Schubert and the First Viennese School Franz Schubert (1797-1828) was born, lived, and died in the Austrian capital of Vienna. Of all the great masters of “Viennese Classicism” – Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert – Schubert was the only native-born Viennese. (These composers are often referred to collectively as the “First Viennese School.” The term “Viennese School” was invented in 1834 by the Austrian musicologist Raphael Georg Kiesewetter, who applied it to Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Mozart only. In time, Beethoven and then Schubert were admitted to the “school” as well. The label “first” was added when the term “Second Viennese School” was coined in reference to the early twentieth century compositional triumvirate of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern.) Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. For us, today, these long dead Euro-persons are among the ruling deities of western concert music. But they weren’t just “deities” for Schubert; they were, for all intents and purposes, his contemporaries. At the time of Schubert’s birth at Nussdorfer Strasse 54, Mozart had been dead for a bit more than five years, having died at Rauhensteingasse 8, about a mile-and-a-half from Schubert’s birthplace. At the time of Schubert’s birth, Joseph Haydn was working on […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
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Let’s get this out of the way up front, because the pretext for today’s post on Lennie Tristano was yesterday’s Music History Monday which, for the large part, was about sightless musicians. Writes Tristano biographer Eunmi Shim (Lennie Tristano: His Life in Music; The University of Michigan Press, 2007): “Born with weak sight, Tristano’s vision grew worse and by the time he was nine or ten years old he became completely blind. According to Bob Blackburn [writing in the Toronto Telegram, July 22, 1964], it was ‘the result of glaucoma probably stemming from his mother being stricken in pregnancy by the post-World War I flu epidemic.’ Judy Tristano, Lennie Tristano’s first wife, recalled that Tristano’s parents tried unsuccessfully to cure his blindness: ‘they had tried everything to cure his glaucoma. Legitimate doctors, quacks, going to church and everybody praying en masse, praying for his sight. But of course, nothing worked. They couldn’t cure glaucoma or treat it.’” As an adult, when the subject of his eyesight came up, Tristano’s standard response was, “I’m blind as a motherf***er.” Brief Biography Leonard Joseph Tristano was born in Chicago on March 19, 1919, and died in New York City on November 18, 1978. […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post featured the trumpet, trombone, and flugelhorn virtuoso Mic Gillette (1951-2016). In fact, Gillette could play virtually all modern brass instruments, and though he was primarily known as a trumpet player, he was an outstanding trombonist as well. (Gillette was known to switch instantly and effortlessly, back-and-forth, between the trumpet and trombone. This might not sound like a big deal to most of us, but for brass players it was – literally! – breath taking. In terms of the nature of the embouchure required, the size and shape of the mouth pieces, and playing technique, the trumpet and trombone are two very different instruments.) (BTW: for those intrepid trombone aficionados out there, I’d refer you to my Instrumental Outliers post for March 25, 2021, which focused on the magnificent, kidney-rattling contrabass and subcontrabass trombones.) Back, please, to Mick Gillette and his “bipolar/bi-instrumental” personality. The people who play the trumpet and the trombone are usually as different from each other as the instruments they play. In an orchestra, the flutes, first violins, and trumpets are considered the “glamor” instruments because they are on top and as such, we can always hear them. Likewise, the fine people who […]
Continue ReadingThe Beatles made their first studio recordings – with George Martin at the helm as their producer – on September 4, 1962, at London’s Abbey Road studios. Out of the six songs they rehearsed and recorded, Martin chose two for their first 45-rpm “single”: an original, Love Me Do, and How Do You Do It, by Mitch Murray, which Martin intended to put on side “A” of the single. In those days, British record producers chose the material for their bands, and George Martin was convinced that How Do You Do It was going to be a hit. As for the other song on the single, writes the Beatles biographer Bob Spitz: “Love Me Do was a concession to the band, who practically begged Martin to consider their own material.” (At this point in time, George Martin and the Parlophone label he managed considered the Beatles to be performers, and certainly not songwriters. Martin later claimed that at this early date, he hadn’t heard: “Any evidence of what was to come in the way of songwriting.”) The Beatles collectively hated Mitch Murray’s How Do You Do It, and in the end, to his great credit, Martin relented. That first single […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday postmarked the 80th anniversary of the completion of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 on December 27, 1941. The utterly cinematic first movement of the symphony depicts a magnificent and lyric “landscape” gutted by a brutal invasion theme that grows from nothing to a vicious, overpowering, overwhelming musical malignancy. Given current events at the time Shostakovich composed that movement – the German invasion of the Soviet Union – it is natural to assume that the “invasion theme” (as it became known) is a depiction of the encroaching Nazi horde. However, in private, Shostakovich told those he trusted that the symphony – and the theme with it – had been conceived before the German invasion, which began on June 22, 1941: “The Seventh Symphony had been planned before the war and consequently it simply cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler’s attack. The ‘invasion theme’ has nothing to do with the attack. I was thinking of other enemies of humanity when I composed the theme. Naturally, fascism is repugnant to me, but not only German fascism; any form is repugnant. Nowadays people like to recall the prewar period as an idyllic time, saying that everything was fine […]
Continue ReadingNetwork television has traditionally served up certain types of programming at certain times of the day. Non-stop cartoons for kids? When I was growing up, that what Saturday mornings were all about. Soap operas? Traditionally broadcast on weekday afternoons before 3 pm, presumably for housewives who had finished their chores but before the kids came home from school. Evening news programs? Broadcast daily between 5 pm and 7pm, for adults who’ve just come home from work. Let us dwell, in particular, on two more such network television designations: prime time, and late-night talk shows. Prime time refers to generally adult programming broadcast – depending upon your time zone – between either 8pm and 11pm or 7pm and 10pm. Late night talk shows refer specifically to variety/interview shows broadcast between 11pm and 1am. Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791) would not have understood the concept of Saturday morning cartoons any more than he’d know how to operate a remote control. Be he would absolutely have understood the concepts of prime time and late-night entertainment because there were media equivalents in his day. In Mozart’s day, a work designated as being a “serenade” or a “divertimento” was intended to be performed in “prime time”: […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post celebrated – in part – George Gershwin’s An American in Paris, a work inspired by two visits to Paris (one in 1926 and the other in 1928). Taking our cue from An American in Paris, today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post might be called “A Frenchman in Rio”, as it celebrates a work by the French composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) inspired by an extended stay in Rio de Janeiro. The Happiest of Composers There are few more enduring musical stereotypes than that of the unhappy, alienated, suffering composer whose inspiration must be torn from the deepest and darkest places of their soul. It was Richard Wagner (1813-1883) who formalized this impression by claiming that serious art – “true art” – can only spring from suffering, from pain, from loneliness and from frustration. In 1958, Darius Milhaud received a letter from young French composer who was deeply troubled by Wagner’s dicta and wanted to know what Milhaud thought about it all. Milhaud responded: “I am glad you decided to write me about your problem; here is my point of view if you want it. I had a marvelously happy childhood. My wife is my companion, my collaborator; […]
Continue ReadingMy Music History Monday post for November 29 focused on the composer Bright Sheng (born 1955), who made the unforgivable mistake of playing Laurence Olivier’s movie of Shakespeare’s Othello to an undergraduate class at the University of Michigan without first offering up a prophylactic explanation/apologia for Oliver’s makeup (the character of Othello being a dark-skinned North African Moor). Bright Sheng was born 66 years ago yesterday, on December 6, 1955, in Shanghai, China. He began taking piano lessons with his mother at the age of four and excelled. That is, until May 16, 1966. That’s when Mao Zedong (1893-1976) instituted the “Cultural Revolution” (which ran for ten long, painful years, from 1966-1976). The Cultural Revolution was a wholesale purge and power grab, plain and simple. Like Stalin’s purges in the 1930s, the Cultural Revolution did not target enemies of the state but rather, those people it considered potential enemies of the state: intellectuals; academes; students; professionals; military leaders; the educated, urban “elite”; those who passed for the Chinese middle class; and so forth. Untold millions of high school, college, and post-college age “young people” were shipped off from the cities to the countryside, there to be “re-educated” and “to […]
Continue ReadingIn yesterday’s Music History Monday post, I mentioned a very few of the virtually countless sins that would cause me to be drummed out of today’s academia. Among those I have indulged in the past – and which would undoubtedly get me into trouble in the present – would be making humorous light of Queen Elizabeth I’s presumed virginity. OMG, I’d be accused of unrepentant virginism and such campus advocacy groups as “Students for Celibacy” and “The Chosen Chaste” would have my hide. Still, inquiring minds want to know: was “Good Queen Bess” the virgin everyone made her out to be, or did she in fact “make the beast with two backs” (Shakespeare’s imagery, not mine) or, perhaps, periodically indulge in a match of hide the salami? (THAT’S why I wouldn’t last 10 minutes in today’s academia.) Elizabeth (1533-1603) began her reign on November 17, 1558, at the age of 25. She gave her first speech to Parliament in early 1559, during which she stated that it would be “sufficient” for her to “live and die a virgin.” Elizabeth’s was a bold and calculated statement, particularly given that her greatest responsibility as queen was to produce an heir. But seeing […]
Continue ReadingBenjamin Britten (1913-1976) and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears (1910-1986), left England in late April 1939 for North America. Their ship arrived in Quebec on May 9, 1939, then sailed on to Montreal. After staying a few weeks in Canada, Britten and Pears set off for New York, where they were reunited with the poet, fellow pacifist and homosexual W.H. Auden. Britten was stunned by New York City, writing a friend: “New York is a staggering place. Very beautiful in some ways – intensely alive and doing – bewildering in some ways, but always interesting.” Britten and Pears remained on the east coast of the United States for two years. Britten composed and had his works performed; he and Pears performed together and separately; they schmoozed, partied, and became part of the New York music scene. Britten used their residence in Amityville, on Long Island as his base of operations for concert trips to New England, Chicago, and various other locations in the American Midwest. But for Britten (as for so many of us!) the lure of California was overwhelming, and in June of 1941, Britten and Pears drove across country from New York to California in an old, […]
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