Dr. Prescribes Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37
April
6th,
2021
Theater-an-der-Wien, opened 1801, circa 1815 Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, Op. 37 is the first of his “mature” piano concerti. While he had sketched bits and pieces of it as far back as 1799, he didn’t get to the nuts and bolts/nitty-gritty/down ‘n’ dirty essentials of composing the thing until early 1803,…
Music History Monday: “Three’s the Charm”
April
5th,
2021
Ludwig/Louis/Luigi van Beethoven (1770-1827) in 1803 at the time of the premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 3, by Christian Horneman We mark the premiere on April 5, 1803 – 218 years ago today – of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor at a public concert held at the Theater-an-der-Wien, in Vienna. Beethoven…
Dr. Bob Prescribes Beethoven – Funeral Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II
March
30th,
2021
Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780) in 1762, by Jean-Étienne Liotard Whether we choose to like her or dislike her (not that she would have cared a whit one way or the other), Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina, Habsburg Empress and German Queen was a remarkable person. She was the only woman to ever rule the Habsburg…
Music History Monday: Beethoven’s Funeral
March
29th,
2021
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) by Joseph Karl Stiele, painted in four sitting between February and April 1820. Beethoven hated being painted and sat for Steiler only to honor the request of his patrons and “best friends in the world”, Franz and Antonie Brentano. (Antonie Brentano remains the consensus choice for being Beethoven’s “Immortal Beloved.”) Beethoven…
Dr. Bob Prescribes: Stephen Sondheim: The Making of a Theatrical Life, Part Two
March
23rd,
2021
We pick up where we left off in yesterday’s Music History Monday with part 2 of “Stephen Sondheim: The Making of a Theatrical Life.” Stephen Sondheim (born 1930) circa 1947 In 1946, at the age of 16, Sondheim went away to Williams College, a small, very exclusive private liberal arts school in the western Massachusetts…
Music History Monday: Stephen Sondheim: The Making of a Theatrical Life, Part One
March
22nd,
2021
Stephen Joshua Sondheim (born 1920); April 6, 2004, by Richard Avedon We mark the birth on March 22, 1930 – 91 years ago today – and the composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Alive and we trust well, living in his brownstone townhouse in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood on the East Side of Midtown (also the…
Dr. Bob Prescribes My Fair Lady
March
16th,
2021
My Fair Lady is a fifth-generation work: an adaption of adaption of an adaption of an adaption, a musical that many top-end talents believed – for reasons we will discuss – could never be successfully written. The original story of King Pygmalion comes from Greek myth and legend. It was the Roman poet Publius Ovidius…
Music History Monday: My Fair Lady and the Making of a Partnership
March
15th,
2021
My Fair Lady, original Broadway cast, left-to-right: Colonel Hugh Pickering (Robert Coote, 1909-1982); Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison, 1908-1990); Alfred P. Doolittle (Stanley Holloway, 1890-1982); Eliza Doolittle (Julie Andrews, born 1935) We mark the opening performance on March 15, 1956 – 65 years ago today – of the Broadway musical My Fair Lady at the…
Dr. Bob Prescribes Hector Berlioz: Requiem
March
9th,
2021
Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) was not just a great composer, but a wonderful writer as well. He left behind a not-insignificant body of prose. In the 1830s he made much of his living writing reviews and essays (and continued to write reviews almost to the end of his life, even when he no longer needed the…
Music History Monday: Dressed to Kill
March
8th,
2021
Louis-Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), in a photograph taken between summer 1864 and July 1865; The notes written under the photograph are from the third bar of the first movement of the Symphonie Fantastique We mark the death on March 8, 1869 – 152 years ago today – of the French composer and conductor Hector Berlioz, in…