On March 5, 1853 – 165 years ago today – Steinway & Sons was founded in New York City by a German immigrant named Henry Steinway. Born Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, Henry Steinway’s life and accomplishments are a textbook example of the great American success story: of an immigrant and his family who by dint of the hardest work, ambition, sacrifice, artistry, and no small bit of genius created something of true and lasting import. Just as the 27-inch retinal display iMac on which I am writing this post saw its ancestor born in a garage in Cupertino, California, so the magnificent concert grand Steinway D (serial number 587837) that sits in my studio/office roughly five feet away from the computer saw its earliest ancestor built in a kitchen in Seesen, Germany in 1836. For the computer I must thank the Steves Jobs and Wozniak. For the piano, Henry Steinway and his sons. Heinrich Steinweg/Henry Steinway’s life reads like a combination rags-to-riches and disaster novel! He was the youngest of 12 children, born on February 15, 1797 in the village of Wolfshagen, in the Harz Mountains of central Germany. The timing and location of Heinrich’s birth were, well, unfortunate. The Napoleonic […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for Music History Monday – Page 32
186 years ago today – on February 26, 1832 – the not quite 22 year-old Frédéric Chopin made his highly anticipated Paris debut at the Salons de Pleyel – the tony concert hall of the Pleyel Piano Company – at 9 rue Cadet in the 9th arrondissement. (Alas; the concert hall is no longer there. At the time of this writing, the building is occupied by a café/brasserie called “Le Petit Cadet”; a small produce market called “Cours des Halles”; a bookstore called “La librerie de JB”; and a high-end grocery and sandwich shop call “Castro Maison”. My goodness if the original walls could speak what stories they could tell!) Chopin was born on March 1, 1810 in Warsaw, Poland, the child of a Polish mother and a French father. His father Nicolas had come to Poland in 1787 when he was sixteen years old, and remained there to avoid being drafted into the French Revolutionary Army. By the time Frederic was born in 1810, his father had become a teacher of French, a Captain in the Polish National Guard, and a genuine Polish patriot: something he would pass on to his son. Chopin – who was, after all, the […]
Continue ReadingOn this day in 1727, the nearly 42 year-old Georg Friedrich Händel was transformed into George Frederick Handel when he was became a naturalized British subject by order of the crown. Handel’s English citizenship was reflection of not just of Handel’s conviction that his future lay in London (where he’d been living since 1710) but the conviction of the British royal family that he was far too valuable an asset to “belong” to any other nation but England. Handel was the ultimate immigrant: an Ausländer who created for his adopted England a body of music – itself an amalgam of German technique and Italian lyricism – that continues to define the English self-image to this day. How it all happened is quite a story He was born in the city of Halle, in the central German state of Saxony-Anhalt, on February 23, 1685. Despite his prodigious musical gifts and his burning ambition to “be a composer”, Handel’s father insisted that his son go to law school. Dutifully but unhappily, the young dude did what he was told, and in 1702 – at the age of 17 – he began studying the law at the University of Halle. Thankfully, within a year he […]
Continue ReadingOn this day 221 years ago – February 12, 1797 – Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in C Major, Op. 76, No. 3 received its premiere. The quartet’s nickname – “Emperor” – stems from the theme of its second movement, a theme composed a few months before the string quartet. Background In 1761, the 29 year-old Joseph Haydn was hired as a musical functionary by the fabulously wealthy Esterhazy family of Hungary. 29 years later – on September 28, 1790 – Joseph Haydn’s boss and benefactor Prince Nicolas Esterhazy kicked the scepter and passed on to the great unknown. Nicholas was succeeded by his son, Prince Anton, who didn’t give a rat’s rump for music; one of Anton’s first acts as Prince was to dismiss almost all the musicians his father had hired. Haydn was granted a 1400 florin annual salary and sent on his way. Was a grief-stricken Haydn left wondering what to do? No he was not. In fact, we can well imagine the spry, energetic Haydn doing some flying chest-bumps around the castle, jumping into some splits, hitting a moonwalk and then the rug for some one-handed pushups, because he was free at last! Haydn left the Esterhazy […]
Continue ReadingOn this day 131 years ago – February 5, 1887 – Giuseppe Verdi’s 25th and penultimate opera, Otello, received its premiere at the Teatro alla Scala (“La Scala”) in Milan. The premiere was the single greatest triumph in Verdi’s sensational career. But it was a premiere – and an opera – that almost didn’t happen. Verdi was born in 1813. He was a tough, no-nonsense man who had a tough life: he lost his wife and two young children to disease during a terrible 20-month span in 1839 and 1840. He battled through his grief to compose an opera called A King for a Day that was booed of the stage. He battled through his rage over that fiasco to compose his third opera, entitled Nabucco, which was a smash hit. He never looked back. No one ever worked harder than Giuseppe Verdi. In the 14 years between 1839 and 1853, he composed nineteen operas. Verdi called these his “galley slave years” because he worked like one: 16 to 18 hours a day, always under deadline, endlessly harried by librettists, producers, singers, critics and conductors. According to Verdi, he hated the whole stinkin’ trip, and as early as 1845 – […]
Continue Reading192 years ago today – on January 29, 1826 – Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, better known as Death and the Maiden, received its premiere at the home of Karl and Franz Hacker in Vienna. The quartet comes by its nickname honestly, as its second movement is a theme and variations form movement based on a song entitled Death and the Maiden, a song Schubert had composed in 1817 when he was twenty years old. The song sets a poem by Matthias Claudius, in which Death comes to claim an adolescent girl who is not prepared to go quietly. In the first stanza she sings: Pass by, alas, pass by! Go, you savage skeleton! I am still young, go, oh dear! And do not touch me. In the second stanza, Death seeks to calm her and allay her fears: Give me your hand, you fair and tender creature; I am a friend and do not come to punish you. Be of good cheer! I am not savage, Gently you will sleep in my arms. The song begins and ends with a slow, solemn, march-like passage played by the piano. At the beginning of the song, it […]
Continue Reading84 years ago today – on January 22, 1934 – Dmitri Shostakovich’s second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, received its premiere in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), and opened two days later in Moscow. Lady Macbeth was, from day one, a smash hit. It was declared a masterpiece, the best Russian opera since Musorgsky; one reviewer said that such an opera: “Could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best traditions of Soviet culture.” With the premiere of Lady Macbeth, the 28 year-old Shostakovich’s international reputation as the leading Soviet composer was locked in. By 1936, it had been performed 83 times in Leningrad and 97(!) times in Moscow; within five months of its premiere it had been broadcast five times. In the two years following it’s premiere Lady Macbeth was performed in New York, Stockholm, London, Zurich, Copenhagen, Argentina and Czechoslovakia. Inside the Soviet Union, Shostakovich became a celebrity: his artistic plans and progress, his comings and goings, were tracked by the press; his ideas on topics both musical and nonmusical were solicited, and he was elected a deputy of Leningrad’s October District. And then on January 26, 1936, the sky fell. Joseph Stalin, […]
Continue ReadingOn January 8, 1843 – 175 years ago today – Robert Schumann’s magnificent Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44 received its public premiere in the Saxon city of Leipzig. Dedicated to his wife, the pianist Clara Wieck Schumann, the quintet was written during what can only be called a manic, three-year compositional jag. Check it out Robert and Clara were married in 1840. Jig city: in 1840 Schumann composed 135 songs, including the two Liederkreis cycles, and the cycles Frauenliebe und leben and Dichterliebe! The jag, continued: in 1841 he turned to orchestral composition and produced, among other works, his Symphony No. 1 in B-flat Major; the Fantasia in A Minor for piano and orchestra (which later became the first movement of his piano concerto); the Overture, Scherzo and Finale in E Major; and he began his Oratorio entitled Das Paradies und die Peri. Then 1842 rolled around and Schumann got freaky. In what is now called his “year of chamber music” he composed – in the span of nine months – the three string quartets of Op. 41; the Piano Quintet in E-flat Major; the Piano Quartet in E-flat Major; and the first of his piano trios, a […]
Continue Reading236 years ago today – on January 1, 1782 – Johann Christian Bach died in London at the age of 47. The youngest surviving son of the great Johann Sebastian Bach (who himself had died 32 years before, in 1750), J. C. Bach attained a level of fame and respect in his lifetime that was far beyond anything ever experienced by his old man. In the centuries since, the elder Bach has rightly been recognized as the singular genius that he was. But we will not denigrate the son as we elevate the father, and thus J.C. Bach must be recognized as one of the most important and influential composers of his time. The Fabulous Bach Boys You want to talk good genes, great genes, crazy-awesome genes, a geneticists dream come true? Let’s talk about the Bach family. From the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, the Bach family of Thuringia and Saxony, states in what today is central Germany, produced over eighty professional musicians, from fiddlers and organists to town musicians and court musicians to Kantors and Kapellmeisters, culminating – of course – with Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). (For our information: entries on the Bach family take up […]
Continue ReadingOn Christmas day of 1870 – 147 years ago today – Richard Wagner’s twenty minute-long instrumental tone poem Siegfried Idyll received its premiere under circumstances to be discussed below. Originally scored for a chamber orchestra of 13 players (flute, oboe, two clarinets, bassoon, two horns, trumpet, two violins, viola, cello and bass), Wagner expanded the orchestration to 35 players when the piece was published in 1878. Let us contemplate, for a moment, what must be considered the second-worst date to be born, second only to February 29 (the birthday of Gioachino Rossini and Dinah Shore but also the serial killers Aileen Wuornos and Richard Ramirez; pretty creepy company). That second-worst birthdate is today: December 25. For someone born into a family that observes Christmas, a Christmas birthday is, frankly, a rip off, as Christmas and birthday get rolled into a single celebration, the whole usually lesser than the parts. As for gifts, well, a December 25th birthday is (or so I’ve been told) is a catastrophe. (How many times have these unfortunate celebrants heard the line, “we decided to give you one big present this year”? Sure. Right.) Among the many good people born on December 25 are Clara Barton, […]
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