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. 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: […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 7
Five years ago, my Dr. Bob Prescribes post for January 15, 2019 recommended Alan Walker’s epic (25 years in the research and writing!), three-volume biography of Franz Liszt. In that post, I mentioned – that our Maine Coon cat Teddy (who, sadly, kicked the Kibble on December 24, 2022) – was often paid the highest compliment any cat can receive: that he acted like a dog. (To my mind, it speaks poorly of cats if the nicest thing one can say about a good one is that it behaves like another species altogether.) The point was to observe that likewise, the nicest thing anyone can say about a work of non-fiction is that it reads like a novel. That’s because non-fiction – written histories in particular – are all-too-often catalogs of names, dates, and events; information-rich but tedious, often poorly written tomes that can induce slumber in even the most hardened insomniacs. Novels tell stories, stories written by professional writers. So when we say a work of non-fiction reads like a novel, we’re saying, one, that the information contained therein has been woven into a compelling narrative and two, that the author who wrote the narrative writes like a pro. […]
Continue ReadingWe 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, […]
Continue ReadingAccording to one review, Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar is: “A disturbing book that screams to be read.” Truer words were never written. Despite its titular reference to the ravine in Kyiv known as Babi Yar, only the first part of the book deals with the murder of Kyiv’s Jewish population there on September 29 and 30, 1941. Beyond Babi Yar, the majority of the book is an account of the invasion, destruction, and occupation of Kyiv by Nazi Germany, as eye-witnessed by the young Anatoly Kuznetsov himself. (The subtitle of the book, “A Document in the Form of a Novel” would more accurately read “A Memoir in the Form of a Novel.”) The prescribed edition of the book came out in 2023, to mark the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. As can be seen from the copyright dates listed above, this is not a new book. Nevertheless, given that yesterday’s Music History Monday post dealt with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, subtitled “Babi Yar,” and given that today’s headlines continue to talk about whether factions within the Congress of United States will be willing to support Ukraine against its current invaders, Anatoly Kuznetsov’s […]
Continue ReadingOn 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! 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. […]
Continue ReadingWe cannot (and will not!) talk about Sebastian Bach’s landmark Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin without first considering what is, to my mind, one of the most perfect examples of human ingenuity this side of cave painting, and that is the violin. The Violin The violin is a miracle of ingenuity and nature, of art and science. Here are some particulars. The instrument we call the “violin” appeared around the year 1530 and continued to evolve until it reached its (more-or-less) definitive size and shape – in the late 1600s and early 1700s – in the hands the great violin gurus of Cremona, Italy: Nicolo Amati (1596-1684), Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737), and Giuseppe Bartolomeo Guarneri (1698-1744). Depending upon whom you talk to, the violin consists of up to 83 parts. (That’s because different ways of counting will yield up a different number of parts; for example, the back of a violin can be made up of one or two pieces of wood.) Whatever. No matter how you count the individual pieces, the violin ultimately consists of three essential components: the resonating body (the sound box), typically 355 millimeters (or 14”) in length; the neck with the fingerboard; and […]
Continue ReadingOn 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 […]
Continue ReadingUnplayable? Yesterday’s Music History Monday post observed how two beloved concert staples by our great and good friend Pyotr (Peter) Ilych Tchaikovsky – his Piano Concerto No. 1 (of 1874) and his Violin Concerto in D major (of 1878) – were deemed unplayable by their initial dedicatees. Those “dedicatees” were, respectively, the pianist Nicolai Rubinstein and the violinist Leopold Auer. Their poor attitudes lost them the dedications, which were ultimately given to the players who sucked it up, learned to play the concertos, and gave them their premieres (that would be, respectively, the pianist Hans von Bülow, and the violinist Adolf Brodsky). At the conclusion of yesterday’s Music History Monday post, I provided a short-list of composers who wrote music that was initially deemed to be “unplayable.” That list included Niccolò Paganini, Franz Liszt, Mily Balakirev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Samuel Barber, and György Ligeti. To that august list of names we could add tens – if not hundreds – of other composers, composers whose music was, at first, thought unplayable by the musicians initially tasked to perform it. For now, please permit me to add just two more composers’ names to that list, Adolf von Henselt and yours truly, Robert M. […]
Continue ReadingWe 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, […]
Continue ReadingAs discussed in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, Richard Strauss’ orchestral tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra (in German, Also sprach Zarathustra, composed in 1896) is based on the “philosophical poem” of the same title by the German philologist (a type of linguist who studies the history of languages through their literature) and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). As we observed yesterday, the historical Zarathustra – also known as “Zoroaster” – was a Persian prophet who is believed to have been born in 628 B.C.E. As is the case with so many ancient philosophers, it is impossible to distinguish the teachings of the actual “Zarathustra” from those of the many “Zoroastrian” sects that sprang up in the centuries after his death. As best as we can tell, Zarathustra himself preached monotheism in what was an otherwise overwhelmingly polytheistic spiritual environment. In his so-called “philosophical poem,” written between 1883 and 1885, Nietzsche uses the historical Zarathustra as a mouthpiece to spout his own ideas about the purpose of human life and the fate of humankind. Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra consists of eighty fairly brief discourses (or “sermons”), in which his stooge Zarathustra holds forth on a wide variety of subjects: from virtue, criminality, […]
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