Giuseppe Verdi’s first opera, “Oberto”, was produced at Milan’s famed Teatro alla Scala in 1839 when Verdi was 26 years old. Oberto’s modest success was completely obscured by the domestic disasters Verdi suffered between 1838 and 1840 when, in the span of 22 months, he lost both his small children and he beloved wife Margherita to disease. Paralyzed by grief, Verdi swore he’d never compose again. But compose he did: egged on, cajoled, wheedled and finally browbeaten by Bartolomeo Merelli – the director of La Scala – Verdi completed his second opera “Un giorno di regno” (“King for a Day”) and composed his third opera, “Nabucco”, about which I blogged on September 20. (Bartolomeo Merelli was an astute businessman, but in his actions towards Verdi, he was also a GREAT AND BRILLIANT man. Merelli’s love for and belief in Verdi very probably kept Verdi alive, and his intransigence towards Verdi the artist kept Verdi composing at a time when he would most likely have quit forever. That would have been a disaster of such magnitude that its mere contemplation loosens my bladder. So please, three cheers for Bartolomeo Merelli who was, in fact, one of music history’s indispensible men.) (While […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Author Archive for Robert Greenberg – Page 81
It has been a very good week. I distrust very good weeks. I would explain. By calling this a “good week” I am (obviously) asserting that good things have happened during the last seven (or so) days. And that is true. But saddled (as I am) with my particular psychoneuroses, such a positive assertion is riddled with dangerous implications. You see, by publically admitting that I’ve had a good week I fear I have called down a Karmic wet blanket that will suffocate my present high spirits and render me, once again, susceptible to the existential gloom that is my natural emotional condition. I expect it can all be boiled down to a single unfortunate assumption: that when a good thing happens there must be a bad reason for it. So here’s what’s happened. On Saturday last, I got married, as documented previously on this site. Yes; all good. In fact, all great. Then today (Thursday), I was informed that I’ve been designated a “Steinway Artist” by Steinway & Sons piano manufacturers. This is, no doubt, a tremendous honor, and I have indulged myself mightily by announcing it here on this page. But my ingrained suspicion of positive news has […]
Continue Reading“If music be the food of love, play on!” So spake Duke Orsino in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night of 1602. Taking our cue from the good Duke (to say nothing for his creator, the extraordinary Billy S.), I would observe that since this site is about music, it must also then be about love (and food, about which we will deal another day). Having broached the subject of love, I would beg your indulgence for the second time this summer as I wax personal. On Saturday, September 21st – 85 days after my eldest daughter Rachel tied the knot – it was my turn: I married a magnificent woman named Nanci Tucker at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, California. Thus does the period my widowhood end, to which I say good freakin’ riddance. Nanci is tackling a tough gig. Having moved out of her condo/loft in a hipper-than-hip south-of-Market San Francisco location, she has moved into my (now officially OUR) house in the hills of Oakland, here to deal with the demands of a husband and two young children (to say nothing for the evil commute back across San Francisco Bay to her place of work not far from the Pacific […]
Continue ReadingWe understand a “eureka moment” as being a revelatory, paradigm-shifting realization that has the power to change EVERYTHING. The word “eureka” comes from the ancient Greek word εὕρηκα, which means “I have found it!” The ancient Greco-dude credited with coining the exclamation “eureka!” was the mathematician, astronomer, physicist, engineer, inventor and Jeopardy!-freak Archimedes (circa 287 BCE – circa 212 BCE). Archimedes purportedly shrieked “EUREKA” when, having stepped into his bath and noticed that the water level rose, he realized that the volume of water he displaced was equal to the volume of his body that was submerged in the water. A nanosecond (or two) later, he then realized that he had solved what had long been considered an unsolvable problem: how to accurately measure the volume of an irregular object. According to legend, Archimedes was so excited by his “eureka moment” that he jumped out of the tub and ran naked through the streets of his native city of Syracuse, there on the southeastern coast of Sicily. We suspect he would have thought twice about doing so had he made his discovery during a winter’s evening in Medicine Hat, Alberta. I trust we’ve all had a “eureka moment”. Mine occurred […]
Continue ReadingSpeaking of facial hair (which I did in my previous post), I would issue a challenge to all the techies out there. I would dearly love to have an app that allowed me to actually “see” what someone looked like – clean shaven – beneath his beard. Now, I completely understand that a full beard is considered a sign of piety by some religious sects and as a symbol of male virility -“plumage” on full display – for various cultures. Nevertheless, as a card-carrying “face-man” (as opposed to a “breast-man” or a “leg-man”), I would assert that full beards cover up, and even disguise, that most special and revealing part of the human body: the face. Depending upon how they are counted, there are anywhere from 19 to 43 muscles in the human face, the subtle interplay of which collectively are capable of an almost infinite degree of expressive nuance. (Yes, there are exceptions to this. For example, given the range of emotional expression displayed by the actor Chuck Norris, we can correctly conclude that it is possible to have but a single facial muscle.) However many facial muscles one possesses, a full beard will mask much of the expression […]
Continue ReadingWe have a major composer birthday coming up: the great Italian opera composer Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi will be turning 200 years old on October 10, and he never sounded better. I am going to take a brief break from my jazz pianist postings in order to focus on my pal and yours, the esteemed Joe Green, the Italian opera machine. Rather than write long, potentially stultifying blogs about this fascinating man and brilliant composer, I am going to draw on a 32-lecture course I made for The Great Courses/The Teaching Company called (not unexpectedly) “The Life and Operas of Verdi.” (I am, of course, assuming that the selected video excerpts I will draw from this course are NOT stultifying.) The approximately nine-minute excerpts I will link to this page have the reinforcing advantages of providing much more info than I can possibly provide in a blog while, hopefully, making you hungry for even more information and therefore susceptible to actually purchasing the course. Follow the link below to the first excerpt, during which I discuss the prodigious gifts the Italians have lavished on humanity. Chief among those gifts is opera itself, and chief among the greatest composers of Italian […]
Continue ReadingAmong the top pick-up lines of my generation was the irksome “what’s your sign?”. I myself never used the line because one, I was too embarrassed to do so and two, I never gave much credence to the whole astrology trip, even as an ice-breaker. If you ask me (which you didn’t, but then you are reading this post), our actual birthdates are much less significant than the dates on which we were conceived. Now please, I am not venturing into the social/religious/emotional minefield of “when” life begins (although I would invoke the joke that has a priest declare that life begins at conception, a reverend assert that life begins at birth, and a rabbi proclaim that “life begins when the kids go to college and the dog is DEAD!”). Rather, I’m merely pointing out that if the heavens truly affect our spirits and reproductive urges and fluids, then conception (and the physical activity that leads to such) seems much more likely to be affected by unseen gravitational tides than the rather more straightforward, contraction-dominated acts of labor and birth. I will gladly acknowledge the advantages of celebrating “birthdays” rather than “days of conception”. First (and we’re all adults here, […]
Continue ReadingIt was as a result of my lessons with Lee Konitz that I was first exposed to the music of Lennie Tristano (as well as Tristano’s teaching method, which Konitz employed pretty much verbatim). Along with my discovery of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”, Tristano’s compositions and style of playing was the great musical revelation of my late teens. To repeat an assertion made in my previous post, along with J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Béla Bartók, Lennie Tristano is my single greatest influence as a pianist and composer. Leonard Joseph Tristano was born in Chicago on March 19, 1919 and died on November 18, 1978. Mention his name to most jazz fans (to say nothing for most concert musicians) and you will draw a blank. Part of that is Tristano’s fault; though he complained endlessly about his lack of recognition, he hardly ever played in public and did next-to-nothing to create a rapport with a fan base. Blind since childhood and rather thorny of temperament, he instead devoted himself to his teaching, to practicing, and, later in his life, making recordings in his home studio. We are told that “unfortunately, Tristano’s esoteric style of playing and improving […]
Continue ReadingI studied jazz improvisation with the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz for the better part of a year between 1973 and ’74. As best as I recall, his apartment in New York City was on the East 30’s. He shared it with his wife and a two cats. Of the three, Konitz clearly had the better relationship with the cats. (One day I went in for a lesson and the place felt different; a bit dustier and more cluttered. His wife, who had always been around during my lessons, was nowhere to be seen. I asked after her. Konitz said, “My old lady’s GONE.” I said I was sorry to hear it. He said, “I’m not”, and that was the end of that conversation.) Konitz was part of a small and elite group of musicians who had studied and/or worked with the pianist Lennie Tristano in the 1940’s, ‘50’s, and 60’s. This “Club Tristano” included the tenor sax player Warne Marsh, the pianist Sal Mosca, the guitarist Billy Bauer, and the bassist Peter Ind. What all these musicians had in common were mad technical skills and a penchant for improvising long, harmonically complex lines marked by a rhythmic asymmetry and phrase […]
Continue ReadingSpring semester of my freshman year at college – this would have been 1973 – I took a jazz history class taught by a youngish (28 year-old) jazz scholar and graduate student named Jim Patrick. (In preparation for writing this blog, I Googled Jim to see what he was up to, expecting – foolishly – to see pictures of the bearded, somewhat rotund, dryly funny guy I knew in the early ‘70’s. Instead, I found his obituary from just a few days ago – July 25, 2013 –which mentions that he died at 68, was predeceased by his wife, was a loving grandfather and yadda yadda. Holy crap. Sometimes I hate the internet; we can no longer pretend “not to know”. Meanwhile, the question, no matter how cliché, must be asked: where does the time go?) I became friends with Jim, because he was the one-and-only jazz guy on the Princeton music faculty. (An interesting factoid: as a graduate student in jazz, he wasn’t being advised and overseen by a music department faculty member but rather, by a sociology professor named Morroe Berger. In those days at ivy-strangled Princeton, jazz was not considered a genuine musical genre but rather, a […]
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