Oops! I’ve been writing these Dr. Bob Prescribes posts since August 6, 2018. I have only now realized that I have not yet featured the pianist Ray Bryant (1931-2011). OMG. It’s time to address and make good on that oversight! What made the light go off in my head regarding Ray Bryant was the act of preparing yesterday’s Music History Monday post about Elton John and Bernie Taupin. As we observed in that post, Elton John is a classically trained pianist who has used his pianistic skill to master a wide range of decidedly non-classical piano styles, including rock ‘n’ roll, blues, and gospel. One of the many songs I listened to in preparing yesterday’s post was Elton John’s and Bernie Taupin’s Take Me to the Pilot (recorded in 1970). As lyrics go, Bernie Taupin’s makes about as much sense as John Lennon’s words to I Am the Walrus. (Lennon later confessed to writing the Walrus’ nonsense lyrics when he learned that many Beatles fans were actually analyzing the band’s lyrics as serious poetry!) Anyway, Taupin’s lyrics for Take Me to the Pilot are out there, way out there. In 2005, Elton John confessed that regarding those lyrics: “in the […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
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Gioachino Rossini was born on February 29, 1792, in the Italian seaport city of Pesaro, on the Adriatic Sea. He was the only child of Giuseppe Rossini (1758-1839), a professional trumpet and horn player; and Anna Rossini (1771-1827), a seamstress and later, a professional operatic soprano (hers was, indeed, quite a career change!). In 1802, when young Gioachino was ten years old, his family moved to Lugo – near Ravenna – and that’s where he received his elementary education: in Italian, Latin, arithmetic, and music. Dude was bigly talented. In 1810, at the age of 18, he moved to Venice, where he immediately scored his first hit with his first professional opera: a one-act comedy called La cambiale di matrimonio, “The Marriage Contract.” Over the course of the next 19 years, 38 additional operas followed: comedies and dramas, many of them masterworks that have remained in the repertoire since they were first performed. And then, in 1829 at the age of 37, having completed William Tell (his 39th opera), Rossini upped and quit the opera biz. And even though he lived another 39 years, he never wrote another opera. Retirement Rossini’s retirement from the opera stage during his artistic prime […]
Continue ReadingThough he composed many other works – including six operettas – John Philip Sousa’s great and enduring fame rests on his 136 marches. His first march, Review, was published in 1873; his final march, Library of Congress, begun in 1931, was left incomplete at his death in 1932. It wasn’t completed until 2003, when the Library of Congress commissioned Stephan Bulla (born 1953, the chief arranger of the United States Marine Corps band) to complete it. Sousa’s marches are so ubiquitous and so well-known that they have taken on the character of American folk music, as if they grew from “the fruited plain” of America’s soil all by themselves. Whether or not we know them by their titles – Semper Fidelis (the official march of the United States Marines); The Washington Post; The Thunderer; The Liberty Bell; Manhattan Beach; and El Capitan – we recognize them instantly, so much part of the national fabric they have become. Rather than attempt to tell the stories behind all or even a few of the Sousa marches on the prescribed discs, I have decided to tell the story of just one of them, as representative of them all. And for that I have […]
Continue ReadingToday is Halloween. Surprise, right? As if you didn’t know. For today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes, I had considered recognizing the date by writing a post on “appropriately ghoulish concert works for your Halloween party.” I began assembling a list of the usual horrific suspects – Hector Berlioz’ Symphonie Fantastique, movements 4 and 5 (respectively entitled “March to the Scaffold” and “Dream of a Witch’s Sabbath”); Camille Saint-Saëns’ Dance Macabre; Franz Liszt’s Totentanz; the theme song from Petticoat Junction (“and there’s Uncle Joe, he’s-a movin’ kinda slow, at the Junction . . .”; damn, but that’ll send shivers up your spine!); and so forth. However, I soon realized that I was contemplating not a Dr. Bob Prescribes-type article, but rather, the sort of post for which the internet was invented: top ten (or twenty or thirty) liszts (yes, that was intentional) that present us with an array of items even as those items are trivialized by appearing on the list and by the minimal bit of explanation that accompanies them. As a public service, then, I have reviewed an all-too-large number of such “Halloween concert music” posts on the internet, and would recommend the following as the best of the bunch, […]
Continue ReadingThe crowning glory of Schoenberg’s “emancipation of dissonance” period is Pierrot Lunaire. In terms of its importance and influence on the literate music of the twentieth century, Pierrot Lunaire stands second only to Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which Stravinsky completed six months after Schoenberg (1874-1951) finished Pierrot. 1912 was, truly, a miraculous year for Western literate music. Pierrot Lunaire is a set of twenty-one songs for female voice and five instrumentalists playing piano, violin doubling on viola, cello, flute doubling on piccolo, and clarinet doubling on bass clarinet. Inspired by Pierrot Lunaire, this ensemble became so standard during the twentieth century that it is now simply referred to as a “Pierrot Ensemble.” Pierrot Lunaire was commissioned by a Viennese actress named Albertine Zehme (1857-1946), who asked Schoenberg to compose a work she could recite to a musical accompaniment. Schoenberg created a vocal part using a technique drawn from German cabaret music called Sprechstimme or “speech voice.” Sprechstimme is a sing-songy recitation technique in which the notated pitches are only momentarily touched upon, even as the rhythms, dynamics, and phrasing are performed as written. This is the first key to understanding, appreciating, and even enjoying Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire: […]
Continue ReadingCamille Saint-Saëns and the Organ Saint-Saëns was almost certainly the greatest organist of his time and among the greatest who has ever lived. From 1857 until 1877 – from the age of 22 to 42 – he held the extremely prestigious position of organist at Paris’ most chic La Madeleine (Catholic) Church: a huge, Greek temple-like ediface in the 8th arrondisement, just south of the Place de la Concorde and east of the Place Vendôme. While Saint-Saëns could play anything he looked at (his sight-reading was as perfectly polished as any performance), his greatest skill as a performer was as an improviser. At La Madeleine, he performed an extended improvisation every Sunday, an improvisation typically based on the plainchant melody featured in that day’s mass. It was one of Saint-Saëns Sunday improvisations that prompted Franz Liszt to write in a letter to his friend Olga von Meyendorff that as an organist: “Saint-Saëns is not merely in the first rank but incomparable, as [Johann] Sebastian Bach is a master of counterpoint. No orchestra is capable of creating a similar impression; it is the individual communing with music rising from earth to heaven.” (Not that we need to be reminded, but this […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the birth on October 9, 1835 – 188 years ago today – of Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, in Paris. He died in that magnificent city on Beethoven’s 151st birthday – on December 16, 1921 – at the age of 86. The Nose Physically, the adult Camille Saint-Saëns was – literally – an odd bird. The music critic Pierre Lalo has left us with this description: “He was short and strangely resembled a parrot: the same sharply curved profile; a beak-like, hooked nose; [with] lively, restless, piercing eyes. He strutted like a bird and talked rapidly, precipitously, with a curiously affected lisp.” In fact, Saint-Saens was as famous for his nose as Beethoven was for his hair. When he concertized in the United States during the 1906-1907 season, Philip Hale wrote in the Boston Symphony program book: “His eyes are almost level with his nose. His eagle-beak would have excited the admiration of Sir Charles Napier, who once exclaimed, ‘Give me a man with plenty of nose!’” Please: heaven forbid I should be accused of nasal-shaming here; we should just know about Saint-Saëns second most distinguishing feature before we move on. His principal distinguishing feature was his prodigious genius, a genius […]
Continue ReadingAs we observed in last week’s Dr. Bob Prescribes, Act I of Lohengrin is a “public” spectacle. As such, Act I is about “appearances”: that is, how the characters choose to portray themselves in public. For example, what’s-his-name – the knight in shiny armor (“Waffenschmuck” in German) – would “appear” to be a God-sent hero. But in truth, we – as an audience – don’t really know that yet. In fact, we don’t know anything about him, not his name, where he’s from, whether he’s got a Quaalude problem, nada, and really, what’s with the swan? Friedrich von Telramund would “appear” to be an honorable knight of Brabant, yet he has sworn what “appears” to be false witness against a young-ish, dizzy blonde virgin, and that’s lower than whale poop. As of yet, we know little about his wife, Ortrud, except that she’s proud and imperious and seems to have a problem with swans. Of the principal characters, the only person who we sort of “know” is the distressed damsel herself, Elsa, who is pretty much exactly what she appears to be: a lonely, helpless, day-dreaming, kind of kooky post-adolescent duchess-in-waiting who has lost her parents and her brother and […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the birth on September 25, 1932 – 91 years ago today – of the pianist Glenn Herbert Gold, in Toronto, Canada. (Yes, the surname on “Glenn Gould’s” birth certificate is “Gold.” When the young guy was seven years old his family began informally using the surname “Gould,” though Glenn himself never formally changed his name from “Gold” to “Gould.”) He died there in Toronto on October 4, 1982, at the age of fifty. Superlatives Cut Two Ways! I would observe that ordinarily, when we refer to someone as being “in a class by themselves,” it is usually understood as a compliment: that someone is “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without equal”; sans pareil”; and so forth. But in fact, superlatives such as these can cut two ways, and are consequently not necessarily complimentary in their entirety. For example. Tyrus Raymond “Ty” Cobb (1886-1961), the so-called “Georgia Peach” was – as I trust we all know – a baseball player during the Deadball Era (circa 1900-1920). He was a transcendent baseball genius (as you know, I do not use the “g-word” – genius – lightly); he was truly “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without […]
Continue ReadingBoth Music History Monday (for August 28) and Dr. Bob Prescribes (for August 29) were dedicated to Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin. That Dr. Bob Prescribes post examined three traditional video performances of the opera, and ultimately recommended a Bayreuth Festival performance recorded in 1982, featuring Peter Hofmann as The Mystery Man in Silver (Lohengrin), Karan Armstrong as Elsa; Elizabeth Connell as Ortrud; and Leif Roar as Telramund; the production conducted by Woldemar Nelsson. Back on August 29, I wrote: “The recommended Peter Hofmann/Bayreuth Festival performance of Lohengrin is, in my estimation, the best traditional staging of the opera currently available on video. But it is not my favorite performance available on video, not by a long shot.” As it turns out, that favorite video performance is an “updated” (though not absurdly so) production that was recorded in Baden-Baden in 2006, featuring the cast listed above and conducted by Kent Nagano. Here’s what I really like about this Nagano-led performance. Lohengrin is a fairytale: it’s my experience that various Knights of the Holy Grail do not typically “show up” in little boats pulled by bewitched swans in times of dire need. In fact, they do not show up at all, whether by […]
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