November 19 is a sad day for us all. On November 19, 1828 – 190 years ago today – Franz Schubert died in Vienna at his brother Ferdinand’s third floor flat at Kettenbrückengasse 6 (in Schubert’s day, the address was Firmiansgasse 694). The building looks almost exactly the same today as it did when Schubert died there; the red and white flags in front of the building today surround a tablet that reads “Schubert Gedenktafel”: “Schubert Memorial Plaque.” On the facing directly below the bust at Schubert’s original grave in Vienna’s Währing Cemetery (what is now called “Schubert Park”) is an inscription written by the Viennese dramatist Franz Grillparzer: “The art of music here interred a rich possession/But still far fairer hopes.” Ain’t that the truth. In the last sixteen years of his brief life, this composer of really unparalleled lyric gifts composed, among other works: 8 finished and “unfinished” symphonies (not 9, which is the number typically bandied about); 10 orchestral overtures; 22 piano sonatas; 6 masses; 17 operas; over 1000 works for solo piano and piano four-hands; around 145 choral works; 45 chamber works, including some drop dead string quartets, and 637 songs. But in fact, the 31 […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for The Great Courses – Page 28
On November 12, 1945 – 73 years ago today – the singer, songwriter, guitarist, pianist, producer, director, screenwriter, humanitarian, entrepreneur, inventor and environmentalist Neil Percival Young was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Upfront: I would tell you that Maestro Neil Young has been part of my life since my coming of age (which I count to 1966, when I was 12 years old). His songs, his voice, his guitar work and the bands in which he has played helped to define my teenage years and as such, my lasting musical sensibilities. His work with Buffalo Springfield (1966-1968); Crazy Horse (1968-1969); Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (1969-1970); and his acoustic work in the early seventies remains – for me – some of the best folk rock and rock ‘n’ roll ever played and recorded. (Just for the heck of it, I’d point out that Young entered and then worked in the United States illegally, and only received his Green Card in 1970, making him one of the countless “illegal aliens” who have gone on to enrich the American cultural gene-pool. Just sayin’.) (Another parenthetical observation. On October 31, 2018 – 12 days ago – Young admitted to having married the 57 […]
Continue ReadingWe mark the death of the American Composer Elliott Carter, who died six years ago today – on November 5, 2012 – one month shy of his 104th birthday. When Elliott Carter was born on December 11, 1908, Theodore Roosevelt was President; an Indian’s head was on the obverse of a United States penny; Gustav Mahler was the conductor of the New York Philharmonic; and the United States was just beginning its run as a dominant nation on the world’s stage. If the twentieth century was “America’s century”, it was “Elliott Carter’s” century as well: there’s hardly an artistic, cultural, or political event that Carter did not actively observe from the early 1920s through almost yesterday. His musical interests and compositions trace a direct line through some of the most important musical trends of the twentieth century: the experimental, expressionist music of the 1920s; the musical populism of the thirties and early forties; the modernist impulse of the fifties and beyond. Throughout his compositional career, Elliott Carter has proven himself to be a quintessentially American composer. Not in an Aaron Copland, “folkloric” sense, but more profoundly. Carter’s mature vision of America mirrors, according to his biographer David Schiff: “the energy, […]
Continue ReadingOn October 29, 1787 – 221 years ago today – Wolfgang Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni received its world premiere in the Bohemian capital of Prague. That premiere was – and remains – Mozart’s single most triumphant first performance. In 1777, the 21 year-old Mozart wrote his father: “I have only to hear an opera discussed, I have only to sit in a theater, hear the orchestra tuning their instruments – oh, I am quite beside myself at once.” The opera house in Mozart’s day was something more than it is today. It was a combination theater; Super Bowl half-time show; Rock concert; carnival mid-way; high-end fashion show; high-tech IMAX-style movie palace; theme park; and a special effects extravaganza: in sum, a total-sensory-immersion facility. In a pre-electronic age, the opera theater was the ultimate virtual reality, where things could happen and be seen and be heard that very simply could not happen, be seen or heard anywhere else. Opera lighting and stage machinery represented cutting-edge technology in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, and the production crews at major opera houses in Paris, London, Hamburg, Dresden, Rome, Venice, Naples, Prague, and Vienna were the Industrial Light and Magic, the Pixar of […]
Continue ReadingParty 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 […]
Continue ReadingToday we mark the death of the songwriter and bon vivant par excellence Cole Albert Porter. He was born on June 9, 1891, and died at the age of 73 on October 15, 1964: 54 years ago today. We begin with what is, I think, is a great story. In September of 1939, Igor Stravinsky travelled from his home in Paris to Cambridge Massachusetts, there to be the Norton professor at Harvard for the school year. By the time his residency ended in June of 1940, France was being overrun by the Nazis. Stravinsky and his wife Vera had a choice to make: go back to Europe and take their chances or stay in the United States where the Hollywood studios were begging Stravinsky to head west. Not a tough choice. Stravinsky instantly became a Hollywood celebrity and his music a sought-after commodity. Disney used The Rite of Spring for the dinosaur sequence in Fantasia. Barnum and Bailey’s circus commissioned Stravinsky to write a work for its dancing elephants. The producer-huckster Billy Rose commissioned a work called Scènes de ballet. After the premiere of Scènes de ballet, Rose telegraphed Stravinsky: “YOUR MUSIC GREAT SUCCESS STOP COULD BE SENSATIONAL SUCCESS IF […]
Continue ReadingOn October 8, 1897 – 121 years ago today – Emperor Franz Joseph I of the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary officially named Gustav Mahler Director of the Vienna Court Opera. For the 37 year-old Mahler, it was the culminating moment in what had been (and sadly, what would continue to be) a very difficult life. He was born on July 7, 1860 in the village of Kalischt, in central Bohemia, in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is today part of the Czech Republic. Mahler’s was a lower middle class Jewish family; they spoke German and were thus a double-minority among their predominately Catholic, Czech-speaking neighbors. Mahler grew up abnormally sensitive and morbidly imaginative; a constant witness to his father’s brutality and his mother’s helplessness. According to Henry Raynor: “All the Mahler children were incapable of facing reality and suffered from a sense of inevitable tragedy.” Young Gustav’s sense of morbid tragedy was also a function of the disastrous mortality rate of his siblings. Of the fourteen Mahler children, seven died in infancy and only four (including Gustav) lived into full adulthood. Mahler’s musical talent was prodigious. He attended the Vienna Conservatory from 1876 to […]
Continue ReadingToday we mark a technological event that came and went with hardly a murmur. It was 87 years ago today – on September 17, 1931 – that the RCA Victor Company demonstrated the first long-playing (or “LP”) record to rotate at 33-1/3 rpm (or “rounds per minute”). The demonstration took place at the Savoy Plaza Hotel in New York City. (Because we need to know: the 33-story Savoy Plaza was located at 767 Fifth Avenue. It overlooked Central park at Fifth Avenue and East 59th Street. Built at a cost of 30 million dollars, it opened in 1927 and met the wrecking ball in 1965.) The tony location of the demonstration aside, listeners were generally unimpressed. The first 33-1/3 rpm records offered no significant sonic improvement over the 78 rpm records that were standard at the time, and despite the fact that more music could be packed onto a disc spinning at 33-1/3 rpm, the new technology eventually fizzled. It wasn’t until 1948, when Columbia/CBS introduced a vastly improved 33-1/3 rpm LP that the new technology took off. (For our information: Columbia/CBS unveiled their new record technology at New York’s Waldorf Astoria on June 18, 1948. Take THAT, Savoy Plaza!) […]
Continue ReadingToday we recognize the birth and the death of two musical masters from entirely different times and places who nevertheless, by the most extraordinary of coincidences, share the same nickname: the jazz tenor saxophonist Lester “Prez” Young and the Franco-Flemish composer Josquin “des Prez” Lebloitte. Lester “Prez” Young Lester Willis Young was born on August 27, 1909 – 109 years ago today – in Woodland, Mississippi. He was the consummate jazz hipster, who played “cool” long before “cool jazz” was recognized as a genre of jazz. Known in particular for his long association with Billie Holiday, Lester Young died on March 15, 1959, at the age of 49. Josquin des Prez Josquin des Prez (or “Desprez”; we will talk about the surname Lebloitte in a moment) was born circa 1450 and died on August 27, 1521: 497 years ago today. He was, simply, the greatest and most respected composer of his time. That he is not still a musical household name speaks to the fickleness of history and not to his music, which is superb. Josquin was the first composer to become a legend after his death, the first to have his music widely disseminated thanks to the newly invented […]
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