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 […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for Music History Monday – Page 36
Since virtually nothing of note in the concert music world took place on April 3rd (aside from the appearance – today – of this post), we turn to April 4th for the subject of today’s post, which marks the birth (in 1922) of one of my all-time favorite composers, Elmer Bernstein. Elmer WHO? Oh, you might not know his name, but you almost certainly know at least some his music. Permit me a brief rumination on guilty pleasures. It seems to me that there are certain things in life that we do for no other reason than the unqualified pleasure they provide. For example, I consume peanut butter, very dry Bombay Sapphire martinis, and The Game of Thrones not because they are good for me but because I must. I feel the same way about good film scores. I myself have never written any movie music and my own compositions have, stylistically, almost nothing in common with that of most film composers. (Although, I would point out that a number of high-end concert composers have indeed turned out some superb film scores, including Aaron Copland’s The Red Pony; Leonard Bernstein’s On the Waterfront, and John Corigliano’s Altered States and The […]
Continue ReadingOn this day in 1808, Joseph Haydn made his last public appearance at a performance of his oratorio The Creation given in honor of his upcoming 76th birthday. The performance – which took place at Vienna’s University Hall – was what we would call today a “star-studded event”: everyone who was anyone in Vienna’s musical world was there, including Beethoven, Salieri, and Hummel. Haydn was born on March 31, 1732 in the Austrian village of Rohrau, which at the time just a hop-and-a-skip from the border with Hungary. He was a small, wiry, energetic and genial boy, and he grew up to be a short, wiry, energetic and genial man. At a time when the average European life expectancy was just 33.3 years, Haydn remained a remarkably healthy man well into what was then considered to be old age. Having never travelled outside the immediate vicinity of his birth, Haydn undertook the arduous journey to England in 1791 at the age of 59, and then again in 1794, at the age of 62. Still composing masterworks into his 69th year (he complete his oratorio The Seasons in 1801), Haydn was considered an ageless wonder by everyone around him. Sadly, no […]
Continue ReadingMarch 20 was a quiet – a very quiet! – day in music history. Thus, as I have done on other “quiet” Mondays, I’m using today’s post to tell a story and to editorialize a bit. In 2016, I got involved with an operation called “One Day University”, founded by a visionary named Steven Schragis in 2006. A “one day university” typically (but not always) consists of four high-end professors each presenting a 75-minute program across the span of a single day. These one-day sessions are held in theaters and hotels in over 45 different locations across the United States. Thus far, I have participated in One Day Universities in Portland (Oregon), Sacramento, Austin, Phoenix, Fresno, and San Francisco; I will appear in New York City on March 25 (I’ll provide info about that session at the conclusion of this post). I would share with you a One Day University experience I had back on November 12. I was speaking at a One Day University program in Sacramento, California. I was last on the program. I had been immediately preceded by an Ivy League historian whose work – which is superb – I know well. He was very good at […]
Continue Reading156 years ago today – on March 13, 1861 – Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser was first performed in Paris at the Théâtre Imperial de l’Opéra. The Paris production of Tannhäuser remains one of the greatest operatic flops of all time: a scheduled ten-performance run that was reduced to three disastrous performances before the opera was withdrawn. Aside from its fabulous gossip value, it’s a story that must be told because it is this Paris version of Tannhäuser that continues to be the version performed today. Richard Wagner had a checkered history with Paris and the Parisians. He lived there in terrible poverty between 1839 and 1842. He returned there in 1859 under very different circumstances: he was no longer an unknown and had, for the time being, some real money in his pocket. While in Paris this second time around, Wagner made friends in very high places, including Princess Pauline Metternich, the daughter-in-law of the former Austrian Chancellor Prince Clemens Wenzel von Metternich. It was thanks to the intervention of the Princess that in March of 1860 the French Emperor, Louis-Napoleon, commanded a performance of Tannhäuser at the Paris Opera. Tannhäuser was not a new work. It had been premiered […]
Continue ReadingOn March 6, 1853 – 164 years ago today – Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata received its first performance at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. The two years between March of 1851 and March of 1853 saw the premieres of three operas by Giuseppe Verdi that cemented, for all time, his reputation as the greatest Italian-born composer of operas since Claudio Monteverdi: Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata. To say that Giuseppe Verdi was the most famous and beloved living composer working in Italy at the time of the premiere of La Traviata is like saying that Babe Ruth was the most famous and beloved baseball player in 1930: a statement so obvious that it hardly bears mention. So it might come as something of a surprise that the premiere of La Traviata was one of the greatest disasters of Verdi’s long and storied career: a “fiasco” in contemporary parlance. Here’s what happened: New Webcourses Mozart In Vienna Music of the Twentieth Century La Traviata Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore received its premiere on January 19, 1853 in Rome. While in Rome, Verdi had a piano installed in his rooms, so that he could get to work composing his […]
Continue ReadingFour years ago today, the pianist, cultural icon and “Cold War Musical Envoy” Van Cliburn died at his home in Fort Worth Texas. He was 78. Van Cliburn’s celebrity was shaped not just by his talent but also by what were – and remain – earth-shaking historical events. Joseph Stalin – “the Leader and Teacher; the Friend of Children; the Great Helmsman; the Great Father of the Nation; the Great Railway Engineer” – was born in 1878. He initially rose to power in 1924; by 1927 he had crushed all opposition to become the all-powerful Soviet dictator that he remained until his death in 1953. Stalin was also a butcher, and while the numbers vary, the eminent English historian Norman Davies claims that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of some 50 million human beings – excluding wartime – between 1924 and 1953. Stalin could not have done it alone, however, and he surrounded himself with a cadre of ruthless goons and henchmen disguised as “government officials”. Among those henchmen was Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (1894-1971). Khrushchev was a short (5’3”), round, peasant-born operative who did what he was told to do, which included strapping on the leather apron and rubber […]
Continue ReadingToday we celebrate the birth – on February 20, 1749 – of the violinist, composer, and impresario Johann Peter Salomon. His name is relatively unknown today, yet without him the musical legacy of the late eighteenth century would be much the poorer. Let us contemplate, for a moment, the massive, gleaming 6.5-liter engine that powers the Lamborghini Aventado SV (superveloce, meaning “super velocity), a V-12 monster that generates 740 horsepower and 509 pound-feet of torque; the beating heart of a $500,000 sports car. Be still our hearts. Now imagine next to it a mundane case of motor oil, $36.99 at Costco. Nothing sexy there. Except for the fact that without the oil – the engine’s life-blood – that Lamborghini V12 cannot function. So it is with most things in our world. We are aware of the glitzy surfaces of things, people, and organization but rarely think twice about the life-blood that allows them to tick. A symphony orchestra or an opera company? Without the union steward and back stage crew nothing happens. A Federal District Court or even SCOTUS? Without their law clerks they couldn’t function for a day. Yes: from the guy who inflates (or doesn’t inflate) Tom Brady’s […]
Continue ReadingOn February 13, 1727 – 290 years ago today – the German-born Georg Friedrich Händel applied for British citizenship. Immigrants and immigration. Hot button topics these days, though I would strongly suggest we take the long view here. If there’s one thing both history and biology have taught us is that the richer the gene pool, the stronger, more competitive and more creative we are and the more tolerant of and adaptable to new ideas and experiences we become. Case in point. In 1712, George Friedrich Handel (his Anglicized name) left Germany and settled permanently in London. His departure was motivated by that most common reason to emigrate: economic opportunity. Though only 27 years old, Handel was already an accomplished composer of Italian-language opera. London offered him an extraordinary opportunity: it was a huge and hugely wealthy city, the population of which was only just beginning to develop a taste for Italian-language opera. Moreover, London had no resident opera composer of any note of its own. Handel correctly reasoned that by setting up shop in London and composing and producing Italian opera he could quickly become a very large musical fish in a very large pond. And that is precisely […]
Continue ReadingOn February 6, 1944 – 73 years ago today – Arnold Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto received its premiere. It was performed by the pianist Eduard Steuermann and the NBC Symphony conducted by Leopold Stokowski. In his book “Fundamentals of Musical Composition” Schoenberg advised that when working on even the simplest of compositional exercises: “the student should never fail to keep in mind a special character. A poem, a story, a play or moving picture may provide the stimulus to express definite moods.” In his Piano Concerto Schoenberg took his own advice; he described its four linked movements with this modest four-line poem: Life was so easy [When] suddenly hatred broke out; A grave situation was created, But life goes on. Schoenberg’s quatrain refers to World War Two, which was in its darkest days at the time the concerto was composed in 1942. The concerto is a powerful, lyric, concise, hauntingly beautiful piece. Yes, beautiful: a twentieth century masterwork. It is also a product of Arnold Schoenberg’s maturity, written using his own “12-Tone Method”. As such it poses certain aesthetic challenges, all easily overcome if we take the concerto for what it is: a work of Romantic era expressive content, phrase structure, […]
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