I am writing this post from my hotel room in what is presently (but sadly, not for long) warm and sunny Vienna. As I mentioned last week, I will be here for eight days acting as “color commentator” for a musical tour of the city sponsored by Wondrium (a.k.a. The Teaching Company/The Great Courses). I also indicated, one, that I would keep you up-to-date on the trip with near-daily posts, and two, that Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes will be rather truncated while I am here. We mark the birth on April 15, 1894 – 130 years ago today – of the American contralto and blues singers Bessie Smith. Appropriately nicknamed “The Empress,” Bessie Smith remains one of the most significant and influential musicians ever born in the United States. Well, it just so happens that we celebrated Maestra Smith birthday in my Music History Monday post of April 15, 2019, and I will thus be excused for directing your attention to that post through the button below:
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
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Today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post takes a different tack than usual. Rather than prescribing/recommending a particular CD (or DVD, or book), today’s post will feature a series of links to various video performances of Arturo Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony, interviews with people who knew him, and audio recordings of a very few of his legendary temper tantrums! Instant Fame The story of Toscanini’s rise to almost instant fame is the stuff of legend. At the age of eighteen, he was living at home and contributing to his family’s finances by working as a freelance cellist. He looked younger than his years, so he grew a mustache in an attempt to look older. During the 1885-’86 opera season, Toscanini played cello at the Teatro Regio in Parma (where, for our information, he had begun performing as a cellist cello at the tender age of thirteen). Over his time in the pit, Toscanini had memorized all of his parts, which allowed him to watch the action on stage without ever having to look at the music on his stand. He later remembered: “I never had to turn a page.” Toscanini’s prodigious memory annoyed the conductor of the Teatro Regio – Nicola […]
Continue ReadingA Lurid, Depraved Tale! Put in contemporary terms, the plot of Rigoletto is, frankly, revolting: a sixteenth century version of the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell story. The opera tells the tale of a rich, slimy, powerful, utterly amoral man (the Duke of Mantua/Epstein) who, among his many carnal sins, rapes and traffics in teenaged girls, abetted by his court jester, Rigoletto (Maxwell). Rigoletto himself only begins to regret the duke’s penchant for youngsters when he discovers that his own teenaged daughter, Gilda, is on the duke’s “defile bucket list.” She is indeed abducted and delivered to the duke’s bed, where he has his way with her, and where – like a hostage suffering from Stockholm Syndrome – she “falls” for her captor, the duke! Beside himself with grief and rage, Rigoletto hires a hit man named Sparafucile to whack the duke, but Rigoletto has been cursed, and instead, it is Gilda whose adolescent bosom receives the business end of Sparafucile’s stiletto! Game Plan Here is the game plan for this double-length post. We will occupy ourselves with the two, opening episodes of the opera. The first of these episodes is the “prelude,” (or overture), the music of which anticipates the maledizione […]
Continue ReadingYear of the Song As I’ve mentioned in previous Dr. Bob Prescribes posts, I’ve unilaterally designated this campaign and election year “The Year of the Song,” so desperate am I for the distraction and solace only the best popular American songs can provide. We began with Barbara Cook’s wonderful Disney Album on February 6, and my intention is to do at least one such popular American song-oriented Dr. Bob Prescribes post every month until January 2025. Today’s post is as much about introducing you to two very special performers as it is hawking their first album, After the Ball, of 1974. They are the mezzo-soprano Joan Morris (born 1943), and her husband, the composer and pianist William Bolcom (born 1938). I will be prescribing no small number of their albums over the course of this year, so I figure we should get to know them a bit before all of these prescriptions commence. Smarter Than the Average Boor I have, if you’ll pardon me, always been a bit smarter than the average boor. For example. It was in either late 1978 or early 1979. I remember the date because I had just come to California for graduate school, and was […]
Continue ReadingReruns I don’t know about you, but personally, I have mixed feelings about reruns. On one hand, I will never tire of seeing of watching the original Star Trek, which ran for 79 episodes spread over three seasons, from 1966 to 1969. I have seen every one of those 79 episodes so many times that I can – no exaggeration – speak the dialogue along with the actors. Why my infatuation with this show, and why am I willing to revisit – over and over again – these manyepisodes? Perhaps it’s because I associate the show with my childhood and the “race to the moon” that so galvanized us all in the 1960s; perhaps it’s because the show was then so fabulously camp and today so magnificently retro; whatever: it was a vision of the future with actors and stories of which I never seemed to tire. And yet, on the other hand, I often dislike and avoid reruns. I’m not talking about the life-preserving flight from reruns of such bottom-dwelling shows as The Beverly Hillbillies; Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and Gilligan’s Island, but rather, reruns of stuff I loved the first time around. For example, Garry Trudeau’s editorial comic […]
Continue ReadingHaydn’s six string quartets published in 1799 as Opus 76 are his supreme works of chamber music, works that show him at the very peak of his craft and imagination. The quartets were composed between 1796-1797, soon after Haydn’s return from his second residency in London. Haydn dedicated the set to his patron, the Hungarian nobleman Count Joseph Georg von Erdődy (1754-1824). The famed English music historian Dr. Charles Burney (1726-1814) first heard Haydn’s Opus 76 string quartets in 1799, and he could not contain himself when he wrote that: “They are full of invention, fire, good taste, and new effects, and seem the production, not of a sublime genius who has written so much and so well recently, but one of the highly cultivated talents, who has expended none of his fire before.” (“Expended none of his fire before”? Okay; whatever.) Haydn’s Op. 76 string quartets are, indeed, brilliant; works that were – as we will soon observe – powerfully inspired by the late quartets of Haydn’s beloved and recently departed friend, Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791). Mozart’s own string quartets aside, it is Joseph Haydn who, through the example of his 68 string quartets, is rightly credited with establishing the […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post marked the premiere of Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor. Nearly five years in the writing, the concerto received its premiere on January 22, 1859, in the German city of Hanover. Brahms himself was the soloist, supported by the Hanover Court Orchestra and conducted by Brahms’ great friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim. As we observed in yesterday’s post, Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 is bound up entirely with his reaction to his friend and mentor Robert Schumann’s suicide attempt; his feelings towards Robert and his wife, the pianist Clara Wieck Schumann; the years he spent with Clara and her children as both a surrogate husband and father during Robert’s institutionalization; Robert’s death; and Brahms’ decision that he could not marry Clara after Robert’s death. No wonder Brahms was consumed by the piece: it was a virtual diary of his feelings, experiences, and musical growth from the time he met the Schumanns in 1853 to the time he left Clara and returned to his hometown of Hamburg in 1856. As such, the concerto took on a terribly outsized degree of importance to Brahms. The consequences of this emotional investment in the concerto were, […]
Continue ReadingWe cannot (and will not!) talk about Sebastian Bach’s landmark Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin without first considering what is, to my mind, one of the most perfect examples of human ingenuity this side of cave painting, and that is the violin. The Violin The violin is a miracle of ingenuity and nature, of art and science. Here are some particulars. The instrument we call the “violin” appeared around the year 1530 and continued to evolve until it reached its (more-or-less) definitive size and shape – in the late 1600s and early 1700s – in the hands the great violin gurus of Cremona, Italy: Nicolo Amati (1596-1684), Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737), and Giuseppe Bartolomeo Guarneri (1698-1744). Depending upon whom you talk to, the violin consists of up to 83 parts. (That’s because different ways of counting will yield up a different number of parts; for example, the back of a violin can be made up of one or two pieces of wood.) Whatever. No matter how you count the individual pieces, the violin ultimately consists of three essential components: the resonating body (the sound box), typically 355 millimeters (or 14”) in length; the neck with the fingerboard; and […]
Continue ReadingUnplayable? Yesterday’s Music History Monday post observed how two beloved concert staples by our great and good friend Pyotr (Peter) Ilych Tchaikovsky – his Piano Concerto No. 1 (of 1874) and his Violin Concerto in D major (of 1878) – were deemed unplayable by their initial dedicatees. Those “dedicatees” were, respectively, the pianist Nicolai Rubinstein and the violinist Leopold Auer. Their poor attitudes lost them the dedications, which were ultimately given to the players who sucked it up, learned to play the concertos, and gave them their premieres (that would be, respectively, the pianist Hans von Bülow, and the violinist Adolf Brodsky). At the conclusion of yesterday’s Music History Monday post, I provided a short-list of composers who wrote music that was initially deemed to be “unplayable.” That list included Niccolò Paganini, Franz Liszt, Mily Balakirev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Samuel Barber, and György Ligeti. To that august list of names we could add tens – if not hundreds – of other composers, composers whose music was, at first, thought unplayable by the musicians initially tasked to perform it. For now, please permit me to add just two more composers’ names to that list, Adolf von Henselt and yours truly, Robert M. […]
Continue ReadingAs discussed in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, Richard Strauss’ orchestral tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra (in German, Also sprach Zarathustra, composed in 1896) is based on the “philosophical poem” of the same title by the German philologist (a type of linguist who studies the history of languages through their literature) and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). As we observed yesterday, the historical Zarathustra – also known as “Zoroaster” – was a Persian prophet who is believed to have been born in 628 B.C.E. As is the case with so many ancient philosophers, it is impossible to distinguish the teachings of the actual “Zarathustra” from those of the many “Zoroastrian” sects that sprang up in the centuries after his death. As best as we can tell, Zarathustra himself preached monotheism in what was an otherwise overwhelmingly polytheistic spiritual environment. In his so-called “philosophical poem,” written between 1883 and 1885, Nietzsche uses the historical Zarathustra as a mouthpiece to spout his own ideas about the purpose of human life and the fate of humankind. Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra consists of eighty fairly brief discourses (or “sermons”), in which his stooge Zarathustra holds forth on a wide variety of subjects: from virtue, criminality, […]
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