We wish a spirited and in all ways happy birthday to the composer and flutist Johann Joachim (J. J.) Quantz, who was born in Oberscheden, Hanover (in what today is central Germany) on January 30, 1697, 320 years ago today. (“You say flutist, and I say flautist …” Actually, I say “flutist” because that’s how North Americans denote someone who plays the flute. In English speaking countries outside of North America, the word “flautist” rules. “Flutist” is by far the older term; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it entered the English language in 1603 having been drawn from the French word flûtiste. It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that the hoity-toits over the pond began using the word flautist, which was drawn from the Italian flautist. And there’s your TMI moment for today!) You want to talk about breaking a father’s heart? On his deathbed, J.J. Quantz’ blacksmith father begged his 10 year-old son to follow him in the family trade. It didn’t happen, as J.J.’s extraordinary promise as a musician was already apparent. Quantz was one of those irksome people who could play (and play well) any instrument he picked up, among them the violin, trumpet, and harpsichord. […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for Music History Monday – Page 37
On 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 ReadingTomorrow, 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 ReadingIn the world of concert music, January 9th was a quiet day. The most noteworthy event to fall on this date was the birth – in 1839 and in Portland, Maine – of the American composer and pedant John Knowles Paine. In 1874, at the age of 35, Paine became not just the first Professor of Music at Harvard University, but the first academic professor of music at any American university. It was a position he held until 1905; he died in 1906 at the age of 67. Let us give Professor Paine his due up front: he was, in his maturity, an extremely skilled compositional craftsperson. Having trained in Berlin, he came home to the United States and spent his career composing concert works that are stylistically indistinguishable from his German models (except for the fact that they are not – artistically – as good as his German models; too bad). In this imitation-of-musical-things-German Paine was the poster-child for pretty much every mid-to-late nineteenth century American composer (excepting the young Charles Ives), all of who spent their compositional careers trying (unsuccessfully) to “be like Brahms”. (In reference to Paine’s music, this “be-like-Brahms” thing is ironic, because despite the fact […]
Continue ReadingA happy 180th birthday to Mily Balakirev, the man who became – virtually – the Tsar of nineteenth century Russian music. More than anyone else, it was Mily Balakirev who postulated and promulgated precisely what Russian nationalist music should be. Balakirev was born in the city of Nizhny Novgorod – which was known as “Gorky” from 1932 to 1990 – about 240 miles east of Moscow. He was a child prodigy as both a pianist and conductor and began composing at the age of 15. Among his early compositions was a virtuosic piano fantasy based on themes from Mikhail Glinka’s groundbreaking opera, A Life for the Tsar. Thanks to his two operas: A Life for the Tsar (known during the Soviet era as “Ivan Susanin”) of 1836 and Ruslan and Lyudmila, of 1842, Glinka was embraced (and continues to be embraced) as the “Messiah of Russian music”, that single composer credited with having lead Russian concert music out of the wilderness of Western European domination to a place of paradisiacal narodnost’, of Russian musical authenticity. In 1855, at the age of 18, Balakirev moved to St. Petersburg, where he met and played piano for his hero, Mikhail Glinka. Glinka – […]
Continue ReadingLast week’s “Music History Monday” was about the premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 on December 18, 1962 and the official Soviet silence that greeted that premiere on December 19, 1962. We’re going to stay with Shostakovich this week because on January 21, 2017 the Alexander String Quartet and I are going to begin a two-season, nine-concert perusal of the string quartets and chamber music of Dmitri Shostakovich in San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre. Along with Shostakovich’s 15 string quartets, we will examine and perform as well Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op. 57 (1940), Piano Trio in E Minor, Op. 67 (1944), and his Viola Sonata Op. 147 (1975). The lessons to be learned from Shostakovich’s life, his times, and his music are as real and relevant today as they were when Shostakovich was alive. Russian repression and adventurism are alive and well today in the kleptocracy of Tsar Vladimir the First as they were under the Soviets. “Mistakes that were made” are once again being made, and Shostakovich’s life and music offer a degree of insight into these current events that few other things can. Art and politics can be problematic bedfellows, but they are an indivisible […]
Continue ReadingThe Premiere That Almost Wasn’t: Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 Wednesday, December 19, 1962 was significant for something that didn’t happen. On the day before – Tuesday, December 18, 1962 – Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 received its premiere in Moscow with Kirill Kondrashin conducting the bass soloist Vitali Gromadsky, the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, and the basses of the Gnessin Institute and Republican State Choirs. The symphony – which set to music five poems by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (who was 29 years old at the time of the premiere) – created a sensation. Yevtushenko recalled: “At the symphony’s premiere, the audience experienced something rare: for fifty minutes, they wept and laughed and smiled and grew pensive.” The Russian-American sculptor Ernst Neizvestny remembered: “It was major! There was a sense of something incredible happening. The interesting part was that when the symphony ended, there was no applause at first, just an unusually long pause—so long that I even thought that it might be some sort of conspiracy. But then the audience burst into wild applause with shouts of ‘Bravo!’ At the time of the premiere, the 56 year-old Dmitri Shostakovich was a Soviet icon, an institution, the most famous and […]
Continue ReadingOn Wednesday December 12, 1792, 224 years ago today, the nearly 22 year-old Ludwig van Beethoven jotted down an expenditure he had made that day: “Haidn [sic] 8 groschen.” Beethoven had just taken and paid for his first lesson with Joseph Haydn. The 8 groschen came to about 24 cents(!), typical of the token sums Haydn charged his non-aristocratic students. Haydn had met Beethoven and examined (and heard) his music some five months before – in July of 1792 – when he passed through Bonn on his way back to Vienna after a triumphant 18 months residency in London. Haydn was knocked out by what he saw and heard and arrangements were quickly made for Beethoven to travel to Vienna in order to study with Haydn at the city of Bonn’s expense. On November 2 or 3, 1792, Beethoven left Bonn for Vienna. The plan: Beethoven would study with Haydn for a year or two; get some high-end Viennese caché and then return to Bonn, there to serve – as did his father and grandfather – as a musical functionary of the Electoral Court. (In fact, Beethoven would never set foot in Bonn again.) Beethoven arrived in Vienna on or […]
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 ReadingOn November 28, 1632 – 284 years ago today – Giovanni Battista Lulli was born to a working class family in a working class neighborhood in Florence. As “Jean-Baptiste Lully”, his rags-to-riches life would see him climb to the very pinnacle Euro-music, becoming the first important composer of French-language opera, the all-powerful director of the Paris Opera, and confident to King Louis XIV of France, the great “Sun King” himself. Yet for all his fame and power, Lully would be almost entirely unknown today except for the way he died. Here’s what happened. Giovanni Battista was a very talented kid: early on he learned to play the guitar, the violin, to compose and to dance; he was said to excel at pretty much everything. At the age of fourteen he caught the first of his lucky breaks. It was Mardi Gras in Florence; he was dressed as Harlequin and was clowning around with his violin on the street, amusing bystanders and picking up a few coins. He was noticed by a Frenchman named Roger de Lorraine, Chevalier de Guise who, as you might expect from all his names, was a very important person. The Chevalier de Guise was on his […]
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