Robert Greenberg

Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author

Archive for San Francisco Performances – Page 34

Music History Mondays: Porgy and Bess

81 years ago today – on October 10, 1935 – George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess opened at the Alvin Theater in New York City. With a libretto by Dubose Heywood (whose play Porgy was the basis of the libretto) and Gershwin’s older brother Ira, Porgy and Bess ran a frankly unimpressive (by contemporary Broadway standards) 124 performances before it closed. Porgy and Bess was applauded for the beauty of its numbers but roundly criticized for being neither fish nor fowl. The critic Samuel Chotzinoff – ordinarily friendly to Gershwin – wrote: “As entertainment it is a hybrid, fluctuating constantly between music drama, musical comedy, and operetta.” Given the version of Porgy and Bess that he heard, Chotzinoff’s criticism is entirely justified. And therein lies a tale. George Gershwin’s amazing success as a composer of Broadway musicals and jazz-influenced concert works lit a fuse deep inside him: a desire to compose a full-length, no-holds-barred, knock-‘em-out-of-their seats American opera. His life-long affinity with the music of the African-American community – drumming, ragtime, jazz, and the spiritual – drew him like a bear to honey to a play called Porgy by Dubose Heywood. Heywood’s Porgy was produced on Broadway in 1927 and depicts […]

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Music History Mondays: Porgy and Bess

81 years ago today – on October 10, 1935 – George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess opened at the Alvin Theater in New York City. With a libretto by Dubose Heywood (whose play Porgy was the basis of the libretto) and Gershwin’s older brother Ira, Porgy and Bess ran a frankly unimpressive (by contemporary Broadway standards) 124 performances before it closed. Porgy and Bess was applauded for the beauty of its numbers but roundly criticized for being neither fish nor fowl. The critic Samuel Chotzinoff – ordinarily friendly to Gershwin – wrote: “As entertainment it is a hybrid, fluctuating constantly between music drama, musical comedy, and operetta.” Given the version of Porgy and Bess that he heard, Chotzinoff’s criticism is entirely justified. And therein lies a tale. George Gershwin’s amazing success as a composer of Broadway musicals and jazz-influenced concert works lit a fuse deep inside him: a desire to compose a full-length, no-holds-barred, knock-‘em-out-of-their seats American opera. His life-long affinity with the music of the African-American community – drumming, ragtime, jazz, and the spiritual – drew him like a bear to honey to a play called Porgy by Dubose Heywood. Heywood’s Porgy was produced on Broadway in 1927 and depicts […]

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Music History Monday: A Marriage Not Made in Heaven

On this date in 1833 the 29 year-old French composer Hector Berlioz married the 33 year-old Anglo-Irish actress Harriet Smithson. They tied the knot at the British embassy in Paris; the wedding was officially witnessed by Berlioz’ good bud, the pianist and composer Franz Liszt. Berlioz had moved to Paris from his hometown in the French Alps in 1822, presumably to study medicine. His passport described the 18 year-old Berlioz as being: “About five foot three or five foot four in height, red hair, red eyebrows, beginning to grow a beard, forehead ordinary, eyes gray, complexion high.” What that passport description does not mention is that Berlioz burned with passion for pretty much everything except medicine, in particular music, theater, and literature. Predictably, he washed out of medical school within a matter of months. Unwilling to return home, he bounced around Paris living in poverty, and—when he had a little money in his pocket—he attended the opera standing room and took a few music lessons. After a rather difficult application process (it was rumored that Berlioz’ father had to bribe the admissions officer), the now 23 year-old Hector Berlioz entered the Paris Conservatory, a full five years older that most […]

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Music History Monday: Béla Bartók – An Appreciation

Seventy-one years ago today – on September 26, 1945 – the composer, pianist, ethnomusicologist and Hungarian patriot Béla Viktor Janos Bartók died at the age of 64 in self-imposed exile in New York City. Sixteen years later, in 1961, the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, the enfant terrible of post-World War Two musical modernism, wrote this about Bartók’s music: “The pieces most applauded are the least good; his best products are loved in their weaker aspects. His work triumphs now through its ambiguity. Ambiguity that will surely bring him insults during future evaluation. His language lacks interior coherence. His name will live on in the limited ensemble of his chamber music.” Boulez was not just wrong: he was snotty wrong. And in this he was not alone. Most of the post-War compositional modernists – which includes most of my own teachers – rejected Bartók because they believed he had squandered his potential as a compositional radical by employing elements of folk-music, neo-tonality, dance rhythms, and Classical era forms to create a body of music that was on occasion – God forbid – viscerally exciting and, even worse, accessible; music that employed such antediluvian elements as tunes and melodic sequences and […]

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Music History Monday: A Blast Of Energy

For nine wonderful years – from 1992-2001 – I was on the faculty of something called the “Andersen Executive Program”, or “AEP”. Three or four times a summer, various partners from the accounting, auditing, and consulting firm of Arthur Andersen gathered in some extraordinary place for a week to talk about the current issues facing their clients. The teaching faculty – as you’ve surmised, since I was on it – was incredibly diverse. For three years in the late 1990s the AEP held sessions at a resort hotel called the Huis ter Duin (“House of the Dunes”) on the North Sea in the Dutch town of Noordwijk, 27 miles southwest of Amsterdam. It was at one of those sessions that I had lunch with a fellow faculty member: an Englishman about my age who was a professional “futurist”. He struck me as equal parts high-tech dude, palm reader, and huckster, all of which seemed necessary tool-box skills for someone who made a living predicting future trends and technologies. When the futurist discovered I was a musician he wanted to talk about one of his pet ideas: how consumers will listen to music in the future. He had it all figured […]

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Music History Monday: A Very Long Engagement!

176 years ago today – on September 12, 1840 – one of the most tortuous, profanity-inducing, potentially violent, legally drawn out courtships ended when the composer Robert Schumann and the pianist Clara Wieck were married in Schönefeld, just northeast of Leipzig. The person to blame for all the tsuris was Friedrich Wieck, Clara’s father. He was a piano teacher who had molded his daughter Clara into one of Europe’s greatest pianists by the time she was a teenager. Clara was Friedrich’s reason-to-be, his creation, a walking advertisement for effectiveness of his “piano method” as well as his Individual Retirement Account. So when that lump Robert Schumann – who had once also been a student of Wieck’s – started sniffing around his Clara when she was just 16 years old (and Schumann was 25), well, it was time to nip things in the bud. There was no way on this good earth that that lame-fingered loser Robert Schumann was going to steal Wieck’s cash cow. Nip things. In the bud. Yes. But in this Friedrich Wieck was singularly unsuccessful, though it wasn’t for lack of trying. For five years after Robert and Clara had pledged themselves to each other he did […]

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Music History Monday Blogs for San Francisco Performances

In my capacity as Music-Historian-in-Residence for San Francisco Performances (SFP), I will be writing a weekly blog called “Music History Monday” for the SFP Facebook page. Being a firm believer in doing double-duty, I will be posting these blogs on my page as well, though I would encourage to visit (and follow!) the SFP Facebook page as well. Welcome to what will become a weekly feature on both my own and the San Francisco Performances Facebook pages, “Music History Monday.” (As titles go that’s about as thrilling as root canal, but it is an accurate description of the feature’s content so run with it we will.) Every Monday I will dredge up some timely, perhaps intriguing and even, if we are lucky, salacious chunk of musical information relevant to that date, or to San Francisco Performances’ concert schedule, or to … whatever. If on (rare) occasion these features appear a tad irreverent, well, that’s okay: we would do well to remember that cultural icons do not create and make music but rather, people do, and people can do and say the darndest things. September 5 is a particularly rich musical birth date. Among others born on September 5 were Johann […]

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Explorations in Music, KALW, The Alexander String Quartet & Relationships

The old line goes that being a member of a professional string quartet is like being married to three people, except there’s no sex and nobody cooks. The lack of food and sex notwithstanding, professional quartet membership IS a marriage. The members of a quartet live for and with each other; they depend on each other; they spend countless hours with each other through sickness and in health and along the way survive the ups and downs inherent in any long-term relationship. They rehearse together and, in doing so, they constantly compromise in order to create a musical whole greater than the sum of their individual parts; they travel together (when a string quartet travels, it must book FIVE airline seats: one for each of the players and one for the ‘cello); nightly, they experience together the stress and trial and potential disaster (and occasional glory) of public concertizing. If the musical and personal chemistry between its four members are not right, a string quartet – no matter how good the players are, individually – cannot succeed or survive. The magnificent Alexander String Quartet was founded in New York in 1981. After 33 years, the ASQ is still going strong, […]

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