Robert Greenberg

Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author

Archive for Robert Greenberg

Dr. Bob Prescribes Joseph Haydn, Mass in the Time of War

Haydn’s Masses During the course of his career, Haydn composed a total of fourteen settings of the mass.  This means he set the same words to music fourteen times.  One might think that in doing so, Haydn could not possibly have avoided repeating himself, but one would be wrong to think so.  Haydn was as devout a Catholic as ever genuflected; he loved and believed to the core of his cockles the words of the mass.  As such, he lavished extraordinarily original music on each of his masses, the composition of which was – for Haydn – an act of faith. Haydn as Believer Joseph Haydn was born into a Roman Catholic family on March 31, 1732, in the Austrian village of Rohrau.  He was raised Catholic and he stayed Catholic; unlike his buddy Mozart and his cantankerous student Beethoven, Haydn’s Catholicism never “lapsed.”   Haydn’s personal friend and biographer Georg August Griesinger (1769-1845) described his faith this way: “Haydn was very religiously inclined, and was loyally devoted to the faith in which he was raised.  He was strongly convinced in all his heart that all human destiny is under God’s guiding hand, that God rewards good and evil, that […]

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Dr. Bob Prescribes The Last Waltz

The Band The group of five musicians that eventually became known as “The Band” began to gather in Toronto, Canada, in 1957.  However, it wasn’t until 1968 – after working as the backup group for the Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins and then Bob Dylan – that the band became “The Band.”  As “The Band,” the group recorded and released ten studio albums, becoming one of the most popular and influential rock ‘n’ roll ensembles of their time. Bruce Eder (born 1955), journalist, film writer, and audio/video producer whose work has appeared in the Village Voice, Newsday, Current Biography, Interview, the Oxford American, AllMusic, and AllMovie describes The Band as: “one of the most popular and influential rock groups in the world, their music embraced by critics as seriously as the music of The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.” An exaggeration?  No.  The Band were the darlings of Rolling Stone magazine, which lavished more attention on them than any other group in the magazine’s history.  On January 12, 1970, The Band appeared on the cover of Time magazine, only the second rock group – after the Beatles – to be so honored.  Both George Harrison and Eric Clapton claimed that The Band had exerted […]

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Dr. Bob Prescribes Joan Sutherland

Joan 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 […]

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Dr. Bob Prescribes Béla Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra

Yesterday’s Music History Monday post marked the 77th anniversary of Bartók’s death in New York City, and the circumstances leading to what he himself called his “comfortable exile” in the United States between January 1940 and his death in September 1945. Among the works he composed while living in New York was his Concerto for Orchestra of 1943 which is, by any and every measure, among the very greatest orchestral works composed during the twentieth century. A monumental achievement in and of itself, the fact that the Concerto for Orchestra was written by a composer suffering from leukemia makes it something of a miracle as well. The story of its composition will be told soon enough. But first, indulge me some first-person reflection. Harlotry in Music Among my most frequently-asked-questions is: “who is your (my) favorite composer?” Who indeed! My typical response – flippant but true – is that I am a musical harlot, a strumpet, a slut: I love whomever/whatever I’m listening to at the moment. I mean, really: when listening to Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion or the Goldberg Variations, how in heaven’s name would it be possible not to convinced that the sun, moon, and stars revolve […]

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Dr. Bob Prescribes: Robert M. Greenberg — Collected Yiddish Songs

As begun in yesterday’s Music History Monday post, we will continue to trace what I think of as my compositional apprenticeship up to my 30th birthday, and then on to some music! California and Graduate School I arrived in Berkeley, California on September 9, 1978, to attend graduate school in music composition at the University of California, Berkeley. I moved in with a friend and Princeton classmate, a fellow composer named Eric Moe, who had started graduate school immediately after we graduated in 1976. He found us an apartment in “north side” at 1822 Francisco Street. (For our information: Berkeley is divided into three large regions: “north side”, meaning the area north of the U.C. campus; “south side”, south of the campus; and “west Berkeley”, the large area of flatlands west of the campus going down to San Francisco Bay. There is no “east” of the campus as U.C. extends east all the way to the top of the hills.) September 10, 1978 – the day after I arrived – is a day I will always remember for the following revelatory event. I got up early and decided to walk to Morrison Hall, the music building on the Berkeley campus […]

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Music History Monday: Charity Begins at Home

On April 18th, 1954 – 68 freaking years ago today – the American composer, pianist, music historian, and bloviator-par-excellence Robert Michael Greenberg was born in Brooklyn, New York. The Teaching Company-slash-The Great Courses and My Favorite Things Since 1993, I have recorded 32 courses for The Teaching Company, rebranded as The Great Courses in 2006, and further rebranded in 2021 as “Wondrium.” (The less said about that latest rebrand, the better. To me, “Wondrium” sounds like an acne control or irritable bowel medication.) I am frequently asked “which is my favorite course.” That’s always an easy question to answer because the answer is whichever course I most recently recorded. As of today, that would be The Great Music of the 20th Century. (Sadly, it would appear that I am the only person who bears much affection for this course, as The Great Music of the 20th Century has proven to be among the least popular course I’ve recorded. A principal issue is the musical examples. The Teaching Company/The Great Courses could not afford to license the music I needed to play during the course, much of which was still under original copyright. So we hit upon the idea of providing […]

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Music History Monday: John Cage, we miss you

On August 12, 1992 – 27 years ago today – the American composer, inventor, philosopher, facilitator, agent provocateur, shaman, clown, and guru, John Cage died in New York City at the age of 79.

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Music History Monday: Boogie Fever

On June 24, 1374 – 645 years ago today – the men, women, and children of the Rhineland city of Aachen began to dash out of their houses and into the streets, where – inexplicably, compulsively and uncontrollably – they began to twist and twirl, jump and shake, writhe and twitch until they dropped from exhaustion or simply dropped dead. Real disco inferno, boogie-fever stuff. It was the first major occurrence of what would come to be known as “dancing plague” or “choreomania”, which over the next years was to spread across Europe. There had been small outbreaks before, going back to the seventh century. An outbreak in 1237 saw a group of children jump and dance all the way from Erfurt to Arnstadt in what today is central Germany, a distance of some 13 miles. It was an event that might very well have given rise to the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. But the outbreak in Aachen 645 years ago today was big: before it was over thousands upon thousands of men, women and children had taken to the streets as the “dancing plague” spread from Aachen to the cities of Cologne, Metz, Strasbourg, Hainaut, Utrecht, […]

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Music History Monday: The First Rock Star

Party hats and noisemakers at the ready, today we celebrate the birth of Ferencz (that’s Hungarian; Franz in German) Liszt. (Woohoo! Let’s make some noise!) He was born on October 22, 1811 – 207 years ago today – in the market town of Doborján in the Kingdom of Hungary. (Today the town is known as Raiding and it is located in Austria.) Here’s something we read/hear with tiresome frequency: “Like, yah, Mozart was the first ROCK STAR!” No, he wasn’t. He was an intense, brilliantly schooled composer whose music was increasingly perceived by his Viennese audience as being too long and complex. Okay; how about: “Beethoven was the first ROCK STAR!” Oh please. One more try. “Liszt was the first ROCK STAR!” That he was. (Or perhaps the second, if we choose to consider Liszt’s inspiration, the violinist Niccolò Paganini to be the first true “rock star.”) But: Paganini or no, in terms of Liszt’s looks and his fame, the tens-of-thousands of miles he travelled on tour and the thousands of concerts he gave; in terms of the utterly whacked-out degree of adulation he received, the crazed atmosphere of his concerts, and the number of ladies (and perhaps men as […]

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Music History Monday: Domenico Scarlatti

We mark the death of the composer Domenico Scarlatti 261 years ago today, on July 23, 1757 in the Spanish capital of Madrid. The year 1685 was something of an annus mirabilis – a “miraculous year” – in the history of Western music as it saw the births of three of the greatest composers ever to grace our planet. On February 23, 1685, George Frederick Handel was born in the central German city of Halle. Thirty-six days later, on March 31, Johann Sebastian Bach was born some 60 miles away, in the central German city of Eisenach. Just under seven months after that, on October 26, Domenico Scarlatti was born in the Italian city of Naples. What a year! Some would take me to task for lumping Scarlatti together with Handel and Bach. (And in truth, we must be careful about lumping anyone together with Sebastian Bach, Handel included.) But having said that, we are not going to diminish one composer’s greatness by cudgeling him with that of another, because any way we spell it, Domenico Scarlatti was, bless him, a great composer. We would further observe that musically, Scarlatti did something that neither Bach nor Handel did: neither Bach […]

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