Yesterday – Monday, June 5 – marked Martha Argerich’s 82nd birthday. As promised in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, it is a birthday we will celebrate here, now, today, in Dr. Bob Prescribes! Over the course of her storied career, Martha Argerich has made people say the darndest things. I present for your reading pleasure a selection of frankly gushing statements by some otherwise jaded, hard-nosed music critics (as if there’s any other kind!): Writing in The New Yorker in 2001, Alex Ross asserts that: “[Argerich] reigns supreme over the feudalistic world of virtuoso pianists. Rivals become mere fans around her, lingering at the door of her dressing room and then skulking away. Argerich brings to bear qualities that are seldom contained in one person: she is a pianist of brain-teasing technical agility; she is a charismatic woman with an enigmatic reputation; she is an unaffected interpreter whose native language is music. This last may be the quality that sets her apart. A lot of pianists play huge double octaves; a lot of pianists photograph well. But few have the unerring naturalness of phrasing that allows them to embody the music rather than interpret it.” Critic Barney Zweitz, writing in […]
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Robert Greenberg
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I am doing something here in this post today that I have only done twice before in the storied history of Dr. Bob Prescribes: I am recommending a recording for the second time. The other two times I did so were a matter of expedience, as I reran two posts back in early March immediately after my heart bypass surgery. The issue today is not one of expedience but rather, of necessity. You see, Giuseppe Verdi’s String Quartet in E minor remains his least-known masterwork, and it deserves a much harder sell than it was given in what was a brief post back on March 10, 2020. Yesterday’s Music History Mondayfocused on Verdi’s Requiem and its premiere on May 22, 1874, 149 years ago yesterday. What went unmentioned in yesterday’s post is that following the premiere of his Requiem, Verdi shocked the operatic world by announcing his retirement. It was an announcement that appeared to have aggrieved pretty much everyone on the planet with the notable exception of Giuseppe Verdi himself, who believed that with the composition of Aida (1871) and his Requiem (1874) he had freaking written enough. Verdi and Retirement In 1875 Giuseppe was truly at the very […]
Continue ReadingIn choosing a topic for last week’s (May 8) Music History Monday post, I had a difficult choice: to either mark the birthday of the short-lived American composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) or the birthday of the even shorter-lived American blues songwriter, singer, and guitarist Robert Johnson (1911-1938). I chose to run with Gottschalk. Today, then, we are offering up a belated birthday greeting to Robert Johnson, who is among the most influential American musicians to have ever lived. Was that last bit an overstatement, “among the most influential American musicians to have ever lived”? No; it is not. But we would note that Johnson’s musical influence was primarily felt by rock ‘n’ roll musicians, living and working a full generation after his death in 1938. As we will soon discuss, we know next to nothing about Johnson himself: his life (and his death). He was an itinerant musician who performed on a small musical circuit up-and-down the Mississippi Delta, playing on street corners, saloons, Saturday night dances, and what were called juke joints. (“Juke joints” were pop-up establishment featuring music, dancing, gambling, and drinking, operated primarily by Black Americans in the deep south). Johnson’s recording career spanned […]
Continue ReadingThe Prodigy and the Musical Venues of New Orleans Louis Moreau Gottschalk began playing the piano at around age 5, and by the time he was 7 he was one of those “child prodigies” of which every city could boast. However: Moreau (as he was called) lived in New Orleans, and for him, that made things different. It was no exaggeration when an article in the New Orleans Bee asserted – on November 18, 1837 – that: “the little musical enthusiasm prevailing in the United States is nearly entirely concentrated in New Orleans.” The young prodigy would grow up in a city whose population had available to them a variety of music unique in the United States at the time. There were three essential public venues for music in Gottschalk’s New Orleans: theaters (meaning opera houses, concert halls, and standard theaters); ballrooms and dance halls; and the streets. In the decades prior to the Civil War, New Orleans was the opera capital of North America. In the 1830s, New Orleans had two permanent opera houses before any other city in the United States had even one. In a single week in 1836 – the year the 7-year-old Moreau Gottschalk attended […]
Continue ReadingMy Dr. Bob Prescribes post for February 21 of this year feature Jean-Pierre Ponnelle’s superb video of Gioachino Rossini’s Barber of Seville. During the course of that post, I wrote: “Comedy requires deftness, speed, and timing, timing, and more timing. Ponnelle’s production has it all, and the opera crackles under his direction. I would like to say that I can hardly imagine an equally good opera film, but actually, I can: Ponnelle’s own version of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, filmed in 1976. With an all-star cast featuring Hermann Prey, Mirella Freni, Dieterich Fischer-Dieskau, Kiri Te Kanawa, and Maria Ewing; accompanied by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Karl Böhm; staged and directed by Ponnelle; and produced by DG, this version of Figaro remains among the very best opera films I’ve ever seen. I will find a reason to feature the performance in a post of its own sooner than later.” Yesterday’s anniversary of the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro on May 1, 1786, is all the excuse we need to celebrate Ponnelle’s film! Jean-Pierre Ponnelle (1932-1988) The opera director and designer Jean-Pierre Ponnelle was born in Paris on February 19, 1932. He died, much too young, in Munich on […]
Continue ReadingThe Easter Holiday has come and gone, but the melody lingers. The “melody” to which I specifically refer is Johann Sebastian Bach’s epic St Matthew Passion, which was first performed on Good Friday, April 11, 1727, at the St. Thomas Church (or Thomaskirche) in the Saxon city of Leipzig. Revised versions of the St Matthew were performed three more times in Bach’s lifetime, all under his direction in Leipzig: on April 15, 1729; March 30, 1736; and on March 23, 1742. Bach then further revised the passionbetween 1743 and 1746, and it is this final version that we will hear in performances and recordings today. Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion is a massive, roughly three-hour-long sacred oratorio that sets to music the story surrounding Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection as told in chapters 26 and 27 of the Gospel of Matthew. Musically, it is a full-blown religious opera presented in concert form, with a narrator, a cast of characters, two adult choirs and a separate boys’ choir, eight vocal soloists and two orchestras. It is replete with arias, recitatives, choruses, and action music of every stripe. With a libretto by Bach’s long-time collaborator Christian Frederic Henrici (known as “Picander”, 1700-1764), the […]
Continue ReadingJohannes Brahms (1833-1897) was born and raised in the cold, dank, north German city of Hamburg. (As an adult, he habitually vacationed in the warmer climes of Italy; it would seem that it took him half a lifetime to warm his frozen bones!) Physically, Brahms matured very slowly. By the age of 20 – fully grown – he was short, blonde, blue-eyed dude, almost girlish in his physical beauty, with a high, piping voice. This description might work for a 12-year-old guy, but not one that’s 20. In fact, the year Brahms turned 20, his friend Hedwig Salomon wrote in her diary: “Brahms has a thin, boyish little voice that has not yet changed, and a child’s countenance that any girl might kiss without blushing.” Brahms’ frequent (and eventually exclusive) indulgence in prostitutes dates from this time of his life, his early 20’s. Writing in 1933, Brahms’ biographer Robert Schauffler (The Unknown Brahms, Crown Pub.) delicately observed: “Thus handicapped, he naturally found trouble in getting respectable girls to take his young virility seriously; whereas the daughters of joy, besides possessing a deep knowledge of masculine psychology and being blasé to sex appeal, would take any man as seriously as they […]
Continue ReadingIt Happens Every Spring Five days ago, on March 30, 2023, something took place that hadn’t happened since 1968, 55 years ago: major league baseball’s Opening Day took place with all thirty teams starting their season on the same day. I am aware that this year, spring technically began on March 20, 2023. But let’s be real: in the United States, the true end of winter and beginning of spring – and with it the sense that verdant life and hope spring eternal – is marked by the beginning of baseball season. In the words of Terrence Mann (as played by James Earl Jones in the 1989 movie Field of Dreams): “The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again. Ohhhhhhhh, people will come, Ray. People will most definitely come.” Terrance Mann’s is a sentiment that would have been shared entirely by the miraculous (not too strong […]
Continue ReadingHaydn’s Masses During the course of his career, Haydn composed a total of fourteen settings of the mass. This means he set the same words to music fourteen times. One might think that in doing so, Haydn could not possibly have avoided repeating himself, but one would be wrong to think so. Haydn was as devout a Catholic as ever genuflected; he loved and believed to the core of his cockles the words of the mass. As such, he lavished extraordinarily original music on each of his masses, the composition of which was – for Haydn – an act of faith. Haydn as Believer Joseph Haydn was born into a Roman Catholic family on March 31, 1732, in the Austrian village of Rohrau. He was raised Catholic and he stayed Catholic; unlike his buddy Mozart and his cantankerous student Beethoven, Haydn’s Catholicism never “lapsed.” Haydn’s personal friend and biographer Georg August Griesinger (1769-1845) described his faith this way: “Haydn was very religiously inclined, and was loyally devoted to the faith in which he was raised. He was strongly convinced in all his heart that all human destiny is under God’s guiding hand, that God rewards good and evil, that […]
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