May 22 is a day so rich in music history that choosing a particular event to write about might seem to be a challenge. For example, May 22, 1790 saw the first performance of Mozart’s String Quartets in D, K. 575 and B-flat, K. 589 (the first two of the three so-called “Prussian Quartets”) at his flat in Vienna. May 22, 1874 saw the first performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s in-all-ways extraordinary Requiem, conducted by Verdi himself at the Church of San Marco in Milan. Four years ago today – on May 22, 2013 – the marvelous French composer Henri Dutilleux died in Paris at the age of 97. (All sentient creatures should at very least know and covet Dutilleux’s Cello Concerto, entitled Tout un monde lointain… [A whole distant world…], completed in 1970 for Mstislav Rostropovich.) But frankly, these events pale in comparison with the BIG event of May 22, and that was the birth in Leipzig on May 22, 1813 – 204 years ago today – of Richard Wagner. Wagner died at the age of 69 on February 13, 1883: 134 years ago. And yet he and his work continue to inspire a level of debate, adulation and rancor that […]
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Robert Greenberg
Historian, Composer, Pianist, Speaker, Author
Archive for The Great Courses – Page 34
On this day in 1501 – 516 years ago – the first polyphonic (multi-part) music printed using moveable type was released to the public by the Venice-based publisher Ottaviano dei Petrucci. (The publication features a dedication dated May 15, 1501, so we assume that this corresponds with its release date.) The publication was an anthology of works entitled Harmonice musices odhecaton A, meaning “One Hundred Pieces of Harmonic Music, Volume A”. (Volumes “B” and “C” would follow in 1502 and 1503, respectively). The anthology consists of 96 (not “100”, as the title claims) French songs and instrumental pieces by some of the most famous composers of the day, as well as some anonymous works as well. Those famous composers represented in the anthology – which include Josquin de Prez, Johannes Ockingham, Jacob Obrecht, Antoine Brumel and Alexander Agricole – were all originally from northern France and southern Belgium: the so-called “Franco-Flemish” composers from “oltre montani” (“the other side of the Alps”) who were so popular in Italy at the time. The publication of Harmonice musices odhecaton A was an event of earth-shaking importance, one that changed – forever – the speed of dissemination and the rate of stylistic change in […]
Continue ReadingToday we celebrate the 188th birthday of Louis Moreau Gottschalk. During his all-too-brief, 40-year lifetime, Gottschalk was considered to be the greatest pianist and composer ever born in the Western hemisphere, the “Chopin of the New World.” An American patriot, he foreswore his allegiance to his native South and embraced the Northern cause during the Civil War because of his unreserved hatred of slavery. During the Civil War he travelled and concertized tirelessly across the North and Midwest of the United States, inspiring his audiences with patriotic compositions and arrangements and giving away much of his earnings to veterans’ organizations. He was born in 1829 in what was then the most cultured and diverse city in the United States: New Orleans. Gottschalk’s heritage was diverse as well. His father was a Jewish businessman from London and his mother was Creole: a Louisiana native of French decent. He was a musical prodigy whose early compositions synthesized the incredibly different sorts of music he heard around him in New Orleans: African music, Caribbean music, Creole music, as well as the classics of the Euro-tradition. Gottschalk composed “Ragtime” fifty years before the term was invented. In some of his pieces he used the […]
Continue ReadingOn 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 […]
Continue ReadingI 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 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 ReadingThe Premiere That Almost Wasn’t: Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 Wednesday, December 19, 1962 was significant for something that didn’t happen. On the day before – Tuesday, December 18, 1962 – Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 received its premiere in Moscow with Kirill Kondrashin conducting the bass soloist Vitali Gromadsky, the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, and the basses of the Gnessin Institute and Republican State Choirs. The symphony – which set to music five poems by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (who was 29 years old at the time of the premiere) – created a sensation. Yevtushenko recalled: “At the symphony’s premiere, the audience experienced something rare: for fifty minutes, they wept and laughed and smiled and grew pensive.” The Russian-American sculptor Ernst Neizvestny remembered: “It was major! There was a sense of something incredible happening. The interesting part was that when the symphony ended, there was no applause at first, just an unusually long pause—so long that I even thought that it might be some sort of conspiracy. But then the audience burst into wild applause with shouts of ‘Bravo!’ At the time of the premiere, the 56 year-old Dmitri Shostakovich was a Soviet icon, an institution, the most famous and […]
Continue ReadingMy thirtieth course for The Great Courses/The Teaching Company, “Music as a Mirror of History”, was released on Friday, July 22. (My friend Ed Leon – the Chief Brand Officer for The Great Courses – and I have a running dispute regarding how many courses I’ve made for TGC. Ed insists the number is twenty-eight, as the first and second editions of “How to Listen to and Understand Great Music” are out-of-print, having been supplanted by the third edition. Yes, it is true that “only” twenty-eight of my courses are currently in print and available. But. I have indeed made and recorded thirty courses, and the fact that two of them are out-of-print doesn’t unmake and un-record them. So Eddie, baby, I’m sticking with my number thirty! I trust I will be forgiven this sin of numerical pride.) “Music as a Mirror of History” was a challenging course to write and, with its often emotionally charged subject matter, an even tougher course to record. We’ve put together a ten-minute excerpt from the first lecture that effectively outlines (if I don’t mind saying so myself) the goals and overall content of the course. Check out the video and then, hopefully inspired […]
Continue ReadingAs I mentioned in my post of July 1, my next The Great Courses/Teaching company course – “Music as a Mirror of History” – is scheduled for release on Friday, July 22nd. It was recorded in January and February of this year and has been in post-production since. Since it’s my gob that’s on display throughout the finished course, it is all-too-easy to overlook the role played by the incredible crew of professionals who were tasked with producing the course. Well, overlook them we cannot; it’s an absolute truism in the media and the performing arts that we are only as good as the good people whose job it is to make us look good. My thanks to everyone who was involved with the production and a special call-out to my producer, Jaimee Aigret; my editor, Cat Lyon; and my directors, Jonathan Levin and Jim Allen. Thank you, my friends, for making The Great Courses GREAT. For anyone with 17 minutes to burn, I did a Google Hangout/Facebook Live interview with my bud Ed Leon of The Great Courses on Friday, July 1, in which we discuss the new course in some detail:
Continue ReadingPhotos from the recording session from my upcoming course for The Great Courses — Music as a Mirror of History:
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