Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964. The Thaw reached its climax in 1962 with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13. Never mind that the Soviet authorities did everything they could to undermine the Symphony’s premiere, and that it was banned outright after it second performance. It was composed, it was heard, and its impact could not be forgotten.
The Poem and a Symphony
On September 19, 1961, a poem entitled Babi Yar was published. Written by a 28-year-old poet named Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932-2017), the poem – an outright condemnation of Soviet anti-Semitism – unleashed a firestorm of controversy. Yevtushenko was vilified, ostracized, threatened, and spat upon. (During Stalin’s lifetime, Yevtushenko would simply have been “disappeared,” leaving hardly a wet spot. So we must consider the treatment he received in 1961 in response to his poem as being quite benign!)…
Friederica Henrietta of Anhalt-Bernburg (1702-1723), the “Amusa”
On December 11, 1721 – 302 years ago today – Johann Sebastian Bach’s employer, the 27-year-old Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen (1694-1728), married the 19-year-old Friederica Henrietta of Anhalt-Bernburg (1702-1723). She was the fourth daughter (and youngest child) of Charles Frederick, Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg (1668-1721) and his first wife, Sophie Albertine of Solms-Sonnenwalde (1672-1708).
We can only hope that the kids enjoyed their wedding, because, sadly, their marriage was not fated to last for very long.
(Allow me, please, a small bit of editorial bloviation. Speaking as a lower middle-class American kid born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in South Jersey – meaning someone with zero tolerance for all this royalty stuff – I find all of these puffed-up hereditary royals insufferable in both their titles and their actions. Among the actions of the literally hundreds of “princes” and “princesses” of the Holy Roman Empire was to intermarry, for generations, with other such “people of quality,” meaning their cousins. A brief look at their life spans – which are, indeed, representative of their “class” – reveals how well that turned out. Bach’s beloved boss, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, lived for all of 33 years.
Leopold’s father, Emmanuel Lebrecht of Anhalt-Cöthen [1671-1704] lasted just 33 years as well, though Leopold’s mother – Anna Eleonore of Stolberg-Wernigerode [1651-1690] – managed to live for 39 years. Leopold’s wife – Friederica Henrietta, the Amusa of this post’s title – lived to be only 21. Her parents – Charles Frederick, Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg and Sophie Albertine of Solms-Sonnenwalde did a bit better, living, respectively, to the ages of 53 and 36. Meanwhile, our magnificent Johann Sebastian Bach lived to be 65 and would certainly have lived longer if not for a botched cataract operation by a quack “oculist” named “Chevalier” John Taylor who, incidentally, lived to be 69 years of age.
”Chevalier” John Taylor (1703-1722)
Speaking strictly for myself, if I had to choose between a “title” and a long life span, I’ll choose life span every time.)
Back, please, to the wedding of Prince Leopold and Princess Friederica Henrietta. It was a lavish and extended five-week long affair, one that put my cousins Arthur and Larry Gottlieb’s Bar Mitzvahs in Massapequa, Long Island, to shame.
Unfortunately, for Bach, the wedding was something else: it was the final nail in the coffin lid of what had once been his dream job: that of Kapellmeister (master-of-music) for the court of Cöthen, in the central German state of Saxony-Anhalt. It was a position he had held since 1717 and one that he had hoped to hold for the remainder of his life.
Alas; as the old Yiddish saying goes, “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht,” meaning “man plans, and God laughs.”
Sebastian Bach (as he was known to his family, friends, and colleagues; “Johann” was but a Bach family patronymic that went back generations) was nobody’s fool. He knew his worth, and at a time when artisans like himself were expected to keep a low profile and “know their place,” Bach was an outspoken, often troublesome, even cantankerous employee, something that got him into trouble on a regular basis.…
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) in 1888, looking rather older than his 48 years
We mark the premiere on December 4, 1881 – 142 years ago today – of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s one-and-only violin concerto, his Violin Concerto in D major. It received its premiere in Vienna, where it was performed by the violinist Adolf Brodsky and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Hans Richter.
The concerto is, in my humble opinion, Tchaikovsky’s single greatest work and one of a handful of greatest concerti ever composed. Yet its premiere in Vienna elicited one of the most vicious reviews of all time.
Unfortunately for him, Tchaikovsky was indeed one of the most over-criticized composers in the history of Western music.
(Just asking: do any of us like being criticized? I think not, and please, let’s not dignify that oxymoronic phrase, “constructive criticism” by considering it seriously. I don’t mean to sound over-sensitive, but after a certain age – say, 25 – criticism of any sort, even if it is deserved [we’re talking to you, George Santos] is simply infuriating.)
Tchaikovsky was also one of the most over-sensitive people ever to become a major composer, which meant that the sometimes brutal criticism he received drove him to near madness. (Regarding Tchaikovsky’s sensitivity, as a youngster, his governess called him “a porcelain child” so easily was his spirit chipped and cracked.) Given Tchaikovsky’s emotional nature, and the fact that he was additionally – as a homosexual in Tsarist Russia – leading virtually a double life, well, we’ve got a prescription for a challenging emotional life.
Tchaikovsky and his “wife”, Antonina Milyukova, on their “honeymoon,” July 1877; Tchaikovsky appears genuinely shell-shocked, which in fact he was
Who Will Play My Concerto?
The actual composition of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto went smoothly. However, the drama surrounding its first performance drove the poor, hysteria-prone dude to despair.
Background. In late February of 1878, Tchaikovsky arrived in Clarens, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where he and his “entourage” took up lodging at the Villa Richelieu. Tchaikovsky was on the mend from his epically disastrous marriage to a frankly crazed former student of his named Antonina Milyukova. The marriage had lasted less than three months, from July 18 to October 7, 1877, at which time Tchaikovsky had a complete nervous breakdown and was spirited out of Moscow by his brothers.
One of Tchaikovsky’s visitors there at Clarens was the violinist Yosif Kotek (1855-1885), a bi-sexual lover of Tchaikovsky’s. Tchaikovsky and Kotek engaged in all sorts of activities there in Clarens – some of them even musical – and Tchaikovsky, feeling rejuvenated and inspired, sketched and orchestrated his entire violin concerto in under a month.
Tchaikovsky wanted to dedicate the concerto to Kotek – he really did – but he didn’t dare because he was terrified by the gossip he believed the dedication would inspire. So instead, he dedicated it to a faculty colleague at the Moscow Conservatory, the then world-famous violinist Leopold Auer (1845-1930). Politically, it was a savvy choice: Tchaikovsky knew that Auer’s fame would give the concerto the sort of caché that would ensure its success.
Leopold Auer (1845-1930)
Sadly, Tchaikovsky’s plan blew up in his face when Auer pronounced that the solo part was “unplayable.” A mortified Tchaikovsky later wrote in his diary:
“Auer pronounced it impossible to play, and this verdict, coming from such an authority, had the effect of casting this unfortunate child of my imagination into the limbo of hopelessly forgotten things.”
Hesitantly (sheepishly?), Tchaikovsky went back to Kotek and offered him the dedication and the premiere performance. But Kotek, peeved that Tchaikovsky had approached Auer, not only told Tchaikovsky to make like a tree and leave but then also pronounced the piece to be unplayable (and this from someone who had played through every single note of it while it was being composed!).
Truly, hell hath no fury like a violinist spurned.…
Music History Monday: Richard Strauss, Stanley Kubrick, Friedrich Nietzsche, and “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”
Nov 27, 2023
Richard Strauss (1864-1949) in 1894
On November 27, 1896 – 127 years ago today – Richard Strauss conducted the premiere performance of his sprawling orchestral tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the German city of Frankfurt.
Requests
A momentary and applicable (if gratuitous) diversion.
Over the course of the first half of my musical life I played a lot of gigs, both in bands and as a solo piano player. The bands ranged from fairly high end to not fairly high end. The best band I ever played with was led by the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz; the worst was a disco band the name of which will remain my little secret. The first band in which I played was a rock ‘n’ roll garage band called “Cold Sun” and the last was a Berkeley, California-based Klezmer group called “Hot Borscht.” (“Cold Sun” and “Hot Borscht”: temperature challenged tags in both cases.)
The former home of The Pewter House Restaurant, at 3909 Grand Avenue, Oakland, California; the building, built in 1916, is currently vacant and in desperate need for some TLC
As a solo player I’ve played pretty much every sort of gig, from cocktail parties, weddings, sing-a-longs, awards shows, and receptions to a long-running gig at a long defunct restaurant in Oakland, California, called The Pewter House.
I played at The Pewter House, in 1978 and 1979, on Friday and Saturday evenings. It was most definitely during my “starving (grad) student” stage, so what I particularly loved about the job was the dinner I’d eat with the staff after closing time. There was always left-over prime rib, and I consumed my body weight on a weekly basis. I also loved the people I worked with and dined with after-hours: the bartender, a big, beautifully mustachioed Czech named Marin; the wait staff (particularly the cocktail waitresses; OMG: how I continue to adore cocktail waitresses!); and the kitchen staff (mostly illegals who worked like dogs at multiple jobs and sent whatever money they could back home); talk about a cross section of Oakland’s population.
What I did not love about my job was an occupational hazard shared by all house musicians, and that is the request. I’d prime my tip jar with a twenty and a couple of fives, but that wouldn’t stop folks from making requests and then winking at me as they dropped a dime or a quarter into the jar, as if they were doing me a favor. As evenings wore on, and the restaurant’s action increasingly moved into the cocktail lounge (where the piano was located), the blood alcohol level of the clientele became markedly higher. It was not at all uncommon, later in the evening, for me to be approached by an off-kilter patron who, in making their request, would say something on the lines of:
“hey, can you guys play . . .”
Yes, I was a solo act, but perhaps these inebriates were seeing double, thus the “you guys.”
Among the most common requests I received at The Pewter House there in the late 1970s were: “can you guys play The Sting?” (this meant Scott Joplin’s classic rag, The Entertainer, which dominated the soundtrack of the 1973 Paul Newman/Robert Redford movie The Sting). Just as often I was asked to play Love is Blue, Classical Gas, Brian’s Song, and . . . and . . . wait for it . . . “the theme from 2001.”
2001: A Space Odyssey, Produced, Directed, and Co-written by Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)
The American film director, producer, screenwriter, and photographer Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999), who produced, directed, and co-wrote (with Arthur C. Clarke) the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey; on the set
By “the theme from 2001,” my requesters were referring to the opening minute-and-a-half of Richard Strauss’ orchestral tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In Strauss’ work, this opening music is meant to represent sunrise and with it, the coming of the “light,” meaning the coming of enlightenment. In his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (of 1968), Kubrick uses Strauss’ music to represent exactly the same thing. Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the sonic equivalent of the Monolith, together the bringers of knowledge, enlightenment, and transformation.…
Music History Monday: The Great-Grandmother of All Concert Tours: Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour”
Nov 20, 2023
Elton Hercules John (born Reggie Kenneth Dwight; March 25, 1947) performing at the Glastonbury Festival in June 2023, during the last leg of his “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour”
We mark the conclusion on November 20, 2022 – one year ago today – of the North American leg of Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour.” The concert took place at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles; it was the third of three “farewell” concerts held at Dodgers Stadium. The three concerts (on November 17, 19, and 20) saw a total attendance of 142,970 people and grossed $23,462,993.
Since the first rock ‘n’ roll concert , which was held in Cleveland on March 21, 1952 (that would be the “Moondog Coronation Ball”), there have been rock ‘n’ roll concert tours and there have been rock ‘n’ roll farewell concert tours. But Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour” was in a league of its own and will likely never, ever be matched. The numbers are mind-boggling and bladder-weakening. The tour, interrupted, as it was, by the COVID epidemic, ran for nearly five years, from September 8, 2018, to July 8, 2023. It began in Allentown, Pennsylvania and concluded in Stockholm, Sweden. It consisted of nine separate legs (or “tours within the tour”) and a total of 330 shows. All together, the tour was attended by 6.1 million fans of Elton Hercules John (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on March 25, 1947) and generated a box office total of $939.1 million (heck, given all the merchandise that was also sold at the concerts, let’s just round that number up and call it a cool billion).
Reggie Dwight (a.k.a. Elton John] in 1955
Given these numbers, it should come as no surprise that Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour” is the highest grossing, the longest running, and most highly attended concert tour of all time.
Elton John (born Reginald Dwight, 1947)
We will save a detailed biography of Maestro John for another time, so please – for now – suffice it the following.
Born in the ‘burbs just northwest of London, he began playing the piano as a young child. Lessons began at seven, and by the time he was eleven his talents as a pianist were such that he won a scholarship to London’s Royal Academy of Music. Young Reggie attended the Royal Academy part-time for the next five years, later claiming that what he enjoyed best was playing the music of Chopin and Sebastian Bach and singing in the Academy chorus.
Still going as Reginald Dwight, Elton John (left) with his band band Bluesology at the Marquee Club in London, 1966
At the age of 15, with the support and assistance of his mother and stepfather, Reggie got a job playing the piano – Thursday through Sunday evenings – at a local pub located in the Northwood Hills Hotel. (The hotel is still there, at 76 Joel Street, Northwood, about 10 miles northwest of central London.) It was there that he played standards and songs of his own composition.
Reg began playing in bands (most notably one he helped found called Bluesology), and even though his eyesight at the time was just fine, he began wearing black, horn-rimmed glasses in solidarity with Buddy Holly.…
Music History Monday: Gioachino Rossini and the Comedic Mind
Nov 13, 2023
Gioachino Antonio Rossini (1792-1868) circa 1856
We mark the death on November 13, 1868 – 155 years ago today – of the opera composer Gioachino Antonio Rossini, in Paris, at the age of 76. He was one of the most famous and beloved artists of his time, and he remains no less so today. It is my humble opinion that anyone who does not like Rossini’s operas – and, believe it or not, I have met any number of such people in the “rarified” confines of academia – well, such a person is a crank and a humbug, someone averse to melodic brilliance, theatric sparkle, and wit.
10,000 Hours?
In his book Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown and Company, 2008), the English-born Canadian journalist (and staff writer at The New Yorker) Malcolm Gladwell posited his “10,000-hour rule.” Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule asserts that:
“the key to achieving true expertise in any skill is simply a matter of practicing, albeit in the correct way, for at least 10,000 hours.”
Of course this is complete nonsense. We must conclude that Mr. Gladwell has practiced making absurd statements for well over 10,000 hours, so completely daft is his “rule.” Listen: when I was twenty, I was 5’7” in height and weighed 145 pounds (I can only wish that the latter were still the case!). I was strong, fast, and had good hand-eye coordination. I also had a vertical jump of about six inches, so no amount of time and practice was going to make me a high-jump champion, a ballet dancer, or allow me to fulfill my singular fantasy: to be able to dunk a basketball.
No way, no how.
Alicia de Laroccha (1923-2009)
The magnificent Spanish pianist Alicia de Laroccha (1923-2009) is said to have learned and memorized in twelve days – when she was but a child – the twelve pieces that make up Isaac Albéniz’s incredibly virtuosic Iberia. All 12 pieces in 12 days; one piece a day. Again, I would, gratuitously, use myself as an example: I have “practiced” the piano for many more than 10,000 hours over the course of my life, and there no way on this good earth that I could learn and memorize any one piece from Iberia in under two weeks, if at all.
Again, no way, no how.
It is an unfortunate but irrefutable fact that genetic predisposition – meaning talent – counts for something as well. Yes, talent must be nurtured and “practiced,” but without it, Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours means bupkis (which is Yiddish for “goat droppings”).
Rossini in 1862, photographed in Passy (Paris), where he lived (and died) in a no longer extant villa at 2 Avenue Ingrès
Wit
I would suggest that among the gene-given abilities most impossible to “learn” – practice time notwithstanding (along with being able to dunk a basketball) – is wit, which is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as:
“a natural aptitude [i.e. talent] for using words and ideas in a quick and inventive way to create humor.”
When it comes to wit, you either got it or you don’t. Practicing bon mots for 10,000 hours will not make a tedious bore a witty person. (I personally find few social situations more awkward than being trapped in conversation with someone who thinks he or she is really clever but is, in fact, not clever at all. To paraphrase the old saw, “’tis better to remain silent and be thought a witless blockhead than to open one’s mouth and prove it.”)
Gioachino Rossini was, bless him, pretty much always the wittiest person in the room. Yes, other composers were famous for their quips as well; the acid-tongued Johannes Brahms and the easily irritated Arnold Schoenberg immediately come to mind. (Brahms was reputed to have left a party by standing at the door and bellowing, “if there’s anyone here I haven’t insulted, I apologize!”; the equally caustic Arnold Schoenberg wrote to a friend, telling him “I hope you weren’t stupid enough to be offended by what I said!”
Great lines both. But not as great as Rossini’s best lines.)…
We mark the birth on November 6, 1854 – 169 years ago today – of the American composer, conductor, and violinist John Philip Sousa. Born in Washington, D.C., Sousa died in Reading, Pennsylvania on March 6, 1932, at the age of 77.
Timing, Location, Life Experience, and Talent
We are told that talent – be it athletic, musical, artistic, culinary, whatever – will only take us so far; that without commitment, hard work, and perseverance “talent” is, in the end, nothing but potential. But success in any field in which innate, gene-given talent is an underlying necessity requires something more than just blood, sweat, and tears: it also requires timing, location, and life experience.
We consider. How many potential William Shakespeares have been born in times and places in which vernacular, secular theater was not being cultivated to a revolutionary degree? How many latent Sebastian Bachs lived until one was born into the perfect family and at the perfect time and place to exploit his skill set? How many possible LeBron Jameses existed before the invention of basketball?
Left: the 24-year-old Mozart in Salzburg, 1780; Right: the 24-year-old Mozart in Cupertino, California, 2023
I would suggest that what made Mozart “Mozart” was not just his talent and work ethic, but that his father was a professional musician who trained his son at a time and place when high-end music making was considered culturally indispensable. If our Mozart had been born in 1999 in Cupertino, California to a father (or mother!) who worked for Apple, how do we think his talents and energies might have been directed? Towards music? I wouldn’t bet on it.
Yes, talent is huge, but timing and location and life experience make the artist as well, and rarely will we find a more striking confluence of talent, time, place, and experience than in the case of John Philip Sousa.
John Philip Sousa (1854-1932)
John Anthony Sousa (1824-1892), John Philip’s father, in his Marine uniform, circa 1863
He was the third of ten children born to immigrant parents. His mother, Maria Elizabeth (born Trinkhaus, 1826-1908) was born in Bavaria, in what today is southern Germany. Sousa’s father, John Anthony Sousa (1824-1892), was born João António de Sousa in Spain, to Portuguese parents.
Sousa was born, and the family lived, in a modest house at 636 G Street, in southeast Washington, D.C. The address is significant because it was close to the United States Marine barracks where John Philip’s father, Antonio, was a trombonist in the Marine Band. (For our information, the Marine Band based in Washington, D.C. is not just any military band. Known as “The President’s Own,” it is – today – the best and most prestigious military band in the United States and among the very best in the world. It was John Philip Sousa himself, who led the Marine Band from 1880-1892, who turned it into the crack ensemble it remains to this day.)
Life experience. Growing up, John Philip Sousa’s musical mother’s milk was military band music. It was in his blood, his DNA, and he was never to veer far from it. …
Music History Monday: Franz Schubert: An Unfinished Symphony; An Unfinished Life
Oct 30, 2023
Franz Schubert (1797-1828) in 1824
We mark October 30, 1822 – 201 years ago today – as being the day on which Franz Schubert began what is now known as his Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the “Unfinished Symphony.” Lost just months after Schubert completed the two movements that make up the “Unfinished,” the symphony was heard for the first time in 1865, 43 years after its composition and 37 years after Schubert’s death.
A Fable Agreed Upon
One of the many clever statements (or in this case, a question) credited to Napoleon Bonaparte is:
“What is history but a fable agreed upon?”
A good question for a despot who was intent on creating his own version of history.
Beethoven (1770-1827), portrait in oils (detail) by Joseph Carl Stieler, 1820
However, it is a question that applies as well to our contemporary view of Ludwig van Beethoven, and how we have come to believe his music was perceived in his own time. Today, Beethoven’s mature symphonies (nos. 3 through 9) are rightly perceived as representing his own, personal struggles and revolutionary times. Our mistake – the “fable agreed upon” – occurs when we assume that Beethoven’s contemporaries believed the same thing about his mature symphonies.
They did not.
For Beethoven’s symphonic contemporaries, the first two decades of the nineteenth century were about the discovery and study of Haydn’s and Mozart’s late symphonies. The musical style of such well-known, even famous (at the time) symphonic composers as Carl Friedrich Zelter, Jean-Paul Richter, Carl Maria von Weber, Ludwig Spohr, Adalbert Gyrowetz, Ferdinand Ries, Andrea Romberg, and Peter Winter was firmly based on the classical models of Haydn and Mozart. According to musicologist Nicholas Temperley, these composers and others like them:
“reached a [classical] musical ideal to which Beethoven’s mature art seemed an intrusive irrelevance.”
Posterity has been unkind to the symphonies of the aforementioned composers, symphonies that in their time were performed much more frequently than Beethoven’s. It was only once that Beethoven’s symphonies came to be understood and appreciated for the masterworks that they are – and that process took a generation – that those of his more conservative, more classically oriented contemporaries were relegated to almost total obscurity. Today, they are the stuff of Ph.D. dissertations and scholarly papers, the surest indicators of utter irrelevance.
With one exception: the symphonies of Franz Schubert.
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Franz Peter Schubert was born in Vienna on January 31, 1797. It was in Vienna that he died, on November 19, 1828, aged 31 years, 9 months, and 20 days.
Franz was one of four surviving Schubert children. Our Franz was the beloved “pet” of the family; from every account that has come down to us he was a small, plump, and endearingly sweet child. His growth-spurt hardly kicked in; the fully-grown Schubert was 1.57 meters in height (about 5’1”) and as his portraits attest, he never lost his cherubic appearance. …
Music History Monday: Al Jolson and the Painful Legacy of Blackface
Oct 23, 2023
Al Jolson (1886-1950)
We mark the death on October 23, 1950 – 73 years ago today – of the Lithuanian-American singer and actor Al Jolson. Born “Asa Yoelson” on May 26, 1886, in the village of Srednik, in what was then the Russian Empire and what is today Lithuania, he died of a massive heart attack in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco at the age of 64. He was playing cards with friends when he collapsed; his last words were “Oh … oh, I’m going.”
Singing ran deep in the Yoelson clan; his father Moses Yoelson was a cantor. The family immigrated to the United States in 1894 when young Asa was eight years old.
Jolson grew up in southwest Washington, D.C., where he began his “career” singing on street corners. From there, it was onto burlesque shows and performing on the vaudeville circuit. In those days, entertainment, local retail, and professional sports were among the few American “industries” open to immigrant Jews. If this sounds painfully familiar to Black Americans, well, so it should. Equally painful is that by 1905, the 19-year-old Jolson began appearing in “blackface”: a holdover from the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century. Jolson wasn’t the only performer working in blackface at the time, but he became the best known of his generation, the so-called “king of blackface.”
Jolson in the movie Mammy, 1930
The subject of tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post is Al Jolson’s groundbreaking movie The Jazz Singer. Given that The Jazz Singer concludes with two musical numbers featuring Jolson in blackface, I feel that it’s importantto broach this topic – “blackface” – here and now.That’s because the issue of blackface cuts to the heart of racism in America and to the soul of the American popular music industry, going back nearly two hundred years.
Blackface
My views on this subject have evolved; a lot. There was a time, when I was a young man (we’re talking decades ago), when I didn’t think much about it one way or the other. Having grown up in the American northeast, I was surrounded by all sorts of racial and ethnic stereotypes, and to be concerned about them seemed the height of oversensitivity and humorlessness.
So: growing up where and when I did (in the late 1950s and 1960s), I experienced a degree of casually insidious racism that conditioned me (and I daresay most of my generation) to accept a degree of bigotry that would be considered far out-of-bounds today.
For example, cast iron, black faced lawn jockeys dotted the front yards of my South Jersey suburban neighborhood. The book Little Black Sambo was on every toddler’s bookshelf, as were books by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991), many of which featured cartoon images of black and Asian people that make us cringe today (an example will appear later in this post). High-end comedians regularly appeared on network TV variety shows like Ed Sullivan, doing routines that today would be considered irredeemably offensive: for example, Buddy Hackett’s Chinese waiter bit and Bill Dana’s “My name is José Jiménez.”
Some old fogies among us might assert that the 1950s and ‘60s were better times, claiming that during those “good ol’ days,” we knew how to laugh at ourselves. But in fact, “we” – meaning, here, straight white people – weren’t laughing at themselves. No: they were laughing at other white people who were making fun of Asian people, Hispanic people, gay people, and – in the case of those wearing blackface – black people.
When I was growing up, blackface imagery was still everywhere to be seen: in the movies, on television, in books and magazines, and at Halloween parties. I took the presence of blackface for granted and was utterly unaware of its origins and how profoundly upsetting it had always been to Black Americans…
Music History Monday: Mathilde Made Him Do It!
Oct 16, 2023
A few, necessary words before moving on to today’s post.
Our hearts bleed for the events currently playing out in Israel and Gaza.
Frankly, there are no words.
Today is also the 14th anniversary of my wife Diane’s death; she died at the age of 35 on October 16, 2009.
Again, there are no words.
Our grief notwithstanding, we soldier on – as we must – doing what we can to make our individual “worlds” a better place. For me, here on Patreon, that means publishing my blogs and podcasts, and thus – hopefully – allowing us to observe the best of the human spirit through our music.
That’s my gig, inadequate though it feels on days like today.
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) circa 1910
We mark the premiere on Wednesday, October 16, 1912 – 111 years ago today – of Arnold Schoenberg’s dazzling, controversial, and in all ways extraordinary work PierrotLunaire, at Berlin’s Choralion–saal.The premiere was preceded by a mind-blowing fortyrehearsals!
(For our information: chamber music premieres typically receive 3 to 5 rehearsals, max. It’s never enough, but that’s just how it is. Forty rehearsalsfor PierrotLunaire? Unheard of!)
Happy Coincidences!
As those of you who follow me on Patreon are aware, I’ve been serializing my book, The Composer is Always Right (CIAR), on Sundays, for over two years now. Yesterday’s installment was number 114; we have 27 more to go. For the first and what will be the only time, the topics of this week’s Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts and CIAR installment all deal with Arnold Schoenberg, the premiere of Pierrot Lunaire, and what, specifically, Schoenberg’s wife Mathilde made him “do.” As such, there will be some overlap between Music History Monday, Dr. Bob Prescribes, and The Composer is Always Right this week, for which I know will be forgiven.
The Schoenberg Dilemma (The Schoenberg Dichotomy)
Arnold Schoenberg, self-portrait, 1910
The music of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) continues to present a unique dilemma, a unique dichotomy. On one hand, no major twentieth-century composer’s music has been – and continues to be – more misunderstood and disparaged by the general listening public than Schoenberg’s. On the other hand, along with Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky, no twentieth-century composer has exerted a greater influence on the compositional community than has Arnold Schoenberg.
On the first page of his wonderful little book, entitled Arnold Schoenberg (Princeton University Press, 1975), the American pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen speaks to this “Schoenberg dilemma”:
“In 1945, Arnold Schoenberg’s application for a grant was turned down by the Guggenheim Foundation. The hostility of the music committee to Schoenberg and his work was undisguised. The seventy-year-old composer had hoped for support in order to finish two of his largest musical compositions, the opera Moses und Aaron and the oratorio Jacob’s Ladder, as well as several theoretical works. Schoenberg had just retired from the [faculty of the] University of California at Los Angeles; since he had been there only eight years, he had a pension of $38.00 a month with which to support a wife and three children aged thirteen, eight, and four. He was obliged, therefore, to spend much of his time taking private pupils in composition. This ‘enforced’ teaching enabled him to complete only one of his theoretical works, the Structural Functions of Harmony. The opera and oratorio were still unfinished at the composer’s death six years later.
Recognized internationally as one of the greatest living composers, considered the finest of all by many, acknowledged, with Igor Stravinsky, as one of the two most influential figures in contemporary music since Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg at the end of his life continued to provoke an enmity, even a hatred, almost unparalleled in the history of music. The elderly artist whose revolutionary works had raised a storm of protest in his youth is a traditional figure, but in old age his fame is unquestioned and dissenting voices have been stilled. In Schoenberg’s case, the dissent may be said to have grown with the fame.”
Schoenberg on the court, circa 1925 (note his rolled up right sleeve; the man is ready for action!)
Given the fear and loathing the name “Arnold Schoenberg” continues to inspire 72 years after his death you’d think he was some sort of Nosferatu-like monster who shot puppies for sport and refused to recycle. Rather, he was a short (around 5’2”), prematurely bald dude with a baritone voice couched in a soft Viennese accent, someone who loved kids (he was still fathering them into his mid-60’s), ping-pong, and tennis (he was, for a period during the late 1930s, George Gershwin’s regular tennis partner). He was, for our information, terrified (not too strong a word) of the number 13 (a fear known as “Triskaidekaphobia”).…
We mark the birth on October 9, 1835 – 188 years ago today – of Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, in Paris. He died in that magnificent city on Beethoven’s 151st birthday – on December 16, 1921 – at the age of 86.
The Nose
Physically, the adult Camille Saint-Saëns was – literally – an odd bird. The music critic Pierre Lalo has left us with this description:
“He was short and strangely resembled a parrot: the same sharply curved profile; a beak-like, hooked nose; [with] lively, restless, piercing eyes. He strutted like a bird and talked rapidly, precipitously, with a curiously affected lisp.”
In fact, Saint-Saens was as famous for his nose as Beethoven was for his hair. When he concertized in the United States during the 1906-1907 season, Philip Hale wrote in the Boston Symphony program book:
“His eyes are almost level with his nose. His eagle-beak would have excited the admiration of Sir Charles Napier, who once exclaimed, ‘Give me a man with plenty of nose!’”
Saint-Saëns in 1906, at the age of 71
Please: heaven forbid I should be accused of nasal-shaming here; we should just know about Saint-Saëns second most distinguishing feature before we move on. His principal distinguishing feature was his prodigious genius, a genius – like that of Felix Mendelssohn – for pretty much anything in which he took an interest.
The Prodigy
Like Felix Mendelssohn, Camille Saint-Saëns was an absurd child prodigy.
He began playing the piano at the age of two. He completed his first composition – for piano – on March 22, 1839, when he was not quite three-and-a-half years old.
Saint-Saëns in 1846, at the time of his public debut as a pianist
He made his public “debut” as a pianist at Paris’ vaunted Salle Pleyel in 1846, when he was still ten years old. His program included piano concerti by both Mozart and Beethoven. For an encore he invited the audience to choose any one of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas which he offered to play from memory.
That’s just stupid.
When the 18-year-old Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 1 received its premiere, the astonished – and always quotable – Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) remarked:
“He knows everything but lacks inexperience.”
(“Lacks inexperience.” Think about it.)
A few years later the redoubtable Franz Liszt heard Saint-Saëns play the organ and publicly declared him to be the greatest organist in the world. …
Music History Monday: 710 Ashbury Street, San Francisco, California
Oct 02, 2023
Before we get to the central topic of today’s post – that being a particular address in San Francisco – we would wish a most happy birthday to someone we only know by his nickname. Please: no looking ahead and peeking!
Sir G. B. Hunter Memorial Hospital in Wallsend, Northumberland, England
Today we wish a happy 71st birthday to the English singer, songwriter, bassist, and actor Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, CBE (“Commander of the Order of the British Empire”). He was born at Sir G. B. Hunter Memorial Hospital in Wallsend, Northumberland, England.
Shipyard, Wallsend
He grew up near the shipyards there in Wallsend, which itself is located just outside of Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the east coast of northern England. The eldest of four kids, his mother Audrey was a hairdresser and his father Ernest a milkman.
Our birthday boy took up the guitar as a child, but as music didn’t pay the rent, he worked as a bus conductor, a construction worker, a tax officer and, after having attended the Northern County College of Education (today known as Northumbrian University) from 1971 to 1974, he received a teaching credential. He went on to teach for two years at St. Paul’s School in Cramlington, some 9 miles north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
The Phoenix Jazzmen circa 1970; the band’s leader and trombonist, Gordon Solomon, is third from left
His various day gigs did not preclude Gordon Sumner from playing in bands on nights and weekends, and he became the bassist for a Newcastle-upon-Tyne based New Orleans-style jazz band called the Phoenix Jazzmen. The band was led by its trombonist, a gentleman (we assume he was a gentleman) named Gordon Solomon. One day young Sumner showed up to a gig wearing a black and yellow striped sweater. We’ll let Sumner himself describe what happened.
“One Saturday night, we are playing the Red House Farm Social Club, Sunderland, in the middle of a tough working-class area in the north of the city. The Phoenix Jazzmen will perform at 9pm, after the bingo session. It is the early part of the evening, and we are lounging in the dressing room.
Gordon Solomon, or ‘Solly,’ the band leader, is going over the set that we will play tonight. He is delivering our nightly pep talk, leaning casually against the bingo machine. [He turns towards me and says] ‘Sting, dear boy…’
He’s been calling me that for weeks now. I must have worn the damned sweater but once, and yes it did make me look like a wasp, with its black-and-yellow hoops, but this stupid name is beginning to stick.”
Stick the nickname did. In 1985, when a journalist called him “Gordon” during an interview, Sumner replied: “My children call me Sting, my mother calls me Sting, who is this Gordon character?”
Music History Monday: In a Class by Himself
Sep 25, 2023
Glenn Herbert Gould (born “Gold,” 1932-1982) circa 1955
We mark the birth on September 25, 1932 – 91 years ago today – of the pianist Glenn Herbert Gold, in Toronto, Canada. (Yes, the surname on “Glenn Gould’s” birth certificate is “Gold.” When the young guy was seven years old his family began informally using the surname “Gould,” though Glenn himself never formally changed his name from “Gold” to “Gould.”) He died there in Toronto on October 4, 1982, at the age of fifty.
Superlatives Cut Two Ways!
I would observe that ordinarily, when we refer to someone as being “in a class by themselves,” it is usually understood as a compliment: that someone is “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without equal”; sans pareil”; and so forth.
But in fact, superlatives such as these can cut two ways, and are consequently not necessarily complimentary in their entirety.
For example.
Tyrus Raymond “Ty” Cobb (1886-1961) in 1913
Tyrus Raymond “Ty” Cobb (1886-1961), the so-called “Georgia Peach” was – as I trust we all know – a baseball player during the Deadball Era (circa 1900-1920). He was a transcendent baseball genius (as you know, I do not use the “g-word” – genius – lightly); he was truly “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without equal.” At the time of his retirement from baseball in 1928 he held over ninety major league records. Today, 95 years later, he still holds a number of those records, including his lifetime batting average of .366 (which is the highest ever), most batting titles over a career (12), and for stealing home plate (which he did a total of 54 times).
Cobb was also “one of a kind” for his demeanor both on and off the field. As a player, intimidation was the name of his game, and he was a vicious – many even said “demonic” – competitor. And while the story that he sharpened his spikes in order to injure opposing players may not be true, he was despised by most of his contemporaries for what were considered his head games, his cheap shots, and his generally unsportsmanlike play.
Cobb sliding spikes-high into St. Louis Browns catcher Paul Krichell in 1912
Cobb was trouble wherever he went. He was, despite the denials of apologists, a notorious racist. He assaulted a heckler named Claude Lucker in the stands at Hilltop Park in New York City, for which he was suspended. (For our information, Hilltop Park was the nickname of a park in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan where the New York Yankees – then known as the “Highlanders” – played from 1903 to 1912.)
He got into drunken brawls in bars and in hotels and on the street, not infrequently spending the night after in a jail cell. He once choked and beat the living daylights out of an umpire named Billy Evans after a game. In June 1914, Cobb pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace after pulling out a revolver during an argument in a Detroit butcher shop, for which he was fined $50. On August 13, 1912, Cobb was stabbed in the back during a street brawl before a game. He refused to tell anyone what had happened and went on to play, going 2 for 3 with two singles and a run scored, raising his batting average to .418.
One of kind.
According to Benjamin Klein, writing in Bleacher Report in 2014:
“Ty Cobb is hands down the worst human being to ever play in Major League Baseball, and it’s not even that close. Cobb is the most hated baseball player of all time. Period.”
Ty Cobb was indeed “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without equal” for reasons both very good and very bad. The same competitive ferocity that made him great also made him a most controversial player and human being!
Glenn Gould: “One of a Kind”
Glenn Gould in 1957, warming his always-cold hands and piano keys, in a photo by Yousuf Karsh
Which brings us to our remarkable birthday boy, Glenn Gould. Like Tyrus Cobb, Gould was a complicated and contrary man of preternatural talent and abilities, “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without equal” for reasons both very good and not so very good.
Let us state for the record up front that Glenn Gould never brandished a gun in a butcher shop or routinely sucker-punched people in bars. Nevertheless, his shamelessly bad attitude towards the music of Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann is, to my mind, the musical equivalent of sliding – sharpened cleats high – into the face of a catcher.
Admittedly, not one of us is perfect, and each of us carries a bit of Mr. Hyde within us; we are, after all, only human. But Glenn Gould’s genius for piano, like Ty Cobb’s for baseball, was a function of both a good side and a frankly self-destructive side. Our job, for the duration of this post, will be to observe the quirks, complexities, and emotional darkness that drove Glenn Gould to become the “one of a kind” that he was.
Know that we will return to Glenn Gould in Dr. Bob Prescribes next week, on October 3.…
Music History Monday: Jimi Hendrix and the 27 Club
Sep 18, 2023
James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix (born Johnny Allen Hendrix, 1942-1970), circa 1967
We mark the death on September 18, 1970 – 53 years ago today – of the American guitarist, singer, and songwriter James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix, at St. Mary Abbots Hospital in London. He was born in Seattle, Washington on November 27, 1942, making him 27 years old at the time of his death, something we will discuss later in this post.
CreatingandMasteringaNewIdiom
“Top ten” lists are entirely subjective and thus often irrelevant. But they can be informative when they agree and as such, indicate a consensus.
Here are a few such lists of rock ‘n’ roll guitarists, in which I’ve cut to the chase and listed only the “top four.”
Rolling Stone cover, December 28, 2011
RollingStone, “100 Greatest [Rock] Guitarists”:
Jimi Hendrix
Eric Clapton
Jimmy Page
Keith Richards
Writing in RollingStone, the American guitarist, singer, songwriter, and political activist Tom Morello explains:
“Jimi Hendrix exploded our idea of what rock music could [italics mine] be. His playing was effortless. There’s not one minute of his recorded career that feels like he’s working hard at it – it feels like it’s all flowing through him. He seamlessly weaves chords and single note runs together and uses chord voicings that don’t appear in any music book. His riffs were a pre-metal funk bulldozer, and his lead lines were an electric LSD trip down to the crossroads, where he pimp-slapped the devil.
His legacy is assured as the greatest guitar player of all time.”
HowStuffWorks, “The Ten Greatest Rock and Roll Guitarists of All Time”:
Jimi Hendrix
Jimmy Page
Eric Clapton
Stevie Ray Vaughan
Writes Jim Halden of HowStuffWorks:
“Despite all the jockeying for position on this list, there was never any question as to who would end up at the top. In his brief life, Jimi Hendrix forever changed the way people thought about the electric guitar. In his hands, it became more than an instrument; it was a gateway into the soul, a vessel through which to communicate the inner workings of a complex man with immeasurable talent.”
Guitarmetrics, “Top 10 Classic Rock Guitarists”:
Jimi Hendrix
SLASH (his real name being Saul Hudson)
Eric Clapton
Jimmy Page
Writes the editors of Guitarmetrics:
“The entire landscape of rock music was altered when Jimi first picked up a guitar. He demonstrated to us how to perform feats that were thought to be impossible on a guitar at the time. The guitar itself started to resemble a part of his body.”
I’ll cut to the chase, because with just a couple of exceptions, every “greatest rock guitarist” list I found during a brief but spirited search on the internet put Hendrix at number one, including GuitaristNextDoor,Cleveland.com,MusicIndustryHowTo,RoadieTuner,CulturaSonara,ReallySimpleGuitar,Louder,DigitalDreamDoor,BollyInside,NewArena, (should I keep going?), TheDelite,MusicThisDay,Rock‘n’RollRemnants,and SkillShare (yes, I’ll stop now).
On those very few lists on which Hendrix wasn’t listed at number one, he was listed at number two, behind either Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page.
Regarding Jimi Hendrix’ place in the pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll guitarists, that’s consensus.
Here’s another bit of consensus. Almost every one of the lists indicated above put Eric Clapton (born 1945) and Jimmy Page (born 1944) in the top five along with Jimi Hendrix.
What makes these three musicians so very special is not just their extraordinary imaginations and technical wizardry; no, something more is involved here. It’s that during the 1960s, they virtually spearheaded the creation of an entirely new instrumental vocabulary, that of the virtuosic, solid body electric rock ‘n’ roll guitar!
One of the earliest extant violins in existence, built by Andrea Amati (1505-1577) circa 1559
Let’s consider this.
The violin family of instruments – the violin, viola, and the cello – were invented in northern Italy in the early 16th century, circa the 1520s. Composers and performers have had 500 years to create a repertoire for these instruments and to progressively develop the technique by which to play them.
Leo Fender (Clarence Leonidas Fender, 1909-1991)
As opposed to the solid body electric guitar, which was invented in the early 1940s and came into use in the late 1940s. (For our information, the first mass produced solid body electric guitars were the Fender Esquire and the Fender Broadcaster, which were first produced in 1950.) Whether we credit Leo Fender (born Clarence Leonidas Fender, 1909-1991) or Les Paul (born Lester William Polsfuss, 1915-2009) for its invention is immaterial; by the early 1960s, the solid body electric guitar had become the identifying instrument of rock ‘n’ roll, a genre of dance music that only acquired its name in 1954.…
Music History Monday: They Did Not Go Gently…
Sep 11, 2023
9-11; a somber day for us all. A day for reflection, contemplation and perhaps, still, after 22 years, a day to grieve.
François Couperin (1668-1733)
Far more often than not, Music History Monday is about celebrating the life and accomplishments of a musician or identifying and exploring some great (or small) event in music history.
If I chose to, today’s post could celebrate the lives and music of two wonderful composers. On September 11, 1733 – 290 years ago today – the French composer and harpsichordist François Couperin (1668-1733) died in Paris, at the age of 65. The Estonian-born composer Arvo Pärt was born 88 years ago today, on September 11, 1935. If we chose to explore an event rather than celebrate the lives and music of François Couperin or Arvo Pärt, this post could mark the 173rd anniversary of the first American concert of “The Swedish Nightingale” – Ms. Jenny Lind (1820-1887) – at the Castle Garden Theater in New York City, in a performance promoted by none-other-than P. T. Barnum.
Jenny Lind (1820-1887) in 1862
(For our information: Johanna Maria “Jenny” Lind was one of the most highly regarded operatic sopranos of her time. After a sensational European career, she retired from the opera stage in 1849 at the still-tender age of 29.
But she didn’t retire from singing. In 1850, at the invitation of the great American showman Phineas Taylor [P.T.] Barnum [1810-1891], Jenny Lind travelled to America to tour. She performed 93 concerts under the banner of Barnum’s production company, then continued to tour the United States, Cuba, and Canada under her own management. During her two-year stay, Lind became the most popular musician ever to visit North America to that point in time, and the wealthiest as well: her concerts netted her roughly $350,000; $13,716,900 in 2023 dollars.)
But back to today and this post.
I would begin with an admission.
I’m feeling my age these days and, for better or for worse, becoming ever-more aware of the brevity of all things as well as the pervasive chaos that lies immediately beneath our perceived veneer of control.
So?
So, running with the avowedly morbid spirit of this day, I present to you a series of chaotic deaths, unnecessary deaths, stupid deaths – tragic, sudden, accidentaldeaths – from the world of concert music. (If I were so foolish as to include unnecessary/stupid deaths from the world of rock ‘n’ roll, this post would run for a million-plus words instead of 2293.) There are no deaths here from chronic illness, suicide, substance abuse, heart attack, stroke, or aneurism; just particularly unnecessary deaths, like being hit by a Boeing 767 while sitting at your desk on the 93rd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46:40am on September 11, 2001.
Admittedly, it’s a grim topic but not an uninteresting one, given that death is one of the very few things that we all will have in common.
We begin, then, with the date-related item that anchors today’s Music History Monday.
Betty Stone (1914-1977): Going Up?
We mark the birth on September 11, 1914 – 109 years ago today – of Betty Stone in Norwich, Connecticut. Ms. Stone, whose birth name was Betty Schanker, was an alto and a member of the Metropolitan Opera chorus. According to her brother, Sidney Schanker of Union, N.J.:
“Ever since she was a child, she had been wrapped up in opera. [Our] older sister Rose played the piano and sang and Betty always wanted to.”
Betty Stone studied choral singing in a chorus sponsored by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression – in the 1930s – and joined the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera in 1945, when she was 31 years old.
Cleveland’s Public Auditorium (also-known-as “Public Hall”), opened 1922
We read from an article that appeared on page 44 of The New York Times on May 2, 1977:
“CLEVELAND, May 1—A member of the chorus of New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company was killed here last night when her flowing costume was caught in the grille of a backstage elevator.
The accident occurred just after the curtain went down on the second act of II Trovatore, the final opera of the Met’s one-week stay in [Cleveland’s] Public Hall. Backstage, some cast members walked upstairs to the dressing rooms, while others lined up for the half-century-old elevator.
The elevator was almost filled when Frank Coffey, a seven‐year chorus member, stepped on. Behind him, Miss Stone was the last to squeeze into the 8‐by‐6 elevator.
It is an old freight‐style elevator, with doors at both ends, and the operator was on the opposite end from Miss Stone. As the car began to rise, Mr. Coffey saw Miss Stone being dragged down. “Stop! Stop,” he yelled. Others took up the shout. There were sobs, shouts of panic.
The robe [Miss Stone] wore as a nun in the cloister scene [had] caught in the door and, as the elevator rose, she was dragged to the floor. ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!,’ the elevator operator, Norman Reser, heard someone shout. He stopped the elevator, but Miss Stone, dragged down as the cage went up, had caught her head between the side of the shaft and the elevator. [A stagehand], Joe Bauer took out a pocketknife and cut her loose from the gown.
The elevator was lowered. The stagehand Joe Bauer lifted her out onto the stage floor. Miss Stone was bleeding profusely and was unconscious. She was taken to St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 10:07 P.M.
Frank M. Duman, a member of the Public Auditorium Commission in Cleveland, said the elevator was to have gone out of service [that] night as part of a remodeling of old sections of the building. It had been scheduled to be used for only another hour.”
OMG; that’s just awful. Singing in an opera chorus should not be hazardous to your health, especially while dressed as a nun. And for a New Yorker to die this way, in Cleveland of all places; oh, the ignominy of it all!
Happy birthday, Betty Schanker-Stone; you no doubt deserved better.
In the spirit of “misery loves company,” I would offer up a few other egregiously stupid musician deaths.…
Music History Monday: On the Spectrum
Sep 04, 2023
Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) in 1896, wearing the Order of Franz Joseph, in a portrait by Josef Büche
We mark the birth on September 4, 1824 – 199 years ago today – of the composer and organist Josef Anton Bruckner, in the Austrian village of Ansfelden, which today is a suburb of the city of Linz. He died in the Austrian capital of Vienna on October 11, 1896, at the age of 72.
It was Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) who famously said that Bruckner was:
“Half simpleton, half God.”
Strangeness
I would be so bold as to suggest that there is such a thing as a “strangeness spectrum,” a scale of personality oddness that stretches from the merely quirky to the genuinely weird. If we were to consider such a spectrum as a scale from one to ten, with one being “quirky” (or idiosyncratic); five being “eccentric” (or odd); and ten being really “weird” (or bizarre), then the personality of the composer and organist Anton Bruckner would lie at about an eleven: an off-the-charts “downright whacky” (and even, at times, unnervingly creepy).
I know, I know: many of you are probably thinking something on the lines of “so what? He was a professional composer. Show me a major composer besides, perhaps, Joseph Haydn and Antonin Dvořák who wasn’ta bit crazy.”
True, that. But even by the standards of professional composers, Bruckner was in a class by himself, perhaps the strangest and most unlikely person to ever become a high-end professional composer. Attempting to reconcile this genuinely bizarre country bumpkin with the complex, sprawling, often magnificent symphonic and religious music he composed remains a challenge.
Brief Biography
Bruckner’s birth house in Ansfelden, Austria
He was born in the Austrian town of Ansfelden, near Linz. His father was the town schoolmaster and the church organist, and it was at the local Catholic Church that Bruckner heard his first music, sang as a choirboy, and learned to play the violin and organ.
The Church was Bruckner’s refuge and solace for the entirety of his life; he was as devout a man as we will ever find outside a monastery or a foxhole. He believed completely that everything he did should honor God. Late in his life he told Gustav Mahler:
“Yes, my dear, now I have to work very hard so that at least [my] tenth Symphony will be finished. Otherwise, I will not pass before God, before whom I shall soon stand. He will say: ‘Why else have I given you talent, you son of a bitch, than you should sing My praise and glory? But you have accomplished much too little!’”
One can only hope that God deemed Bruckner’s nine symphonies as being adequate, because he died before completing his Tenth.
Bruckner’s statement to Mahler – made in all seriousness – reveals what was a pathological inferiority complex. As a student teacher between the ages of 17 and 19, he was constantly and mercilessly humiliated by his boss, one Franz Fuchs, a teacher at the Windhagg School in the Austrian town of Windhaag. But Bruckner never complained or rebelled. Rather, characteristically, he submitted to any and all abuse without a whimper, so convinced was he of his own inferiority.
Everyone who knew him said the same thing, that he was a classic country bumpkin: naïve, simple, overly trusting, and deferential. According to his biographer Deryck Watson, Bruckner was:
“Humble, straightforward, uncomplicated, unpretentious, and unsophisticated. He was warm-hearted and childlike, [though] his proverbial naivety should not be confused with a lack of intelligence. His rural background was evident throughout his life. City life never suited him, and the little countryman, habitually dressed in a bulky black suit and wide-brimmed black hat, was in sharp contrast with the style and elegance of fashionable Vienna [where he lived from 1868 to his death in 1896].…
Richard Wagner (1813-1883) in 1850, by Henri Lehmann
We mark the premiere performance on August 28, 1850 – 173 years ago today – of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, in the central German city of Weimar.
Franz Liszt (1811-1886) in 1847, by Miklós Barabás
The premiere was conducted by none-other-than Wagner’s friend and supporter (and future father-in-law!) Franz Liszt (1811-1886). Liszt had chosen the premiere date of August 28 in honor of Weimar’s most famous citizen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was born on August 28, 1749, 101 years to the day before Lohengrin’s premiere.
The “opera” – the last of Wagner’s stage works to be designated by him as being an “opera” – was brilliantly received and has been a mainstay of the international repertoire since that first performance.
Alas, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was not in attendance there at the premiere. With a price on his head, he had been de-facto exiled from Germany thanks to his activities in the Dresden Uprising of May of 1849. Wagner did not hear a full performance of Lohengrin until 1861, 11 years later, in Vienna.
Be informed that both today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts will deal with Lohengrin. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes will focus on three video performances, comparing video excerpts from each of the three performances in our search for a single, prescribed recording.
Wagner in Dresden and the “Education” of an Audience
Richard Wagner, the newly appointed Assistant Kapellmeister of the Royal Dresden Opera in 1843, by Johann Jacob Weber
Wagner was hired as Assistant Kapellmeister of the Royal Dresden Opera in 1843, at the age of 30. From the moment he took the job, his burning ambition was to turn Dresden into a hot bed for new German opera. In order to do that, he had to convince the conservative Dresden opera audience to embrace and support opera that was new and different.
A tall order that, “educating the audience,” one that long experience tells us only rarely succeeds. But we’re talking here about the human dynamo that was Richard Wagner, for whom, in Dresden at least, “failure” was not an option.
More than anything else, it was Wagner’s own operas that converted a significant portion of his Dresden audience from the “staid” to the “adventurous.” Wagner’s opera Rienzi – a traditional pot-boiler written in the contemporary French-style – won the Dresden audience over to Wagner almost immediately in October of 1842. The Flying Dutchman – premiered in Dresden on January 2, 1843 – was another thing altogether. A psychodrama with terrifically challenging vocal parts, it left its audiences confused: not particularly “entertained”, but not turned off, either. Having said that, the fact that The Flying Dutchman turned out to be a huge hit in other German cities instilled no small bit of pride in the Dresden musical community, which, for the most part, came to be delighted with its assistant Kapellmeister.
The response to the premiere of Wagner’s Tannhäuser on October 19, 1845, made it clear that something special was happening in Dresden. In an article that appeared in the Leipzig journal “Signal for The Musical World,” the Dresden correspondent wrote:
“It is a noteworthy phenomenon that the cool and unexcitable Dresden theater public has been transformed by Wagner’s operas into a fiery and enthusiastic body such as can be found nowhere else in Germany.”
That “fiery enthusiasm” for Wagner’s operas soon spread across all of what today is Germany. It wasn’t just that Wagner was a German composer writing German language operas based on Germanic-slash-Nordic subject matter. Even more, it was because Wagner’s music was evolving away from traditional Italian and French operatic practice, towards something of his own making. In Tannhäuser, Wagner blurs the edge between recitative and aria: between action music and lyric music. This was something new for German audiences, and it allowed dramatic momentum to build more powerfully, unchecked by “traditional” structural divisions. Wagner also deployed his pit orchestras ever more symphonically, with the result being a level of instrumental magnificence that drove German audiences wild, even though it sometimes drowned out smaller-voiced singers who could not compete with the orchestra on equal terms. (When we call someone a “Wagner singer,” what we’re saying is that a singer has a voice “big enough” to be heard over a “Wagner orchestra!”)…
Music History Monday: Where is the “Sin” in “Synthesizer?: Robert Moog and “Synthetic” Sound
Aug 21, 2023
Robert Moog (1934-2005)
We mark the death on August 21, 2005 – 18 years ago today – of the American engineer and electronic music pioneer Robert Moog. Born in New York City on May 23, 1934, he died of a brain tumor in Asheville, North Carolina, at the age of 71.
First things first: let us pronounce this fine man’s surname properly. It is not pronounced as “moo-g.” “Moo-g” is a sound made by a cow after she painfully stubs her hoof. Despite its double-o, the name is pronounced “mogue,” as in “vogue.”
Moog didn’t invent the sound synthesizer. Rather, he (and his inventing “partners,” the composer Herbert Arnold “Herb” Deutsch, 1932-2022 and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Wendy Carlos, born 1939) democratized the thing, making it affordable, portable, and playable enough to be bought and used by anyone who could get around a piano-like keyboard.
Our Game Plan
Today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts are conceived as a single post, one that I’ve divided in half and will post on two successive days. As my Patreon subscribers know, I’ve done this before; it’s no big deal and I will certainly do it again. However, for those of you who are listening solely to the podcast of Music History Monday and have not subscribed to my Patreon page (at Patreon.com/RobertGreenbergMusic), tomorrow’s second half of this fascinating story will remain unheard (or unread, as the case may be). To my mind, this is a sorry state of affairs, like eating half a potato chip or watching just the first half of Gone with the Wind.
The solution is simple: subscribe.
Just a suggestion.
Music and Electricity
Now bear with me, as I will do my darndest to briefly explain the development of electronically produced and manipulated sound as it evolved in the twentieth century without confusing either you or myself.
The Grid
A momentary but heartfelt bit of praise for the grid: how do we love thee? Can we even hope to count the ways? Personally, I cannot count them. When our power goes out here in Oakland, CA – infrequent an event though it may be – life as I know and understand it comes to a screeching halt, so completely dependent am I on devices that employ the controlled movement of electrons between atoms.
My dependence is a recent phenomenon. Mass electrification in Europe and North American did not begin until the early twentieth century, first in major cities and in areas served by electric railways. By 1930, roughly 70% of all households in the United States had electricity. That might sound like a high number, but huge swatches of American territory and population were without electric power (and, for that matter, often without plumbing, sanitary sewage and storm drainage, and telephone service); in 1934, fewer than 11% of all farms in the United States had electrical power.
A poster dating from the 1930s, promoting the ‘Rural Electrification Administration of the U.S. Department of Agriculture
It wasn’t until 1935, with the creation of the Rural Utilities Service by executive order of President Franklin Roosevelt, that this issue was systematically addressed. By 1942, nearly 50% of all farms in the United States had electricity, and by 1952 almost all farms in the United States – finally! – had electricity.
1952. For some of us, 71 years might seem like a long time ago but, in fact, it was, by any historic measure, yesterday.
And so the development of electronic musical instruments during the twentieth century, something that went hand-in-hand with electrification was, likewise, a very recent event.
Strictly defined, an “electronic musical instrument” (or an “electrophone”):
“is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic, or digital audio signal that ultimately is plugged into a power amplifier which then drives a loudspeaker, creating the sound heard by the performer and listener.”
Precursors
Because I know you come to Music History Monday (meaning me) for the whole story, I am compelled to point out that the first electrified musical instruments date to the eighteenth century.
The first so-called “electronic musical instrument” was very likely a specialized harpsichord-like device designed and built by a Czech cleric, natural scientist, and musician named Václav Divíšek (1698-1765). Sometime around 1748, Divíšek built a large keyboard instrument (which is long since lost) that sent an electrical charge through its iron strings in order to enhance and vary the quality of its sound. Václav Divíšek called his electro-toy a “Denis d’or” (meaning “Golden Dionysus”).
Other such experimental, metal-stringed instruments came and went, including something called a “clavecin électrique” built by a French Jesuit priest named Jean-Baptiste de Laborde in 1761.…
Music History Monday: Worst. Timing. Ever
Aug 14, 2023
If physical appearance had been the criterion, and not the ability to play the drums . . .
On August 14, 1962 – 61 years ago today – the manager of the Beatles Brian Epstein made a phone call to the drummer Ringo Starr, inviting him to join the band. As I suspect we are all aware, Starr said “yes.” Two days later, on August 16, Epstein had the unenviable task of firing the band’s present drummer, Randolph Peter “Pete” Best (born Randolph Peter Scanland, 1941), who had been the Beatles’ drummer for almost exactly two years, since August 1960. Best’s firing, effective on August 18, 1962, was, for Best, the worst timing ever. 17 days later, on September 4, 1962, a reconfigured Beatles with Ringo Starr as drummer recorded their first #1 hit and went from nobodies to superstars in the span of a few weeks.
Pete Best (Born 1941)
Best circa 1962
Peter Best was born on November 24, 1941, in Madras, which was then part of British India. His father, a marine engineer named Donald Peter Scanland, died during World War Two. Pete’s mother Mona went on to marry a British officer from Liverpool named Johnny Best, with whom she had a second son, this one named Rory. In 1945, the Best family returned to Britain on the MV Georgic, the last British troop ship to leave India. It docked in Liverpool on December 25, 1945.
It was in Liverpool that Pete Best grew up. Writes the Beatles’ “biographer” Mark Lewisohn:
“Pete grew into a strong, muscly lad, exceptional at sports and carrying no excess weight, eminently capable of taking care of himself in a physical confrontation, which in Liverpool could always happen at any moment. He was also handsome and knew it.”
At the age of 17 (or so), Pete Best showed some interest in the drums. His mother Mona, who was running a club called the “Casbah Coffee Club” in her basement (it was a large basement!) was thrilled that Pete had expressed interest in anything: she “hurried down” to Rushworth & Draper’s music store and bought her son:
The “bandstand” at the Casbah Coffee Club as it exists today, as a shrine to the Beatles
“a smart-looking Premier kit in blue mother of pearl.”
Being a rank beginner as a drummer never stopped Pete Best (nor has it ever stopped any wannabe rock ‘n’ roller), and he organized a band called the Black Jacks.
Having a doting mother who owns a nightclub never hurts when it comes to bookings, and it didn’t hurt the Black Jacks, amateurish though they were. It was at his mother’s “Casbah Coffee Club” that Pete Best also met the local talent, including an up-and-coming band called the Quarrymen, which featured Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison. In the spring of 1960, the Quarrymen changed their name to the Beatles, and a couple of months later their first manager – Allan William – secured the band an extended gig in Hamburg, Germany.
Paul McCartney (born 1942) and John Lennon (1940-1980) playing at the Casbah on August 29, 1959
There was a problem, though: the Beatles, consisting of McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison – were without a drummer. Paul McCartney was tasked with finding one. McCartney knew Best through the Casbah, and he knew that Best had one very important thing going for him: he actually owned a set of drums. McCartney also heard, as he later stated in an interview, that Pete Best’s female fans considered him as being:
“mean, moody, and magnificent,”
a James Dean/Marlon Brando-like trifecta that convinced McCartney that Pete Best would be a good match for the Beatles.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
Brian Epstein (1934-1967) in 1965
Sadly, Pete Best wasn’t much of a drummer when he joined the Beatles in Hamburg, and he wasn’t much of one when they returned from Hamburg two years later, in 1962. By 1962, almost everyone associated with the Beatles except their manager Brian Epstein (1934-1967) wanted Best to make like a tree and leave. Nevertheless, had Pete Best been a little better; had he been willing to grow out his hair like McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison; had he spent some off time schmoozing with the other three bandmembers; if, in a phrase, he had made any attempt to behave like a member of the band, he might have lasted a bit longer. And had he managed to last just a bit longer, he might today be a household name (instead of being an object lesson in failure), because the Beatles caught fire just weeks after his departure.
How many different ways can we say, “bummer, dude”? Bummero; bummerissimo, bummersky, bummah. I would suggest that the next time any one of us suffers a professional reversal, a disappointment, or even, heaven forbid, a firing, let us count our blessings that, in fact, we are not Randolph Peter Best and that we have not had to spend our lives explaining our firing to an endlessly curious world.…
Music History Monday: All Hail The King!
Aug 07, 2023
Elvis Presley (1935-1977) wearing his peacock jumpsuit in concert, circa 1974
We mark an online auction that concluded on August 7, 2008 – 15 years ago today – at which Elvis Presley’s white, sweat-stained, high-collared, plunging V-necked jumpsuit, decorated with a dazzling, hand-embroidered blue and gold peacock – sold for $300,000. (Because I know you want to know, the jumpsuit is cinched at the waist by a wide belt decorated in gold medallions in a design meant to resemble the eye of a peacock feather, all of it an ongoing reflection of Elvis’ fascination with peacocks as being his personal good luck symbol.)
The outfit cost Elvis a cool $10,000. It was designed by the Los Angeles couturier Bill Belew (1931-2008), who designed all of The King’s stage wardrobe between 1968 and 1977.
Bill Belew (1931-2008)
Talk about provenance (something we’ll define and discuss in just a bit)! Aside from Elvis’ personal sweat stains (do they still . . . give off an odor?), he performed wearing the jumpsuit for the better part of a year. Elvis first wore the “peacock” at a concert at the Forum in Los Angeles on May 11, 1974. He then performed wearing it in Las Vegas and wore it as well on the cover of his album “Promised Land,” which was released in 1975.
In their pre-sale estimate, the auction house, Gotta Have It!, had anticipated that the jumpsuit would bring between $275,000 and $325,000. The $300k hammer price was, then, nothing short of a surgical strike.
At the time of that auction, which closed exactly 15 years ago today, the peacock jumpsuit was the most expensive piece of Elvis Presley memorabilia ever sold at auction. (Up to that time, the previous record for an Elvis collectible was $295,000, for his 1956 Lincoln Continental Mark II, which was sold in 1999 at an auction held at Graceland.)
The peacock jumpsuit might have been the most expensive piece of Elvis Presley memorabilia sold at auction up to 2008, but its selling price has long since been surpassed. Do not fret; we’ll talk about some of those more expensive items in due time.
As for the identities of the jumpsuit’s seller and its buyer, well, who knows? We only know that the seller was described by the auctioneer as:
“a Big Elvis collector.”
As for who ponied up the $300k for the outfit, the auction house Gotta Have It! has declined to identify the buyer.
What’s it Worth?
The ubiquitous “Red Book” guide to American coins, which has been inflating coin values – sometimes comically so – since 1947
Collectors almost inevitably believe their stuff is worth more than it really is. Part of the problem is the legion of collectors’ books that contain price guides. In order to sell more copies of the books, such coin and antique collectors’ guides are far more often than not filled with atmospheric price valuations:
“OMG, Edgar, according to this-here price guide, my 1909 Indian Head penny is worth $30,000!!”
Sorry Chauncy; it’s only worth $30k if you can convince some poor, dumb sucker to pay $30k for it. Until then, it’s worth all of . . . 1 cent.
When it comes to high-end stuff, auctions – and the open market they represent – are probably the best way to gauge what something is worth at a given point in time. …
Before we get to the actual date-related topic for today, I beg your indulgence, as I need to tell you a story. It’s a story that most of you know, at least in part. Again, indulge me.
A partial reunion of the stars of The Godfather films I and II in 2017, on the 45th anniversary of the release of The Godfather I; from left-to-right: Diane Keaton, Robert de Niro, Robert Duvall, director Francis Ford Coppola, James Caan, Al Pacino, and Talia Shire; missing are Marlon Brando – Don Corleone himself – who died in 2004; and John Cazale, who portrayed Fredo Corleone, who passed away in 1978
The Godfather III – the third film in the storied Godfather franchise, released in 1990 – was one of the most anticipated films of all time. And no wonder: the first of the Godfather movies – The Godfather, or “G1”, released in 1972 – was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and received three, including Best Picture and Best Actor (for Marlon Brando). G2, released two years later in 1974 was also nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning six of them, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor (for Robert DeNiro). So G3 – The Godfather III – had a lot riding on it.
Much of the casting was easy. Al Pacino returned in the role of Michael Corleone; Diane Keaton in the role of Kaye Corleone; and Talia Shire in the role of Connie Corleone. But there were new roles to fill, none more important than Mary Corleone, the now grown-up daughter of the “godfather” himself, Michael Corleone. G3’s writer and director, Francis Ford Coppola (born 1939), wanted Julia Roberts for the role of Mary Corleone. Unfortunately, Ms. Roberts was not available, so Coppola tested a number of other actresses for the part, including Madonna (whose own Italian heritage did not, in the end, help her get the part). In the end, the part went to Winona Ryder. (Born Winona Horowitz in Winona, Minnesota in 1971, Ms. Ryder grew up in Northern California and graduated from Petaluma High School in 1989 with a 4.0 average). The 18-year-old Ms. Ryder was up-and-coming at the time she was chosen for the role of Mary Corleone, having scored major successes in the movies Beetlejuice (1988) and Heathers (1989).
Winona Ryder (born Horowitz, 1971) in 1990 with Johnny Depp (born 1963), her boyfriend at the time
Ryder arrived at the G3 set in Italy and rehearsed for a day. The next morning, her boyfriend, a young actor named Johnny Depp, called in to say that Ms. Ryder was “indisposed” and unavailable. Her issues were, in fact, a bit more serious than that. Suffering from what was later diagnosed as “nervous exhaustion,” Ryder left the movie, never to return, after just that one day of rehearsals.
Okay: I trust we all appreciate the expenses involved in having the cast and crew of a big-budget movie on set in a foreign country, twiddling their thumbs and sitting on their collective rear ends, with no female lead anywhere in sight. Coppola considered replacing Ryder with either Madonna, Annabella Sciorra, or Laura San Giacomo, but wasn’t happy with any of those choices. Meanwhile, principal photography, which was slated to begin on November 15, 1989, there at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios (meaning “Cinema City Studios”) was pushed back three weeks, during which Coppola’s ongoing expenses forced him to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Francis Ford Coppola, who had not wanted to make a third Godfather movie in the first place, was pushed to the brink; he needed a female lead, and he needed her yesterday. So in his desperation, he made what turned out to be the worst decision of his career: he gave the role to his youngest child and only daughter, Sophia (born 1971). …
We mark the birth on July 24, 1880 – 143 years ago today – of the Swiss-born American composer and educator Ernest Bloch, who was born in Geneva, Switzerland. He died in Portland, Oregon, on July 15, 1959, at the age of 78.
Establishing a Genealogy
People trace their family trees for all sorts of reasons: to establish family connections, to collect family medical information, to meet other people engaged in such research, and so forth. But at the root (pun intended) of these (and other) reasons to establish a family tree is the issue of self-identity: the desire to connect with oneself by connecting with one’s ancestors: learning what we can of who they were; where they came from; what sort of lives they led; and what they accomplished.
With the advent of genetic testing sites like “23 and Me,” “AncestryDNA,” “LivingDNA,” and “HomeDNA,” the whole family tree trip has taken a crazy-giant step forward, in that our family trees have gone from saplings to 400-year-old oaks.
A couple of years ago, bored to death during the pandemic and unable to resist any longer, my wife and I were so tested using the site “23 and Me.” Here are my results:
Ashkenazi Jewish: 98.9%
French and German: 0.6%
Sudanese: 0.2%
Northern Indian and Pakistani: 0.1%
Unassigned: 0.2%
(You betcha that 0.2% Sudanese caught my attention!)
The major drawback of having multiple testing sites is that your DNA can only be compared to others who have been tested using the same site. Nevertheless, my results are fascinating.
Not unexpectedly, the person with whom I share the most DNA is my brother Steve: we share 53.1% of our DNA and 45 segments, those “segments” being sections of DNA that are identical between two individuals.
According to “23 and Me,” at number 1508 of my 1510 DNA relatives is my wife, Nanci Tucker, who is rated as being a “Distant Cousin” with 0.12% DNA shared and 1 segment. (According to “23 and Me,” Nanci and I have in common a pair of ancestors more distant than our 5th-great-grandparents, making us more that sixth cousins.)
Experiential DNA
Might I be so bold as to suggest that family members are not the only people who share, in quotations, “DNA”? By “DNA” in quotations I’m not referring to the chemical deoxyribonucleic acid but rather, what we might call “experiential DNA”: wisdom passed down from one generation to the next via one-on-one relationship; one-on-one mentorships.
Edward Toner Cone (1917-2004)
This is precisely the sort of “DNA” that is shared by musicians – composers, instrumentalists, and singers – musicians whose education consists of a series of one-on-one relationships with their teachers. For example, as an undergraduate, I studied composition primarily with Edward T. Cone (1917-2004). When it came time for graduate school, Ed wanted me to continue my studies with his friend Andrew Imbrie (1921-2007) at the University of California, Berkeley. And so I did; Andy Imbrie became not only my composition mentor but served as my Ph.D. thesis advisor.
Andrew Imbrie (1921-2007)
While at UC Berkeley, I developed another very close mentor-student relationship with the composer Olly Wilson (1937-2018).
Olly Wilson (1937-2018)
Ed Cone, Andy Imbrie, and Olly Wilson are, and always will be, my most treasured and most important composition teachers. Just so, Ed, Andy, and Olly were shaped by their own mentors, mentors whose experiences, knowledge, and wisdom they passed on to me.
For genealogists, tracking their family’s genetic roots allow them to connect more deeply with themselves by learning about their family’s past. For the musicians among us, tracing our teachers’ roots – our “experiential DNA” – allows us to connect with our artistic forebearers and to understand those artistic proclivities that have literally been “bred” into us. …
Music History Monday: Elaine Stritch: An Appreciation
Jul 17, 2023
Elaine Stritch (1925-2014) circa 2012: a self-professed “tough old dame”
We mark the death on July 17, 2014 – 9 years ago today – of the Broadway and television actress Elaine Stritch, in Birmingham, Michigan, at the age of 89.
I personally have a soft spot in my heart for Ms. Stritch the size of Manitoba. She was your quintessential brassy, tart-tongued (a euphemism for foul mouthed), cigarette smoking, alcohol-soaked blonde who took nothing from no one and could sell a song like nobody’s business. (Please note that I didn’t say “sing a song” but rather, “sell a song.” Her ability to do so will be discussed in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post.)
Elaine Stritch “singing” (selling!) a song during her final engagement at the Cafe Carlyle in New York City, 2013
It is my great hope that by the time you finish this Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts, you will have come to love her almost as much as I do.
My decision to profile Elaine Stritch is, in my estimation, a great sign of respect, given the other musical events of the day. Both the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane and the singer Billie Holiday died on this date, in 1967 and 1959, respectively. (Be assured that both of these luminaries – Coltrane and Holiday – will receive their due on these pages sooner or later.)
On this date in 1972, James Brown released the seminal funk song, Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, which went on to sell over 2 million copies and received a Grammy Award for Best Rhythm & Blues Recording.
On this date – again, in 1972 – a bomb exploded under an equipment van in Montreal belonging to The Rolling Stones. Believed to be the work of French separatists, we’d observe that the bombing might have simply been intended as a critical statement.…
Music History Monday: When You Dance with the Devil
Jul 10, 2023
We mark the birth on July 10, 1895 – 128 years ago today – of the German composer and educator Carl Heinrich Maria Orff. Born in Munich, he died in that city on March 29, 1982, at the age of 86.
Carl Heinrich Maria Orff (1895-1982) circa 1955
Bild: Brille, ernst
The Good News
Orff lived a long and productive life. He was a composer of considerable talent whose works draw on influences as diverse as ancient Greek tragedy and medieval chant, Baroque theater, and Bavarian peasant life. His so-called “scenic cantata”, Carmina Burana (of 1936), remains an audience favorite today. Along with the German educator Gunild Keetman, Orff developed a musical education method in the 1920s called the Orff Schulwerk, or the “Orff Approach,” a methodology that integrates music, movement, speech, and drama in a manner based on what children do instinctively, and that is play. Today, the Orff Approach is employed around the world and is one of the four major developmental music educational methodologies. The other three are the Kodály Method (created by the Hungarian composer and educator Zoltán Kodály, 1882-1967); the Suzuki Method (created by the Japanese violinist and educator Shinichi Suzuki, 1898-1998), and Dalcroze Eurhythmics (created by the Swiss composer and educator Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, 1865-1950).
Orff’s success as a composer and educator garnered him great honors in his native Germany. From 1950 to 1960 he was the Chair of Music Composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich, one of the most prestigious conservatories in the world. In 1956 he was given membership in the order Pour le Mérite, an honor awarded by the German government in recognition of extraordinary personal achievement. (During World War One, the military version of the Pour le Mérite was referred to as the Blauer Max, the “Blue Max.”) In 1959, Orff received an honorary doctorate from the University of Tübingen; in 1972 he received another from the University of Munich. That same year he was awarded the Grosses Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (“Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany”), and in 1974 he received the Guardini Prize from the Catholic Academy of Bavaria.
It all sounds lovely: a composer and educator honored in his lifetime and esteemed after his death.
Except. Except for …
The Bad News
Orff in 1940
From 1933 to 1945, Orff lived, worked, and – for all of his postwar statements to the contrary – thrived in Nazi Germany. For reasons we will observe, the exact nature Orff’s life in Hitler’s Third Reich remains a mystery and will almost certainly never be known for sure. One thing we do know, however, is that by remaining in Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933, Carl Orff’s life and career became a Cautionary Tale for any artist who would dance with the devil.
There are three schools of thought regarding Orff’s relationship with the Nazis. The first claims that he was, at best, tolerated. The second maintains that Orff not only collaborated but was, himself, a tried-and-true National Socialist who composed music in the service of Nazi ideology. The third school of thought is complicated, and lies somewhere between the first and second.
I let you guess which school we are about to attend. Yes: the middle ground, somewhere between collaboration and not.…
Music History Monday: Leoš Janáček: Composer, Patriot, and Patriot Composer!
Jul 03, 2023
Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) circa 1925, at the age of 71
We mark the birth on July 3, 1854 – 169 years ago today – of the Moravian (meaning Czech) composer, music theorist, folklorist, and teacher Leoš Janáček. Born in the village of Hukvaldy in what today is the Czech Republic, he died on August 12, 1928 in the city of Ostrava, today the capital of the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic.
It’s All in the Name!
Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) was an American writer and lecturer known for his self-help guides to self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. If he were alive today, he’d be on the speaking circuit, doing Ted Talks and, perhaps, making a fortune through a video self-help network. But given the comparatively limited technology of his day, Carnegie made his living writing books, books with such titles as The Art of Public Speaking (first published in 1915); How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948), and The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking (1962). But Dale Carnegie’s most famous and influential tome – one that remains in print today after 87 years! – is How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936.
Among the thousands of assuredly useful tidbits Carnegie shared with his readers was:
“A person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
Meaning that nothing makes a better, more positive impression than saying someone’s name when speaking to them.
This seems to me to be self-evidently true. If you want someone to feel noticed, valued, and important, well, say their name to their face with a tone that connotes kindness, warmth, and respect.
However, for the purposes of this post we would – with all due – ever so slightly amend Dale Carnegie’s maxim:
“A person’s name – correctly pronounced – is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”
As a public service, then, let us start this homage to Leoš Janáček by learning how to pronounce his name correctly. This is not just an issue of politeness, because while the mature Leoš Janáček might have looked like a snuggly little teddy bear, he was – in fact – an often irascible, highly emotional man, someone who suffered insult easily and angered quickly.
Let us not insult him and thus trigger that anger by mispronouncing his name!
Janáček’s name is notoriously mispronounced by non-Czechs. His first name – Leoš – is easy enough: “LAY-osh.” But his surname is a challenge for those of us who have trouble moving our vowels. We will learn to pronounce it in two steps. Step one: place an accent on the middle syllable: “Ya–NA-check”. Step two: place an accent on the first syllable as well – “YA-NA-check” – and say it quickly: “YA-NA-check”.
Excellent.
Brief Biography
Janáček’s birth house; the bottom floor was a schoolhouse supervised by Janáček’s father, a schoolmaster named Jiří Janáček (1815–1866)
He was born 169 years ago today in the village of Hukvaldy in the Moravia-Silesia (that is, the north-eastern) region of today’s Czech Republic. At the time of his birth, Moravia was part of the Austrian Empire and Janáček’s hometown was known by its German name of “Hochwald.”
Young Janáček had a first-rate singing voice. At 11, he received a scholarship to attend the Queen’s Monastery and School in the city of Brno (pronounced Bur-NO), the largest city in Moravia.
The Queen’s Monastery and School had a first-rate music conservatory. Janáček studied singing, organ, and piano, and he did well. After graduating at the age of 15, he attended the Royal Teachers’ Training Institute for three years, after which he was appointed Deputy Choir Master for the city of Brno. He began composing at around the age of 21; his first compositions were simple, folk-influenced choral works for the various amateur choral societies he conducted.…
Music History Monday: You’ve Got to be Kidding
Jun 26, 2023
‘Fessing Up
THE SCENE from the John Carpenter movie The Thing (1983)
Okay: you’re going to have to bear with me for one of my idiotic tangents, one that nevertheless explains precisely how I feel about Mozart and his music at a gut level. What follows is a deep confession, something I’ve never shared before. Be forewarned though, that once you’ve read and/or heard this confession (depending upon whether you’re reading Music History Monday as a blog or listening to it as a podcast), it cannot be unread or unheard.
Here goes.
John Carpenter in 1982, during filming of The Thing
Since childhood, I have had a deep and abiding affection for horror films, the gnarlier, the gnastier, the better. Yes, color me juvenile if you must, but there it is. Among the very greatest masters of the genre is the American filmmaker John Carpenter (born 1948), whose oeuvre includes such classics as the Halloween franchise, Escape From New York, Escape from L.A., Christine, The Fog, Assault on Precinct 13, They Live, and Prince of Darkness. But for my dinaro, Carpenter’s magnum opus is The Thing (which was released in 1982). Critically panned when it first opened, it is today considered (by those of us who consider it at all) to be a masterwork of graphic, on occasion inadvertently comedic, over-the-top horror.
(In 2008, the British film magazine Empire designated The Thing as being number 289 on its list of “The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time,” calling it:
“a peerless masterpiece of relentless suspense, retina-wrecking visual excess, and outright, nihilistic terror.”
It is an appraisal with which I wholeheartedly agree!)
Starring, among others, Kurt Russell and Wilford Brimley, with a musical score by Ennio Morricone, The Thing tells the story of a group of American research scientists on station in Antarctica and their horrific encounter with an alien presence: the “Thing” itself. The Thing’s “thing” is to consume, assimilate, and then imitate other life forms, and as such, the members of the station – who, as we would expect, are picked off one at a time – are overcome by paranoia, not knowing who or what among them is the Thing.…
We mark the birth on June 19, 1810 – 213 years ago today – of the German virtuoso violinist and composer, Ferdinand David. Born in the exact same house in Hamburg that saw Felix Mendelssohn’s birth 16½ months before, David died while on vacation in Switzerland on July 18, 1873, at the age of 63.
We will get to the specifics of Maestro David’s life and career and why, to my mind, he is “our kind of musician” in a moment. But first, with your indulgence, a brief bit of editorializing.
When the Performer Becomes the Show
Marlon Brando (1924-2004) in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) (FYI: I have a granddaughter named Stella and find it difficult to resist calling her “Hey Stellaaa!”)
Marlon Brando (1924-2004). Yes, Marlon Brando: actor, director, activist, and father of at least 16 children (at least 16 children). I would respectfully suggest that a movie with Marlon Brando is not so much a movie in which Marlon Brando plays a role as it is a movie in which Marlon Brando plays Marlon Brando playing a role. Accordingly, I would assert that in A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando portrays Marlon Brando portraying Stanley Kowalski; in The Godfather, Marlon Brando portrays Marlon Brando playing Vito Corleone; in Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando portrays Marlon Brando playing Colonel Walter Kurtz, and so forth. Brando was so brilliant, his persona so larger than life, his affectations so uniquely individual, that his personal brand always seemed to overshadow the actual characters he portrayed.
Franz Liszt (1811-1886) in 1839, by Henri Lehmann
So it is with certain musicians, and so it has been since the pianist Franz Liszt (1811-1886) blazed across the European musical firmament during the mid-nineteenth century. Liszt was not just the greatest pianist of his time but the greatest pianist ever to have lived up to his time, and arguably the greatest pianist of all time. But mere pianistic greatness was not enough for Liszt. He composed a huge body of piano music that, initially, only he could play, music often calculated to stun simply by its technical excess. Blessed with movie-star good looks and a fearless, aristocratic bearing, he toured tirelessly with this music, performing in a fashion that was calculated – always – to call attention to himself.
Let there be no mistake about it: Franz Liszt was almost certainly the greatest performing musician of the nineteenth century. But his legend was a not just a product of his pianism but of his performingpersona, which often bordered on carnival hucksterism. Many of his greatest contemporaries, including Robert and Clara Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, and Joseph Joachim, were awed by Liszt’s pianism but physically sickened by his onstage shenanigans.
But it was Liszt’s persona – those onstage shenanigans – that put derrieres in seats and money in the bank, and many – if not most – of those people who paid to see Liszt perform did so not for the music he played but for the show he put on.
The Liszt-inspired instrumental performer-as-hero, as God, as an object-of-sexual-desire, pretty much disappeared by the early twentieth century, only to return with a vengeance by the end of the twentieth century. Part of it was rock ‘n’ roll, as some young concert musicians wanted for themselves the same sort of money, popularity, and notoriety enjoyed by rock ‘n’ roll musicians. …
Music History Monday: Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea
Jun 12, 2023
Chick Corea (1941-2021) in 2019
We mark the birth on June 12, 1941 – 82 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea, in Chelsea, Massachusetts. He died of cancer after a brief illness on February 9, 2021, at his home just outside of Tampa Bay, Florida, at the age of 79.
Chick Corea’s spectacularly varied, 50-plus year career as a professional musician offers an object lesson in both the necessity and futility of labels.
“Spectacularly varied” is the operative phrase in the sentence above. In the mid-1960s Corea became deeply involved in Latin American music, having broken in with the Cuban bandleader and percussionist Mongo Santamaria (1917-2003) and the Puerto Rican-American bandleader and percussionist Willie Bobo (whose real name was Willie Correa, no relation, 1934-1983).
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Corea played with the Miles Davis (1926-1991) band (he played piano on seven of Miles Davis’ albums, including Davis’ classic Bitches Brew album of 1969). As such, the Chick-Meister was a full-participant in Davis’ electrified experiment in fusion, in synthesizing jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. In 1970 and 1971 Corea led his own, avant-garde, free jazz band called Circle. In 1972, Corea formed his jazz/Latin fusion progressive rock band Return to Forever, which performed both electronic and acoustic instrument music that fused jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and Latin music.
Along the way Corea played and recorded bossa nova with João Gilberto and Stan Getz; he fused jazz and flamenco (shall we call it “jazzmenco”?) with the violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and the great flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia.…
Music History Monday: Never Eat Anything That Can Bite You Back!
Jun 05, 2023
Alice Cooper (born Vincent Damon Furnier, 1948) with his beloved boa, Julius Squeezer, before the “breakfast incident”
On June 5, 1977 – 46 years ago today – the shock-rock superstar Alice Cooper’s pet boa constrictor and concert co-star, a creature rather cleverly named “Julius Squeezer,” suffered what turned out to be a fatal bite from a live rat it was eating for breakfast. No doubt: Julius probably should have ordered the scrambled eggs and toast, and in doing so would have heeded the advice offered by the title of this post: “never eat anything that can bite you back.”
This is a heartbreaking tale, a tragic love story between a boy and his reptile, a love story brought to an ignominious end by an alpha-rodent. But it is also a story of hope, renewal, and love rekindled, as the auditions Alice Cooper subsequently held for a replacement snake allowed him to discover his new boa, a precious girl-snake named “Angel.”
Now of course we’re going to expand on this saga of reptilian eradication-by-rambunctious-rat and subsequent replacement in just a bit. But first, we’d observe two other, date-relevant items.
Martha Argerich (born 1941) in 2015
First, we mark the birth on June 5, 1941 – 82 years ago today – of the pianist Martha Argerich, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. To my ear and mind, Argerich the pianist is an enduring miracle. When she plays in public (which, since the 1980s, has happened with painful infrequence) we listen, because her technically flawless pianism is expressively and intellectually compelling. Like the greatest of actors – and I’m thinking here of people like Laurence Olivier, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Katherine Hepburn – actors who become one with the roles they play, so Martha Argerich has that alchemical ability to become one with the music she plays. Speaking as a composer, this is, to me, the greatest (and rarest!) gift a musician can have: to remove one’s own ego from a performance and live entirely through music as it is written.
That might sound a bit flakey, but still, it’s true. A Martha Argerich performance – “volatile, explosive, quixotic, astounding and mesmerizing” though it may be – is never “about” Martha Argerich. Rather, it is “about” the music she is performing. Like her living pianistic contemporaries Vladimir Ashkenazy (born 1937), Maurizio Pollini (born 1942), Murray Perahia (born 1947), András Schiff (born 1953), and Krystian Zimerman (born 1956), Argerich is truly an advocate for the composers whose music she plays. But unlike all the marvelous pianists just mentioned, Argerich’s legend is such that the mere implication that she might show up to a venue and actually perform will sell out a house in minutes.
In order to discuss Maestra Argerich in the manner she justly deserves and, as well, to recommend three of my favorite Argerich recordings, she will be the topic of tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post.
Be there.
Moments ago, I mentioned that we’d get back to Alice Cooper’s snake and the rat after having discussed two other date-related items. The first was Martha Argerich’s 82nd birthday. The second item follows, under the heading of “can we really blame him?”
On June 5, 2003 – an even 20 years ago today – a pirate radio station in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom, was shut down by local authorities. The “pirate” himself has been identified only as a “grandfather” who went by the rather questionable name of “Ricky Rock.” Grandpa Rock had set up a 32-foot-high radio transmitter in the garden of his house, and had taken it upon himself to illegally broadcast hits by Elvis Presley and such bands as The Beatles and The Beach Boys. When questioned as to why he had done such a thing, this Robin Hood of the air waves told the authorities that his local radio stations did not address the listening needs of his generation, instead playing music by what he called:
“talentless boy bands and dance music.”
Can we blame Grandad Ricky Rock for doing what he did? No, we cannot.…
On May 29, 1860 – 163 years ago today – the composer and pianist Isaac Albéniz was born in Camprodón, Spain. Albéniz was a brilliant pianist and, as evidenced by his 12-movement suite for piano entitled Iberia (written between 1905-1909), a composer of genius.
However, before we can get to Maestro Albéniz, I would beg your indulgence while we celebrate this remarkable day in music history!
Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1893-1957) in 1934
Also born on this date was the Austrian-American composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who came into this world in 1893 in Brno, in what today is the Czech Republic; he died in Los Angeles in 1957. The Romanian-born Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was born on this day in 1922 in Brâila, Romania; he died in Paris in 2001. The American singer, songwriter, and composer Danny Elfman was born on this day in 1953; the singer LaToya Jackson in 1956; and the Academy Award and Grammy Award winning singer and songwriter Melissa Etheridge in 1961.
Sadly but not unexpectedly, notable people from the world of music passed away on this date as well.
Mily Balakirev (1837-1910) circa 1908
May 29,1910, saw the death of Mily Balakirev in St. Petersburg;he was 73 years old.
On this day in 1911, the poet and librettist William S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) left this vale of tears at the age of 74. On this day in 1935, the Czech violinist and composer Joseph Suk died at the age of 61; and on May 29, 2005, the American composer George Rochberg died at 86.
Philip Kramer (1952-1995)
Here’s a particularly grim date-related item. On May 29, 1999 – 24 years ago today – a group of photographers looking for old car wrecks to photograph at the bottom of Decker Canyon near Malibu, California, found a bit more than they bargained for: a wrecked car tricked out with its own skeletal remains still inside. Those remains belonged to Philip Kramer, the former bassist with Iron Butterfly, who had disappeared four years before, on February 12, 1995. His death was eventually ruled a suicide.
Sticking with grim, May 29 also marks the 326th anniversary of the assassination of the 44-year-old Italian castrato Giovanni Grossi (known popularly as “Siface”). One of the most famous singers of the entire Baroque era, Siface met his end on May 29, 1697, on the road between Bologna and Ferrara at the hands of “bravi” (meaning thugs/muscle) in the employ of a nobleman with whose wife Siface had had a . . . liaison. So much for the erroneous perception that those without balls cannot have a ball. (A crude statement, yes, but physiologically accurate).
And still May 29 is a gift that keeps on giving!
On May 29, 1942, Bing Crosby recorded Irving Berlin’s White Christmas. Crosby’s recording won an Oscar for “Best Song” and sold over 50 million copies world-wide. The link provided transits to Der Bingle and Marjorie Reynolds introducing White Christmas inthe movie Holiday Inn (1942).
But wait! There’s more! Because on May 29, 1913, 110 years ago today, the most famous riot in Western music history broke out during the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. (The riot was the topic of Music History Monday on May 29, 2017.)
Okay; deep, cleansing breath. It is time to talk about Isaac Albéniz and his supreme masterwork, his 12-movement suite for solo piano entitled Iberia. As happens not infrequently here on these august pages, our exploration of Albéniz’ life, his Spanish heritage, and the impact of that heritage on the creation and content of Iberia will take us through both today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post.…
Music History Monday: Giuseppe Verdi and the Requiem for Alessandro Manzoni
May 22, 2023
We mark the first performance on May 22, 1874 – 149 years ago today – of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem, written in memory of the Italian novelist, poet, and patriot Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1872).”
Background
Giuseppe Verdi circa 1870
In June of 1870, the 57-year-old Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) agreed to compose an opera for the brand-new Cairo Opera Theater. The Khedive Ismail Pasha of Egypt personally handled the negotiations, as the opera was to celebrate nothing less than the opening of the Suez Canal. No expense was spared, either on the opera or on Verdi, who received the unheard-of commissioning fee of 150,000 gold francs: roughly $1,935,000 today!
The opera – Aida – received its premiere in Cairo on December 24, 1871. With no disrespect intended towards either the Khedive Ismail Pasha of Egypt or the Cairo Opera Theater, the opera’s real premiere – as far as Verdi and the larger opera world were concerned – took place six weeks later: at La Scala in Milan on February 8, 1872. That Italianpremiere was a triumph, the greatest of Verdi’s career to date. He himself received 32 curtain calls!
Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873)
The only contemporary Italian artist who could possibly be considered as beloved as Giuseppe Verdi was the novelist and poet Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1883). Manzoni’s most famous work is a novel entitled I promessi sposi (“The Betrothed”), which was written initially between 1821 and 1827; Manzoni completed the final, “definitive” version in 1842. Manzoni wrote this final version in what was (and still is) considered the stylistically superior Italian dialect of Tuscany. This final, “Tuscan” version of “The Betrothed” had a pivotal impact on the development of a consistent Italian-language prose style. At a time when the Italian peninsula boasted more dialects than varieties of pasta, Manzoni, more than any other single person, helped to popularize a single, ideal way of writing and speaking Italian, based on the dialect of Tuscany.
The importance of this cannot be overstated. At a time when Italian nationalism sought the creation of a single, unified Italian nation with a single national identity, Manzoni’s work offered his nation a single, universally understood Italian language. Manzoni came to be perceived – rightly – as not just the greatest Italian writer of his generation, but as a great Italian patriot as well. What Verdi did for his nascent Italian nation through the medium of opera, so Manzoni accomplished through the medium of literature: he inspired a national Italian identity through its oh-so-special language.
Giuseppe Verdi considered Manzoni to be a living saint, a man who combined astonishing talent with great personal virtue and nobility.
Manzoni died at the age of 88 on May 22, 1873. The following day Verdi wrote to his friend and publisher Tito Ricordi:
“I am profoundly saddened by the death of our Great Man! But I shall not go to Milan, for I do not have the heart to attend his funeral. I will soon come to visit his grave, alone and unseen, and perhaps (after further reflection, having weighed my strength) to propose something to honor his memory.”
A Requiem
Ten days after Manzoni’s death, Verdi did indeed go to the cemetery in Milan, where he stood at Manzoni’s grave and formulated a plan. He returned to his suite at the Grand Hotel de Milan and wrote another letter to his publisher Tito Ricordi, proposing that he compose a Requiem Mass for Manzoni, to be performed on the first anniversary of his death. Verdi’s intention was to write a work that, following its first performance, would be performed not in churches but rather, in concert halls, with each such performance offering a proper memorial to the memory of Manzoni. …
Music History Monday: All the Music That’s Fit to Print
May 15, 2023
Frontispiece to the Harmonice musices odhecaton A, published on May 15, 1501
On May 15, 1501 – 522 years ago today – the first polyphonic (that is, multi-part) music printed using moveable type was released to the public by the Venice-based publisher Ottaviano dei Petrucci. (The publication features a dedication dated May 15, 1501, so we assume that this corresponds with its release date.) The publication was an anthology of works entitled Harmonicemusices odhecaton A, meaning “One Hundred Pieces of Harmonic Music, Volume A”. (Volumes “B” and “C” followed in 1502 and 1503, respectively). In fact, “One Hundred Pieces of Harmonic Music, Volume A” consists of 96 (not “100”, as the title claims) instrumental works and French-language songs by some of the most famous composers of the day, as well as some anonymous works as well. Those famous composers represented in the anthology – which include Josquin de Prez, Johannes Ockeghem, Jacob Obrecht, Antoine Brumel, and Alexander Agricole – were all originally from northern France and southern Belgium: the so-called “Franco-Flemish” composers from the “oltre montani” (“the other side of the Alps”) who were so popular in Italy at the time.
I am aware that that previous, opening paragraph, filled with relatively obscure Italian and Franco-Flemish names, musicological rubric, and featuring an obscure, Latin-titled anthology – Harmonice musices odhecaton A -might have crossed your eyes and loosened your bladders even as it threatened to put you to sleep.
But!
But, but!
But in fact, the publication of “One Hundred Pieces of Harmonic Music, Volume A” in 1501 was a huge, big deal in the history of Western music, an event we can accurately call a “game changer”!
In reference to human evolution and development, there have been all sorts of large-case game changers: the control of fire; the invention of clothing; the development of tools and the invention of the wheel; the rise of agriculture; the ability to smelt, forge, and alloy metals; the harnessing of steam, and so forth. But I would argue that collectively, the most important game-changers in the evolution and development of humanity have to do with information transfer, starting with the development of language.
While it now appears likely that our ancestor homo erectus “invented” some sort of “grunted” language as long as 2 million years ago, complex language only emerged among the most loquacious of human species – that being we homo sapiens – some 150,000 years ago, as a systematic way for modern humans to communicate.
Next to language, sliced bread as a game changer is, well, overrated. …
Music History Monday: Louis Moreau Gottschalk, or What Happens in Oakland Does Not Stay in Oakland
May 08, 2023
Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) circa 1864
We mark the birth on May 8, 1829 – 194 years ago today – of the American composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, in New Orleans. He died, all-too-young, on December 18, 1869 at the age of forty, in exile in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Events that occurred in September of 1865 in San Francisco, California and across the San Francisco Bay in Oakland led directly to Gottschalk’s “exile” to South America. Those frankly tawdry events, most unfairly, have been recounted way too often and as a result, they have come to obscure Gottschalk’s memory as a composer, pianist, patriot, and philanthropist. That’s because people like me continue to write about them as if they, somehow, encapsulated the totality of who and what Louis Moreau Gottschalk was.
I hate myself for having participated in this unholy example of scandal mongering – I do – and I stand before you filled with shame and remorse.
Nevertheless.
Nevertheless, I fully intend to rehash these salacious events here and now with the understanding that following that rehash, we will spend the remainder of this post and all of tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post doing penance, by providing a proper account of the cultural importance of Gottschalk’s hometown of New Orleans, as well as his life, times, and musical career.
Background
Gottschalk circa 1850, at the time he was being called “Chopin’s Successor”
During his lifetime, Louis Moreau Gottschalk was considered to be the greatest pianist and composer ever born in the Western hemisphere, the “Chopin of the New World.” An American patriot, he foreswore his allegiance to his native South and embraced the Northern cause during the Civil War because of his unreserved hatred of slavery. During the Civil War he travelled and concertized tirelessly across the North and Midwest of the United States, inspiring his audiences with compositions and arrangements of patriotic melodies. He gave away much of his earnings to veterans’ organizations.
He was born in 1829 in what was then the most highly cultured and diverse city in the United States: New Orleans. Gottschalk’s personal heritage was diverse as well. His father was a Jewish businessman from London and his mother a Creole, that is, a Louisiana native of French descent. He was a musical prodigy whose compositions synthesized the incredibly different sorts of music he heard around him in New Orleans: African music, Caribbean music, Creole music, as well as the classics of the European concert tradition.
Trained at the Paris Conservatoire, the 20-year-old Gottschalk was called “Chopin’s Successor” when Chopin died in 1849. Subsequent concert tours took him across Europe, North America, Central America, and South America made him a legend in his time.…
Music History Monday: The Enduring Miracle
May 01, 2023
Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, title page of the first edition of the score, published by the firm of N. Simrock in 1819
On May 1, 1786 – on what was also a Monday, 237 years ago today – a miracle was heard for the first time: Wolfgang Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro received its premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna.
Some 100 years later, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) wrote this about The Marriage of Figaro:
“Every number in Figaro is for me a marvel; I simply cannot fathom how anyone could create anything so perfect. Such a thing has never been done, not even by Beethoven.”
Herr Brahms, when you’re right, you’re right, and this case you are so right! 237 years after the premiere, Brahms’ awe of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro mirrors our own. For many of us – myself included – it is, simply, the greatest opera ever composed.
Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791) in 1783, by Joseph Lange
Composing an Italian Language Opera for the Viennese
On May 7th, 1783 – some three years before the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro – Mozart wrote the following in a letter to his father back in Salzburg:
“The Italian opera buffa [here in Vienna] is very popular. I have looked through more than a hundred libretti [meaning literally “little book,” the script of an opera] but I have found hardly a single one that satisfies me. That is to say, there are so many changes that would have to be made that any poet, even if he were to undertake to make them, would find it easier to write an entirely new text. Our poet here now is a certain Da Ponte. He has an enormous amount to do, and he is at present writing a libretto for Salieri, which will take him two months. He has then promised to write a libretto for me. But who knows if he will be able to keep his word, or whether he will want to? As you know, these Italians are very civil to one’s face . . . I should dearly love to show what I can do in an Italian opera.”
That Mozart would “dearly love” to compose an Italian language opera for the Viennese was an understatement; “desperately want” would have been a far more appropriate way to put it!
When the 27-year-old Mozart wrote that letter to his father in May, 1783, he had been living and working as a freelance musician in Vienna for almost exactly two years. The young dude was, at the time, filled with inestimable energy, ambition, and – of course – fathomless talent. Italian language opera was the most prestigious (and potentially profitable) entertainment medium of the day, and Mozart desperately wanted a piece of that action. But he was also savvy enough to know that composing an Italian language opera in the 1780s for the Viennese was an entirely different ball-of-notes than composing one for audiences in Salzburg, Munich, and even Milan, which he had done already. He was no longer a child prodigy, for whom the composition of any opera would stun audiences merely by dint of its exitance. By the 1780s he was a seasoned pro, composing for a Viennese audience that was, at the time, arguably the most discriminating one in Europe.
Consequently, Mozart knew that when the time came for him to throw his compositional hat into the Viennese ring (pun intended) by composing an Italian language opera for the toughest crowd this side of the Roman Colosseum, it couldn’t be just any opera. It would have to represent his best work, and as such it would have to be based on a really good story with a libretto by a first-rate poet. Which is why – during the course of his letter to his father – Mozart mentioned Lorenzo Da Ponte, the official “poet” (meaning the official “librettist”) of the Viennese Court.…
Music History Monday: A Voice Like Buttah!
Apr 24, 2023
Barbra Streisand (born 1942) in 1965
We mark the birth on April 24, 1942 – 81 years ago today – of the American singer, songwriter, actress, and filmmaker Barbara Joan “Barbra” Streisand, in Brooklyn, New York.
But first, before we get to the magnificent Babs, a brief but spirited edition of “This Day In Music History . . .” okay, “stupid” is too strong a word, so let’s just call it, “This Day In Music History . . . Dumb.”
On April 24, 2007 – 16 years ago today – the American musician, actress, singer, and songwriter Sheryl Crowe (born 1962) declared on her website that in order to help the environment, the use of toilet paper should be limited to:
“only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required.”
We cannot help but wonder precisely what “pesky occasions” Crowe might be referring to. Additionally, we must assume that Ms. Crowe’s proscription again TP overuse was intended to be voluntary, as the issues surrounding enforcement are, indeed, troubling.
Sheryl Crow’s environmental concerns extended, as well, to what she deemed to be the profligate use of napkins. She went so far as to design a line of clothing that featured what she called a “dining sleeve.” Those sleeves – what amounted to wearable napkins – were “replaceable”: they could be detached after diners had used them to wipe their mouths and replaced with clean sleaves. What a shock that “dining sleeves” never caught on!
Sheryl Crowe (born 1962) demonstrating (wastefully demonstrating!) how to properly employ toilet paper
While we would acknowledge that Sheryl Crowe’s environmental heart is in the right place, we would respectfully suggest she aim a bit higher than toilet paper and for example, stop drinking from plastic water bottles, as seen in the image above.
Just suggesting.
Barbra Streisand (born 1942)
There is nothing I can say about Maestra Streisand that has not already been said a thousand times. Regarding her talents as a singer, actress, and filmmaker; her command of the stage; her intelligence and sense of humor; her ego and ambition; her philanthropy and activism; the clichés be damned, she is truly a force of nature: one-of-a-kind. She has been a constant presence in our cultural lives for seven decades: her first network television appearance occurred on April 5, 1961, when she appeared on The Jack Paar Show (later, The Tonight Show), which was guest-hosted that evening by Orson Bean (1928-2020).
Orson Bean (1928-2020) in 1965
Bean late recalled:
“I met Barbra when she was 18 and singing at a place in Greenwich Village. When I guest-hosted The Jack Paar Show I got them to fly her in from a club she was playing in Detroit. She was a nervous wreck. But then when she started singing – [the song] ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’ – it was like God singing through her. She got a standing ovation, which doesn’t happen on TV. It was an incredible moment.”
Music History Monday: I Left My Nerve in San Francisco
Apr 17, 2023
Grand Opera House (originally “Wade’s Opera House”), San Francisco, in 1881
We mark the final San Francisco performance – on the evening of Tuesday, April 17, 1906, 117 years ago today – of the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso (1874-1921). That performance at the no longer extant Grand Opera House at No. 2 Mission Street (between 2nd and 3rd Streets) was not intended to have been Caruso’s last local appearance, but circumstances beyond his control assured that it was!
Enrico Caruso (1874-1921)
Enrico Caruso in one of his first publicity photos, taken in Sicily 1896 at the age of 24; he is wearing a bedspread draped like a toga since his only dress shirt was at the laundry
Caruso was born into a poor family in Naples, Italy, on February 24th, 1874. He was the third of seven children (and not the nineteenth of twenty-one, as Caruso himself often claimed!). Following in the professional footsteps of his father, Marcellino Caruso, who was a mechanic, young Enrico was apprenticed to a mechanical engineer at the age of 11. He “discovered” his voice singing in a church choir, and as a teenager he made a few extra dinero singing on the streets and in the cafes of Naples.
At the age of 18, Caruso had something of a revelation, when he used money he had earned as a singer to buy his first new pair of shoes. Realizing his real professional potential, he began taking voice lessons, and his progress was rapid.
The 21-year-old Caruso made his professional debut as an opera singer on March 15, 1895, when he sang in a now-forgotten opera (entitled L’Amico Francesco by Mario Morelli) at Naples’ Teatro Nuovo. He proceeded to pay his dues, singing a wide variety of roles in various provincial opera houses while continuing his vocal studies. He made his La Scala debut at the age of 26 on December 26, 1900, singing Rodolfo in Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème under the baton of Arturo Toscanini.
Caruso quickly became a fan favorite throughout Italy, but it was technology – a brand-new technology – that made him world famous.
Self-caricature by Caruso himself, making his first records in a hotel room in Milan in April 1902; note the drawing of Nipper the dog listening to “his master’s voice” at the upper right, originally the logo of Emile Berliner’s The Gramophone Company
On April 11, 1902, Caruso walked into a hotel room in Milan which had been outfitted as a makeshift recording studio. On that day, for a fee of 100 pounds sterling, Caruso recorded 10 discs, becoming in the process the first opera singer to make a flat disc, 78 rpm record.
(For our information, those records were made for Emile Berliner’s The Gramophone Company. Founded in London in 1898, The Gramophone Company was the parent company of the record label His Master’s Voice (HMV), which was the American affiliate of the Victor Talking Machine Company. The Victor Talking Machine Company was acquired by RCA in 1929 and the new label was initially known as RCA Victor. In London, in a separate transaction, His Master’s Voice merged with the Columbia Gramophone Company in 1931 to create Electric and Musical Industries Limited, better known as the classical labels EMI and Angel.)
The records Caruso recorded in that Milanese hotel room made him an overnight sensation. Just weeks after they were released, Caruso was signed to sing at London’s Covent Garden. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in a new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto on November 23, 1903, and from that day forward became the Met’s most popular tenor.
It was as a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company that Enrico Caruso came to perform in San Francisco, California, on April 17, 1906.…
Music History Monday: A Mama’s Boy, and Proud of It!
Apr 10, 2023
We mark the premiere on April 10, 1868 – 155 years ago today – of Johannes Brahms’ magnificent A German Requiem, for vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra.
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) in 1866
Johannes Brahms, Again?
I know I’ve been going heavy on Brahms (1833-1897) as of late. I would apologize if he wasn’t so fascinating a person and if his music wasn’t so darned good, but he was a fascinating person and his music is superb, so our continued attention is well deserved.
It’s not as if we didn’t have other topical options for this date. For example, on this date in 1970 – 53 years ago today – Paul McCartney “officially” announced the split-up of TheBeatles.Okay; whatever; if there’s one topic that’s gotten more play here in MusicHistoryMonday than Bach, Brahms and Beethoven combined, it’s the fourth “B”: TheBeatles.
The breakup of TheBeatles?
Sorry, but yawn.
The “Wilhelm Scream”
Shelby Frederick “Sheb” Wooley (1921-2003)
Then there’s this. April 10, 1921, marks the birth – 102 years ago today – of the American singer, songwriter, actor, and comedian Shelby Frederick “Sheb” Wooley, in Erick Oklahoma (he died in Nashville, Tennessee on September 16, 2003, at the age of 82). For the vast majority of us who do indeed remember him, Wooley is best known for his 1958 rock ‘n’ roll comedy single ThePurplePeopleEater, which he wrote in a matter of minutes and which sat at number 1 on Billboard’sHotPopChart for six weeks between June 9 and July 14, 1958. The so-called “Official Video” is linked below.
But for those “in the know” (which is about to include all of us), Wooley’s greatest contribution to Western culture is not ThePurplePeopleEater but rather, something called the “Wilhelm Scream.”
Here’s the scoop.
Among his various roles as an actor, Sheb Wooley made an uncredited appearance as one “Private Jessup” in a 1951 Gary Cooper movie called DistantDrums.At one point during the movie, a company of soldiers is fleeing through the Florida Everglades, pursued by a pack of Seminole Indians. Several soldiers die during the chase, including one who emits a blood-curdling scream as he is dragged underwater to his death by an alligator. Here is that scream:
The scream was created and recorded by none-other-than Sheb Wooley, and it has long outlived him. Wooley’s screeching sound-bite got its name when it was used again – in 1953 – in the movie The Charge at Feather River, when a character named “Private Wilhelm” got hit in the thigh with an arrow:
The now so-called “Wilhelm Scream” became part of Hollywood’s stock sound library, and as such, it went on to be been used – often multipletimesin a single film – in hundreds of movies, TV shows, and video games, including the StarWars, IndianaJones,LordoftheRings, KillBill, ToyStory, Cars, TheIncredibles, and LethalWeapon franchises; ReservoirDogs; Aladdin; BeautyandtheBeast; TheFifthElement; BreakingBad; TheSimpsons; TheX–Files; TheMandalorian; the list goes on and on!
I offer up two video links. The first one features what WatchMojo considers the “10 best” Wilhelm Screams:
The second link below features literally hundreds of Wilhelm Screams – that is, the samescream as recorded by Sheb Wooley in 1951 – over the course of its 12 minutes and 22 seconds!
Maestro Wooley, yours is a cinematic legacy of which to be proud!
WeTransition!
Okay, enough screaming. We proceed to Johannes Brahms and A German Requiem. For your information, the remainder of this post and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes is going to constitute a “twofer”, as Dr. Bob Prescribes will pick up where today’s Music History Monday leaves off.…
Music History Monday: The Death of Johannes Brahms
Apr 03, 2023
Johannes Brahms on his deathbed, April 1897
We mark the death on April 3, 1897 – 126 years ago today – of the German composer and pianist Johannes Brahms at the age of 63. One of the great ones and along with Sebastian Bach and Louis van Beethoven one of the three bees – the killer bees – Brahms was born in the Hanseatic port city of Hamburg on May 7, 1833.
We will get to Maestro Brahms in just a moment but first – with appropriate fanfare – I offer up this edition of “This Day in Music History Stupid.”
Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust; Be Kind to My Ashes, Though Snort if You Must
On April 3, 2007 – 16 years ago today – the Reuters news agency reported that Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards (born December 18, 1943) admitted in a soon-to-be published interview with NME (New Musical Express) magazine that he had snorted his father’s ashes during a drug binge.
Keith Richards (born 1943)
I think we’ve all wondered the same thing at some point or another: given his personal habits and corpse-like appearance, how and why is Keith Richards still alive, yet still performing at nearly 80 years of age?
Richards would seem to be as surprised as we are that he is still among the living. For decades he has expressed his (dubious) pride at having survived his legendary lifestyle. Back in his sixties Richards told an interviewer:
“I was number one on the ‘Who’s Likely to Die’ list for 10 years. I mean, I was really disappointed when I fell off the list. Some doctor told me I had six months to live and I went to his funeral.”
According to an NME magazine spokesperson, the interview in which Richards claimed to have snorted his father’s ashes was genuine and not a late April Fool’s joke. During that interview, Richards was asked what the strangest thing was he ever snorted. His response:
“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort? My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared. It went down pretty well and I’m still alive.”
For our information, Keith Richards’ father, Bert Richards, died in 2002 at the age of 84. Will his son Keith outlive him? On this we’ll simply have to wait and see.
Johannes Brahms Approaching 60
Johannes Brahms in 1889, at the age of 56
Johannes Brahms in his late-fifties was a picture of ruddy good health.
His schedule remained fixed: vacation in Italy during the early spring; compose in the countryside during the late spring and summer; return to Vienna in the fall to polish what he had written during the summer, conduct, or simply loaf around, as he pleased. Despite his bulky physique, Brahms remained quite spry, and despite the countless cigars and the gallons of beer and wine he consumed he remained a picture of health.
While in Vienna, he dined religiously – lunch and dinner – at the Zum rotten Igel – “The Red Hedgehog” – in the Wildpretmarkt. As far as he was concerned, the Hedgehog served the best cheap food in Vienna, a double positive if there ever was one, something he never tired of telling his less frugal friends and associates.
What Brahms did spend his money on were the Viennese ladies of the evening, with whom – we are told – he was kindly, caring, and generous, sometimes to a fault. Of the older Brahms writes biographer Jan Swafford:
“In his fashion, Brahms remained modest and generous and often self-deprecating, but he did not escape the effects of fame. In his age he could not abide being contradicted, took for granted that he was the center of every company. He maintained his chosen masks: the Master to be approached at peril; the gruff, hard drinking bourgeois man preferring the company of men or in mixed company telling naughty stories to the ladies. He played the old scamp, the old rogue, flirting with every pretty face and everyone’s daughter. But he looked, and did not touch, beyond a playful squeeze, laughed and held forth and gave lavish gifts but in the end gave nothing of himself beyond his art. Ruthlessly, he had sunk his fair features and moonstruck young soul under the patriarchal beard and forbidding bark of Herr Doktor Brahms.”
By the late 1880s and early 1890s, the awards, laurels, and prizes began to pour into Brahms’ Viennese flat, unbidden but not unwelcome. Brahms kept the lid on his grand piano down, and instead of the usual family photographs, he covered the piano with a rotating display of his medals and certificates. By far the most welcome honor to come his way arrived in May 1889: Brahms was informed that his hometown of Hamburg was to award him the “Freedom of Hamburg” prize, the city’s greatest honor. Only twelve people had ever received the prize, the most recent two being Otto von Bismarck and the Prussian general Helmut von Moltke. …
Music History Monday: Papa’s Last Appearance
Mar 27, 2023
A quick comment in reference to the title of today’s post, “Papa’s Last Appearance.” Not that you really need me to tell you, but by “Papa” we are not referring to Papa John Schnatter, who founded “Papa John’s Pizza” in 1984. Neither are we referring to the stand-up comedian Tom Papa, the sportscaster Greg Papa, the American rock band Papa Roach, nor the American Paul Karason (1950-2013), also-known-as “Papa Smurf,” whose skin turned to a purplish-blue color as a result of ingesting a home-made brew of silver chloride colloid.
Papa Smurf (Paul Karason; 1950-2013)
By “Papa,” we are referring to Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) who was once-and-forever nicknamed “papa” while still in his thirties by the grateful musicians who worked for him!
We mark what turned out to be the final public appearance of “Papa” Joseph Haydn on March 27, 1808 – 215 years ago today – at a concert held in honor of his upcoming 76th birthday. The gala concert, held at Vienna’s University Hall, featured a performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, which had been completed ten years before, in 1798. The concert was what we would call today a “star-studded event”: everyone who was anyone in Vienna’s musical world was there, including Ludwig van Beethoven, Antonio Salieri, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel.
Background
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) in 1791, at the age of 59
Haydn was born on March 31, 1732, in the Austrian village of Rohrau, which at the time was just a hop-and-a-skip from the border with Hungary. He was a small, wiry, energetic, and genial boy, and he grew up to be a small, wiry, energetic, and genial man.
At a time when the average European life expectancy was just 33.3 years, Haydn remained a remarkably healthy man well into what was then considered to be old age. Having never travelled outside the immediate vicinity of his birth, Haydn undertook the arduous journey to England in 1791 at the age of 59, and then again in 1794, at the age of 62. Still composing masterworks into his 69th year (he completed his oratorio The Seasons in 1801), Haydn was considered an ageless wonder by everyone around him.
Unfortunately, no one of us is in fact “ageless,” and time caught up with Haydn when he was in his late sixties. Though he lived until May of 1809, his last years were marred by increasingly bad health. His symptoms – swollen legs, exhaustion, failing memory – point to a general case of arteriosclerosis, or “hardening of the arteries.” While symptoms of the disease first became apparent in 1799, Haydn’s health declined precipitously after 1805, by which time, at the age of 73, he was for all intents and purposes an invalid.
However, Haydn had the rare pleasure of knowing that in his old age he had not been forgotten. His ongoing popularity was astonishing, and from every corner of Europe, medals, awards, honors, and proclamations poured into his home in the Viennese suburbs. …
Music History Monday: The First Night: Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville
Feb 20, 2023
We mark the premiere performance, on February 20, 1816 – 207 years ago today – of Gioachino Rossini’s comic opera masterwork, The Barber of Seville, at Rome’s famed Teatro Argentina.
Gioachino Antonio Rossini (1792-1868) in 1815 by Vicenzo Camuccini
The Natural
Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born on February 29 (bummer of a birthday!), 1792 in the Italian city of Pesaro, on the Adriatic Sea. He died of colorectal cancer on November 13, 1868, in his villa in Passy, which today is located in Paris’ chic, 16tharrondisement.
He was the only child of Giuseppe Rossini (1758-1839) and Anna (née Guidarini) Rossini (1771-1827).
Giuseppe Rossini (1758-1839)
Rossini’s father Giuseppe was a professional trumpet and horn player, and as such was Gioachino’s first music teacher. (The adult Rossini liked to say that:
“Sono figlio di corna,” “I am the son of a horn!”)
Anna (née Guidarini) Rossini (1771-1827)
“Son of a horn” he might have been, but when it came to his real musical education, it was as the son of an opera singer. Rossini’s mother Anna was, at the time of his birth in 1792, a seamstress by trade. But changes in Italian society allowed her to make a second career as a professional singer. According to Rossini’s biographer Richard Osborne (Rossini; Oxford University Press):
“Italian Society began to change in the late 1790s, not least in the arts, where a process of democratization set in. Admission to academic institutions became easier for ordinary folk; new music was encouraged from a wider variety of sources; ticket prices fell; women found it easier to take paid employment on the stage. The last development had enormous repercussions for the Rossini family, as it allowed Anna Rossini to earn useful money as a singer.”
According to her son Gioachino, Anna Rossini was a “natural,” with a voice, to quote her son:
“as sweet as her appearance.”
She wasn’t able to read music, but like her son Gioachino, she had a phenomenal musical memory. All together, she mastered and performed 15 roles, all of them from comic operas.
Anna Rossini began her singing career in the 1797-1798 season at Ancona’s Teatro della Fenice, where she performed as the second soprano in operas by Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816), Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801), and Giovanni Battista Martini (1706-1784). She concluded her career in the fall of 1808 as the prima donna assoluta (“the absolute first lady”: the starring soprano) at the Teatro Communale in Bagnacavallo, a town about 50 miles northwest of Pesaro.
By the time Gioachino was ten years old, he was going on tour with his mother, watching rehearsals from the house and following performances from backstage. It was a musical and operatic education like no other, and by the age of 13, he was hooked: he was a person of the theater.
As it turned out, Anna wasn’t the only musical “natural” in the Rossini clan. …
Music History Monday: A Man for All Symptoms: The Death of Wagner
Feb 13, 2023
Richard Wagner (1813-1883) in 1871
We mark the death, on February 13, 1883 – 140 years ago today – of the German composer Richard Wagner, in Venice, at the age of 69. He had been born in the Saxon city of Leipzig on May 22, 1813.
Wagner’s Health
Writing in Hektoen International – A Journal of Medical Humanities, George Dunea, MD, states that:
“[Richard] Wagner was an extraordinarily highly strung individual.”
Do you think, Dr. Dunea?
In fact, he was a pathologically overwrought individual, a certifiable narcissist who required maximum stimulation at all times whether he was awake or asleep. (Yes, even asleep. As a young child he kept his many siblings awake at night by shouting and talking while he slept.)
Wagner was not born a particularly healthy person, and as an adult, his personal habits and constant excitability exacted a considerable toll on his already compromised constitution.
Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association back in 1903 (Gould, George M.; The Ill-health of Richard Wagner, JAMA 1903; 51: 293 and 368; as articles go, this is an oldie but a goodie!), Dr. George Gould described Wagner as having the collective symptoms of:
“[Thomas] DeQuincy [best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater]; [Thomas] Carlisle; [Charles] Darwin, [Thomas Henry] Huxley; [Robert] Browning, [Herbert] Spencer, and [James] Parkinson all together and all at once.”
The illnesses shared by these illustrious individuals included migraine headaches, severe gastric issues, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. They were all workaholics who, according to Dr. Gould, drove themselves until they were:
“threatened either by disease or by despair.”
From childhood on, Wagner suffered recurrent skin disease that has been variously diagnosed as eczema or erysipelas. He suffered from what were likely migraine headaches his entire life, complaining about “the nerves of his brain.” As an adult he suffered from depression and severe anxiety, and thought obsessively about death. (As early as 1852, as a young man of 39, he wrote: “I am daily thinking of my death.”)
He was an insomniac and subject to rheumatic pains and constant gastric discomforts. Physically, he was a mess. But migraines and dyspepsia were not likely to kill Wagner, as opposed to his problems with his heart.
Those problems began in December of 1873, when Wagner was 60, at a time when he was desperately trying to put together the funding for his Bayreuth Festival, his grand monument to himself and his art (more on the festival in just a moment). The anguish and stress he put himself through and the anxiety and depression he experienced began to affect his heart. (According to Wagner’s wife Cosima, writing in her diary:
“by starting the festival, he signed his own death-warrant; he seldom had a good night and his attacks of cramp about the heart became more and more frequent.”)
The Bayreuth Festival
The Bayreuth Festival – held in the picturesque, medieval Bavarian city of Bayreuth in southern Germany – is an annual music festival/Wagner lovefest dedicated to performing the works of Richard Wagner his very self.…
Music History Monday: Johannes Ockeghem and the Oltremontani
Feb 06, 2023
We mark the death on February 6, 1497 – 526 years ago today – of the composer and singer Johannes Ockeghem, in Tours, France, at the age of 87 (or so). He was born circa 1410 in the French-speaking city of Saint-Ghislain in what today is Belgium, about 5 miles from the border with France.
Anonymous portrait believed to be that of Johannes Ockeghem (circa 1410-1497)
The title of this post – “Johannes Ockeghem and the Oltremontani” – employs a Italian word that may not be familiar to everybody: “Oltremontani.” It’s a word that means, literally, “those from the other side of the mountains.” The mountains in question are the alps, so in fact, generally, the word refers to people “from the other side of the alps”: from northern and northwestern Europe. But when used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it meant something quite more specific than that: it referred to musicians from what today are northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg.
Johannes Ockeghem was just such an oltremontano, having been born in Belgium close to the northern border of France.
Johannes Ockeghem (circa 1410-1497)
“Born circa 1410, died 1497.” Back in the fifteenth century, if someone became famous – and at the time of his death, Johannes Ockeghem was famous across Europe – their death date was (and remains) common knowledge. But for people born in the fifteenth century (and earlier), birth dates and early accounts of their lives before they became famous, well, that’s a different matter entirely. Generally, we know next to nothing about the birth dates and early lives of ordinary people born in the fifteenth century and before, and that includes Johannes Ockeghem. In fact, we’re not even sure how he spelled his name. We use “Ockeghem” today because that spelling came from a document – now lost – in which he supposedly signed his name using that spelling. But other spellings of his name include Ogkegum, Okchem, Hocquegam, and Ockegham.
Here’s some stuff we do know.
Johannes Ockeghem was considered by his contemporaries, as he is considered today, to be – along with Guillaume DuFay (circa 1397-1474), Antoine Busnois (circa 1430-1492), and Josquin Desprez (circa 1450-1521) – the greatest and most influential composer of the fifteenth century.
(For those of us who may not be familiar with the names of the oltremontani Ockeghem, DuFay, Busnois, and Desprez, I would be so bold as to suggest that they were equivalent, in their time, to the Vienna-based quartet of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert.
In terms of these Renaissance composers’ talent and impact on the history of Western music, I am not exaggerating.)
For reason’s already explained, we know nothing about Ockeghem’s early life. Like most composers of his time, he almost certainly started his musical life as a church chorister, likely in the city of Mons, a few miles east of his hometown of Saint-Ghislain.
The first documentary mention of Ockeghem’s activity as a musician date to June, 1443, when he is listed as being among the chanteurs – the singers – at the Church of Our Lady, in Antwerp. His initial fame was, indeed, as a singer: he was a basso and was reputed to have a rich, flexible, and unerringly accurate voice.
He was described by the people that knew him, including the famed humanist Erasmus, as being:
“exceptionally engaging: honest, virtuous, kind, generous, charitable, and pious.”
Ockeghem’s friend, the cleric Francesco Florio (1428-1484) described him this way in the 1470s:
“I am sure you could not dislike this man, so pleasing is the beauty of his person, so noteworthy the sobriety of his speech and of his morals, and his graciousness. He alone of all the singers is free from vice and abounding in all virtues.”
Okay: combine a brilliant singer and composer with physical beauty, a great attitude, and a long life and you have the prescription for success.
Music History Monday: Francis Poulenc: “a bit of monk and a bit of hooligan”
Jan 30, 2023
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) in Paris, circa 1955
We mark the death on January 30, 1963 – exactly sixty years ago today – of the French composer and pianist Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc, in Paris. A Parisian from head to toe, he was born in the tres chic 8tharrondisement in that magnificent city on January 7, 1899. He died of a heart attack not far from where he’d been born, in his flat opposite the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris’ 6tharrondisement.
Before we can get down with the magnifique Monsieur Poulenc, we have an important event in rock ‘n’ roll history to mark.
The Beatles rooftop concert, January 30, 1969
On January 30, 1969 – 54 years ago today – the Beatles, joined by the keyboard player Billy Preston, performed their final live concert. The venue was unusual: a hastily constructed stage on the rooftop of their five-story Apple Corps (their record company) headquarters, at 3 Savile Row: smack dab in the middle of the fashion district in London’s tony Mayfair neighborhood.
(I cannot resist the joke: how do you get a rock band onto a roof? You tell them the beer is on the house.)
Badaboom.
A couple of weeks before the rooftop concert eventually took place, Paul McCartney had suggested that the Beatles should perform a concert:
“in a place we’re not allowed to do it … like we should trespass, go in, set up and then get moved. Getting forcibly ejected, still trying to play your numbers, and the police lifting you.”
The shock value of such a “concert” was sure to generate awesome publicity for the Beatles just released (on January 13, 1969) Yellow Submarine album. Still, it wasn’t until January 26 – just four days before the concert – that the Beatles and their management decided to go ahead with their impromptu, rooftop recital.
No announcement of the event was made ahead of time. Instead, the Beatles and Billy Preston took their places on the rooftop stage and started playing at around 12:30 pm, smack-dab in the middle of London’s lunchtime break, with lots of people out and about. Word quickly spread that a sensational event was taking place on Savile Row, and it wasn’t the opening of a new haberdashery; after all, The Beatles had not played in public for 2½ years: not since their performance at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on August 29th, 1966.
Crowds quickly began to assemble in the surrounding streets, and in the windows and on the roofs of surrounding buildings. (So much for George Harrison’s fear that they would be performing “only for chimneys.”) Soon enough, streets became impassable and the doors to businesses blocked. Given that the blocked streets included Savile Row and Regent Street (the latter a major thoroughfare); and that the blocked businesses constituted some of the ritziest in the city, not everyone was overjoyed with the spontaneous concert. …
Music History Monday: Paul Robeson: Truly Larger Than Life
Jan 23, 2023
Paul Leroy Robeson (1898-1976) in 1942
We mark the death on January 23, 1976 – 47 years ago today – of the American bass-baritone singer, stage and screen actor, civil rights activist, professional football player, and graduate of Columbia University Law School Paul Robeson at the age of 77, in Philadelphia. Born in Princeton, New Jersey on April 9, 1898, the son of an escaped slave turned Presbyterian minister, Robeson had more intellectual, artistic, and athletic gifts and lived more lives than any 10 (20? 50? 100?) so-called “normal” people. And he had to fight for every one of those lives, growing up a black person in early twentieth century America.
“Larger than Life”
The English-language idiom “larger than life” describes people “who are better and stronger and smarter than the average Joe”: individuals imbued with characteristics and abilities far beyond those of “ordinary” human beings. Typically, the idiom is reserved for fictional characters, who are gifted with superhuman (or nearly so) qualities and abilities. The heroes, warriors, gods, and goddesses of myths and legends are, by definition, “larger than life.” Achilles, Hercules, Zeus, Odysseus, Thor, Brünnhilde (and many, many more) would all qualify.
Comic book characters and superheroes are likewise, by their nature, “larger than life.” Certain other fictional characters become larger than life thanks to their singular identity: thanks to their stature, their presence, and their flair. Love them or hate them, we remember them. For example, Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins; Cruella de Vil and Scarlet O’Hara; Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes would all qualify.
Employed judiciously, “larger than life” can also be used to describe an actual human being, providing that person’s life, abilities, personality, and accomplishments truly distinguish them from the rest of us. When used to describe an actual person, the idiom gets its power from its use of figurative license, since, in fact, it’s impossible to actually quantify the “size” of a life.
According to an entry in languagehumanities.org:
“The use of exaggeration is what gives this phrase its particular power. Especially when it is used in reference to an actual person, there can hardly be a greater compliment than to call someone “larger than life.” That is why it is usually reserved for only the most noteworthy personalities, or else its impact would be somewhat lessened.”
“Larger than life,” a physical giant among men: the larger than life Paul Robeson leading workers in singing The Star-Spangled Banner at the Moore Shipyard in Oakland, California, September of 1942
Paul Robeson (1898-1976) was truly “larger than life.”
Robeson’s life as a singer, actor, athlete, intellectual, and activist; as a Black American aggressively and publicly battling racism and Jim Crow; as a socialist and, to many, a communist dupe and traitor to America defies easy telling. As such, this post is going to focus on Robeson’s preternatural talent and artistry, and will trace his life though 1933, the year he made the film, The Emperor Jones. Through interviews and archival footage, tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will briefly observe his political awakening and subsequent activism, finally focusing on the controversial but still breathtaking The Emperor Jones, “breathtaking” thanks to Robeson’s for-the-ages performance.…
Music History Monday: The Blockhead – Anton Felix Schindler – and Beethoven’s Conversation Books
Jan 16, 2023
Anton Felix Schindler (1795-1864)
We mark the death on January 16, 1864 – 159 years ago today – of Anton Felix Schindler, in Frankfurt, at the age of 68. Born on June 13, 1795, in the town of Medlov in today’s Czech Republic, Schindler was, for a time, Beethoven’s “factotum”: his secretary and general assistant. He was also a scoundrel and a profiteer, who after Beethoven’s death lied about his relationship with Beethoven, stole irreplaceable objects and documents from Beethoven’s estate, and falsified and destroyed many of those documents (some of which he later sold off) in order to make himself look better in the eyes of history. Boo-hoo for Schindler: the “making-himself-look-better-in-the-eyes-of-history” thing didn’t work, and today he is regarded as the patron saint of lying and thieving employees.
Among the Beethovenian documents Anton Schindler took upon himself to “remove for safekeeping” were Beethoven’s so-called “Conversation Books.”
Beethoven’s Conversation Books
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) in 1803
It took an agonizingly long time for Beethoven to go completely deaf. His hearing loss began in 1796, in his 26th year: a buzzing in his ears and a slow but progressive loss of high frequency hearing. By the fall of 1802, Beethoven had cut himself off from much of his world out of fear his infirmity would be discovered. Having been assaulted by doctors and the useless (and often painful) remedies they prescribed, Beethoven had come to realize that his condition was incurable and irreversible, and he considered suicide. But he survived his crisis by convincing himself that like the great man of his age – Napoleon Bonaparte (1767-1821) – he (Beethoven) would struggle against his “enemies” (fate, despair, and physical disability) and emerge victorious through his music!
Beethoven’s ear-trumpets, as displayed at the Beethoven Haus Museum in Bonn
Beethoven was still playing the piano in public and attempting to conduct as late as 1812. Between 1816 and 1818 he employed various ear-trumpets built for him by his erstwhile friend (and the presumed inventor of the metronome) Johann Nepomuk Mälzel (1772-1838).
Sadly, by 1818 Beethoven’s deafness had advanced to the point where the ear-trumpets had become useless.
From 1818 to 1827 (the year of his death), Beethoven carried around blank books in which friends and acquaintances could write down their side of a conversation, conversations during which Beethoven would speak out loud. Beethoven also used the books for “private” purposes: to jot down notes and ideas, drafts for letters and other documents, shopping lists, and even some brief compositional sketches. …
Music History Monday: An Impresario for the Ages: Rudolf Bing
Jan 09, 2023
Rudolf Bing (1902-1997) circa 1944
We mark the birth on January 9, 1902 – 121 years ago today – of the opera impresario Rudolf Bing, in Vienna Austria. The general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1950 to 1972, Bing died in Yonkers, New York in September 1997 at the age of 95. His was a long life by any standard, but particularly by the standards of an opera impresario, whose professional livesare marked by a degree of life-threatening stress and anxiety that, perhaps, only has its equal in combat and divorce court.
Impresario
The term “impresario” originated in the world of Italian opera in the 1750s. Deriving from the Italian word “impresa,” which is “an enterprise or undertaking,” an impresario was that single individual who organized, financed, and produced operas (and later, concerts). It was a job similar to what a film producer does today; a high stress job not for the faint of heart or weak of bladder.
Apropos of the impresarios of his day, the great Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) wrote in reference to how he went about composing his opera overtures:
“Wait until the evening before the opening night. Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it’s the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or the prodding of an impresario tearing at his hair. In my time, all the impresarios of Italy were bald at 30.”
For our information, Rudolf Bing was bald at thirty.
At left, a bald Rudolf Bing at Glyndebourne in 1935
Rudolf Bing (1902-1997)
Rudolf Franz Joseph Bing was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Vienna 121 years ago today. By his own admission a terrible student, Bing’s parents allowed him to drop out of high school (or gymnasium) at sixteen. He went to work at the prestigious Viennese bookshop of Gilhofer & Ranschburg before moving on to the shop of a bookseller named Hugo Heller, who also ran a theatrical and concert agency. By the age of 19, Bing was deeply immersed in the running of Heller’s concert operation, and he was hooked, later writing in his memoir 5000 Nights at the Opera:
“I enjoyed the atmosphere of the theater, with its nightly deadline; only journalism and the theater give you this daily excitement, and it is a poison far more habit forming than coffee or nicotine.”
(For our information, Bing grew up speaking German and English, and as such, was completely fluent in English. His two memoirs, 5000 Nights at the Opera [of 1972] and A Knight at the Opera [of 1981] were both written in English.)…
Music History Monday: Getting Personal: Édith Piaf
Dec 19, 2022
Édith Piaf (1915-1963)
We mark the birth on December 19, 1915 – 107 years ago today – of the French singer and actress Édith Piaf in the Belleville district of Paris. Born Édith Giovanna Gassion, she came to be considered France’s national chanteuse, one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century, a French combination of Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, and Billie Holiday. She died in Plascassier, near the French Riviera city of Nice, on October 10, 1963, all-too young at the age of 47.
Way Too Personal
I will be forgiven for making today’s post personal. (It’s just going to happen sometimes.)
I was first married in August of 1981. I was 27 and my betrothed was 23 at the time of our marriage. We were . . . young. Frankly, chronological years notwithstanding, I was far “younger” than my bride. Together, we made two wonderful babies: our daughter Rachel, now 36 years old, and our son Samuel, now 32. Our marriage lasted for seventeen years. Based on the frankly terrifying statistics out there, our marriage lasted considerably longer than the seven-to-eight-year average of the 50% of marriages that fail in the United States.
Three years after our breakup, I became involved with another woman, someone who was twenty years my junior. Yes, the age difference was extreme (and it did not go over well with my ex). But once again, chronological age meant nothing. Diane was an old soul, with an emotional age many decades beyond mine. She was smart, funny, and a brilliant, professional-grade flutist. I was smitten, besotted, hopelessly and forever taken with her.
We moved in together in 2000.
On September 11, 2001, our phone rang at a little after 6am Pacific Time; we were still asleep. It was my daughter Rachel, 15 years old at the time and an early riser, telling us to turn on our television. We did so and proceeded to watch – like every one of us, with our jaws hanging open – as that awful day’s events unfolded. (My parents were among the many millions who watched everything live and in real time from their apartment terrace high on New Jersey’s Palisades, overlooking the Hudson River and Manhattan.)
Looking back, it’s difficult to believe – given our present national dysfunctionality – how united we were as a nation during that post-9/11 autumn of 2001. I can only wish that we could recapture something of that spirit without first having to suffer a national trauma. …
Music History Monday: The Garden State Hall of Fame
Dec 12, 2022
“The Garden State” (having been born in Brooklyn, New York, I grew up in Willingboro, New Jersey, just northeast of 75° latitude and 40° longitude
December 12 is a crazy day in American jazz and popular music history, a day that saw the births of five – count ‘em, five – significant musicians, three of whom have something very special in common.
Let us first recognize the birthdays of the two jazz/pop musicians who do not share this special commonality.
Joe Williams (1918-1999)
We start with a big, happy birthday to the jazz singer Joe Williams, who was born on December 12, 1918, 104 years ago today. Born Joseph Goreed, he came into this world in Cordele, Georgia, and left it on March 29, 1999, in Las Vegas at the age of 80. Big Joe had a gorgeous, warm baritone voice that was as smooth as a peeled onion. Long associated with Count Basie (1904-1984) and his big band, Williams sings one of his trademark songs – Alright, Okay, You Win – with the Basie Band in the link below, recorded circa 1970.
Sheila E. (born 1957)
Another big, happy birthday to the singer, drummer, and percussionist Sheila E. (“E” for Escovedo), who was born right here in Oakland, California, on December 12, 1957, 65 years ago today. Sheila Escovedo came by her musical bona fides honestly. Her father is the Latin jazz percussionist Peter (“Pete”) Escovedo (born in 1935 in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Pittsburg, California), and her Godfather was the great American Latin, Afro-Cuban, and mambo musician, songwriter, bandleader, and record producer Tito Puente (1923-2000). She is a singer of talent and a killer-fine drummer. The link below dates to 1987, with Sheila E. playing a knockout drum solo with her frequent collaborator, Prince.
And now, three more birthday babies, all with something special in common beyond the shared date of their births, and that is their roots (or “ruts”, as it might be locally pronounced) in the great Garden State of New Jersey! …
Music History Monday: Myths of Mayhem and Murder!
Dec 05, 2022
HereWeGoAgain...
It has come to pass. I have been writing these MusicHistoryMonday posts for long enough that Monday dates and events have begun to repeat. And as a result, December 5, which was a Monday in 2016, once again falls on a Monday today. Ordinarily there are enough events on any given Monday to keep me from having to deal with the same topic. But December 5 is a special date for one particularly terrible musical event, an event that demands to be revisited.
DatesThatWillLiveinInfamy
We consider: there are some dates that, for events that marked them, will live in infamy.
I would suggest that what qualifies as an “infamous date” – that is, a date we will all remember to our dying day – is generally dependent upon when one was born. For example, for someone born in the United States in 1854 (that’s 100 years before I was born), those dates of infamy might include:
Dred Scott (1795-1858) in 1857
March 6, 1857: the date of the Dred Scott decision, which saw the U.S. Supreme Court rule 7-2 that an enslaved human being (Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory where slavery was prohibited was not entitled to his freedom; that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States; and that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which had declared all territories west of Missouri and north of latitude 36°30′ to be free from slavery) was unconstitutional.
Some other such infamous dates for someone born in the United States in 1854:
April 12, 1861: the opening of the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina, which initiated the American Civil War.
April 14, 1865: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who died early in the morning of April 15.
Now: for me and my generation, such “dates of infamy” would include:
November 22, 1963: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.
April 4, 1968: the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, in Memphis, Tennessee.
September 11, 2001. We all know what happened on that day.
January 6, 2021. Again, we all know what happened on that day.
For those good people who will be born in 2054, their dates of infamy will – again – reflect their own time and experience.
Mozart at 24 in 1780; detail from portrait by Johann Nepomuk della Croce
However, there are some dates of infamy we can all agree on, whether we were born in 1854, 1954, or 2054. Among them is December 5, 1791, 231 years ago today: the day Wolfgang Mozart died in his Viennese flat at the age of 35 years, 10 months, and 9 days.
As previously observed, December 5 last fell on a Monday in 2016. My Music History Monday post for that day was entitled “Mozart: A diagnosis.” Based on contemporary reports of Mozart’s symptoms and modern interpretations of those reports and symptoms, that post offered up what is almost certainly the correct cause of Mozart’s death: a relapse of Rheumatic fever.
Today’s post – “Myths of Murder and Mayhem!” – will deal with some of the many falsehoods that came to surround Mozart’s death almost from the moment of his death!
Music History Monday: Aaron Copland in New York
Nov 28, 2022
Aaron Copland (1900-1990) in 1933
We mark the New York premiere on November 28, 1925 – 97 years ago today – of Aaron Copland’s Music for the Theater, at a League of Composer’s concert conducted by Serge Koussevitzky at New York’s Town Hall. The actual world premiere of the piece took place eight days before, when Koussevitzky conducted Music for the Theater in Boston. But Copland was a native New Yorker and Music from the Theater is about the New York theatrical and musical world. So – and for this you’ll have to excuse me, particularly the Bean Town babies among us – the so-called “Boston Premiere” was nothing but a warmup, a preview, a promo, an hors d’oeuvre akin to trying out a Broadway play in New Haven or Philadelphia before taking it to the house, to the big time, the Apple, to the city that never sleeps, to the burg so big they had to name it twice: New York, New York!
Coming Clean
We all have to make decisions, the vast majority of which are, gratefully, relatively insignificant. (I cannot imagine having to make decisions that would affect the health and welfare of entire communities. It’s difficult enough for me to figure out what to make for dinner.) The decisions I do make are for myself and for my families: my immediate family and my Patreon family.
Here’s a decision I made for my Patreon family two weeks ago today, on November 14. You see, November 14 is one of those crazy dates when so much happened in the world of music that I was hard put to decide what to feature in that day’s Music History Monday. Check it out.
Leopold Mozart (1719-1787)
On November 14, 1719, the composer, violinist, teacher, and tennis-father-supreme Leopold Mozart (father of you-know-who) was born in the German city of Augsburg.
On November 14, 1778, the composer and pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel was born in the city of Pressburg, today Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.
On November 14, 1805, the composer and pianist Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel was born in the German city of Hamburg.
On November 14, 1831, the Austrian-French composer and piano builder Ignaz Joseph Pleyel died in Paris at the age 74.
On November 14, 1900, the composer Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York.
On November 14, 1939, the composer and synthesizer virtuosa Wendy (“don’t call me ‘Walter’”) Carlos was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
On November 14, 1946, the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla died in Alta Gracia, Argentina, at the age of 69.
(And finally, on that very day two weeks ago – November 14, 2022 – the wonderful Robert Flack [born 1937) revealed that she is suffering from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and is no longer able to sing.)
Heavens: and to think that on some dates, nothing happened.
Ignaz Joseph Pleyel (1757-1831)
Okay; when deciding what to write about two weeks ago on November 14, I was able to knock a couple of names off this list. My Music History Monday post for June 18, 2018, celebrated the birth of Ignaz Pleyel (1757-1831), and Music History Monday of October 17, 2022 (six weeks ago today) noted the death (and celebrated the life) of Johann Nepomuk Hummel.
As it turned out, I chose to feature Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel in my Music History Monday post of November 14 past (and my Dr. Bob Prescribes post on November 15). I was comforted in making this decision by the fact that I knew I’d be writing about the November 14 birthday boy Aaron Copland in today’s Music History Monday (and in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes as well).
Aaron Copland in New York (?)
The question mark attached to the post title above is appropriate, because as a native New Yorker who lived the great bulk of his life in that singular town, we might rightly wonder when was Aaron Copland not in New York?
In fact, the title of today’s post refers to two very specific periods of Copland’s life in New York: his childhood and the period after his return to New York in 1924 after three years of study abroad, primarily with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.…
Music History Monday: Henry Purcell and British Music Restored!
Nov 21, 2022
Henry Purcell (1659-1695), portrait by John Closterman, circa 1695
We mark the death on November 21, 1695 – 327 years ago today – of the English composer and organist Henry Purcell, in London. He lies buried today in a place of singular honor, adjacent to the organ on which he performed in Westminster Abbey in London. He had been born there in London on (or about) September 10, 1659, making him only 36 years old when he died. But like both Mozart and Schubert after him, Purcell’s terribly premature death did not preclude him from writing a tremendous amount of music of the very highest quality.
Purcell’s music – sacred and secular – utterly defined his time, a time known in British history as the Restoration.
Timing
I know that the realtors among us will tell us that in the end, everything is all about location, location, and location. Well, sorry to disagree but, in fact, in the end, nothing is more important than timing, timing, and timing. Hey: I love the city of Paris; it is my favorite urban location. But a successful visit to that magnificent location is dependent on timing.
Black Death victims unearthed in central Paris in 2014
Had I chosen to visit in August 1348, I would have arrived simultaneously with the Black Death and may very well have perished along with roughly 80,000 Parisians, fully one-third of the population.
When I bought my first house in 1986, I would have loved to have been able to buy one in a location called Piedmont, a lovely enclave located in the heart of Oakland.
Typical Piedmont shack, currently on sale for a cool $16.8 million
A great location, yes. But I (we; my wife and I) couldn’t buy in Piedmont because we didn’t have the bucks at the time (or at any time, for that matter). The message? Location without timing is useless.
So: location verses timing. Henry Purcell could have been born in any major metropolitan area in England in 1659: in London, Norwich, York, Bristol, Newcastle, Exeter, Ipswich, Great Yarmouth, or Oxford. Every one of those locations had institutions that would have allowed Purcell to be educated as a musician. But the extraordinary opportunities that allowed him to not just become a composer but to thrive as a composer were strictly a matter of timing.
Writes Robert King:
“Purcell began his musical upbringing as a boy chorister. There is nothing inherently unusual about that, for many British musicians have, over the years, been fortunate enough to have that unequalled education. But had he been born just a few years earlier, this [Purcell’s musical education] would have been impossible. Fortunately, within a few months of his birth the puritan rule of Oliver Cromwell came to an end, and the monarchy and the Anglican Church were restored to Britain, releasing with it a burst of musical creativity and life that has never since been repeated. By the 1680s, when Purcell’s genius was flowering, London was buzzing with newly written music for the church, the royal and private chapels, the newly founded concert halls, the theaters and even the taverns.”
Music History Monday: The Other Prodigious Mendelssohn: Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel
Nov 14, 2022
Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel (1805-1847), drawn by her Husband Wilhelm Hensel (1794-1861) in 1829, the year they were married
We mark the birth on November 14, 1805 – 217 years ago today – of the German composer, pianist, wife, mother, and hausfrau Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, in the Hanseatic city of Hamburg. She died on May 14, 1847, all-too-young at the age of 41, at her home in the Prussian capital of Berlin.
Fanny Cäcille Mendelssohn was the first child (of an eventual four) of Lea and Abraham Mendelssohn. Lea Mendelssohn took one look at her infant daughter’s hands and famously exclaimed:
“Look! She has Bach fugue hands.”
And that she did.
The next Mendelssohn child was born three years and three months later, Fanny’s baby brother – the “genius” – Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847).
“Genius”
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) in 1821 at the age of 12, by Carl Joseph Begas
The word “genius” is so overused as to be almost useless. Nevertheless, it is necessary that we define it and then discuss an aspect its usage.
Definition. Admittedly, while there is no precise, scientific way to measure and define genius, the following definition, by Walter Isaacson, will do. (Isaacson “knows” genius; his biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci are must reads.)
“Genius is a characteristic of original and exceptional insight in the performance of some art or endeavor that surpasses expectations, sets new standards for future works, establishes better methods of operation, or remains outside the capabilities of competitors. Genius is associated with intellectual ability and creative productivity, and may refer to a polymath who excels across diverse subjects.”
A most intriguing question: when was the last time any of us heard of a woman being referred to as a “genius”?
Before setting out to write this blog, I’d never asked myself that question. But after a proper bit of brain wracking, my personal answer is never.
Dr. Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) in 1966
Yes, Marie Curie (1867-1934) remains the only woman to have won the Nobel Prize twice. (Perhaps Walter Isaacson would consider writing a biography of Madame Curie?) The actress Hedy Lamar (1914-2000) was a self-taught inventor who, among many other things, helped create frequency-hopping, a technology that today lies at the heart of wi-fi and Bluetooth. As a mathematician for NASA, it was Dr. Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) who calculated the flight paths for the Apollo moon missions.
I could go on, but I don’t need to, because whatever we choose to call them, there always have been and always will be geniuses that are women. The issues for us, right now, are, one, whether or not their societies allow women to develop their genius and two, whether their societies are willing to designate them as being geniuses.
Alas, male-dominated societal machinations have traditionally conspired against smart women. Sadly, it’s an undeniable fact: such women have historically been perceived as presenting a threat to patriarchal order, and were kept at home, there to protect the patrilinear family. As such, writes Françoise Tillard:
“the notion of ‘genius’ belongs to a world of masculine concepts that do not include female creativity.”
The distinction between “talent” and “genius” was formulated by German writers and philosophers in the eighteenth century. By the nineteenth century, the prestigious French Le Robert Dictionary defined “genius” (génie) as (the following italics are mine):
“a superior aptitude of the mind that lifts a man above the common measure and renders him capable of creations, inventions and undertakings which seem extraordinary or superhuman to his peers.”
“Man”, “him”, and “his.” This is not just old-style pronoun usage. It is a mindset that takes as an ironclad given that men create and women procreate, and never shall that twain meet!…
Music History Monday: Listening to the Thundah from Down Undah
Nov 07, 2022
Joan Sutherland (1926-2010) in make up for her role as Lucia di Lammermoor in Gaetano Donizetti’s opera Lucia di Lammermoor; at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, circa 1965
We mark the birth on November 7, 1926 – 96 years ago today – of the dramatic coloratura soprano Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, in Sydney, Australia. She died on October 10, 2010, in Montreux, Switzerland at the age of 83.
I want you all to know upfront that Joan Sutherland was the first singer on whom I had a major crush, both because of her stupendous voice (hey: she wasn’t called “La Stupenda!” for nothing) and for reasons to be described below.
In this post I will be using the occasion of Ms. Sutherland’s birth to not just talk about her extraordinary talent, but to wax nostalgic, for which I trust you’ll indulge me. While that nostalgia might dominate this post, be assured that tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will be dedicated entirely to Joan Sutherland’s artistry and recordings.
Records and Record Players
A child record player, circa 1960, not unlike the one we owned
I’m going to talk about “sound reproducing equipment” for a bit. Please: though it might, momentarily, appear that I am geeking out here, I am – in fact – not. Because for people of a certain age, our records and the gear on which we played our records were for our younger selves (and perhaps our older ones as well) an essential, irreplaceable part of our lives.
Like most kids born around the time I was (1954), I (actually we: my brother and I) had a portable record player on which we played the 45-rpm records our family bought for us. The two records I remember as being my six-or-seven-year-old self’s favorites were Shadrach, Meshack & Abednego and Gerald McBoing-Boing at Professor Wumple’s Music School. Thanks to the world-wide-web, I found both recordings online and offer up links below!
The Wanderers: Shadrach, Meshack & Abednego (recorded 1959).
Gerald McBoing-Boing at Professor Wumple’s Music School (circa 1957):
I remember feeling that there was magic in those records, with their tiny grooves somehow containing music. And I was mesmerized by the record player itself: the tone arm swinging back-and-forth, the spinning turntable and, of course, the music that came out of the thing. It was the best toy I ever owned!
Downstairs, in the living room, my parents had a somewhat higher fidelity record player, not at all unlike the one pictured below.
Record Player, circa 1964
My parents had an eclectic mix of records: “classical” (mostly orchestral), jazz (mostly piano players), Broadway shows, lots of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and lots of Joan Sutherland (more on those Sutherland recordings in a moment).
And then came 1965. For the wonderful musical satirist and math professor Tom Lehrer, 1965 was “That Was the Year That Was.” For the Greenberg family at 11 Belhurst Lane in Willingboro, N.J., that was the year we went from being technologically deficient to the techno-forefront! Because that was the year we got our first color TV (an RCA) and the year that my father (who was a fine musician in his own right) upgraded to what we all considered, at the time, to be a high-fidelity system: a monaural rig consisting of Dynakit/Dynaco tube preamplifier and amplifier, a Garrard turntable, and a single Acoustic Research AR2 speaker.
Dynakit/Dynaco tube preamplifierGarrard turntableAcoustic Research AR2 speaker
It was a rather crude system by modern standards, but considering what we were coming from (the “record player” above!), it was a revelation, and the pleasure it gave my father could not have been greater had it consisted of Wilson Audio WAMM Master Chronosonic Speakers (at $850,000 a pair), Ultrasound Otello amplification (at $650,000) and a Goldmund Reference II turntable (a relative bargain at $250,000).
(However, let it be noted that the pleasure Imyself would receive from the equipment just mentioned would indeed exceed what I felt listening to my father’s system. So should any of you have any of that rather pricey gear hanging about unused and unwanted, you will let me know.)
To the point. As often as not on Sunday afternoons, particularly during the winter, I would find my father on the living room couch, listening primarily to opera singers on his new semi-hi-fi. Not to operas, per se, but to albums of arias. Far and away, the singer whose albums he listened to the most – and I know this because I listened with him – was Joan Sutherland. The result, for me, was that Joan Sutherland’s was the first operatic voice I got to know well, a voice that became – for the younger me – the benchmark of what an operatic soprano was supposed to sound like.
Admittedly, as a kid, I had no reference point for what a coloratura soprano (FYI, an operatic soprano who specializes in music distinguished by its virtuosity) was supposed to sound like. I was completely ignorant of other extraordinary contemporary coloraturas, an amazing bunch of singers that included Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Beverly Sills, Lucia Popp, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Margaret Price, Monserrat Caballé, and Leontyne Price.
So: when it came to the female voice, the 11-year-old me didn’t know you-know-what from Shinola, but I still understood – at a gut level – that Joan Sutherland was, well, stupendous.
What I heard was a voice that even I could recognize as being the size of an Olympic swimming pool. …
Music History Monday: The Grandmother of All Drop Parties
Oct 31, 2022
Before moving forward, the title of this post – “The Grandmother of All Drop Parties!” – demands an explanation-slash-definition.
Naked woman (center) frolicking in a casket beneath the stage at Led Zeppelin’s famed drop party in the Chislehurst Caves in southeast London, October 31, 1974
A “grandmother” is the mother of a parent, though in this usage, thank you, it is meant to indicate the ultimate example of what follows, as in “the grandmother of all drop parties.”
I know you knew that. On to the important definition.
A “drop party” or “release party” or “launch party” is a festive event sponsored by someone or some corporate entity to celebrate the release of a new product or service.
In these here parts – meaning the San Francisco Bay Area – the most familiar sort of drop parties are those usually lavish affairs thrown by tech companies to launch new hardware or software (as opposed to underwear, overwear, everywhere, nowhere, or whatever-ware). Certainly, the pandemic put a major crimp on such parties, but I have little doubt they will be back, and that’s because they check off so many important boxes. They allow a company to celebrate itself and to entertain its employees and clients while also drawing in potential customers at the same time. They increase brand visibility and status, and presumably serve as venues for networking.
They can also cost a freaking fortune as companies continue to up the ante in order to one-up the competition. Yes: of course such parties will be held in desirable, exclusive, high-end venues. Of course they will offer copious amounts of the best quality food and drink, often prepared by celebrity chefs and bartenders. And of course there will be entertainment, typically provided by everyone from famous musicians to circus performers, and perhaps even a few “celebrity guests” circulating around as well, celebrity guests that will press the flesh, take selfies with, and provide autographs for the attendees. And let’s not forget the freebies and gift bags, containing everything from branded clothing to expensive foodstuffs to jewelry, electronics, and so forth.
Writes tech industry observer Mary McMahon:
“In the late 1990s, the launch party took off, with some cities such as San Francisco hosting upwards of 20 such parties a week in spaces ranging from exclusive venues to rented convention centers. As more companies started to have these events, the pressure to have a catchy gimmick or draw increased, with most companies consulting with party planning firms for their expensive soirees. Many firms also hoped to use the launch party for new employee recruitment, projecting a forceful, trendy image of the company to prospective new employees.”
Question: are such launch parties, in fact, outdated rituals, resource-wasting exercises in corporate hubris? Many folks today would say yes. But there are a lot of event planners and caterers out there desperate to get back into business, so I wouldn’t count them out just yet.
The Musical Launch or Drop Party
Led Zeppelin, clockwise from left: John Bonham (1948-1980), John Paul Jones (born 1946), Robert Plant (born 1948), and Jimmy Page (born 1944)
For our information, it wasn’t the high-tech industry that created the lavish, over-the-top launch party. Long before the phrase “high-tech” ever entered our vocabulary, there was the musical drop party.
A musical “drop party” or “release party” or “launch party” is a gathering held to celebrate the release of a new song or album (or even the creation of a new record label!).
We’re not talking about the smallish, ultra-civilized, wine-and-cheese soirees that pass for the parties surrounding the release of a concert recording. No, no: we’re talking about pop and rock ‘n’ roll drop parties, which are (or at least were) a different animal entirely.
Which brings us, finally, to the grandmother of all drop parties, what is generally considered the craziest drop party of all, one that took place 48 years ago today.
Swan Song Records
On October 31, 1974 – 48 years ago today – the band Led Zeppelin threw a drop party to celebrate both their new, in-house record label called “Swan Song Records” as well as the label’s first United Kingdom release, an album called Silk Torpedo by the band “Pretty Things.”
Swan Song” logo
It was the drop party by which all subsequent musical drop parties have been measured and found wanting.
Led Zeppelin had initially launched their new label – named after an unfinished and unreleased instrumental number called Swan Song – in May of 1974. In an interview conducted in 1977, Jimmy Page (born 1944), guitarist and founder of the band, explained why the members and management of Led Zeppelin had created their own record label:
“We’d been thinking about it for a while, and we knew if we formed a label there wouldn’t be the kind of fuss and bother we’d been going through over album covers and things like that. Having gone through, ourselves, interference on the artistic side by record companies, we wanted to form a label where the artists would be able to fulfill themselves without all of that hassle.”
In introducing/launching Swan Song Records, Led Zeppelin initially hosted two drop parties in Los Angeles, the second of which was held at the five-star luxury “Hotel Bel-Air” on May 10, 1974. This party featured a bevy of then A-list celebrity guests, including Groucho Marx, David Geffen, Lloyd Bridges, Dr. John, Michelle Phillips, and Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees.
(Wow: to think that there was a time when Mickey Dolenz was considered to be “A-list” material!)
However, these parties in The City of Angels were but a prelude, a warm-up act for the main event, the Swan Song Records drop party to be held back home in Britain, which was scheduled for October 31, 1974.…
Before moving on to Carl Ruggles, the featured composer of today’s post, we would offer the warmest of happy birthdays to one of the most brilliant composers of the twentieth century, who also happened to be one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met, George Crumb. He was born in Charleston, West Virginia on October 24, 1929 – 93 years ago today – and died at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Media, Pennsylvania, on February 6, 2022, at the age of 92.
I offered up an appreciation of Crumb in my Music History Monday post on the occasion of his 87th birthday on October 24, 2016. We will revisit Crumb in my Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts for March 13 and 14, 2023 (yes, I plan ahead!) when we tackle his Black Angels for electric string quartet.
On to the featured event for today’s post.
Carl Ruggles (1876-1971) circa 1950
We mark the death on October 24, 1971 – 51 years ago today – of the American composer, teacher, and painter Charles Sprague (“Carl”) Ruggles, in Bennington Vermont. Born in Marion, Massachusetts on March 11, 1876, Ruggles was 95 years old at the time of his death.
C-level People
Ordinarily when we refer to “C-level people”, we are talking about those people who constitute the upper echelons of a corporation’s senior executives and managers. “C” means “chief”, and such “C-level” individuals include CEO (chief executive officer); CFO (chief financial officer); COO (chief operating officer); and CIO (chief information officer).
Much as I’d love to discuss the leadership issues and workforce empowerment challenges faced by such C-level/C-suite executives, we’d observe that there is another sort of “C-level people”, folks who are, by their nature:
Crusty. Curmudgeonly. Cantankerous. Crabby. Cranky. And Cross.
Let us now get a bit more specific. Let’s talk about “C-level Composers.”
BTW, this isn’t to say that the individuals on the following list of (C-level) composers didn’t have good reason to be the way they were; that they didn’t have “hearts of gold” and various saving graces: and that they weren’t capable of the warm-‘n’-fuzzies. Just that on a day-to-day basis they could be . . . crotchety.
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901). Johannes Brahms (1833-1897). Charles Ives (1874-1954). Carl Ruggles (1876-1961).
(Those people in-the-know will wonder why I didn’t put the American composer David Diamond [1915-2005] on this C-level composers list. A truly wonderful composer whose Symphony No. 2 was featured in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post on May 21, 2019, David Diamond, bless him, crossed the line from being a just a curmudgeon to genuine douchebag. Sorry, but that’s just how he was.)
(Neither is Richard Wagner on my “C-level” composer list. See David Diamond, above.)
Carl Ruggles (he changed his first name from “Charles” to the German equivalent of “Carl” out of his love for things German) was of that generation of American modernists (which included his friend, Charles Ives), who were bound up in a “dissonance equals machismo” thing. Born in New England (as was Ives) in 1876, Ruggles grew up at a time when real American men weren’t professional musicians, a career considered fit only for “foreigners” and “effeminates.” The result was an overcompensating, exaggerated machismo on the part of both Ives and Ruggles, both of whom felt that purposely “pretty” music (like that of Debussy) was the compositional equivalent of a limp handshake. Instead, they each cultivated edgy, chromatic music that, in their own minds, reinforced their masculinity.…
Music History Monday: Name the Composer/Pianist
Oct 17, 2022
Name the Composer/Pianist: he was a student of Wolfgang Mozart, Antonio Salieri, Muzio Clementi, and Joseph Haydn; friend to Franz Schubert and a friend (and rival!) of Ludwig van Beethoven; and teacher of – among many others – Carl Czerny, Ferdinand Hiller, Sigismond Thalberg, and Felix Mendelssohn; in his lifetime considered one of the greats and in ours almost entirely forgotten?
With a title like that, the subject of this post better be good.
And good he was!
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837) in 1820, by Joseph Karl Stieler
We mark the death on October 17, 1837 – 185 years ago today – of the composer and pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel in the Thuringian city Weimar. Born in Pressburg (today Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia) on November 14, 1778, Hummel was 59 years old at the time of his death.
A Preliminary: What’s in a Name?
Listen, the last thing in the world I want to be accused of (okay, maybe not the last thing . . .) is name shaming: making fun of someone’s name. But let’s be serious: what sort of middle name is “Nepomuk”? And it’s not just Hummel: “Nepomuk”, a name that most certainly does not ring beatific for native English speakers, was a fairly common middle and surname among central Europeans, particularly those in Czech lands.
John of Nepomuk (circa 1345-1393), painted in Augsburg, Germany, during the late eighteenth Century
The name comes from the town of Nepomuk, in the Plzeň Region of the Czech Republic, some 60 miles southwest of Prague. The town’s claim-to-fame is as the birthplace of Saint John of Nepomuk, who was born there around 1345. John of Nepomuk earned his sainthood by defending the sanctity of the Confessional. As the story goes, he was the confessor of Queen Sophia of Bohemia, the wife of King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia (1361-1419). King Wenceslas suspected his queen of indulging in extra-marital hanky-panky and demanded that John of Nepomuk – as her confessor – spill the beans. But John refused, even under torture. On March 20, 1393, he was – we are told – thrown off the newly completed Charles Bridge (in Prague) into the Vltava River. Whether he died under torture or was drowned is unknown. Whatever; John of Nepomuk’s martyrdom in defending the sanctity of the confessional eventually earned him his sainthood (although not until March 19, 1729, when he was canonized by Pope Benedict XIII).
o the name Nepomuk became an honorable – and common – name in Czech lands.
Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837)
Hummel’s birthplace in Klobučnícka Street in Bratislava, today a Hummel Museum
Again: Hummel was born in Pressburg – as previously observed, what is now Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia – on November 14, 1778. He died in Weimar, in what today is central Germany, on October 17, 1837, where he held the position of Kapellmeister for eighteen years.
Hummel was a spectacular child prodigy as both a pianist and as a violinist. His father, Johannes, was himself a string player, conductor, and music educator, and like Leopold Mozart before him, he observed his son’s musical development with slack-jawed amazement. According to Johannes Hummel, young Johann could read music at four, play the piano and violin like a seasoned pro at five, and sing with perfect intonation. Hummel’s parents realized that Pressburg (Bratislava) could not offer their prodigious son anywhere near the musical education and experience that he required, so in 1786, when Johann was eight years old, they pulled up stakes and moved to Vienna.
It took the 8-year-old Johann Nepomuk Hummel but a few weeks to make his mark in Vienna. Soon after arriving there, he played piano for Wolfgang Mozart who, no exaggeration, flipped his gourd. Writes musicologists Joel Sachs and Mark Kroll in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians:
“Mozart was so impressed by the young prodigy that he taught him free of charge; and as was often the arrangement at the time, Hummel lived with the Mozarts and became a de facto member of the family. He played billiards with Mozart and tried out his teacher’s newest compositions, and the pair were often seen together on the streets of Vienna. While living at the Mozarts,’ Hummel also had the opportunity to meet, or at least observe, the distinguished guests who frequently visited the Mozart household during this period. These included Lorenzo da Ponte and none other than Haydn, who would sometimes come over to read through string quartets, with Mozart playing viola, Vanhal the cello and von Dittersdorf the second violin.”
Music History Monday: Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky, AKA “Vernon Duke”
Oct 10, 2022
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky/Vernon Duke (1903-1969)
We mark the birth on October 10, 1903 – 119 years ago today – of the Russian-American composer of concert music Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky. As a composer of popular music, and as a major contributor to the Great American Songbook, he is known as Vernon Duke.
The Great American Songbook
The Great American Songbook refers to neither a book nor a specific list of songs. Rather, the phrase encompasses the repertoire of American popular song, written between about 1915 and 1955 that are today collectively referred to as the “standards.” According to what should be the unimpeachable source, the “Great American Songbook Foundation”:
The “Great American Songbook” is the canon of the most important and influential American popular songs and jazz standards from the early 20th century that have stood the test of time in their life and legacy. Often referred to as “American Standards”, the songs published during the Golden Age of this genre include those popular and enduring tunes from the 1920s to the 1950s that were created for Broadway Theater, musical theater, and Hollywood musical film.”
Irving Berlin (1888–1989), circa 1935
Now, you didn’t have to be born in America to be a contributor to the Great American Songbook. In fact, some of the greatest contributors to the “Song Book” were not born in America. For example, among the “greatest” of them all was Irving Berlin (1888-1989), whose catalog as both a composer and lyricist includes not just hundreds of songs but songs that have become virtual American anthems, including: God Bless America; White Christmas; Alexander’s Ragtime Band; Cheek to Cheek; Puttin’ on the Ritz; and There’s No Business Like Show Business.
Irving Berlin was born “Israel Beilin” in the Siberian city of Tyumen, where his father was an itinerant Jewish cantor. The family emigrated to the United States when Berlin was five, arriving on Ellis Island (where they were quarantined) on September 14, 1893. Berlin grew up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and he learned his life lessons (and presumably his music, as well) on the streets and in the cafes, saloons, and restaurants of the Lower East Side.
The point: to be a recognized composer of the Great American Songbook, you don’t have to be American by birth; you just had to be living and working in America at the time you wrote your hit song (or songs) to be so included.
Vladimir Aleksandrovich Dukelsky (1903-1969)
Dukelsky was born on October 10, 1903 – 119 years ago today – in the Belorussian town of Parafianovo, near Minsk, in what was then the Russian Empire. His family was of the minor nobility, specifically the “small gentry class”, which meant they could own and hold hereditary land. (Dukelsky’s hereditary ties to the Russian “nobility” might well have been more impressive than that. According to the 1954 edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, his paternal grandmother, who was born as “Princess Tumanishvili”, was “directly descended from the kings of Georgia.” We’d observe that the most recent edition of Grove’sDictionary – in an article updated in 2010 – makes no such mention.)
Dukelsky remembered:
“My parents were well-to-do people in the sugar business. I was slated for a diplomatic career, so at age 4 I started the study of languages. But before I was 7, I was trying to compose.”
We mark the death on October 3, 1931 – 91 years ago today – of the Danish composer and violinist Carl Nielsen in Copenhagen, at the age of 66.
Nielsen had what we colloquially call “a bad ticker.” He suffered his first heart attack in 1925, when he was sixty years old. A nasty series of heart attacks put him in Copenhagen’s National Hospital (the Rigshospitalet) on October 1, 1931. He died there at 12:10 am on October 3. Surrounded by his family, his last words were:
“You are standing here as if you were waiting for something.”
(We could take those last words a variety of ways. For example, we might assume that Nielsen, suffering from delirium, was genuinely curious as to why his entire family was gathered around his bed. But knowing Nielsen as we do – he was a salty, funny, straight-shooting person and a proud family man, married to a famous sculptress and the father of five kids – we’d like to think that Nielsen went to his death cracking an ironic joke. Not quite as ironic as Chicago’s founding guitarist and vocalist Terry Kath’s last words, “Don’t worry, it’s not loaded”, but ironic enough.)
Nielsen clowning around for the camera, circa 1890
Despite the fact that Nielsen was born in 1865 and, as such, reached his compositional maturity in the musical environment of nineteenth century Romanticism, he lived and composed long enough into the twentieth century to have been influenced by the revolutionary new musical languages of the twentieth century. For example, given its musical content, Nielsen’s Symphony No. 4 of 1916 – which will be the topic of tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post – could not have been composed in, say, 1890.
Carl Nielsen was and remains the central figure in Danish music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His music, his writings, and his attitudes about music exert a decisive influence over Danish music today and have been a source of inspiration for composers across Scandinavia as well. …
Music History Monday: Béla Bartók’s American Exile
Sep 26, 2022
Béla Bartók (1881-1945) and his second wife, the pianist Ditta Pásztory (1903-1982), photographed in New York City circa 1942
We mark the death on September 26, 1945 – 77 years ago today – of the pianist, composer, and Hungarian patriot Béla Bartók. Born in what was then the Hungarian town of Nagyszentmiklós(now Sînnicolau Mare in Romania) on March 25, 1881, Bartók died – during what he called his “comfortable exile” – in New York City.
Before moving on to Bartók’s “American Exile”, let’s establish –as we can from our vantage point in 2022 – his creds as a great and influential twentieth century composer!
In 1961, 16 years after Bartók’s death, Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) – composer, conductor, and, in the words of his teacher Olivier Messiaen, thegreat insufferable one – wrote this about Bartók’s music:
“The pieces most applauded are the least good; his best products are loved in their weaker aspects. His work triumphs now through its ambiguity. Ambiguity that will surely bring him insults during future evaluation. His work has not the profound unity and novelty of Webern’s or the vigorous controlled dynamism of Stravinsky’s. His language lacks interior coherence. His name will live on in the limited ensemble of his chamber music.”
Boulez was not just wrong; he was snotty wrong.
But the degree of his “wrongness” has only became apparent in time.
You see, Boulez and the modernist community he spoke for rejected Bartók’s music because they believed he had copped out, that he had squandered his potential as a compositional radical by employing elements of folk-music, tonality, dance rhythms, and Classical era forms to create a body of music that was on occasion – heaven forbid – viscerally exciting, and, even worse, accessible: music that employed such dreary and tired things as recognizable thematic melodies and was “expressive” in an unabashedly Romantic sense. (In direct response to Stravinsky’s assertion that music, in itself, “is powerless to express anything”, Bartók wrote:
“I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.”)
The post-World War Two modernists considered Bartók to be a dinosaur, an evolutionary dead-end, a Romantic nationalist holdover who composed music during the first half of the twentieth century that was irredeemably irrelevant to the second half of the twentieth century.
Thankfully, we here in the twenty-first century know better. And it’s not just the fact that it is once again okay for “concert” music to be fun to listen to; or the fact that from a purely technical point of view, Bartók was one of the most accomplished composers ever to put pencil to paper. No, what truly makes Bartók a composer for the twenty-first century is the degree to which his music represents a synthesis nearly global in scope. His is a compositional language of purposeful diversity integrated into a singular and singularly personal musical language. Bartok’s music offers a model for one of the most pressing issues-slash-questions facing composers today: in an increasingly global culture, in which “diversity” and “variety” are not just buzzwords but real cultural descriptors, how might a composer go about incorporating and reconciling some aspects of that diversity into an integrated and personalized musical language? …
“Don’t give up your day gig.” Along with “don’t eat yellow snow” and “fake it ‘til you make it”, “don’t give up your day gig” remains one of the oldest, hoariest, clichéd pieces of advice anyone can give or receive.
But unless you were lucky/wise enough to heed the other greatest piece of advice any musician can receive, that being “marry rich”, “don’t give up your day gig” is still among the very best pieces of advice a musician can receive. Very few of us get our dream job right out of school; hell, very few of us ever get our dream job. All too rapidly, reality intrudes on youthful artistic idealism and no matter how much one wants to compose, or play violin, or sing, unless we can find someone willing to pay us to do so, we must all do something to make money. And then, as we get older and develop a taste for the finer things in life – like feeding, clothing, and housing our children – our day gigs become not just a matter of survival for ourselves but for those around us.
Chubby Checker (born Ernest Evans; October 3, 1941) circa 1961
Now, here and there and every now and then, someone gets very lucky and actually scores a career and, as a result, can give up their day gig. Such fine people are the subjects of today’s post. Let us begin, then, with our date-appropriate example.
On September 19, 1960 – 62 years ago today – Chubby Checker (born Ernest Evans; October 3, 1941) went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 Chart with his performance of the rhythm & blues song The Twist.
(For our information, on October 11, 2012, the Chubster set a “world record” in DeLand Florida. That’s when and where he sang The Twist to a crowd of some 4,000 people, who twisted along with him, breaking the previous Guinness World Record for most people twisting at once.
One wonders what the record might be for the most people doing the boogaloo?)
Young Ernest Evans was lucky enough to score what was his first major hit some 5 months before his nineteenth birthday. As a result, he was able to quit his day gig: that of a chicken plucker for a firm called “Fresh Farm Poultry”, which was located at the Italian Produce Market (or the South 9th Street Curb Market) in South Philadelphia. (For our information, though born in Spring Gully, South Carolina, Evans/Checker grew up in the projects of South Philly.)
(A great story. The naturally outgoing young Evans entertained customers at the poultry market with his singing even as he shucked ‘n’ plucked. It was his boss at the market – someone known today only as “Tony A.”, who nicknamed him “Chubby.” But even more important was the owner of “Fresh Farm Poultry”, a man named Henry Holt. Holt was so taken with Chubby and his talent that he arranged for him to make a private recording with Dick Clark, the host of Philadelphia’s own American Bandstand. It was Dick Clark’s first wife Barbara – née Mallery – that completed Chubby’s stage name. She asked him what his name was, and he replied:
“Well, my friends call me ‘Chubby.’”
“As he had just completed a Fats Domino impression, she smiled and said, ‘As in Checker?’ That little play on words [‘chubby’ describing a degree of fatness and ‘checkers’ being, like ‘dominoes’ a tabletop game] got an instant laugh, and stuck: from then on, Evans would use the name ‘Chubby Checker.’”)
To the point: after July of 1960, Earnest Evans/Chubby Checker never had to pluck another chicken (at least not for money!).
I have done some research and have discovered that Chubby Checker’s day gig was not even close to being the worst among certain popular musicians of note.…
Music History Monday: Robert and Clara, Sittin’ in a Tree…
Sep 12, 2022
Robert (1810-1856) and Clara Schumann (née Wieck, 1819-1896) in 1847
We mark the marriage on September 12, 1840 – 182 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Clara Wieck (1819-1896) to the composer and pianist Robert Schumann (1810-1856). The couple were married the day before Clara’s 21st birthday (September 13, 1840), for reasons that will be explained in detail in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post.
Not for the Timid
I ask: what are the most difficult things any person can attempt? To summit K2 and return alive? To win Olympic gold? To overcome addiction? To row solo across the Pacific? All tough things to accomplish, no doubt.
What are the scariest things anyone can do?
Swim with piranhas? Eat at a barbecue restaurant next to a cat hospital? Urinate on Mike Tyson? Scary stuff, dangerous stuff, that.
But to my mind, nothing is more soul-searingly difficult-slash terrifying than one, raising children and two, staying in a first marriage. (Okay; I’ve probably told you more about my life than I intended to, but there it is.)
Children are to people what water is to a house: children will find and reveal every flaw in your “structure” – your personality – while simultaneously sucking dry your money, patience, energy, and creative spirit like a lamprey does the innards of a trout. And yet our babies make us immortal as virtually nothing else can. The books we write, the paintings we paint, the buildings we design, and the symphonies we compose shrink to utter insignificance when compared to the life we create.
And then there are first marriages.
A typical first marriage made problematic by the youth of the bride and groom
By their nature, most first marriages are between two relatively young people, people whose lack of life experience should, in fact, disqualify them entirely from making a decision as important as getting married. But if young people didn’t get married, most babies would not be made. Which would be problematic for the survival of our species.
For better or for worse, getting married (and perpetuating the species) is not a priority for everyone, particularly for artists, who by the nature of their calling must be selfish with their time and energy. For example, the number of major composers who never married is a substantial one; whatever their domestic aspirations were vis-à-vis a mate, their needs for unrestricted independence and freedom from any external commitment precluded anything so imprisoning as a walk down the aisle. Such unmarried composers include Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), George Frederick Handel (1685-1759), Antonio Salieri (1750-1825), Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), Giacomo Rossini (1792-1868), Franz Schubert (1797-1828), Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881), Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), and George Gershwin (1898-1937).
(We’d observe that collectively, that’s a helluva fine gene pool never to have been passed on.)
Jean and Aino Sibelius; they were married for 65 years!
Now: all of this is not to say that composers don’t marry. In fact, a few notable composers would seem to have had solid first marriages, although we’d point out that they were “solid” because their wives took care of everything, allowing their composer/husbands absolute freedom to do their thing. Among such first and only marriages were those of Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) and Cécile Mendelssohn (née Jeanrenaud, 1817-1853); Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) and Carolina von Weber (née Brandt, 1794-1852); Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904) and Anna Dvořák (née Čermáková, 1854–1931); and Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) and Aino Sibelius (née Järnefelt, 1871-1969).
But unfortunately, the list of tragic or simply rotten first marriages of composers is longer than the list of good first marriages. A lot longer.…
We mark the premiere on September 5, 1913 – 109 years ago today – of Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Prokofiev (1891-1953) composed the piece while still a student at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory; it was completed in April of 1913. (For our information, Prokofiev still had another year to go at the Conservatory; he didn’t graduate until May of 1914.)
The concerto received its premiere – 109 years ago today – at the Vauxhall at Pavlovsk, Pavlovsk being a sprawling Imperial palace, park, garden, and summertime concert venue some 19 miles south of St. Petersburg. The orchestra was conducted by Alexander Aslanov, who for many years led the summer concert series there at Pavlovsk. The piano solo – with its spectacularly difficult piano part – was performed by the then 22-year-old Prokofiev himself.
That premiere performance provoked quite an uproar from the audience. That uproar will be discussed at length in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post, which will be built around Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 2.
For now, we are going to talk about what happened to the actual score of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. But first, some historical background without which there would be no context for the fire that is, along with Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, the subject of today’s post.
Petrograd/Saint Petersburg on March 8, 1917: the Russian Revolution begins
Petrograd/St. Petersburg in 1917
For the residents of what was then the capital city of the Russian Empire, Petrograd (better known as “St. Petersburg”), the year 1917 was a dangerous, passionate, heady, exhilarating, and ultimately tragic year.
In was in March of 1917 that the horrific and ongoing sins of the Russian government under Tzar Nicholas II finally and forever came home to roost. At war since July 1914, the Tsarist government had shown itself to be utterly inept and corrupt, incapable of supplying adequate arms and food to its soldiers who died by the millions, often forcing peasant conscripts into battle against the Austrian/German enemy without rifles. On March 8, 1917, food riots broke out in Petrograd. Troops were called out, but they refused to fire on the rioters. Instead, by the hundreds, they themselves mutinied and joined the rioters.
It was anarchy.
Seven days later – on March 15, 1917 – Tsar Nicholas abdicated his throne, bringing to an end 304 years of Romanov family rule.
The New York Times, March 16, 1917
On March 17, 1917, two days after Nicholas’ abdication, Russia became a republic ruled by a temporary, or “Provisional” Government. Sadly (and not for the last time), Russia’s brief flirtation with a republican government was not to last. The Provisional Government was, from day one, fatally flawed: it was far too moderate and far too closely associated with the Tsarist regime to be taken seriously by such far-left Marxist Socialist parties as the Bolsheviks, the Mensheviks, and the Social Revolutionists.
On April 16, 1917, Vladimir Lenin (born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, 1870-1924) and his Bolshevik homies rode into town. Lenin had been in “exile” in Zurich, Switzerland. In what turned out to be a foreign policy triumph, the German government facilitated Lenin’s return to Russia, believing that his presence in Saint Petersburg (then the capital of the Russian Empire) would further destabilize Russia and help bring the war in the East to its conclusion. Which is exactly what happened.
Promising the soldiers, peasants, and workers “peace, land, and bread” the Bolsheviks quietly consolidated their power.
On the night of November 6-7, 1917, Lenin and his Bolsheviks made their move: they took over the telephone switchboards, the railway stations, and electric plants in Petrograd. The cruiser Aurora trained its guns on the Winter Palace, headquarters of the Provisional Government. A quickly assembled “Congress of Soviets” declared the Provisional Government dead as dial up and created in its place a “Council of People’s Commissars”, with Vladimir Lenin at its head. Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was named commissar of foreign affairs, and the 38-year-old Joseph Stalin (1878-1953) became the commissar for nationalities.
All of these events were witnessed by an increasingly agitated (perhaps even an increasingly freaked-out?) Sergei Prokofiev.…
Charlie Parker (1920-1955) performing at the Three Deuces in New York City in 1947
We mark the birth on August 29, 1920 – 102 years ago today – of the alto saxophonist and composer Charlie Parker. The trumpet player (and one-time member of Charlie Parker’s quintet) Miles Davis (1926-1991) famously said:
“You can tell the history of jazz in four words: Louis Armstrong. Charlie Parker.”
Miles Davis never minced words, and he does not mince them here. Along with Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker was (and remains) the most innovative, influential, and technically brilliant jazz musician to have yet lived.
However, before moving on to Parker, we have one other piece of date-related musical business.
I know, I know: I am most aware that having broached the subject of Charlie Parker, it behooves us – out of awe and respect – to get on with his story. But along with Parker’s birth, one other event occurred on this date that demands – demands! – our attention. So please, allow me this brief excursion.
On this Day in Music History Stupid
The New York Post, August 29, 1977
On August 29, 1977 – 45 years ago today – three people were arrested in Memphis after trying to steal Elvis Presley’s body. (The New York Post headline pictured above indicates that four people were arrested for the attempted heist, but this is incorrect.)
As I think we all know (or should know, at least), Elvis died while sitting on the toilet of his mansion in Memphis – “Graceland” – on Tuesday, August 16. He was laid to rest at Memphis’ Forest Hill Cemetery in a huge, flower-strewn mausoleum two days later, on August 18, 1977.
On August 29, 11 days after Presley’s interment, the following appeared in The New York Times:
“Early this morning three men entered the cemetery over a back wall and made their way toward the white marble mausoleum. The men apparently became suspicious and turned to leave, the police said. They were then arrested. No charges were filed immediately against the men, and the police refused to identify them.”
The men had broken into the cemetery – presumably – to steal Elvis Presley’s corpse.
We should all be struck by two bits of information in that brief report in The New York Times. One, that the “men apparently became suspicious and turned to leave.” Suspicious of what, we rightly ask? And two, why weren’t they charged or identified? (FYI: they were never identified.)
These questions were not answered definitively until 2002, 25 years after the purported grave-robbery-gone-wrong had occurred.
Here’s the story!
Immediately after Elvis’ death, his family requested that he be allowed to be buried on the grounds of his “Graceland” estate. But the Memphis Board of Health said no. Whispered inquiries were made; money changed hands; and a Shelby County Deputy named Bill Talley was hired by the Presley family to stage a fake corpse-snatch. The hoax achieved precisely what it was intended to achieve: it convinced Shelby County officials and the Memphis Board of Health that the body of Elvis Presley and, for that matter, the corpse of his mother Gladys be moved to Graceland for security reasons.
On Oct. 3, 1977, Elvis’ and his mother’s coffins were moved to Graceland. Two years later, Elvis’ father Vernon died and was buried next to his wife and son. The so-called “meditation garden” where the family rests today is an absolutely must-see on any visit to Graceland.…
We celebrate the birth on August 22, 1862 – 160 years ago today – of the French composer and pianist Claude Debussy. Born in the Paris suburb of St. Germain-en-Laye, he died in Paris on March 25, 1918, at the age of 55.
Let’s tell it like it is: Monsieur Debussy was one of the great ones. For all of its sensual beauty – and Debussy did indeed compose some of the most gorgeous music ever written – his music is among the most original, revolutionary, and influential ever composed. At a time when young composers like Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and Béla Bartók (1881-1945) were casting about for new musical models, it was Debussy’s music that became their essential inspiration. Along with Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) Debussy was the most influential composer of the twentieth century.
Among the radical triumvirate of Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky, it was Debussy who was the “breakout” composer, the first composer to cultivate a musical language that broke free of the melodic and harmonic traditions of tonality, traditions that had governed Western music since the fifteenth century. That the musical revolution started in France is most significant, for reasons to be discussed in a moment.
Our Game Plan
Here’s how we are going to approach our celebration of Debussy and his remarkable music. Today’s Music History Monday post will be dedicated to understanding the anti-German origins of his distinctly French musical revolution and we’ll start to get know Debussy as a person. In tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post, we will pick up from where we leave off today and then we’ll tackle Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (of 1894) and his 12 Études for piano (of 1915), for which I will recommend recordings.
France
France and Germany: uneasy neighbors
According to the musicologist Arthur Locke writing in the Musical Quarterly in April 1920:
“German tendencies both in music and literature strongly affected the course of the romantic movement in France.”
Merci, Professor Locke; I needed someone else to say that because, for your average Francophile, it is heresy to even imply that the French turned to German models for anything! But it is true that for the first 70 years of the nineteenth century, many French composers looked to Germany for their inspiration. For example, the French Romantic Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) bemoaned the state of music and opera in France and Italy and looked to Germany for his inspiration. And it’s no overstatement to say that in the 1850s and 1860s, young French composers were as addicted to the music dramas of Richard Wagner as they were to claret, cigarettes, and to arguing with one another.
But that all changed in 1870, a year that would haunt Europe well into the twentieth century.
1870 was the year that the issue and conflict that would upend Europe for the next 75 years began. The issue was the unification of Germany, and the conflict was the Franco-Prussian War between France and Germany.…
Music History Monday: Woodstock: A Triumph of Locational Branding!
Aug 15, 2022
We mark the opening of the so-called “Woodstock Festival” on August 15, 1969 – 53 years ago today – “so-called” for the following reasons.
“Woodstock.” Even without considering the original festival that bears its name, “Woodstock”, as a placename has a homey, countryside-like quality to it. And a beautiful, quaint town it is, with a population – in 1970 – of 5714 people (it’s just about the same today). Eighty-eight miles north of New York City, within the borders of the Catskill Mountains Park, Woodstock has been a hub for musicians, writers, artists, and actors going back to the 1940s.
The Band at home in Woodstock, 1968: Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, and Levon Helm
(Even a short list of just the musicians associated with Woodstock should make our saliva run down our chins. That short list includes The Band [the members of which shared a house and two of whom – Rick Danko and Levon Helm – are buried in Woodstock Cemetery], Carla Bley, David Bowie, Jimmy Cobb, Henry Cowell, Jack DeJohnette, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Pat Metheny, Charlie Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Van Morrison, Pauline Oliveros, Graham Parker, Bonnie Raitt, Sonny Rollins, Todd Rundgren, David Sandborn, Carlos Santana, and Peter Schickele [“P.D.Q. Bach” his very self!])
Woodstock Festival co-creator principal producer, Michael Lange (1944-2022) at center, during the festival
The festival was created by an operation called “Woodstock Ventures”, which was run by three producers – Michael Lang, Artie Kornfeld, and Joel Rosenman – and one money man, John Roberts, who bankrolled the operation. The original plan was to hold the festival in Woodstock, NY, where it would bask in the reflected glory of the town’s storied artistic reputation. But the locals nixed the idea almost immediately; they had zero interest in hosting what was then projected to be 50,000 assorted rock ‘n’ rollers/hippies/druggies in what was their backyard. Organizers Joel Rosenman and John Roberts then came upon a 300-acre site at Mills Industrial Park in the town of Wallkill, New York, some 40 miles south of Woodstock. Woodstock Ventures leased the site for $10,000 (roughly $80,000 today) in the Spring of 1969. But the Wallkill Town Council was no happier about hosting the festival than had been the good people of Woodstock, and it created a byzantine permitting process that made the festival an impossibility.
As the projected date of the festival approached and a venue had yet been secured, we would imagine that a lot of hair was ripped and clothing rent from the heads and bodies of Messrs. Lang, Kornfeld, Rosenman, and Roberts.…
Music History Monday: Abbey Road, and This and That
Aug 08, 2022
August 8 is a great day, a signal day, an epic day for both good and bad reasons in the history of popular, rock, and jazz music. We’d observe a few of today’s date-related events before moving on to our featured story.
First, with heads respectfully bowed, we would note some of those who have passed away on this date.
Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five: standing left to right: Johnny St. Cyr (1890-1966; banjo and guitar); Edward “Kid Ory” (1886-1973; trombone); Louis Armstrong (1901-1971; trumpet, cornet, vocals) Johnny Dodds (1892-1940; clarinet, alto saxophone); Lil Hardin Armstrong (1898-1971, piano); circa 1925
On August 8, 1940 – 82 years ago today – the jazz clarinetist and alto saxophonist Johnny Dodds died of a heart attack in Chicago, all-too-young at the age of 48. I have known Dodds’ wonderful, blues-inspired playing since I was a teenager, because that’s when I fell under the spell of two of the greatest jazz ensembles of all time: Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven, groups in which Dodds played and recorded. I wrote about Armstrong’s Hot Five and Hot Seven in Dr. Bob Prescribes on July 7, 2020.
The Miles Davis Sextet recording Kind of Blue in 1959; left-to-right Bill Evans (1929-1980), Miles Davis (1926-1991), Cannonball Adderley (1928-1975), and John Coltrane (1926-1967); not in photo: bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Jimmy Cobb
On this date in 1975 – 47 years ago today – the jazz alto saxophonist and bandleader Julian Edwin “Cannonball” Adderley also died all-too-young at the age of 46 in Gary Indiana, from a stroke. Talk about being a member of an all-time great band and making all-time great recordings: Adderley signed on with the Miles Davis band in October 1957, which eventually also included Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. This Miles Davis Sextet recorded an album entitled Kind of Blue (in 1959). Kind of Blue remains (and will always remain!) among the most important recordings in jazz history. It will be the subject of tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post.
Barbara Cook (1927-2017) as Ado Annie in the 1953 Broadway revival of Oklahoma!
On August 8, 2017 – 5 years ago today – the American musical theater singer and actress Barbara Cook died at the age of 89, in New York City. Blessed with a gorgeous, clear-as-a-bell lyric soprano voice, Cook was one of the outstanding interpreters of the songs of The Great American Songbook. She was also one of those special Broadway performers who was totally dissed by the movie industry. Despite having won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Marian, the librarian, in The Music Man (which opened in 1957), she was bypassed for the role in the movie version (of 1962), which was given, instead, to the lesser but more “bankable” singer/actor Shirley Jones (born 1934).
Glen Campbell (1936-2017) in 1967
Glen Campbell also died on this date in 2017, he at the age of 81, in Nashville, Tennessee. In the 1960s and 1970s, Glen Campbell was everywhere, the Renaissance man of the American entertainment industry. He was a Grammy Award-winning, Academy Award and Golden Globe-nominated actor and country-pop singer, whose hits included By The Time I Get to Phoenix; Wichita Lineman; Rhinestone Cowboy; and Gentle on My Mind. He was a highly sought after session guitarist who recorded with The Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, The Monkees, and Phil Specter. He was a television personality: from 1969 to 1972 he hosted his own, weekly variety show, The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour (the comedy writers on that show included Steve Martin and Rob Reiner!). As an actor, he co-starred with John Wayne and Kim Darby in True Grit (1969; a movie for which John Wayne – in the role of Rooster Cogburn – received his one-and-only Oscar, for Best Actor). …
Music History Monday: The Wayward Bach, His Wayward Daughter, and the Bachs of Oklahoma
Aug 01, 2022
Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (1710-1784) circa 1760, oil on canvas by Wilhelm Weitsch
We mark the death on August 1, 1784 – 238 years ago today – of the German composer and organist Wilhelm Friedemann Bach in Berlin at the age of 73. Born in the central German city of Weimar on November 22, 1710, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who from here on we will refer to as Friedemann Bach, was the second child and first son of Johann Sebastian Bach (who from this point forward we will refer to as Sebastian Bach).
Friedemann Bach was a gifted musician, the equal (in my opinion) to his more famous brothers Carl Philip Emanual and Johann Christian Bach. But unlike his brothers, Friedemann harbored personal demons that poisoned his relationships with others and led to his financial ruin later in his life. We’ll discuss these issues in detail in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post, as well as the singular disaster Friedemann’s poverty eventually wrought, when he chose to the sell off so many of his father’s precious musical manuscripts, which were then lost for all time.
For the remainder of this post, we’re going to shift our focus to Friedemann Bach’s only surviving child, his daughter Friederica Sophia, who was born in the Saxon city of Halle (today in central Germany) on February 27, 1757.
On the Move
On May 29, 1746, Friedemann Bach took up the position of organist at the Liebfrauenkirche in Halle. On February 25, 1751, the 40-year-old Bach married Dorothea Elisabeth Georgi (1725–1791). Though the couple eventually had three children, only one survived her infancy. Her name was Friederica Sophia Bach.
After unsuccessfully trying to find a new job for many years, Friedemann walked off his job in Halle in 1771, with no new prospects of employment. After kicking around Germany for three years, the family settled in Berlin in 1774, where Friedemann lived in increasing poverty and abject bitterness until his death on August 1, 1784, 238 years ago today.…
Music History Monday: Under the Covers
Jul 25, 2022
Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton (1926-1984)
We mark the death on July 25, 1984 – 38 years ago today – of the American Rhythm and Blues singer Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton. Born on December 11, 1926, she died in Los Angeles of both heart and liver disease brought on by alcohol abuse. According to Gillian Gaar, writing in She’s a Rebel: The History of Women in Rock & Roll (Seal Press, 1992), during the brief period of her final illness, Thornton went from 450 pounds (Big Momma!) to 95 pounds, a weight loss of some 355 pounds.
Thornton scored her one-and-only hit when, on August 13, 1952, she recorded a brand-new, 12-bar blues song by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller entitled Hound Dog.
Released by Peacock Records in February 1953, Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog sold over 500,000 copies and spent fourteen weeks on the Rhythm and Blues charts, seven of those fourteen weeks at number one. Thornton’s recording is linked below:
(By the way: please ignore the photo of Josephine Baker at the top of the link; Big Momma’s left leg was bigger than all of Madame Baker.)
Thornton’s recording of Hound Dog was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2013 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame lists it as one of the “500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.”
For our information, Big Mamma Thornton made a total of $100 from the recording.
Since Thornton made that first recording, Hound Dog has been recorded over 250 times. But by far the best-known version was recorded in July 1956 by the King himself, Elvis Presley (1935-1977). Presley’s version of Hound Dog sold over 10 million copies across the globe, making it Elvis’ best-selling record and one of the best-selling records of all time. In 1956, it sat at number one on Billboard magazine’s pop chart for 11 consecutive weeks, a record that stood for 36 years: until 1992-1993, when Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You spent 14 weeks at number one.…
Music History Monday: A Debussy Discovery!
Jul 18, 2022
The Dead Sea
Before getting into the date specific event/discovery that drives today’s post, permit me, please, to tell the story of the greatest manuscript discovery of all time.
The ancient city of Jerusalem sits at nearly 2,700 feet above sea level. Less than 15 miles south of Jerusalem sits the Dead Sea, which at 1,300 feet below sea level is the lowest point on earth.
Two of the three Bedouin shepherds who discovered the scrolls: Jum’a Muhammad, left, and Muhammad edh-Dhib, right
In November of 1946, three Bedouin shepherds – Muhammed edh-Dhib, his cousin Jum’a Muhammed, and his friend Khalil Musa – were looking for a stray goat (or sheep; the story shifts) around the cliffs at the northern end of the Dead Sea. According to the story they told, Muhammed edh-Dhib threw a rock into a cave on the side of a cliff, thinking the stray animal was inside and that the rock would chase it out. Instead of a hearing a frightened bleat, he heard pottery breaking. Lowering himself into the cave, he found three ancient scrolls wrapped in linen. Having climbed out of the cave and shown them to his companions, the guys went back into the cave and found four more scrolls, seven in all. They put them in a bag and, on returning to their camp, hung the bag on a tent pole.
It is believed that among the three scrolls Muhammed edh-Dhib initially removed from the cave was the Great Isaiah Scroll, the oldest complete biblical manuscript ever discovered.
Muhammed edh-Dhib, Jum’a Muhammed, and Khalil Musa initially brought the scrolls to a Bethlehem-based dealer in antiquities named Ibrahim ‘Ijha, who told them that they were worthless. Undaunted, the trio eventually found a buyer and sold four of the seven scrolls – including the Great Isaiah Scroll – to the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Jerusalem, Metropolitan Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, for roughly $250; about $2,500 today.…
On November 29, 1947 – roughly a year after the scrolls were discovered and on the same day the United Nations voted to create the State of Israel – a Jewish archeology professor at Hebrew University named Eleazar Lipa Sukenik (1889-1953) bought the other three scrolls in Bethlehem. He took the bus back to Jerusalem, carry the scrolls in a paper shopping bag.
In his effort to sell his four scrolls, Metropolitan Samuel placed an ad in The Wall Street Journal on June 1, 1954. The ad read:
“Miscellaneous for Sale. ‘The Four Dead Sea Scrolls.’ Biblical manuscripts dating back to at least 200 BC are for sale. This would be an ideal gift to an educational or religious institution by an individual or group. Box F 206, The Wall Street Journal.”
After extended negotiations held at New York City’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, those four remaining scrolls were purchased on behalf of the State of Israel for $250,000 (roughly $2,500,000 today) by the Hebrew University professor Benjamin Mazar (1906-1995) and the son of Eleazar Sukenik: the Israeli soldier, politician, and archaeologist Yigael Yadin (1917-1984).
Those seven scrolls found by three Bedouin shepherds that day in November 1946 – the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls to be found, and today owned (and treasured) by the State of Israel – collectively comprise the single greatest manuscript discovery of all time.
I have offered up this extraordinary story because, after The Dead Sea Scrolls, any subsequent “discovery” of a manuscript or manuscripts seems rather, well, less significant.
Nevertheless.
Claude Debussy (1862-1918) in 1908
On July 18, 2003 – 19 years ago today – a newly discovered work by the great French composer Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was publicly performed for the first time by the French pianist Jean-Pierre Armengaud (born 1943). That premiere performance took place in a church on the Swedish island of Blidö.
That newly discovered work, for piano solo, is entitled Les Soirs illumines par l’ardeur du charbon, which translates as “the evenings lighted by the glow of the coals.” The title is the first line of the second stanza of a poem by Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) entitled “The Balcony.” As titles go Debussy’s is a great one, as it describes not just the glowing warmth of the music itself but the inspiration for its composition and the person to whom, in spirit, it was dedicated! …
Music History Monday: The Death of George Gershwin
Jul 11, 2022
George Gershwin (1898-1937) photographed by Carl Van Vechten on March 28, 1937, 3½ months before his death
We mark the death on July 11, 1937 – 85 years ago today – of the American composer and pianist George Gershwin, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Born in Brooklyn New York on September 26, 1898, Gershwin was only 38 years old at the time of his death.
This is going to be an unavoidably depressing post. Dealing with anyone’s death is difficult. Dealing with the death of a young person (and damn, from where I stand, 38 is still a kid) is both difficult and tragic. When we add to that Gershwin’s dazzling talent and unlimited promise we are forced, as well, to ask “what if . . .?”
George Gershwin (1898-1937)
George Gershwin had it all. Tall, athletic, good-looking (in his own lantern-jawed sort of way), he was blessed with preternatural talent. As someone who had grown up poor on the streets of New York City, he was devoid of snobbery or pretense and could get along with just about anyone. He suffered no childhood trauma; he adored and was adored by his family and friends and was filled with vitality and an infectious joie de vivre. We are told that given his gifts and effusive personality, he would have inspired envy (and perhaps even dislike!) had not been such a genuinely sweet, ingratiating, affectionate man.
He had serious and lasting relationships with women but never married. The bachelor’s life suited him just fine, and he lived a life that we all might envy. An international jetsetter long before the invention of jet aircraft, he partied and performed; was feted and fawned over; and he ate, drank, smoked his cigars, played tennis, composed, and made love across the Americas and Europe at a time – the 1930s – when most people were doing their best to simply survive the Depression. …
Music History Monday: As American as tarte aux pommes! Celebrating the Fourth with some Real American Music! or Tampering with National Property
Jul 04, 2022
We mark the completion on July 4, 1941 – 81 years ago today – of Igor Stravinsky’s reharmonization and orchestration of The Star-Spangled Banner.
Stravinsky in America
In September of 1939, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) and his long-time mistress Vera de Bosset (1889-1982) arrived in the United States from their home in Paris. The couple were married in Bedford, Massachusetts six months later, on March 9, 1940.
Stravinsky had come to the United States to spend the 1939-1940 academic year at Harvard University, where he was to occupy the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry and deliver six lectures on music that were that year’s Charles Eliot Norton Lectures.
By the time the academic year ended in June of 1940, the Stravinskys, Igor and Vera, had no home to return to. Nazi Germany had occupied Paris on June 14, and France surrendered to Germany 8 days later, on June 22, 1940.
The couple settled in Los Angeles in 1941 and bought a house at 1260 North Wetherly Drive, just above the Sunset Strip, in Hollywood. Stravinsky and Vera would live there for the next 29 years, until his final illness forced a move to New York City. (For our information, Igor and Vera became American citizens in 1945; their sponsor was Stravinsky’s friend, the actor Edward G. Robinson.)
In Los Angeles and in America, Stravinsky was a star among stars; a big fish in a big pond. Having settled in LA, he made his fortune touring as a conductor of his own music. At the time, like so many American sporting events to this day, an orchestral concert in the United States began with a rendition of the national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner.
(At the time Stravinsky settled in the United States in 1940, The Star-Spangled Banner was the newly-minted national anthem, having been officially designated the national anthem of the United States by congressional resolution on March 3, 1931. [For those who’d like to look it up, it is 46 Stat. 150; Pub. Law 71-823.])
Rather predictably, Stravinsky didn’t like any of the available orchestra arrangements of The Star-Spangled Banner, so in the great American spirit of DIY – when in doubt, do it yourself – he made his own arrangement, finishing it – coincidentally – on July 4, 1941, 81 years ago today.
Speaking for myself, I can take-or-leave Stravinsky’s arrangement. In an attempt to make the anthem more interesting, he changes the harmony on pretty much every beat, overwriting in the process and creating, what is to my ear, a rather clunky and ungainly arrangement. Most listeners won’t be in the least bothered by what I’m talking about with the exception of one harmony, a “it-sticks-out-like-a-sore-thumb”, “what’s-that-doing-there?” Bb dominant seventh chord at 01:30 of the linked performance:
Music History Monday: The Fabulous Hill Sisters!
Jun 27, 2022
Humiliation
Before getting to the anniversary we are honoring in today’s Music History Monday post, it is necessary for us to contemplate the painful issue of humiliation.
“Humiliation” is a consequence of unjustified shaming, as a result of which one’s social status, public image, and self-esteem are decreased, often quite significantly.
Humiliation hurts; humiliation sucks.
We are not, for now, going to discuss the seemingly countless ways we can (and have! and will!) be humiliated. Let us instead – for now – observe the difference between spontaneous humiliation and ritual humiliation.
“Spontaneous” humiliations would be those unexpected moments of shaming, bullying, rejection, or deep embarrassment that come out of nowhere and have the emotional and physical impact of a punch to the gut.
“Ritual” humiliations are different, in that we know exactly what’s coming but are powerless to stop them. Ostracism and its attendant processes – excommunication, shunning, and blackballing, whereby someone is purposely excluded from a community – is a form of ritual humiliation. “Hazing rituals” are another: those activities that purposely humiliate, degrade, and even risk physical harm to someone wanting to join a group or maintain status within a group.
Please, God, find me a hole to crawl into . . .
Then, there is – for me – that most horrific of all ritual humiliations. That would be the public singing of Happy Birthday by a restaurant’s waitstaff as they deliver to my cringing self a melting piece of lava cake with a lone, crooked candle sputtering atop. (Some would say that such moments are merely an “embarrassment.” But I would observe that embarrassment is fleeting and for me, such Happy Birthday moments scar.)
At such times as these, I imagine my fist raised in defiance and bitterness to Mildred Jane Hill, who wrote the music for the song Happy Birthday to You in 1893.
On To Business
Mildred Jane Hill (1859-1916)
We mark the birth on June 27, 1859 – 163 years ago today – of the American songwriter, composer, organist, pianist, and musicologist Mildred Jane Hill, in Louisville, Kentucky. She died on June 5, 1916, in Chicago, three weeks shy of her 57th birthday.
Mildred Hill was the eldest of three sisters: after her came Patty (1868-1946) and then Jessica.
Mildred Hill was a professional musician of real accomplishment. Along with teaching and performing, she was a songwriter and composer of some reputation. She was also a serious student and scholar of Negro Spirituals. Under the pen name of “Johann Tonsor”, she wrote extensively on the subject of Black American music. In 1892, she wrote an article called “Negro Music” that, as it turned out, had no small impact on the history of Western music! Dvořák scholar and musicologist Michael Beckerman writes:
“In December 1892, [the journalist James Gibbons] Huneker appeared at [Antonin] Dvořák’s apartment on 17th Street in Manhattan. [Dvořák had arrived in the United States in September 1892 to take up the Directorship of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City.] Huneker had with him, as he later stated, a copy of an article that he thought might interest the composer. Titled ‘Negro Music’ and written by one Johann Tonsor [a.k.a. Mildred Hill] of Louisville, Ky., it had just been published in an exciting new journal called Music and was nothing less than a manifesto. ‘When our American musical Messiah sees fit to be born,’ it read, ‘he will then find ready to his hand a mass of lyrical and dramatic themes with which to construct a distinctively American music. Dvořák sat down and read the article, with its six musical examples. We know this because [Dvořák’s] copy made its way to the Dvořák Museum in Prague with the words ‘I love you Daddy’ written upside down in the margin, letting us imagine that as Dvořák was engrossed in the article, his young son tried to get his attention. Within days [after having read the article], Dvořák was making the sketches that formed the basis of both the ‘New World’ Symphony and his American style in general.”
Music History Monday: Fyodor Ignatyevich Stravinsky
Jun 20, 2022
Fyodor Ignatyevich Stravinsky (1843-1902) in 1887
We mark the birth on June 20, 1843 – 179 years ago today – of the Russia bass opera singer Fyodor Ignatyevich Stravinsky, in the city of Minsk, which is today the capital of Belarus but was then part of the Russian Empire. Considered one of the greatest singers of his time, Fyodor Ignatyevich has largely been forgotten because, one, he never recorded and, two, he’s been eclipsed by the fame of his son, the composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971).
He was born of Polish descent in the “Government (province) of Minsk”, in what had been part of Poland until 1793, when the Russian Empire sliced off and annexed a large chunk of Poland in what is euphemistically called the “second partition of Poland.” (Today, the “province of Minsk” is part of the “nation” of Belarus, which is advised to mind its P’s and Q’s, as Tsar Putin no more considers Belarus to be separate country than he does Ukraine. Not that you need me to point this out, but I’ll do it anyway: the “annexation” of Crimea in 2014 and the present attempts to destroy Ukraine and annex the Donbas demonstrate that Russian actions towards its neighbors have not changed a whit in hundreds of years: invade, occupy, and annex; invade, occupy, and annex; repeat as necessary until the desired result has been achieved.)
In 1959, Igor Stravinsky explained the origin of his family’s name:
“‘Stravinsky’ comes from ‘Strava’, the name of a small river, tributary to the Vistula, in eastern Poland. We were originally called Soulima-Stravinsky – Soulima being the name of another Vistula branch – but when Russia annexed this part of Poland the Soulima was for some reason dropped.”
Fyodor Stravinsky grew up and attended gimnaziya (grammar school) in the formerly Polish city of Nezhin. (For our information, Nezhin is today located in Ukraine. 72 miles northeast of Kyiv, it has been badly damaged by rocket attacks during Putin’s invasion.) As a student, Fyodor Stravinsky sang as an amateur, first in choirs and then as a soloist. Although he attended law school and had a career as a civil servant ahead of him, his abilities as a singer convinced him to take a shot at making a career of it. In 1869, at the rather advanced age of 26, he enrolled at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. On graduating in 1873, he sang the role of Don Basilio in a student performance of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. Critics were in attendance, and they were impressed.
He was immediately engaged by the Kyiv Opera Theater in Ukraine, where he made his professional debut on September 3, 1873, in the role of Count Rodolpho in Vincenzo Bellini’s La sonnambula (composed in 1831).
And that was that: Fyodor Ignatyevich Stravinsky became an up-and-coming star in a country where audiences worshipped (not too strong a word) bass singers like himself. …
Music History Monday: The Ultimate Fanboy: The Mad King, Ludwig II
Jun 13, 2022
King of Bavaria Ludwig II (Ludwig Otto Friedrich Wilhelm; 1845-1886), circa 1864
We mark the death (the most suspicious death) on June 13, 1886 – 136 years ago today – of the ultimate Richard Wagner fanboy King Ludwig II of Bavaria.
The Running Man
Richard Wagner was among the least-athletic looking people to ever grace a composing studio or a conductor’s podium. Depending upon the source, he was between 5’ 3” and 5’ 5” in heights. His legs were too short for his torso, and his oversized square head was perched on an otherwise frail body. In his lifetime, an unknown wag referred to him as “that shovel-faced dwarf”, an unkind if not inaccurate description of the man.
But despite his physical shortcomings, Wagner – believe it or not – could run like the wind for remarkable distances. These miracles of sustained athleticism were inspired by Wagner’s creditors and/or the law, from which Wagner was forced to flee on a regular basis.
For example, in April of 1836, following the failure of his opera Das Liebesverbot (“The Ban on Love”; for your information, my spell check just tried to change “liebesverbot” to “lobster pot”).Again: in April of 1836, following the failure of his opera Das Liebesverbot in the central German city of Magdeburg, a warrant was issued for Wagner’s arrest due to his debts. The 23-year-old Wagner ran away so fast that he left his shadow in the dust, and he didn’t stop running until he arrived in Königsberg, today Kaliningrad, Russia, a distance as the crow flies of 654 kilometers (or 406 miles).
That’s an impressive dash.
Three years later, on July 9, 1839, with his passport having been confiscated to keep him from running off, the 26-year-old Wagner nevertheless bolted from the Latvian capital of Riga, just minutes ahead of a posse of creditors who had tracked him down. He didn’t stop running until he arrived in London, by his own account without a penny to his name, 3½ weeks later.
1849 saw Wagner living and working in the Saxon capital of Dresden. Having gotten mixed up with a revolutionary group, a warrant was issued for his arrest by the Dresden police on May 16, 1849. He was charged with treason, which carried the death penalty. The now 36-year-old Wagner ran and didn’t stop running until he’d crossed the border from Germany to Switzerland.
(For our information: among the many things Wagner left behind in Germany was yet another mountain of debt, an estimated 20,000 thalers in debt. This for a guy whose salary at Dresden was 1,500 thalers a year. It’s the equivalent of someone today making $150,000 a year running up two million dollars’ worth of credit card debt. Astonishing.)
In sum: you can keep your Usain Bolt: Richard Wagner could run!…
Music History Monday: Siegfried Wagner
Jun 06, 2022
Siegfried Wagner (1869-1930)
We mark the birth of Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried Wagner on June 6, 1869 – 163 years ago today – in Lucerne, Switzerland. Like the sons of so many great men groomed to follow in their fathers’ footsteps, he could never hope to measure up to or escape from his father’s shadow.
Cliché
We contemplate, for a moment, this thing called a “cliché.”
Strictly defined, a cliché is:
“an element of an artistic work, saying, or idea that has become overused to the point of losing its original meaning or effect, even to the point of being trite or irritating, especially when at some earlier time it was considered meaningful or novel.”
Granted. But clichés didn’t become the tiresome, oft-repeated, over-used devices that – by definition – they are without carrying within them a kernel of truth. Admittedly, some clichés express stereotypes that may (or may not) be true, but the vast majority of them are analogies that do indeed express truisms. In fact, when it comes to expressing a truism succinctly, nothing succeeds more quickly that a cliché.
For example:
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
(Parenthetically, some folks would tell us that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” is an idiom. But they’d be wrong. An idiom is figurative: a phrase that cannot be literally understood; for example, “getting cold feet” or “I smell a rat.” However, overuse an idiom and it becomes a cliché.)
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
Long before we understood the science of genetic inheritance, we understood the existence of the commonalities between parents and their children: physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual commonalities. “The apple” – an offspring – “doesn’t fall far the tree”: the parents.
Here’s another cliché:
“Like father, like son”; or “like mother, like daughter.”
Mothers and daughters; fathers and sons. On one hand, as teenagers, we spend no small percentage of our time rejecting our parents as we seek to define ourselves as independent, self-aware, pre-adults. But heaven help us, we can no more escape our parents’ influence than we can our own shadows.
Now, speaking of fathers and sons.
In the “olden days” – before the mid-nineteenth century, give-or-take – it was a given that lower, working, and middle-class sons, particularly first sons, would follow into their fathers’ trades, for which they were groomed from the earliest age. Farmers begat farmers; blacksmiths begat blacksmiths; merchants begat merchants, and so forth.
Despite this patrilinear profession track, sheer talent often demanded that a gifted child receive a musical education. This was the case for George Frederick Handel (1685-1759), whose father was an eminent barber-surgeon (one wonders in which profession he was the most eminent). It was the case for Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), whose father was a wheelwright; for Franz Schubert (1797-1828) and Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), whose fathers were schoolteachers; for Robert Schumann, whose father was a bookseller and writer; and for Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904), whose father was a butcher (young Dvořák himself served as a butcher’s apprentice until the age of 13).…
Music History Monday: Benjamin Britten War Requiem
May 30, 2022
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) taking tea during the rehearsals of his War Requiem at Coventry Cathedral, in Coventry, England, May 1962
We mark the premiere performance on May 30, 1962 – 60 years ago today – of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. Completed in early 1962, the War Requiem was commissioned to mark the consecration of the “new” Coventry Cathedral, which was built to replace the original fourteenth century cathedral that had been destroyed on the evening and night of November 14 and 15, 1940.
Today’s post will deal entirely with the events that led up to the composition of Britten’s War Requiem: the destruction of Coventry’s Cathedral of St. Michael, the extraordinary spirit of forgiveness and redemption that came to be identified with its ruins, and the New Cathedral that was built between 1956 and 1962. We cannot appreciate the meaning and spirit of Britten’s War Requiem unless we first come to grips with the meaning and spirit of the destruction and rebirth of Coventry Cathedral. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will get into the specifics of the Requiem itself, along with a recommended recording of the piece.
Coventry, the historic central district circa 1930
Coventry and its Cathedral
Coventry is a city in the West Midlands of England, 95 miles north-west of London. Founded by the Romans, by the fourteenth century Coventry had become a major center of England’s fabric trade. The cloth makers of Coventry were particularly famous for a blue fabric called “Coventry blue.” So permanent was the color that it led to the coining of the phrases “as true as Coventry blue” or in short, “true blue.”
Such was the wealth of the city that during the late fourteenth century, a magnificent church was built in the Saint Michael district of the city center using red sandstone quarried in nearby Staffordshire. The Church of St. Michael – at 293 feet in length, 140 feet in width, with a floor area of over 24,000 square feet and featuring a towering spire 295 feet high – was the largest parish church in all of England. …
Music History Monday: Beethoven and the Human Voice
May 23, 2022
Beethoven in 1812, from a life mask made by the sculptor Franz Klein
We mark the premiere on May 23, 1814 – 208 years ago today – of Ludwig van Beethoven’s one-and-only opera, Fidelio, at the Kärntnertor Theater in Vienna. While Beethoven (1770-1827) had composed two preliminary versions of the opera, which had been performed in 1805 and 1806, it is this third and substantially different version that we will hear in the opera house today.
It’s an odd but, in this case, an applicable idiom, “red herring.” Literally, a “red herring” is, believe it or not, a red herring (see image above): a dried and smoked herring that’s turned red due to being smoked. However, for our purposes, a “red herring” is:
“something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question. It may be either a logical fallacy or a literary device that leads readers or audiences toward a false conclusion.”
The Beethovenian red herring to which we are referring started with the German author, legal scholar, composer, music critic, and artist Ernst Theodor Amadeus (or “E. T. A.”) Hoffman (1776-1822). Hoffman wrote a lengthy and frankly worshipful appreciation of Beethoven’s instrumental music entitled “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music” in 1813, when Beethoven was in his 43rd year. In the course of his essay, Hoffmann wrote this:
“Beethoven’s [instrumental] music wields the lever of fear, awe, horror, and pain, and it awakens that eternal longing that is the essence of the romantic. If he has had less success with vocal music, this is because vocal music excludes the character of indefinite longing and [instead] represents the emotions [as described by] words.”
Hoffman’s implication – that Beethoven was inherently less successful as a composer of vocal music than of instrumental music – ran like open carbuncle through the Beethoven literature of the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, it had become an article of faith among many musicians – who should have known better – that Beethoven couldn’t write properly for the voice because he could not compose “vocal styled” or so-called “lyric” melodies. …
Music History Monday: The Phoenix Rises!
May 16, 2022
The interior of the Teatro la Fenice in 2015
We mark the opening on May 16, 1792 – 230 years ago today – of Venice’s principal opera house, the Teatro la Fenice, meaning the “The Phoenix Theater.”
Excepting, perhaps, the magnificent phallus that is the Washington Monument, dedicated as it is to “The Father of Our Country,” rarely – if ever – will a building be better named than La Fenice, which has risen from the ashes three times.
Background
The first public opera house – the Teatro San Cassiano – opened in Venice in 1637. Public opera quickly proved to be tremendously popular and immensely profitable, and Venice – already the tourist capitol, the Las Vegas of the European world – had yet another recreational activity to offer its endless stream of visitors. By 1700, there were some twenty opera theaters operating in Venice, cranking out operas the way Hollywood cranked out movies in the pre-television glory days of the 1930s and 1940s.
As the popularity of public opera spread first across Italy and then all of Europe, so opera theaters were built across Europe. No longer the singular purveyor of public opera, many of Venice’s opera houses closed, so that by 1770 only five remained. Of those five, the most plush and the most prestigious (in terms of its productions) was the Teatro San Benedetto, which had opened in 1755.
A gala dinner and ball being held at the rebuilt Teatro San Benedetto, February 1782; the Teatro San Benedetto would go on to have a series of different names over the subsequent 240 years: the Teatro Venier, Teatro Gallo, Teatro Rossini, the Cinema Rossini, and finally the Teatro Concordia
In the seventeenth century, eighteenth century, and first half of the nineteenth century, theaters of every stripe burned down with alarming regularity. This should come as no surprise, as candles and oil lamps – open flames – were employed in prodigious number to light both the stage and the house. Some of these flammables were placed in rows at the front edge of the stage with mirrored reflectors behind them to light the stage. This row of lights was called the footlights. Other such lights illuminated the stage from above and from the sides; these were called, respectively, border lights and striplights. Boys were employed to scamper around during a performance, regulating the lights and cleaning up the candle wax that dripped, ran, and created smoke.
Given that these theaters were built from wood covered in fabric and papier-mâché, and were occupied – during a performance – by musicians, performers, stagehands, and such constantly scurrying around on stage and backstage, it is difficult to imagine a less “fire safe” environment outside of an active volcano. Frankly, it’s something of a miracle that any theater survived at all before the use of reliable gas lighting around 1840. …
Music History Monday: Little Richard: The King and Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll
May 09, 2022
Richard Wayne Penniman (1932-2020) in 1972
We mark the death on May 9, 2020 – just two years ago today – of the American musician, singer, and songwriter Richard Wayne Penniman, known universally by his stage name of “Little Richard.” Born on December 5, 1932, in Macon, Georgia, he died at his home in Tullahoma, Tennessee two years ago today from bone cancer. He was 87 years old.
As a founding inductee to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, the following statement was read aloud:
“He claims to be ‘the architect of rock and roll’, and history would seem to bear out Little Richard’s boast. More than any other performer—save, perhaps, Elvis Presley – Little Richard blew the lid off the Fifties, laying the foundation for rock and roll with his explosive music and charismatic persona. On record, he made spine-tingling rock and roll. His frantically charged piano playing and raspy, shouted vocals on such classics as Tutti Frutti, Long Tall Sally, and Good Golly, Miss Molly defined the dynamic sound of rock and roll.”
Along with Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Ike Turner, and Bo Diddley, Little Richard was one of that handful of Black American musicians who synthesized blues, rhythm and blues (or R&B), and gospel into what came to be called rock ‘n’ roll in the mid-1950s. Penniman put it this way in an interview with Time magazine in 2001:
“It [meaning rock ‘n’ roll] started out as rhythm and blues. There wasn’t nobody playing it at the time but black people — myself, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry. White kids started paying more attention to this music, white girls were going over to this music, [but] they needed somebody to come in there — like Elvis.”
Yes, “like Elvis”, who hit the bigtime in 1956. What Penniman is saying is that white audiences required a white performer to “legitimize” rock ‘n’ roll and make it part of the white, mainstream culture. And sadly, to a degree, this is true. But Little Richard, whose ego was ordinarily as over-the-top as his makeup and gender-bending personality – here does himself a rare disservice. Because to no small extent, Elvis built his persona on that of Little Richard’s. And so did almost everyone else.
Little Richard: single-handedly raising androgyny in popular music to an art form
No One
No one had more impact on the emerging rock ‘n’ roll scene than did Richard Wayne Penniman: no one. The androgynous flamboyance of David Bowie, Elton John, Michael Jackson, and Prince? Little Richard had been there, done that, with even greater extravagance decades before.
With his pencil moustache and pancake makeup, his gospel-strong voice and his hooting and hollering, his erotically wild, drag queen persona, Little Richard didn’t just tear down barriers; he nuked ‘em. All in all, it was no small thing for a black, openly gay man from the south to accomplish what he did in the 1950s. His impact on the rock ‘n’ roll community was seminal. James Brown worshipped Penniman and imitated his screams and whoops. Otis Reading (also from Macon, Georgia) and Sly Stone built their musical personas around Penniman’s. When the Beatles met Little Richard after a performance at the Tower Ballroom in the Merseyside resort of New Brighton in October 1962, Penniman gave Paul McCartney a lesson on how to scream in tune (a lesson McCartney would put to good use on Hey Jude, Maybe I’m Amazed, and I’m Down). …
Music History Monday: Giacomo Meyerbeer and French PopOp
May 02, 2022
Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864), circa 1863
We mark the death on May 2, 1864 – 158 years ago today – of the German-born opera composer Jacob Liebmann Beer, also-known-as Giacomo Meyerbeer. Born in Berlin on September 5, 1791, he died in Paris during the rehearsals for the premiere of his opera L’Africaine – “The African” – which turned out to be, no surprise then, his final opera.
Let us get to know Herr/Signore/Monsieur Meyerbeer a bit even as we explore the tremendous popularity of his operas, the reasons behind that popularity, and the reasons for their fall from popularity!
No Exaggeration: As Popular as Elvis
Incredible though it may seem to us, here today, Meyerbeer was the Elvis Presley of nineteenth century opera. Not that he was a pelvis gyrating, groupie groping “rock star” as we understand a rock star to be today, no; but in the world of nineteenth century opera, he was the most popular musician of not just his time but of his century: the single most frequently performed opera composer of the nineteenth century. In terms of his singular international fame and his income, Meyerbeer was – more than Gioachino Rossini, more than Giuseppe Verdi, more than Richard Wagner –the most successful stage composer of the nineteenth century.
Meyerbeer’s impact was not limited to the opera-going public. Au contraire, his operas were stunningly influential as well. Writes David Salazar:
“Such noted composers as Verdi, Wagner, Berlioz, Massenet, Donizetti, Halevy, Dvořák, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky, Gounod, Liszt, and Chopin, among others, all came under his [Meyerbeer’s] spell at one point or another in their respective careers.”
And yet, here today, we would observe the sad truth: Meyerbeer’s operas are almost entirely unknown, a fall from artistic grace almost without equal in the history of Western music. …
Music History Monday: Puccini’s Turandot: An Opera That Almost Wasn’t
Apr 25, 2022
We mark the premiere performance on April 25, 1926 – 96 years ago today – of Giacomo Puccini’s twelfth and final opera, Turandot. The premiere took place at Milan’s storied La Scala opera house and was conducted by Puccini’s friend (and occasional nemesis!) Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957). At the time of the premiere, Puccini himself had been dead for 17 months. And therein lies our tale. Because given the delays in creating the libretto for Turandot, Puccini’s failing health, his leaving the opera incomplete at his death, and the controversy surrounding Turandot’s subsequent completion by the composer Franco Alfano (1875-1954), itwas indeed an opera that almost didn’t happen.
Giacomo Puccini was born in the Tuscan city of Lucca on December 22, 1858, and died in Brussels, Belgium on November 29, 1924, three weeks shy of his 66th birthday. Puccini’s operas remain among the most popular in the repertoire, but among the most critically controversial as well. It is a controversary we will not discuss in this post; rather, I’d direct you to Music History Monday for January 14, 2019. That post – on Puccini’s opera Tosca – wades chin-deep into the critical issues that continue to dog his work.
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) in 1905, with his ever-present cigarette (or cigar)
Sometime in early March 1920, Puccini was having lunch in Milan with the librettists Giuseppe Adami (1878-1946) and Renato Simoni (1875-1952). Discussing stories that could be turned into operas, Simoni brought up the name of the Venetian playwright Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806), and suggested they look over his works. Puccini, who knew something of Gozzi’s “theatrical fables” asked, “What about Turandotte?”
What about it indeed! It was a well-known story: the German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) had translated it and staged it in German in 1801, and it had been the subject of an opera composed in 1854 by Puccini’s teacher Antonio Bazzani.
Simoni had a copy of the play in his nearby apartment; he ran home, retrieved it, and gave it to Puccini to read.
Having read (and, we expect, reread!) the play, Puccini wrote Simoni a few days later, instructing Simoni and Adami to prepare a libretto about the haughty Chinese Princess Turandot, emphasizing, according to Puccini:
“the amorous passions of Turandot, who has suffered for such a long time under the ashes of her great pride.”
And then? And then Puccini’s waiting began. Spring turned to summer; summer to fall. In October of 1920, a clearly frustrated Puccini wrote to his friend Sybil Seligman in London:
“I’m not yet working [on Turandot] because they haven’t given me the libretto yet. If they wait much longer I shall have to get them to put pen, paper, and ink-pot in my tomb! What a cheerful idea! [But] that’s how I feel – just like that.”
By December, Puccini’s frustration had turned to genuine worry.…
Music History Monday: Charity Begins at Home
Apr 18, 2022
Home from the hospital circa April 25, 1954, “The Heir” (my father’s handwriting)
On April 18th, 1954 – 68 freaking years ago today – the American composer, pianist, music historian, and bloviator-par-excellence Robert Michael Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York.
The Teaching Company-slash-The Great Courses and My Favorite Things
Since 1993, I have recorded 32 courses for The Teaching Company, rebranded as The Great Courses in 2006, and further rebranded in 2021 as “Wondrium.” (The less said about that latest rebrand, the better. To me, “Wondrium” sounds like an acne control or irritable bowel medication.)
I am frequently asked “which is my favorite course.” That’s always an easy question to answer because the answer is whichever course I most recently recorded. As of today, that would be The Great Music of the 20th Century.
(Sadly, it would appear that I am the only person who bears much affection for this course, as The Great Music of the 20th Century has proven to be among the least popular course I’ve recorded. A principal issue is the musical examples. The Teaching Company/The Great Courses could not afford to license the music I needed to play during the course, much of which was still under original copyright. So we hit upon the idea of providing URL’s to performances freely found on the web. It was a great idea, or so we (incorrectly) thought. In fact, the whole thing proved unwieldy and ineffective: unwieldy because it is a royal pain-in-the-you-know-what to be constantly diving into the web for the musical examples, and ineffective because so many of the links went dead so very quickly.)
The 24th and final lecture of The Great Music of the 20th Century was, auspiciously, the 666th lecture I’d recorded for The Teaching Company/The Great Courses (auspicious because 666 is, after all, “the number of the beast!”). And indeed, the actual content of that 24th/666th lecture could be considered bestial (meaning “savagely cruel and depraved”), as it focused entirely on my life and my music.
For the first and only time in 666 lectures – recorded over a period of 24 years – I dedicated a lecture to my own music. (The lecture, which is entitled “Among Friends”, might just as well have been entitled “Charity Begins at Home”, which is the title for today’s post.) Without a doubt, my experience as a composer had informed every one of those prior 665 lectures. But despite the fact that I’d been writing music down since I was five years old and have a Ph.D. in music composition, I had not talked about myself and my own music until then.
So you will forgive me the dreadful conceit – here on the occasion of my 68th birthday – of drawing from (and extending) some of the biographical material that appeared in that 666th lecture for today’s post. I will not bore you nearly-to-death with the tale of my entire life (heaven forbid) but rather, I will bore you nearly-to-death with the story of my first thirty years, what we might consider my “making” as a composer.
Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will finish up that bit of biography and will then delve into a subset of my output of which I am particularly proud, that being vocal works based on Yiddish poetry in English translation.
From the Top
I was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 18, 1954, 31 days before Charles Ives died across the East River in Manhattan on May 19. How I would love to believe that something of his spirit floated east to Brooklyn and found its way to me!
My very self, surrounded by ladies: my mother Doris Faith Pollock Greenberg to the right, and my maternal grandmother Nancy Reiben Pollock to my left, July, 1954, somewhere in Brooklyn, New York
I spent the first two years of my life in the “Madison” section of Brooklyn, living in an apartment at 2020 Kings Highway. In 1956, my parents escaped New York (and their parents) by moving to the South Jersey ‘burbs, first to Haddonfield and then, in 1959, to Levittown (now known as Willingboro; Exit 5 off the New Jersey Turnpike). And that’s where I grew up.
My father Alvin (I know, I know; I hated when kids found out his name!) was a businessman who worked in Philadelphia and my mother Doris Faith (née Pollock) was a Ph.D. candidate in education at Rutgers University. I was the eldest of two; my younger brother Steve is today a radiologist living in Boston.…
Music History Monday: St. Matthew Passion
Apr 11, 2022
The St. Thomas Church (Thomaskirche) in 1723, the year Sebastian Bach was appointed Cantor; the St. Thomas School, where Bach taught, is on the left
We mark the first performance on April 11, 1727 – on what was Good Friday 295 years ago today – of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion at the St. Thomas Church (or Thomaskirche) in the Saxon city of Leipzig. The Passion was performed three more times in Bach’s lifetime, all under his direction in Leipzig: on April 15, 1729; March 30, 1736; and on March 23, 1742. Bach revised his St Matthew Passion between 1743 and 1746, and it is this revised version that we will hear in performances and recordings today.
The St. Thomas Church today
Our game plan for this post will be, one, to discuss what a “Passion” is and what the “gospels” are; two, to observe the structure and scope and make some blanket observations about the artistic quality of Bach’s St Matthew Passion; three, to discuss “the masterpiece syndrome” and some of the good and bad things that phrase implies; four, to once again venture into the unmapped minefield that is contemporary identity politics and attempt to create a meaningful context for the St Matthew Passion; and finally, five, to speculate on how the parishioners and church officials who, having filed in and taken their seats at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche on Good Friday, April 11, 1727, reacted to hearing the St Matthew Passion for the first time.
The Passion
The “Passion” is the story surrounding Jesus’ crucifixion as told in the gospels. The word “gospel” comes from the Old English word “Gōdspel”, which means “good news” or “good tidings.” The gospels in the Bible’s New Testament, then, tell of “good tidings”: the story of Jesus’ birth and Baptism; his ministry of teaching and of healing; and his sacrifice: his trial, death, burial, and resurrection.
There are four such gospels in the New Testament: Mark, Matthew, John, and Luke. (These names notwithstanding, all four of the gospels were written anonymously between about 66 CE and 100 CE.)
These four gospels – Mark, Matthew, John, and Luke – make up 4 of the 27 books of the New Testament. The story of the Passion itself, that is, Jesus’ arrest, trial, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection, takes up but a small part of each gospel. In Mark, the Passion story is told in chapters 14 and 15; in Matthew, Chapters 26 and 27; in John, chapters 18 and 19; and in Luke, chapters 22 and 23.
Sebastian Bach set three of the four Passions to music: the St John Passion in 1724; the St Matthew Passion in 1727; and the St Mark Passion in 1731. Tragically, Bach’s St Mark Passion has been lost; we have the libretto – its words – but its music is gone.
Music History Monday: McKinley Morganfield, a.k.a. Muddy Waters
Apr 04, 2022
McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters, 1913-1983)
We mark the birth on April 4, 1913 – 109 years ago today – of the American blues singer, songwriter, and guitar and harmonica player McKinley Morganfield. He was born in either Rolling Fork or Jug’s Corner, Mississippi. Known professionally as “Muddy Waters” (as opposed to, say “Crystal Springs”, or “Briny Deep”, or “Silty Delta”, or “Occluded H20”), Maestro Morganfield-slash-Waters died in Westmont, Illinois on April 30, 1983, at the age of 70. We will get to Muddy Waters (as we will now refer to him) in a bit. But April 4 is a busy day in music history and thus, I’d like to observe three other date-related events.
Elmer Bernstein (1922-2004)
We mark the birth – on April 4, 1922, exactly 100 years ago today – of the American composer Elmer Bernstein, in New York City. He died in Ojai, California, on August 18, 2004, at the age of 82.
Elmer Bernstein is among my very favorite film and television composers, and he would have been the lead story today if not for the fact that my Music History Monday post for April 3, 2017, already celebrated his birthday. (I’ll own up to it: April 3 is a quiet day in music history, and in the earlier days of this post, when I couldn’t come up with a good date related item, I’d look to events that occurred on the day before or after. Thus, in 2017, we celebrated Bernstein’s April 4th birthday on April 3rd.)
That earlier post notwithstanding, Elmer Bernstein was such a fascinating, multi-talented person, and he composed so much music that we know (and love), that a little information about him here and now is most appropriate.
As a child, Bernstein performed professionally (on Broadway, no less) as an actor and dancer. He was an award-winning painter and a novelist. He loved the horses and was a co-owner of the Triad Thoroughbred Racing Stable for many years. He was an outstanding pianist and made his career on stage as a touring concert pianist between 1939 and 1950. He was a professor of music at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California (USC) and during the 1970s, he was the conductor of the San Fernando Valley Orchestra.
But it was Bernstein’s film, TV, and theater music for which he is remembered today. He composed the music for over 200 films and for hundreds more TV shows. He composed the fanfare for the National Geographic specials that have been airing since the 1960s. He composed the scores for two Broadway musicals: How Now Dow Jones (1967) and Merlin (1983). And while even a partial list of Bernstein’s outstanding film scores is lengthy, such a list must be provided in order to get a sense of his tremendous artistic range. Indulge me: The Man with the Golden Arm (1955); The Ten Commandments (1957); The Sweet Smell of Success (1957); God’s Little Acre (1958); The Buccaneer (1958); The Magnificent Seven (1960); Summer and Smoke (1961); Walk on the Wild Side (1962); Birdman of Alcatraz (1962); To Kill a Mockingbird (1962); The Great Escape (1963); Hud (1963); The Carpetbaggers (1963); The Sons of Katie Elder (1965); The Hallelujah Trail (1965); Return of the Seven (1966); Hawaii (1966); I Love You, Alice B. Toklas (1968); The Bridge at Remagen (1969); True Grit (1969); Cahill U.S. Marshall (1973); The Shootist (1976); National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978); The Great Santini (1979); Meatballs (1979); Airplane! (1980); The Blues Brothers (1980); The Chosen (1981); An American Werewolf in London (1981); Stripes (1981); Ghostbusters (1984); The Black Cauldron (1985); My Left Foot (1989); The Grifters (1990); The Age of Innocence (1993); The Rainmaker (1997); The Wild Wild West (1999); Bringing Out the Dead (1999); and Far From Heaven (2002).
Whoa.
For our information, my 2017 post on Elmer Bernstein was entitled “The Other Bernstein.” …
Music History Monday: Sergei Rachmaninoff in California
Mar 28, 2022
Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
We mark the death on March 28, 1943 – 79 years ago today – of the composer, pianist, and conductor Sergei Rachmaninoff, at his home in Beverly Hills, California. He was born on April 1, 1873, and thus died just four days before his 70th birthday.
This post, as well as tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes, will focus on the last year of Rachmaninoff’s life, during which he lived in Beverly Hills, California.
Rachmaninoff – all 6’6” of him! – was one of the great pianists of his (or any) time; an outstanding composer; and a more than able conductor (he was, for example, the conductor of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow from 1904-1906). Lucrative though performing as a pianist and conductor were, what Rachmaninoff really wanted to be was a composer (the composition bug is, as I will attest, something of a disease). As is the case with so many “working” composers – meaning composers who make the bulk of their income doing something other than composing – Rachmaninoff composed primarily during the summer months.
The Rachmaninoff house is Ivanovka, circa 1915
Between 1890 and 1917 – from the ages of 17 to 44 – Rachmaninoff spent those summer months composing at his home in Ivanovka, a sprawling family estate/compound roughly 260 miles south-southeast of Moscow. It was, by every account, a peaceful and idyllic place, one that both inspired Rachmaninoff and provided him the peace and quiet that he required to compose.…
Music History Monday: Ludwig van Beethoven and the Legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach
Mar 21, 2022
The only undisputed image of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) is that painted and repainted by Elias Gottlob Haussmann between 1746 and 1748; the painting above is Haussmann’s second version of his original, 1746 canvas, in which Bach is seen holding a copy of his six-part canon BWV 1076
We mark the birth on March 21, 1685, of Johann Sebastian Bach in the Thuringian town of Eisenach, in what today is central Germany. He died 65 years later, on July 28, 1750, in the Saxon city of Leipzig.
I can hear the howling now, “Dr. B, hello, Bach was born on March 31, 1685, not March 21; March 31:it says so on Wikipedia!”
Chill out and unknot those jockeys; let’s talk.
Wikipedia and various other sources do indeed indicate, not incorrectly, that Bach was born on March 31. But according to the irrefutable and unassailable Bach scholar Christoff Wolff writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Sebastian Bach was born on March 21. And in fact Bach celebrated his birthday on March 21. So what gives?
A Brief Contemplation of Dates (by which we do not refer to one’s social life but the calendar)
Old style and new style; in style and out-of-style. It is a question of almost Talmudic complexity.
We’re talking about calendars and the confusion wrought by changing calendars.
The famed Tusculum bust of Gaius Julius Caesar (100 BCE-44 BCE), purportedly the only surviving portrait made in his lifetime
In 46 BCE (two years before his conversion into a human pincushion), Julius Caesar proposed replacing what was the 10-month Roman Calendar with a 12-month calendar. Appropriately called the “Julian” Calendar, it went into effect by edict on January 1, 45 BCE. The Julian Calendar divided the year into 12 months and 365.25 days and stayed in effect for 1627 years: until 1582.
By 1582, a tiny but not insignificant flaw in the Julian Calendar had become glaringly apparent: over the 1627 years it had been in use, the Julian Calendar had drifted away from the solar year (meaning that the sun was no longer in the same position in the sky on the same date every year!).
Pope Gregory XIII (1502-1585)
It was in 1582 then, that during the reign of Pope Gregory XIII (born Ugo Boncompagni,
1502-1585), that a slight but significant change was made to the calendar: instead of dividing the year into 365.25 days, the so-called “Gregorian” Calendar divided the year more accurately into 365.2425 days.
In order to institute the Gregorian Calendar and correct for the solar drift that had taken place under the Julian Calendar, dates had to be adjusted. Protestant Germany didn’t adopt the Gregorian Calendar until 1700, at which time the calendar had to be adjusted by 10 days. Thus, based on the position of the sun, Bach’s birthday – March 21, 1685, O.S. (“Old Style”, meaning the Julian Calendar) – became March 31 N.S. (“New Style”, in the Gregorian Calendar).
Like everyone else who lived through the date change, Sebastian Bach had a choice: did he want to celebrate his birthday based on a date or based on the position of the sun? He chose the date, and we can name his birthday as being either March 21st or the 31st , provided an explanation is given.
Here’s another reason for us to choose the March 21st date.…
Music History Monday: Georg Philipp Telemann
Mar 14, 2022
Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) circa 1745, engraving by Georg Lichtensteger
We mark the birth of March 14, 1681 – 341 years ago today – of the German composer Georg Philipp Telemann, in the city Magdeburg, in what today is central Germany. A contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) (both of whom Telemann numbered as good friends; Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel was both the godson and namesake of Georg Philipp Telemann), Telemann was considered in his lifetime the greatest composer living and working in Germany, with our friend Sebastian Bach well down that list. Telemann died in Hamburg on June 25, 1767, at the age of 86.
Georg Philipp was the youngest of three surviving children (two boys and a girl) of Maria and Heinrich Telemann. Young Telemann came from a long line of Protestant clergymen. His mother Maria’s father was a deacon, and his father Heinrich Telemann was a Lutheran pastor (as was Heinrich’s father before him). Sadly, Heinrich Telemann died his late 30’s in 1685 when Georg Philipp was just 4 years old, and the task of raising and providing for the family fell squarely on Maria Telemann’s shoulders.
Single mothers are usually, by necessity, a tough bunch, and in this Maria Telemann was no exception. Despite the fact that her youngest child Georg Philipp displayed prodigious musical talents from a young age, she took it for granted that like his father and both his grandfathers before him, young Telemann was destined for the cloth and a career in the clergy.
But as is so often the case, the young Georg Philipp Telemann had other ideas. By the age of 12, he had been taught to sing and play keyboards. He had, as well, taught himself to play recorder, violin, and zither; and on his own had learned the principals of composition sufficiently to have composed various arias, motets, and instrumental works. At the age of 12 he composed his first opera entitled Sigismundus to a libretto by the German poet and librettist Christian Heinrich Postel (1658-1705).
(In 1739, the 58-year-old Telemann wrote a brief autobiography. Regarding his opera Sigismundus he wrote:
“This [opera] was performed with a measure of éclat on an improvised stage, with me singing a rather arrogant version of my own hero. I really would like to see that music now . . .”)
That’s some serious talent, but rather than be proud of her precocious son and his musical aspirations, Momma Telemann freaked out. Terrified that Georg Philipp was headed for a career in music, having “produced” his opera at the age of 12, his mother forbade him from having any further contact with music and confiscated his musical instruments. Telemann later described it this way:
“Done! Music and instruments were whisked away, and with them half my very life.”
But Georg Philipp was wily, or at least so he thought he was. He composed secretly at night and practiced on borrowed instruments in seclusion:
“My fire burned far too brightly, and lighted my way into the path of innocent disobedience, so that I spent many a night with pen in hand because I was forbidden it by day, and passed many an hour in lonely places with borrowed instruments.”
But in the end Georg Philipp fooled no one, not least his mother Maria, who was enraged by her son’s “innocent disobedience.” Extreme measures were called for. So she wrote her husband’s old friend and university classmate Caspar Calvoer in the town of Zellerfeld, about 50 miles southwest of Magdeburg. Calvoer was the superintendent of a school there in Zellerfeld, and he agreed to not just accept the now 13-year-old Georg Philipp, but to personally oversee his education.
We imagine that Maria Telemann sighed with relief. Calvoer was a theologian, historian, mathematician, and a writer with a number of scientific papers and publications to his credit. Maria would seem to have had no idea that Calvoer had applied himself as well to a study of music and had written several papers on medieval music theory.
Oops.
According to Telemann biographer Richard Petzoldt (Georg Philipp Telemann, Oxford University Press, 1974):
“Casper Calvoer rejoiced at his protégé’s musical gift. With Calvoer’s approval, the boy once again set about practicing his instruments, regularly writing pieces for the church choir, as well as [works] for the town musicians and occasional pieces for celebrations, weddings, and the like.”
We don’t know how Maria Telemann reacted when she became aware of the situation with Calvoer in Zellerfeld, although we can safely assume she reacted poorly. We do know that seven years later, when Telemann was twenty and preparing to enter Leipzig University, she again demanded that he “leave music [and] abandon his entire musical household” in order to study law. But in the end, she was no more successful turning her son away from music when he was 20 than when he was 13, and we are all the richer for that fact.…
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