A most interesting interview with Jon Housman, the CEO of OraTV who brought me into the Ora family after reading a blog about Mozart on this very Facebook page. Check it out below:
Continue Reading
Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 78
I swear, I promise, I guarantee (as best as I can guarantee anything): after today, there will be no more gratuitous references to my trip to SoCal yesterday, where I appeared on talk shows already named. Having said all of that, I would offer up one more photo that my wife found on her iPhone today. While I was doing my interview with Larry King, she (my wife Nanci) was cooling her well-clad heels in the so-called “Green Room”, the waiting room one finds in every concert hall, opera house and TV studio across our planet. Among those in the Green Room was Larry King’s next guest, an actor/comedian named Simon Helberg who is best know for playing a character named Howard Wolowitz on the sitcom “The Big Bang Theory”. He and I chatted for a while before I went on; it turns out that he’s a serious jazz pianist and thus we had something of substance to talk about. Anyway, my wife took a bunch of pictures of the monitor in the Green Room, most of which feature young Mr. Helberg who, according to my wife, seriously enjoyed my interview. Since I have learned (the hard way) NEVER to […]
Continue ReadingMonday was a fantastic day. I would beg your indulgence as I describe it. I will be forgiven upfront for namedropping as yesterday was about meeting some very special people. First things first. My wife Nanci was my boon companion from moment one. Nanci’s presence was a wise choice for any number of reasons, aside from the simple joy having my life-mate on my arm. Number one: I needed a built-in cheering squad. Number two: I needed a personal photographer who would document the events of the day. Number three: if I HADN’T asked Nanci to join me I would likely never heard the end of it, so . . . join me she did. We took a 7:55 flight out of Oakland (Oaktown) California, which put us in Burbank at 9 AM. We were picked up by Danielle, who was our driver-tour-guide-confidante-escort for the day. From the airport it was a hop-skip-and-jump to the Ora TV studios in Glendale. Once we arrived, I was “made up” and – when the time came – I sat down with Larry King and did my interview. A word, please. I have been interviewed many times: by the New York Times; by The […]
Continue ReadingI spent the better part of last week working on background materials for my OraTV show “Conspiracies, Peccadilloes, and Dirty Little Secrets: Fun and Games With the Great Composers.” A chunk of time was spent finding and scanning visual images appropriate for the shows, images that will be projected behind me. The bulk of the week was spent planning for and video recording musical examples that will “accompany” the shows. For this we hired the superb pianist Lino Rivera and the indomitable (and inexhaustible) Alexander String Quartet. We recorded Lino at my house on my studio piano and the Alexander Quartet in Knuth Hall at San Francisco State University. The recordings were supervised by my producer Jason Rovou and my director Scott Brown, who flew up from SoCal to supervise a locally hired recording crew. Total pros, all. I’ve posted a few photos below of the Alexander String Quartet in action; I’ll post a few pix of Lino Rivera’s recording session in a few days. The programs themselves will be on-line at OraTV and on Hulu within a few weeks. I will keep you posted re: when and where. Tomorrow will be a most exciting day. In preparation for joining […]
Continue ReadingIt’s hard to believe that it’s almost two weeks since we returned from our trip to Vienna, but there you go, time flies when you’re putting things away, doing laundry, and paying bills. I have always advocated – vainly – that we should all have the opportunity to “take a vacation from a vacation” by doing nothing for the first three or four days after returning home, the better to ease ourselves back into real life. I know: I don’t feel sorry for me either. Vienna is one of those wonderful places where the longer you stay, the more there is to do. If we didn’t have kids and jobs to come home to, and if my Visa card had not been whimpering and gagging and begging for mercy, we might have tried to stay a few more days. (Yes: Vienna is expensive; very expensive; extremely expensive. I began referring to our trip as our “moneymoon”; as a “paycation.” The price of paradise, I suppose.) So here’s a rundown on a couple of events that brought our trip to its conclusion. On our last day in Vienna, I stayed in the hotel room finishing up my previous post on Haydn’s […]
Continue ReadingFor my two Euros, the best monument to a composer in Vienna is – by far – the house in which Joseph Haydn lived during the last twelve years of his life, from 1797 to 1809. Here’s the story: Between 1791 and 1795, Joseph Haydn twice visited England. The first of Haydn’s most excellent English adventures took place between January of 1791 and June of 1792, and the second one between January of 1794 and August of 1795. These trips cemented Haydn’s reputation as the world’s most famous and popular living composer and made him – as composers go – a rich man. It was thanks to the money Haydn earned during his first English adventure that he was able to do something that neither Antonio Vivaldi (who died in Vienna in 1741) nor Wolfgang Mozart (who died in Vienna in 1791), nor Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, nor Mahler (who died in Vienna in, respectively, 1827, 1828, 1897, and 1911) ever managed to do: Haydn bought his very own house in Vienna. It was a one-story house on Kleine Steingasse in the Viennese suburb of Obere Windmūhl. It had been spotted by Haydn’s wife Maria Anna while he was away in […]
Continue ReadingUPDATE New Mozart In Vienna Webcourse! The extraordinary Joseph Haydn was born in the Austrian town of Rohrau on March 31, 1732. At the age of eight he moved to Vienna, where he became a chorister at St. Stephens Cathedral. He remained in Vienna, on and off, for the remainder of his long life, dying here on May 31, 1809. The amazing Ludwig (“my friends call me Louis”) van Beethoven moved to Vienna in November of 1792 a few weeks shy of his 22nd birthday. He remained a resident of the city until his death 34½ years later, dying during an early spring snowstorm on March 26, 1827. The incredible Franz Schubert was born in Vienna on January 31, 1797 and died here on November 19, 1828. The quintessentially Viennese composer, the “waltz-king” Johann Strauss, Jr. was born just outside of Vienna on October 25, 1825 and died here on June 3, 1899. The spectacular Johannes Brahms settled in Vienna at the age of 30 in 1863 and remained here until his death 34 years later on April 3, 1897. The stunning Gustav Mahler studied at the Vienna Conservatory, directed the Vienna Imperial opera for ten years – from 1897 […]
Continue ReadingProud as I am to be a 36-year resident of Northern California, and proud as I am that all four of my children were born there, I myself grew in the ironically named “Garden State” of New Jersey. This bears mentioning (for the second time in two posts, no less) because one cannot urinate in north, central or south Jersey without hitting a historical marker that says “George Washington Slept Here”. A little Revolutionary history: On June 14, 1775, George Washington was appointed General and commander-in-chief of the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress. It was the wisest of appointments, because only Washington’s extraordinary leadership and generalship managed to preserve the army during the first 30 months of the War. In July of 1776 the English General William Howe landed some 25,000 troops in Staten Island, New York. Outnumbered and outgunned, Washington and the Continentals executed what accounted to a fighting withdrawal from Long Island to Brooklyn to Manhattan and then across the Hudson River to Fort Lee New Jersey (where my father lives today, about a half-a-mile from the Revolution-era fort overlooking the Hudson River). From Fort Lee, Washington and his army traipsed southwest across New Jersey, withdrawing […]
Continue ReadingAlong with mass consumption of Viennese coffee, strudel, and schnitzel, our pilgrimages have begun. Today we visited he house in which Franz Schubert was born on January 31, 1797 at Nußdorfer Straße 54. To call the house “modest” is a bit of an understatement; at the time of Schubert’s birth its 16 apartments housed some 70 people, making the tract house in which I grew up in South Jersey seem like a palace by comparison. The Schubert apartment – on the upper right-hand side of the second floor (see photo below) – consisted of two rooms: a small kitchen and a single living room, in which the Schubert family managed to live, sleep, make music, reproduce, etc. The family moved to larger digs when Franz was a few years old. Schubert was born in the kitchen, next to the fireplace/stove. For a January birth it was the warmest spot in the apartment and thus the location. One of the photos below shows me crouching at pretty much the exact spot Schubert was born. Also pictured below (and on display in the apartment): a pair of Schubert’s glasses (looking, to my untrained eye, very much like bifocals). He was severely near-sighted […]
Continue ReadingOver FOURTEEN of my courses on sale during The Great Courses Spring Warehouse Clearance. Take advantage of courses up to 70% Off Today! On Sale Courses include: The 30 Greatest Orchestral Works How to Listen to and Understand Opera Bach and the High Baroque Concert Masterworks Music of Richard Wagner Life and Operas of Verdi Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas Chamber Music of Mozart String Quartets of Beethoven Operas of Mozart Great Masters: Tchaikovsky — His Life and Music Great Masters: Haydn — His Life and Music Great Masters: Shostakovich — His Life and Music Great Masters: Liszt — His Life and Music And more!
Continue Reading
Robert Greenberg | Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved