We mark the death on December 20, 1982 – 39 years ago today – of the Polish-born American pianist Arthur Rubinstein, at the age of 95. Practicing the Piano Question: does anyone really like to practice the piano? Answer: believe it or not, yes. However, we’d observe that those good people who really like to practice are – frankly – in the minority. The vast minority. Now, obviously, there is a galactic difference between the practice schedules of kids and adult hobbyists taking piano lessons and serious students of music and professional musicians. We would expect the latter – serious students and professionals – to be practice room junkies, addicted to practice and inseparable from their instruments. But this is not always the case. Which brings us to the pianist Arthur (or Artur) Rubinstein (1887-1982). Rubinstein in America, 1906 Rubinstein made his first concert tour of the United States in 1906, when he was 19 years old. It did not go particularly well. Rubinstein played his first solo recital in New York City. Henry Krehbiel (1854-1923), the famed music critic for The New York Tribune, was there and his review was scathing. How scathing I do not know, as the […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Podcast – Page 14
As those who read via blog and/or listen via podcast to Music History Monday know, as often as not I’ll mention two, three, or even more date related items before getting to the “main attraction” of a particular post. However, every now and then, one of those preliminary items will take on a life of its own and demand – rather curtly I would add – to be the main attraction itself. That’s precisely what has happened today. The original title for today’s Music History Monday was An American in Paris. Here is that post’s lead: “We mark the premiere on December 13, 1928 – 93 years ago today – of George Gershwin’s orchestral work An American in Paris. The premiere took place in Carnegie Hall, with Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Philharmonic.” We will briefly deal with the creation and premiere of George Gershwin’s An American in Paris before moving on to the canine-related item that has stolen today’s show. Be assured, however, that we will return to An American in Paris and what was to be the meat-and-potatoes of today’s post on Thursday, December 23. A Brooklynite in Paris In the spring of 1926, George and Ira […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the disastrous concert held on December 6, 1969 – 52 years ago today – at the Altamont Speedway here in Alameda Country in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over 300,000 people attended, four of whom died that day, one of them at the hands of the so-called “security personnel.” The word “Altamont” has become synonymous with “rock concert disasters.” However, before we get to the tragic events of December 6, 1969, we would recognize an event that occurred on this day in 1975, 46 years ago today, in this edition of “This Day in Music Stupid.” On Saturday, December 6, 1975, the Reverend Charles Boykin – associate pastor and youth director of the Lakewood Baptist Church in Tallahassee, Florida – gave a talk to the young people of his church on “evil effects of rock music on youth.” Not content to just talk-the-talk, the good reverend had his charges gather up their rock ‘n’ records, including those by Elton John, the Rolling Stones, Cream, the Doors, and Neil Diamond, and burned them. Boykin claimed to have been inspired by a nameless professor at Hyles-Anderson College (an unaccredited private independent Baptist college in unincorporated Crown Point, in Lake County, Indiana), […]
Continue ReadingBefore getting to the question that drives today’s post, we would recognize five date-worthy events: a tragedy; two notable cancellations, and two notable opera performances. First, the tragedy. On November 29, 2001 – 20 years ago today – George Harrison died in Los Angeles of lung cancer at the age of 58. Born in Liverpool on February 25, 1943, Harrison was the youngest of the Beatles: just 16 years old when he joined up in 1959. Though not known for his song writing early on, Harrison’s contributions to the band’s repertoire came to rival those of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Harrison contributed four songs to the Beatles second to last album, released in November of 1968 and nicknamed “The White Album” for its plain white cover. Among those four songs is the exquisite While My Guitar Gently Weeps (the recording of which features Eric Clapton on lead guitar). Harrison’s two contributions to the Beatles’ final album – Abby Road, released in 1969 – are both rock classics: Here Comes the Sun and Something. (John Lennon declared that Something was the best song on the album, and it is the second most covered Beatles song, after Paul McCartney’s Yesterday. The […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the birth on November 22, 1913 – 108 years ago today – of the English composer, pianist, and conductor Edward Benjamin Britten 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. The danger of overstatement is great when tossing around superlatives, but with Britten it’s no danger at all. He was not just the most important English composer of the twentieth century; he was quite arguably the most important English-born composer since Henry Purcell, who was born in London in 1659, 246 years before Britten. Britain composed scads of music(that’s a musical term, “scads”): orchestral music, choral music, chamber music, vocal music, and film music as well. But pride of place must go to his dramatic works: his War Requiem (of 1962) and his fifteen operas. Those operas include Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951), Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1960), Prodigal Son (1968), and Death in Venice (1974). Britten’s operas constitute, by any measure, the most significant body of opera composed during the twentieth century. Britten was lucky enough to have experienced fame […]
Continue ReadingWe will observe the first performances that occurred on this date and contemplate, as well, the nature and reality of a “first performance” in a moment. But first. I know; I know. We collectively wait, with breaths bated, for today’s “This Day in Musical Stupid.” Sadly, aside from this very post, I have not been able to dig up any particular date-related event that would so qualify. However, I did find a brief but compelling item that qualifies under the heading, “This Day in Musical ENVY”, the envy being my own. Here’s the item. On November 15, 1956 – 65 years ago today – the 21-year-old Elvis Presley (1935-1977) celebrated his new-found success by buying himself a brand-new Harley Davidson motorcycle. He spent the remainder of the day tooling around Memphis on his new bike with a “friend” nestled on the seat behind him: the then 18-year-old actress, Natalie Wood (1938-1981). Okay people: let’s put ourselves in Elvis Presley’s riding boots. Can we imagine being 21 years old, poised at the edge of phenomenal fame and fortune, buying a Harley and driving around town with Natalie Wood’s arms around you, her young, nubile body pressed up around your back? Think […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the death on November 8, 1833 – 188 years ago today – of the Austrian pianist, composer, and Benedictine monk, Maximilian Stadler. Born on August 4, 1748, in the Austrian city of Melk, Abbé Stadler died in his adopted home city of Vienna. Witnesses to History We contemplate “witnesses to history,” who I’m going to categorize as “chroniclers” and “bystanders”. “Chroniclers” would be those individuals who, advertently or inadvertently, were witness to historical events which they then reported, firsthand. For example, John “Jack” Silas Reed (1887-1920). Reed was an American journalist, poet, and communist activist. A prominent World War One war correspondent, Reed was in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) immediately before during and after the Russian Revolution, which he witnessed as a member of the revolutionary inner circle. His book, Ten Days That Shook the World (published in 1919) remains, despite Reed’s parochial political leanings, a riveting, firsthand account of the October Revolution. Then there’s the American journalist and war correspondent William Shirer (1904-1993). As the European bureau chief for CBS, Shirer was headquartered in Vienna and was a firsthand witness to the “Anschluss”, the Nazi “annexation” of Austria on March 11, 1938. He reported the Munich agreement and Hitler’s occupation of […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the American operatic debut on November 1, 1954 – 67 years ago today – of “La Divina” – “the divine one” – meaning Maria Callas at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Callas performed her signature role of Norma in Vincenzo Bellini’s opera of the same name under the baton of Nicola Rescigno. I have never envied great athletes or dancers, except perhaps for the income potential of the former. My (general) lack of envy stems from the all-too-brief shelf life of such careers. With rare exception – Phil Niekro, George Blanda, George Foreman, and Tom Brady come to mind – most top athletes and dancers hit their prime in their twenties. By their thirties, wear and tear and the aging process have damaged their bodies and eroded their skills and will soon enough bring their careers to an end. (Magnificent though they still are, Steph Curry [33 years old, born 1988] and LeBron James [presently still 36 years old, born 1984] are considered to be among the “old men” of their sport, that being professional basketball. An old man at 33? Please.) What professional athletes, dancers, and musicians all have in common is that they will have begun […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the world premiere – on October 25, 1885, 136 years ago today – of Johannes Brahms’ fourth and final symphony. Performed by the superb Meiningen Court Orchestra, the performance was conducted by Brahms himself. It went well. We’ll get to Herr Doktor Professor Brahms in a bit. But first, some gratuitous, auto back slapping. I began writing these Music History Monday posts in September of 2016. That was when Melanie Smith, President of San Francisco Performances (for which I am the Music-Historian-in-Residence) asked me to write some sort of regular feature for SFP’s Facebook page. Here’s the first paragraph of my first post: a celebration of the birthday of Anton Diabelli (1771-1858, as in Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations) that appeared on September 5, 2016: “Welcome to what will become a weekly feature here on the San Francisco Performances Facebook page, ‘Music History Monday.’ (As titles go that’s about as thrilling as root canal, but it is an accurate description of the feature’s content so run with it we will.) Every Monday I will dredge up some timely, perhaps intriguing and even, if we are lucky, salacious chunk of musical information relevant to that date, or to San Francisco Performances’ […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the death on October 18, 1944 – 77 years ago today – of the composer and pianist Viktor Ullmann, in a gas chamber at the concentration and death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Nazi-occupied Poland. Last week’s Music History Monday focused on a soft-rock song entitled Je t’aime… Moi non plus by the French singer-songwriter, author, filmmaker, and actor Serge Gainsbourg (1928-1991), and recorded in 1969 by Gainsbourg and the English singer, songwriter, and actress Jane Birkin (born 1946). Musically, the song is, pardon, beaucoup de merde. Nevertheless, it climbed to number one on charts across the globe. That’s because over the course of the song, Ms. Birkin’s heavy breathing leads to a simulated orgasm at the “climax” of the song. As we observed last week, “sex sells.” We also observed that those arbiters of morality – of which there is never a dearth – declared the song “obscene” and it was banned from radio play by hundreds (if not thousands) of radio stations. I pointed out then as I would again now: that at an “obscenity level” from one to ten, Je t’aime… rates – maybe – a 00.5, while the tragic fate of the Czechoslovakian composer Viktor […]
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