In Six, Short Years! Yesterday’s Music History monday post concluded by observing that in the six short years between 1964 and 1970, the Beatles amassed a total of 20 number one songs on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart, a number that here, 53 years later, remains a record. As a public service, here are the top 10 top ten performers with the most #1 hits: In addition to those songs that charted #1 on the Billboard Hot 100, the Beatles had an additional seven (further) number one songs on the UK Singles Record Retailer Chart, giving them a total of 27 number one songs on the combined US and UK charts. When we consider that The Beatles, as a group, were together for not quite eight years – from August 18, 1962, to May 8, 1970, when the album Let it Be was released – that’s a level of popular and artistic success that’s just a bit insane. What makes that 27 number one hits so difficult to fathom – something that separates the Beatles entirely from the competition – is that they were all originals, songs written by three members of the band: Paul McCartney, John Lennon, […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
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Yesterday’s Music History Monday post was all about auctions; specifically, auctions of Elvis Presley memorabilia. As we observed yesterday, the most expensive piece of Elvis memorabilia sold to date that isn’t a gold Rolex watch is Presley’s 1942 Martin D-18 guitar, Serial Number 80221, which was auctioned off for $1,320,000 August 1, 2020. As I suggested in yesterday’s post, given its historical importance and provenance – Elvis owned the guitar between 1954 and 1956, began his career and made his first recordings (for Sun Records) with the guitar – the $1.32 million paid for the thing was a steal, anyway you strum it. Anyway, that post about the prices paid for Elvis’ stuff got me to thinking about the prices paid for music manuscripts by the “great” composers, prices that dwarf the amount paid for Elvis’ Martin D-18 guitar. The high prices brought by such manuscripts are a function of rarity. Handwritten musical scores by household name composers are excessively rare, as the overwhelming majority of those that have survived are safely locked away in climate-controlled vaults in libraries and museums. There are a few such autograph manuscripts – or “holographs” – still in private hands, and on the exceedingly […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday was generally about nepo (as in “nepotism”) babies: “the children of celebrities who have succeeded in the same or adjacent career as their celebrity parents or other esteemed relatives. The implication is that, because their parents already had connections to an industry, the child was able to use those connections to build a career in that industry.” Specifically, yesterday’s Music History Monday marked the 77th birthday of Gary (Levitch) Lewis, the son of the comedian Jerry Lewis and a nepo baby par excellence. Gary Lewis’ mother – Patti Palmer – was a professional singer who gave her son a set of drums when he was 15. At the age of 18, he formed a band with four friends. Since his mother was underwriting the band’s equipment purchases, Lewis got top billing, and the band was called “Gary and the Playboys.” The band was taken on by the American record producer Snuff Garrett, not because they were particularly good but because Garrett saw the band as an opportunity to capitalize off of Gary’s father, the presumed “King of Comedy” himself, Jerry Lewis. In yesterday’s post, we observed that Gary Lewis was not much of a […]
Continue ReadingBefore we get to the actual date-related topic for today, I beg your indulgence, as I need to tell you a story. It’s a story that most of you know, at least in part. Again, indulge me. The Godfather III – the third film in the storied Godfather franchise, released in 1990 – was one of the most anticipated films of all time. And no wonder: the first of the Godfather movies – The Godfather, or “G1”, released in 1972 – was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and received three, including Best Picture and Best Actor (for Marlon Brando). G2, released two years later in 1974 was also nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning six of them, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor (for Robert DeNiro). So G3 – The Godfather III – had a lot riding on it. Much of the casting was easy. Al Pacino returned in the role of Michael Corleone; Diane Keaton in the role of Kaye Corleone; and Talia Shire in the role of Connie Corleone. But there were new roles to fill, none more important than Mary Corleone, the now grown-up daughter of the “godfather” himself, Michael Corleone. G3’s writer and director, […]
Continue ReadingThe subject of today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post is doubly appropriate. Yesterday’s Music History Monday dealt with Carl Orff (1895-1982), a composer who thrived under the Nazi regime only to later claim (as did so many others in the post-war period) to have been a “victim” of the Nazis. Well, today’s composer was a victim – a real victim – of the Nazi terror: the Czech composer Pavel Haas (1899-1944), who was “selected,” gassed, and cremated at the concentration/death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau on October 17, 1944. Haas was a student and disciple of Leoš Janáček, whose own life and string quartets were celebrated in last week’s Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts. “The Gathering Storm” It still boggles the mind. Seventy-eight years after the end of World War Two, it still amazes us that so very many Germans – citizens of a great and modern nation – could descend to such depths of criminal depravity and sheer wickedness as they did between 1933 and 1945. If it remains hard for us, here, today, to grasp the enormity of the Nazi evil, imagine how difficult it was to grasp for most Europeans in the early and mid-1930s. Most such […]
Continue ReadingI am well aware that today is July 4 and that, perhaps, the patriotic thing for me to do today would be to celebrate the national anthem of the United States – The Star-Spangled Banner – and, perhaps, a famous arrangement of that very anthem. Sadly, no-can-do, because it has already-been-done: just last year, in Music History Monday for July 4, 2022, and Dr. Bob Prescribes for July 5, 2022. Those posts – respectively entitled “As American as tarte aux pommes! Celebrating the Fourth with some Real American Music! or Tampering with National Property” and “Stravinsky in America” – together recount the story of The Star-Spangled Banner as well as Igor Stravinsky’s famous and most controversial arrangement of the anthem, made in 1944 and subsequently banned in Boston! I would humbly direct your attention to these two posts for appropriately “spangled” reading. As for today, we pick up where we left off in yesterday’s Music History Monday, with the Czech composer Leoš Janáček and his two superb string quartets: No. 1, subtitled “The Kreutzer Sonata” and No. 2, subtitled “Intimate Letters.” Leoš Janáček(1854-1928) Our impressions of Leoš Janáček tend to be conditioned by photographs taken of him later in life. […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post dealt with the incredulity we should all feel when faced with the astounding magnitude of Wolfgang Mozart’s talent and the beauty and quality of his music. It is appropriate, then, that today’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post should celebrate at least some of Mozart’s astonishing music, and I have chosen his two Piano Quartets and what is a brilliant and relatively new recording, one released in 2018. Superlatives The title of this album of Mozart’s two piano quartets is “Apotheosis.” The program booklet packaged with the CD defines apotheosis as: “1. Elevation to divine status 2. The perfect form or example of something” With its references to “divine status” and “perfection,” that definition indulges in superlatives: “Something of the highest quality or degree.” Statements of superlatives are dangerous because they can ride roughshod over important details, details that would otherwise force us to qualify those superlative statements. For example. The consensus “greatest baseball player” of all time is Babe Ruth (1895-1948), whose statistics as a power hitter were so far ahead of his contemporaries as to put him in a league of his own. (His stats as a pitcher – had he continued to pitch regularly […]
Continue ReadingIn my Dr. Bob Prescribes post of June 6, 2023, on Martha Argerich, I recommended an album containing two piano trios: Pyotr Tchaikovsky one-and-only piano trio of 1882, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s second piano trio, in E minor of 1944, as performed by Martha Argerich, piano; Gidon Kremer, violin; and Mischa Maisky, cello. In that post, I observed that Ms. Argerich (born 1941) has long been associated with the violinist Gidon Kremer (born 1947) and the cellist Mischa Maisky (born 1948). Their album containing live performances of Shostakovich’s Trio No. 2 and Tchaikovsky’s Trio in A minor, Op. 50 is superb. I opined that as musical compositions go, Tchaikovsky’s trio is wonderful, but Shostakovich’s is a world-class masterpiece, a bristling gut-wrenching chef-d’oeuvre. I then promised that I would write about Shostakovich’s Piano Trio in E minor as soon as possible, and here we are, two weeks later, ready to go. Who says I don’t keep my promises? Shostakovich’s trio, composed in 1944, was a product of the war years and, in many ways, a product of the war itself. As such, some necessary historical background is called for. So bear with me, as we address – by necessity – something of […]
Continue ReadingYesterday’s Music History Monday post celebrated the birth of the American pianist and composer Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea (1941-2021), in Chelsea, Massachusetts. A good bit of that post was spent discussing Corea’s stunning versatility as a pianist and composer: he could play the piano and compose for the piano in almost any conceivable style. This versatility was a function of his talent, of his training, and of his omnivorous musical appetite: when it came to music in general and jazz in particular, Corea consumed and internalized it all. The result is a body of music so varied that many commentators appear to spend more time categorizing it than actually listening to it. (I say that because if they actually listened to and thought about Corea’s music, they’d realize that for all its stylistic variety Chick Corea’s music always sounds like Chick Corea’s music, its “stylistic category” notwithstanding.) Corea addressed this issue in an interview conducted in 2010: “I’m often asked about what others consider my diversity of tastes. Actually, the simple, most truthful and direct answer is, I never think about it. I follow my interests and find that it leads me to trying to understand other cultures and […]
Continue ReadingI am doing something here in this post today that I have only done twice before in the storied history of Dr. Bob Prescribes: I am recommending a recording for the second time. The other two times I did so were a matter of expedience, as I reran two posts back in early March immediately after my heart bypass surgery. The issue today is not one of expedience but rather, of necessity. You see, Giuseppe Verdi’s String Quartet in E minor remains his least-known masterwork, and it deserves a much harder sell than it was given in what was a brief post back on March 10, 2020. Yesterday’s Music History Mondayfocused on Verdi’s Requiem and its premiere on May 22, 1874, 149 years ago yesterday. What went unmentioned in yesterday’s post is that following the premiere of his Requiem, Verdi shocked the operatic world by announcing his retirement. It was an announcement that appeared to have aggrieved pretty much everyone on the planet with the notable exception of Giuseppe Verdi himself, who believed that with the composition of Aida (1871) and his Requiem (1874) he had freaking written enough. Verdi and Retirement In 1875 Giuseppe was truly at the very […]
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