186 years ago today – on February 26, 1832 – the not quite 22 year-old Frédéric Chopin made his highly anticipated Paris debut at the Salons de Pleyel – the tony concert hall of the Pleyel Piano Company – at 9 rue Cadet in the 9th arrondissement. (Alas; the concert hall is no longer there. At the time of this writing, the building is occupied by a café/brasserie called “Le Petit Cadet”; a small produce market called “Cours des Halles”; a bookstore called “La librerie de JB”; and a high-end grocery and sandwich shop call “Castro Maison”. My goodness if the original walls could speak what stories they could tell!) Chopin was born on March 1, 1810 in Warsaw, Poland, the child of a Polish mother and a French father. His father Nicolas had come to Poland in 1787 when he was sixteen years old, and remained there to avoid being drafted into the French Revolutionary Army. By the time Frederic was born in 1810, his father had become a teacher of French, a Captain in the Polish National Guard, and a genuine Polish patriot: something he would pass on to his son. Chopin – who was, after all, the […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for San Francisco Performances – Page 29
On this day in 1727, the nearly 42 year-old Georg Friedrich Händel was transformed into George Frederick Handel when he was became a naturalized British subject by order of the crown. Handel’s English citizenship was reflection of not just of Handel’s conviction that his future lay in London (where he’d been living since 1710) but the conviction of the British royal family that he was far too valuable an asset to “belong” to any other nation but England. Handel was the ultimate immigrant: an Ausländer who created for his adopted England a body of music – itself an amalgam of German technique and Italian lyricism – that continues to define the English self-image to this day. How it all happened is quite a story He was born in the city of Halle, in the central German state of Saxony-Anhalt, on February 23, 1685. Despite his prodigious musical gifts and his burning ambition to “be a composer”, Handel’s father insisted that his son go to law school. Dutifully but unhappily, the young dude did what he was told, and in 1702 – at the age of 17 – he began studying the law at the University of Halle. Thankfully, within a year he […]
Continue ReadingOn this day 221 years ago – February 12, 1797 – Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in C Major, Op. 76, No. 3 received its premiere. The quartet’s nickname – “Emperor” – stems from the theme of its second movement, a theme composed a few months before the string quartet. Background In 1761, the 29 year-old Joseph Haydn was hired as a musical functionary by the fabulously wealthy Esterhazy family of Hungary. 29 years later – on September 28, 1790 – Joseph Haydn’s boss and benefactor Prince Nicolas Esterhazy kicked the scepter and passed on to the great unknown. Nicholas was succeeded by his son, Prince Anton, who didn’t give a rat’s rump for music; one of Anton’s first acts as Prince was to dismiss almost all the musicians his father had hired. Haydn was granted a 1400 florin annual salary and sent on his way. Was a grief-stricken Haydn left wondering what to do? No he was not. In fact, we can well imagine the spry, energetic Haydn doing some flying chest-bumps around the castle, jumping into some splits, hitting a moonwalk and then the rug for some one-handed pushups, because he was free at last! Haydn left the Esterhazy […]
Continue ReadingOn this day 131 years ago – February 5, 1887 – Giuseppe Verdi’s 25th and penultimate opera, Otello, received its premiere at the Teatro alla Scala (“La Scala”) in Milan. The premiere was the single greatest triumph in Verdi’s sensational career. But it was a premiere – and an opera – that almost didn’t happen. Verdi was born in 1813. He was a tough, no-nonsense man who had a tough life: he lost his wife and two young children to disease during a terrible 20-month span in 1839 and 1840. He battled through his grief to compose an opera called A King for a Day that was booed of the stage. He battled through his rage over that fiasco to compose his third opera, entitled Nabucco, which was a smash hit. He never looked back. No one ever worked harder than Giuseppe Verdi. In the 14 years between 1839 and 1853, he composed nineteen operas. Verdi called these his “galley slave years” because he worked like one: 16 to 18 hours a day, always under deadline, endlessly harried by librettists, producers, singers, critics and conductors. According to Verdi, he hated the whole stinkin’ trip, and as early as 1845 – […]
Continue Reading192 years ago today – on January 29, 1826 – Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14 in D Minor, better known as Death and the Maiden, received its premiere at the home of Karl and Franz Hacker in Vienna. The quartet comes by its nickname honestly, as its second movement is a theme and variations form movement based on a song entitled Death and the Maiden, a song Schubert had composed in 1817 when he was twenty years old. The song sets a poem by Matthias Claudius, in which Death comes to claim an adolescent girl who is not prepared to go quietly. In the first stanza she sings: Pass by, alas, pass by! Go, you savage skeleton! I am still young, go, oh dear! And do not touch me. In the second stanza, Death seeks to calm her and allay her fears: Give me your hand, you fair and tender creature; I am a friend and do not come to punish you. Be of good cheer! I am not savage, Gently you will sleep in my arms. The song begins and ends with a slow, solemn, march-like passage played by the piano. At the beginning of the song, it […]
Continue Reading84 years ago today – on January 22, 1934 – Dmitri Shostakovich’s second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, received its premiere in Leningrad (St. Petersburg), and opened two days later in Moscow. Lady Macbeth was, from day one, a smash hit. It was declared a masterpiece, the best Russian opera since Musorgsky; one reviewer said that such an opera: “Could have been written only by a Soviet composer brought up in the best traditions of Soviet culture.” With the premiere of Lady Macbeth, the 28 year-old Shostakovich’s international reputation as the leading Soviet composer was locked in. By 1936, it had been performed 83 times in Leningrad and 97(!) times in Moscow; within five months of its premiere it had been broadcast five times. In the two years following it’s premiere Lady Macbeth was performed in New York, Stockholm, London, Zurich, Copenhagen, Argentina and Czechoslovakia. Inside the Soviet Union, Shostakovich became a celebrity: his artistic plans and progress, his comings and goings, were tracked by the press; his ideas on topics both musical and nonmusical were solicited, and he was elected a deputy of Leningrad’s October District. And then on January 26, 1936, the sky fell. Joseph Stalin, […]
Continue ReadingOn January 8, 1843 – 175 years ago today – Robert Schumann’s magnificent Piano Quintet in E-flat Major, Op. 44 received its public premiere in the Saxon city of Leipzig. Dedicated to his wife, the pianist Clara Wieck Schumann, the quintet was written during what can only be called a manic, three-year compositional jag. Check it out Robert and Clara were married in 1840. Jig city: in 1840 Schumann composed 135 songs, including the two Liederkreis cycles, and the cycles Frauenliebe und leben and Dichterliebe! The jag, continued: in 1841 he turned to orchestral composition and produced, among other works, his Symphony No. 1 in B-flat Major; the Fantasia in A Minor for piano and orchestra (which later became the first movement of his piano concerto); the Overture, Scherzo and Finale in E Major; and he began his Oratorio entitled Das Paradies und die Peri. Then 1842 rolled around and Schumann got freaky. In what is now called his “year of chamber music” he composed – in the span of nine months – the three string quartets of Op. 41; the Piano Quintet in E-flat Major; the Piano Quartet in E-flat Major; and the first of his piano trios, a […]
Continue ReadingOn December 18, 1962 – 55 years ago today – Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 received its premiere in Moscow. It was a premiere that almost didn’t take place, one that did indeed take place even though officially it did not really take place! Here’s what happened Joseph Stalin – the “great leader and teacher” and butcher par excellence – died in March of 1953. He was succeeded as “First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” by Nikita Khrushchev. In 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin as being “savage, half-mad and power-crazed” in his famous “secret speech”. Delivered to the 20th Party Congress in February of 1956, the speech was, in fact, anything but secret. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin initiated a period called the “Thaw”, during which domestic repression and censorship in the Soviet bloc were scaled back significantly, until Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964. The Thaw reached its climax in 1962 with the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13. Never mind that the Soviet authorities did everything they could to undermine the Symphony’s premiere, and that it was banned outright […]
Continue ReadingOn this day in 1721 – 296 years ago – Johann Sebastian Bach’s employer, the 27 year-old Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen married the 19 year-old Friederica Henrietta of Anhalt-Bernburg. It was, for Bach, the final nail in the coffin lid of what had once been his dream job: that of Kapellmeister (master-of-music) for the court of Cöthen, in the central German state of Saxony-Anhalt. It was a position he had held since 1717 and one he had fully expected to hold for the rest of his life. Alas; as the old Yiddish saying goes, “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht”: man plans and God laughs. Sebastian Bach (as he was known to his family, friends and colleagues; “Johann” was but a Bach family patronymic that went back generations) was nobody’s fool. He knew his worth, and at a time when artisans like himself were expected to keep a low profile and “know their place”, Bach was an outspoken, often cantankerous employee, something that got him into trouble with his bosses on a regular basis. The November 6, 2017 Music History Monday post describes just such an event, when Bach got himself tossed into jail for a month for attempting to quit […]
Continue Reading121 years ago today – on November 27, 1896 – Richard Strauss conducted the premiere performance of his sprawling orchestral tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Frankfurt. A momentary if gratuitous diversion… Over the course of the first half of my musical life I played a lot of gigs, both in bands and as a solo piano player. The bands ranged from fairly high end to not fairly high end. The best band I ever played with was led by the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz; the worst was a disco band the name of which will remain my little secret. My first band (a rock & roll garage band) was called “Cold Sun” and the last was a Klezmer group called “Hot Borscht”. (“Cold Sun” and “Hot Borscht”: temperature challenged tags in both cases.) As a solo player I’ve played pretty much everything, from cocktail parties, weddings, sing-a-longs, awards shows, and receptions to a long-running gig at a long defunct restaurant in Oakland, California called The Pewter House. One of the occupational hazards of playing the piano in public is the request. Among the most common requests I received in the 1970s were: “hey man, can you play ‘The Sting?’” […]
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