Music History Monday: Go Figure
November
21st,
2016
On this day in 1928, Maurice Ravel’s one-movement orchestra work Boléro received its premiere at the Opera Comique in Paris with Ravel conducting. (Various sources variously describe the premiere as having taken place on November 20, November 21, and November 22! We are splitting the difference and going with the 21st.) Boléro was commissioned by…
Music History Mondays: Too Many Birthdays!
November
14th,
2016
[caption id="attachment_1785" align="alignright" width="300"] Clockwise from top left: Fanny Mendelssohn, Johann Hummel, Leopold Mozart, and Aaron Copland.[/caption] I began this “Music History Monday” project by scouring the Web for musical events from which I assembled a master list of what happened in the world of Western concert music on each of the year’s 366 days.…
Music History Mondays: Good Advice
November
7th,
2016
159 years ago today, on November 7, 1857, Franz Liszt’s Dante Symphony for orchestra and female choir received its premiere at the Royal Theater in the Saxon capital of Dresden. The 46 year-old Liszt was, at the time, the most famous and beloved performing musician in all of Europe, and nowhere was he more popular…
Music History Mondays: Steinway Concert Hall
October
31st,
2016
[caption id="attachment_1789" align="alignright" width="283"] The original Steinway Hall on East 14th Street[/caption] 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…
Music History Mondays: George Crumb: A Birthday Appreciation
October
24th,
2016
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…
Music History Monday: Chopin’s Heart
October
17th,
2016
167 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…
Music History Mondays: Porgy and Bess
October
10th,
2016
81 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)…
Music History Mondays: Porgy and Bess
October
10th,
2016
81 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)…
Music History Monday: A Marriage Not Made in Heaven
October
3rd,
2016
On 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…
Music History Monday: Béla Bartók – An Appreciation
September
26th,
2016
Seventy-one years ago today - on September 26, 1945 – the composer, pianist, ethnomusicologist and Hungarian patriot Béla Viktor Janos Bartók died at the age of 64 in self-imposed exile in New York City. Sixteen years later, in 1961, the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, the enfant terrible of post-World War Two musical modernism, wrote…