World War One began on July 28, 1914. All of the warring parties – the Central Powers of principally Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Turkey and the Triple Entente of mainly France, the United Kingdom, the Russian Empire, and Italy – believed they would be victorious and home by Christmas. They were all very, very wrong. Across the pond, with the exception of a few hotheads, the American public and government wanted nothing to do with the “European war”. The prevailing public opinion and governmental policy was one of neutrality. The feeling was that if the dusty, old Euro-Empires wanted to destroy themselves, they should be allowed to do so. In the end, a neutral America could only benefit from Europe’s self-destruction, or so the majority of Americans believed at the time. It didn’t take long for American public opinion to turn against the Central Powers. That turn was triggered by the sinking of the British passenger liner the RMS Lusitania 11 miles off the southern coast of Ireland on May 7, 1915; the Lusitania was returning to port in England from New York. Torpedoed by the German submarine U-20, 1198 passengers and crew were killed, including 123 Americans. Though the German […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
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By the early nineteenth century, opera in Italy had become a universally popular art. In addition to large cities like Naples, Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice, there were operatic performances in almost every town of moderate size on the Italian peninsula. Much of this popularity was attributable to the rise of opera buffa, which itself had evolved from the tradition of Italian street theater known as “commedia dell’arte”, opera that pretty much anyone could enjoy. Italian opera buffa made few intellectual demands on its audience and was perfectly suited to the Italian genius for wit, fast-paced dialogue, attractive tunes, and comic situations. Might we – with all due respect – suggest that early nineteenth-century Italian opera buffa is “opera lite” – sounds great but not terribly filling. Such opera buffa composers as Giovanni Paisiello (1714-1816) and Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801) were masters of musical characterization, deft orchestration, and lilting melodies. Their operas were popular not only in Italy but throughout Europe. We’d further observe that opera seria continued to be cultivated in the larger cities, primarily under aristocratic patronage. What this all means is that by the early nineteenth century, Italian opera had become a major commercial enterprise: a highly profitable, […]
Continue ReadingA Brahms trivia question: what was the only regular, paying job Brahms ever held? Answer: that of a choral conductor. When we think of Brahms and his music, we typically think of a “serious” German composer of primarily instrumental music: his four magnificent symphonies; his violin concerto and two piano concerti; his many works for solo piano; and his superb chamber music, the most varied set of chamber works by a single composer since Mozart. Unless we are, ourselves, choral conductors or hard-core choristers, we do not think of Brahms as a composer of choral music. But in fact, he spent a significant portion of his career not just composing for chorus but conducting choruses as well. Three rather event-packed years passed between the time Brahms met Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf in October of 1853 to the time he moved back home to Hamburg in October 1856 at the age of 23. Robert Schumann, driven to madness by syphilis, attempted suicide in February 1854, some 4½ months after Brahms first met him. Brahms rushed to Clara’s side, and during Robert’s subsequent institutionalization, became not just her rock of support but a surrogate father to her seven children. Despite […]
Continue ReadingOn September 8, 1942, the composer and pianist Victor Ullmann was deported from Prague and sent to the concentration camp-slash-ghetto of Terezín (what the German’s called “Theresienstadt”) some 20 miles north of Prague, in what today is the northwestern corner of the Czech Republic. Even though roughly 33,000 Jews died at Terezín – mostly of starvation and disease (including Ferdinand Bloch, the artist of the watercolor above) – it was not an extermination center. Rather, it was used as a holding camp for prominent Czech Jews and as a transit camp for Jews of various nationalities on their way to killing centers or slave-labor camps. Along with Ullmann, among the other “prominent” Czech Jews deported to Terezín were the composers Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, and Hans Krása; the conductors Rafael Schächter and Karel Ančerl; the violinist (and former principal violinist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) Julius Stwertka; the actor and director Kurt Gerron; the artists FrederikaDicker-Brandeis, Bedrich Fritta, and Malva Schalek; the poet Pavel Friedman and the architect Norbert Troller. Of this list of high-end talent, the only one to survive the war was Karel Ančerl. It was as a “holding camp” for prominent Czech Jews that Terezín earned its […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post, entitled “Sex Sells”, featured the French pop song Je t’aime… Moi non plus, written by Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991) and performed by Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin (born 1946). By every possible musical standard, the song is complete drivel. But it didn’t climb to number one on most of the European charts for its musical content but rather, for the simulated orgasm Ms. Birkin “performs” as the song progresses to its wholly predictable “climax”. The song’s success is a graphic example that sex does indeed sell. In the continuing spirit of “sex sells”, today we transit from the ridiculous to the sublime, from Serge Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime… Moi non plus to Richard Strauss’ opera Salome. A vivid description of Richard Strauss’ less than warm and fuzzy personality comes down to us from the German soprano Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976). Lehmann was one of the great Strauss sopranos of her generation and performed in the premieres of four of Strauss’ operas. (For our information, Lehmann emigrated permanently to the United States in 1938. She ended up in Santa Barbara, California where she helped found the Music Academy of the West. She has a star on the “Hollywood Walk of […]
Continue ReadingLeopold Godowsky’s “Study on Chopin’s ‘Black Key’ Etude”, completed when he – Godowsky – was not quite 24 years old is but one of fifty-three studies on Chopin’s etudes Godowsky composed between 1894 and 1914. We’ll discuss his life in a moment, but first Godowsky’s version of/paraphrase on Chopin’s etude, in which the rapid, right-hand filigree of Chopin’s original is elaborated and reharmonized and put into the pianist’s left-hand while the right-hand part is likewise elaborated and “filled out.” It is played here by the in-every-way miraculous Marc-André Hamelin, at 04:13-05:55 of the link below: Time and fame are gruesomely fickle. In his lifetime, the pianism and piano music of Leopold Godowsky were held in awe, even by his fellow professionals. Just 100 years later, he has been almost entirely forgotten by the listening public. Let’s start, then, with some quotes from Godowsky’s contemporaries, who considered him the “Buddha of the piano.” According to Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), he and Godowsky were: “the only composers to have added anything of significance to keyboard writing since Franz Liszt.” Arthur Rubinstein (1887-1982) went on the record stating that it would take him: “five hundred years to get a mechanism [a technique] like Godowsky’s.” […]
Continue ReadingAntonin Dvořák arrived in the United States (with most of his family in tow) on September 27, 1893. He had been offered and had accepted the Directorship of the National Conservatory of Music of America by the conservatory’s visionary founder, Jeanette Meyers Thurber. On his arrival, Dvořák hit the ground running. Along with his directorship, his teaching and conducting responsibilities, he was composing: he put the finishing touches on his Symphony No. 9 in E minor, also-known-as the “New World Symphony” on May 24, 1893, just eight months after having arrived in New York. Lest we think that Dvořák’s life was all work and no play, we’d observe that he was treated like royalty in New York: partied, feted, honored, and applauded wherever he went. (He also drank everyone under the table wherever he went, but that’s another story for another time.) For all his homesickness, fear of strangers, and hypochondria, it must have been exhilarating for this former butcher’s apprentice. But it was elementally exhausting as well, and by the time he finished his E minor symphony in late May 1893, Dvořák was utterly fried. Summer break was approaching, and decisions needed to be made as to where and […]
Continue ReadingIt was a once-in-a-lifetime discovery. Like Howard Carter’s discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 and Hiram Bingham’s discovery of the “lost” Incan citadel of Machu Picchu in Peru in 1911, Peter Schickele’s discovery of P.D.Q. Bach is the stuff of legend. Here’s what happened. It was 1953. Peter Schickele, born 1935, a “Very Full Professor” (a very young “very full” professor!) of “Music Pathology” at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, was touring the “Lechendochschloss” in the German state of Bavaria. (For our information, we are told that the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople “is a little-known institution which does not normally welcome out-of-state visitors.”) Anyway, it was at the “Lechendochschloss” in Bavaria that the good professor discovered – “quite by chance, in all fairness” we are told – a music manuscript being used as a filter in the caretaker’s coffee maker. The music turned out to be the theretofore presumed lost “Sanka” Cantata, “the first autograph manuscript by P.D.Q. (‘Pretty Damned Quick’) Bach ever found.” (Just as Johann Sebastian Bach’s contemporaries knew him as “Sebastian” Bach, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s contemporaries knew him as “Emanuel” Bach, so P.D.Q.’s contemporaries would have known him […]
Continue ReadingSpending Other People’s Money I’ve always had a talent for spending other people’s money. 35 years ago, when Berkeley California had more hi-fi/stereo shops then fleas on a feral dog, I used to take anyone who asked me stereo shopping. (I had a lot of requests as I was teaching adult extension classes for UC Berkeley, the San Francisco Conservatory, and my own private “living room” classes in San Francisco and Oakland.) I would take folks to the appropriate shop depending upon how much money they wanted to spend. Shopping for a decent hi-fi could be intimidating, especially in those days, with the advent of digital equipment. Folks didn’t know what questions to ask, what to listen for, or whether they were being conned by salespeople. I couldn’t be conned; I knew what to listen for and what equipment was good and what was not; I knew which shops were run by honest and knowledgeable managers and which were not; and which shops provided in-home setup and did not charge extra for extended warranties. Again, in the early days of digital (1985-1995, or so) I’d take friends to Tower Records (a moment of respectful silence, please) in San Francisco or […]
Continue ReadingDeadlines! On July 8, 1791, Domenico Guardasoni (circa 1731-1806), the newly hired superintendent of the Estates Opera in Prague, was charged with producing an opera on criminally short notice. The Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II (Peter Leopold Joseph Anton Joachim Pius Gotthard; 1747-1792, the brother of the recently deceased Emperor Joseph II) was about to be crowned King of Bohemia, and the Bohemian Estates (the governing body of Bohemia) wanted to create and produce an opera in celebration of the coronation. The opera was to be performed on the day of the coronation, which was scheduled to take place in Prague on September 6, 1791. Superintendent Guardasoni had exactly 2 months to find and hire a librettist and a composer; see the libretto written and the opera composed; hire the singers; build the sets: make the costumes; stage and rehearse the opera; and then perform it for the newly crowned King of Bohemia (who was also the Holy-freaking-Roman Emperor). Two months. The contract Guardasoni signed with the Bohemian Estates indicated that he would “engage a castrato of leading quality” and that he would “have the libretto caused to be written and to be set to music by ‘un celebre maestro’”, […]
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