We mark the premiere performance on August 28, 1850 – 173 years ago today – of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, in the central German city of Weimar. The premiere was conducted by none-other-than Wagner’s friend and supporter (and future father-in-law!) Franz Liszt (1811-1886). Liszt had chosen the premiere date of August 28 in honor of Weimar’s most famous citizen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was born on August 28, 1749, 101 years to the day before Lohengrin’s premiere. The “opera” – the last of Wagner’s stage works to be designated by him as being an “opera” – was brilliantly received and has been a mainstay of the international repertoire since that first performance. Alas, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was not in attendance there at the premiere. With a price on his head, he had been de-facto exiled from Germany thanks to his activities in the Dresden Uprising of May of 1849. Wagner did not hear a full performance of Lohengrin until 1861, 11 years later, in Vienna. Be informed that both today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts will deal with Lohengrin. Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes will focus on three video performances, comparing video excerpts from each […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for Dr. Bob Prescribes – Page 6
We pick back up where we left off in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, with the techno-wizard and American maverick-styled inventor Robert Moog’s education. Robert Moog (1934-2005), Continued Having graduated from Columbia and Queen’s College in 1957, Moog headed north to Cornell University, where he eventually received a Ph.D. in Engineering Physics in 1965. His fascination with electronic musical instruments remained undimmed. At a time (the early 1960s) when synthesizers were still the room-sized, tube-driven, super-expensive behemoths running on punched paper (like Viktor, aka the RCA Mark II Sound Synthesizer), Moog’s ambition was to create a synthesizer that would be accessible to all musicians, and not just an elite, academic few. Three parameters drove Moog’s thinking: his synthesizer had to be compact enough to be reasonably portable; it had to have a practical interface, meaning that it would have to be operated by a piano-like keyboard; and it had to be affordable. As it turned out, Robert Moog was the right man living at the right time, because the technology he required to create a portable, practical, and affordable synthesizer came into being at exactly the time he needed it, a technology called the high-density integrated circuit. Bear with me […]
Continue ReadingIn Six, Short Years! Yesterday’s Music History monday post concluded by observing that in the six short years between 1964 and 1970, the Beatles amassed a total of 20 number one songs on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart, a number that here, 53 years later, remains a record. As a public service, here are the top 10 top ten performers with the most #1 hits: In addition to those songs that charted #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, the Beatles had an additional seven (further) number one songs on the UK Singles Record Retailer Chart, giving them a total of 27 number one songs on the combined US and UK charts. When we consider that The Beatles, as a group, were together for not quite eight years – from August 18, 1962, to May 8, 1970, when the album Let it Be was released – that’s a level of popular and artistic success that’s just a bit insane. What makes that 27 number one hits so difficult to fathom – something that separates the Beatles entirely from the competition – is that they were all originals, songs written by three members of the band: Paul McCartney, John Lennon, […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post was all about auctions; specifically, auctions of Elvis Presley memorabilia. As we observed yesterday, the most expensive piece of Elvis memorabilia sold to date that isn’t a gold Rolex watch is Presley’s 1942 Martin D-18 guitar, Serial Number 80221, which was auctioned off for $1,320,000 August 1, 2020. As I suggested in yesterday’s post, given its historical importance and provenance – Elvis owned the guitar between 1954 and 1956, began his career and made his first recordings (for Sun Records) with the guitar – the $1.32 million paid for the thing was a steal, anyway you strum it. Anyway, that post about the prices paid for Elvis’ stuff got me to thinking about the prices paid for music manuscripts by the “great” composers, prices that dwarf the amount paid for Elvis’ Martin D-18 guitar. The high prices brought by such manuscripts are a function of rarity. Handwritten musical scores by household name composers are excessively rare, as the overwhelming majority of those that have survived are safely locked away in climate-controlled vaults in libraries and museums. There are a few such autograph manuscripts – or “holographs” – still in private hands, and on the exceedingly […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday was generally about nepo (as in “nepotism”) babies: “the children of celebrities who have succeeded in the same or adjacent career as their celebrity parents or other esteemed relatives. The implication is that, because their parents already had connections to an industry, the child was able to use those connections to build a career in that industry.” Specifically, yesterday’s Music History Monday marked the 77th birthday of Gary (Levitch) Lewis, the son of the comedian Jerry Lewis and a nepo baby par excellence. Gary Lewis’ mother – Patti Palmer – was a professional singer who gave her son a set of drums when he was 15. At the age of 18, he formed a band with four friends. Since his mother was underwriting the band’s equipment purchases, Lewis got top billing, and the band was called “Gary and the Playboys.” The band was taken on by the American record producer Snuff Garrett, not because they were particularly good but because Garrett saw the band as an opportunity to capitalize off of Gary’s father, the presumed “King of Comedy” himself, Jerry Lewis. In yesterday’s post, we observed that Gary Lewis was not much of a […]
Continue ReadingThe composer, conductor, pianist, violinist, watercolorist, photographer, and teacher Ernest Bloch (1880-1959) was born 143 years ago yesterday in Geneva, Switzerland. He grew up in a middle-class household; his father Maurice Bloch was a merchant and his mother Sophie (née Brunschwig) was a highly cultured, stay-at-home mother. The Bloch’s were Jewish, and both religious and cultural Judaism played a powerful role in Bloch’s childhood. (A brief explanation here. Many Jews, particularly Reform Jews like myself, differentiate between our cultural background and our religious background. Judaism is a very ancient way of life-slash-religion; the current Hebrew year is 5783. That’s a long time and it encompasses a lot of history, a lot of art and literature, a lot of human experience, a lot of food, and a lot of guilt. More than just a form of worship, then, Judaism is a cultural way of life and a moral code of conduct based on the Golden Rule of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” or so believe secular Jews like myself. This is why people like me – who are nonbelievers [or nearly so] – can still identify powerfully as Jews, despite the fact that ultra-religious […]
Continue ReadingToday’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post is a bit different from any other I’ve done to date. Instead of offering up a recommended recording, or a video, or a book, I’m prescribing a person: the indomitable Elaine Stritch (1924-2014). Love her or not, she was like a gorilla in your boudoir: impossible to ignore. She was one-of-a-kind and deserves to be celebrated! Madame Stritch Nearing the End On February 17, 2014, just five months before she passed away on July 17, 2014, at the age of 89, a wheelchair-bound Elaine Stritch appeared onstage at the 92nd Street Y (in New York City) for an interview. Stritch’s age and infirmity meant nothing; seven particularly good one-liners from that interview are linked below: The Emmy Award-winning actress Holland Taylor (born 1943) said this about her long-time friend and mentor, Elaine Stritch: “There was always the element of danger with her, and the possibility of dying of embarrassment.” That there was. Stritch was, in turns, loud, domineering, irascible, volcanic, and funny as hell, a consummate entertainer who carried – and happily celebrated! – her many demons on her sleeve. A self-professed “gravel voiced broad,” her career – which began in the 1940s – […]
Continue ReadingThe subject of today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post is doubly appropriate. Yesterday’s Music History Monday dealt with Carl Orff (1895-1982), a composer who thrived under the Nazi regime only to later claim (as did so many others in the post-war period) to have been a “victim” of the Nazis. Well, today’s composer was a victim – a real victim – of the Nazi terror: the Czech composer Pavel Haas (1899-1944), who was “selected,” gassed, and cremated at the concentration/death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 17, 1944. Haas was a student and disciple of Leoš Janáček, whose own life and string quartets were celebrated in last week’s Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts. “The Gathering Storm” It still boggles the mind. Seventy-eight years after the end of World War Two, it still amazes us that so very many Germans – citizens of a great and modern nation – could descend to such depths of criminal depravity and sheer wickedness as they did between 1933 and 1945. If it remains hard for us, here, today, to grasp the enormity of the Nazi evil, imagine how difficult it was to grasp for most Europeans in the early and mid-1930s. Most such […]
Continue ReadingI am well aware that today is July 4 and that, perhaps, the patriotic thing for me to do today would be to celebrate the national anthem of the United States – The Star-Spangled Banner – and, perhaps, a famous arrangement of that very anthem. Sadly, no-can-do, because it has already-been-done: just last year, in Music History Monday for July 4, 2022, and Dr. Bob Prescribes for July 5, 2022. Those posts – respectively entitled “As American as tarte aux pommes! Celebrating the Fourth with some Real American Music! or Tampering with National Property” and “Stravinsky in America” – together recount the story of The Star-Spangled Banner as well as Igor Stravinsky’s famous and most controversial arrangement of the anthem, made in 1944 and subsequently banned in Boston! I would humbly direct your attention to these two posts for appropriately “spangled” reading. As for today, we pick up where we left off in yesterday’s Music History Monday, with the Czech composer Leoš Janáček and his two superb string quartets: No. 1, subtitled “The Kreutzer Sonata” and No. 2, subtitled “Intimate Letters.” Leoš Janáček(1854-1928) Our impressions of Leoš Janáček tend to be conditioned by photographs taken of him later in life. […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post dealt with the incredulity we should all feel when faced with the astounding magnitude of Wolfgang Mozart’s talent and the beauty and quality of his music. It is appropriate, then, that today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post should celebrate at least some of Mozart’s astonishing music, and I have chosen his two Piano Quartets and what is a brilliant and relatively new recording, one released in 2018. Superlatives The title of this album of Mozart’s two piano quartets is “Apotheosis.” The program booklet packaged with the CD defines apotheosis as: “1. Elevation to divine status 2. The perfect form or example of something” With its references to “divine status” and “perfection,” that definition indulges in superlatives: “Something of the highest quality or degree.” Statements of superlatives are dangerous because they can ride roughshod over important details, details that would otherwise force us to qualify those superlative statements. For example. The consensus “greatest baseball player” of all time is Babe Ruth (1895-1948), whose statistics as a power hitter were so far ahead of his contemporaries as to put him in a league of his own. (His stats as a pitcher – had he continued to pitch regularly […]
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