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 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 […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg
Yesterday’s Music History Monday marked the death of the Russian impresario and polymath Serge Diaghilev (1872-1929). Serge Diaghilev was a facilitator of genius. His special gift was for “creative administration.” He could spot talent from 100 miles away, then bring that talent together, all the while imposing his own taste, vision, artistic and aesthetic will on a project. He was a narcissist, an egomaniac, and a born leader, who created a way of doing things that had not existed before him. The medium of ballet was Diaghilev’s all-inclusive art form – his gesamtkunstwerke – and through ballet he managed to influence almost all the arts of his time, not just dance but music, theater, painting, literature, design, fashion, and early cinema as well. It was Serge Diaghilev who gave the young Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) the opportunity to become Stravinsky. Without Diaghilev, Stravinsky would never have become an international sensation at the age of 28. Without Diaghilev, some of Stravinsky’s greatest masterworks – Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, Les Noces, and Pulcinella would never have been composed. Without Diaghilev, twentieth century music and dance would have evolved in a manner entirely different than it did, and not for the better. But thanks to […]
Continue ReadingWe 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.” Serge Diaghilev’s audacious and spectacular career was intertwined completely with […]
Continue ReadingGiovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1555-1612) By the last years of the sixteenth century, the multi-choral/multi-ensemble (or just “polychoral”) religious music being composed for performance at the Basilica of San Marco (St. Mark’s) in Venice had virtually nothing to do with the sober spirit and musical dictates of the Counter Reformation. Rather, it had everything to do with the exuberant, independent spirit of Venice. The great exponents of this magnificent, polychoral Venetian music were the Gabrieli boys – Andrea Gabrieli (ca. 1510-1586) and his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli (ca. 1555-1612). Giovanni Gabrieli was born in Venice around 1555. His uncle, Andrea Gabrieli, was an excellent and influential composer as well as the principal organist at San Marco, a musical position second only to maestro di cappella (who was, at the time, the theorist and sometime composer Gioseffo Zarlino, 1517-1590). Young Giovanni was Andrea Gabrieli’s star pupil, and Andrea was proud of his nephew. Giovanni Gabrieli recalled: “If Signor Andrea Gabrieli (of blessed memory) had not been my uncle, I should dare to say (without fear of being accused of bias) that, as there are few illustrious painters and sculptors gathered together in the world, so are there few indeed composers and organists as excellent as […]
Continue ReadingWe 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.… Continue Reading, only on Patreon!
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post celebrated the 627th birthday of Guillaume (“William”) Du Fay (1397-1474). He was, by every measure, one of the greatest composers yet to have lived, and was considered – in his lifetime, by his contemporaries – to be the greatest among them. Why, then, is he not TODAY a household name? Why, then, do we not hear his music programmed alongside that of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Greenberg? You know the answer. 627 years was, in terms of Western music history, a long time ago. The compositional language has changed profoundly since the fifteenth century, as has the very “nature” of what constitutes musical expression. Du Fay’s music mirrors a world long gone, a world – socially, politically, and spiritually – that most of us, today, simply cannot identify with. And yet, his music – no small amount of which is based on complex compositional methods that had been formulated in the fourteenth century – is, to my ear, ineffably beautiful. This is the mark of any great art: art that transcends the mechanics of its construction and the time of its creation to communicate something intrinsically and aesthetically important over the centuries, to people otherwise unfamiliar with […]
Continue ReadingEasy 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 historical repertoire. 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). 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 […]
Continue ReadingWe 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. 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 […]
Continue ReadingAs often happens, the topic of a previous day’s Music History Monday post has become, here, the inspiration for today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes. As a reminder: yesterday’s Music History Monday – entitled “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” – focused on a pair of Taylor Swift concerts in Seattle that shook the ground beneath the stadium with such violence that it registered as a magnitude 2.3 earthquake. OMG: does that mean that today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes will feature Taylor Swift? No, it does not, for which we can all breathe a sigh of relief. Instead, we’re going to run with the music-and-earthquake connection. It’s a bit tangential, to be sure, but nevertheless, applicable. Carmen With music by Georges Bizet (1838-1875) and a libretto by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée, Carmen opened on March 3, 1875, at the Théâtre national de l’Opéra-Comique in Paris’ 2nd arrondissement. Neither Carmen’s premiere nor the run that followed went well. Audiences at the “Opéra-Comique” were accustomed to, well, comic French operas. Instead, in Carmen, they witnessed an opera that the critics slammed as “Wagnerian” because – so they wrongly claimed – the voices were subordinated to the orchestra. Additionally, the audiences at the Opéra-Comique found both of Carmen’s […]
Continue ReadingOnly 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. 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 […]
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