On May 1, 1786 – on what was also a Monday, 237 years ago today – a miracle was heard for the first time: Wolfgang Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro received its premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Some 100 years later, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) wrote this about The Marriage of Figaro: “Every number in Figaro is for me a marvel; I simply cannot fathom how anyone could create anything so perfect. Such a thing has never been done, not even by Beethoven.” Herr Brahms, when you’re right, you’re right, and this case you are so right! 237 years after the premiere, Brahms’ awe of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro mirrors our own. For many of us – myself included – it is, simply, the greatest opera ever composed. Composing an Italian Language Opera for the Viennese On May 7th, 1783 – some three years before the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro – Mozart wrote the following in a letter to his father back in Salzburg: “The Italian opera buffa [here in Vienna] is very popular. I have looked through more than a hundred libretti [meaning literally “little book,” the script of an opera] but I have […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for Mozart in Vienna
Tomorrow, on January 17, I will release for download the first of what I hope will be many “webcourses”: “Mozart in Vienna” (16 lectures) and “The Music of the Twentieth Century” (18 lectures). With your kind indulgence, I will dedicate the bulk of this post to my philosophy of teaching as encapsulated in two words: “story telling”. It is a teaching philosophy that has been forty years in the making. (My first classroom-teaching gig was at an all-girls private high school in Pottersville, New Jersey called the Purnell School in 1977. I learned more that year – about teaching, about girls/women, and about myself – than in any five-year period before or since. It’s a story I will tell, but not today!) Before moving on, let us – with unfortunate rapidity – put some date sensitive info on the table. On this day in 1728, the Italian opera composer Niccoló Piccinni was born in the southern Italian city of Bari. On this day in 1739, George Frederick Handel’s oratorio “Saul” received its premiere at the Haymarket Theater in ye merrye-olde London. On this day in 1864, the scoundrel Anton Felix Schindler died in Frankfurt am Main. From 1822 to 1825, […]
Continue ReadingA gratuitous though heart-felt description of (and plug for) my soon-to-be-released web courses, “Mozart in Vienna” and “The Music of the Twentieth Century”:
Continue ReadingA drum roll (okay; perhaps just an onion roll): announcing the upcoming releases of my latest Great Courses survey and my first webcast courses, what I will now refer to as “webcourses”. It’s been a year since I announced my intention to begin self-publishing such webcourses; I have now completed writing two of them. The first is “Mozart in Vienna”, a 16-part course that deals with the last 10 years of Mozart’s tragically short life, from 1781 to 1791. Featuring Mozart’s chamber music for strings, the webcourse focuses on Mozart’s day-to-day life and his amazing compositional development during his years as a resident of Vienna. While there is some overlap with the repertoire covered in my The Great Courses/Teaching Company course “The Chamber Music of Mozart” (recorded back in 2004), “Mozart in Vienna” is considerably less technical than the aforementioned Great Courses survey and explores many works I’ve never before examined, including Mozart’s last four string quartets: the so-called “Hoffmeister” Quartet and the three “Prussian” Quartets. The second webcourse is one I’ve wanted to create for many, many years: an 18-part survey entitled “The Music of the Twentieth Century”. The “music” to which the title refers is primarily concert music, […]
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