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 8th arrondisement 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’ 6th arrondisement. Before we can get down with the magnifique Monsieur Poulenc, we have an important event in rock ‘n’ roll history to mark. 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 […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 16
In 1965, the American writer James Baldwin wrote: “At a time when there seemed to be no hope at all, Paul Robeson [1898-1976] spoke out for all of us.” By “all of us,” Baldwin is, of course, referring to Black America. In 1998, the American scholar, historian, author, and social historian Lerone Bennett expanded on Baldwin’s comment, writing: “Before King dreamed, before Thurgood Marshall petitioned and Sidney Poitier emoted, before the big breakthrough in Hollywood and Washington, before the Jim Crow signs came down, and before the civil rights banners went up, before Spike Lee, before Denzel, before Sam Jackson and Jesse Jackson, there was Paul Robeson. One of the most phenomenally gifted men ever born in America, he lived one of the most extraordinary stories of the century. When he died, even his critics and detractors conceded that he was one of the immortals.” According to the American historian Dr. Clement Alexander Price, who was the Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History at the Newark, NJ campus of Rutgers University: “Called by some ‘The Great Forerunner’ and others the ‘Tallest Tree in Our Forest,’ Paul Robeson is without peer in the annals of modern American civilization. His […]
Continue ReadingWe 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 […]
Continue ReadingHad I not taken a necessary holiday respite from both Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes, my January 2 and 3, 2023, posts would have featured Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman, which received its premiere on January 2, 1843, in Dresden. The story of the opera, and the DVD I was going to feature in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post of January 3 are simply too good to pass up, and so here is the Dutchman, better late than never! In August of 1837, the 24-year-old Richard Wagner accepted the job of music director at the municipal theater in Riga, the present-day capital of Latvia. For Wagner, who’d been moving around from one low-end musical job to the next for the previous three years, Riga was the bottom of the barrel, nowheresville, the end of the line: a predominately German-speaking burg that was, nevertheless, part of the Russian Empire and a gazillion miles from the centers of German culture he so longed for. But Wagner, as he always did when he had to, persevered, and putting aside his despair, he made the Riga gig work, at least at first. To great local acclaim, he conducted fifteen different operas […]
Continue ReadingWe 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 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 […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post celebrated the birth of the opera impresario Sir Rudolf Bing in 1902 and, using excerpts from his memoir 5000 Nights at the Opera, sketched his life and career up to 1950: the year he took over as general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. Bing was not the first, nor – sadly – the last senior manager to take on a job only to find out that the institution he was hired to run was in much worse condition than he ever thought possible. For Bing, the Met was a Mess, and to his eternal credit and everlasting fame, it was a mess he cleaned up. He didn’t do it alone, though, and one of the things I admire about Bing’s memoir is the extent to which he credits others – his staff, board members, volunteers, etc. – with helping to turn the Met around. But then, Bing was clever enough to hire and then lead the right people, and so his modesty aside, we must give credit where credit is due. Dealing With Artists Rudolf Bings observes: “Dealing with artists is not like dealing with people in any other profession. Bank officials and law clerks […]
Continue ReadingWe 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 […]
Continue ReadingSome 30 years ago, I was given a novel by the English author Charles Palliser called The Quincunx. The good friend who gave me the book claimed that it was, hands down, her favorite novel of all time. Back then, when someone gave me a book – especially with such a glowing endorsement – I generally read it. And I did indeed read The Quincunx. Mistake. Alas, for this insensitive lout, The Quincunx was a dreary, irksome, endless book written in the style of an early Victorian novel, in which an exceptionally unlucky protagonist lurches from one catastrophe to the next across its near 800-page length. In search of a codicil to a will that would presumably reverse his misfortunes, the dude takes more hard shots to the chin than Chuck Wepner (born 1939) did in his fight with Sonny Liston. (Wepner was not nicknamed “the Bayonne Bleeder” for nothing; after his fight with Liston, 72 stitches were required to put his face back together.) But, believe it or not, The Quincunx was not the most harrowing tale of seemingly nonstop calamities with which I was familiar, because even back then, I knew something of the life of Édith Piaf. […]
Continue ReadingWe 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 […]
Continue ReadingLive and Learn I have been known to make snide comments about the electric organ. This is an unfortunate artifact of my childhood in the 1950s and 60s, when toy organs made by “Emenee Industries Inc.” (of New York, N.Y.) were everywhere. They came in different sizes, though the ones I remember were the chord organs (see the illustration above): the buttons on the left side of the thing played simple harmonies to accompany whatever pathetic, wheezing tune was being played on the keys to the right. It was an instrument so simple and crude as to make its cousin – the accordion – look and sound like a Steinway Concert Grand by comparison. When I became a jazz freak as a teenager and first listened to the great Jimmy Smith (1925-2005) play jazz organ, I was unimpressed. I still related the sound of Smith’s organ (a Hammond B3, as I later learned) to those Emenee beasties of my childhood, and because the organ is incapable of the sort of punchy, unexpected accentuation (syncopations) that give jazz its polyrhythmic character (its swing), I found Smith’s playing to be rather flaccid. Alas, the arrogance of youth. My attitude towards jazz […]
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