On September 8, 1942, the composer and pianist Victor Ullmann was deported from Prague and sent to the concentration camp-slash-ghetto of Terezín (what the German’s called “Theresienstadt”) some 20 miles north of Prague, in what today is the northwestern corner of the Czech Republic. Even though roughly 33,000 Jews died at Terezín – mostly of starvation and disease (including Ferdinand Bloch, the artist of the watercolor above) – it was not an extermination center. Rather, it was used as a holding camp for prominent Czech Jews and as a transit camp for Jews of various nationalities on their way to killing centers or slave-labor camps. Along with Ullmann, among the other “prominent” Czech Jews deported to Terezín were the composers Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, and Hans Krása; the conductors Rafael Schächter and Karel Ančerl; the violinist (and former principal violinist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) Julius Stwertka; the actor and director Kurt Gerron; the artists FrederikaDicker-Brandeis, Bedrich Fritta, and Malva Schalek; the poet Pavel Friedman and the architect Norbert Troller. Of this list of high-end talent, the only one to survive the war was Karel Ančerl. It was as a “holding camp” for prominent Czech Jews that Terezín earned its […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 28
We mark the death on October 18, 1944 – 77 years ago today – of the composer and pianist Viktor Ullmann, in a gas chamber at the concentration and death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Nazi-occupied Poland. Last week’s Music History Monday focused on a soft-rock song entitled Je t’aime… Moi non plus by the French singer-songwriter, author, filmmaker, and actor Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991), and recorded in 1969 by Gainsbourg and the English singer, songwriter, and actress Jane Birkin (born 1946). Musically, the song is, pardon, beaucoup de merde. Nevertheless, it climbed to number one on charts across the globe. That’s because over the course of the song, Ms. Birkin’s heavy breathing leads to a simulated orgasm at the “climax” of the song. As we observed last week, “sex sells.” We also observed that those arbiters of morality – of which there is never a dearth – declared the song “obscene” and it was banned from radio play by hundreds (if not thousands) of radio stations. I pointed out then as I would again now: that at an “obscenity level” from one to ten, Je t’aime… rates – maybe – a 00.5, while the tragic fate of the Czechoslovakian composer Viktor […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post, entitled “Sex Sells”, featured the French pop song Je t’aime… Moi non plus, written by Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991) and performed by Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin (born 1946). By every possible musical standard, the song is complete drivel. But it didn’t climb to number one on most of the European charts for its musical content but rather, for the simulated orgasm Ms. Birkin “performs” as the song progresses to its wholly predictable “climax”. The song’s success is a graphic example that sex does indeed sell. In the continuing spirit of “sex sells”, today we transit from the ridiculous to the sublime, from Serge Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime… Moi non plus to Richard Strauss’ opera Salome. A vivid description of Richard Strauss’ less than warm and fuzzy personality comes down to us from the German soprano Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976). Lehmann was one of the great Strauss sopranos of her generation and performed in the premieres of four of Strauss’ operas. (For our information, Lehmann emigrated permanently to the United States in 1938. She ended up in Santa Barbara, California where she helped found the Music Academy of the West. She has a star on the “Hollywood Walk of […]
Continue ReadingThere was a time, in the not terribly distant past (in our days of relative musical innocence), when a little heavy breathing was all it took to get a recording banned from the airwaves. Today we celebrate just such an event. On October 11, 1969 – 52 years ago today – a song entitled Je t’aime… Moi non plus, which means “I love you . . . me neither” hit number 1 on the UK singles chart. Written by the French singer-songwriter, author, filmmaker, and actor Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991) and performed on record by Gainsbourg and the English singer, songwriter, actress, and former model Jane Birkin (born 1946), the song was controversial. Because of what was considered its overtly sexual content, the song was banned by many radio stations across Europe and North America. For the first time in the history of the BBC show Top of the Pops, the show’s producers refused to broadcast Je t’aime… Moi non plus despite the fact that it was the BBC’s “Number 1” song. *Public Service Announcement* Aspects of this post and its language are going to be off-color and perhaps off-putting, particularly for those who find sexual references offensive. If you are […]
Continue ReadingLeopold Godowsky’s “Study on Chopin’s ‘Black Key’ Etude”, completed when he – Godowsky – was not quite 24 years old is but one of fifty-three studies on Chopin’s etudes Godowsky composed between 1894 and 1914. We’ll discuss his life in a moment, but first Godowsky’s version of/paraphrase on Chopin’s etude, in which the rapid, right-hand filigree of Chopin’s original is elaborated and reharmonized and put into the pianist’s left-hand while the right-hand part is likewise elaborated and “filled out.” It is played here by the in-every-way miraculous Marc-André Hamelin, at 04:13-05:55 of the link below: Time and fame are gruesomely fickle. In his lifetime, the pianism and piano music of Leopold Godowsky were held in awe, even by his fellow professionals. Just 100 years later, he has been almost entirely forgotten by the listening public. Let’s start, then, with some quotes from Godowsky’s contemporaries, who considered him the “Buddha of the piano.” According to Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), he and Godowsky were: “the only composers to have added anything of significance to keyboard writing since Franz Liszt.” Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982) went on the record stating that it would take him: “five hundred years to get a mechanism [a technique] like Godowsky’s.” […]
Continue ReadingBefore moving on to the main topic for today’s post, I would like to announce a new feature here on Music History Monday, something called “This Day in Musical Stupid.” I explain. As regular readers of this post know, I will, occasionally, dedicate a post to the shenanigans and sometimes plain old idiocy of musicians as they go about their daily lives and business. More often (far more often!) than not, such antics are perpetrated by pop, rock, rap, and hip-hop “artists”, but frankly, not always. In the past, if there is a topic of genuine import on a given Monday, I would ignore such events. In the past, I have only reported them when there was nothing else to write about. My thinking on this has changed. Why should I deny you the special pleasure that observing other people’s stupidity can give? Exactly. So whenever I can, I will initiate a Music History Monday post with just such a date appropriate event. Here’s today’s “This Day in Musical Stupid.” Just so, musicians, who are, in their own right athletes, must know their physical limits. Yes: we read about Franz Liszt (1811-1886) holing up in 1831 at the age of […]
Continue ReadingAntonin Dvořák arrived in the United States (with most of his family in tow) on September 27, 1893. He had been offered and had accepted the Directorship of the National Conservatory of Music of America by the conservatory’s visionary founder, Jeanette Meyers Thurber. On his arrival, Dvořák hit the ground running. Along with his directorship, his teaching and conducting responsibilities, he was composing: he put the finishing touches on his Symphony No. 9 in E minor, also-known-as the “New World Symphony” on May 24, 1893, just eight months after having arrived in New York. Lest we think that Dvořák’s life was all work and no play, we’d observe that he was treated like royalty in New York: partied, feted, honored, and applauded wherever he went. (He also drank everyone under the table wherever he went, but that’s another story for another time.) For all his homesickness, fear of strangers, and hypochondria, it must have been exhilarating for this former butcher’s apprentice. But it was elementally exhausting as well, and by the time he finished his E minor symphony in late May 1893, Dvořák was utterly fried. Summer break was approaching, and decisions needed to be made as to where and […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the arrival on September 27, 1892 – 129 years ago today – of the Bohemian-born Czech composer Antonin Dvořák (1841-1904) to the United States, here to take up the Directorship of the National Conservatory of Music in New York City. He retained the directorship for 2½ years – until March of 1895 – at which time he and his family returned to Prague. Antonin Dvořák in 1891 By 1891 – at the age of fifty – Dvořák was that rarest of living composers: successful, appreciated by a worldwide public, and relatively wealthy. Regarded by many as the second-greatest living composer after Brahms, the nationalist Czech-accent with which Dvořák’s music spoke made it, in reality, much more “popular” than Brahms’ music. It was Dvořák’s fame as a “nationalist” composer that brought him to the attention of a rich American woman by the name of Jeanette Meyers Thurber (1850-1946). Mrs. Thurber was the wife of a wholesale grocer and was, herself, a musician of talent, having been educated at the Paris Conservatoire. Jeanette Thurber was one of the greatest patrons of music the United States has ever known. I would suggest that had she given her name to any of […]
Continue ReadingIt was a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. Like Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 and Hiram Bingham’s discovery of the “lost” Incan citadel of Machu Picchu in Peru in 1911, Peter Schickele’s discovery of P.D.Q. Bach is the stuff of legend. Here’s what happened. It was 1953. Peter Schickele, born 1935, a “Very Full Professor” (a very young “very full” professor!) of “Music Pathology” at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, was touring the “Lechendochschloss” in the German state of Bavaria. (For our information, we are told that the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople “is a little-known institution which does not normally welcome out-of-state visitors.”) Anyway, it was at the “Lechendochschloss” in Bavaria that the good professor discovered – “quite by chance, in all fairness” we are told – a music manuscript being used as a filter in the caretaker’s coffee maker. The music turned out to be the theretofore presumed lost “Sanka” Cantata, “the first autograph manuscript by P.D.Q. (‘Pretty Damned Quick’) Bach ever found.” (Just as Johann Sebastian Bach’s contemporaries knew him as “Sebastian” Bach, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s contemporaries knew him as “Emanuel” Bach, so P.D.Q.’s contemporaries would have known him […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the death on September 20, 1957 – 64 years ago today – of the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, in Järvenpää (yes, that’s a lot of umlauts), Finland. Born on December 8, 1865, in Hameenlinna, Finland, Sibelius was 91 years old when he died. Scandanavia Scandinavia is the Canada of Europe: a huge, climatically challenged area of extraordinary beauty that has produced an artistic community the breadth and depth of which is way out of proportion with its relatively small population. Of course, the cynic might suggest that in such northern climes, where it’s so dark and so cold and you have to stay indoors for so much of the year, there are just so many things you can do after you’ve eaten, slept, drank, and reproduced, and playing a round of golf in February is not one of them, thus encouraging – perhaps – the production of art. Certainly, Scandinavia is a vast environment of physical extremes that challenges both the body and the soul, an environment that encourages reflection and contemplation. … Continue reading, only on Patreon! Listen on the Music History Monday Podcast
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