81 years ago today – on October 10, 1935 – George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess opened at the Alvin Theater in New York City. With a libretto by Dubose Heywood (whose play Porgy was the basis of the libretto) and Gershwin’s older brother Ira, Porgy and Bess ran a frankly unimpressive (by contemporary Broadway standards) 124 performances before it closed. Porgy and Bess was applauded for the beauty of its numbers but roundly criticized for being neither fish nor fowl. The critic Samuel Chotzinoff – ordinarily friendly to Gershwin – wrote: “As entertainment it is a hybrid, fluctuating constantly between music drama, musical comedy, and operetta.” Given the version of Porgy and Bess that he heard, Chotzinoff’s criticism is entirely justified. And therein lies a tale. George Gershwin’s amazing success as a composer of Broadway musicals and jazz-influenced concert works lit a fuse deep inside him: a desire to compose a full-length, no-holds-barred, knock-‘em-out-of-their seats American opera. His life-long affinity with the music of the African-American community – drumming, ragtime, jazz, and the spiritual – drew him like a bear to honey to a play called Porgy by Dubose Heywood. Heywood’s Porgy was produced on Broadway in 1927 and depicts […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
San Francisco Performances – Page 3
On this date in 1833 the 29 year-old French composer Hector Berlioz married the 33 year-old Anglo-Irish actress Harriet Smithson. They tied the knot at the British embassy in Paris; the wedding was officially witnessed by Berlioz’ good bud, the pianist and composer Franz Liszt. Berlioz had moved to Paris from his hometown in the French Alps in 1822, presumably to study medicine. His passport described the 18 year-old Berlioz as being: “About five foot three or five foot four in height, red hair, red eyebrows, beginning to grow a beard, forehead ordinary, eyes gray, complexion high.” What that passport description does not mention is that Berlioz burned with passion for pretty much everything except medicine, in particular music, theater, and literature. Predictably, he washed out of medical school within a matter of months. Unwilling to return home, he bounced around Paris living in poverty, and—when he had a little money in his pocket—he attended the opera standing room and took a few music lessons. After a rather difficult application process (it was rumored that Berlioz’ father had to bribe the admissions officer), the now 23 year-old Hector Berlioz entered the Paris Conservatory, a full five years older that most […]
Continue ReadingFor nine wonderful years – from 1992-2001 – I was on the faculty of something called the “Andersen Executive Program”, or “AEP”. Three or four times a summer, various partners from the accounting, auditing, and consulting firm of Arthur Andersen gathered in some extraordinary place for a week to talk about the current issues facing their clients. The teaching faculty – as you’ve surmised, since I was on it – was incredibly diverse. For three years in the late 1990s the AEP held sessions at a resort hotel called the Huis ter Duin (“House of the Dunes”) on the North Sea in the Dutch town of Noordwijk, 27 miles southwest of Amsterdam. It was at one of those sessions that I had lunch with a fellow faculty member: an Englishman about my age who was a professional “futurist”. He struck me as equal parts high-tech dude, palm reader, and huckster, all of which seemed necessary tool-box skills for someone who made a living predicting future trends and technologies. When the futurist discovered I was a musician he wanted to talk about one of his pet ideas: how consumers will listen to music in the future. He had it all figured […]
Continue Reading176 years ago today – on September 12, 1840 – one of the most tortuous, profanity-inducing, potentially violent, legally drawn out courtships ended when the composer Robert Schumann and the pianist Clara Wieck were married in Schönefeld, just northeast of Leipzig. The person to blame for all the tsuris was Friedrich Wieck, Clara’s father. He was a piano teacher who had molded his daughter Clara into one of Europe’s greatest pianists by the time she was a teenager. Clara was Friedrich’s reason-to-be, his creation, a walking advertisement for effectiveness of his “piano method” as well as his Individual Retirement Account. So when that lump Robert Schumann – who had once also been a student of Wieck’s – started sniffing around his Clara when she was just 16 years old (and Schumann was 25), well, it was time to nip things in the bud. There was no way on this good earth that that lame-fingered loser Robert Schumann was going to steal Wieck’s cash cow. Nip things. In the bud. Yes. But in this Friedrich Wieck was singularly unsuccessful, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. For five years after Robert and Clara had pledged themselves to each other he did […]
Continue ReadingIn my capacity as Music-Historian-in-Residence for San Francisco Performances (SFP), I will be writing a weekly blog called “Music History Monday” for the SFP Facebook page. Being a firm believer in doing double-duty, I will be posting these blogs on my page as well, though I would encourage to visit (and follow!) the SFP Facebook page as well. Welcome to what will become a weekly feature on both my own and the San Francisco Performances Facebook pages, “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’ concert schedule, or to … whatever. If on (rare) occasion these features appear a tad irreverent, well, that’s okay: we would do well to remember that cultural icons do not create and make music but rather, people do, and people can do and say the darndest things. September 5 is a particularly rich musical birth date. Among others born on September 5 were Johann […]
Continue ReadingShostakovich: the SOVIET Composer Art, politics, and current events make problematic bedfellows, but they are a Ménage à trois that cannot be avoided when talking about Dmitri Shostakovich and his music. Shostakovich was born on September 25, 1906 in St. Petersburg, and died in Moscow on August 9, 1975, a few weeks shy of his 69th birthday. Shostakovich’s compositional career corresponded exactly with the history of the Soviet Union from 1917-1975. He began attending the St. Petersburg (Petrograd) Conservatory at the very end of the Tsarist era; he graduated and began his career during Lenin’s rule (the early 1920’s); he knew Stalin and was nearly purged twice, in 1936 and 1948; he survived the siege of Leningrad, kowtowed to Khrushchev, and died while Brezhnev was in power. Among the reasons Shostakovich managed to survive was that he was considered by the powers that were to be a yurodivy, a village idiot, a holy fool who protests in the name of humanity and not in the name of political change. In truth, he was a coward and a hero and everything in between. He saw his friends purged and killed; he was eyewitness to Stalin’s horrific “five year plans” as well […]
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