In choosing a topic for last week’s (May 8) Music History Monday post, I had a difficult choice: to either mark the birthday of the short-lived American composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) or the birthday of the even shorter-lived American blues songwriter, singer, and guitarist Robert Johnson (1911-1938). I chose to run with Gottschalk. Today, then, we are offering up a belated birthday greeting to Robert Johnson, who is among the most influential American musicians to have ever lived. Was that last bit an overstatement, “among the most influential American musicians to have ever lived”? No; it is not. But we would note that Johnson’s musical influence was primarily felt by rock ‘n’ roll musicians, living and working a full generation after his death in 1938. As we will soon discuss, we know next to nothing about Johnson himself: his life (and his death). He was an itinerant musician who performed on a small musical circuit up-and-down the Mississippi Delta, playing on street corners, saloons, Saturday night dances, and what were called juke joints. (“Juke joints” were pop-up establishment featuring music, dancing, gambling, and drinking, operated primarily by Black Americans in the deep south). Johnson’s recording career spanned […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
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“What Right Had He to Write This Thing?” A happy vernal equinox to everyone and sundry! Yes, technically the first day of spring in 2023 was yesterday, March 20. But I was taught that the first day of spring is usually March 21, and so we are honoring it today with its eponymous masterwork, Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The Rite – composed in 1912 and premiered in Paris on May 29, 1913 – was new and different, and it inspired people to say the darndest things. For example, the following poem appeared in the Boston Herald on February 9, 1924, following a performance of The Rite in that city: “Who wrote this fiendish Rite of Spring?What right had he to write this thing,Against our helpless ears to flingIts crash, clash, cling, clang, bing, bang, bing?And then to call it Rite of Spring,The season when on joyous wingThe birds’ harmonious carols singAnd harmony’s in everything?He who could write The Rite of Spring,If I be right, by right should swing!” Igor Stravinsky composed The Rite of Spring for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes when he was thirty years old. Even if he had never written another piece of music, Stravinsky would […]
Continue ReadingItalian Opera as an Industry From the moment the first public opera house – the Teatro San Cassiano – opened in Venice in 1637, opera has been a media industry in Italy. By the early nineteenth century, virtually every Italian city and many Italian towns as well had their own opera theaters; in the case of larger cities, multiple opera houses. Like movie theaters in the first half of the twentieth century – before the advent of television – opera houses in nineteenth century Italy were not just entertainment venues but secular houses of worship, where people of virtually every class gathered to experience and cheer the musical/dramatic gospel and worship the great celebrities of their day: singers and opera composers. For nineteenth century Italian opera houses and twentieth century movie theaters alike, turnover was the key. An opera (or a movie) would run for a week, by which time those who had wanted to see it had seen it. (When I was growing up in Willingboro, NJ, we had a single theater, part of the Fox chain; new movies opened every Wednesday.) What “turnover” meant for nineteenth century Italian opera was a constant demand for new operas, which […]
Continue ReadingThe New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg offers this appraisal of the music of Francis Poulenc in third edition of his book, The Lives of the Great Composers (W. W. Norton, 1997): “It seems clear that Francis Poulenc has emerged as the strongest and most individual member of Les Six [that group of six Paris-based composers arbitrarily lumped together by a Parisian journalist in 1919: Georges Auric (1899–1983), Louis Durey (1888–1979), Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Francis Poulenc (1899–1963), and Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983)]. Nobody would have guessed it in the 1930s. The betting would have been on Milhaud or Honegger. Poulenc was considered a comic (he even had the marked facial and physical resemblance to the great French comic Fernandel).” Harold Schonberg facetiously continues: “[Poulenc was] the court jester, the sophisticate. So charming and amusing! So lightweight! So chic! As a corollary, so unimportant, au fond [basically]. To the world, Poulenc was the musical soft-shoe man, dancing away at his music-hall routines with not a care in the world, a grin perpetually plastered on his face.” Learning to Compose Lacking any formal training, in his early music Poulenc (1899-1963) fell back on what he did best, and that was write beautiful […]
Continue ReadingIn 1965, the American writer James Baldwin wrote: “At a time when there seemed to be no hope at all, Paul Robeson [1898-1976] spoke out for all of us.” By “all of us,” Baldwin is, of course, referring to Black America. In 1998, the American scholar, historian, author, and social historian Lerone Bennett expanded on Baldwin’s comment, writing: “Before King dreamed, before Thurgood Marshall petitioned and Sidney Poitier emoted, before the big breakthrough in Hollywood and Washington, before the Jim Crow signs came down, and before the civil rights banners went up, before Spike Lee, before Denzel, before Sam Jackson and Jesse Jackson, there was Paul Robeson. One of the most phenomenally gifted men ever born in America, he lived one of the most extraordinary stories of the century. When he died, even his critics and detractors conceded that he was one of the immortals.” According to the American historian Dr. Clement Alexander Price, who was the Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor of History at the Newark, NJ campus of Rutgers University: “Called by some ‘The Great Forerunner’ and others the ‘Tallest Tree in Our Forest,’ Paul Robeson is without peer in the annals of modern American civilization. His […]
Continue ReadingHad I not taken a necessary holiday respite from both Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes, my January 2 and 3, 2023, posts would have featured Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman, which received its premiere on January 2, 1843, in Dresden. The story of the opera, and the DVD I was going to feature in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post of January 3 are simply too good to pass up, and so here is the Dutchman, better late than never! In August of 1837, the 24-year-old Richard Wagner accepted the job of music director at the municipal theater in Riga, the present-day capital of Latvia. For Wagner, who’d been moving around from one low-end musical job to the next for the previous three years, Riga was the bottom of the barrel, nowheresville, the end of the line: a predominately German-speaking burg that was, nevertheless, part of the Russian Empire and a gazillion miles from the centers of German culture he so longed for. But Wagner, as he always did when he had to, persevered, and putting aside his despair, he made the Riga gig work, at least at first. To great local acclaim, he conducted fifteen different operas […]
Continue ReadingAaron Copland in France, 1921-1924 Aaron Copland (1900-1990) never went to college. It was a decision that he later claimed to regret, although it’s hard to imagine how he could have gotten a better education than the one he actually received. He had begun to study music composition with the well-know and highly respected composer and teacher Rubin Goldmark (1872-1936) in the fall of 1917, during his senior year of high school in Brooklyn, New York. Copland graduated from high school in the spring of 1918 and continued his lessons with Goldmark while living at home. At the same time, he had the vibrant New York music and theater scene at his disposal and the full support of his family to pursue his musical studies (as an indication of that support, his father bought him a Steinway grand in 1919). Goldmark was an alum of the Vienna Conservatory and at the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, and he gave Copland exactly the sort of rigorous and vigorous grounding in harmony, counterpoint, and musical form that the young dude required. But even as Copland thrived under Goldmark’s regimen, he did what your people have always done and hopefully […]
Continue ReadingJoan Sutherland (1926-2010) had a preternaturally big voice, one that spanned three octaves and had the size and punching power of Sonny Listen. Yet she had the vocal “hand speed” of Sugar Ray Leonard and was consequently able to specialize in repertoire ordinarily sung by women with voices lighter, smaller, and presumably more flexible than hers. That repertoire was the so-called “bel canto”, or “beautiful song/beautiful singing” style characteristic of much late-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century Italian opera. Here is the textbook definition of “bel canto” from Nicolas Slonimsky, writing in Baker’s Dictionary of Music: “The art of lyrical and virtuosic performance as exemplified by the finest Italian singers of the 18th and 19th centuries, in contrast to the declamatory singing style brought into such prominence by Wagner. The term represents the once glorious tradition of vocal performance for beauty’s sake. The secret of bel canto was exclusively the property of Italian singing teachers. It was, above all, applied to lyric singing, particularly in opera. The operatic repertoire composed to highlight bel canto singers, notably early Romantic Italian opera, fell into disuse until after World War Two, when singers such as Callas, Sutherland, and Sills brought new life to the works […]
Continue ReadingThe backstory: in 1970, the 26-year-old Tilson-Thomas conducted Ruggles’ masterwork – Sun-Treader – in concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. (That performance was followed by Tilson-Thomas’ recording of Sun-Treader with the BSO recommended above.) At the time, Carl Ruggles was 94 years old and living in a nursing home in Bennington, Vermont (he died the following year, in 1971). We’ll let MTT tell the story from here: “Ruggles, enigmatic and granitic man – how his music and spirit have haunted me. I first heard his music at age thirteen. The piece was Men and Mountains and I remember how stunning it was. Years later I began to perform Mr. Ruggles’ music and to discover more of his remarkable testimony in each new performance. The fascination continued over the years and turned to awe and appreciation as through repeated performances I began to understand the depth of the music and power of its testimony. It was in this mood that following a performance of Sun-Treader with the Boston Symphony, I set out to meet Mr. Ruggles. Syrl Silberman of WGBH-TV in Boston had worked on a film about him and had become friendly with the old man, who even then […]
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