We mark the passing, on May 18, 1911 – 109 years ago today – of the composer and conductor Gustav Mahler. Mahler, who was born on July 7, 1860 in the Bohemian village of Kalischt, died all-too-young in Vienna, two months shy of his 51st birthday. But before moving on to the painful circumstances of Mahler’s death and his “last words”, we would mark the painful circumstances of the death of his exact contemporary, the Spanish-born composer and pianist Isaac Manuel Francisco Albéniz Y Pascual, or simply Isaac Albéniz. Albéniz was born on May 20, 1860 – 39 days before Gustav Mahler – in Camprodon, a town in northern Catalonia not far from the French Border. A spectacularly gifted child, he made his first public appearance as a pianist at the age of four and began his concert career at the age of nine. As a composer, he embraced the music of his native Spain in 1883 at the age of 23, when he began composing avowedly “Spanish-styled” works. His great masterwork is Iberia a set of twelve virtuosic piano works composed between 1905 and 1909, completed just three months before his death. (For those interested in an examination of […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 43
Irving Berlin (born Israel Isidore Beilin, 1888-1989) was the greatest songwriter ever to live and work in North America. His songs – for which he wrote both the words and music – capture the spirit and chronicle the events of the first half of twentieth century America in a manner far beyond that of any other single songwriter. Among Berlin’s great contemporaries there were lyricists who wrote cleverer, more sophisticated lyrics and composers who pushed the formal structure and harmonic complexity of the popular song more than Berlin. But Berlin’s songs united the personal and the topical in words and melodies that had an almost universal appeal. Writes Robert Kimball: “The ability to capture and represent the human experience in a simple, direct way is what great songwriting is all about. And that is where Irving Berlin had no peer.” (BTW, this doesn’t mean that Berlin couldn’t create a great rhyme; rather, when he does so, it is entirely in the service of the song and never to show us how very clever he is. For example, the lyric to Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee, written in 1932 during the darkest days of the Depression, in which he rhymes […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the birth on May 11, 1888 – 132 years ago today – of the Russian-born American songwriter Irving Berlin (1888-1989). Berlin wrote the words and music to over 1500 songs across a 60-plus year career. He is an American institution, whose life was, according to his obituary in the New York Times, “a classic rags-to-riches story that he never forgot could have happened only in America.” Having emigrated from his native Russian Empire at the age of five, Berlin grew up dirt poor in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Nevertheless, he was a legend by the age of 23. All told, he wrote the scores for 20 Broadway musicals and 15 Hollywood movie musicals. His songs were nominated for eight Academy Awards. (His one Oscar win came in 1943, for the song White Christmas. Bing Crosby’s recording has sold upwards of 100 million copies, and remains the best-selling single of all time). A word. I have been writing these Music History Monday posts since Monday, September 5, 2016. Over the years, these posts have run between 1500 and 2000 words; a few shorter and a very few longer. (I figure if you can’t tell a good story in 2000 […]
Continue ReadingMy Dr. Bob Prescribes post for October 23, 2018, was titled “Fine Dining”. The post featured Ronald Brautigan’s revelatory performances of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas recorded on modern copies of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century pianos built by Paul McNulty (born in Houston in 1953). (These early pianos are often referred to as “fortepianos”, which simply means “loud-soft.” By definition, a fortepiano is an early piano that employs thin, harpsichord-like strings; leather-covered – as opposed to felt – hammers; a wooden harp; and lacks any metal bracing. The term fortepiano, then, designates pianos built from the invention of the instrument by Bartolomeo Cristofori sometime before the year 1700 to approximately 1825, when larger metal harped and thicker stringed pianos – proto-modern pianos, as they were – began to become the norm.) The title of that post – “Fine Dining” – referred to the crow I was obligated to eat as a result of Brautigam’s recording of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas. I wrote: “For lo these many years, I have always looked down on the fortepiano: those early pianos distinguished by their wood-framed (as opposed to metal-framed) harps, built between 1700 and 1825. In my ignorance, I have long considered wooden-harped pianos […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the birth on May 4, 1655 – 365 years ago today – of the inventor, musical instrument builder, and engineer extraordinaire Bartolomeo Cristofori. Though born in the northern Italian city of Padua in the Republic of Venice, Cristofori spent the bulk of his professional life in Florence, where he designed and then built the first piano sometime before the year 1700. No less than the inventions of Archimedes, Johannes Gutenberg, Karl Benz, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Wright Brothers, Cristofori’s “piano” changed the world. Inventors are a breed apart. Whether they’re tinkering in a garage or working in a high-end laboratory, an inventor requires imagination, originality, innate engineering skills, deep powers of analysis, and perseverance. And more perseverance. And still more perseverance. (Did I mention perseverance?) But just as much, someone who would be an inventor cannot believe in the status quo, that things are okay as they are. Inventors don’t perceive the world as it is, but rather, as it could be. In terms of his imagination, originality, innate engineering skills, deep powers of analysis, perseverance, and dissatisfaction with his world “as it was”, Bartolomeo Cristofori was a quintessential inventor. Pardon me the colloquialism, but […]
Continue ReadingA couple of weeks ago, I did a Facebook Live show with Julie Stoltz of The Great Courses. When we first discussed doing the show, Julie asked me if I’d give a lecture of some sort after which I would field some questions. I wasn’t terribly interested in doing a lecture; heaven knows, there’s enough of my blathering out there already, and besides, I wanted Julie to be able to take an active part in the show and to give the viewers an opportunity to comment at any time and not just at the end. So I came up with the idea of offering up a stack of recordings that would, as I put it at the time, be “guaranteed to raise our spirits, make us forget our woes, and render us susceptible to boogie fever.” It was Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke (1800-1891), the Chief of Staff of the Prussian General Staff and then the Great [German] General Staff who famously said that “no battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.” On those same lines, I have myself discovered that “no interview plan survives the first question from the interviewer”, and as such, my […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the birth – on April 27, 1920, 100 years ago today – of the conductor Guido Cantelli, in Novara, Italy, some 30 miles west of Milan. Perhaps the most overused words in our top-ten culture of superlatives are “genius” and “hero”. We’ll contemplate the word “genius” (and the folly of its current usage) at another time. For now, I’d ask that we consider the word “hero”. Heaven knows, given the state of our world just now, we need heroes more than ever: people we can look up to and be inspired by; people whose accomplishments and decency remind us all of how good we can be. But I also think that, perhaps, we require heroes too much and as a result we elevate many individuals of questionable heroic worth to that lofty status just, well, because we can. The word itself derives from the Greek ἥρως (hērōs), which means, literally “protector” or “defender”. Both “protector” and “defender” imply someone who would stand in harm’s way for some greater good. And that is indeed the operable definition of a hero or heroine: “someone who, in the face of danger, combats adversity; who performs great deeds or selfless acts for […]
Continue ReadingGustav Mahler (1860-1911) was the greatest opera composer never to have composed an opera. Huh? Once again: Gustav Mahler was the greatest opera composer never to have composed an opera. That statement is intended to be neither ironic nor provocative. Nor, well, stupid. I would explain. Compositionally, Mahler was, from the first, a dramatist: when composing, he thought in terms of dramatic scenarios. Whether a given work is instrumental or vocal, Mahler’s music, like Beethoven’s mature music before him, describes some sort of narrative, be it allegorical, metaphorical, or programmatic. Mahler came to his narrative impulse honestly. Along with the hyper-expressivity that was his late-nineteenth century German Romantic heritage, he was – like pretty much every German-speaking composer of his generation – a dyed-in-the-wool fan-person of Richard Wagner and the expressive ethos that drove Wagner’s music dramas. That Wagnerian ethos posited that music and literature must be combined to create archetypal stories/fables that resonated with the deepest of human impulses and experiences. Mahler took this ethos for granted as a composer, and it was something he put into action on a daily basis as a conductor. Mahler conducted opera for a living, and starting in 1880 at the age of […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the solo piano recital on April 20, 1986 – 34 years ago today – that saw Vladimir Horowitz perform at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Horowitz, who was 82 years old at the time, had not visited or performed in his native Russia for 61 years. Not since Franz Liszt (1811-1886) had a pianist routinely electrified audiences as did Horowitz (1903-1989). It wasn’t just his flawless technique: the amazing colors he could draw from the piano; the preternatural accuracy and clarity of his playing; the ungodly speed of his octaves and the overwhelming volume of sound he could produce without ever banging. It was also the prodigious electricity – the sheer excitement – he generated on stage, what the senior music critic of The New York Times Harold Schonberg called: “a kind of high-voltage charisma that, in his time, could be matched only by Toscanini, Callas, and Pavarotti.” The American pianist Emanuel Ax said: “I knew people who worshiped Horowitz, as I did, and I knew people who hated him. But no one was indifferent. He brought the idea of excitement in piano playing to a higher pitch than anyone I’ve ever heard. For me the […]
Continue ReadingAs promised on The Great Courses Facebook LIVE – here is my list of music guaranteed to raise our spirits, make us forget our woes, and render us susceptible to boogie fever: Bach: Brandenburg Concertos; Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert; Archiv Bach: Goldberg Variations; Glenn Gould 1955 & 1981 recordings; Sony Beethoven: Complete Piano Sonatas; Ronald Brautigam; BIS Beethoven: Complete Symphonies: John Eliot Gardiner, conductor; Archiv Bernstein: The Theater Works Vol. 1; Sony Brahms: Clarinet Quintet; Karl Leister and the Vermeer Quartet; Orfeo Brahms: Complete Piano Quartets; Beaux Arts Trio with Walter Trampler; Philips Brahms: Horn Trio; Vladimir Ashkenazy, Itzhak Perlman, Barry Tuckwell; London Brahms and Schumann: Piano Quintets; Joyce Yang and the Alexander String Quartet; Foghorn Brahms: String Quintets; Boston Symphony Chamber Players; Nonesuch De Falla: El Amor Brujo; Montreal Symphony; London Dvořák: Piano Quintet Op. 81; Menahem Pressler and the Emerson String Quartet; DG Gershwin: Overtures; John McGlinn, conductor; EMI Mendelssohn: Octet for Strings; Alexander and Afiara String Quartets; Foghorn Mozart: Piano Quartets; Joyce Yang and the Alexander String Quartet; Foghorn Mozart: Symphony No. 41; Yehudi Menuhin, conductor; Virgin Prokofiev: Piano Concertos 1 & 3; Yevgeny Kissin and Claudio Abbado, conductor; DG Schumann: Complete Symphonies; John Eliot […]
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