It’s hard to believe that it’s almost two weeks since we returned from our trip to Vienna, but there you go, time flies when you’re putting things away, doing laundry, and paying bills. I have always advocated – vainly – that we should all have the opportunity to “take a vacation from a vacation” by doing nothing for the first three or four days after returning home, the better to ease ourselves back into real life. I know: I don’t feel sorry for me either. Vienna is one of those wonderful places where the longer you stay, the more there is to do. If we didn’t have kids and jobs to come home to, and if my Visa card had not been whimpering and gagging and begging for mercy, we might have tried to stay a few more days. (Yes: Vienna is expensive; very expensive; extremely expensive. I began referring to our trip as our “moneymoon”; as a “paycation.” The price of paradise, I suppose.) So here’s a rundown on a couple of events that brought our trip to its conclusion. On our last day in Vienna, I stayed in the hotel room finishing up my previous post on Haydn’s […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Tours
For my two Euros, the best monument to a composer in Vienna is – by far – the house in which Joseph Haydn lived during the last twelve years of his life, from 1797 to 1809. Here’s the story: Between 1791 and 1795, Joseph Haydn twice visited England. The first of Haydn’s most excellent English adventures took place between January of 1791 and June of 1792, and the second one between January of 1794 and August of 1795. These trips cemented Haydn’s reputation as the world’s most famous and popular living composer and made him – as composers go – a rich man. It was thanks to the money Haydn earned during his first English adventure that he was able to do something that neither Antonio Vivaldi (who died in Vienna in 1741) nor Wolfgang Mozart (who died in Vienna in 1791), nor Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, nor Mahler (who died in Vienna in, respectively, 1827, 1828, 1897, and 1911) ever managed to do: Haydn bought his very own house in Vienna. It was a one-story house on Kleine Steingasse in the Viennese suburb of Obere Windmūhl. It had been spotted by Haydn’s wife Maria Anna while he was away in […]
Continue ReadingUPDATE New Mozart In Vienna Webcourse! The extraordinary Joseph Haydn was born in the Austrian town of Rohrau on March 31, 1732. At the age of eight he moved to Vienna, where he became a chorister at St. Stephens Cathedral. He remained in Vienna, on and off, for the remainder of his long life, dying here on May 31, 1809. The amazing Ludwig (“my friends call me Louis”) van Beethoven moved to Vienna in November of 1792 a few weeks shy of his 22nd birthday. He remained a resident of the city until his death 34½ years later, dying during an early spring snowstorm on March 26, 1827. The incredible Franz Schubert was born in Vienna on January 31, 1797 and died here on November 19, 1828. The quintessentially Viennese composer, the “waltz-king” Johann Strauss, Jr. was born just outside of Vienna on October 25, 1825 and died here on June 3, 1899. The spectacular Johannes Brahms settled in Vienna at the age of 30 in 1863 and remained here until his death 34 years later on April 3, 1897. The stunning Gustav Mahler studied at the Vienna Conservatory, directed the Vienna Imperial opera for ten years – from 1897 […]
Continue ReadingProud as I am to be a 36-year resident of Northern California, and proud as I am that all four of my children were born there, I myself grew in the ironically named “Garden State” of New Jersey. This bears mentioning (for the second time in two posts, no less) because one cannot urinate in north, central or south Jersey without hitting a historical marker that says “George Washington Slept Here”. A little Revolutionary history: On June 14, 1775, George Washington was appointed General and commander-in-chief of the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress. It was the wisest of appointments, because only Washington’s extraordinary leadership and generalship managed to preserve the army during the first 30 months of the War. In July of 1776 the English General William Howe landed some 25,000 troops in Staten Island, New York. Outnumbered and outgunned, Washington and the Continentals executed what accounted to a fighting withdrawal from Long Island to Brooklyn to Manhattan and then across the Hudson River to Fort Lee New Jersey (where my father lives today, about a half-a-mile from the Revolution-era fort overlooking the Hudson River). From Fort Lee, Washington and his army traipsed southwest across New Jersey, withdrawing […]
Continue ReadingAlong with mass consumption of Viennese coffee, strudel, and schnitzel, our pilgrimages have begun. Today we visited he house in which Franz Schubert was born on January 31, 1797 at Nußdorfer Straße 54. To call the house “modest” is a bit of an understatement; at the time of Schubert’s birth its 16 apartments housed some 70 people, making the tract house in which I grew up in South Jersey seem like a palace by comparison. The Schubert apartment – on the upper right-hand side of the second floor (see photo below) – consisted of two rooms: a small kitchen and a single living room, in which the Schubert family managed to live, sleep, make music, reproduce, etc. The family moved to larger digs when Franz was a few years old. Schubert was born in the kitchen, next to the fireplace/stove. For a January birth it was the warmest spot in the apartment and thus the location. One of the photos below shows me crouching at pretty much the exact spot Schubert was born. Also pictured below (and on display in the apartment): a pair of Schubert’s glasses (looking, to my untrained eye, very much like bifocals). He was severely near-sighted […]
Continue ReadingIf it’s Friday, it must be Mantua. The potential downside with a tour the likes of the one I am presently engaged in is that it IS a tour: we climb on a bus and thus cocooned, we journey forth to various locations. We must adhere to the almighty schedule lest people get lost and chaos ensue. Once we arrive at a particular destination, we travel primarily as a pack with locale guides, who describe in magnificent detail the features of yet another Renaissance fresco in yet another ancient and beautiful church. We walk together, dine together, take pictures of each other while still doing our level best to absorb something of the ambience of the places we are visiting. Gratefully, the upsides of such a tour far outweigh the down. One, the people in our group are wonderful: fun, smart, and extremely diverse in life experience; I’ve no doubt that we (my wife and I) are making friends we will keep for a long time. Two, because we’re travelling by bus (and with local guides), we’re seeing the towns and landscape of the Po River valley with a detail we could never achieve on our own. Three, we’re visiting […]
Continue ReadingHard to believe, it’s already a week since I/we left home in order to lead a Verdi opera tour in Italy. We arrived on Wednesday, October 16 and are staying in a renovated thirteenth-century castle in an ancient village called Tabiano Castello in Emilia-Romagna, about 30 minutes south-west of Parma. This is Verdi territory; he grew up and lived in and around the city of Busseto, about 15 miles north of where I presently sit. We are not suffering. While it goes without saying (although I’ll say it anyway), the food and vino are absurdly, insanely good. I fear I will need two adjacent seats on my return flight in order to accommodate my bloated body back. This is the home of REAL Parmesan cheese, “prosciutto di Parma”, Parma ham, Lambrusco (bubbly red wine), balsamic vinegar (yesterday, in Modena, we tasted 25+ year-old vinegar over vanilla gelato; unbelievably good), Bolognese sauce, and a thousand other delicacies. But you are not reading this blog in order to follow my gluttony but rather, to hear about the performance of Verdi’s operas here in the heart of Verdi country. So here goes. We have attended two operas thus far, “Don Carlo” on Saturday […]
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 ReadingThe third installment of our Berlin Ring cycle – Siegfried – took place on Sunday, April 7 (by total coincidence, “International Holocaust Remembrance Day”). The curtain was particularly early that day – 4 PM – presumably to allow everyone to get home for a workday on the morrow. It would appear that everyone was aware of the early curtain time except the Canadian singer Lance Ryan, who was scheduled to sing Siegfried. I heard Lance Ryan sing the role of Siegfried in this exact production at La Scala in Milan in November of 2012. He was brilliant, and the La Scala audience – no easy sell when it comes to Wagner – gave him an appropriate ovation. There were no such ovations for Mr. Ryan on Sunday, April 7, at least not at first, as he apparently thought the show was to begin at 6 PM. So it was that twenty minutes before curtain time there was no Siegfried in the house. We – the audience – calmly took our seats, unaware of the panic going on backstage. With the clock thus ticking, Daniel Barenboim made a phone call to the young Austrian tenor Andreas Schager who had, a few […]
Continue ReadingThe permanent home of the Berlin State Theater (the “Staatsoper”) is a magnificent, traditionally arrayed 1300-seat theater on the Unter den Linden, Berlin’s equivalent to Paris’ Champs Elysées and New York’s Fifth Avenue. The theater has been closed for renovations since 2010, and will likely remain closed until 2015. Thus, performances have been transferred across town to the Schiller Theater, a considerably smaller and more modern theater (with big, cushy, movie theater-like seats set – like Wagner’s own theater in Bayreuth – at a fairly steep pitch). It was a fabulous place to see and hear The Ring. We sat in row six, and the sound in this small, wood-paneled theater was truly awesome. The huge orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim was kidney-rattlingly brilliant, and offered up pretty much the best stretch of orchestral playing I have ever heard. The singers were likewise wonderful, from top-to-bottom. To single out just a few: René Pape was a brooding and intense Wotan; the ageless (57 year-old) Waltraud Meier sang Sieglinde; and the Swedish soprano Iréne Theorin played Brünnhilde. And what a Brünnhilde she was! Diva Theorin is as big as a Schloss: with a front-end like twin locomotives, arms and back like […]
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