I trust we all raised a glass last Thursday on the 10th of October in honor of Giuseppe Verdi’s 200th birthday. Now, I am aware that with the exception of “belated birthday cards” (“I really crapped up, I’m embarrassed to say; but I had better things to do than remember your day”), we generally do not continue to celebrate birthdays after the date has passed. But 200th birthdays should – rightly – be considered an exception, and thus October of this year has been unofficially designated as “Giuseppe Verdi Appreciation Month”. In Italy in particular, the celebration goes on, with Verdi festivals and opera performances up and down the peninsula. With this in mind, I will be on my way to Italy in just a few hours where I will lead an opera tour organized by Arte & Travel in and around Verdi’s home province of Parma. Among other treats, we will attend performances of “Don Carlo” at La Scala (in Milan); “Nabucco” in Bologna, and “I Masnadieri” (“The Bandits”) at the Teatro Reggio in Parma. This, my friends, is pretty much as good as it gets, and I am most aware of how fabulously lucky I am to be […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
The Great Courses – Page 3
During the first half of his professional life, Giuseppe Verdi worked like a proverbial dog. (An odd idiom, “worked like a dog”. Yes, I suppose some dogs do work, but most of them spend the bulk of their time sleeping, eating, scratching themselves and licking their privates. If the latter is what is really meant by “working like a dog”, well then, the idiom takes on a whole new meaning, doesn’t it? With that possibility in mind, permit me to restart this post, sans the canine reference.) During the first half of his professional life, Giuseppe Verdi worked REALLY HARD. In the fourteen years between 1839 (when he completed his first opera, “Oberto”) and 1853 (when he completed “La Traviata”), Verdi composed and oversaw the casting, staging, and premieres of eighteen operas. (A nineteenth opera – Jérusalem, produced in 1847 – was in actuality an adaptation and translation into French of an earlier opera entitled “I Lombardi alla prima crociata”.) Verdi himself referred to the period between 1839 and 1853 as constituting his “galley slave years” because to his mind (and to ours), he worked like a slave: 18-20 hours a day, almost every day, always under deadline, harried endlessly […]
Continue ReadingNow Available: The 23 Greatest Solo Piano Works Purchase Today! As a solo concert instrument, the piano enjoys an unrivaled popularity in Western music. Capable of a vast sonic range, from ethereal softness to thundering grandeur, its appeal is global and seemingly eternal. For nearly 200 years, audiences have packed concert halls and opera houses to hear performers play this single, phenomenal instrument. One of the primary reasons for the piano’s popularity is the fact that it has inspired many of the greatest compositional masterworks in the concert repertoire. The piano’s harmonic and melodic capabilities, tone colors, and orchestral resources have fascinated composers—the majority of them highly accomplished pianists themselves—since the mid-18th century. The result is a magnificent body of work, from the intricate and lyric creations of the High Baroque and Classical masters to the passionate visions of Romantic virtuosos to the revolutionary sonorities of pianistic “impressionism” and modernism. Within the rich repertoire of the piano, a group of unique masterworks stand out as the greatest achievements of this tradition. These historic milestones in piano writing are celebrated for several key reasons: They have commanded the respect of the music world through their compositional mastery and their […]
Continue ReadingGiuseppe Verdi’s first opera, “Oberto”, was produced at Milan’s famed Teatro alla Scala in 1839 when Verdi was 26 years old. Oberto’s modest success was completely obscured by the domestic disasters Verdi suffered between 1838 and 1840 when, in the span of 22 months, he lost both his small children and he beloved wife Margherita to disease. Paralyzed by grief, Verdi swore he’d never compose again. But compose he did: egged on, cajoled, wheedled and finally browbeaten by Bartolomeo Merelli – the director of La Scala – Verdi completed his second opera “Un giorno di regno” (“King for a Day”) and composed his third opera, “Nabucco”, about which I blogged on September 20. (Bartolomeo Merelli was an astute businessman, but in his actions towards Verdi, he was also a GREAT AND BRILLIANT man. Merelli’s love for and belief in Verdi very probably kept Verdi alive, and his intransigence towards Verdi the artist kept Verdi composing at a time when he would most likely have quit forever. That would have been a disaster of such magnitude that its mere contemplation loosens my bladder. So please, three cheers for Bartolomeo Merelli who was, in fact, one of music history’s indispensible men.) (While […]
Continue ReadingWe understand a “eureka moment” as being a revelatory, paradigm-shifting realization that has the power to change EVERYTHING. The word “eureka” comes from the ancient Greek word εὕρηκα, which means “I have found it!” The ancient Greco-dude credited with coining the exclamation “eureka!” was the mathematician, astronomer, physicist, engineer, inventor and Jeopardy!-freak Archimedes (circa 287 BCE – circa 212 BCE). Archimedes purportedly shrieked “EUREKA” when, having stepped into his bath and noticed that the water level rose, he realized that the volume of water he displaced was equal to the volume of his body that was submerged in the water. A nanosecond (or two) later, he then realized that he had solved what had long been considered an unsolvable problem: how to accurately measure the volume of an irregular object. According to legend, Archimedes was so excited by his “eureka moment” that he jumped out of the tub and ran naked through the streets of his native city of Syracuse, there on the southeastern coast of Sicily. We suspect he would have thought twice about doing so had he made his discovery during a winter’s evening in Medicine Hat, Alberta. I trust we’ve all had a “eureka moment”. Mine occurred […]
Continue ReadingSpeaking of facial hair (which I did in my previous post), I would issue a challenge to all the techies out there. I would dearly love to have an app that allowed me to actually “see” what someone looked like – clean shaven – beneath his beard. Now, I completely understand that a full beard is considered a sign of piety by some religious sects and as a symbol of male virility -“plumage” on full display – for various cultures. Nevertheless, as a card-carrying “face-man” (as opposed to a “breast-man” or a “leg-man”), I would assert that full beards cover up, and even disguise, that most special and revealing part of the human body: the face. Depending upon how they are counted, there are anywhere from 19 to 43 muscles in the human face, the subtle interplay of which collectively are capable of an almost infinite degree of expressive nuance. (Yes, there are exceptions to this. For example, given the range of emotional expression displayed by the actor Chuck Norris, we can correctly conclude that it is possible to have but a single facial muscle.) However many facial muscles one possesses, a full beard will mask much of the expression […]
Continue ReadingWe have a major composer birthday coming up: the great Italian opera composer Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi will be turning 200 years old on October 10, and he never sounded better. I am going to take a brief break from my jazz pianist postings in order to focus on my pal and yours, the esteemed Joe Green, the Italian opera machine. Rather than write long, potentially stultifying blogs about this fascinating man and brilliant composer, I am going to draw on a 32-lecture course I made for The Great Courses/The Teaching Company called (not unexpectedly) “The Life and Operas of Verdi.” (I am, of course, assuming that the selected video excerpts I will draw from this course are NOT stultifying.) The approximately nine-minute excerpts I will link to this page have the reinforcing advantages of providing much more info than I can possibly provide in a blog while, hopefully, making you hungry for even more information and therefore susceptible to actually purchasing the course. Follow the link below to the first excerpt, during which I discuss the prodigious gifts the Italians have lavished on humanity. Chief among those gifts is opera itself, and chief among the greatest composers of Italian […]
Continue ReadingI’ve spent the last week editing the piano excerpts that will illustrate my upcoming The Great Courses survey, “The 23 Greatest Solo Works”. In honor of that poorly entitled and numerically challenged course (which will be available in early October), I offer up a brief piano masterwork, one with a story a mile long: Robert Schumann’s Kinderscenen, Op. 15, No. 7 (1838), a piece better known as Träumerei. In 1945, Schumann’s Träumerei – which means “Dreaming” – was selected by some forgotten apparatchik at Radio Moscow to be played in the background during a moment of silence at 6:55 pm on May 8, 1945, in memory of the victims of the Soviet Union’s war against Nazi Germany. Whoever that Radio Moscow functionary was, he has gained a measure of immortality for what was an inspired choice. Schumann’s work evokes a mood of aching melancholy, loss, and nostalgia, a mood very different from that evoked by the military or funeral music that might well have been chosen. Schumann’s Träumerei was immediately embraced by the Soviet people, who felt in its sweetness and longing not just their own grief but a healing sense of peace as well. Träumerei became the go-to piece […]
Continue ReadingAugust 9 marks the 38th anniversary of the death of Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich. Never a particularly healthy man, what got Shostakovich in the end was lung cancer, the result of a lifetime of chain-smoking those foulest-of-foul “papirosi”: cardboard-tipped Soviet cigarettes. Please a moment of silence (and, if you’re a smoker, perhaps a tobacco-free day) for this superb composer. Art, politics, and current events make problematic bedfellows, but they are a ménage à trois we cannot avoid 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, argued with Khrushchev, and died while Brezhnev was in power. Shostakovich survived because he was considered by the powers that were a Yurodivy, a village idiot, a holy fool who […]
Continue ReadingI have spent the last four days writing up a calendar of events discussed in my twenty-six in-print The Great Courses/Teaching Company courses. (The calendar presently runs 70 pages in length. By the time I finish – with luck, tomorrow – it will run about 90 pages.) My intention is to choose one or two date-appropriate items per week, and post them along with a link to the appropriate Great Courses course. My thinking here is that a spoon full of info helps the shameless self-promotion go down. We lift a glass in a birthday salute to a dear departed friend and former colleague of mine, the American oboist John de Lancie, who was born on July 26, 1921 in Berkeley California and died on May 17, 2002 in Walnut Creek, a suburb of San Francisco. Aside from being one of the greatest oboists of the twentieth century, a brilliant educator and a ferociously exacting oboe teacher, de Lancie was personally responsible for the composition of the single greatest oboe concerto written during the twentieth century: Richard Strauss’ stunning Oboe Concerto in D Major of 1945. Strauss (1864-1949) rode out the end of World War Two at his country house […]
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