On Monday, May 1, 1786 – 231 years ago today – a miracle occurred in the great city of Vienna: Wolfgang Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro received its premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. 100 years later, Johannes Brahms 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.” 231 years after the premiere, Brahms’ awe of Figaro mirrors our own. For many of us – myself included – it is, simply, the greatest opera ever composed. On May 7th, 1783 – three years before the premiere – Mozart wrote to his father: “The Italian opera buffa [here in Vienna] is very popular. I have looked through more than a hundred libretti but I have found hardly a single one that satisfies me. That is to say, there are so many changes that would have to be made that any poet, even if he were to undertake to make them, would find it easier to write an entirely new text. Our poet here now is a certain da Ponte. He has […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for Mozart – Page 4
As is sometimes the case, the lack of notable musical events on our “appointed” date (in today’s case, April 10) requires that we shimmy forward (or back) a day for relevant material; thus: On April 11, 1770 – 247 years ago tomorrow – a choral performance took place in Rome that was the source of one of the most famous stories in the entire history of Western music. Here’s the story. On December 13, 1769, the then 13 year-old Wolfgang Mozart and his father left their hometown of Salzburg for what would be the first of three extended tours of Italy. Working their way south, they arrived in Rome on Wednesday, April 11, 1770, four days before Easter. They were just in time to hear the Papal Choir perform Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere in the Sistine Chapel. Allegri’s Miserere is a setting of Psalm 51, which consists of 20 lines. Here are its first three: Have mercy upon me, O God, after Thy great goodness According to the multitude of Thy mercies do away mine offences. Wash me thoroughly from my wickedness: and cleanse me from my sin. Allegri (1582-1652) composed his Miserere sometime in the late 1630s, during the reign […]
Continue ReadingOn January 23, 1752 – 265 years ago today – the composer, harpsichordist, pianist, organist, conductor, teacher, music publisher and editor, and piano manufacturer Muzio Filippo Vincenzo Francesco Clementi was born in Rome. Remembered best today for his six delightful Sonatinas for Piano published as Op. 36, he was, in fact a prodigious composer; his collected works (published in Bologna by Ut Orpheus) fills 60 volumes! In his own lifetime, Clementi was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the handful of greatest living pianists. Wolfgang Mozart – almost exactly four years younger than Clementi – quit his day job in Salzburg and settled in Vienna in May, 1781. He was 25 years old. Mozart knew his worth, and he knew – as well as we do, today – that in 1781 he was the greatest pianist and composer in the world. To his mind, among his first tasks in Vienna was to make sure that everyone in that fine city understood his greatness as well. By December 1781, Mozart had gone a long way towards accomplishing that task. By December of 1781, Mozart considered Vienna to be his turf, and he was not kindly disposed towards anyone busting […]
Continue ReadingDecember 5 is an important date in music history. On December 5, 1830 (which was a Sunday) Hector Berlioz’ ground-breaking Symphonie Fantastique received its premiere at a concert that began at 2 P.M. at the Paris Conservatoire, then located on the Rue Bergère – what today is called the Rue de Conservatoire – in the 9th arrondissement. Tuesday, December 5, 1865 saw the public premiere of Johannes Brahms’ crazy-awesome Trio for Horn, Violin, and Piano in E-flat Major, Op. 40, in the southwestern German city of Karlsruhe, with the 32 year-old Brahms at the piano. The Barry Tuckwell, Itzhak Perlman, and Vladimir Ashkenazy recording on London affords more pleasure than any of us have a right to experience. Acquire it. Now. It gets no better. But these and other events pale to insignificance next to what happened on Monday, December 5, 1791 in Vienna. It was then and there – at 55 minutes past midnight – that Wolfgang Mozart died in the music room of his first story (what we in the U.S.A. call the second story) flat, located in a house called “das kleine Kaiserhaus” (“the small imperial house’) at Rauhensteingasse 8 in central Vienna. Mozart was 35 years, […]
Continue ReadingConspiracy Theories Pssst! Did you know that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld knowingly allowed Mossad to blow up the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001? Did you know that the fluoridation of our water is a communist conspiracy meant to contaminate our precious bodily fluids? Are you aware that global warming is fake, the moon landing was staged, vaccinations cause autism, Paul McCartney is dead (that’s why he’s barefoot on the Abbey Road cover) and has been portrayed by a double since 1966? Are we all cognizant of the fact that — along with Queen Elizabeth II and most other world leaders — Obama is a shape-shifting space lizard, a blood-sucking repto-humanoid alien from the Alpha Dragonis star system?(Check out the oeuvre of journalist David Ickes, who has made a career writing and lecturing on just that topic.) Oh those whacky conspiracy theories and the Internet that proliferates them. And yet, so desperate are some people to perceive logical narrative in the chaos of everyday events, so desperate are some people to see government as representative of evil, so desperate are some people to have something or someone to blame for their own misfortunes that they […]
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 ReadingMozart died 222 years ago today at the not-at-all ripe age of 35 years, 10 months, and 8 days. In yesterday’s post I described some of the conspiracy theories that have accumulated around Mozart’s death like guano on seaside rocks. Today we move on to some of the medical diagnoses that have been proposed to explain his untimely death. What killed Mozart? According to his death certificate, Mozart died of “heated miliary fever” which was eighteenth century for “haven’t a clue.” A contemporary newspaper claimed that he died of “dropsy of the heart,” a swelling of the body due to water retention as a result of kidney failure. So, kidney failure has also been blamed for Mozart’s death, a failure that could have been brought on by a streptococcal infection (strep throat), viral hepatitis, scarlet fever, or some other viral illness. According to Dr. Peter J. Davies in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (1983), Mozart died from Henoch-Schonlein syndrome, another secondary illness brought on by a viral infection. In fact, some 150 separate diagnoses have been proposed to explain Mozart’s death. According to Dr. Jan Hirschmann of Puget Sound Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Seattle, Mozart died […]
Continue ReadingTomorrow, December 5, marks the 222nd anniversary of the Death of Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, who died in Vienna at the age of 35 on December 5, 1791. Few historical events have been subjected to as much speculation as the cause of Mozart’s death. So many different theories and stories have been suggested over the years that it’s impossible to discuss (or refute) them all. So let’s examine the facts as best as we can and then discuss a few of the alternative explanations for Mozart’s death. First, “the plot.” During the summer of 1791, Mozart was anonymously commissioned to write a Requiem mass. More than any other single element, it is this fact that served to create the myth of Mozart’s murder: “An uncanny messenger had delivered a summons from the underworld to prepare a doomed hero for an appointment in Samarra.” Near the end of her life, Mozart’s widow Constanze purportedly told Mozart researchers Vincent and Mary Novello that: “Some six months before his death he was possessed with the idea of his being poisoned – ‘I know I must die’, he exclaimed, ‘someone has given me aqua toffana [a mixture of arsenic and lead] and has […]
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