Yesterday’s Music History Monday post marked the premiere of Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor. Nearly five years in the writing, the concerto received its premiere on January 22, 1859, in the German city of Hanover. Brahms himself was the soloist, supported by the Hanover Court Orchestra and conducted by Brahms’ great friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim. As we observed in yesterday’s post, Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 is bound up entirely with his reaction to his friend and mentor Robert Schumann’s suicide attempt; his feelings towards Robert and his wife, the pianist Clara Wieck Schumann; the years he spent with Clara and her children as both a surrogate husband and father during Robert’s institutionalization; Robert’s death; and Brahms’ decision that he could not marry Clara after Robert’s death. No wonder Brahms was consumed by the piece: it was a virtual diary of his feelings, experiences, and musical growth from the time he met the Schumanns in 1853 to the time he left Clara and returned to his hometown of Hamburg in 1856. As such, the concerto took on a terribly outsized degree of importance to Brahms. The consequences of this emotional investment in the concerto were, […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for Dr. Bob Prescribes – Page 4
I’ve always believed there are basically two kinds of music: the music you grow up listening to as a child and as an adolescent and everything else. An overly simple statement? No, I don’t believe it is. It’s been my experience that nothing impresses itself more powerfully (or permanently) on the relatively blank slates that are our young brains than the smells we smell and the music we hear as kids and adolescents. As olfactory phenomena are beyond the scope of my knowledge, we’ll stick here with music. The music we listen to growing up impresses itself on us like no other music heard at any other time of our lives, or so I believe. Our childhood innocence, our sexual coming-of-age, the magic that ensues when almost every experience is new, all of this (and more) is wrapped up in and forever identified with the music of our childhoods and adolescence. That music becomes our music; we own it. Good or bad, we love it like a we love our delinquent children, just because they’re ours. (I know that when I was an infant, my father used to sing Waltzing Mathilde and When You Wish Upon a Star to […]
Continue ReadingFive years ago, my Dr. Bob Prescribes post for January 15, 2019 recommended Alan Walker’s epic (25 years in the research and writing!), three-volume biography of Franz Liszt. In that post, I mentioned – that our Maine Coon cat Teddy (who, sadly, kicked the Kibble on December 24, 2022) – was often paid the highest compliment any cat can receive: that he acted like a dog. (To my mind, it speaks poorly of cats if the nicest thing one can say about a good one is that it behaves like another species altogether.) The point was to observe that likewise, the nicest thing anyone can say about a work of non-fiction is that it reads like a novel. That’s because non-fiction – written histories in particular – are all-too-often catalogs of names, dates, and events; information-rich but tedious, often poorly written tomes that can induce slumber in even the most hardened insomniacs. Novels tell stories, stories written by professional writers. So when we say a work of non-fiction reads like a novel, we’re saying, one, that the information contained therein has been woven into a compelling narrative and two, that the author who wrote the narrative writes like a pro. […]
Continue ReadingAccording to one review, Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar is: “A disturbing book that screams to be read.” Truer words were never written. Despite its titular reference to the ravine in Kyiv known as Babi Yar, only the first part of the book deals with the murder of Kyiv’s Jewish population there on September 29 and 30, 1941. Beyond Babi Yar, the majority of the book is an account of the invasion, destruction, and occupation of Kyiv by Nazi Germany, as eye-witnessed by the young Anatoly Kuznetsov himself. (The subtitle of the book, “A Document in the Form of a Novel” would more accurately read “A Memoir in the Form of a Novel.”) The prescribed edition of the book came out in 2023, to mark the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. As can be seen from the copyright dates listed above, this is not a new book. Nevertheless, given that yesterday’s Music History Monday post dealt with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, subtitled “Babi Yar,” and given that today’s headlines continue to talk about whether factions within the Congress of United States will be willing to support Ukraine against its current invaders, Anatoly Kuznetsov’s […]
Continue ReadingWe cannot (and will not!) talk about Sebastian Bach’s landmark Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin without first considering what is, to my mind, one of the most perfect examples of human ingenuity this side of cave painting, and that is the violin. The Violin The violin is a miracle of ingenuity and nature, of art and science. Here are some particulars. The instrument we call the “violin” appeared around the year 1530 and continued to evolve until it reached its (more-or-less) definitive size and shape – in the late 1600s and early 1700s – in the hands the great violin gurus of Cremona, Italy: Nicolo Amati (1596-1684), Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737), and Giuseppe Bartolomeo Guarneri (1698-1744). Depending upon whom you talk to, the violin consists of up to 83 parts. (That’s because different ways of counting will yield up a different number of parts; for example, the back of a violin can be made up of one or two pieces of wood.) Whatever. No matter how you count the individual pieces, the violin ultimately consists of three essential components: the resonating body (the sound box), typically 355 millimeters (or 14”) in length; the neck with the fingerboard; and […]
Continue ReadingUnplayable? Yesterday’s Music History Monday post observed how two beloved concert staples by our great and good friend Pyotr (Peter) Ilych Tchaikovsky – his Piano Concerto No. 1 (of 1874) and his Violin Concerto in D major (of 1878) – were deemed unplayable by their initial dedicatees. Those “dedicatees” were, respectively, the pianist Nicolai Rubinstein and the violinist Leopold Auer. Their poor attitudes lost them the dedications, which were ultimately given to the players who sucked it up, learned to play the concertos, and gave them their premieres (that would be, respectively, the pianist Hans von Bülow, and the violinist Adolf Brodsky). At the conclusion of yesterday’s Music History Monday post, I provided a short-list of composers who wrote music that was initially deemed to be “unplayable.” That list included Niccolò Paganini, Franz Liszt, Mily Balakirev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Samuel Barber, and György Ligeti. To that august list of names we could add tens – if not hundreds – of other composers, composers whose music was, at first, thought unplayable by the musicians initially tasked to perform it. For now, please permit me to add just two more composers’ names to that list, Adolf von Henselt and yours truly, Robert M. […]
Continue ReadingAs discussed in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, Richard Strauss’ orchestral tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra (in German, Also sprach Zarathustra, composed in 1896) is based on the “philosophical poem” of the same title by the German philologist (a type of linguist who studies the history of languages through their literature) and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). As we observed yesterday, the historical Zarathustra – also known as “Zoroaster” – was a Persian prophet who is believed to have been born in 628 B.C.E. As is the case with so many ancient philosophers, it is impossible to distinguish the teachings of the actual “Zarathustra” from those of the many “Zoroastrian” sects that sprang up in the centuries after his death. As best as we can tell, Zarathustra himself preached monotheism in what was an otherwise overwhelmingly polytheistic spiritual environment. In his so-called “philosophical poem,” written between 1883 and 1885, Nietzsche uses the historical Zarathustra as a mouthpiece to spout his own ideas about the purpose of human life and the fate of humankind. Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra consists of eighty fairly brief discourses (or “sermons”), in which his stooge Zarathustra holds forth on a wide variety of subjects: from virtue, criminality, […]
Continue ReadingOops! I’ve been writing these Dr. Bob Prescribes posts since August 6, 2018. I have only now realized that I have not yet featured the pianist Ray Bryant (1931-2011). OMG. It’s time to address and make good on that oversight! What made the light go off in my head regarding Ray Bryant was the act of preparing yesterday’s Music History Monday post about Elton John and Bernie Taupin. As we observed in that post, Elton John is a classically trained pianist who has used his pianistic skill to master a wide range of decidedly non-classical piano styles, including rock ‘n’ roll, blues, and gospel. One of the many songs I listened to in preparing yesterday’s post was Elton John’s and Bernie Taupin’s Take Me to the Pilot (recorded in 1970). As lyrics go, Bernie Taupin’s makes about as much sense as John Lennon’s words to I Am the Walrus. (Lennon later confessed to writing the Walrus’ nonsense lyrics when he learned that many Beatles fans were actually analyzing the band’s lyrics as serious poetry!) Anyway, Taupin’s lyrics for Take Me to the Pilot are out there, way out there. In 2005, Elton John confessed that regarding those lyrics: “in the […]
Continue ReadingGioachino Rossini was born on February 29, 1792, in the Italian seaport city of Pesaro, on the Adriatic Sea. He was the only child of Giuseppe Rossini (1758-1839), a professional trumpet and horn player; and Anna Rossini (1771-1827), a seamstress and later, a professional operatic soprano (hers was, indeed, quite a career change!). In 1802, when young Gioachino was ten years old, his family moved to Lugo – near Ravenna – and that’s where he received his elementary education: in Italian, Latin, arithmetic, and music. Dude was bigly talented. In 1810, at the age of 18, he moved to Venice, where he immediately scored his first hit with his first professional opera: a one-act comedy called La cambiale di matrimonio, “The Marriage Contract.” Over the course of the next 19 years, 38 additional operas followed: comedies and dramas, many of them masterworks that have remained in the repertoire since they were first performed. And then, in 1829 at the age of 37, having completed William Tell (his 39th opera), Rossini upped and quit the opera biz. And even though he lived another 39 years, he never wrote another opera. Retirement Rossini’s retirement from the opera stage during his artistic prime […]
Continue ReadingThough he composed many other works – including six operettas – John Philip Sousa’s great and enduring fame rests on his 136 marches. His first march, Review, was published in 1873; his final march, Library of Congress, begun in 1931, was left incomplete at his death in 1932. It wasn’t completed until 2003, when the Library of Congress commissioned Stephan Bulla (born 1953, the chief arranger of the United States Marine Corps band) to complete it. Sousa’s marches are so ubiquitous and so well-known that they have taken on the character of American folk music, as if they grew from “the fruited plain” of America’s soil all by themselves. Whether or not we know them by their titles – Semper Fidelis (the official march of the United States Marines); The Washington Post; The Thunderer; The Liberty Bell; Manhattan Beach; and El Capitan – we recognize them instantly, so much part of the national fabric they have become. Rather than attempt to tell the stories behind all or even a few of the Sousa marches on the prescribed discs, I have decided to tell the story of just one of them, as representative of them all. And for that I have […]
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