Tomorrow, December 5, marks the 222nd anniversary of the Death of Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, who died in Vienna at the age of 35 on December 5, 1791. Few historical events have been subjected to as much speculation as the cause of Mozart’s death. So many different theories and stories have been suggested over the years that it’s impossible to discuss (or refute) them all. So let’s examine the facts as best as we can and then discuss a few of the alternative explanations for Mozart’s death. First, “the plot.” During the summer of 1791, Mozart was anonymously commissioned to write a Requiem mass. More than any other single element, it is this fact that served to create the myth of Mozart’s murder: “An uncanny messenger had delivered a summons from the underworld to prepare a doomed hero for an appointment in Samarra.” Near the end of her life, Mozart’s widow Constanze purportedly told Mozart researchers Vincent and Mary Novello that: “Some six months before his death he was possessed with the idea of his being poisoned – ‘I know I must die’, he exclaimed, ‘someone has given me aqua toffana [a mixture of arsenic and lead] and has […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 80
I had a premiere in Stockton, California on November 2 and now, with video in hand, I would take the opportunity of sharing it with you. The name of the piece is “180 Shift”; it is scored for violin, ‘cello, and piano. The piece was composed for and dedicated to a wonderful group called Trio 180 on a commission from the Pacific Arts and Lectures Committee of the University of the Pacific. The premiere performance was outstanding. The rehearsals were excellent as well, though I have learned over the decades that great rehearsals do not guarantee a great first performance. It is, I think, one of life’s truisms that we never really “know” anything (which includes playing a piece of music) until we have done it in front of other people (or, on the same lines, until we have taught it to other people). There was a time when premieres made me downright nauseous. I was worried that the players were going to botch the piece; I was worried that the audience was going to hate the piece (and me and my entire genome by extension); I was worried that I was going to vomit, etc. As it turns out, […]
Continue ReadingI have taken a brief but necessary hiatus from my Facebook blogging, but I’m back now, reinvigorated and prepared now to write about stuff you probably couldn’t care less about: growing up in New Jersey and then moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. However, the video I’ve posted at the butt-end of this post is so wonderful that I’m figuring folks will be willing to read through the setup before watching what amounts to the punch line. I was conceived and born in Brooklyn NY, which I’d like to believe afforded me some degree of genetic cache. Unfortunately, my WWII vet/GI Bill-educated father and mother did what millions of other like-minded young adults did in the 1950’s: they fled the city for the ‘burbs, in our case South Jersey. We landed in Levittown, which later adopted its original name of Willingboro. Call it what you will (“da ‘boro” was common among my milieu), it was (is) a lump of suburban sprawl not far from the miasmically vaporous Delaware River, about 13 miles north-east of downtown Philadelphia. It was a great place to grow up (given the wonderful friends I had and the survival skills I learned) and an even […]
Continue ReadingBe it ever so humble . . . We returned home late in the day on Tuesday, October 29. Typical of extended trips, we needed a vacation following our vacation. (Admittedly, mine was a “working vacation”, a phrase as oxymoronic as “vacations with children”. In truth, hanging out in Italy with your wife and 40 great people, eating like a pig and attending operas all over the map cannot possibly be construed as REAL work. So a “working vacation” it was.) Anyway, given the physical consequences of intercontinental travel, a day or two of time zone reacclimation would have been sweet. But this was not to be, so on Wednesday, my new wife Nanci (who is a pediatrician) headed off to her office to see patients and then to the hospital to check on the newborns while I steeled myself for The Great Courses’ first professor web-chat, which occurred from 4PM-6PM Pacific time on Wednesday afternoon. I was given a tutorial earlier in the day when a young woman from The Great Courses named Michelle walked me through the process over the phone and on the computer. I presume she is a young woman because only the young can explain […]
Continue ReadingIf it’s Friday, it must be Mantua. The potential downside with a tour the likes of the one I am presently engaged in is that it IS a tour: we climb on a bus and thus cocooned, we journey forth to various locations. We must adhere to the almighty schedule lest people get lost and chaos ensue. Once we arrive at a particular destination, we travel primarily as a pack with locale guides, who describe in magnificent detail the features of yet another Renaissance fresco in yet another ancient and beautiful church. We walk together, dine together, take pictures of each other while still doing our level best to absorb something of the ambience of the places we are visiting. Gratefully, the upsides of such a tour far outweigh the down. One, the people in our group are wonderful: fun, smart, and extremely diverse in life experience; I’ve no doubt that we (my wife and I) are making friends we will keep for a long time. Two, because we’re travelling by bus (and with local guides), we’re seeing the towns and landscape of the Po River valley with a detail we could never achieve on our own. Three, we’re visiting […]
Continue ReadingHard to believe, it’s already a week since I/we left home in order to lead a Verdi opera tour in Italy. We arrived on Wednesday, October 16 and are staying in a renovated thirteenth-century castle in an ancient village called Tabiano Castello in Emilia-Romagna, about 30 minutes south-west of Parma. This is Verdi territory; he grew up and lived in and around the city of Busseto, about 15 miles north of where I presently sit. We are not suffering. While it goes without saying (although I’ll say it anyway), the food and vino are absurdly, insanely good. I fear I will need two adjacent seats on my return flight in order to accommodate my bloated body back. This is the home of REAL Parmesan cheese, “prosciutto di Parma”, Parma ham, Lambrusco (bubbly red wine), balsamic vinegar (yesterday, in Modena, we tasted 25+ year-old vinegar over vanilla gelato; unbelievably good), Bolognese sauce, and a thousand other delicacies. But you are not reading this blog in order to follow my gluttony but rather, to hear about the performance of Verdi’s operas here in the heart of Verdi country. So here goes. We have attended two operas thus far, “Don Carlo” on Saturday […]
Continue ReadingI trust we all raised a glass last Thursday on the 10th of October in honor of Giuseppe Verdi’s 200th birthday. Now, I am aware that with the exception of “belated birthday cards” (“I really crapped up, I’m embarrassed to say; but I had better things to do than remember your day”), we generally do not continue to celebrate birthdays after the date has passed. But 200th birthdays should – rightly – be considered an exception, and thus October of this year has been unofficially designated as “Giuseppe Verdi Appreciation Month”. In Italy in particular, the celebration goes on, with Verdi festivals and opera performances up and down the peninsula. With this in mind, I will be on my way to Italy in just a few hours where I will lead an opera tour organized by Arte & Travel in and around Verdi’s home province of Parma. Among other treats, we will attend performances of “Don Carlo” at La Scala (in Milan); “Nabucco” in Bologna, and “I Masnadieri” (“The Bandits”) at the Teatro Reggio in Parma. This, my friends, is pretty much as good as it gets, and I am most aware of how fabulously lucky I am to be […]
Continue ReadingI will have two works premiered this season. In the spirit of self-promotion I am posting the particulars and would then discuss the first of the premieres, coming up in November. Premiere One: “180 Shift” (2013) Place: Recital Hall, Conservatory of Music at University of the Pacific, 3515 Pacific Circle, Stockton, California Date: November 2, 2013 Time: 7:30 PM Series: Resident Artist Series Performers: Trio 180 Ann Miller, violin Nina Flyer, ‘cello Sonia Leong, piano Commissioned by and dedicated to Trio 180 and supported by a Pacific Arts and Lectures Committee Award/Grant More information Premiere Two: “Invasive Species” (2012) Place: First Congregational Church of Berkeley, 2345 Channing Way, Berkeley, California Time: 8 PM Date: March 11, 2014 Time: 8 PM Series: Composers, Inc. Performers: Roger Woodward, piano and the Alexander String Quartet Zakarias Grafilo, first violin Fred Lifsitz, second violin Paul Yarborough, viola Sandy Wilson, ‘cello: Composed for and dedicated to Roger Woodward and the Alexander String Quartet in honor of the Alexander String Quartet’s thirtieth anniversary More information 180 Shift Trio 180 received their parts and scores for “180 Shift” about 6 weeks ago. They’ve been practicing, rehearsing, and asking me all the right questions since. They are, individually […]
Continue ReadingDuring the first half of his professional life, Giuseppe Verdi worked like a proverbial dog. (An odd idiom, “worked like a dog”. Yes, I suppose some dogs do work, but most of them spend the bulk of their time sleeping, eating, scratching themselves and licking their privates. If the latter is what is really meant by “working like a dog”, well then, the idiom takes on a whole new meaning, doesn’t it? With that possibility in mind, permit me to restart this post, sans the canine reference.) During the first half of his professional life, Giuseppe Verdi worked REALLY HARD. In the fourteen years between 1839 (when he completed his first opera, “Oberto”) and 1853 (when he completed “La Traviata”), Verdi composed and oversaw the casting, staging, and premieres of eighteen operas. (A nineteenth opera – Jérusalem, produced in 1847 – was in actuality an adaptation and translation into French of an earlier opera entitled “I Lombardi alla prima crociata”.) Verdi himself referred to the period between 1839 and 1853 as constituting his “galley slave years” because to his mind (and to ours), he worked like a slave: 18-20 hours a day, almost every day, always under deadline, harried endlessly […]
Continue ReadingNow Available: The 23 Greatest Solo Piano Works Purchase Today! As a solo concert instrument, the piano enjoys an unrivaled popularity in Western music. Capable of a vast sonic range, from ethereal softness to thundering grandeur, its appeal is global and seemingly eternal. For nearly 200 years, audiences have packed concert halls and opera houses to hear performers play this single, phenomenal instrument. One of the primary reasons for the piano’s popularity is the fact that it has inspired many of the greatest compositional masterworks in the concert repertoire. The piano’s harmonic and melodic capabilities, tone colors, and orchestral resources have fascinated composers—the majority of them highly accomplished pianists themselves—since the mid-18th century. The result is a magnificent body of work, from the intricate and lyric creations of the High Baroque and Classical masters to the passionate visions of Romantic virtuosos to the revolutionary sonorities of pianistic “impressionism” and modernism. Within the rich repertoire of the piano, a group of unique masterworks stand out as the greatest achievements of this tradition. These historic milestones in piano writing are celebrated for several key reasons: They have commanded the respect of the music world through their compositional mastery and their […]
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