Indulge me, please, the musings of a 68-year-old baby boomer. Aging sucks. Like you needed me to tell you, right? I’m not just talking about our knees, shoulders, fingers, hairlines and waistlines; sagging, spotted skin; sore hips, fatty livers, and forgetfulness; and the terrible knowledge that our physical discomfort notwithstanding, our time on this earth is dwindling. Neither am I just talking about the psychic damage of getting older, in particular loss: of seeing friends, family, and spouses pass, or heaven forbid, children and grandchildren predecease us. There are times when I do wonder how we “elderly” (legally defined as someone 65 years and older) manage to simply cope with accumulated grief. Now, we tell ourselves – rightly, I think – that in exchange for our losses and increasingly irksome bodies and memories, our life experience gifts us with wisdom. We come to realize that nothing is simple; that nothing is black and white; that good and evil are relative concepts; that nothing is forever and all we can really count on is change. Unfortunately, it is my experience that this “wisdom” often verges into pessimism because with wisdom – with knowledge and experience – comes a certain and unavoidable […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
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Weimar On July 14, 1708, the newly appointed court organist Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and his wife Maria Barbara Bach (1684-1720) arrived in the Thuringian (central German) city of Weimar from Bach’s previous post in the Thuringian city of Mühlhausen. The young couple moved into an apartment in a house owned by another employee of the court, Adam Immanuel Weldig, who was master of the pages and a falsettist (a non-surgical male soprano) in the chorus of the court chapel. (Coincidentally, this same Adam Weldig was an alum of the St. Thomas School in Leipzig, where Bach would be the master of music for the last 27 years of his life, from 1723 to 1750). Whatever else its amenities, Weldig’s house had location in spades. It was located at number 5 Markt, on Weimar’s Markplatz (market square), which had been the city’s most important public space since around 1300. From there, it was just a five-minute walk to the Ducal palace (the Wilhelmsburg), where both Bach and Weldig worked. It was at the Weldig house that Bach’s first child, Catharina Dorothea, was born on December 29, 1708, and where his second child – Wilhelm Friedemann – was born on November […]
Continue ReadingBack on June 21, in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post entitled “The Joys of Bassi”, I asserted that, in my experience, baritones, bass-baritones, and bass singers – like the people that play their instrumental equivalents, the string bass and low brass – are the salts of the earth of the vocal world. I observed that, in my experience: “They show up early and stay late; they help set up chairs before a rehearsal and stack them up afterwards. They don’t cut to the front of the line (remind me to tell you my Thomas Hampson story; what a wonderful guy he is!) or exercise ‘artistic prerogative.’ Their collegiality, sense of humor, and general lack of bad attitude will, as my experience has played out over and over again, keep a rehearsal on an even keel.” I would observe with some pique that no one took me up on what are actually my Thomas Hampson stories. Well, if you’re not going to ask, I’ll just going to have to tell you. Story one. Sometime around 1992/1993, Hampson (born 1955) came to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) to do a master class. Here’s how a musical master class works. A […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post celebrated the premiere (on July 18, 2003) of a newly discovered piano work by Claude Debussy (1862-1918). Composed in late February/early March of 1917, Les Soirs illumines par l’ardeur du charbon (“the evenings lighted by the glow of the coals”) was, in fact, Debussy’s final piano work; he died of colorectal cancer a year later, on March 25, 1918. (Yesterday’s post also discussed the initial Dead Sea Scroll discovery, in November 1946, just because. Because it was the grandmother of all manuscript discoveries! Because any other manuscript discovery made during the twentieth century shrinks to near insignificance by comparison and because, for me, the discovery of those scrolls will always boggle my bean!) For our information, Debussy’s Les Soirs illumines. . . is not the only significant musical manuscript discovered in recent memory. For example. Where’s That Cello Concerto Been Haydn? (apologies) For nearly 200 years, the musical community knew that Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) had composed his first cello concerto around the year 1765 for his great friend, the cellist Joseph Weigl. We “knew” this because Haydn himself kept meticulous records of the music he composed. Unfortunately, that’s all anyone knew about the concerto, because […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post on the death of George Gershwin was, to my mind, painfully dark. Having examined and processed the dreadful events leading up to Gershwin’s tragic death at the age of 38, we turn here in today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post not just to the land of the living but to a musical world filled with dance and with joy. We deserve no less. Disclosure In the spirit of full disclosure, I will tell you that in the very early weeks of my Patreon presence in 2018, I wrote about this album. However, that post was tossed off quickly, and at a measly 890 words, it was roughly one-third the length of what today is a typical Dr. Bob Prescribes post. So today we do the phenomenal Vocal Sampling and their fourth (of five) albums, Cambio de Tiempo, released in April of 2002, proper justice.… See it, only on Patreon! Robert Greenberg Courses On Sale Now
Continue ReadingMonday’s Music History Monday post marked the birth, on June 27, 1859, of Mildred Jane Hill, who wrote the music to Happy Birthday to You. Thus, today’s Happy Birthday to You-themed Dr. Bob Prescribes post! The “Book” I have not a clue as to where or when I bought (or was given) the book that is the prescribed item for today’s post. I’ve had it for as long as I can remember, which means I had it before I moved to California in 1978. There is no price scribbled on its title page, so it’s unlikely that I bought it used. It might – might – have been given to me by my composition teacher Edward T. Cone when I graduated Princeton in 1976; I just don’t remember. Whatever; here’s what “it” is. It is a souvenir of a concert and ball held at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music on January 24, 1970. The festivities marked three events: the 113th anniversary of the Academy of Music, the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the 70th birthday of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s long-time music director, Eugene Ormandy (1889-1985).… See the full post — and more — only on Patreon! Robert […]
Continue ReadingIf we want to own a facsimile of one of Wagner’s handwritten, manuscript scores, we’ve got limited options, because a great many of Wagner’s manuscripts have not survived. Their disappearance has everything to do with Wagner’s relationship with King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was the subject of yesterday’s Music History Monday post. We’ll get into the particulars of the disappearance (and likely destruction) of the manuscripts in a bit. But first, let us contemplate the nature and importance of a composer’s hand-written manuscript scores. Composers’ Holographs A “holograph” is a manuscript or document written in its composer’s or author’s hand. There was a time when a composer’s most prized possessions were their holographs: their hand-written, autograph manuscripts: complete scores notated in pencil or ink. (We pause to rue the passing of such hand-written manuscripts. As a new generation of composers notates their music using computer programs, the art of music calligraphy is presently going the way of hand-copied illuminated manuscripts, and thus technology will soon claim another victory over a time-honored craft. But even worse, we – as students and lovers of music – will lose an irreplaceable resource: hand-written manuscripts from which we can learn a remarkable amount about […]
Continue ReadingIn 2014, I was asked by The Great Courses/The Teaching Company to figure out a way to make a 24-lecture, 16-hour course that minimized the cost of licensing music for musical examples. Upfront: I thought then – as I do now – that this was a case of penny wise and pound foolish, as a music course needs, in the end, to feature . . . music. Whatever; I complied, and in 2015 we recorded Music as a Mirror of History, which explores certain works as personifying certain specific, historic events. As such, Music as a Mirror of History is a history course with music, rather than a music course with history. I read and learned a lot writing the course, and was tickled no end when, after its release, I received inquiries asking me how many research assistants I had employed in its making. “Not a single one” was my repeated response. “How do you know so much?”, I was asked in return. As the nerdish, CIA analyst Joseph Turner says in Joseph Grady’s Six Days of the Condor (shortened to Three Days of the Condor in the movie, starring Robert Redford), “I just read books.” Lecture 10 […]
Continue ReadingMusic History Monday for November 22, 2021, was entitled “Benjamin Britten: The Making of a Composer.” The Dr. Bob Prescribes post that followed, on November 23, 2021, featured Britten’s String Quartet No. 1, which was composed in 1941. Between them, those two posts outlined the first 29 years of Britten’s life, from his birth in 1913 through 1942. In this post, we will push Britten’s biography forward to 1962, the year he completed his War Requiem, paying special attention to Britten’s life-long pacifism. Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) Edward Benjamin Britten was born on November 22, 1913, in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on the eastern coast of England, roughly 105 miles northeast of London. He died in nearby Aldeburgh on December 4, 1976, at the age of 63. He was not just the most important English composer of the twentieth century but arguably the most important English-born composer since Henry Purcell, who was born in London in 1659, 246 years before Britten. Britten began piano lessons at seven. At the age of eight, he was enrolled in South Lodge Preparatory School just down the hill from his family home. The headmaster of the South Lodge School was named Thomas Sewell, a Cambridge graduate […]
Continue ReadingIn referring to Fidelio as Beethoven’s only opera, we often overlook the fact that for all its preliminary versions it was also his first opera. As such, it has been pointed out that Fidelio, which Beethoven began composing when he was 34 years old, is “the best first opera ever written.” Writes Paul Robeson in The Cambridge Opera Handbook: Fidelio: “Certainly, it surpasses the first efforts of better-known opera composers: Wagner’s Die Feen, Verdi’s Oberto, Puccini’s Le Villi, and Richard Strauss’ Guntram.” (We would observe that the little whippersnapper, Wolfgang Mozart, composed his first opera – La finta semplice – at the age of 12, so comparisons to Beethoven here are inappropriate. We’d further observe that he was just 30 years old when he composed The Marriage of Figaro; 32 years old when he composed Don Giovanni; and 33 years old when he composed Cosí fan tutte. Freak.) As his “first” opera and as a slow worker, Beethoven labored long and hard on Fidelio. It began its life with the title Leonore, oder Der Triumph der ehelichen Liebe (meaning “Leonore, or The Triumph of Marital Love”). The opera is a setting of a German-language libretto by Joseph Sonnleithner which was based […]
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