On Monday, May 1, 1786 – 231 years ago today – a miracle occurred in the great city of Vienna: Wolfgang Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro received its premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. 100 years later, Johannes Brahms wrote this about The Marriage of Figaro: “Every number in Figaro is for me a marvel; I simply cannot fathom how anyone could create anything so perfect. Such a thing has never been done, not even by Beethoven.” 231 years after the premiere, Brahms’ awe of Figaro mirrors our own. For many of us – myself included – it is, simply, the greatest opera ever composed. On May 7th, 1783 – three years before the premiere – Mozart wrote to his father: “The Italian opera buffa [here in Vienna] is very popular. I have looked through more than a hundred libretti but I have found hardly a single one that satisfies me. That is to say, there are so many changes that would have to be made that any poet, even if he were to undertake to make them, would find it easier to write an entirely new text. Our poet here now is a certain da Ponte. He has […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for San Francisco Performances – Page 32
I have a particular affection for the date April 18. (Yes: I know this post is about a musical event that took place on April 17; bear with me.) Back, momentarily, to April 18th and a few of the events that mark this auspicious date. On April 18th 796, King Æthelred of Northumbria (son of Æthelwald and Æthelthryth, no less!) was assassinated in the northern English town of Corbridge. The assassins were lead by two of his ealdormen (old English for “elder men”, meaning high-ranking royal officials) Ealdred and Wada. Bad dudes, both. On a more recent note, it was on the evening of April 18, 1775 that the silver smith Paul Revere rode through the Massachusetts countryside crying, “the British are coming!”. It was on April 18, 1923 that Yankee Stadium – “the house that Babe Ruth built” – opened in the Bronx. On April 18, 1942 Lieutenant Colonel James “Jimmy” Doolittle of the United States Army Air Force led the first American air strike on Japan. On April 18, 1954, Gamal Abdel Nasser seized power in Egypt. On that very same day, 9014 kilometers (5601 miles) away, in Brooklyn N.Y., I was born, which explains my particular affection […]
Continue ReadingSince virtually nothing of note in the concert music world took place on April 3rd (aside from the appearance – today – of this post), we turn to April 4th for the subject of today’s post, which marks the birth (in 1922) of one of my all-time favorite composers, Elmer Bernstein. Elmer WHO? Oh, you might not know his name, but you almost certainly know at least some his music. Permit me a brief rumination on guilty pleasures. It seems to me that there are certain things in life that we do for no other reason than the unqualified pleasure they provide. For example, I consume peanut butter, very dry Bombay Sapphire martinis, and The Game of Thrones not because they are good for me but because I must. I feel the same way about good film scores. I myself have never written any movie music and my own compositions have, stylistically, almost nothing in common with that of most film composers. (Although, I would point out that a number of high-end concert composers have indeed turned out some superb film scores, including Aaron Copland’s The Red Pony; Leonard Bernstein’s On the Waterfront, and John Corigliano’s Altered States and The […]
Continue Reading156 years ago today – on March 13, 1861 – Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser was first performed in Paris at the Théâtre Imperial de l’Opéra. The Paris production of Tannhäuser remains one of the greatest operatic flops of all time: a scheduled ten-performance run that was reduced to three disastrous performances before the opera was withdrawn. Aside from its fabulous gossip value, it’s a story that must be told because it is this Paris version of Tannhäuser that continues to be the version performed today. Richard Wagner had a checkered history with Paris and the Parisians. He lived there in terrible poverty between 1839 and 1842. He returned there in 1859 under very different circumstances: he was no longer an unknown and had, for the time being, some real money in his pocket. While in Paris this second time around, Wagner made friends in very high places, including Princess Pauline Metternich, the daughter-in-law of the former Austrian Chancellor Prince Clemens Wenzel von Metternich. It was thanks to the intervention of the Princess that in March of 1860 the French Emperor, Louis-Napoleon, commanded a performance of Tannhäuser at the Paris Opera. Tannhäuser was not a new work. It had been premiered […]
Continue ReadingToday we celebrate the birth – on February 20, 1749 – of the violinist, composer, and impresario Johann Peter Salomon. His name is relatively unknown today, yet without him the musical legacy of the late eighteenth century would be much the poorer. Let us contemplate, for a moment, the massive, gleaming 6.5-liter engine that powers the Lamborghini Aventado SV (superveloce, meaning “super velocity), a V-12 monster that generates 740 horsepower and 509 pound-feet of torque; the beating heart of a $500,000 sports car. Be still our hearts. Now imagine next to it a mundane case of motor oil, $36.99 at Costco. Nothing sexy there. Except for the fact that without the oil – the engine’s life-blood – that Lamborghini V12 cannot function. So it is with most things in our world. We are aware of the glitzy surfaces of things, people, and organization but rarely think twice about the life-blood that allows them to tick. A symphony orchestra or an opera company? Without the union steward and back stage crew nothing happens. A Federal District Court or even SCOTUS? Without their law clerks they couldn’t function for a day. Yes: from the guy who inflates (or doesn’t inflate) Tom Brady’s […]
Continue ReadingOn February 13, 1727 – 290 years ago today – the German-born Georg Friedrich Händel applied for British citizenship. Immigrants and immigration. Hot button topics these days, though I would strongly suggest we take the long view here. If there’s one thing both history and biology have taught us is that the richer the gene pool, the stronger, more competitive and more creative we are and the more tolerant of and adaptable to new ideas and experiences we become. Case in point. In 1712, George Friedrich Handel (his Anglicized name) left Germany and settled permanently in London. His departure was motivated by that most common reason to emigrate: economic opportunity. Though only 27 years old, Handel was already an accomplished composer of Italian-language opera. London offered him an extraordinary opportunity: it was a huge and hugely wealthy city, the population of which was only just beginning to develop a taste for Italian-language opera. Moreover, London had no resident opera composer of any note of its own. Handel correctly reasoned that by setting up shop in London and composing and producing Italian opera he could quickly become a very large musical fish in a very large pond. And that is precisely […]
Continue ReadingOn February 6, 1944 – 73 years ago today – Arnold Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto received its premiere. It was performed by the pianist Eduard Steuermann and the NBC Symphony conducted by Leopold Stokowski. In his book “Fundamentals of Musical Composition” Schoenberg advised that when working on even the simplest of compositional exercises: “the student should never fail to keep in mind a special character. A poem, a story, a play or moving picture may provide the stimulus to express definite moods.” In his Piano Concerto Schoenberg took his own advice; he described its four linked movements with this modest four-line poem: Life was so easy [When] suddenly hatred broke out; A grave situation was created, But life goes on. Schoenberg’s quatrain refers to World War Two, which was in its darkest days at the time the concerto was composed in 1942. The concerto is a powerful, lyric, concise, hauntingly beautiful piece. Yes, beautiful: a twentieth century masterwork. It is also a product of Arnold Schoenberg’s maturity, written using his own “12-Tone Method”. As such it poses certain aesthetic challenges, all easily overcome if we take the concerto for what it is: a work of Romantic era expressive content, phrase structure, […]
Continue ReadingWe wish a spirited and in all ways happy birthday to the composer and flutist Johann Joachim (J. J.) Quantz, who was born in Oberscheden, Hanover (in what today is central Germany) on January 30, 1697, 320 years ago today. (“You say flutist, and I say flautist …” Actually, I say “flutist” because that’s how North Americans denote someone who plays the flute. In English speaking countries outside of North America, the word “flautist” rules. “Flutist” is by far the older term; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it entered the English language in 1603 having been drawn from the French word flûtiste. It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that the hoity-toits over the pond began using the word flautist, which was drawn from the Italian flautist. And there’s your TMI moment for today!) You want to talk about breaking a father’s heart? On his deathbed, J.J. Quantz’ blacksmith father begged his 10 year-old son to follow him in the family trade. It didn’t happen, as J.J.’s extraordinary promise as a musician was already apparent. Quantz was one of those irksome people who could play (and play well) any instrument he picked up, among them the violin, trumpet, and harpsichord. […]
Continue ReadingOn January 23, 1752 – 265 years ago today – the composer, harpsichordist, pianist, organist, conductor, teacher, music publisher and editor, and piano manufacturer Muzio Filippo Vincenzo Francesco Clementi was born in Rome. Remembered best today for his six delightful Sonatinas for Piano published as Op. 36, he was, in fact a prodigious composer; his collected works (published in Bologna by Ut Orpheus) fills 60 volumes! In his own lifetime, Clementi was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the handful of greatest living pianists. Wolfgang Mozart – almost exactly four years younger than Clementi – quit his day job in Salzburg and settled in Vienna in May, 1781. He was 25 years old. Mozart knew his worth, and he knew – as well as we do, today – that in 1781 he was the greatest pianist and composer in the world. To his mind, among his first tasks in Vienna was to make sure that everyone in that fine city understood his greatness as well. By December 1781, Mozart had gone a long way towards accomplishing that task. By December of 1781, Mozart considered Vienna to be his turf, and he was not kindly disposed towards anyone busting […]
Continue ReadingIn the world of concert music, January 9th was a quiet day. The most noteworthy event to fall on this date was the birth – in 1839 and in Portland, Maine – of the American composer and pedant John Knowles Paine. In 1874, at the age of 35, Paine became not just the first Professor of Music at Harvard University, but the first academic professor of music at any American university. It was a position he held until 1905; he died in 1906 at the age of 67. Let us give Professor Paine his due up front: he was, in his maturity, an extremely skilled compositional craftsperson. Having trained in Berlin, he came home to the United States and spent his career composing concert works that are stylistically indistinguishable from his German models (except for the fact that they are not – artistically – as good as his German models; too bad). In this imitation-of-musical-things-German Paine was the poster-child for pretty much every mid-to-late nineteenth century American composer (excepting the young Charles Ives), all of who spent their compositional careers trying (unsuccessfully) to “be like Brahms”. (In reference to Paine’s music, this “be-like-Brahms” thing is ironic, because despite the fact […]
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