On October 31, 1866 – 150 years ago today – Steinway Hall opened on East 14th Street, between Fifth Avenue and University Place in New York. (As a native of New York City, I would tell you that when a New Yorker says “New York”, she is referring specifically to the island of Manhattan. You got a problem with that?) Steinway Hall, which cost $90,786 to build there in 1866, served two mutually reinforcing purposes. Purpose one: to provide the city of New York with a state-of-the-art concert hall. To that end, Steinway Hall contained a concert hall with 2500 seats and a stage that could accommodate a 100-piece symphony orchestra. It was – at the time it opened – among the largest and certainly the most opulent and prestigious concert venue in New York City. It was the home of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for 25 years: from the day it opened its doors in 1866 until 1891, when the orchestra moved to the newly built Carnegie Hall. Purpose two: to sell pianos! Steinway Hall’s grand showroom was big enough to display over 100 pianos. According to the president of Steinway & Sons, William Steinway (born Wilhelm Steinweg, […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 72
A most happy birthday to the iconic American composer George Crumb, who was born in Charleston, West Virginia 87 years ago today. Youth is indeed wasted on the young. One of the many wonderful things about being a kid (and here I’m talking about anyone under the age of 25) is the revelatory, earth-shaking, full-contact emotional body slam that comes from discovering something new. And since most everything is new for young ‘uns, the pace of such revelations can be daily, creating a level of existential excitement that an old fart like me can only look upon with melancholic envy. (I would note that this “excitement of discovery” doesn’t necessarily provoke a positive response. I remember well when my daughter Lily—the third of my four kids—first tasted ice cream. She was about 18 months old; her eyes rolled back in her head and a beatific smile crossed her face when suddenly she fixed me, her father, whose loins contributed to giving her life, with a death glare that Medusa herself would have envied. I understood immediately what she was thinking: “you rotten b*stard, I’ve been alive for a year-and-a-half and you’ve only now allowed me to taste this bit of […]
Continue Reading167 years ago today – on October 17, 1849 – the brilliant Polish-born composer Frédéric Chopin died in his apartment in Paris’ très chic Place Vendome. He was 39 years, 6 months, and 16 days old when he died and was attended by Dr. Jean Cruveilhier, France’s leading authority on tuberculosis. A few months before his death, Dr. Cruveilhier had diagnosed Chopin with tuberculosis, and Cruveilhier ascribed TB as the cause of Chopin’s death on his death certificate. There was a certain tragic romance associated with tuberculosis in nineteenth century Europe. Dubbed the “White Plague”, TB was thought to imbue its victims with a heightened artistic sensibility. Reflecting on just this, the prototypical Romantic poet Lord George Gordon Byron, wrote, “I should like to die from consumption.” (He didn’t; he died of a septic infection at the age of 36. No romance there at all.) In a letter to a friend, George Sand wrote of her beloved Frédéric Chopin, “Chopin coughs with infinite grace.” So idealized was the “spiritual purity” tuberculosis presumably bestowed on its sufferers that it became stylish for mid-nineteenth century women to affect the appearance of a consumptive by making their skin as pale as possible. (As […]
Continue Reading81 years ago today – on October 10, 1935 – George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess opened at the Alvin Theater in New York City. With a libretto by Dubose Heywood (whose play Porgy was the basis of the libretto) and Gershwin’s older brother Ira, Porgy and Bess ran a frankly unimpressive (by contemporary Broadway standards) 124 performances before it closed. Porgy and Bess was applauded for the beauty of its numbers but roundly criticized for being neither fish nor fowl. The critic Samuel Chotzinoff – ordinarily friendly to Gershwin – wrote: “As entertainment it is a hybrid, fluctuating constantly between music drama, musical comedy, and operetta.” Given the version of Porgy and Bess that he heard, Chotzinoff’s criticism is entirely justified. And therein lies a tale. George Gershwin’s amazing success as a composer of Broadway musicals and jazz-influenced concert works lit a fuse deep inside him: a desire to compose a full-length, no-holds-barred, knock-‘em-out-of-their seats American opera. His life-long affinity with the music of the African-American community – drumming, ragtime, jazz, and the spiritual – drew him like a bear to honey to a play called Porgy by Dubose Heywood. Heywood’s Porgy was produced on Broadway in 1927 and depicts […]
Continue Reading81 years ago today – on October 10, 1935 – George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess opened at the Alvin Theater in New York City. With a libretto by Dubose Heywood (whose play Porgy was the basis of the libretto) and Gershwin’s older brother Ira, Porgy and Bess ran a frankly unimpressive (by contemporary Broadway standards) 124 performances before it closed. Porgy and Bess was applauded for the beauty of its numbers but roundly criticized for being neither fish nor fowl. The critic Samuel Chotzinoff – ordinarily friendly to Gershwin – wrote: “As entertainment it is a hybrid, fluctuating constantly between music drama, musical comedy, and operetta.” Given the version of Porgy and Bess that he heard, Chotzinoff’s criticism is entirely justified. And therein lies a tale. George Gershwin’s amazing success as a composer of Broadway musicals and jazz-influenced concert works lit a fuse deep inside him: a desire to compose a full-length, no-holds-barred, knock-‘em-out-of-their seats American opera. His life-long affinity with the music of the African-American community – drumming, ragtime, jazz, and the spiritual – drew him like a bear to honey to a play called Porgy by Dubose Heywood. Heywood’s Porgy was produced on Broadway in 1927 and depicts […]
Continue ReadingOn this date in 1833 the 29 year-old French composer Hector Berlioz married the 33 year-old Anglo-Irish actress Harriet Smithson. They tied the knot at the British embassy in Paris; the wedding was officially witnessed by Berlioz’ good bud, the pianist and composer Franz Liszt. Berlioz had moved to Paris from his hometown in the French Alps in 1822, presumably to study medicine. His passport described the 18 year-old Berlioz as being: “About five foot three or five foot four in height, red hair, red eyebrows, beginning to grow a beard, forehead ordinary, eyes gray, complexion high.” What that passport description does not mention is that Berlioz burned with passion for pretty much everything except medicine, in particular music, theater, and literature. Predictably, he washed out of medical school within a matter of months. Unwilling to return home, he bounced around Paris living in poverty, and—when he had a little money in his pocket—he attended the opera standing room and took a few music lessons. After a rather difficult application process (it was rumored that Berlioz’ father had to bribe the admissions officer), the now 23 year-old Hector Berlioz entered the Paris Conservatory, a full five years older that most […]
Continue ReadingFor nine wonderful years – from 1992-2001 – I was on the faculty of something called the “Andersen Executive Program”, or “AEP”. Three or four times a summer, various partners from the accounting, auditing, and consulting firm of Arthur Andersen gathered in some extraordinary place for a week to talk about the current issues facing their clients. The teaching faculty – as you’ve surmised, since I was on it – was incredibly diverse. For three years in the late 1990s the AEP held sessions at a resort hotel called the Huis ter Duin (“House of the Dunes”) on the North Sea in the Dutch town of Noordwijk, 27 miles southwest of Amsterdam. It was at one of those sessions that I had lunch with a fellow faculty member: an Englishman about my age who was a professional “futurist”. He struck me as equal parts high-tech dude, palm reader, and huckster, all of which seemed necessary tool-box skills for someone who made a living predicting future trends and technologies. When the futurist discovered I was a musician he wanted to talk about one of his pet ideas: how consumers will listen to music in the future. He had it all figured […]
Continue Reading176 years ago today – on September 12, 1840 – one of the most tortuous, profanity-inducing, potentially violent, legally drawn out courtships ended when the composer Robert Schumann and the pianist Clara Wieck were married in Schönefeld, just northeast of Leipzig. The person to blame for all the tsuris was Friedrich Wieck, Clara’s father. He was a piano teacher who had molded his daughter Clara into one of Europe’s greatest pianists by the time she was a teenager. Clara was Friedrich’s reason-to-be, his creation, a walking advertisement for effectiveness of his “piano method” as well as his Individual Retirement Account. So when that lump Robert Schumann – who had once also been a student of Wieck’s – started sniffing around his Clara when she was just 16 years old (and Schumann was 25), well, it was time to nip things in the bud. There was no way on this good earth that that lame-fingered loser Robert Schumann was going to steal Wieck’s cash cow. Nip things. In the bud. Yes. But in this Friedrich Wieck was singularly unsuccessful, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. For five years after Robert and Clara had pledged themselves to each other he did […]
Continue ReadingIn my capacity as Music-Historian-in-Residence for San Francisco Performances (SFP), I will be writing a weekly blog called “Music History Monday” for the SFP Facebook page. Being a firm believer in doing double-duty, I will be posting these blogs on my page as well, though I would encourage to visit (and follow!) the SFP Facebook page as well. Welcome to what will become a weekly feature on both my own and the San Francisco Performances Facebook pages, “Music History Monday.” (As titles go that’s about as thrilling as root canal, but it is an accurate description of the feature’s content so run with it we will.) Every Monday I will dredge up some timely, perhaps intriguing and even, if we are lucky, salacious chunk of musical information relevant to that date, or to San Francisco Performances’ concert schedule, or to … whatever. If on (rare) occasion these features appear a tad irreverent, well, that’s okay: we would do well to remember that cultural icons do not create and make music but rather, people do, and people can do and say the darndest things. September 5 is a particularly rich musical birth date. Among others born on September 5 were Johann […]
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