Monday’s Music History Monday post marked the birth – on April 22, 1916 – of the distinguished American-British violinist, conductor, and teacher Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999). During the course of that post, I wrote that Menuhin: “was a man of unwavering moral integrity and courage: a soft-spoken, kind, gentle, and elegant man, a role model for everyone who knew him.” In support of that statement, I would offer up two of the many examples of his integrity and courage. But first, an anecdote that sets the stage for those examples. Menuhin was born in New York City to a family of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. His given name – “Yehudi” – literally means “Jew” in Hebrew. In an interview published in the British magazine New Internationalist, Menuhin described how he got his name: “Obliged to find an apartment [in New York City], my parents searched the neighborhood and chose one. Showing them out after they had viewed it, the landlady said: ‘And you’ll be glad to know I don’t take Jews.’ Her mistake made clear to her, the antisemitic landlady was renounced, and another apartment found. But her blunder left its mark. Back on the street my mother made a vow. Her unborn […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Dr. Bob Prescribes
The Project In early 1819, the Vienna-based music publisher Anton Diabelli (1781-1858) had what was a great idea for a charity project. He sent a brief waltz of his own composition to 50 composers living in Austria and invited each of them to compose a single variation on the waltz. Diabelli’s plan was to publish the set as an anthology entitled “Patriotic Artist’s Club” (“Vaterländischer Künstlerverein”) and distribute the profits from its sale to widows and children left orphaned by the Napoleonic Wars. Among the composers to receive the theme and Diabelli’s invitation to participate in his project was the 48-year-old Ludwig van Beethoven. Typical to form, Beethoven was deeply irked at being included in such a “group grope,” on top of which he dismissed Diabelli’s theme as a “cobbler’s patch”: as being entirely beneath his musical dignity. But then, for reasons discussed in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, Beethoven had a change of heart, and decided to accept Diabelli’s offer after all. But Beethoven was unwilling to join the mob of composers who had consented to contribute but a single variation each. Instead, he made it clear that his contribution would be a complete set of variations, the number […]
Continue ReadingFor the second week in a row, I’m offering up a different sort of Dr. Bob Prescribes (DBP) post. Yesterday’s Music History Monday marked the private ceremony, held on April 1, 2017, during which Bob Dylan received his Novel Prize for Literature. Typically, if I were to follow my usual modus operandi in today’s DBP, I would now be prescribing for you my favorite Bob Dylan album (or albums). But circumstances force a confession: with the exception of “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits,” (pictured above), I don’t own any of Dylan’s albums. In fact – and I trust his will not affect your good opinion of me – I’ve never been much of a Bob Dylan fan. And while I recognize and acknowledge his greatness, I personally have never thought much of his attitude, his voice, or even, with a few exceptions, his songs. Okay, color me a barbarian; you wouldn’t be the first. I can handle it. But as for the various “personas” Dylan has concocted/projected over the course of his 60-plus year career: those personas have always fascinated me. Cool to the point of detachment, Dylan is, in fact, a middle-class Jewish nebbish from Hibbing Minnesota crossed with a […]
Continue ReadingToday’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post takes a different tack than usual. Rather than prescribing/recommending a particular CD (or DVD, or book), today’s post will feature a series of links to various video performances of Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony, interviews with people who knew him, and audio recordings of a very few of his legendary temper tantrums! Instant Fame The story of Toscanini’s rise to almost instant fame is the stuff of legend. At the age of eighteen, he was living at home and contributing to his family’s finances by working as a freelance cellist. He looked younger than his years, so he grew a mustache in an attempt to look older. During the 1885-’86 opera season, Toscanini played cello at the Teatro Regio in Parma (where, for our information, he had begun performing as a cellist cello at the tender age of thirteen). Over his time in the pit, Toscanini had memorized all of his parts, which allowed him to watch the action on stage without ever having to look at the music on his stand. He later remembered: “I never had to turn a page.” Toscanini’s prodigious memory annoyed the conductor of the Teatro Regio – Nicola […]
Continue ReadingWe begin where we left off in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, with what was the closing statement: “It’s a fact: the very history of twentieth century Russian, Russian expatriate, and Soviet composers starts with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), whose own roots trace back through The Five to Glinka and the awakening of Russian musical nationalism in the 1830s, all of which was an outgrowth of Napoleon’s defeat in Russia in 1812!” During his lifetime, Rimsky-Korsakov was best known for his thirteen operas. However, he is best known today for three spectacularly popular orchestral works, all of which were composed within a span of 18 months, between the winter of 1887 and August 1888: the Capriccio espagnole, The Russian Easter Overture, and Scheherazade. Scheherazade – the Story The literary story behind Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade comes from a collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian folk tales initially compiled during the 9th century, a compilation entitled One Thousand and One Nights. Among the best-known of the folk tales in this compilation are “Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp,” “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” and “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.” Many different versions of One Thousand and One Nights have come down to us, […]
Continue ReadingA Lurid, Depraved Tale! Put in contemporary terms, the plot of Rigoletto is, frankly, revolting: a sixteenth century version of the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell story. The opera tells the tale of a rich, slimy, powerful, utterly amoral man (the Duke of Mantua/Epstein) who, among his many carnal sins, rapes and traffics in teenaged girls, abetted by his court jester, Rigoletto (Maxwell). Rigoletto himself only begins to regret the duke’s penchant for youngsters when he discovers that his own teenaged daughter, Gilda, is on the duke’s “defile bucket list.” She is indeed abducted and delivered to the duke’s bed, where he has his way with her, and where – like a hostage suffering from Stockholm Syndrome – she “falls” for her captor, the duke! Beside himself with grief and rage, Rigoletto hires a hit man named Sparafucile to whack the duke, but Rigoletto has been cursed, and instead, it is Gilda whose adolescent bosom receives the business end of Sparafucile’s stiletto! Game Plan Here is the game plan for this double-length post. We will occupy ourselves with the two, opening episodes of the opera. The first of these episodes is the “prelude,” (or overture), the music of which anticipates the maledizione […]
Continue ReadingYear of the Song As I’ve mentioned in previous Dr. Bob Prescribes posts, I’ve unilaterally designated this campaign and election year “The Year of the Song,” so desperate am I for the distraction and solace only the best popular American songs can provide. We began with Barbara Cook’s wonderful Disney Album on February 6, and my intention is to do at least one such popular American song-oriented Dr. Bob Prescribes post every month until January 2025. Today’s post is as much about introducing you to two very special performers as it is hawking their first album, After the Ball, of 1974. They are the mezzo-soprano Joan Morris (born 1943), and her husband, the composer and pianist William Bolcom (born 1938). I will be prescribing no small number of their albums over the course of this year, so I figure we should get to know them a bit before all of these prescriptions commence. Smarter Than the Average Boor I have, if you’ll pardon me, always been a bit smarter than the average boor. For example. It was in either late 1978 or early 1979. I remember the date because I had just come to California for graduate school, and was […]
Continue ReadingReruns I don’t know about you, but personally, I have mixed feelings about reruns. On one hand, I will never tire of seeing of watching the original Star Trek, which ran for 79 episodes spread over three seasons, from 1966 to 1969. I have seen every one of those 79 episodes so many times that I can – no exaggeration – speak the dialogue along with the actors. Why my infatuation with this show, and why am I willing to revisit – over and over again – these manyepisodes? Perhaps it’s because I associate the show with my childhood and the “race to the moon” that so galvanized us all in the 1960s; perhaps it’s because the show was then so fabulously camp and today so magnificently retro; whatever: it was a vision of the future with actors and stories of which I never seemed to tire. And yet, on the other hand, I often dislike and avoid reruns. I’m not talking about the life-preserving flight from reruns of such bottom-dwelling shows as The Beverly Hillbillies; Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and Gilligan’s Island, but rather, reruns of stuff I loved the first time around. For example, Garry Trudeau’s editorial comic […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday focused on the crime of passion that was the murder of the be-bop trumpet player Lee Morgan (1938-1972), a crime committed on February 19, 1972, by his common-law wife, Helen Moore. Morgan was an extraordinary player, someone who recorded prodigiously and who – being only 33 years old when he was killed – should have had a long and storied career in front of him. Morgan didn’t get his first trumpet until he was 13. Nevertheless, by the time he was 18, he was already making records and performing as a member of the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band. Given that he died at 33, I suppose we should be grateful that he wasn’t a late bloomer, as he likely would have left little by way of a recorded legacy behind him! The subject of this post is another trumpet player who made his mark as a youngster: Sergei Nakariakov, who was born in 1977. Nakariakov was a crazy child prodigy, and he has grown nicely into his maturity: today he must be considered among a handful of greatest living trumpet players. I first introduced you to Maestro Nakariakov back in 2020, and it is time to […]
Continue ReadingHaydn’s six string quartets published in 1799 as Opus 76 are his supreme works of chamber music, works that show him at the very peak of his craft and imagination. The quartets were composed between 1796-1797, soon after Haydn’s return from his second residency in London. Haydn dedicated the set to his patron, the Hungarian nobleman Count Joseph Georg von Erdődy (1754-1824). The famed English music historian Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814) first heard Haydn’s Opus 76 string quartets in 1799, and he could not contain himself when he wrote that: “They are full of invention, fire, good taste, and new effects, and seem the production, not of a sublime genius who has written so much and so well recently, but one of the highly cultivated talents, who has expended none of his fire before.” (“Expended none of his fire before”? Okay; whatever.) Haydn’s Op. 76 string quartets are, indeed, brilliant; works that were – as we will soon observe – powerfully inspired by the late quartets of Haydn’s beloved and recently departed friend, Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791). Mozart’s own string quartets aside, it is Joseph Haydn who, through the example of his 68 string quartets, is rightly credited with establishing the […]
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