We mark the London premiere on August 26, 1952 – 72 years ago today – of the film “An American in Paris.” With music by George Gershwin (1898-1937), directed by Vincente Minnelli, starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, and Oscar Levant, the flick won six Academy Awards, including the Oscar for Best Picture. While the film actually opened in New York City on October 4, 1951, this London premiere offers us all the excuse we need to examine both the film and the music that inspired it, George Gershwin’s programmatic orchestral work, An American in Paris.

Here’s how we’re going to proceed.  Today’s Music History Monday post will deal specifically with Gershwin’s An American in Paris, a roughly 21-minute workfor orchestra composed in 1928.

Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will feature the 1951 film of the same name, focusing on (and excerpting) four of its musical numbers.

Statement

George Gershwin is among the handful of greatest composers ever born in the United States. His death at the age of 38 (of a brain tumor) should be considered an artistic tragedy on par with the premature deaths of Schubert (at 31), Mozart (at 35), and Chopin (at 39). 

He was born Jacob Gershovitz (though his birth certificate reads “Jacob Gershwine”), the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, on September 26, 1898.  He was born at home, in a flat at 242 Snediker Avenue in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York.  

(In 1963, a bronze plaque commemorating Gershwin’s birth was affixed to the building.  By the 1970s, the neighborhood had fallen on very hard times: the plaque was stolen – it is still MIA – and the building vandalized.  It burned down in 1987, and all that remains today of this once thriving neighborhood of immigrants is a blighted area of warehouses and junkyards.)

Rarely has a major composer begun his life in an artistically less promising manner.  Tall, athletic, and charismatic, Gershwin was the leader of his various tenement gangs, playing street ball, roller skating everywhere, and engaging in petty crime.  By his own admission, he cared nothing for music until he was ten, when George’s parents Morris and Rose bought his elder brother Ira a piano.  But it was George who attacked the thing, with an intensity and precocity that shocked everyone.  …

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Addendum: A Heartfelt Postscript

This will be my final Music History Monday podcast and post.  I have been writing Music History Monday for exactly eight years – since September 5, 2016 – during which I have created over 400 of them.  It’s been a wonderful run, and now it’s time for me to return to writing music.  From here on out, my blogging and vlogging will take on the character of a personal journal punctuated with generalized and editorial commentary, all of which will be accessible through my Patreon subscription site at Patreon.com/RobertGreenbergMusic. 

If you are not already part of my Patreon family, I would urge you to consider joining us!

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We mark the death on August 19, 1929 – 95 years ago today – of the Russian impresario, patron, art critic, and founder of the Ballets Russes Serge (or “Sergei”) Pavlovich Diaghilev, in Venice.  Born in the village of Selishchi roughly 75 miles southeast of St. Petersburg on March 31, 1872, he was 57 years old when he died.

Movers and Shakers

Serge Diaghilev was one of the great movers-and-shakers of all time.  In a letter to his stepmother written in 1895, the 23-year-old Diaghilev described himself with astonishing honesty and no small bit of prescience, given the way his life went on the develop:

“I am firstly a great charlatan, though con brio [meaning vivacious and spirited!]; secondly, a great charmer; thirdly I have any amount of cheek [meaning chutzpah; moxie; nerve!]; fourthly, I am a man with a great quantity of logic, but with very few principles; fifthly, I think I have no real gifts.  All the same, I think I have found my true vocation – being a patron of the arts.  I have all that is necessary except the money – but that will come.”  

Serge Diaghilev’s audacious and spectacular career was intertwined completely with the audacious and spectacular career of one Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971).  Without Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky would never have become STRAVINSKY: the enfant terrible of Western music in the years before World War One.  Without Diaghilev, Stravinsky would never have seen his career reborn and finances recover after the war.  Conversely, without Stravinsky, Diaghilev might have made his mark but not his legend.  Consequently, I’m going to dedicate this post to not just Monsieur Diaghilev, but to his discovery of and ongoing relationship with Igor Stravinsky!

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We mark the death on August 12, 1612 – 412 years ago today – of the composer Giovanni Gabrieli.  Born in Venice circa 1555, he grew up and spent his professional life in that glorious city, and died there as a result of complications from a kidney stone.

Gabrieli’s magnificent, soul-stirring music went a long way towards helping to define the expressive exuberance of what we now identify as Baroque era music.  The impact and influence of his music was ginormous, an impact and influence that culminated a century later in the German High Baroque music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)!

To a degree beyond any other composer before or after him, Gabrieli’s music has come to be identified with his hometown of Venice, in particular the acoustically unique Venetian performance venues for which so much of his music was composed.   

It is necessary, then, for us to spend some time in Venice, if only to get some inkling of what makes this singularly remarkable city so spiritually, artistically, and architecturally unique; and why Gabrieli’s music is uniquely Venetian.…

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Easy Times!

We’ve been having a good time, an easy time here at Music History Monday these last few weeks. Five of our last six MHM posts have featured fairly recent musical events from the “popular” side of the musical aisle.  Music History Monday for June 24 focused on Disco; on July 1, the invention and marketing of Sony’s Walkman; on July 8, the American crooner Steve Lawrence (who was born, as I know you recall, Sidney Liebowitz); on July 22, Taylor Swift; and on July 29, Cass Elliot (born Ellen Naomi Cohen).

Today we get back to the historical repertoire.  But let me assure you: the composer we will focus on was as ground-breaking as Sony’s Walkman; his music as gorgeous as the silken voices of Steve Lawrence and Cass Elliot; his rhythmic sensibilities as sharply honed as those of the Bee Gees and Taylor Swift (though, to my knowledge, a concert of his music never simulated a magnitude 2.3 earthquake in downtown Seattle, as did Ms. Swift’s on July 22, 2023).

Ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for Guillaume Du Fay!

We celebrate the birth on August 5, 1397 – 627 years ago today – of the composer Guillaume Du Fay.  He was, by every standard, one of the greatest composers to have ever lived and was admired as such in his own lifetime.

Guillaume Du Fay as The First Professional Composer

Writing in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the Venezuelan -American musicologist, conductor, and composer Alejandro Enrique Planchart observes that:

“Before Du Fay’s time, the concept of a “composer” – that is, a musician whose primary occupation is composition [and not a priest, choir master, or teacher] – was largely unfamiliar in Europe. The emergence of musicians who focused on composition above other musical endeavors arose in the 15th century, and was exemplified by Du Fay.”

Early Life

He was born in the Flemish (today Belgian) town of Bersele (today spelled Beersel), just south of Brussels.  He died 77 years later, on November 27, 1474, just across the border in northern France in the city of Cambrai.…

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We mark the death of Cass Elliot on July 29, 1974 – 50 years ago today – in an apartment at No. 9 Curzon Street in London’s Mayfair District.  Born on September 19, 1941, she was just 32 years old at the time of her death.

Brief Biography

Cass Elliot was born Ellen Naomi Cohen in Baltimore, Maryland.  According to her biography, “all four of her grandparents were Russian-Jewish immigrants.”

The Pale of Settlement

(Parenthetically, I grew up hearing that all four of my great-grandparents were, likewise, from “Russia,” which created a misunderstanding that I carried around with me until my twenties.  As it turns out, in this case, “from Russia” actually means from the Pale of Settlement, that part of the western region of the Russian Empire where Jews were allowed to live.  Today, the territory that encompassed the Pale includes all of Belarus and Moldova, much of Ukraine and Lithuania, part of Latvia, and only a small area of what is today the western Russian Federation.)

It was while she was in high school that Ellen Cohen was bitten by the musical theater bug and began calling herself “Cass Elliot.” Ms. Elliot’s parents fully expected her to go to college, so we can all imagine their . . . “surprise” when she dropped out of high school just before graduation and moved to New York City, there to pursue her dream to be an actor!

Cass Elliot’s acting career never quite got off the ground.  (Yes, she was part of a touring production of The Music Man, but her one-and-only shot at the bigtime came and went when she lost the part of Miss Marmelstein in the Broadway show I Can Get it for You Wholesale to an up-and-comer named Barbra Streisand.)

It was as a singer that Cass Elliot made her mark.  She had a clear, strong, distinctive voice and a charismatic stage presence to go along with her 300-pound “figure.”  In 1963 she helped form a progressive folk trio called the Big 3 which recorded two albums and appeared on The Tonight Show, Hootenanny, and The Danny Kaye Show.  In 1964, the Big 3 became a quartet called the Mugwumps.  Finally, in 1965, Cass Elliot and fellow Mugwump member Denny Dougherty joined the husband/wife team of John and Michelle Phillips to become the Mamas and the Papas.…

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Only July 22, 2023 – one year ago today – Taylor Swift (born 1989; she has, according to Forbes, a present net worth of $1.3 billion) literally “shook up” Seattle: her concerts in that city shook the ground with such violence that it registered as a magnitude 2.3 earthquake.  (As if to prove that the “Swiftquake” at her first show was no fluke, her second show in Seattle also registered a 2.3 on the Richter Scale.)

Talk about shake, rattle, and roll!

A necessary acknowledgement before kicking things off: as entertainers go, there is no one on the planet who is presently more overexposed than Taylor Swift.

No one, I mean, not even Englebert Humperdinck (born Arnold George Dorsey, 1936) in his prime, heaven bless him.

Yet here I am, seemingly jumping on the Swifty bandwagon, writing about she-who-does-not-need-to-be-spoken-of-ever-again.  My reason for doing so has nothing to do with Taylor Swift herself but rather, the nature of the geology on which my house, neighborhood, city, and region of Northern California (NoCal) rests.

I live in what is euphemistically called “earthquake country,” at the edge of where the North American tectonic plate borders the Pacific plate.  These plates are moving at approximately the speed of a growing fingernail in opposite directions.  The Pacific Plate is moving north; the North American Plate is moving south.  The immediate area where the plates meet is called the fault zone or the fracture zone, because the bedrock adjacent to the plates is filled with faults – fractures – where the rock has given way due to the movement of the plates against each other.

Like them or not (and I would hazard to guess that most people and animals do not like them), earthquakes are an almost everyday occurrence up and down the Pacific coast.  So like it or not, most folks who live on the fault lines – especially home owners, who have to bolt their homes to the ground using technologies unknown outside of earthquake country, whose families keep survival supplies and have emergency plans in case of a Big One – know more about earthquakes and fault lines than they’d like to.…

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Indispensability

The title of this blog – “An Indispensable Person” – might be considered controversial. That’s because any number of very smart people would argue that there is, in fact, so such thing as an “indispensable person.”  

According to both Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt:

“There is no indispensable man.”

Said President John F. Kennedy:

“Nobody’s indispensable.”

Observed the redoubtable Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970):

“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”

And there we have it: there is a school of thought that states without equivocation that “No one, absolutely no one, no matter how anyone has painted someone’s existence or value, is indispensable.”

It’s a school of thought that I do not attend.  That’s because based on my reading of history, there are indeed certain individuals without whom certain positive historical ends could not have been achieved.  Here are four obvious examples.

James Thomas Flexner entitled his superb biography of George Washington The Indispensable Man (Plume, 1974; currently published by Back Bay Books).  Flexner was correct in so titling his book,  because George Washington (1732-1799) was, in fact, an indispensable person.  Without his leadership and indomitable will, the American Revolution would have quickly unraveled and been lost.  And without Washington, the American presidency and with it, the nascent American democracy, would very likely have devolved into autocracy, perhaps even monarchy.  (This book should be required reading for a certain six members of our current not-terribly-Supreme Court, who need – desperately – to be reminded of what the Founders intended and what moral greatness look like.)

We should all be loath to even consider what the United States would look like today if not for the indispensable moral guidance and eloquence of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865).  As for the twentieth century, the world as we know it would not exist, and the forces of darkness might very well have triumphed, without the indispensable Winston Churchill (1874-1965) and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945).  

(As for the overly politically and socially sensitive among us: yes, yes, I am aware that these are all white, Protestant men; one of them a slave owner [Washington]; one of them an imperialist [Churchill]; and three of them members of the wealthy, ruling class [Washington, Churchill, and Roosevelt].  So what? Does that information in any way reduce their contributions to humanity?)

The Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) pinpointed the traits that leaders require to make them “indispensable”:

“Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.” 

Okay: some perspective as we observe the obvious: the indispensable people of, say, the world of potash-mining; of lip-gloss manufacturing; and of shipping palette design may not be as well-known and their impact on humanity not as universal as Washington, Lincoln, Churchill, and Roosevelt.  But in terms of their fields, they are indispensable people as well.  Yo: without Howard T. Hallowell (1877-1955), who patented the first shipping palette in 1924 (he called it a “Lift Truck Platform”), the American trucking industry might never have gotten off the ground in the manner it did.  Long live Howard T. Hallowell, the indispensable person of the shipping palette!

Another Unsung Hero! Another Indispensable Person!

We mark the death on July 15, 1857 – 167 years ago today – of the Austrian composer, pianist, chronicler of Beethoven, and teacher Carl Czerny.  For all his various and extraordinary contributions, Czerny must be considered an indispensable person to Western music during the first half of the nineteenth century!

I would hazard that some might think that I’m stretching the “indispensable-thing” just a tad by including Carl Czerny on a list that just featured George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Howard T. Hallowell.  But no, I’m not.…

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We mark the birth on July 8, 1935 – 89 years ago today – of the American Grammy and Emmy Award-winning singer, actor, and comedian Steve Lawrence, in Brooklyn, New York.  He died just four months ago, on March 7, 2024, in Los Angeles.

Steve Lawrence, one might ask?  Have potential topics for Music History Monday become so depleted that after nearly eight years (my first such blog was posted on September 9, 2016) I’ve been reduced to profiling baritone-voiced male pop singers of the second half of the twentieth century?  Who’s next: Dean Martin? Perry Como?  Andy Williams? Tom Jones? Jack Jones? Vic Damone? Al Martino? Robert Goulet?

And what of it, I would rather AGGRESSIVELY ASK IN RESPONSE?  Over the years, I’ve profiled the likes of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Tony Bennett, Otis Redding, and Chubby Checker, among others.  SO WHY NOT STEVE LAWRENCE?

Okay, I will admit that there is an ulterior motive here, and we’ll get to that ulterior motive behind this profile of Maestro Lawrence in due time.  But first, permit me, please, to reminisce.

“Fitting In”

As I have mentioned more than once, I was born and spent my first years in that Olduvai Gorge of American ethnicity (pronounced “et-nicity”): the New York City borough of Brooklyn.  Three of my four grandparents were born there as well (the fourth – my paternal grandfather – was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey but moved to Brooklyn as a toddler and grew up there). Both of my parents and my stepmother were born in Brooklyn and grew up in Brooklyn.   

That’s a lot of freaking Brooklyn.

While I grew up in the New Jersey ‘burbs and was shaped by the lower middle-class suburban experience of the 1950s and 1960s, my grandparents and parents were all New Yorkers to the bone, and were shaped by the dual experience of growing up in Brooklyn and by being the children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants from Belarus.  That meant maintaining something of their ethnic and religious identity while, paradoxically, at the same time, trying to blend in – to assimilate – and be, as my paternal grandfather Sidney would say, “real Yankees!”

When my extended family got together, you could count on certain conversations to always take place.  The alte kaker (meaning the old men; literally “old poopers”) would play pinochle and complain about politicians, taxes, the stock market, the weather, and the New York Mets.  Boring and predictable. It was the women of my mother’s and grandmothers’ generations whose conversations I would eavesdrop on, because they were interesting and they were funny. (If they saw me listening, they’d start speaking in Yiddish, so I’d have to keep my distance and look as if I wasn’t listening to them at all.)  

I recall their conversations as representing gossip and innuendo raised to high art, conversations more often than not fixated on other women: who was married to the worst/best husband (sometimes the same thing: “he slaps her around, but he makes a BUCK”); who had the best/worst clothes and jewelry, and what they paid for their best/worst clothing and jewelry; who was too fat or too thin (these were Jewish ladies, so it was indeed possible to be “too thin”); who wore too much makeup and who wore too little; whose teeth needed fixing and hair needed cutting and/or coloring; who was drinking too much and popping diet pills (meaning methamphetamines, which were legal at the time); who was sexless and who was shtupping the mailman; etc.  The comments I enjoyed the most were about the people I knew: my girl cousins, some of whom were these ladies’ daughters.  This one needs to go on a diet, that one needs a nose-job; this one needs to see a dermatologist, that one has to dress more appropriately; this one needs to do something with her hair, that one needs braces.  

Genuine compliments for anyone were few and far between, though the greatest compliment that these women could bestow on any fellow female is burned into my memory:

“She could pass.”

“She could pass”: meaning, she could pass for a goy, for not being Jewish. The beneficiary of such a compliment would be slim (but not, God forbid, skinny); her hair and teeth would be straight; her skin would be clear, her accent undetectable, and her nose a button. 

Sidney Liebowitz

Which – finally! – brings us back to Steve Lawrence.  He was indeed born Sidney Liebowitz, in Brooklyn, on July 8, 1935.  He came by his musical bona fides honestly: his father, Max Liebowitz was a cantor (a professional singer and prayer leader) at Temple Beth Sholom Tomchei Harav in Brooklyn; his mother Anna (born Gelb), was a homemaker.…

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We mark the introduction on July 1, 1979 – 45 years ago today – of the Sony Walkman.  The Walkman was the first entirely portable, high-fidelity (or at least fairly high-fidelity) audio cassette player, a revolutionary device that allowed a user to listen to entire albums anywhere, anytime.  Introduced initially in Japan, the higher-ups at Sony expected to sell 5000 units a month for the first six months after its release.  Instead, they sold 30,000 units in the first month alone and then – then – sales exploded.  All told, Sony has sold over 400 million Walkmen (“Walkmans”?) in cassette, CD, mini-disc, and digital file versions, and Sony remained the market leader among portable music players until the introduction of Apple’s iPod on October 23, 2001.

For Sony the Walkman was a commercial triumph.  For consumers, it was a technological game-changer.  But for humanity, taken as widely as we please, it can (and will!) be argued that the “portable music player” – or PMP – has been an unmitigated disaster, a tragedy that has served to increasingly isolate human beings from one another in a manner unique in our history.

Headphones and Earbuds

Growing up, my maternal grandparents lived in a pre-War apartment building at 82nd and Riverside Drive in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (or just Lincoln Center) was just 16 blocks to the south, a 16.3-acre complex between 66th and 62nd Streets.  Lincoln Center’s Library & Museum of the Performing Arts opened in 1965, and I remember my grandmother taking me and my brother Steve down to see it.  Actually, I don’t just “remember” the visit; it is etched forever in my 11-year-old memory because of what happened there.

There was a large, open area filled with small, circular tables on which were built in record turntables.  As I recall, each of these circular tables had four stereo headphones plugged in around the turntable.  One would go up to a counter, request a particular record, and then sit down and listen to it through the headphones.

I had never listened to music through over-the-ear headphones (stereo or otherwise) before that visit, and I still remember the amazement I felt: I’d never, ever experienced such sonic fidelity; I’d never imagined that recorded music could sound so fantastic.  And because I was listening through over-the-ear headphones, most of the ambient noise in the room was blocked out, effectively isolating me and allowing me to focus strictly on the music. I don’t remember what my grandmother did to drag me away from that turntable, whether she used a leather sap, a fire hose, the jaws-of-life or, more likely, the promise of ice cream on the way back to her apartment.  Whatever; because of those stereo headphones, I had experienced musical high-fidelity for the first time in my life, and I was hooked.

To this day, I have a number of excellent over-the-ear headphones, and when I really must “listen” for recorded detail, I will listen through one of them.  (FYI: I will not use earbuds, as I can’t tolerate the sensation of something shoved into my ear canal.  Too bad for me.)

To the point.  The immersive experience provided by headphones – by broadcasting directly into our ears while isolating us from ambient sound – is seductive.  But at what point might the isolating aspect of the headphone/earbud experience become a less-than-positive thing?  The advent of PMPs – be they Walkmen, iPods, or smartphones – has allowed two generations of listeners to isolate themselves from the world around them, often to the point of near total disengagement. …

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On June 24, 1374 – 650 years ago today – the men, women, and children of the Rhineland city of Aachen began to dash out of their houses and into the streets, where – inexplicably, compulsively, and uncontrollably – they began to twist and twirl, jump and shake, writhe and twitch until they dropped from exhaustion or, in some cases, just plain dropped dead.  It was a real-life disco inferno, true boogie-fever stuff: the first (but not the last) major occurrence of what would come to be known as the “dancing plague (or mania)” or “choreomania,” which soon enough spread across Europe.

There had been small outbreaks of the “dancing plague” before, going back as far as the seventh century.  An outbreak in the thirteenth century – in 1237 – saw a group of children jump and dance all the way from Erfurt to Arnstadt in what today is central Germany, a distance of some 13 miles. It was an event that is believed to have inspired the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

But the outbreak in Aachen 650 years ago today was big.  Before it was over, thousands upon thousands of men, women, and children had taken to the streets as the “dancing plague” spread from the western German cities of Aachen, Cologne, Metz, and Stuttgart; to the Belgian cities of Hainaut, Utrecht, Tongeren; then across France, the Netherlands, and finally, back into Germany!

This gigantic outbreak came to be referred to as “St. John’s Dance,” though at other times and in other places it was called “St. Vitus’ Dance.”  (These names were coined based on the assumption that the dancing plague was the result of a curse cast by either St. John the Baptist or St. Vitus, St. John having been beheaded by Herod Antipas between 28 and 36 CE and St. Vitus martyred in 303 during the persecution of Christians by the co-ruling Roman Emperors Diocletian and Maximian.) 

Writing in his book The Black Death and the Dancing Mania, the German physician and medical writer Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker (1795-1850) describes St. John’s Dance this way:

“They formed circles hand in hand and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack.”…

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We mark the death on June 17, 2014 – an even 10 years ago today – of the Grammy Award winning American record producer and Director of Columbia Masterworks Recordings John Taylor McClure.  McClure was born in Rahway, New Jersey on June 28, 1929, and died in Belmont Vermont at the age of 84, 11 days short of his 85^th birthday.

Record Producers

The title of this post says it all: “Unsung Heroes.” It is my experience that unless someone has personally been involved in creating a recording, it’s pretty much impossible to appreciate the amount of work a producer puts into the process and the degree to which the producers’ own musical taste, musical proclivities, and musicality influence the final product.  The front of a record jacket or CD case might bear the image of a composer or performer, and the producer’s name might appear in the tiniest of print on the lower left-hand corner of the back of the jacket, but in fact – in terms of their singular impact on a recording – the producer should, by all rights, be pictured on the front of the album side-by-side with whomever else the producer deems worthy of joining them.  

Over the years, I’ve featured a few of the most important record producers of the post-World War Two era.  Thus far, I’ve written about the opera record producer John Royds Culshaw (1924-1980; Dr. Bob Prescribes, March 24, 2020); the Beatles’ record producer and so-called “Fifth Beatle” George Martin (1926-2016; Music History Monday January 3, 2022, and Dr. Bob Prescribes January 4, 2022); and the jazz record producer Orrin Keepnews (1923-2015; Music History Monday, March 21, 2021).

Today we add John McClure to this august list.  

The Job of a Record Producer

Here’s how The Recording Academy (formally the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, or NARAS) defines a record producer:

“The person who has overall creative and technical control of the entire recording project, and the individual recording sessions that are part of that project. He or she is present in the recording studio or at the location recording and works directly with the artist and engineer. The producer makes creative and aesthetic decisions that realize both the artist’s and label’s goals in the creation of musical content. Other duties include but are not limited to keeping budgets and schedules, adhering to deadlines, hiring musicians, singers, studios and engineers, overseeing other staffing needs and editing.”

(And editing.  I trust we all realize that expert editing will make [and bad editing break] almost every musical and literary enterprise.  From book editors and newspaper editors; to television and film editors; to radio producers and record producers, it is the editors/producers that are, in the end, responsible for shaping and delivering the final product that goes out to the public.)

When it comes to making a recording, then, the producer is the chief, the chef, the Jefe, the top dog, the Geeter-with-the-Heater, the Big-Boss-with-the-Hot-Sauce: that single person responsible for every aspect of a recording, from hiring the players to running the recording sessions to supervising the editing to choosing the cover art!

Having said all that, we should also be aware that the exact job of a record producer will vary depending upon the genre of music involved (meaning operas, concert music, rock/pop/country/hip-hop, or jazz) and whether the recording is made in a studio or live, in front of an audience.

A concert music record producer (like today’s featured producer, John McClure) is working from a script: a composer’s score.  Whether a producer is partnered up with a conductor and an orchestra, or a string quartet, or a solo pianist, or whatever, said producer’s job is to present that conductor’s, that quartet’s, or that pianist’s interpretation of the score in as flattering a sonic environment as possible.  In a studio, such a recording will typically be done in multiple takes.  In the case of a live performance, multiple performances will typically contribute bits and pieces to the final – edited – recorded product.  

A producer of opera recordings is also dealing with a script: again, with a composer’s score.  But they must also cope with a vastly greater number of moving parts than a concert music record producer: not just instrumentalists but solo singers and, not unusually, choruses as well. But even more than all of the moving parts, an opera recording producer must deal with the egos of the singers, meaning that such a producer must have the calm, steady nerves of a brain surgeon and the diplomatic skills of Kofi Annan.…

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On June 10, 1865 – 159 years ago today – Richard Wagner’s magnificent and groundbreaking music drama Tristan und Isolde received its premiere in Munich under the baton of Hans von Bülow (whose wife, Cosima Liszt von Bülow, Wagner was enthusiastically shtupping at the same time). 

Oh Goodness; Did I Just Write That?

I did. 

I know, right?  Here I am, introducing Tristan und Isolde – one of the most awesome, incredible works of art ever created – and I still couldn’t resist a cheap dig at Wagner the person.  As we have discussed in the past and will do so again, the same personality flaws that made Richard Wagner an often despicable narcissist allowed him the conceit to reject the operatic clichés and conventions of his time and to create a body of dramatic musical art unfathomable in its originality, beauty, dramatic power, and imagination. Of course, had he not been the towering genius he was, and had he not risked everything – including his sanity, over and over again – to create his unparalleled body of work, well, he would just have been another loathsome crank, writing nasty letters to newspaper editors and shouting at people in the street.  

But he was a towering genius, and he did create a singularly stunning body of work, a body of work we all deserve to revel in.  So revel we shall, with the satisfying understanding that our pleasure in Wagner’s music affords him no monetary profit or emotional gratification at all, given that he’s been dead since February 13, 1883.

Our gameplan.  This post will indeed discuss Tristan und Isolde; it’s basic story line and its origins. But this post will deal primarily with the cliché but inescapable “Wagner Problem”: how to reconcile Wagner the “man” with Wagner the “artist,” and how to allow ourselves to accept the man while reveling in the artist!

Meanwhile, my Dr. Bob Prescribes posts for June 11 and 18 will feature my favorite DVD recording of Tristan und Isolde and, as such, will be all about Tristan und Isolde, all the time!

Don’t Call it an Opera!!!

Tristan und Isolde is a three-act music drama, or what Wagner himself called “eine Handlung” (which means “a drama” or“an action”). By his mid-career, Wagner outright refused to use the word “opera” except as a pejorative, claiming that the word represented the debased musical stage works of everyone not named “Richard Wagner.” Tristan und Isolde’s libretto (or “poem,” as Wagner would have us call it) was written and its music composed by Wagner between 1855 and 1859.

Wagner based his “poem” on a twelfth-century romance entitled Tristan by Gottfried von Strassburg, who died circa 1210.  Wagner’s poem tells the story of two presumed “enemies” – the Irish princess Isolde and the Cornish (southern English) knight Tristan – who presumably fall madly in love only when they are duped into drinking a love potion.  (Many modern observers – yours truly included – believe that this “love potion” is in fact a placebo, likely of high alcohol content – Bacardi 151, for example – a drink that allows Tristan and Isolde to, like, finally get in touch with their feelings and admit that they’ve actually loved each other for years.)  Unfortunately, their love for each other is illicit (Isolde is due to marry the King of Cornwall, an old dude named “Marke”) and “unconsummated” (despite their very best efforts, T and I never manage to “do the dirty,” perhaps because they just can’t stop singing about how much they love each other).  In the end, Tristan is cut down by a fellow knight of Cornwall and Isolde, on watching Tristan die, expires over his now dead body in an orgasmic haze.

Critics of Tristan und Isolde have referred to Wagner’s linked infatuation with sex and death as “perfumed obscenity” and its orgasmic and deathly conclusion as “snuff opera.” 

Those nattering nabobs of critical negativism aside, I will happily argue that Tristan und Isolde is Wagner’s single greatest work. There’s nothing else even remotely like it in the repertoire.…

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We mark the death on June 3, 1877 – 147 years ago today – of the Austrian lawyer, botanist, geologist, teacher, writer, publisher, composer, and “musicologist” Ludwig Alois Friedrich Ritter (“Ritter” meaning “Knight”) von Köchel, of cancer, in Vienna.  Born on January 14, 1800, he was 77 years old at the time of his death.

Ludwig Köchel and the Archduke

Herr Köchel wasn’t born a “Ritter” – a “knight” – a “von” – with all the privileges and perks that such a title brought.  Rather, he was born to the middle class in the Lower Austrian town of Krems an der Donau (meaning “At the junction of the Kremas and Danube Rivers”) some 43 miles west of Vienna. Smart and ambitious, he studied law in Vienna and went on to earn a Ph.D. in 1827, at the age of 27.

Köchel was a polymath, someone who knew a lot about a lot of things.  As such, despite having a law degree, he chose a career as a teacher.  But he was not just any teacher, and he didn’t teach just any students.  For 15 years, Köchel was the tutor to the four sons of Archduke Charles of Austria.

This requires a wee bit of discussion/explanation.

Archduke Charles Louis John Joseph Laurentius of Austria, Duke of Teschen (1771-1847) was an Austrian field-marshal, the third son of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II and the grandson of the Empress Maria Theresa. He was the nephew of both Emperor Joseph II (of Amadeus fame) and Marie Antoinette (of “oops, has anyone seen my noggin?” fame). 

In a virtual sea of Austrian military incompetence against Napoleon, Archduke Charles stands out as the best Habsburg general officer of the Napoleonic era, and arguably the best commander ever produced by the House of Habsburg in its 636-year run (from 1282 until 1918). According to Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington (1769-1852), Archduke Charles was:

“the greatest general of his time.”

This, then, is the man who chose Ludwig Köchel to educate his four sons. Köchel lived with and worked with the Archduke’s boys for 15 years, from 1827 to 1842 (from the time Köchel was 27 years of age to 42).  It would appear that everyone was satisfied with Köchel’s teaching, because upon his departure in 1842, he was rewarded by the archduke with a knighthood and life-time pension large enough to guarantee that he’d never have to “work” for a living again.…

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There Must Be Something in the Air

Have any of you done – or anticipate doing – anything particularly foolish today, anything particularly inappropriate?

If you do, know that you will be in good company.  Perhaps it’s the angle of the sun; perhaps it’s something in the air or water, because as dates go, May 27 is ripe with musical stories and actions that we shall deem as being “inappropriate.”

For example.

On May 27, 1964 – 60 years ago today – four of the eleven 16-year-old boys suspended from Woodlands Comprehensive School in Coventry, UK, for having Mick Jagger haircuts complied with their headmaster’s demand that they cut their hair, and returned to school.  The other seven lads put their hair (or at least the allegiance to Mick Jagger!) before their schooling and remained suspended.  According to an article in the Coventry Evening Telegraph:

“their headmaster Mr. Donald Thompson has said that he would not object if they returned to school with a ‘neat Beatle cut.’

           Mr. Thompson told the Coventry Evening Telegraph today that he was not against boys having modern hair styles, but he did object to the ‘scruffy, long hair style of the Rolling Stones with hair curling into the nape of the neck and over their ears.’”

Thompson’s anti-Jagger, anti-Stones, pro-neatly-shorn hairdecree was handed down about a month after the President of the UK’s National Federation of Hairdressers declared that the Rolling Stones’ haircuts were “the worst” of all their rock ‘n’ roll colleagues.  He then added:

“One of them [no doubt referring to Keith Richards] looks as if he has a feather duster on his head.”

Oh my goodness, how worried everyone was about hair in the 1960s!  Was it inappropriate for the parents of those eleven suspended boys to send their kids to school in violation of what was a stated “hair code policy?”  Yes, it was inappropriate of them.  Was it inappropriate for the headmaster to indefinitely suspend those children at the end of the school year?  Yes, doubly inappropriate.
At least those boys weren’t yet wearing their pants down around their knees, as they might do so today.  Triply inappropriate.

Speaking of INAPPROPRIATE

On May 27, 1977 – 47 years ago today – the Sex Pistols released their single, God Save the Queen,in the UK.

Now, if you thought I was going to label the Sex Pistols’ “song” God Save the Queen as being “inappropriate,” you are incorrect.  Insipid?  Yes.  Artless?  Surely.  Ridiculous?  Of course: it’s the freaking Sex Pistols, for heaven’s sake, the lowest, bottom-feeding punkers of the punks.

What was inappropriate was the reaction of the “establishment” to the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen and the degree to which that reaction made the song a cause célèbres.  You see, after its release, the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen was instantly banned from British TV and radio stations.  Many of the workers in UK record pressing plants refused to even manufacture the record, and many UK record shops simply refused to stock and sell it.

We should all know what happens when this sort of spontaneous censorship occurs, and that’s exactly what did happen.  The single sold 200,000 copies in one week, making it the No. 2 hit on the UK charts, just behind Rod Stewart’s I Don’t Want to Talk About It.

No. 2 on the charts, for what amounts to a total piece of musical merde. But certain rumors continue to circulate, rumors that have never been confirmed nor denied: that the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen was actually No. 1 on the UK charts, but the British Phonographic Industry – the trade association that controls the UK charts – conspired to keep it out of the top slot.  If true, that would have been most inappropriate!…

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Before we get to the principal topic of today’s post, we must note an operatic disaster that had nothing to do with singers or the opera being performed on stage.  Rather, it was a disaster that inspired Gaston Leroux to write the novel The Phantom of the Opera, which was published in 1909.

On May 20, 1896 – 128 years ago today – a counterweight helping to hold up the six-ton chandelier at Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera House fell into the audience during a performance of Étienne-Joseph Floquet’s opera Hellé (composed in 1779).  We don’t know how the opera performance was going, but the counterweight was a big hit: one woman in the audience was killed and a number of other audience members were badly injured.

The disaster was covered by a reporter for the Parisian daily Le Matin named Gaston Leroux (1868-1927).  The accident – to say nothing for the Paris Opera House itself and the lake beneath it – made quite an impression on Monsieur Leroux.

About that underground “lake.” Writing in The New York Times on January 24, 2023, Sam Lubell tells us that:

“When digging the foundations [for the Paris Opera House], workers hit a hidden arm of the Seine, causing water to flood the site. It was impossible to remove all the water, so crews had to contain it with a massive concrete reservoir with a vaulted ceiling from which water is still pumped today. The so-called lake was dramatized by Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom of the Opera, who made it the stomping grounds of the Phantom. [Christopher Mead, author of Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera: Architectural Empathy and the Renaissance of French Classicism] was mesmerized by [the opera house house]. ‘You can see why it inspired Leroux,’ he said. ‘You could invent a whole world there.’”

Which, of course, is precisely what Gaston Leroux did.

Onwards to the star attraction of today’s post!

With our heads bowed, we mark the death – 128 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Clara Wieck Schumann, who died of a stroke at the age of 76 on May 20, 1896.

She was among the great pianists of her time, a child prodigy whose performances were described with awe by her adult contemporaries.  She was a composer of outstanding promise, who – for reasons we will discuss in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post – never had the opportunity to fulfill that promise.  She was the compositional muse for her fiancé and husband, Robert Schumann (1810-1856), and the spiritual muse of her best friend, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897).  Most of all she was a survivor: someone whose life reads like some endlessly tragic Victorian novel, only without the “happy ending” tacked on at the end.

No One Escapes This Life Unscathed, But When it Came to Clara . . .

Next time one of us gets into a self-pitying funk (at which I am a particular virtuoso), during which we stand convinced that our personal lives represent the very nadir of human existence, I would recommend that we think of Clara Schumann and her life as a cautionary tale, as an example of how very badly things can go if fate is not on one’s side.  If such reflection doesn’t temper our own self-absorbed misery, frankly nothing will.…

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We recognize May 13th as being, among other “days” here in the United States, National Frog Jumping Day, Leprechaun Day, International Hummus Day, National Crouton Day, and – wait for it – World Cocktail Day!

National Days, Weeks, and Months!

Who creates these damned things?

We’ll get to that in a moment.  But first, let’s distinguish between a national holiday and a national day (or week or month).

In the United States, national (or “federal”) holidays are designated by Congress and/or the President.  There are presently a total of ten national/federal holidays, meaning that federal employees get to take the day off.  However, anyone can declare a national day (or week or month).  The trick is getting enough people to buy into the “day” that it actually gains some traction and has some meaning.  Such national days are created by advocacy groups; lobbying groups; industry groups; government bodies; even individuals.

According to the “National Day Calendar,” today, May 13, 2024, is – along with those “days” listed at the top of this post – National Women’s Checkup Day; National Fruit Cocktail Day; and National Apple Pie Day.  May 13 of this year is also the first day of Bike to Work Week; of Dementia Awareness Week; Water Savings Week; American Craft Beer Week; National Salvation Army Week; National Stationary Week; and National Smile Month.

I am oh-so-tempted to call this list of promotional idiocy, well, idiocy.  But that today is both World Cocktail Day and the first day of American Craft Beer Week has gratefully given us the hook for both today’s Music History Monday post and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post: the drinking habits of some of our favorite composers, and drinking songs we should all know (and love).

A Disclaimer and a Necessary, Pre-emptive Point

First the disclaimer.  While I like my dry, gin martinis as much as the next guy – hell, probably a lot more than the next guy – I am in no way promoting the consumption of alcohol in this post, especially in excess.  Rather, as is my usual m.o., my goal is to render as human as I can composers who are otherwise pedestalized and, as such, de-humanized.

And now the necessary point. Today, some of us tend to be very judgmental about the regular consumption of alcohol.  And no wonder: given its potentially addictive nature and sometimes adverse effects on our bodies, moods, and minds, it is – for many people – nothing less than poison.  But for most of us it is a great pleasure in a life otherwise in short supply of such.

Now please: in the centuries prior to the twentieth, alcoholic beverages were more than merely recreation fluids but lifesavers as well, as the dearth of clean drinking water necessitated the consumption of far more alcohol than many of us, today, would consider healthy.  But given the choice, say, between a mug of ale or a pilsner glass of cholera-infected water, I do believe every one of us would choose the ale every time.

There’s a tendency, then – today – to call all sort of historical figures “alcoholics,” despite the fact that the word and the concept behind it only came in to being in 1852.  Today, we can read that Mozart was an alcoholic, Beethoven was an alcoholic, Schubert was an alcoholic; Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, etc.: all alcoholics.

Please.

Drinkers? Yes.  But we must (and will) be careful about who we call an “alcoholic,” especially if they lived at a time when alcoholic beverages were among the only safe ways to consume fluid.…

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We mark the public release, on May 6, 2015 – nine years ago today – of a scientific/statistical study published by The Royal Society Open Science Journal, a study entitled “The Evolution of Western Pop Music: USA (1960-2010).”

Scoff not, my friends: this was, in fact, a high-end study conducted (and written up) by four high-end scientists: Dr. Matthias Mauch, of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, whose current professional title is “Research Manager for Recommender Systems and Music Intelligence at Apple Music”; Dr. Robert M. MacCallum, who teaches in the Division of Life Sciences at Imperial College, London; Dr. Mark Levy, a former research assistant at the Centre for Digital Music at the University of London and for the last three years a principal research scientist at Apple, where he researches potential future applications of machine learning to music creation and listening; and finally, Armand M. Leroi, a professor of evolutionary developmental biology at Imperial College in London.

Scary fine creds on display here: up, down, and sideways.

The study’s abstract is as follows.  I figure it’s better to get it directly from the quartet of Mauch, MacCallum, Levy, and Leroi than to offer up a watered down and abbreviated version of the abstract by yours truly.

“In modern societies, cultural change seems ceaseless. The flux of fashion is especially obvious for popular music. While much has been written about the origin and evolution of pop, most claims about its history are anecdotal rather than scientific in nature. To rectify this, we investigate the US Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010. Using music information retrieval and text-mining tools, we analyze the musical properties of approximately 17,000 recordings that appeared in the charts and demonstrate quantitative trends in their harmonic and timbral properties. We then use these properties to produce an audio-based classification of musical styles and study the evolution of musical diversity and disparity, testing, and rejecting, several classical theories of cultural change. Finally, we investigate whether pop musical evolution has been gradual or punctuated. We show that, although pop music has evolved continuously, it did so with particular rapidity during three stylistic ‘revolutions’ around 1964, 1983 and 1991. We conclude by discussing how our study points the way to a quantitative science of cultural change.”

Fascinating, yes?

Methodology

The actual paper – “The Evolution of Western Pop Music: USA (1960-2010)” – is rather lengthy; 4614 words (FYI: I let my computer do the word count).  Overall, the paper is characterized by the sort of technical jargon we would expect to find in a scientific journal.  For example: in the course of their introduction, the authors lay out their methodology as follows. 

“We adopted an approach inspired by recent advances in text-mining. We began by measuring our songs for a series of quantitative audio features, 12 descriptors of tonal content and 14 of timbre. These were then discretized into ‘words’ resulting in a harmonic lexicon (H-lexicon) of chord changes, and a timbral lexicon (T-lexicon) of timbre clusters. To relate the T-lexicon to semantic labels in plain English [“plain English”; if only!], we carried out expert annotations. The musical words from both lexica were then combined into 8+8=16 ‘topics’ using latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). LDA is a hierarchical generative model of a text-like corpus, in which every document (here: song) is represented as a distribution over a number of topics, and every topic is represented as a distribution over all possible words (here: chord changes from the H-lexicon, and timbre clusters from the T-lexicon). We obtain the most likely model by means of probabilistic inference. Each song, then, is represented as a distribution over eight harmonic topics (H-topics) that capture classes of chord changes (e.g. ‘dominant-seventh chord changes’) and eight timbral topics (T-topics) that capture particular timbres (e.g. ‘drums, aggressive, percussive’, ‘female voice, melodic, vocal’, derived from the expert annotations), with topic proportions q. These topic frequencies were the basis of our analyses.”

Got that?

Okay: I am so, so sorry I made you read that; really, I am.  But it was necessary to show you why we aren’t going to get into the details of the study but rather, fairly quickly cut to the study’s conclusions which are, to my mind, of no small interest, methodology aside!…

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We mark the birth of The Duke on April 29, 1899 – 125 years ago today – in Washington D.C. 

By “The Duke,” we are not here referring to the actor John Wayne (who was born on May 26, 1907, in Winterset, Iowa), but rather, Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, one of the greatest songwriters and composers ever to be born in the United States.  

Aside from their shared nickname, it would appear that the only thing Duke Ellington had in common with John Wayne was that they both suffered from lung cancer.  In Ellington’s case, cancer killed him at the age of 75 on May 24, 1974, at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City (and not at the UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles, as is inexplicably claimed on certain web sites!).

Born in Washington D.C., he grew up at 2129 Ida Place (now Ward Place) NW, in the district’s West End neighborhood. His father, James Edward Ellington, worked as a blueprint maker for the Navy Department and on occasion as a butler, sometimes at the White House.  His mother, Daisy (born Kennedy) was the daughter of formerly enslaved people.  Theirs was a musical household; both of Ellington’s parents played piano. (We are told that James Edward Ellington preferred to play arrangements of operatic arias, while Daisy preferred the semi-classical parlor songs that were popular with the middle and upper middle classes at the time.)

And let us make no mistake; the Ellingtons were indeed of the upper middle class: sophisticated, educated, upwardly mobile, proud of their racial heritage and unwilling to allow their children to be limited by the Jim Crow laws of the time.  According to Studs Terkel, writing in his book Giants of Jazz (The New Press, 2^nd edition, 2002):

“Daisy [Ellington] surrounded her son with dignified women to reinforce his manners and teach him elegance. His childhood friends noticed that his casual, offhand manner and dapper dress gave him the bearing of a young nobleman.”

It was that noble bearing that prompted Ellington’s high school friend Edgar McEntee to come up with the nickname that Ellington wore so very well for so very long.  According to Ellington himself: 

“I think he [Edgar McEntee] felt that in order for me to be eligible for his constant companionship, I should have a title. So he called me Duke.”)

For the young Ellington, piano lessons were a must; it was, for children of his generation (and mine as well!) an inevitable childhood rite-of-passage.  Having said that, like so many red-blooded American kids, Ellington preferred baseball, at which he excelled.  In his autobiography he recalled that:

“President [Theodore] Roosevelt would come on his horse sometimes, and stop and watch us play.”

(For our information: Ellington’s love of the game ran deep, and his first paying job was selling peanuts at Washington Senators games.)

(Because we all should know: the Senators, also-known-as the “Nationals,” played in D.C. from 1901 to 1960.  It was in 1960 that the team broke the collective hearts of its District fans and moved to Minnesota, there to become the “Minnesota Twins”: “twins” as in the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.)

Ellington’s first piano teacher was the spectacularly named Marietta Clinkscales (OMG; who could make such a name up?). As a teenager, he took up ragtime piano and studied harmony, though as a teen his growing love of music shared equal time with a real talent for painting and design. …

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I am writing this post from my hotel room in what is presently (but sadly, not for long) warm and sunny Vienna.  As I mentioned last week, I will be here for eight days acting as “color commentator” for a musical tour of the city sponsored by Wondrium (a.k.a. The Teaching Company/The Great Courses).  I also indicated, one, that I would keep you up-to-date on the trip with near-daily posts, and two, that Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes will be rather truncated while I am here.

We mark the birth on April 15, 1894 – 130 years ago today – of the American contralto and blues singers Bessie Smith.  Appropriately nicknamed “The Empress,” Bessie Smith remains one of the most significant and influential musicians ever born in the United States.  Well, it just so happens that we celebrated Maestra Smith birthday in my Music History Monday post of April 15, 2019, and I will thus be excused for directing your attention to that post through the button below:

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We mark the death on April 8, 1858 – 166 years ago today – of the Austrian composer, editor, and music publisher Anton Diabelli in Vienna, at the age of 76.  Born on September 5, 1781, his enduring fame is based on a waltz of his composition that became the basis for Beethoven’s epic Diabelli Variations for piano.

Quick Work

We are, fairly or unfairly, going to make rather quick work of Herr Diabelli.  That’s because, with all due respect, what I really want to write about is Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.  

There’s a powerful ulterior motive at work here as well.  In a field of great recordings, my numero uno favorite Diabelli Variations is the recording made by the Milan-born Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini in 1998 and released by Deutsche Grammophon in 2000.  Pollini passed away at the age of 82, on March 23, 2024: 16 days ago.  As such, we will honor Maestro Pollini in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes even as we celebrate his unequaled performance of Beethoven’s variations.

Anton Diabelli (1781-1858)

Despite his Italian surname, Anton Diabelli was Austrian born-and-bred.  

He was born in Mattsee, a market town just outside of Salzburg.  He was a musical child, and typical of almost every musically talented boy of his time and place (and by “place” we’re referring to Catholic Europe), he was musically schooled as a chorister in a boys’ choir, in Diabelli’s case at the Salzburg Cathedral (where he almost certainly studied composition with Joseph Haydn’s younger brother, Michael Haydn [1737-1806]).  

By the time he was 19 years old – in 1800 – Diabelli had composed a number of large-scale works, including six masses.  It was in that year that Diabelli, who had been trained for the priesthood, was packed off to the monastery at Raitenhaslach, in the southeastern German state of Bavaria. …

Important Programming Note

A scheduling note before I leave you.  I will be in Vienna leading a tour starting on April 13, which – sadly – will preclude me from posting Music History Monday Podcasts on April 15 and 22.  I will, however, be posting daily reports from Vienna on my Patreon site.  I would be remiss, then, if I didn’t invite everyone who is not already a subscribing member to join me at Patreon and partake in the fun. 

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On April 1, 2017 – 7 years ago today – Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman, 1941) was awarded his Nobel Prize in Literature in a private ceremony held at an undisclosed location in Stockholm, Sweden.  At the ceremony, Dylan received his gold Nobel Prize medal and his Nobel diploma. The cash prize of eight million Swedish kronor (837,000 euros, or $891,000) was not handed over to Dylan at the time, as he was required to give a lecture before receiving the cash. That lecture was recorded and then released some 9 weeks later, on June 5, 2017. 

The private award ceremony was attended by twelve members of the Swedish Academy, that organization tasked with choosing the recipients of the Nobel Prize in literature.  According to Sara Danius, the academy’s permanent secretary, a good time was had by all:

“Spirits were high. Champagne was had.”

Ms. Danius went on to describe the occasion in a bit more detail:

“Quite a bit of time was spent looking closely at the gold medal, in particular the beautifully crafted back, an image of a young man sitting under a laurel tree who listens to the Muse. Taken from Virgil’s Aeneid, the inscription reads: ‘Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes,’ loosely translated as ‘And they who bettered life on earth by their newly found mastery’.”

We would observe that the announcement of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize was made nearly six months before, on October 16, 2016.  Dylan, who was performing in Las Vegas, was immediately informed.  However, in the days that followed, he failed to return any of the phone calls he received from the Swedish Academy.  Neither did Dylan make any public comment or statement about the prize to the press.  No one knew if he intended to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, where prize winners were to receive their awards from Swedish King Carl XVI and where they were then expected to give a speech.  

In reference to not hearing even a peep from Bob Dylan, a member of the Swedish Academy, the writer Per Wastberg, said on Swedish television:

“This is an unprecedented situation.”

He then criticized Dylan as being:

“Impolite and arrogant.”

We don’t imagine Per Wastberg’s opinion changed much when, after over a week, Dylan’s people finally communicated with the Swedish Academy, informing them that he could not attend the award ceremony on December 10 due to “previous commitments,” as if he’d been invited to play a round of golf. 

When Dylan finally did show up to accept his award, on April 1, 2017 – seven years ago today – he honored those champagne-swilling academy members by showing up in a hoodie under a leather jacket.  And lest you think he ventured to Stockholm specifically to receive his prize, allow me to disabuse you of that notion. Rather, Stockholm was the first stop on a long-planned European concert tour, so a visit to the Swedish Academy was conveniently booked between the first and second concerts of the tour.  …

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We mark the birth on March 25, 1867 – 157 years ago today – of the cellist and conductor Arturo Toscanini, in the city of Parma, in what was then the Kingdom of Italy.  He died, at the age of 89, on January 16, 1957, at his home in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, in New York City.

(Properly embalmed and, we trust, adequately chilled, his no-doubt well-dressed corpse was shipped off to Milan, Italy, where he was entombed in the Cimitero Monumentale.  His epitaph features his own words, words he spoke in 1926 after conducting the posthumous premiere of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, which had been left unfinished at Puccini’s death:

“Qui finisce l’opera, perché a questo punto il maestro è morto.” (“Here the opera ends, because at this point the maestro died.”)

What Made Toscanini So Special

Arturo Toscanini lived a long life, and he lived it to the hilt.  Firmly in the public eye from the age of 19 (in 1886) until his death in 1957, he travelled everywhere, seemed to have performed with everyone, and had more affairs than Hugh Heffner had bunnies.  This is my subtle way of saying that even the most cursory examination of his life is far, far beyond the purview of a 2300-word post.  Consequently, we will focus today on the two aspects of Toscanini’s career that made Toscanini special and that together created the Toscanini legend: his revolutionary (at the time) style of conducting and his incendiary, Vesuvian temper.

In tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post, we will pick back up with Maestro Toscanini, first with his breakthrough performance on June 30, 1886 (when as the principal cellist in a travelling opera company he was called upon to conduct Aida in Rio de Janeiro in the middle what amounted to an audience riot) and then with recordings made and tantrums thrown during his final gig, with the NBC Symphony Orchestra in New York City.

The First “Modern” Conductor

As a conductor, Toscanini was a literalist. At the time he broke in as a conductor in 1886, at the age of 19 (to instant acclaim on the part of audiences and performers!), conductors typically treated the scores they conducted as vehicles for their personal self-expression and self-aggrandizement.  For those conductors, that meant milking every piece of music they performed for as much expressive Sturm und Drang, and Schmerz und Angst as was possible.  If such conducting meant constantly speeding up and slowing down in a manner not indicated in the score, so be it; if it meant exaggerating the dynamics, so be it; if it meant playing movements at speeds vastly different from those indicated by the composer, so be it; and if it meant altering a composer’s indicated instrumentation, yes: so be it as well.  

It was said that hearing Toscanini conduct a familiar work – be it an opera by Puccini or a symphony by Beethoven – was like seeing a familiar painting cleaned and restored: with centuries of grime stripped away, viewers could experience and revel in its original colors for the first time.  …

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We mark the birth of the Russian composer Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov on March 18, 1844: 180 years ago today.  Born in the Russian town of Tikhvin – roughly 120 miles east of St. Petersburg – Rimsky-Korsakov died at the age of 64, on June 21, 1908, on his estate near the Russian town of Luga, about 85 miles south of St. Petersburg

Fake It ‘til You Make It

Like most kids growing up, I had various assumptions about grownups (i.e. “adults”).  As someone who has now – presumably – been an adult for very nearly a half of a century, I have learned that my assumptions – a few of which I’ve listed below – were all crazy wrong.

Assumption one: at around 21, we cross the line into adulthood.  

Wrong.  There are no such “lines”; we’re all changing, all the time.

Assumption two: adults are emotionally mature.

Wrong.  Physically, yes, I’m pushing seventy.  Emotionally? I’m roughly fifteen. On a good day.

Assumption three: adults know what they’re doing.

Really?  Adults only “know” what they’re doing (if they ever learn what their “doing” at all) after they’ve been doing it for decades.  Until then, they are apprentices, “learning on the job,” which are nice ways of saying “faking it”!

Growing up, I had no concept of this.  I just assumed that once you got to a certain age, you actually knew what you were doing.  

Silly me.  I was disabused of that bit of foolishness as soon as I entered the job market when, at the age of 23, I was hired as the music teacher at a now defunct, all-girls’ private high school in Pottersville, New Jersey called the Purnell School.  Oh sure, I thought I had it all together at the time, but in retrospect I didn’t know Scheiße from Shinola (which was a brand of shoe polish that was popular during the first decades of the twentieth century). 

In retrospect, my “apprenticeship” as a teacher – that period that saw me “fake it ‘til I made it” – lasted some 5 years. This doesn’t mean that I ever stopped learning on the job; hopefully, I’ll never stop getting better at what I do. It only means that it took me around 5 years to achieve what today I consider to be a passing competence at teaching.

And so it was as well for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.…

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We mark the first performance on March 11, 1851 – 173 years ago today – of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto at Venice’s storied Teatro la Fenice: The Phoenix Theater.

We set the scene.  

The year was 1849.  Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (1813-1901) was – at the age of 36 – the most famous and popular composer of opera living and working in Italy.  

Living in his hometown of Busseto, in the Parma region of northern Italy, Verdi spent the last days of 1849 and the first weeks of 1850 considering future opera projects.  He sat down and drew up a list of stories that captured his interest, a list filled with literary masterworks old and new.  At the top of the list were Shakespeare’s King Lear, Hamlet, and The Tempest.  There was Kean, by Alexander Dumas pere and Victor Hugo’s Marion Delorme, Ruy Blas, and Le Roi s’amuse (“The King’s Jester”).  Among other works on the list were Lord George Gordon Byron’s Cain; Jean Baptiste Racine’s Phedre; Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s A Secret Grievance, a Secret Revenge; Vicomte Francois Rene de Chateaubriand’s Atala; and Count Vittorio Alfieri’s Filippo (which would eventually become the opera Don Carlo).

Stifellio

Narrowing things down more than just a bit, Verdi wrote the librettist Francesco Maria Piave (1810-1876) at his home in Venice and asked him – per favore – to prepare a draft scenario for Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’amuse,(“The King’s Jester”).  Piave consented to do so, and additionally suggested some other possible texts, including a play by the French dramatists Émile Souvestre and Eugène Bourgeois entitled Stifellio.

Verdi and Piave went ahead with Stifellio, which was Verdi’s 16^th (of 27) operas. It received its premiere on November 16, 1850, at the Teatro Grande in the city of Trieste, in the north-eastern corner of Italy. 

To say that Stifellio has a controversial plot is a major understatement.  It’s a drama about a Protestant minister who leaves his home to preach, during which time his lonely wife takes a lover.  Having confessed her infidelity, the opera reaches its climax as the preacher forgives her adultery while delivering a sermon from his pulpit.  All in all, it was a most unusual subject for an opera composed and performed in Catholic Italy.  

Just days before Stifellio’s opening, the local censors in Trieste exercised their “prerogative” and savaged the opera, cutting out whole sections of what they called “offensive text.”  

Those poor, offended censors hardly knew where to start!  OMG, the protagonists were Protestant!  Actual verses from the Bible were sung onstage!  An adulterous woman was portrayed sympathetically, and then – then – she was forgiven by her husband!  Various pieces of religious paraphernalia were used as props! By the time the censors had finished with it, little of Stifellio was left untouched.  Verdi was apoplectic, and he accused the censors of having “castrated” his opera.  Somehow, Verdi, Piave, and the cast managed to stitch together what was left and went on with the show.  It was nothing short of a miracle that Stifellio wasn’t a complete flop.  It was only a partial flop, because its sympathetic audience – including the critics – were aware of its 11^th hour demolition.  

It’s important that we know something of Stifellio’s fate, because when censors threatened Verdi’s next project – Rigoletto – Verdi was prepared to go to war!…

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We mark the first performance of the ballet Swan Lake on March 4, 1877: 147 years ago today.  Premiered at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, with music by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), choreography by the Czech-born dance master Julius Reisinger (1828-1892), and its music performed by the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra, the first performance of Swan Lake landed with an epic THUD, meaning not good.  

Pretty much every aspect of the ballet was critically blasted.  The vast majority of the critics present found Tchaikovsky’s score to be far too “complex” for a ballet; one critic called it: 

“too noisy, too ‘Wagnerian,” and too symphonic.” 

A visiting correspondent by the name of Tyler Grant called the ballet:

“utter hogwash, unimaginative and altogether unmemorable.”

Now, admittedly, there were some problems with that premiere performance.  

For example. 

The famed Russian prima ballerina Anna Sobeshchanskaya (1842-1918) was originally cast in the role of Odette – the “white swan” – the star and heroine of the ballet.  She may also have been slated to dance the role of the villainous Black Swan, Odile; today it is common practice for the same ballerina to perform the parts of both Odette and Odile.  However, it is now believed that the ballet had originally called for two different dancers to dance the parts.

Whatever the case, the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina – Anna Sobeshchanskaya – was to star in the original production of Swan Lake. And then, out of the blue, she was suddenly removed from the cast and replaced by an entirely inferior dancer named Pelageya Karpakova (who was also known as Polina Karpakova)!

What happened?

Apparently, a major figure in the Russian government (who has remained nameless over the years, a testament to his power!) had Sobeshchanskaya black-balled (or “black-swanned,” as it were) and bounced from the ballet. This government big-wig and Sobeshchanskaya had been having an affair (seedy but true; this is how ballet worked in France and Russia, where aristocrats took as their lovers ballerinas), and he had rewarded her prowess-in-the-sack and loyalty towards him with some very expensive jewelry.  Having received the jewelry, Madame Sobeshchanskaya turned around and married a fellow dancer and sold the bling for cash.

A lot of cash, leaving her erstwhile fat-cat boyfriend unhappy.

And so it was up to a lesser and likely under-rehearsed dancer to negotiate the virtuosic part of Odette at the premiere, a part that had been created for Anna Sobeshchanskaya.  As the replacement, Pelageya Karpakova’s performance did not go well.

Then there were the issues surrounding the score Tchaikovsky composed for this, his first ballet.

He was, frankly, an odd choice to be commissioned by the Imperial Theaters in 1875 to compose Swan Lake.  Okay, he was an accomplished composer with three symphonies under his belt, but in Russia, ballets were usually composed by specialists who wrote nothing but dance music.  Such dance music was generally characterized by glaringly obvious and easily followed “oom-pah-pah” type rhythmic accentuation tricked out with simple melodies set in even phrases.  Along came Tchaikovsky, who composed for ballet the way he composed for the symphony hall, writing music in which the groupings of beats are not always obvious and phrases that are not always even; music replete with countermelodies and polyphony, thematic development, and long-range key relationships; music that did not merely accompany the dancers but that deepened the dramatic and emotional action being depicted on stage.  

Tchaikovsky did not set out to be a “revolutionary” when it came to Russian ballet music, but that’s what he was, and it was only after his death that his “symphonic” ballets came to be acclaimed as the compositional masterworks that they are.  But in his lifetime, Tchaikovsky’s ballet scores were considered to be “problematic.” …

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We mark the premiere on February 26, 1935 – 89 years ago today – of Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C.  The premiere took place in Basel, Switzerland, in a performance conducted by Felix Weingartner (1863-1942).  Bizet (1838-1875) never heard the symphony performed; he had died in the Paris suburbs in 1875 at the age of 36, a full 60 years before Weingartner’s premiere of his symphony.  Bizet’s Symphony in C, considered today to be a masterwork, was only “discovered” in the archives of the Paris Conservatoire in 1933, 78 years after its composition in 1855! 

What If

We contemplate a short list of those great (or potentially great) composers who died before their fortieth birthday. Henry Purcell (dead at 36), Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (26), Wolfgang Mozart (35), Vincenzo Bellini (33), Frédéric Chopin (39), Felix Mendelssohn (38), Lili Boulanger (24), Juan Arriaga (19), and George Gershwin (who died at the age of 38).  We should all deeply regret their early passing, not just because of the inherent tragedy of dying so young but because it is impossible not to think about what these composers might have accomplished had they at least lived Beethoven’s life span (56 years), or Sebastian Bach’s (65 years), or Richard Strauss’ (85 years), or Elliott Carter’s (103 years), or Leo Ornstein’s (106 years; though some say 109!).

Admittedly, not everyone wonders about what those short-lived composers might have accomplished had they lived longer lives.   For example, apropos of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann (who himself didn’t live a particularly long life; 1810-1856) wrote:

“It is pointless to guess at what more Schubert might have achieved. He did enough; and let them be honored who have striven and accomplished as he did.”  

Rather more recently, the pianist András Schiff (born 1953) said that:

“Schubert lived a very short life, but it was a very concentrated life. In 31 years, he [composed] more than other people would in 100 years, and it is needless to speculate what he could have written had he lived another 50 years. It’s irrelevant, just like with Mozart.” 

At very least, I would accuse Messrs. Schumann and Schiff of being intellectual party-poopers, by denying themselves the joys of speculation.  But I also believe their assertions that speculation is “pointless,” “needless,” and “irrelevant” to be downright wrong.

Why “wrong”?  Because speculating on “what if” allows us to formulate alternative outcomes, alternative outcomes that in the end help us to recognize and process more deeply what actually did happen.   

(Of course, if the American theoretical physicist and string theorist Brian Greene is correct, and we live in a “quilted multiverse,” then any possible event will occur an infinite number of times in an infinite number of parallel universes.  If this is true, there is no such thing as “speculation,” as anything we might “speculate upon” will already have occurred or will occur in some universe or another!)

Back to our cozy, home universe. To my mind, far from being merely sport, speculating on possible outcomes allows us to sharpen our understanding of what actually did happen, and to appreciate as well the incredible web of interactive cause-and-effect that characterizes the progress of time.

For example.  What if Georges Bizet had lived another thirty years, until 1905, and had died at the age of 67?  He might very well have decided to compose another symphony, or another two symphonies, or another three symphonies, or whatever.  Based on what we now know to be his Symphony in C, those subsequent symphonies would almost certainly have been terrific works.  Had Bizet lived even a few more months, the fame and fortune that just eluded him in his lifetime (more on this in a bit) would have been his for the taking, and a work like the Symphony in C would likely not have languished in an archive for all those years.

Idle speculation? Yes.  But it helps us to understand just how special Bizet’s Symphony in C really is and just how unfair was its fate.…

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I am aware that Valentine’s Day is already 5 days past, but darned if the romantic warm ‘n’ fuzzies aren’t still lingering with me like a rash from poison oak. As such, I will be excused for offering up what I will admit is a belated, but nevertheless Valentine’s Day-related post.

Gratitude

We should all be grateful that the following Valentine’s Day-related post is not on the lines of those blogs I wrote in 2010 and 2011, blogs written for various websites in my attempt to drum up sales for my Great Courses/Teaching Company Courses. For example, I wrote a couple of Valentine’s Day-themed blogs in 2011, one for Huffpost and the other for J-Date, as in “Jewish-Dating.” For those posts – entitled “Romantic Music” – I was tasked with recommending appropriately “romantic” music for an intimate, tête-à-tête Valentine’s Day evening. This is how they began:

“Fresh flowers, chilled champagne, and a candlelight dinner for two; the stereotypical trappings of a successful Valentine’s Day evening. But the sensual menu is still incomplete: smell, taste, touch, and sight are covered, but proper sound is still wanting.

Yes indeed, music, the purported feast of the gods, the indispensable aural lubricant for romance, must be chosen and chosen well.”

OMG; gag me with not just a spoon but an industrial-sized ladle. BTW, I will not waste your time with the music I recommended except to observe that it consisted of all the usual suspects, saccharine music for a Hallmark Holiday.

One song that wasn’t on my list back then but would surely be on it today is one that reflects the cynicism with which I now hold the entire St. Valentine’s Day trip. That song is Frankie and Johnny.

Frankie and Johnny

There are so many different versions of the song Frankie and Johnny that to this day, no one is precisely sure who originally wrote it. (Writing in 1962, a musicologist named Bruce Redfern Buckley unearthed 291 different versions of Frankie and Johnny!) The version we are most familiar with today was created by the Leighton Brothers (Frank and Bert) along with the then well-known folk musician Ren Shields (1868-1913) in 1908.

The lyric of the song tells the lurid tale of a prostitute named Frankie and her wayward boyfriend, Johnny. Here are the first nine of the song’s thirteen verses.

“Frankie and Johnny were lovers,
O Lordy, how they could love.
They swore to be true to each other,
Just as true as the stars above.
He was her man but he done her wrong.

Frankie and Johnny went walking,
Johnny had a brand new suit.
Frankie paid a hundred dollars,
Just to make her man look cute.
He was her man but he done her wrong.

Johnny said, “I’ve got to leave you,
But I won't be very long.
Don’t you wait up for me, honey,
Nor worry while I’m gone.”
He was her man but he done her wrong.

Frankie went down to the corner,
Stopped in to buy her some beer.
Says to the fat bartender,
“Has my Johnny man been here?”
He was her man but he done her wrong.

“Well, I ain’t going to tell you no story,
Ain’t going to tell you no lie.
Johnny went by ‘bout an hour ago,
With a girl named Nellie Bly.
He is your man but he’s doing you wrong.”

Frankie went home in a hurry,
She didn’t go there for fun.
She hurried home to get ahold
Of Johnny's shootin’ gun.
He was her man but he’s doing her wrong.

Frankie took a cab at the corner,
Says, driver step on this cab.
She was just a desperate woman,
Getting’ two-timed by her man.
He was her man but he’s doin’ her wrong.

Frankie got out at south Clark Street,
Looked in a window, so high.
Saw Johnny, man, a lovin’ up,
That high-brow Nellie Bly.
He was her man but he done her wrong.

Johnny saw Frankie a-comin’,
Out the back door he did scoot.
But Frankie took aim with her pistol,
And the gun went roota-toot-toot.
He was her man but he done her wrong.”

Ah, romance, don’t you think?

Now that’s a Valentine’s Day-appropriate love song! No flowers and carb-loaded chocolates but rather, genuine passion and three .44 caliber slugs!

The song was inspired by an actual event that took place in an apartment building at 212 Targee Street in St. Louis, Missouri’s red-light district. At 2am on the morning of October 15, 1899, a 22-year-old prostitute named Frankie Baker (1876-1952) shot and killed her lover and pimp, the 17-year-old Allen (or “Albert”) Britt.…

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February 12 is one of those remarkable days in music history, remarkable for all the notable events that took place on this day. So: before getting to our featured topic, let us acknowledge some of those events and share some links to previous Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts that dealt with those events.

On this day in 1812, Beethoven’s student (and friend), the Austrian composer, pianist, and teacher Carl Czerny (1791-1857) performed as the soloist in the premiere of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, the “Emperor.” Czerny was the subject of Music History Monday on July 15, 2019.

We wish a heartfelt farewell to the German pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who died on this date in Cairo, Egypt in 1894, at the age of 64. Von Bülow was the subject of both Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes just last month, on January 8 and 9,respectively.

Birthday greetings to the American composer Roy Harris (1898-1979), who was born on this date in 1898 in Chandler, Oklahoma. Harris and his Symphony No. 3 were featured in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post on April 9, 2019.

On February 12, 1924 – exactly 100 years ago today – George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue received its premiere at Aeolian Hall in New York City. Gershwin (1898-1937), accompanied by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, played the solo piano part. George Gershwin and his music have been featured regularly on my Patreon page, including Music History Monday on July 11, 2022; and in Dr. Bob Prescribes posts on October 20, 2020, and January 5, 2021.

Finally, we mark the death on February 12, 1959, of the American composer George Antheil (1900-1959) at the age 58, in New York City. Antheil was the subject of Music History Monday on July 8, 2019.

With no further ado, it is – finally – time to move on to today’s topic!

On February 12, 1797 – 227 years ago today –– Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in C Major, Op. 76, No. 3, nicknamed “Emperor” reputedly received its premiere. The quartet’s nickname – “Emperor” – stems from the hymn tune Haydn employed in its second movement theme and variations, a hymn Haydn had composed just a few months before and which was adopted as the Austrian national anthem in 1797.

This elegant and stately hymn, through a route most circuitous (a route that will be detailed in a bit), eventually became the national anthem of Nazi Germany (an anthem that began with the words Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, or “Germany, Germany above all else”).

Had Joseph Haydn – who was a kind, considerate, gentle, optimistic, old-world man of peace and good-will – had even an inkling that a depraved, criminal regime was going to adopt his hymn as its anthem (and as a result forever link his hymn with that regime), he would likely first have vomited and then burned the manuscript of the hymn and every copy he could get his hands on.

The Nazi’s adoption of Haydn’s hymn for its own, political ends, was neither the first nor last example of something we call, today, “unauthorized use.”…

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On February 5, 1887 – 137 years ago today – Giuseppe Verdi’s 25^th and second-to-last opera, Otello, received its premiere at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan.  The premiere was the single greatest triumph in Verdi’s sensational career.  But it was a premiere – and an opera – that was a long time coming.

Background

He was born on October 10, 1813, in the sticks: in the tiny village of Le Roncole, in the northern Italian province of Parma.  

Verdi’s first opera, Oberto, received its premiere at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in November 1839, when Verdi was 26 years old.  Oberto was a modest success – it received 13 performances – and based on its success, the management at La Scala offered Verdi a contract to compose three more operas.  Verdi had begun his second opera – a comedy called A King for a Day – when catastrophe struck: he lost his wife and two young children to disease during a horrific, 20-month span between 1839 and 1840.  Rendered nearly insane by the deaths, Verdi nevertheless battled through his grief and managed to complete A King for a Day.  The opera received its premiere on September 5, 1840; it was booed off the stage and its run was cancelled on the spot after that one performance.  For Verdi, the experience was excruciatingly painful, and it’s one he never forgot.  Twenty years later, still mad as hell, Verdi wrote:

“[The audience] abused the opera of a poor, sick young man, harassed by the pressure of the schedule and heartsick and torn by horrible misfortune!  Oh, if the audience then had – I do not say applauded, but had borne that opera in silence – I would not have had the words to thank them.  Today, I accept the public; I accept its whistles, on the condition that I am not asked to give back anything in exchange for its applause.”

From that night in September of 1840 to the end of his life, over sixty years later, Verdi’s personal relationship with the public was set in his own mind, and, as far as Verdi was concerned, it was not an affectionate relationship.  He later wrote that as a result of the fiasco:

“At 26, I knew what ‘the public’ meant.  From then on, successes have never made the blood rush to my head, and fiascos have never discouraged me.  If I went on with this unfortunate career, it was because at 26 it was too late for me to do anything else.”

Verdi was a tough, taciturn, straight-talking, no-nonsense man to begin with.  The loss of his family and the failure of A King for a Day made him doubly (triply? quadruply?) so.  Still, with the help and support of La Scala’s director, Bartolomeo Merelli, Verdi continued to battle through his grief over his family and rage over the fiasco that was A King for a Day to compose his third opera, entitled Nabucco.  Nabucco, which received its premiereon March 9, 1842 (also at La Scala) was a smash hit from which Verdi never looked back.  

The Galley Slave

No composer ever worked harder than did 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; always emotionally depressed and physically ill with some bug or another.

According to Verdi, he hated the whole stinkin’ opera trip, and as early as 1845 – at the age of just 32 – he was already thinking about retiring.  On November 5, 1845, he wrote to a friend in Rome:

“Thanks for remembering your poor friend, condemned to continually scribbling notes.  God save the ears of every good Christian from having to listen to them!  How am I, physically and spiritually?  Physically I am well, but my mind is black, always black, and will be so until I have finished with this career that I hate.” 

Retirement at Last!

As it turned out, it wasn’t until late 1875 that the now 62-year-old Verdi, still in his prime and at the top of his game, dropped his thunderbolt and did the unthinkable: he informed his nearest and dearest – his second wife, his friends, and his publisher – that as a composer he was through.  After 24 operas and one Requiem, Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was done, finito. When his great friend Clarina Maffei told him that he had a moral obligation to compose, Verdi wrote:

“Are you serious about my moral obligation to compose? No, you’re joking, since you know as well as I that the account is settled.”

…

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We mark the premiere on January 29, 1781 – 243 years ago today – of Wolfgang Mozart’s opera Idomeneo, Re di Creta (“Idomeneo, King of Crete”).  With a libretto by Giambattista Varesco (1735-1805), which was adapted from a French story by Antoine Danchet (1671-1748), itself based on a play written in 1705 by the French tragedian Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1674 -1762; that’s a lot of writing credits!), Idomeneo received its premiere at the Cuvilliés Theatre in Munich, Germany.  Idomeneo was a hit, and it constitutes not just Mozart’s first operatic masterwork but, by consensus, the single greatest Italian-language opera seria ever composed!

Setting the Biographical Scene

On January 15^th, 1779, the 23-year-old Wolfgang Mozart returned home to Salzburg after having been away for 15 months.  His trip, which had taken him primarily to Mannheim and Paris, had been both a professional and personal disaster.  He had left Salzburg with his mother, filled with high hopes, high spirits, and dreams of finding a permanent job and romance.  He returned without his mother (who had died in Paris), without a job, without any money, and without the young woman he had met and fallen in love with during the trip (one Aloysia Weber), who had rejected his proposal of marriage and sent him packing.

In returning – at his father Leopold’s insistence – to Salzburg and the dreaded employ of Archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo (to say nothing for the life of chastity required by both his father and the archbishop!), Mozart was painfully aware that he was wasting his time, his talent, and his testosterone.  And he was furious about it.

By 1780, the now 24-year-old Mozart was both personally and professionally suffocating there in Salzburg.  He desperately wanted out and despaired that life was passing him by.  

More than anything, Mozart wanted to compose opera (something that was difficult to do in Salzburg, given that the archbishop had closed all the theaters!).  Mozart was, at his core, a person of the theater and lived for everything the opera theater entailed.  He wrote:

“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 Stars Align

As the old line goes, “sometimes, it’s not just what you know but who you know that matters!”

In 1780, that line applied very nicely to Mozart, for which we all must be grateful.  Because it was thanks to his own, hard-won personal contacts that he received the commission for Idomeneo, a commission that changed not only Mozart’s life but the very history of Western music, taken as widely as we please.…

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We mark the premiere on January 22, 1859 – 165 years ago today – of Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, in the German city of Hanover.

No other work by Brahms caused him such effort; never before or after did he so agonize over a piece, working and reworking it over and over again.

Background

On October 1, 1853, the 20-year-old Johannes Brahms showed up at the door of Robert and Clara Schumann’s house in Düsseldorf, in the Rhineland.  At the time, Brahms was pretty much a complete unknown outside of his hometown of Hamburg.  He was visiting the Schumann’s at the behest of the violinist and conductor Joseph Joachim (1831-1907) who, although only two years older than Brahms, was already world famous.  

Physically, the young Brahms looked virtually nothing like the bearded, portly, cigar-smoking, bear-like dude of his later years; at twenty he was described as being:

“a shy, awkward, nearsighted young man, blonde, delicate, almost wispy, boyish in appearance as well as in manner (the beard was still 22 years away) and with a voice whose high pitch was a constant embarrassment to him.”

This 20-year-old kid might not have looked like our familiar image of Brahms, but his extraordinary talents as a composer and pianist were already there, and in spades.  He performed some his early music for Robert and Clara and they were, very simply, gob smacked. 

That evening Clara wrote in her journal:

“Here is one who comes as if sent from God!  He played us sonatas and scherzos of his own, all of them rich in fantasy, depth of feeling and mastery of form.  Robert could see no reason to suggest any changes.  A great future lies before him, for when he comes to the point of writing for orchestra, then he will have found the true medium for his imagination.” 

Robert’s diary entry that night was rather more abbreviated:

“Visit from Brahms (a genius).”

Brahms stayed with the Schumanns for a full month, and bonded with them like a wad of gum to the bottom of your high tops. …

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On January 15, 1972 – 52 years ago today – Don McLean’s folk-rock song American Pie began what would eventually be a four-week stay at number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.  The song made the singer, songwriter, and guitarist Don McLean (born 1945) very famous and very rich, and it is considered by many to be one of the greatest songs ever written.

No One is Perfect

Not a one of us is perfect, and that goes double/triple/quadruple for me.  I eat ice cream right out of the carton before putting it back in the freezer, and will guzzle club soda and tonic water out of the bottle before putting it back in the fridge. I will lick a knife with cream cheese or peanut butter on it, lest any of it go to waste, and I will observe my personal ten-to-fifteen second rule when I drop food on the floor (providing one of the cats hasn’t gotten to it first). 

I don’t always turn my socks right-side-out before putting them in the washing machine, and I have been known to forget to water the plants even when I’ve been reminded to do so. (Regarding the freaking plants: the heck with them if they don’t have a sense of humor; besides, do I ever ask them to make me a drink?).   

(FYI: I routinely introduce myself to house plants as “Agent Orange.” You can actually hear them shrivel.)

I would add in my favor that I always put the seat down and replace the toilet paper roll; I floss every day; hang up my towel; immediately put my dirty clothes in the hamper; and never, ever, leave dirty dishes on the counter or in the sink.

What, you ask, has prompted this bit of confession, which might very well be considered TMI by many (if not most) of you?

Here’s why. By admitting to some of my many flaws, I am attempting to pre-emptively head off your criticism of me, criticism for disparaging a rock ‘n’ roll song considered by many to be an icon, a classic, one of the greatest songs of the rock ‘n’ roll era (an era now some 70 years in age!). 

The song I am referring to is none-other-than Don McLean’s American Pie.

We’ve Been Down This Road Before

This is not the first time I’ve proven myself aesthetically imperfect by offering up a less-than-positive critical evaluation of a presumably “classic” rock ‘n’ roll song.  (Yes: I typically prefer to take a high critical road here on Patreon, but sometimes that’s just not possible.) Such a thing happened in my Music History Monday post of August 24, 2020, a post that “celebrated” what was then the 45^th anniversary of Freddie Mercury and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. 

I admitted then and will admit now that I have always considered Bohemian Rhapsody to be among the most overrated things in contemporary popular culture, right up there with Tik Tok, air pods, anime, and Cardi B. 

In that post I observed that Bohemian Rhapsody was never considered, by its creator(s), to be anything other than nonsense.

According to Freddie Mercury’s friend, the DJ and television personality Kenny Everett (who played a key role in promoting Bohemian Rhapsody on his radio show), the song’s lyrics have no meaning whatsoever.  According to Everett, Freddie Mercury told him that the words were simply “random rhyming nonsense.”

Bohemian Rhapsody’s producer Roy Thomas Baker recalled in 1999:

“Bohemian Rhapsody was totally insane, but we enjoyed every minute of it. It was basically a joke, but a successful joke . . . We never stopped laughing.”

However, being declared a “joke” by its author and producer has not stopped the listening public and the critical community from turning Bohemian Rhapsody into a defining masterwork, a philosophical tract of generational import, a song considered by many critics and fans alike to be among the greatest rock ‘n’ roll songs of all time, a song that routinely polls in the top five of “greatest songs of all time.” And lest we forget: in 2012, the readers of Rolling Stone magazine voted Freddie Mercury’s performance of Bohemian Rhapsody to be “the greatest in rock history.”

And so my post of August 24, 2020, critical of Bohemian Rhapsody, drew the righteous anger of many of my patrons. 

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We mark the birth on January 8, 1830 – 196 years ago today – of the German pianist, conductor, composer, and cuckold, Hans Guido von Bülow.  Born in the Saxon capital of Dresden, he died in a hotel in Cairo, Egypt, on February 12, 1894, at the age of 64. 

Poor Hans von Bülow.  He was one of the top pianists and conductors of his time.  His career was closely associated with some of the greatest composers of all time, including Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, and Pyotr Tchaikovsky.  Famous for his devastating wit and ability to turn a phrase, it was Bülow who coined the alliterative trio of “Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.” Sadly, for all of his many accomplishments and deserved renown, he remains best known today (in no small measure because of scandal-mongering sensationalists like myself) as one of the great cuckolds of all time, right up there with myself (cuckolded by my college girlfriend Maureen Makler and an Israeli guy named Avi Luzon); Eddie Fisher (cuckolded by Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), and Henry VIII (cuckolded, or so we are told, by Ann Boleyn and a wide assortment of various courtiers and hangers-on). 

Bummer all the way around, Hans, just bummer.

(Listen: to make up for this gracelessly scandalous post and to give Herr von Bülow some of the respect he is due, tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will feature Alan Walker’s superb biography of the man’s life, a life that should not be defined solely by the betrayal of his wife, Cosima Liszt von Bülow, and his erstwhile “friend,” Richard Wagner!)

Hans von Bülow (1830-1894)

He was born into the noble “House of Bülow,” an ancient German/Danish family whose members have, over the centuries, been entitled Freiherr (meaning Baron); Graf (meaning Count); and even Fürst (meaning Prince).

Growing up in Dresden, Bülow began formal piano lessons at the age of nine and quickly established himself as a major prodigy.  In 1844, at the age of 14, he and his mother moved to Leipzig, where he enrolled at the Leipzig Conservatory, founded just a year before by Felix Mendelssohn.  It was there that Hans studied with the highly regarded pedant Louis Plaidy. In 1845, at the of 15, Bülow took his piano lessons with Friedrich Wieck.  (Wieck was the father of Clara Wieck-Schumann, eventual father-in-law of Robert Schumann, and the piano teacher who ruined Robert Schumann’s right hand!)  

Hans von Bülow was as intellectually precocious as he was musically precocious.  Unfortunately, the physical package that contained these gifts was . . . wanting.  Writes Alan Walker:

“As a child von Bülow was a weakling.  According to his mother he succumbed to ‘brain fever’ five times and was continually in the care of doctors.  [For our information, ‘Brain Fever’ is defined as ‘an acute nervous breakdown and/or temporary insanity, due to extreme emotional distress.’] Bülow was ravaged by headaches, which struck him down whenever the problems of life overwhelmed him.  He also became self-conscious about his personal appearance; his short stature, high forehead, and slightly bulging eyes caused him embarrassment. Eventually, he learned to protect himself from the imagined hostility of the world by his trenchant use of language, which became the scourge of his enemies and the despair of his friends.”

In a story that has become as cliché as a movie character setting fire to a building and walking away in slow motion, Hans’ parents (that would be the novelist Karl Eduard von Bülow and Franziska Elisabeth Stoll von Berneck) demanded that he forego a career in music and instead, study law.  In 1848, at the age of 18, Hans was packed off to the Leipzig University Law School.  In 1849, he transferred to the University of Berlin. While on his way to Berlin, Bülow stopped in Weimar to visit the great Franz Liszt, who he had met when he was a child back in Dresden and with whom he’d corresponded, on and off, for years.  

The visit changed Hans von Bülow’s life. Liszt and Bülow began what became their life-long mutual admiration society.  Among other things, Bülow heard Franz Liszt conduct the premiere of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin there in Weimar and for Bülow, that was that. His nascent “career” as a lawyer evaporated like a puddle in Death Valley.

With Liszt’s encouragement, Bülow visited and introduced himself to Richard Wagner (1813-1883), who was living, at the time, in Zurich, Switzerland.  Then – with Wagner’s encouragement – Hans served as an apprentice conductor in a number of theaters there in Zurich, getting his first taste of the seductive power of the baton. Finally, in June 1851, von Bülow returned to Weimar, where he became Liszt’s first great piano student. 

According to Liszt and Bülow’s biographer Alan Walker:

“Liszt’s admiration for the talents of his young pupil was unbounded, and he came to regard him as his true heir in piano playing.”

As Liszt’s “heir,” in 1857 Hans von Bülow received from his master two great gifts: the fruits of Liszt’s artistry and that of his loins.  On January 27, 1857, Bülow was tasked with giving the premiere performance – in Berlin – of what is arguably Liszt’s greatest solo piano work: his Piano Sonata in B minor.  As for Liszt’s loins, on August 18, 1857, Franz Liszt gave Hans von Bülow the hand of his second child – his daughter Cosima – in marriage.  For both Hans and Cosima, it was to be a marriage from hell.  …

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On December 18, 1962 – 61 years ago today – Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13 received its premiere in Moscow.  The symphony stirred up a proverbial hornet’s nest of controversy, and we’re not talking here about your everyday hornet, but rather, those gnarly ‘n’ gnasty Asian Giant Hornets!

It was a symphonic premiere that almost didn’t take place, though, in the end, the show did go on.  Nevertheless, the authorities (the Soviet authorities, notable for their heavy blue serge suits, vodka breaths, and deficient senses of humor) did everything in their power to squash the symphony out of existence.  In this they failed miserably, and Shostakovich’s Thirteenth is today acknowledged as not just one of Shostakovich’s supreme masterworks but as one of the most musically and politically important works composed during the twentieth century. 

A Good Communist

During the late 1950s, Shostakovich was increasingly used by the Soviet authorities as a sort of artistic “figure head,” meant to represent the supposedly “free” Soviet intelligentsia.  In 1960, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union – Nikita Khrushchev (1894-1971) – decided to make the 54-year-old Shostakovich the chairman of the newly founded RSFSR, the Russian Union of Composers.  It was a huge honor, and Shostakovich felt that it was a position that would make him, finally and for all time, unassailable, untouchable, unpurgeable and, of equal importance, would guarantee the safety and success of his two now-grown children, Galina (24 years old) and Maxim (22 years old).  However, there was a catch: to take the position, Shostakovich had to join the Communist Party, something he had long-sworn he would never, ever, under any circumstances, do.  Well, he did join the Communist Party, telling his friends that he signed the necessary papers while under the influence of alcohol, SUI, “signing under the influence.”  For months afterwards, Shostakovich was – no exaggeration – literally hysterical with self-loathing.  The musicologist, folklorist, and friend of Shostakovich Lev Lebedinsky recalled:

“I will never forget some of the things he said that night [before his induction into the Party], sobbing hysterically: ‘I’m scared to death of them’; ‘You don’t know the whole truth’; ‘From childhood I’ve always had to do things I didn’t want to do’; ‘I’ve been a whore, and always will be a whore.’ 

He often lashed at himself in strong words.” 

And so, kicking and screaming, Shostakovich joined the Soviet Communist Party.  For all the world, he was the picture of a good and obedient Communist apparatchik.  Again, according to the previously quoted Lev Lebedinsky:

“Without fail he attended every possible ridiculous meeting of the Supreme Soviet, every plenary session, every political gathering; he even took part in the AGITPROP [agitation/propaganda] car rally.  In other words, he eagerly took part in events that he himself described as ‘torture by boredom.’  He sat there like a puppet, applauding when the others applauded.  Once I remember him clapping eagerly after Khrennikov had made a speech in which he made some offensive remarks about Shostakovich!’ ‘Why did you clap when you were being criticized?’ I asked.  He hadn’t even noticed! 

What moved him was not a lack of principles, but [fear].  Take his attack on Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov.  It is well known that Shostakovich sympathized with both of them.  So God only knows what possessed him to put his signature on that filthy slander of Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. Nobody forced him to do it.  Afterwards he cursed himself, saying that he’d never forgive himself for having done it.” 

The Thaw

While all of this was happening, the nature of Soviet suppression was actually changing for the better.

Joseph Stalin – the “great leader and teacher” and truly, one of the worst people ever to have lived – died on March 5, 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, at least 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 after it second performance.  It was composed, it was heard, and its impact could not be forgotten.  

The Poem and a Symphony

On September 19, 1961, a poem entitled Babi Yar was published.  Written by a 28-year-old poet named Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1932-2017), the poem – an outright condemnation of Soviet anti-Semitism – unleashed a firestorm of controversy.  Yevtushenko was vilified, ostracized, threatened, and spat upon.  (During Stalin’s lifetime, Yevtushenko would simply have been “disappeared,” leaving hardly a wet spot.  So we must consider the treatment he received in 1961 in response to his poem as being quite benign!)…

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On December 11, 1721 – 302 years ago today – Johann Sebastian Bach’s employer, the 27-year-old Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen (1694-1728), married the 19-year-old Friederica Henrietta of Anhalt-Bernburg (1702-1723).  She was the fourth daughter (and youngest child) of Charles Frederick, Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg (1668-1721) and his first wife, Sophie Albertine of Solms-Sonnenwalde (1672-1708).

We can only hope that the kids enjoyed their wedding, because, sadly, their marriage was not fated to last for very long.

(Allow me, please, a small bit of editorial bloviation. Speaking as a lower middle-class American kid born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in South Jersey – meaning someone with zero tolerance for all this royalty stuff – I find all of these puffed-up hereditary royals insufferable in both their titles and their actions.  Among the actions of the literally hundreds of “princes” and “princesses” of the Holy Roman Empire was to intermarry, for generations, with other such “people of quality,” meaning their cousins.  A brief look at their life spans – which are, indeed, representative of their “class” – reveals how well that turned out.  Bach’s beloved boss, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen, lived for all of 33 years.  

Leopold’s father, Emmanuel Lebrecht of Anhalt-Cöthen [1671-1704] lasted just 33 years as well, though Leopold’s mother – Anna Eleonore of Stolberg-Wernigerode [1651-1690] – managed to live for 39 years.  Leopold’s wife – Friederica Henrietta, the Amusa of this post’s title – lived to be only 21.  Her parents – Charles Frederick, Prince of Anhalt-Bernburg and Sophie Albertine of Solms-Sonnenwalde did a bit better, living, respectively, to the ages of 53 and 36.  Meanwhile, our magnificent Johann Sebastian Bach lived to be 65 and would certainly have lived longer if not for a botched cataract operation by a quack “oculist” named “Chevalier” John Taylor who, incidentally, lived to be 69 years of age. 

Speaking strictly for myself, if I had to choose between a “title” and a long life span, I’ll choose life span every time.) 

Back, please, to the wedding of Prince Leopold and Princess Friederica Henrietta.  It was a lavish and extended five-week long affair, one that put my cousins Arthur and Larry Gottlieb’s Bar Mitzvahs in Massapequa, Long Island, to shame.

Unfortunately, for Bach, the wedding was something else: it was 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 that he had hoped to hold for the remainder of his life.  

Alas; as the old Yiddish saying goes, “Mann Tracht, Un Gott Lacht,” meaning “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 troublesome, even cantankerous employee, something that got him into trouble on a regular basis.…

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We mark the premiere on December 4, 1881 – 142 years ago today – of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s one-and-only violin concerto, his Violin Concerto in D major.  It received its premiere in Vienna, where it was performed by the violinist Adolf Brodsky and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Hans Richter.

The concerto is, in my humble opinion, Tchaikovsky’s single greatest work and one of a handful of greatest concerti ever composed.   Yet its premiere in Vienna elicited one of the most vicious reviews of all time.

Unfortunately for him, Tchaikovsky was indeed one of the most over-criticized composers in the history of Western music.

(Just asking: do any of us like being criticized?  I think not, and please, let’s not dignify that oxymoronic phrase, “constructive criticism” by considering it seriously. I don’t mean to sound over-sensitive, but after a certain age – say, 25 – criticism of any sort, even if it is deserved [we’re talking to you, George Santos] is simply infuriating.)

Tchaikovsky was also one of the most over-sensitive people ever to become a major composer, which meant that the sometimes brutal criticism he received drove him to near madness.  (Regarding Tchaikovsky’s sensitivity, as a youngster, his governess called him “a porcelain child” so easily was his spirit chipped and cracked.)  Given Tchaikovsky’s emotional nature, and the fact that he was additionally – as a homosexual in Tsarist Russia – leading virtually a double life, well, we’ve got a prescription for a challenging emotional life.

Who Will Play My Concerto?

The actual composition of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto went smoothly.  However, the drama surrounding its first performance drove the poor, hysteria-prone dude to despair.  

Background.  In late February of 1878, Tchaikovsky arrived in Clarens, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where he and his “entourage” took up lodging at the Villa Richelieu.  Tchaikovsky was on the mend from his epically disastrous marriage to a frankly crazed former student of his named Antonina Milyukova. The marriage had lasted less than three months, from July 18 to October 7, 1877, at which time Tchaikovsky had a complete nervous breakdown and was spirited out of Moscow by his brothers.  

One of Tchaikovsky’s visitors there at Clarens was the violinist Yosif Kotek (1855-1885), a bi-sexual lover of Tchaikovsky’s.  Tchaikovsky and Kotek engaged in all sorts of activities there in Clarens – some of them even musical – and Tchaikovsky, feeling rejuvenated and inspired, sketched and orchestrated his entire violin concerto in under a month.

Tchaikovsky wanted to dedicate the concerto to Kotek – he really did – but he didn’t dare because he was terrified by the gossip he believed the dedication would inspire.  So instead, he dedicated it to a faculty colleague at the Moscow Conservatory, the then world-famous violinist Leopold Auer (1845-1930).  Politically, it was a savvy choice: Tchaikovsky knew that Auer’s fame would give the concerto the sort of caché that would ensure its success.

Sadly, Tchaikovsky’s plan blew up in his face when Auer pronounced that the solo part was “unplayable.” A mortified Tchaikovsky later wrote in his diary:

“Auer pronounced it impossible to play, and this verdict, coming from such an authority, had the effect of casting this unfortunate child of my imagination into the limbo of hopelessly forgotten things.” 

Hesitantly (sheepishly?), Tchaikovsky went back to Kotek and offered him the dedication and the premiere performance.  But Kotek, peeved that Tchaikovsky had approached Auer, not only told Tchaikovsky to make like a tree and leave but then also pronounced the piece to be unplayable (and this from someone who had played through every single note of it while it was being composed!).  

Truly, hell hath no fury like a violinist spurned.…

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On November 27, 1896 – 127 years ago today – Richard Strauss conducted the premiere performance of his sprawling orchestral tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the German city of Frankfurt. 

Requests

A momentary and applicable (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.  The first band in which I played was a rock ‘n’ roll garage band called “Cold Sun” and the last was a Berkeley, California-based 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 every sort of gig, 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.

I played at The Pewter House, in 1978 and 1979, on Friday and Saturday evenings.  It was most definitely during my “starving (grad) student” stage, so what I particularly loved about the job was the dinner I’d eat with the staff after closing time.  There was always left-over prime rib, and I consumed my body weight on a weekly basis.  I also loved the people I worked with and dined with after-hours: the bartender, a big, beautifully mustachioed Czech named Marin; the wait staff (particularly the cocktail waitresses; OMG: how I continue to adore cocktail waitresses!); and the kitchen staff (mostly illegals who worked like dogs at multiple jobs and sent whatever money they could back home); talk about a cross section of Oakland’s population. 

What I did not love about my job was an occupational hazard shared by all house musicians, and that is the request.  I’d prime my tip jar with a twenty and a couple of fives, but that wouldn’t stop folks from making requests and then winking at me as they dropped a dime or a quarter into the jar, as if they were doing me a favor.  As evenings wore on, and the restaurant’s action increasingly moved into the cocktail lounge (where the piano was located), the blood alcohol level of the clientele became markedly higher.  It was not at all uncommon, later in the evening, for me to be approached by an off-kilter patron who, in making their request, would say something on the lines of:

“hey, can you guys play . . .”

Yes, I was a solo act, but perhaps these inebriates were seeing double, thus the “you guys.”

Among the most common requests I received at The Pewter House there in the late 1970s were: “can you guys play The Sting?” (this meant Scott Joplin’s classic rag, The Entertainer, which dominated the soundtrack of the 1973 Paul Newman/Robert Redford movie The Sting). Just as often I was asked to play Love is Blue, Classical Gas, Brian’s Song, and . . . and . . . wait for it . . . “the theme from 2001.”

2001: A Space Odyssey, Produced, Directed, and Co-written by Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)

By “the theme from 2001,” my requesters were referring to the opening minute-and-a-half of Richard Strauss’ orchestral tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  In Strauss’ work, this opening music is meant to represent sunrise and with it, the coming of the “light,” meaning the coming of enlightenment.  In his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (of 1968), Kubrick uses Strauss’ music to represent exactly the same thing.  Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the sonic equivalent of the Monolith, together the bringers of knowledge, enlightenment, and transformation.…

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We mark the conclusion on November 20, 2022 – one year ago today – of the North American leg of Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour.”  The concert took place at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles; it was the third of three “farewell” concerts held at Dodgers Stadium. The three concerts (on November 17, 19, and 20) saw a total attendance of 142,970 people and grossed $23,462,993.

Since the first rock ‘n’ roll concert , which was held in Cleveland on March 21, 1952 (that would be the “Moondog Coronation Ball”), there have been rock ‘n’ roll concert tours and there have been rock ‘n’ roll farewell concert tours.  But Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour” was in a league of its own and will likely never, ever be matched.  The numbers are mind-boggling and bladder-weakening.  The tour, interrupted, as it was, by the COVID epidemic, ran for nearly five years, from September 8, 2018, to July 8, 2023.  It began in Allentown, Pennsylvania and concluded in Stockholm, Sweden. It consisted of nine separate legs (or “tours within the tour”) and a total of 330 shows.  All together, the tour was attended by 6.1 million fans of Elton Hercules John (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on March 25, 1947) and generated a box office total of $939.1 million (heck, given all the merchandise that was also sold at the concerts, let’s just round that number up and call it a cool billion).  

Given these numbers, it should come as no surprise that Elton John’s “Farewell Yellow Brick Road: The Final Tour” is the highest grossing, the longest running, and most highly attended concert tour of all time.  

Elton John (born Reginald Dwight, 1947)

We will save a detailed biography of Maestro John for another time, so please – for now – suffice it the following.

Born in the ‘burbs just northwest of London, he began playing the piano as a young child.  Lessons began at seven, and by the time he was eleven his talents as a pianist were such that he won a scholarship to London’s Royal Academy of Music.  Young Reggie attended the Royal Academy part-time for the next five years, later claiming that what he enjoyed best was playing the music of Chopin and Sebastian Bach and singing in the Academy chorus.

At the age of 15, with the support and assistance of his mother and stepfather, Reggie got a job playing the piano – Thursday through Sunday evenings – at a local pub located in the Northwood Hills Hotel. (The hotel is still there, at 76 Joel Street, Northwood, about 10 miles northwest of central London.) It was there that he played standards and songs of his own composition. 

Reg began playing in bands (most notably one he helped found called Bluesology), and even though his eyesight at the time was just fine, he began wearing black, horn-rimmed glasses in solidarity with Buddy Holly.…

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We mark the death on November 13, 1868 – 155 years ago today – of the opera composer Gioachino Antonio Rossini, in Paris, at the age of 76. He was one of the most famous and beloved artists of his time, and he remains no less so today. It is my humble opinion that anyone who does not like Rossini’s operas – and, believe it or not, I have met any number of such people in the “rarified” confines of academia – well, such a person is a crank and a humbug, someone averse to melodic brilliance, theatric sparkle, and wit.

10,000 Hours?

In his book Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown and Company, 2008), the English-born Canadian journalist (and staff writer at The New Yorker) Malcolm Gladwell posited his “10,000-hour rule.” Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule asserts that:

“the key to achieving true expertise in any skill is simply a matter of practicing, albeit in the correct way, for at least 10,000 hours.”

Of course this is complete nonsense. We must conclude that Mr. Gladwell has practiced making absurd statements for well over 10,000 hours, so completely daft is his “rule.” Listen: when I was twenty, I was 5’7” in height and weighed 145 pounds (I can only wish that the latter were still the case!). I was strong, fast, and had good hand-eye coordination. I also had a vertical jump of about six inches, so no amount of time and practice was going to make me a high-jump champion, a ballet dancer, or allow me to fulfill my singular fantasy: to be able to dunk a basketball.

No way, no how.

The magnificent Spanish pianist Alicia de Laroccha (1923-2009) is said to have learned and memorized in twelve days – when she was but a child – the twelve pieces that make up Isaac Albéniz’s incredibly virtuosic Iberia.  All 12 pieces in 12 days; one piece a day. Again, I would, gratuitously, use myself as an example: I have “practiced” the piano for many more than 10,000 hours over the course of my life, and there no way on this good earth that I could learn and memorize any one piece from Iberia in under two weeks, if at all.

Again, no way, no how.

It is an unfortunate but irrefutable fact that genetic predisposition – meaning talent – counts for something as well. Yes, talent must be nurtured and “practiced,” but without it, Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours means bupkis (which is Yiddish for “goat droppings”).

Wit

I would suggest that among the gene-given abilities most impossible to “learn” – practice time notwithstanding (along with being able to dunk a basketball) – is wit, which is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as:

“a natural aptitude [i.e. talent] for using words and ideas in a quick and inventive way to create humor.”

When it comes to wit, you either got it or you don’t. Practicing bon mots for 10,000 hours will not make a tedious bore a witty person. (I personally find few social situations more awkward than being trapped in conversation with someone who thinks he or she is really clever but is, in fact, not clever at all. To paraphrase the old saw, “’tis better to remain silent and be thought a witless blockhead than to open one’s mouth and prove it.”)

Gioachino Rossini was, bless him, pretty much always the wittiest person in the room. Yes, other composers were famous for their quips as well; the acid-tongued Johannes Brahms and the easily irritated Arnold Schoenberg immediately come to mind. (Brahms was reputed to have left a party by standing at the door and bellowing, “if there’s anyone here I haven’t insulted, I apologize!”; the equally caustic Arnold Schoenberg wrote to a friend, telling him “I hope you weren’t stupid enough to be offended by what I said!”

Great lines both. But not as great as Rossini’s best lines.)…

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We mark the birth on November 6, 1854 – 169 years ago today – of the American composer, conductor, and violinist John Philip Sousa.  Born in Washington, D.C., Sousa died in Reading, Pennsylvania on March 6, 1932, at the age of 77.

Timing, Location, Life Experience, and Talent

We are told that talent – be it athletic, musical, artistic, culinary, whatever – will only take us so far; that without commitment, hard work, and perseverance “talent” is, in the end, nothing but potential.  But success in any field in which innate, gene-given talent is an underlying necessity requires something more than just blood, sweat, and tears: it also requires timing, location, and life experience.

We consider.  How many potential William Shakespeares have been born in times and places in which vernacular, secular theater was not being cultivated to a revolutionary degree?  How many latent Sebastian Bachs lived until one was born into the perfect family and at the perfect time and place to exploit his skill set? How many possible LeBron Jameses existed before the invention of basketball? 

I would suggest that what made Mozart “Mozart” was not just his talent and work ethic, but that his father was a professional musician who trained his son at a time and place when high-end music making was considered culturally indispensable.  If our Mozart had been born in 1999 in Cupertino, California to a father (or mother!) who worked for Apple, how do we think his talents and energies might have been directed?  Towards music?  I wouldn’t bet on it.

Yes, talent is huge, but timing and location and life experience make the artist as well, and rarely will we find a more striking confluence of talent, time, place, and experience than in the case of John Philip Sousa.

John Philip Sousa (1854-1932)

He was the third of ten children born to immigrant parents.  His mother, Maria Elizabeth (born Trinkhaus, 1826-1908) was born in Bavaria, in what today is southern Germany.  Sousa’s father, John Anthony Sousa (1824-1892), was born João António de Sousa in Spain, to Portuguese parents.  

Sousa was born, and the family lived, in a modest house at 636 G Street, in southeast Washington, D.C.  The address is significant because it was close to the United States Marine barracks where John Philip’s father, Antonio, was a trombonist in the Marine Band.  (For our information, the Marine Band based in Washington, D.C. is not just any military band. Known as “The President’s Own,” it is – today – the best and most prestigious military band in the United States and among the very best in the world.  It was John Philip Sousa himself, who led the Marine Band from 1880-1892, who turned it into the crack ensemble it remains to this day.)

Life experience. Growing up, John Philip Sousa’s musical mother’s milk was military band music.  It was in his blood, his DNA, and he was never to veer far from it.  …

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We mark October 30, 1822 – 201 years ago today – as being the day on which Franz Schubert began what is now known as his Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the “Unfinished Symphony.”  Lost just months after Schubert completed the two movements that make up the “Unfinished,” the symphony was heard for the first time in 1865, 43 years after its composition and 37 years after Schubert’s death.  

A Fable Agreed Upon

One of the many clever statements (or in this case, a question) credited to Napoleon Bonaparte is:

“What is history but a fable agreed upon?”

A good question for a despot who was intent on creating his own version of history.

However, it is a question that applies as well to our contemporary view of Ludwig van Beethoven, and how we have come to believe his music was perceived in his own time.  Today, Beethoven’s mature symphonies (nos. 3 through 9) are rightly perceived as representing his own, personal struggles and revolutionary times.  Our mistake – the “fable agreed upon” – occurs when we assume that Beethoven’s contemporaries believed the same thing about his mature symphonies.  

They did not.  

For Beethoven’s symphonic contemporaries, the first two decades of the nineteenth century were about the discovery and study of Haydn’s and Mozart’s late symphonies.  The musical style of such well-known, even famous (at the time) symphonic composers as Carl Friedrich Zelter, Jean-Paul Richter, Carl Maria von Weber, Ludwig Spohr, Adalbert Gyrowetz, Ferdinand Ries, Andrea Romberg, and Peter Winter was firmly based on the classical models of Haydn and Mozart.  According to musicologist Nicholas Temperley, these composers and others like them:

“reached a [classical] musical ideal to which Beethoven’s mature art seemed an intrusive irrelevance.” 

Posterity has been unkind to the symphonies of the aforementioned composers, symphonies that in their time were performed much more frequently than Beethoven’s.  It was only once that Beethoven’s symphonies came to be understood and appreciated for the masterworks that they are – and that process took a generation – that those of his more conservative, more classically oriented contemporaries were relegated to almost total obscurity.  Today, they are the stuff of Ph.D. dissertations and scholarly papers, the surest indicators of utter irrelevance.  

With one exception: the symphonies of Franz Schubert.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Franz Peter Schubert was born in Vienna on January 31, 1797.  It was in Vienna that he died, on November 19, 1828, aged 31 years, 9 months, and 20 days.  

Franz was one of four surviving Schubert children.  Our Franz was the beloved “pet” of the family; from every account that has come down to us he was a small, plump, and endearingly sweet child.  His growth-spurt hardly kicked in; the fully-grown Schubert was 1.57 meters in height (about 5’1”) and as his portraits attest, he never lost his cherubic appearance.  …

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We mark the death on October 23, 1950 – 73 years ago today – of the Lithuanian-American singer and actor Al Jolson. Born “Asa Yoelson” on May 26, 1886, in the village of Srednik, in what was then the Russian Empire and what is today Lithuania, he died of a massive heart attack in his suite at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco at the age of 64. He was playing cards with friends when he collapsed; his last words were “Oh … oh, I’m going.”

Singing ran deep in the Yoelson clan; his father Moses Yoelson was a cantor. The family immigrated to the United States in 1894 when young Asa was eight years old.

Jolson grew up in southwest Washington, D.C., where he began his “career” singing on street corners. From there, it was onto burlesque shows and performing on the vaudeville circuit. In those days, entertainment, local retail, and professional sports were among the few American “industries” open to immigrant Jews. If this sounds painfully familiar to Black Americans, well, so it should. Equally painful is that by 1905, the 19-year-old Jolson began appearing in “blackface”: a holdover from the minstrel shows of the nineteenth century. Jolson wasn’t the only performer working in blackface at the time, but he became the best known of his generation, the so-called “king of blackface.”

The subject of tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post is Al Jolson’s groundbreaking movie The Jazz Singer. Given that The Jazz Singer concludes with two musical numbers featuring Jolson in blackface, I feel that it’s important to broach this topic – “blackface” – here and now. That’s because the issue of blackface cuts to the heart of racism in America and to the soul of the American popular music industry, going back nearly two hundred years.

Blackface

My views on this subject have evolved; a lot. There was a time, when I was a young man (we’re talking decades ago), when I didn’t think much about it one way or the other. Having grown up in the American northeast, I was surrounded by all sorts of racial and ethnic stereotypes, and to be concerned about them seemed the height of oversensitivity and humorlessness.

So: growing up where and when I did (in the late 1950s and 1960s), I experienced a degree of casually insidious racism that conditioned me (and I daresay most of my generation) to accept a degree of bigotry that would be considered far out-of-bounds today.

For example, cast iron, black faced lawn jockeys dotted the front yards of my South Jersey suburban neighborhood. The book Little Black Sambo was on every toddler’s bookshelf, as were books by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991), many of which featured cartoon images of black and Asian people that make us cringe today (an example will appear later in this post). High-end comedians regularly appeared on network TV variety shows like Ed Sullivan, doing routines that today would be considered irredeemably offensive: for example, Buddy Hackett’s Chinese waiter bit and Bill Dana’s “My name is José Jiménez.”

Some old fogies among us might assert that the 1950s and ‘60s were better times, claiming that during those “good ol’ days,” we knew how to laugh at ourselves. But in fact, “we” – meaning, here, straight white people – weren’t laughing at themselves. No: they were laughing at other white people who were making fun of Asian people, Hispanic people, gay people, and – in the case of those wearing blackface – black people.

When I was growing up, blackface imagery was still everywhere to be seen: in the movies, on television, in books and magazines, and at Halloween parties. I took the presence of blackface for granted and was utterly unaware of its origins and how profoundly upsetting it had always been to Black Americans…

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A few, necessary words before moving on to today’s post.

Our hearts bleed for the events currently playing out in Israel and Gaza.

Frankly, there are no words.

Today is also the 14th anniversary of my wife Diane’s death; she died at the age of 35 on October 16, 2009.

Again, there are no words.

Our grief notwithstanding, we soldier on – as we must – doing what we can to make our individual “worlds” a better place. For me, here on Patreon, that means publishing my blogs and podcasts, and thus – hopefully – allowing us to observe the best of the human spirit through our music.

That’s my gig, inadequate though it feels on days like today.

We mark the premiere on Wednesday, October 16, 1912 – 111 years ago today – of Arnold Schoenberg’s dazzling, controversial, and in all ways extraordinary work Pierrot Lunaire, at Berlin’s Choralion–saal. The premiere was preceded by a mind-blowing forty rehearsals!

(For our information: chamber music premieres typically receive 3 to 5 rehearsals, max. It’s never enough, but that’s just how it is. Forty rehearsals for Pierrot Lunaire? Unheard of!)

Happy Coincidences!

As those of you who follow me on Patreon are aware, I’ve been serializing my book, The Composer is Always Right (CIAR), on Sundays, for over two years now. Yesterday’s installment was number 114; we have 27 more to go. For the first and what will be the only time, the topics of this week’s Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts and CIAR installment all deal with Arnold Schoenberg, the premiere of Pierrot Lunaire, and what, specifically, Schoenberg’s wife Mathilde made him “do.” As such, there will be some overlap between Music History Monday, Dr. Bob Prescribes, and The Composer is Always Right this week, for which I know will be forgiven.

The Schoenberg Dilemma (The Schoenberg Dichotomy)

The music of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) continues to present a unique dilemma, a unique dichotomy. On one hand, no major twentieth-century composer’s music has been – and continues to be – more misunderstood and disparaged by the general listening public than Schoenberg’s. On the other hand, along with Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky, no twentieth-century composer has exerted a greater influence on the compositional community than has Arnold Schoenberg.

On the first page of his wonderful little book, entitled Arnold Schoenberg (Princeton University Press, 1975), the American pianist and musicologist Charles Rosen speaks to this “Schoenberg dilemma”:

“In 1945, Arnold Schoenberg’s application for a grant was turned down by the Guggenheim Foundation. The hostility of the music committee to Schoenberg and his work was undisguised. The seventy-year-old composer had hoped for support in order to finish two of his largest musical compositions, the opera Moses und Aaron and the oratorio Jacob’s Ladder, as well as several theoretical works. Schoenberg had just retired from the [faculty of the] University of California at Los Angeles; since he had been there only eight years, he had a pension of $38.00 a month with which to support a wife and three children aged thirteen, eight, and four. He was obliged, therefore, to spend much of his time taking private pupils in composition. This ‘enforced’ teaching enabled him to complete only one of his theoretical works, the Structural Functions of Harmony. The opera and oratorio were still unfinished at the composer’s death six years later.

Recognized internationally as one of the greatest living composers, considered the finest of all by many, acknowledged, with Igor Stravinsky, as one of the two most influential figures in contemporary music since Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg at the end of his life continued to provoke an enmity, even a hatred, almost unparalleled in the history of music. The elderly artist whose revolutionary works had raised a storm of protest in his youth is a traditional figure, but in old age his fame is unquestioned and dissenting voices have been stilled. In Schoenberg’s case, the dissent may be said to have grown with the fame.”

Given the fear and loathing the name “Arnold Schoenberg” continues to inspire 72 years after his death you’d think he was some sort of Nosferatu-like monster who shot puppies for sport and refused to recycle. Rather, he was a short (around 5’2”), prematurely bald dude with a baritone voice couched in a soft Viennese accent, someone who loved kids (he was still fathering them into his mid-60’s), ping-pong, and tennis (he was, for a period during the late 1930s, George Gershwin’s regular tennis partner). He was, for our information, terrified (not too strong a word) of the number 13 (a fear known as “Triskaidekaphobia”).…

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We mark the birth on October 9, 1835 – 188 years ago today – of Charles-Camille Saint-Saëns, in Paris.  He died in that magnificent city on Beethoven’s 151^st birthday – on December 16, 1921 – at the age of 86.

The Nose

Physically, the adult Camille Saint-Saëns was – literally – an odd bird.  The music critic Pierre Lalo has left us with this description:

“He was short and strangely resembled a parrot: the same sharply curved profile; a beak-like, hooked nose; [with] lively, restless, piercing eyes.  He strutted like a bird and talked rapidly, precipitously, with a curiously affected lisp.” 

In fact, Saint-Saens was as famous for his nose as Beethoven was for his hair.  When he concertized in the United States during the 1906-1907 season, Philip Hale wrote in the Boston Symphony program book:

“His eyes are almost level with his nose.  His eagle-beak would have excited the admiration of Sir Charles Napier, who once exclaimed, ‘Give me a man with plenty of nose!’”

Please: heaven forbid I should be accused of nasal-shaming here; we should just know about Saint-Saëns second most distinguishing feature before we move on.  His principal distinguishing feature was his prodigious genius, a genius – like that of Felix Mendelssohn – for pretty much anything in which he took an interest.

The Prodigy

Like Felix Mendelssohn, Camille Saint-Saëns was an absurd child prodigy.  

He began playing the piano at the age of two.  He completed his first composition – for piano – on March 22, 1839, when he was not quite three-and-a-half years old.  

He made his public “debut” as a pianist at Paris’ vaunted Salle Pleyel in 1846, when he was still ten years old.  His program included piano concerti by both Mozart and Beethoven.   For an encore he invited the audience to choose any one of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas which he offered to play from memory.

That’s just stupid.

When the 18-year-old Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 1 received its premiere, the astonished – and always quotable – Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) remarked:

“He knows everything but lacks inexperience.” 

(“Lacks inexperience.” Think about it.)

A few years later the redoubtable Franz Liszt heard Saint-Saëns play the organ and publicly declared him to be the greatest organist in the world. …

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Before we get to the central topic of today’s post – that being a particular address in San Francisco – we would wish a most happy birthday to someone we only know by his nickname.  Please: no looking ahead and peeking!

Today we wish a happy 71^st birthday to the English singer, songwriter, bassist, and actor Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, CBE (“Commander of the Order of the British Empire”).  He was born at Sir G. B. Hunter Memorial Hospital in Wallsend, Northumberland, England.  

He grew up near the shipyards there in Wallsend, which itself is located just outside of Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the east coast of northern England.  The eldest of four kids, his mother Audrey was a hairdresser and his father Ernest a milkman.

Our birthday boy took up the guitar as a child, but as music didn’t pay the rent, he worked as a bus conductor, a construction worker, a tax officer and, after having attended the Northern County College of Education (today known as Northumbrian University) from 1971 to 1974, he received a teaching credential.  He went on to teach for two years at St. Paul’s School in Cramlington, some 9 miles north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  

His various day gigs did not preclude Gordon Sumner from playing in bands on nights and weekends, and he became the bassist for a Newcastle-upon-Tyne based New Orleans-style jazz band called the Phoenix Jazzmen.  The band was led by its trombonist, a gentleman (we assume he was a gentleman) named Gordon Solomon.  One day young Sumner showed up to a gig wearing a black and yellow striped sweater.  We’ll let Sumner himself describe what happened.

“One Saturday night, we are playing the Red House Farm Social Club, Sunderland, in the middle of a tough working-class area in the north of the city. The Phoenix Jazzmen will perform at 9pm, after the bingo session. It is the early part of the evening, and we are lounging in the dressing room.

Gordon Solomon, or ‘Solly,’ the band leader, is going over the set that we will play tonight. He is delivering our nightly pep talk, leaning casually against the bingo machine. [He turns towards me and says] ‘Sting, dear boy…’

He’s been calling me that for weeks now. I must have worn the damned sweater but once, and yes it did make me look like a wasp, with its black-and-yellow hoops, but this stupid name is beginning to stick.”

Stick the nickname did.  In 1985, when a journalist called him “Gordon” during an interview, Sumner replied:

“My children call me Sting, my mother calls me Sting, who is this Gordon character?”

Happy 71^st birthday, Sting.

…

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We mark the birth on September 25, 1932 – 91 years ago today – of the pianist Glenn Herbert Gold, in Toronto, Canada.  (Yes, the surname on “Glenn Gould’s” birth certificate is “Gold.”  When the young guy was seven years old his family began informally using the surname “Gould,” though Glenn himself never formally changed his name from “Gold” to “Gould.”)  He died there in Toronto on October 4, 1982, at the age of fifty.

Superlatives Cut Two Ways!

I would observe that ordinarily, when we refer to someone as being “in a class by themselves,” it is usually understood as a compliment: that someone is “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without equal”; sans pareil”; and so forth.

But in fact, superlatives such as these can cut two ways, and are consequently not necessarily complimentary in their entirety.  

For example.

Tyrus Raymond “Ty” Cobb (1886-1961), the so-called “Georgia Peach” was – as I trust we all know – a baseball player during the Deadball Era (circa 1900-1920).  He was a transcendent baseball genius (as you know, I do not use the “g-word” – genius – lightly); he was truly “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without equal.”  At the time of his retirement from baseball in 1928 he held over ninety major league records.  Today, 95 years later, he still holds a number of those records, including his lifetime batting average of .366 (which is the highest ever), most batting titles over a career (12), and for stealing home plate (which he did a total of 54 times).     

Cobb was also “one of a kind” for his demeanor both on and off the field.  As a player, intimidation was the name of his game, and he was a vicious – many even said “demonic” – competitor.  And while the story that he sharpened his spikes in order to injure opposing players may not be true, he was despised by most of his contemporaries for what were considered his head games, his cheap shots, and his generally unsportsmanlike play.  

Cobb was trouble wherever he went.  He was, despite the denials of apologists, a notorious racist. He assaulted a heckler named Claude Lucker in the stands at Hilltop Park in New York City, for which he was suspended.  (For our information, Hilltop Park was the nickname of a park in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan where the New York Yankees – then known as the “Highlanders” – played from 1903 to 1912.)

He got into drunken brawls in bars and in hotels and on the street, not infrequently spending the night after in a jail cell.  He once choked and beat the living daylights out of an umpire named Billy Evans after a game.  In June 1914, Cobb pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace after pulling out a revolver during an argument in a Detroit butcher shop, for which he was fined $50.  On August 13, 1912, Cobb was stabbed in the back during a street brawl before a game.  He refused to tell anyone what had happened and went on to play, going 2 for 3 with two singles and a run scored, raising his batting average to .418.

One of kind.

According to Benjamin Klein, writing in Bleacher Report in 2014:

“Ty Cobb is hands down the worst human being to ever play in Major League Baseball, and it’s not even that close. Cobb is the most hated baseball player of all time. Period.”

Ty Cobb was indeed “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without equal” for reasons both very good and very bad. The same competitive ferocity that made him great also made him a most controversial player and human being!

Glenn Gould: “One of a Kind”

Which brings us to our remarkable birthday boy, Glenn Gould.  Like Tyrus Cobb, Gould was a complicated and contrary man of preternatural talent and abilities, “one of a kind”; “unique”; “sui generis”; “without equal” for reasons both very good and not so very good. 

Let us state for the record up front that Glenn Gould never brandished a gun in a butcher shop or routinely sucker-punched people in bars.  Nevertheless, his shamelessly bad attitude towards the music of Mozart, Chopin, Liszt, and Schumann is, to my mind, the musical equivalent of sliding – sharpened cleats high – into the face of a catcher.  

Admittedly, not one of us is perfect, and each of us carries a bit of Mr. Hyde within us; we are, after all, only human.  But Glenn Gould’s genius for piano, like Ty Cobb’s for baseball, was a function of both a good side and a frankly self-destructive side.  Our job, for the duration of this post, will be to observe the quirks, complexities, and emotional darkness that drove Glenn Gould to become the “one of a kind” that he was. 

Know that we will return to Glenn Gould in Dr. Bob Prescribes next week, on October 3.…

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We mark the death on September 18, 1970 – 53 years ago today – of the American guitarist, singer, and songwriter James Marshall “Jimi” Hendrix, at St. Mary Abbots Hospital in London. He was born in Seattle, Washington on November 27, 1942, making him 27 years old at the time of his death, something we will discuss later in this post.

Creating and Mastering a New Idiom

“Top ten” lists are entirely subjective and thus often irrelevant. But they can be informative when they agree and as such, indicate a consensus.

Here are a few such lists of rock ‘n’ roll guitarists, in which I’ve cut to the chase and listed only the “top four.”

Rolling Stone, “100 Greatest [Rock] Guitarists”:

1. Jimi Hendrix
2. Eric Clapton
3. Jimmy Page
4. Keith Richards

Writing in Rolling Stone, the American guitarist, singer, songwriter, and political activist Tom Morello explains:

“Jimi Hendrix exploded our idea of what rock music could [italics mine] be. His playing was effortless. There’s not one minute of his recorded career that feels like he’s working hard at it – it feels like it’s all flowing through him. He seamlessly weaves chords and single note runs together and uses chord voicings that don’t appear in any music book. His riffs were a pre-metal funk bulldozer, and his lead lines were an electric LSD trip down to the crossroads, where he pimp-slapped the devil.

His legacy is assured as the greatest guitar player of all time.”

HowStuffWorks, “The Ten Greatest Rock and Roll Guitarists of All Time”:

1. Jimi Hendrix
2. Jimmy Page
3. Eric Clapton
4. Stevie Ray Vaughan

Writes Jim Halden of HowStuffWorks:

“Despite all the jockeying for position on this list, there was never any question as to who would end up at the top. In his brief life, Jimi Hendrix forever changed the way people thought about the electric guitar. In his hands, it became more than an instrument; it was a gateway into the soul, a vessel through which to communicate the inner workings of a complex man with immeasurable talent.”

Guitarmetrics, “Top 10 Classic Rock Guitarists”:

1. Jimi Hendrix
2. SLASH (his real name being Saul Hudson)
3. Eric Clapton
4. Jimmy Page

Writes the editors of Guitarmetrics:

“The entire landscape of rock music was altered when Jimi first picked up a guitar. He demonstrated to us how to perform feats that were thought to be impossible on a guitar at the time. The guitar itself started to resemble a part of his body.”

I’ll cut to the chase, because with just a couple of exceptions, every “greatest rock guitarist” list I found during a brief but spirited search on the internet put Hendrix at number one, including Guitarist Next Door, Cleveland.com, Music Industry How To, Roadie Tuner, Cultura Sonara, Really Simple Guitar, Louder, Digital Dream Door, Bolly Inside, New Arena, (should I keep going?), The Delite, Music This Day, Rock ‘n’ Roll Remnants, and Skill Share (yes, I’ll stop now).

On those very few lists on which Hendrix wasn’t listed at number one, he was listed at number two, behind either Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page.

Regarding Jimi Hendrix’ place in the pantheon of rock ‘n’ roll guitarists, that’s consensus.

Here’s another bit of consensus. Almost every one of the lists indicated above put Eric Clapton (born 1945) and Jimmy Page (born 1944) in the top five along with Jimi Hendrix.

What makes these three musicians so very special is not just their extraordinary imaginations and technical wizardry; no, something more is involved here. It’s that during the 1960s, they virtually spearheaded the creation of an entirely new instrumental vocabulary, that of the virtuosic, solid body electric rock ‘n’ roll guitar!

Let’s consider this.

The violin family of instruments – the violin, viola, and the cello – were invented in northern Italy in the early 16th century, circa the 1520s. Composers and performers have had 500 years to create a repertoire for these instruments and to progressively develop the technique by which to play them.

As opposed to the solid body electric guitar, which was invented in the early 1940s and came into use in the late 1940s. (For our information, the first mass produced solid body electric guitars were the Fender Esquire and the Fender Broadcaster, which were first produced in 1950.) Whether we credit Leo Fender (born Clarence Leonidas Fender, 1909-1991) or Les Paul (born Lester William Polsfuss, 1915-2009) for its invention is immaterial; by the early 1960s, the solid body electric guitar had become the identifying instrument of rock ‘n’ roll, a genre of dance music that only acquired its name in 1954.…

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9-11; a somber day for us all.  A day for reflection, contemplation and perhaps, still, after 22 years, a day to grieve.  

Far more often than not, Music History Monday is about celebrating the life and accomplishments of a musician or identifying and exploring some great (or small) event in music history.  

If I chose to, today’s post could celebrate the lives and music of two wonderful composers.  On September 11, 1733 – 290 years ago today – the French composer and harpsichordist François Couperin (1668-1733) died in Paris, at the age of 65.  The Estonian-born composer Arvo Pärt was born 88 years ago today, on September 11, 1935.  If we chose to explore an event rather than celebrate the lives and music of François Couperin or Arvo Pärt, this post could mark the 173^rd anniversary of the first American concert of “The Swedish Nightingale” – Ms. Jenny Lind (1820-1887) – at the Castle Garden Theater in New York City, in a performance promoted by none-other-than P. T. Barnum. 

(For our information: Johanna Maria “Jenny” Lind was one of the most highly regarded operatic sopranos of her time.  After a sensational European career, she retired from the opera stage in 1849 at the still-tender age of 29.

But she didn’t retire from singing.  In 1850, at the invitation of the great American showman Phineas Taylor [P.T.] Barnum [1810-1891], Jenny Lind travelled to America to tour.  She performed 93 concerts under the banner of Barnum’s production company, then continued to tour the United States, Cuba, and Canada under her own management.  During her two-year stay, Lind became the most popular musician ever to visit North America to that point in time, and the wealthiest as well: her concerts netted her roughly $350,000; $13,716,900 in 2023 dollars.)

But back to today and this post.

I would begin with an admission. 

I’m feeling my age these days and, for better or for worse, becoming ever-more aware of the brevity of all things as well as the pervasive chaos that lies immediately beneath our perceived veneer of control.  

So?

So, running with the avowedly morbid spirit of this day, I present to you a series of chaotic deaths, unnecessary deaths, stupid deaths – tragic, sudden, accidentaldeaths – from the world of concert music.  (If I were so foolish as to include unnecessary/stupid deaths from the world of rock ‘n’ roll, this post would run for a million-plus words instead of 2293.)  There are no deaths here from chronic illness, suicide, substance abuse, heart attack, stroke, or aneurism; just particularly unnecessary deaths, like being hit by a Boeing 767 while sitting at your desk on the 93^rd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46:40am on September 11, 2001. 

Admittedly, it’s a grim topic but not an uninteresting one, given that death is one of the very few things that we all will have in common.

We begin, then, with the date-related item that anchors today’s Music History Monday.

Betty Stone (1914-1977): Going Up?

We mark the birth on September 11, 1914 – 109 years ago today – of Betty Stone in Norwich, Connecticut. Ms. Stone, whose birth name was Betty Schanker, was an alto and a member of the Metropolitan Opera chorus.  According to her brother, Sidney Schanker of Union, N.J.: 

“Ever since she was a child, she had been wrapped up in opera.  [Our] older sister Rose played the piano and sang and Betty always wanted to.”

Betty Stone studied choral singing in a chorus sponsored by the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression – in the 1930s – and joined the chorus of the Metropolitan Opera in 1945, when she was 31 years old. 

We read from an article that appeared on page 44 of The New York Times on May 2, 1977:

“CLEVELAND, May 1—A member of the chorus of New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company was killed here last night when her flowing costume was caught in the grille of a backstage elevator.

The accident occurred just after the curtain went down on the second act of II Trovatore, the final opera of the Met’s one-week stay in [Cleveland’s] Public Hall. Backstage, some cast members walked upstairs to the dressing rooms, while others lined up for the half-century-old elevator.

The elevator was almost filled when Frank Coffey, a seven‐year chorus member, stepped on. Behind him, Miss Stone was the last to squeeze into the 8‐by‐6 elevator.

It is an old freight‐style elevator, with doors at both ends, and the operator was on the opposite end from Miss Stone. As the car began to rise, Mr. Coffey saw Miss Stone being dragged down. “Stop! Stop,” he yelled. Others took up the shout. There were sobs, shouts of panic.

The robe [Miss Stone] wore as a nun in the cloister scene [had] caught in the door and, as the elevator rose, she was dragged to the floor. ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!,’ the elevator operator, Norman Reser, heard someone shout. He stopped the elevator, but Miss Stone, dragged down as the cage went up, had caught her head between the side of the shaft and the elevator.  [A stagehand], Joe Bauer took out a pocketknife and cut her loose from the gown.

The elevator was lowered. The stagehand Joe Bauer lifted her out onto the stage floor. Miss Stone was bleeding profusely and was unconscious. She was taken to St. Vincent’s Charity Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 10:07 P.M.

Frank M. Duman, a member of the Public Auditorium Commission in Cleveland, said the elevator was to have gone out of service [that] night as part of a remodeling of old sections of the building. It had been scheduled to be used for only another hour.”

OMG; that’s just awful.  Singing in an opera chorus should not be hazardous to your health, especially while dressed as a nun.  And for a New Yorker to die this way, in Cleveland of all places; oh, the ignominy of it all!

Happy birthday, Betty Schanker-Stone; you no doubt deserved better.

In the spirit of “misery loves company,” I would offer up a few other egregiously stupid musician deaths.…

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We mark the birth on September 4, 1824 – 199 years ago today – of the composer and organist Josef Anton Bruckner, in the Austrian village of Ansfelden, which today is a suburb of the city of Linz.  He died in the Austrian capital of Vienna on October 11, 1896, at the age of 72.

It was Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) who famously said that Bruckner was:

“Half simpleton, half God.”

Strangeness

I would be so bold as to suggest that there is such a thing as a “strangeness spectrum,” a scale of personality oddness that stretches from the merely quirky to the genuinely weird.  If we were to consider such a spectrum as a scale from one to ten, with one being “quirky” (or idiosyncratic); five being “eccentric” (or odd); and ten being really “weird” (or bizarre), then the personality of the composer and organist Anton Bruckner would lie at about an eleven: an off-the-charts “downright whacky” (and even, at times, unnervingly creepy).

I know, I know: many of you are probably thinking something on the lines of “so what? He was a professional composer.  Show me a major composer besides, perhaps, Joseph Haydn and Antonin Dvořák who wasn’t a bit crazy.” 

True, that.  But even by the standards of professional composers, Bruckner was in a class by himself, perhaps the strangest and most unlikely person to ever become a high-end professional composer.  Attempting to reconcile this genuinely bizarre country bumpkin with the complex, sprawling, often magnificent symphonic and religious music he composed remains a challenge.

Brief Biography

He was born in the Austrian town of Ansfelden, near Linz.  His father was the town schoolmaster and the church organist, and it was at the local Catholic Church that Bruckner heard his first music, sang as a choirboy, and learned to play the violin and organ.  

The Church was Bruckner’s refuge and solace for the entirety of his life; he was as devout a man as we will ever find outside a monastery or a foxhole.  He believed completely that everything he did should honor God.  Late in his life he told Gustav Mahler:

“Yes, my dear, now I have to work very hard so that at least [my] tenth Symphony will be finished.  Otherwise, I will not pass before God, before whom I shall soon stand.  He will say: ‘Why else have I given you talent, you son of a bitch, than you should sing My praise and glory? But you have accomplished much too little!’” 

One can only hope that God deemed Bruckner’s nine symphonies as being adequate, because he died before completing his Tenth.  

Bruckner’s statement to Mahler – made in all seriousness – reveals what was a pathological inferiority complex.  As a student teacher between the ages of 17 and 19, he was constantly and mercilessly humiliated by his boss, one Franz Fuchs, a teacher at the Windhagg School in the Austrian town of Windhaag.  But Bruckner never complained or rebelled.  Rather, characteristically, he submitted to any and all abuse without a whimper, so convinced was he of his own inferiority.  

Everyone who knew him said the same thing, that he was a classic country bumpkin: naïve, simple, overly trusting, and deferential.  According to his biographer Deryck Watson, Bruckner was:

“Humble, straightforward, uncomplicated, unpretentious, and unsophisticated.  He was warm-hearted and childlike, [though] his proverbial naivety should not be confused with a lack of intelligence. His rural background was evident throughout his life.  City life never suited him, and the little countryman, habitually dressed in a bulky black suit and wide-brimmed black hat, was in sharp contrast with the style and elegance of fashionable Vienna [where he lived from 1868 to his death in 1896].…

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We mark the premiere performance on August 28, 1850 – 173 years ago today – of Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, in the central German city of Weimar.  

The premiere was conducted by none-other-than Wagner’s friend and supporter (and future father-in-law!) Franz Liszt (1811-1886).  Liszt had chosen the premiere date of August 28 in honor of Weimar’s most famous citizen, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was born on August 28, 1749, 101 years to the day before Lohengrin’s premiere. 

The “opera” – the last of Wagner’s stage works to be designated by him as being an “opera” – was brilliantly received and has been a mainstay of the international repertoire since that first performance.

Alas, Richard Wagner (1813-1883) was not in attendance there at the premiere.  With a price on his head, he had been de-facto exiled from Germany thanks to his activities in the Dresden Uprising of May of 1849.  Wagner did not hear a full performance of Lohengrin until 1861, 11 years later, in Vienna.

Be informed that both today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts will deal with Lohengrin.  Tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes will focus on three video performances, comparing video excerpts from each of the three performances in our search for a single, prescribed recording. 

Wagner in Dresden and the “Education” of an Audience

Wagner was hired as Assistant Kapellmeister of the Royal Dresden Opera in 1843, at the age of 30.  From the moment he took the job, his burning ambition was to turn Dresden into a hot bed for new German opera.  In order to do that, he had to convince the conservative Dresden opera audience to embrace and support opera that was new and different.

A tall order that, “educating the audience,” one that long experience tells us only rarely succeeds.  But we’re talking here about the human dynamo that was Richard Wagner, for whom, in Dresden at least, “failure” was not an option.

More than anything else, it was Wagner’s own operas that converted a significant portion of his Dresden audience from the “staid” to the “adventurous.”  Wagner’s opera Rienzi – a traditional pot-boiler written in the contemporary French-style – won the Dresden audience over to Wagner almost immediately in October of 1842.  The Flying Dutchman – premiered in Dresden on January 2, 1843 – was another thing altogether.  A psychodrama with terrifically challenging vocal parts, it left its audiences confused: not particularly “entertained”, but not turned off, either.  Having said that, the fact that The Flying Dutchman turned out to be a huge hit in other German cities instilled no small bit of pride in the Dresden musical community, which, for the most part, came to be delighted with its assistant Kapellmeister.  

The response to the premiere of Wagner’s Tannhäuser on October 19, 1845, made it clear that something special was happening in Dresden.  In an article that appeared in the Leipzig journal “Signal for The Musical World,” the Dresden correspondent wrote:

“It is a noteworthy phenomenon that the cool and unexcitable Dresden theater public has been transformed by Wagner’s operas into a fiery and enthusiastic body such as can be found nowhere else in Germany.” 

That “fiery enthusiasm” for Wagner’s operas soon spread across all of what today is Germany.  It wasn’t just that Wagner was a German composer writing German language operas based on Germanic-slash-Nordic subject matter.  Even more, it was because Wagner’s music was evolving away from traditional Italian and French operatic practice, towards something of his own making.  In Tannhäuser, Wagner blurs the edge between recitative and aria: between action music and lyric music.  This was something new for German audiences, and it allowed dramatic momentum to build more powerfully, unchecked by “traditional” structural divisions.  Wagner also deployed his pit orchestras ever more symphonically, with the result being a level of instrumental magnificence that drove German audiences wild, even though it sometimes drowned out smaller-voiced singers who could not compete with the orchestra on equal terms.  (When we call someone a “Wagner singer,” what we’re saying is that a singer has a voice “big enough” to be heard over a “Wagner orchestra!”)…

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We mark the death on August 21, 2005 – 18 years ago today – of the American engineer and electronic music pioneer Robert Moog.  Born in New York City on May 23, 1934, he died of a brain tumor in Asheville, North Carolina, at the age of 71.

First things first: let us pronounce this fine man’s surname properly.  It is not pronounced as “moo-g.”  “Moo-g” is a sound made by a cow after she painfully stubs her hoof.  Despite its double-o, the name is pronounced “mogue,” as in “vogue.”

Moog didn’t invent the sound synthesizer.  Rather, he (and his inventing “partners,” the composer Herbert Arnold “Herb” Deutsch, 1932-2022 and, to a somewhat lesser degree, Wendy Carlos, born 1939) democratized the thing, making it affordable, portable, and playable enough to be bought and used by anyone who could get around a piano-like keyboard.

Our Game Plan

Today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts are conceived as a single post, one that I’ve divided in half and will post on two successive days.  As my Patreon subscribers know, I’ve done this before; it’s no big deal and I will certainly do it again.  However, for those of you who are listening solely to the podcast of Music History Monday and have not subscribed to my Patreon page (at Patreon.com/RobertGreenbergMusic), tomorrow’s second half of this fascinating story will remain unheard (or unread, as the case may be). To my mind, this is a sorry state of affairs, like eating half a potato chip or watching just the first half of Gone with the Wind. 

The solution is simple: subscribe.

Just a suggestion.

Music and Electricity

Now bear with me, as I will do my darndest to briefly explain the development of electronically produced and manipulated sound as it evolved in the twentieth century without confusing either you or myself.

A momentary but heartfelt bit of praise for the grid: how do we love thee?  Can we even hope to count the ways?  Personally, I cannot count them.  When our power goes out here in Oakland, CA – infrequent an event though it may be – life as I know and understand it comes to a screeching halt, so completely dependent am I on devices that employ the controlled movement of electrons between atoms.

My dependence is a recent phenomenon.  Mass electrification in Europe and North American did not begin until the early twentieth century, first in major cities and in areas served by electric railways.  By 1930, roughly 70% of all households in the United States had electricity.  That might sound like a high number, but huge swatches of American territory and population were without electric power (and, for that matter, often without plumbing, sanitary sewage and storm drainage, and telephone service); in 1934, fewer than 11% of all farms in the United States had electrical power.  

It wasn’t until 1935, with the creation of the Rural Utilities Service by executive order of President Franklin Roosevelt, that this issue was systematically addressed.  By 1942, nearly 50% of all farms in the United States had electricity, and by 1952 almost all farms in the United States – finally! – had electricity.

1952.  For some of us, 71 years might seem like a long time ago but, in fact, it was, by any historic measure, yesterday. 

And so the development of electronic musical instruments during the twentieth century, something that went hand-in-hand with electrification was, likewise, a very recent event. 

Strictly defined, an “electronic musical instrument” (or an “electrophone”):

“is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic, or digital audio signal that ultimately is plugged into a power amplifier which then drives a loudspeaker, creating the sound heard by the performer and listener.”

Precursors

Because I know you come to Music History Monday (meaning me) for the whole story, I am compelled to point out that the first electrified musical instruments date to the eighteenth century.

The first so-called “electronic musical instrument” was very likely a specialized harpsichord-like device designed and built by a Czech cleric, natural scientist, and musician named Václav Divíšek (1698-1765).  Sometime around 1748, Divíšek built a large keyboard instrument (which is long since lost) that sent an electrical charge through its iron strings in order to enhance and vary the quality of its sound. Václav Divíšek called his electro-toy a “Denis d’or” (meaning “Golden Dionysus”).  

Other such experimental, metal-stringed instruments came and went, including something called a “clavecin électrique” built by a French Jesuit priest named Jean-Baptiste de Laborde in 1761.…

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On August 14, 1962 – 61 years ago today – the manager of the Beatles Brian Epstein made a phone call to the drummer Ringo Starr, inviting him to join the band.  As I suspect we are all aware, Starr said “yes.”   Two days later, on August 16, Epstein had the unenviable task of firing the band’s present drummer, Randolph Peter “Pete” Best (born Randolph Peter Scanland, 1941), who had been the Beatles’ drummer for almost exactly two years, since August 1960.  Best’s firing, effective on August 18, 1962, was, for Best, the worst timing ever.  17 days later, on September 4, 1962, a reconfigured Beatles with Ringo Starr as drummer recorded their first #1 hit and went from nobodies to superstars in the span of a few weeks.

Pete Best (Born 1941)

Peter Best was born on November 24, 1941, in Madras, which was then part of British India.  His father, a marine engineer named Donald Peter Scanland, died during World War Two.  Pete’s mother Mona went on to marry a British officer from Liverpool named Johnny Best, with whom she had a second son, this one named Rory.  In 1945, the Best family returned to Britain on the MV Georgic, the last British troop ship to leave India.  It docked in Liverpool on December 25, 1945.

It was in Liverpool that Pete Best grew up.  Writes the Beatles’ “biographer” Mark Lewisohn:

“Pete grew into a strong, muscly lad, exceptional at sports and carrying no excess weight, eminently capable of taking care of himself in a physical confrontation, which in Liverpool could always happen at any moment.  He was also handsome and knew it.”

At the age of 17 (or so), Pete Best showed some interest in the drums.  His mother Mona, who was running a club called the “Casbah Coffee Club” in her basement (it was a large basement!) was thrilled that Pete had expressed interest in anything: she “hurried down” to Rushworth & Draper’s music store and bought her son:

“a smart-looking Premier kit in blue mother of pearl.”

Being a rank beginner as a drummer never stopped Pete Best (nor has it ever stopped any wannabe rock ‘n’ roller), and he organized a band called the Black Jacks.

Having a doting mother who owns a nightclub never hurts when it comes to bookings, and it didn’t hurt the Black Jacks, amateurish though they were.  It was at his mother’s “Casbah Coffee Club” that Pete Best also met the local talent, including an up-and-coming band called the Quarrymen, which featured Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison.  In the spring of 1960, the Quarrymen changed their name to the Beatles, and a couple of months later their first manager – Allan William – secured the band an extended gig in Hamburg, Germany.  

There was a problem, though: the Beatles, consisting of McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison – were without a drummer.  Paul McCartney was tasked with finding one.  McCartney knew Best through the Casbah, and he knew that Best had one very important thing going for him: he actually owned a set of drums.  McCartney also heard, as he later stated in an interview, that Pete Best’s female fans considered him as being:

“mean, moody, and magnificent,” 

a James Dean/Marlon Brando-like trifecta that convinced McCartney that Pete Best would be a good match for the Beatles.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

Sadly, Pete Best wasn’t much of a drummer when he joined the Beatles in Hamburg, and he wasn’t much of one when they returned from Hamburg two years later, in 1962.  By 1962, almost everyone associated with the Beatles except their manager Brian Epstein (1934-1967) wanted Best to make like a tree and leave.  Nevertheless, had Pete Best been a little better; had he been willing to grow out his hair like McCartney, Lennon, and Harrison; had he spent some off time schmoozing with the other three bandmembers; if, in a phrase, he had made any attempt to behave like a member of the band, he might have lasted a bit longer.  And had he managed to last just a bit longer, he might today be a household name (instead of being an object lesson in failure), because the Beatles caught fire just weeks after his departure.

How many different ways can we say, “bummer, dude”?  Bummero; bummerissimo, bummersky, bummah.  I would suggest that the next time any one of us suffers a professional reversal, a disappointment, or even, heaven forbid, a firing, let us count our blessings that, in fact, we are not Randolph Peter Best and that we have not had to spend our lives explaining our firing to an endlessly curious world.…

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We mark an online auction that concluded on August 7, 2008 – 15 years ago today – at which Elvis Presley’s white, sweat-stained, high-collared, plunging V-necked jumpsuit, decorated with a dazzling, hand-embroidered blue and gold peacock – sold for $300,000.  (Because I know you want to know, the jumpsuit is cinched at the waist by a wide belt decorated in gold medallions in a design meant to resemble the eye of a peacock feather, all of it an ongoing reflection of Elvis’ fascination with peacocks as being his personal good luck symbol.)

The outfit cost Elvis a cool $10,000.  It was designed by the Los Angeles couturier Bill Belew (1931-2008), who designed all of The King’s stage wardrobe between 1968 and 1977.

Talk about provenance (something we’ll define and discuss in just a bit)!  Aside from Elvis’ personal sweat stains (do they still . . . give off an odor?), he performed wearing the jumpsuit for the better part of a year.  Elvis first wore the “peacock” at a concert at the Forum in Los Angeles on May 11, 1974.  He then performed wearing it in Las Vegas and wore it as well on the cover of his album “Promised Land,” which was released in 1975.

In their pre-sale estimate, the auction house, Gotta Have It!, had anticipated that the jumpsuit would bring between $275,000 and $325,000. The $300k hammer price was, then, nothing short of a surgical strike.

At the time of that auction, which closed exactly 15 years ago today, the peacock jumpsuit was the most expensive piece of Elvis Presley memorabilia ever sold at auction.  (Up to that time, the previous record for an Elvis collectible was $295,000, for his 1956 Lincoln Continental Mark II, which was sold in 1999 at an auction held at Graceland.)

The peacock jumpsuit might have been the most expensive piece of Elvis Presley memorabilia sold at auction up to 2008, but its selling price has long since been surpassed.  Do not fret; we’ll talk about some of those more expensive items in due time.

As for the identities of the jumpsuit’s seller and its buyer, well, who knows? We only know that the seller was described by the auctioneer as:

“a Big Elvis collector.”

As for who ponied up the $300k for the outfit, the auction house Gotta Have It! has declined to identify the buyer.  

What’s it Worth?

Collectors almost inevitably believe their stuff is worth more than it really is.  Part of the problem is the legion of collectors’ books that contain price guides.  In order to sell more copies of the books, such coin and antique collectors’ guides are far more often than not filled with atmospheric price valuations:

“OMG, Edgar, according to this-here price guide, my 1909 Indian Head penny is worth $30,000!!”

Sorry Chauncy; it’s only worth $30k if you can convince some poor, dumb sucker to pay $30k for it.  Until then, it’s worth all of . . . 1 cent.

When it comes to high-end stuff, auctions – and the open market they represent – are probably the best way to gauge what something is worth at a given point in time. …

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Before we get to the actual date-related topic for today, I beg your indulgence, as I need to tell you a story.  It’s a story that most of you know, at least in part. Again, indulge me.

The Godfather III – the third film in the storied Godfather franchise, released in 1990 – was one of the most anticipated films of all time.  And no wonder: the first of the Godfather movies – The Godfather, or “G1”, released in 1972 – was nominated for eleven Academy Awards and received three, including Best Picture and Best Actor (for Marlon Brando). G2, released two years later in 1974 was also nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning six of them, including Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor (for Robert DeNiro).   So G3 – The Godfather III – had a lot riding on it.

Much of the casting was easy.  Al Pacino returned in the role of Michael Corleone; Diane Keaton in the role of Kaye Corleone; and Talia Shire in the role of Connie Corleone. But there were new roles to fill, none more important than Mary Corleone, the now grown-up daughter of the “godfather” himself, Michael Corleone. G3’s writer and director, Francis Ford Coppola (born 1939), wanted Julia Roberts for the role of Mary Corleone. Unfortunately, Ms. Roberts was not available, so Coppola tested a number of other actresses for the part, including Madonna (whose own Italian heritage did not, in the end, help her get the part). In the end, the part went to Winona Ryder. (Born Winona Horowitz in Winona, Minnesota in 1971, Ms. Ryder grew up in Northern California and graduated from Petaluma High School in 1989 with a 4.0 average).  The 18-year-old Ms. Ryder was up-and-coming at the time she was chosen for the role of Mary Corleone, having scored major successes in the movies Beetlejuice (1988) and Heathers (1989).

Ryder arrived at the G3 set in Italy and rehearsed for a day.  The next morning, her boyfriend, a young actor named Johnny Depp, called in to say that Ms. Ryder was “indisposed” and unavailable.  Her issues were, in fact, a bit more serious than that.  Suffering from what was later diagnosed as “nervous exhaustion,” Ryder left the movie, never to return, after just that one day of rehearsals.

Okay: I trust we all appreciate the expenses involved in having the cast and crew of a big-budget movie on set in a foreign country, twiddling their thumbs and sitting on their collective rear ends, with no female lead anywhere in sight.  Coppola considered replacing Ryder with either Madonna, Annabella Sciorra, or Laura San Giacomo, but wasn’t happy with any of those choices.  Meanwhile, principal photography, which was slated to begin on November 15, 1989, there at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios (meaning “Cinema City Studios”) was pushed back three weeks, during which Coppola’s ongoing expenses forced him to declare Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Francis Ford Coppola, who had not wanted to make a third Godfather movie in the first place, was pushed to the brink; he needed a female lead, and he needed her yesterday.  So in his desperation, he made what turned out to be the worst decision of his career: he gave the role to his youngest child and only daughter, Sophia (born 1971).  …

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We mark the birth on July 24, 1880 – 143 years ago today – of the Swiss-born American composer and educator Ernest Bloch, who was born in Geneva, Switzerland.  He died in Portland, Oregon, on July 15, 1959, at the age of 78.

Establishing a Genealogy

People trace their family trees for all sorts of reasons: to establish family connections, to collect family medical information, to meet other people engaged in such research, and so forth.  But at the root (pun intended) of these (and other) reasons to establish a family tree is the issue of self-identity: the desire to connect with oneself by connecting with one’s ancestors: learning what we can of who they were; where they came from; what sort of lives they led; and what they accomplished.

With the advent of genetic testing sites like “23 and Me,” “AncestryDNA,” “LivingDNA,” and “HomeDNA,” the whole family tree trip has taken a crazy-giant step forward, in that our family trees have gone from saplings to 400-year-old oaks.

A couple of years ago, bored to death during the pandemic and unable to resist any longer, my wife and I were so tested using the site “23 and Me.”  Here are my results:

• Ashkenazi Jewish: 98.9%
• French and German: 0.6%
• Sudanese: 0.2%
• Northern Indian and Pakistani: 0.1%
• Unassigned: 0.2%
• (You betcha that 0.2% Sudanese caught my attention!) 

The major drawback of having multiple testing sites is that your DNA can only be compared to others who have been tested using the same site.  Nevertheless, my results are fascinating.  

Not unexpectedly, the person with whom I share the most DNA is my brother Steve: we share 53.1% of our DNA and 45 segments, those “segments” being sections of DNA that are identical between two individuals.

According to “23 and Me,” at number 1508 of my 1510 DNA relatives is my wife, Nanci Tucker, who is rated as being a “Distant Cousin” with 0.12% DNA shared and 1 segment.  (According to “23 and Me,” Nanci and I have in common a pair of ancestors more distant than our 5th-great-grandparents, making us more that sixth cousins.)

Experiential DNA

Might I be so bold as to suggest that family members are not the only people who share, in quotations, “DNA”?  By “DNA” in quotations I’m not referring to the chemical deoxyribonucleic acid but rather, what we might call “experiential DNA”: wisdom passed down from one generation to the next via one-on-one relationship; one-on-one mentorships.

This is precisely the sort of “DNA” that is shared by musicians – composers, instrumentalists, and singers – musicians whose education consists of a series of one-on-one relationships with their teachers.  For example, as an undergraduate, I studied composition primarily with Edward T. Cone (1917-2004).  When it came time for graduate school, Ed wanted me to continue my studies with his friend Andrew Imbrie (1921-2007) at the University of California, Berkeley.  And so I did; Andy Imbrie became not only my composition mentor but served as my Ph.D. thesis advisor.

While at UC Berkeley, I developed another very close mentor-student relationship with the composer Olly Wilson (1937-2018).  

Ed Cone, Andy Imbrie, and Olly Wilson are, and always will be, my most treasured and most important composition teachers.  Just so, Ed, Andy, and Olly were shaped by their own mentors, mentors whose experiences, knowledge, and wisdom they passed on to me.  

For genealogists, tracking their family’s genetic roots allow them to connect more deeply with themselves by learning about their family’s past.  For the musicians among us, tracing our teachers’ roots – our “experiential DNA” – allows us to connect with our artistic forebearers and to understand those artistic proclivities that have literally been “bred” into us.  …

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We mark the death on July 17, 2014 – 9 years ago today – of the Broadway and television actress Elaine Stritch, in Birmingham, Michigan, at the age of 89. 

I personally have a soft spot in my heart for Ms. Stritch the size of Manitoba. She was your quintessential brassy, tart-tongued (a euphemism for foul mouthed), cigarette smoking, alcohol-soaked blonde who took nothing from no one and could sell a song like nobody’s business.  (Please note that I didn’t say “sing a song” but rather, “sell a song.” Her ability to do so will be discussed in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post.)

It is my great hope that by the time you finish this Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes posts, you will have come to love her almost as much as I do.

My decision to profile Elaine Stritch is, in my estimation, a great sign of respect, given the other musical events of the day.  Both the tenor saxophonist John Coltrane and the singer Billie Holiday died on this date, in 1967 and 1959, respectively.  (Be assured that both of these luminaries – Coltrane and Holiday – will receive their due on these pages sooner or later.) 

On this date in 1972, James Brown released the seminal funk song, Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, which went on to sell over 2 million copies and received a Grammy Award for Best Rhythm & Blues Recording. 

On this date – again, in 1972 – a bomb exploded under an equipment van in Montreal belonging to The Rolling Stones.  Believed to be the work of French separatists, we’d observe that the bombing might have simply been intended as a critical statement.…

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We mark the birth on July 10, 1895 – 128 years ago today – of the German composer and educator Carl Heinrich Maria Orff.  Born in Munich, he died in that city on March 29, 1982, at the age of 86.

The Good News

Orff lived a long and productive life.  He was a composer of considerable talent whose works draw on influences as diverse as ancient Greek tragedy and medieval chant, Baroque theater, and Bavarian peasant life.  His so-called “scenic cantata”, Carmina Burana (of 1936), remains an audience favorite today.  Along with the German educator Gunild Keetman, Orff developed a musical education method in the 1920s called the Orff Schulwerk, or the “Orff Approach,” a methodology that integrates music, movement, speech, and drama in a manner based on what children do instinctively, and that is play.  Today, the Orff Approach is employed around the world and is one of the four major developmental music educational methodologies. The other three are the Kodály Method (created by the Hungarian composer and educator Zoltán Kodály, 1882-1967); the Suzuki Method (created by the Japanese violinist and educator Shinichi Suzuki, 1898-1998), and Dalcroze Eurhythmics (created by the Swiss composer and educator Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, 1865-1950).  

Orff’s success as a composer and educator garnered him great honors in his native Germany.  From 1950 to 1960 he was the Chair of Music Composition at the Hochschule für Musik in Munich, one of the most prestigious conservatories in the world.  In 1956 he was given membership in the order Pour le Mérite, an honor awarded by the German government in recognition of extraordinary personal achievement.  (During World War One, the military version of the Pour le Mérite was referred to as the Blauer Max, the “Blue Max.”)  In 1959, Orff received an honorary doctorate from the University of Tübingen; in 1972 he received another from the University of Munich.  That same year he was awarded the Grosses Verdienstkreuz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (“Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany”), and in 1974 he received the Guardini Prize from the Catholic Academy of Bavaria.

It all sounds lovely: a composer and educator honored in his lifetime and esteemed after his death.

Except.  Except for …

The Bad News

From 1933 to 1945, Orff lived, worked, and – for all of his postwar statements to the contrary – thrived in Nazi Germany.  For reasons we will observe, the exact nature Orff’s life in Hitler’s Third Reich remains a mystery and will almost certainly never be known for sure.  One thing we do know, however, is that by remaining in Germany after Hitler came to power in 1933, Carl Orff’s life and career became a Cautionary Tale for any artist who would dance with the devil.

There are three schools of thought regarding Orff’s relationship with the Nazis.  The first claims that he was, at best, tolerated.  The second maintains that Orff not only collaborated but was, himself, a tried-and-true National Socialist who composed music in the service of Nazi ideology.  The third school of thought is complicated, and lies somewhere between the first and second. 

I let you guess which school we are about to attend. Yes: the middle ground, somewhere between collaboration and not.…

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We mark the birth on July 3, 1854 – 169 years ago today – of the Moravian (meaning Czech) composer, music theorist, folklorist, and teacher Leoš Janáček. Born in the village of Hukvaldy in what today is the Czech Republic, he died on August 12, 1928 in the city of Ostrava, today the capital of the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic.

It’s All in the Name!

Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) was an American writer and lecturer known for his self-help guides to self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. If he were alive today, he’d be on the speaking circuit, doing Ted Talks and, perhaps, making a fortune through a video self-help network. But given the comparatively limited technology of his day, Carnegie made his living writing books, books with such titles as The Art of Public Speaking (first published in 1915); How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948), and The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking (1962). But Dale Carnegie’s most famous and influential tome – one that remains in print today after 87 years! – is How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936.

Among the thousands of assuredly useful tidbits Carnegie shared with his readers was:

“A person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

Meaning that nothing makes a better, more positive impression than saying someone’s name when speaking to them.

This seems to me to be self-evidently true. If you want someone to feel noticed, valued, and important, well, say their name to their face with a tone that connotes kindness, warmth, and respect.

However, for the purposes of this post we would – with all due – ever so slightly amend Dale Carnegie’s maxim:

“A person’s name – correctly pronounced – is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.”

As a public service, then, let us start this homage to Leoš Janáček by learning how to pronounce his name correctly. This is not just an issue of politeness, because while the mature Leoš Janáček might have looked like a snuggly little teddy bear, he was – in fact – an often irascible, highly emotional man, someone who suffered insult easily and angered quickly.

Let us not insult him and thus trigger that anger by mispronouncing his name!

Janáček’s name is notoriously mispronounced by non-Czechs. His first name – Leoš – is easy enough: “LAY-osh.” But his surname is a challenge for those of us who have trouble moving our vowels. We will learn to pronounce it in two steps. Step one: place an accent on the middle syllable: “Ya–NA-check”. Step two: place an accent on the first syllable as well – “YA-NA-check” – and say it quickly: “YA-NA-check”.

Excellent.

Brief Biography

He was born 169 years ago today in the village of Hukvaldy in the Moravia-Silesia (that is, the north-eastern) region of today’s Czech Republic. At the time of his birth, Moravia was part of the Austrian Empire and Janáček’s hometown was known by its German name of “Hochwald.”

Young Janáček had a first-rate singing voice. At 11, he received a scholarship to attend the Queen’s Monastery and School in the city of Brno (pronounced Bur-NO), the largest city in Moravia.

The Queen’s Monastery and School had a first-rate music conservatory. Janáček studied singing, organ, and piano, and he did well. After graduating at the age of 15, he attended the Royal Teachers’ Training Institute for three years, after which he was appointed Deputy Choir Master for the city of Brno. He began composing at around the age of 21; his first compositions were simple, folk-influenced choral works for the various amateur choral societies he conducted.…

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‘Fessing Up

Okay: you’re going to have to bear with me for one of my idiotic tangents, one that nevertheless explains precisely how I feel about Mozart and his music at a gut level.  What follows is a deep confession, something I’ve never shared before.  Be forewarned though, that once you’ve read and/or heard this confession (depending upon whether you’re reading Music History Monday as a blog or listening to it as a podcast), it cannot be unread or unheard.

Here goes.

Since childhood, I have had a deep and abiding affection for horror films, the gnarlier, the gnastier, the better.  Yes, color me juvenile if you must, but there it is.  Among the very greatest masters of the genre is the American filmmaker John Carpenter (born 1948), whose oeuvre includes such classics as the Halloween franchise, Escape From New York, Escape from L.A., Christine, The Fog, Assault on Precinct 13, They Live, and Prince of Darkness.  But for my dinaro, Carpenter’s magnum opus is The Thing (which was released in 1982).  Critically panned when it first opened, it is today considered (by those of us who consider it at all) to be a masterwork of graphic, on occasion inadvertently comedic, over-the-top horror.

(In 2008, the British film magazine Empire designated The Thing as being number 289 on its list of “The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time,” calling it:

“a peerless masterpiece of relentless suspense, retina-wrecking visual excess, and outright, nihilistic terror.”

It is an appraisal with which I wholeheartedly agree!)

Starring, among others, Kurt Russell and Wilford Brimley, with a musical score by Ennio Morricone, The Thing tells the story of a group of American research scientists on station in Antarctica and their horrific encounter with an alien presence: the “Thing” itself.  The Thing’s “thing” is to consume, assimilate, and then imitate other life forms, and as such, the members of the station – who, as we would expect, are picked off one at a time – are overcome by paranoia, not knowing who or what among them is the Thing.…

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We mark the birth on June 19, 1810 – 213 years ago today – of the German virtuoso violinist and composer, Ferdinand David.  Born in the exact same house in Hamburg that saw Felix Mendelssohn’s birth 16½ months before, David died while on vacation in Switzerland on July 18, 1873, at the age of 63. 

We will get to the specifics of Maestro David’s life and career and why, to my mind, he is “our kind of musician” in a moment.  But first, with your indulgence, a brief bit of editorializing.

When the Performer Becomes the Show

Marlon Brando (1924-2004).  Yes, Marlon Brando: actor, director, activist, and father of at least 16 children (at least 16 children).  I would respectfully suggest that a movie with Marlon Brando is not so much a movie in which Marlon Brando plays a role as it is a movie in which Marlon Brando plays Marlon Brando playing a role.  Accordingly, I would assert that in A Streetcar Named Desire, Marlon Brando portrays Marlon Brando portraying Stanley Kowalski; in The Godfather, Marlon Brando portrays Marlon Brando playing Vito Corleone; in Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando portrays Marlon Brando playing Colonel Walter Kurtz, and so forth.  Brando was so brilliant, his persona so larger than life, his affectations so uniquely individual, that his personal brand always seemed to overshadow the actual characters he portrayed.

So it is with certain musicians, and so it has been since the pianist Franz Liszt (1811-1886) blazed across the European musical firmament during the mid-nineteenth century.  Liszt was not just the greatest pianist of his time but the greatest pianist ever to have lived up to his time, and arguably the greatest pianist of all time.  But mere pianistic greatness was not enough for Liszt.  He composed a huge body of piano music that, initially, only he could play, music often calculated to stun simply by its technical excess.  Blessed with movie-star good looks and a fearless, aristocratic bearing, he toured tirelessly with this music, performing in a fashion that was calculated – always – to call attention to himself.

Let there be no mistake about it: Franz Liszt was almost certainly the greatest performing musician of the nineteenth century.  But his legend was a not just a product of his pianism but of his performing persona, which often bordered on carnival hucksterism.  Many of his greatest contemporaries, including Robert and Clara Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, and Joseph Joachim, were awed by Liszt’s pianism but physically sickened by his onstage shenanigans.  

But it was Liszt’s persona – those onstage shenanigans – that put derrieres in seats and money in the bank, and many – if not most – of those people who paid to see Liszt perform did so not for the music he played but for the show he put on.  

The Liszt-inspired instrumental performer-as-hero, as God, as an object-of-sexual-desire, pretty much disappeared by the early twentieth century, only to return with a vengeance by the end of the twentieth century.  Part of it was rock ‘n’ roll, as some young concert musicians wanted for themselves the same sort of money, popularity, and notoriety enjoyed by rock ‘n’ roll musicians.  …

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We mark the birth on June 12, 1941 – 82 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Armando Anthony “Chick” Corea, in Chelsea, Massachusetts.  He died of cancer after a brief illness on February 9, 2021, at his home just outside of Tampa Bay, Florida, at the age of 79.

Chick Corea’s spectacularly varied, 50-plus year career as a professional musician offers an object lesson in both the necessity and futility of labels.  

“Spectacularly varied” is the operative phrase in the sentence above.  In the mid-1960s Corea became deeply involved in Latin American music, having broken in with the Cuban bandleader and percussionist Mongo Santamaria (1917-2003) and the Puerto Rican-American bandleader and percussionist Willie Bobo (whose real name was Willie Correa, no relation, 1934-1983).  

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Corea played with the Miles Davis (1926-1991) band (he played piano on seven of Miles Davis’ albums, including Davis’ classic Bitches Brew album of 1969).  As such, the Chick-Meister was a full-participant in Davis’ electrified experiment in fusion, in synthesizing jazz and rock ‘n’ roll. In 1970 and 1971 Corea led his own, avant-garde, free jazz band called Circle. In 1972, Corea formed his jazz/Latin fusion progressive rock band Return to Forever, which performed both electronic and acoustic instrument music that fused jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and Latin music.  

Along the way Corea played and recorded bossa nova with João Gilberto and Stan Getz; he fused jazz and flamenco (shall we call it “jazzmenco”?) with the violinist Jean-Luc Ponty and the great flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia.…

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On June 5, 1977 – 46 years ago today – the shock-rock superstar Alice Cooper’s pet boa constrictor and concert co-star, a creature rather cleverly named “Julius Squeezer,” suffered what turned out to be a fatal bite from a live rat it was eating for breakfast. No doubt: Julius probably should have ordered the scrambled eggs and toast, and in doing so would have heeded the advice offered by the title of this post: “never eat anything that can bite you back.”

This is a heartbreaking tale, a tragic love story between a boy and his reptile, a love story brought to an ignominious end by an alpha-rodent. But it is also a story of hope, renewal, and love rekindled, as the auditions Alice Cooper subsequently held for a replacement snake allowed him to discover his new boa, a precious girl-snake named “Angel.”

Now of course we’re going to expand on this saga of reptilian eradication-by-rambunctious-rat and subsequent replacement in just a bit. But first, we’d observe two other, date-relevant items.

First, we mark the birth on June 5, 1941 – 82 years ago today – of the pianist Martha Argerich, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. To my ear and mind, Argerich the pianist is an enduring miracle. When she plays in public (which, since the 1980s, has happened with painful infrequence) we listen, because her technically flawless pianism is expressively and intellectually compelling. Like the greatest of actors – and I’m thinking here of people like Laurence Olivier, Meryl Streep, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Katherine Hepburn – actors who become one with the roles they play, so Martha Argerich has that alchemical ability to become one with the music she plays. Speaking as a composer, this is, to me, the greatest (and rarest!) gift a musician can have: to remove one’s own ego from a performance and live entirely through music as it is written.

That might sound a bit flakey, but still, it’s true. A Martha Argerich performance – “volatile, explosive, quixotic, astounding and mesmerizing” though it may be – is never “about” Martha Argerich. Rather, it is “about” the music she is performing. Like her living pianistic contemporaries Vladimir Ashkenazy (born 1937), Maurizio Pollini (born 1942), Murray Perahia (born 1947), András Schiff (born 1953), and Krystian Zimerman (born 1956), Argerich is truly an advocate for the composers whose music she plays. But unlike all the marvelous pianists just mentioned, Argerich’s legend is such that the mere implication that she might show up to a venue and actually perform will sell out a house in minutes.

In order to discuss Maestra Argerich in the manner she justly deserves and, as well, to recommend three of my favorite Argerich recordings, she will be the topic of tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post.

Be there.

Moments ago, I mentioned that we’d get back to Alice Cooper’s snake and the rat after having discussed two other date-related items. The first was Martha Argerich’s 82nd birthday. The second item follows, under the heading of “can we really blame him?”

On June 5, 2003 – an even 20 years ago today – a pirate radio station in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom, was shut down by local authorities. The “pirate” himself has been identified only as a “grandfather” who went by the rather questionable name of “Ricky Rock.” Grandpa Rock had set up a 32-foot-high radio transmitter in the garden of his house, and had taken it upon himself to illegally broadcast hits by Elvis Presley and such bands as The Beatles and The Beach Boys. When questioned as to why he had done such a thing, this Robin Hood of the air waves told the authorities that his local radio stations did not address the listening needs of his generation, instead playing music by what he called:

“talentless boy bands and dance music.”

Can we blame Grandad Ricky Rock for doing what he did? No, we cannot.…

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On May 29, 1860 – 163 years ago today – the composer and pianist Isaac Albéniz was born in Camprodón, Spain.  Albéniz was a brilliant pianist and, as evidenced by his 12-movement suite for piano entitled Iberia (written between 1905-1909), a composer of genius.  

However, before we can get to Maestro Albéniz, I would beg your indulgence while we celebrate this remarkable day in music history!

Also born on this date was the Austrian-American composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who came into this world in 1893 in Brno, in what today is the Czech Republic; he died in Los Angeles in 1957.  The Romanian-born Greek composer Iannis Xenakis was born on this day in 1922 in Brâila, Romania; he died in Paris in 2001.  The American singer, songwriter, and composer Danny Elfman was born on this day in 1953; the singer LaToya Jackson in 1956; and the Academy Award and Grammy Award winning singer and songwriter Melissa Etheridge in 1961.

Sadly but not unexpectedly, notable people from the world of music passed away on this date as well.  

May 29,1910, saw the death of Mily Balakirev in St. Petersburg;he was 73 years old.

On this day in 1911, the poet and librettist William S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame) left this vale of tears at the age of 74.  On this day in 1935, the Czech violinist and composer Joseph Suk died at the age of 61; and on May 29, 2005, the American composer George Rochberg died at 86.

Here’s a particularly grim date-related item.  On May 29, 1999 – 24 years ago today – a group of photographers looking for old car wrecks to photograph at the bottom of Decker Canyon near Malibu, California, found a bit more than they bargained for: a wrecked car tricked out with its own skeletal remains still inside.  Those remains belonged to Philip Kramer, the former bassist with Iron Butterfly, who had disappeared four years before, on February 12, 1995.  His death was eventually ruled a suicide.  

Sticking with grim, May 29 also marks the 326th anniversary of the assassination of the 44-year-old Italian castrato Giovanni Grossi (known popularly as “Siface”).  One of the most famous singers of the entire Baroque era, Siface met his end on May 29, 1697, on the road between Bologna and Ferrara at the hands of “bravi” (meaning thugs/muscle) in the employ of a nobleman with whose wife Siface had had a . . . liaison. So much for the erroneous perception that those without balls cannot have a ball.  (A crude statement, yes, but physiologically accurate).

And still May 29 is a gift that keeps on giving!

On May 29, 1942, Bing Crosby recorded Irving Berlin’s White Christmas.  Crosby’s recording won an Oscar for “Best Song” and sold over 50 million copies world-wide.  The link provided transits to Der Bingle and Marjorie Reynolds introducing White Christmas inthe movie Holiday Inn (1942).

But wait!  There’s more!  Because on May 29, 1913, 110 years ago today, the most famous riot in Western music history broke out during the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring at Paris’ Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.  (The riot was the topic of Music History Monday on May 29, 2017.)

Okay; deep, cleansing breath.  It is time to talk about Isaac Albéniz and his supreme masterwork, his 12-movement suite for solo piano entitled Iberia.  As happens not infrequently here on these august pages, our exploration of Albéniz’ life, his Spanish heritage, and the impact of that heritage on the creation and content of Iberia will take us through both today’s Music History Monday and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post.…

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We mark the first performance on May 22, 1874 – 149 years ago today – of Giuseppe Verdi’s Requiem, written in memory of the Italian novelist, poet, and patriot Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1872).”

Background

In June of 1870, the 57-year-old Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) agreed to compose an opera for the brand-new Cairo Opera Theater.  The Khedive Ismail Pasha of Egypt personally handled the negotiations, as the opera was to celebrate nothing less than the opening of the Suez Canal.  No expense was spared, either on the opera or on Verdi, who received the unheard-of commissioning fee of 150,000 gold francs: roughly $1,935,000 today!

The opera – Aida – received its premiere in Cairo on December 24, 1871.  With no disrespect intended towards either the Khedive Ismail Pasha of Egypt or the Cairo Opera Theater, the opera’s real premiere – as far as Verdi and the larger opera world were concerned – took place six weeks later: at La Scala in Milan on February 8, 1872.  That Italian premiere was a triumph, the greatest of Verdi’s career to date.  He himself received 32 curtain calls!

The only contemporary Italian artist who could possibly be considered as beloved as Giuseppe Verdi was the novelist and poet Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1883).  Manzoni’s most famous work is a novel entitled I promessi sposi (“The Betrothed”), which was written initially between 1821 and 1827; Manzoni completed the final, “definitive” version in 1842.  Manzoni wrote this final version in what was (and still is) considered the stylistically superior Italian dialect of Tuscany.  This final, “Tuscan” version of “The Betrothed” had a pivotal impact on the development of a consistent Italian-language prose style.  At a time when the Italian peninsula boasted more dialects than varieties of pasta, Manzoni, more than any other single person, helped to popularize a single, ideal way of writing and speaking Italian, based on the dialect of Tuscany.  

The importance of this cannot be overstated.  At a time when Italian nationalism sought the creation of a single, unified Italian nation with a single national identity, Manzoni’s work offered his nation a single, universally understood Italian language.  Manzoni came to be perceived – rightly – as not just the greatest Italian writer of his generation, but as a great Italian patriot as well.  What Verdi did for his nascent Italian nation through the medium of opera, so Manzoni accomplished through the medium of literature: he inspired a national Italian identity through its oh-so-special language.

Giuseppe Verdi considered Manzoni to be a living saint, a man who combined astonishing talent with great personal virtue and nobility.  

Manzoni died at the age of 88 on May 22, 1873.  The following day Verdi wrote to his friend and publisher Tito Ricordi:

“I am profoundly saddened by the death of our Great Man!  But I shall not go to Milan, for I do not have the heart to attend his funeral.  I will soon come to visit his grave, alone and unseen, and perhaps (after further reflection, having weighed my strength) to propose something to honor his memory.” 

A Requiem

Ten days after Manzoni’s death, Verdi did indeed go to the cemetery in Milan, where he stood at Manzoni’s grave and formulated a plan.  He returned to his suite at the Grand Hotel de Milan and wrote another letter to his publisher Tito Ricordi, proposing that he compose a Requiem Mass for Manzoni, to be performed on the first anniversary of his death.  Verdi’s intention was to write a work that, following its first performance, would be performed not in churches but rather, in concert halls, with each such performance offering a proper memorial to the memory of Manzoni. …

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On May 15, 1501 – 522 years ago today – the first polyphonic (that is, 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” followed in 1502 and 1503, respectively).  In fact, “One Hundred Pieces of Harmonic Music, Volume A” consists of 96 (not “100”, as the title claims) instrumental works and French-language songs 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 Ockeghem, Jacob Obrecht, Antoine Brumel, and Alexander Agricole – were all originally from northern France and southern Belgium: the so-called “Franco-Flemish” composers from the “oltre montani” (“the other side of the Alps”) who were so popular in Italy at the time.  

I am aware that that previous, opening paragraph, filled with relatively obscure Italian and Franco-Flemish names, musicological rubric, and featuring an obscure, Latin-titled anthology – Harmonice musices odhecaton A -might have crossed your eyes and loosened your bladders even as it threatened to put you to sleep.

But!

But, but!

But in fact, the publication of “One Hundred Pieces of Harmonic Music, Volume A” in 1501 was a huge, big deal in the history of Western music, an event we can accurately call a “game changer”!

In reference to human evolution and development, there have been all sorts of large-case game changers: the control of fire; the invention of clothing; the development of tools and the invention of the wheel; the rise of agriculture; the ability to smelt, forge, and alloy metals; the harnessing of steam, and so forth.  But I would argue that collectively, the most important game-changers in the evolution and development of humanity have to do with information transfer, starting with the development of language.

While it now appears likely that our ancestor homo erectus “invented” some sort of “grunted” language as long as 2 million years ago, complex language only emerged among the most loquacious of human species – that being we homo sapiens – some 150,000 years ago, as a systematic way for modern humans to communicate. 

Next to language, sliced bread as a game changer is, well, overrated.  …

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We mark the birth on May 8, 1829 – 194 years ago today – of the American composer and pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, in New Orleans. He died, all-too-young, on December 18, 1869 at the age of forty, in exile in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Events that occurred in September of 1865 in San Francisco, California and across the San Francisco Bay in Oakland led directly to Gottschalk’s “exile” to South America. Those frankly tawdry events, most unfairly, have been recounted way too often and as a result, they have come to obscure Gottschalk’s memory as a composer, pianist, patriot, and philanthropist. That’s because people like me continue to write about them as if they, somehow, encapsulated the totality of who and what Louis Moreau Gottschalk was.

I hate myself for having participated in this unholy example of scandal mongering – I do – and I stand before you filled with shame and remorse.

Nevertheless.

Nevertheless, I fully intend to rehash these salacious events here and now with the understanding that following that rehash, we will spend the remainder of this post and all of tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post doing penance, by providing a proper account of the cultural importance of Gottschalk’s hometown of New Orleans, as well as his life, times, and musical career.

Background

During his lifetime, Louis Moreau 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 compositions and arrangements of patriotic melodies. He gave away much of his earnings to veterans’ organizations.

He was born in 1829 in what was then the most highly cultured and diverse city in the United States: New Orleans. Gottschalk’s personal heritage was diverse as well. His father was a Jewish businessman from London and his mother a Creole, that is, a Louisiana native of French descent. He was a musical prodigy whose 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 European concert tradition.

Trained at the Paris Conservatoire, the 20-year-old Gottschalk was called “Chopin’s Successor” when Chopin died in 1849. Subsequent concert tours took him across Europe, North America, Central America, and South America made him a legend in his time.…

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On May 1, 1786 – on what was also a Monday, 237 years ago today – a miracle was heard for the first time: Wolfgang Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro received its premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna.  

Some 100 years later, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) 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.”

Herr Brahms, when you’re right, you’re right, and this case you are so right!  237 years after the premiere, Brahms’ awe of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro mirrors our own.  For many of us – myself included – it is, simply, the greatest opera ever composed. 

Composing an Italian Language Opera for the Viennese

On May 7^th, 1783 – some three years before the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro – Mozart wrote the following in a letter to his father back in Salzburg:

“The Italian opera buffa [here in Vienna] is very popular.  I have looked through more than a hundred libretti [meaning literally “little book,” the script of an opera] 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 an enormous amount to do, and he is at present writing a libretto for Salieri, which will take him two months. He has then promised to write a libretto for me.  But who knows if he will be able to keep his word, or whether he will want to?  As you know, these Italians are very civil to one’s face . . . I should dearly love to show what I can do in an Italian opera.”

That Mozart would “dearly love” to compose an Italian language opera for the Viennese was an understatement; “desperately want” would have been a far more appropriate way to put it!

When the 27-year-old Mozart wrote that letter to his father in May, 1783, he had been living and working as a freelance musician in Vienna for almost exactly two years.  The young dude was, at the time, filled with inestimable energy, ambition, and – of course – fathomless talent.  Italian language opera was the most prestigious (and potentially profitable) entertainment medium of the day, and Mozart desperately wanted a piece of that action.  But he was also savvy enough to know that composing an Italian language opera in the 1780s for the Viennese was an entirely different ball-of-notes than composing one for audiences in Salzburg, Munich, and even Milan, which he had done already.  He was no longer a child prodigy, for whom the composition of any opera would stun audiences merely by dint of its exitance.  By the 1780s he was a seasoned pro, composing for a Viennese audience that was, at the time, arguably the most discriminating one in Europe.   

Consequently, Mozart knew that when the time came for him to throw his compositional hat into the Viennese ring (pun intended) by composing an Italian language opera for the toughest crowd this side of the Roman Colosseum, it couldn’t be just any opera.  It would have to represent his best work, and as such it would have to be based on a really good story with a libretto by a first-rate poet.  Which is why – during the course of his letter to his father – Mozart mentioned Lorenzo Da Ponte, the official “poet” (meaning the official “librettist”) of the Viennese Court.…

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We mark the birth on April 24, 1942 – 81 years ago today – of the American singer, songwriter, actress, and filmmaker Barbara Joan “Barbra” Streisand, in Brooklyn, New York.  

But first, before we get to the magnificent Babs, a brief but spirited edition of “This Day In Music History  . . .” okay, “stupid” is too strong a word, so let’s just call it, “This Day In Music History . . . Dumb.”

On April 24, 2007 – 16 years ago today – the American musician, actress, singer, and songwriter Sheryl Crowe (born 1962) declared on her website that in order to help the environment, the use of toilet paper should be limited to:

“only one square per restroom visit, except, of course, on those pesky occasions where two to three could be required.” 

We cannot help but wonder precisely what “pesky occasions” Crowe might be referring to.  Additionally, we must assume that Ms. Crowe’s proscription again TP overuse was intended to be voluntary, as the issues surrounding enforcement are, indeed, troubling.

Sheryl Crow’s environmental concerns extended, as well, to what she deemed to be the profligate use of napkins. She went so far as to design a line of clothing that featured what she called a “dining sleeve.” Those sleeves – what amounted to wearable napkins – were “replaceable”: they could be detached after diners had used them to wipe their mouths and replaced with clean sleaves.  What a shock that “dining sleeves” never caught on!

While we would acknowledge that Sheryl Crowe’s environmental heart is in the right place, we would respectfully suggest she aim a bit higher than toilet paper and for example, stop drinking from plastic water bottles, as seen in the image above. 

Just suggesting.

Barbra Streisand (born 1942)

There is nothing I can say about Maestra Streisand that has not already been said a thousand times.  Regarding her talents as a singer, actress, and filmmaker; her command of the stage; her intelligence and sense of humor; her ego and ambition; her philanthropy and activism; the clichés be damned, she is truly a force of nature: one-of-a-kind.  She has been a constant presence in our cultural lives for seven decades: her first network television appearance occurred on April 5, 1961, when she appeared on The Jack Paar Show (later, The Tonight Show), which was guest-hosted that evening by Orson Bean (1928-2020).  

Bean late recalled:

“I met Barbra when she was 18 and singing at a place in Greenwich Village.  When I guest-hosted The Jack Paar Show I got them to fly her in from a club she was playing in Detroit. She was a nervous wreck.  But then when she started singing – [the song] ‘A Sleepin’ Bee’ – it was like God singing through her. She got a standing ovation, which doesn’t happen on TV. It was an incredible moment.”

…

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We mark the final San Francisco performance – on the evening of Tuesday, April 17, 1906, 117 years ago today – of the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso (1874-1921).  That performance at the no longer extant Grand Opera House at No. 2 Mission Street (between 2^nd and 3^rd Streets) was not intended to have been Caruso’s last local appearance, but circumstances beyond his control assured that it was!

Enrico Caruso (1874-1921)

Caruso was born into a poor family in Naples, Italy, on February 24^th, 1874.  He was the third of seven children (and not the nineteenth of twenty-one, as Caruso himself often claimed!).  Following in the professional footsteps of his father, Marcellino Caruso, who was a mechanic, young Enrico was apprenticed to a mechanical engineer at the age of 11.  He “discovered” his voice singing in a church choir, and as a teenager he made a few extra dinero singing on the streets and in the cafes of Naples.

At the age of 18, Caruso had something of a revelation, when he used money he had earned as a singer to buy his first new pair of shoes.  Realizing his real professional potential, he began taking voice lessons, and his progress was rapid.

The 21-year-old Caruso made his professional debut as an opera singer on March 15, 1895, when he sang in a now-forgotten opera (entitled L’Amico Francesco by Mario Morelli) at Naples’ Teatro Nuovo. He proceeded to pay his dues, singing a wide variety of roles in various provincial opera houses while continuing his vocal studies.  He made his La Scala debut at the age of 26 on December 26, 1900, singing Rodolfo in Giacomo Puccini’s La bohème under the baton of Arturo Toscanini.

Caruso quickly became a fan favorite throughout Italy, but it was technology – a brand-new technology – that made him world famous. 

On April 11, 1902, Caruso walked into a hotel room in Milan which had been outfitted as a makeshift recording studio.  On that day, for a fee of 100 pounds sterling, Caruso recorded 10 discs, becoming in the process the first opera singer to make a flat disc, 78 rpm record.  

(For our information, those records were made for Emile Berliner’s The Gramophone Company. Founded in London in 1898, The Gramophone Company was the parent company of the record label His Master’s Voice (HMV), which was the American affiliate of the Victor Talking Machine Company. The Victor Talking Machine Company was acquired by RCA in 1929 and the new label was initially known as RCA Victor.  In London, in a separate transaction, His Master’s Voice merged with the Columbia Gramophone Company in 1931 to create Electric and Musical Industries Limited, better known as the classical labels EMI and Angel.)

The records Caruso recorded in that Milanese hotel room made him an overnight sensation.  Just weeks after they were released, Caruso was signed to sing at London’s Covent Garden.  He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in a new production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto on November 23, 1903, and from that day forward became the Met’s most popular tenor. 

It was as a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company that Enrico Caruso came to perform in San Francisco, California, on April 17, 1906.…

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We mark the premiere on April 10, 1868 – 155 years ago today – of Johannes Brahms’ magnificent A German Requiem, for vocal soloists, chorus, and orchestra.

Johannes Brahms, Again?

I know I’ve been going heavy on Brahms (1833-1897) as of late. I would apologize if he wasn’t so fascinating a person and if his music wasn’t so darned good, but he was a fascinating person and his music is superb, so our continued attention is well deserved.

It’s not as if we didn’t have other topical options for this date. For example, on this date in 1970 – 53 years ago today – Paul McCartney “officially” announced the split-up of The Beatles. Okay; whatever; if there’s one topic that’s gotten more play here in Music History Monday than Bach, Brahms and Beethoven combined, it’s the fourth “B”: The Beatles.

The breakup of The Beatles?

Sorry, but yawn.

The “Wilhelm Scream”

Then there’s this. April 10, 1921, marks the birth – 102 years ago today – of the American singer, songwriter, actor, and comedian Shelby Frederick “Sheb” Wooley, in Erick Oklahoma (he died in Nashville, Tennessee on September 16, 2003, at the age of 82). For the vast majority of us who do indeed remember him, Wooley is best known for his 1958 rock ‘n’ roll comedy single The Purple People Eater, which he wrote in a matter of minutes and which sat at number 1 on Billboard’s Hot Pop Chart for six weeks between June 9 and July 14, 1958. The so-called “Official Video” is linked below.

But for those “in the know” (which is about to include all of us), Wooley’s greatest contribution to Western culture is not The Purple People Eater but rather, something called the “Wilhelm Scream.”

Here’s the scoop.

Among his various roles as an actor, Sheb Wooley made an uncredited appearance as one “Private Jessup” in a 1951 Gary Cooper movie called Distant Drums. At one point during the movie, a company of soldiers is fleeing through the Florida Everglades, pursued by a pack of Seminole Indians. Several soldiers die during the chase, including one who emits a blood-curdling scream as he is dragged underwater to his death by an alligator. Here is that scream:

The scream was created and recorded by none-other-than Sheb Wooley, and it has long outlived him. Wooley’s screeching sound-bite got its name when it was used again – in 1953 – in the movie The Charge at Feather River, when a character named “Private Wilhelm” got hit in the thigh with an arrow:

The now so-called “Wilhelm Scream” became part of Hollywood’s stock sound library, and as such, it went on to be been used – often multiple times in a single film – in hundreds of movies, TV shows, and video games, including the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Lord of the Rings, Kill Bill, Toy Story, Cars, The Incredibles, and Lethal Weapon franchises; Reservoir Dogs; Aladdin; Beauty and the Beast; The Fifth Element; Breaking Bad; The Simpsons; The X–Files; The Mandalorian; the list goes on and on!

I offer up two video links. The first one features what WatchMojo considers the “10 best” Wilhelm Screams:

The second link below features literally hundreds of Wilhelm Screams – that is, the same scream as recorded by Sheb Wooley in 1951 – over the course of its 12 minutes and 22 seconds!

Maestro Wooley, yours is a cinematic legacy of which to be proud!

We Transition!

Okay, enough screaming. We proceed to Johannes Brahms and A German Requiem. For your information, the remainder of this post and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes is going to constitute a “twofer”, as Dr. Bob Prescribes will pick up where today’s Music History Monday leaves off.…

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We mark the death on April 3, 1897 – 126 years ago today – of the German composer and pianist Johannes Brahms at the age of 63.  One of the great ones and along with Sebastian Bach and Louis van Beethoven one of the three bees – the killer bees – Brahms was born in the Hanseatic port city of Hamburg on May 7, 1833.

We will get to Maestro Brahms in just a moment but first – with appropriate fanfare – I offer up this edition of “This Day in Music History Stupid.”

Ashes to Ashes; Dust to Dust; Be Kind to My Ashes, Though Snort if You Must

On April 3, 2007 – 16 years ago today – the Reuters news agency reported that Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards (born December 18, 1943) admitted in a soon-to-be published interview with NME (New Musical Express) magazine that he had snorted his father’s ashes during a drug binge. 

I think we’ve all wondered the same thing at some point or another: given his personal habits and corpse-like appearance, how and why is Keith Richards still alive, yet still performing at nearly 80 years of age?

Richards would seem to be as surprised as we are that he is still among the living.  For decades he has expressed his (dubious) pride at having survived his legendary lifestyle.  Back in his sixties Richards told an interviewer:

“I was number one on the ‘Who’s Likely to Die’ list for 10 years. I mean, I was really disappointed when I fell off the list.  Some doctor told me I had six months to live and I went to his funeral.”

According to an NME magazine spokesperson, the interview in which Richards claimed to have snorted his father’s ashes was genuine and not a late April Fool’s joke. During that interview, Richards was asked what the strangest thing was he ever snorted.  His response:

“The strangest thing I’ve tried to snort?  My father. I snorted my father. He was cremated and I couldn’t resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn’t have cared. It went down pretty well and I’m still alive.”

For our information, Keith Richards’ father, Bert Richards, died in 2002 at the age of 84.  Will his son Keith outlive him? On this we’ll simply have to wait and see.

Johannes Brahms Approaching 60

Johannes Brahms in his late-fifties was a picture of ruddy good health.  

His schedule remained fixed: vacation in Italy during the early spring; compose in the countryside during the late spring and summer; return to Vienna in the fall to polish what he had written during the summer, conduct, or simply loaf around, as he pleased.  Despite his bulky physique, Brahms remained quite spry, and despite the countless cigars and the gallons of beer and wine he consumed he remained a picture of health.  

While in Vienna, he dined religiously – lunch and dinner – at the Zum rotten Igel – “The Red Hedgehog” – in the Wildpretmarkt.  As far as he was concerned, the Hedgehog served the best cheap food in Vienna, a double positive if there ever was one, something he never tired of telling his less frugal friends and associates.  

What Brahms did spend his money on were the Viennese ladies of the evening, with whom – we are told – he was kindly, caring, and generous, sometimes to a fault.  Of the older Brahms writes biographer Jan Swafford:

“In his fashion, Brahms remained modest and generous and often self-deprecating, but he did not escape the effects of fame.  In his age he could not abide being contradicted, took for granted that he was the center of every company.  He maintained his chosen masks:  the Master to be approached at peril; the gruff, hard drinking bourgeois man preferring the company of men or in mixed company telling naughty stories to the ladies.  He played the old scamp, the old rogue, flirting with every pretty face and everyone’s daughter.  But he looked, and did not touch, beyond a playful squeeze, laughed and held forth and gave lavish gifts but in the end gave nothing of himself beyond his art.  Ruthlessly, he had sunk his fair features and moonstruck young soul under the patriarchal beard and forbidding bark of Herr Doktor Brahms.” 

By the late 1880s and early 1890s, the awards, laurels, and prizes began to pour into Brahms’ Viennese flat, unbidden but not unwelcome.  Brahms kept the lid on his grand piano down, and instead of the usual family photographs, he covered the piano with a rotating display of his medals and certificates.  By far the most welcome honor to come his way arrived in May 1889:  Brahms was informed that his hometown of Hamburg was to award him the “Freedom of Hamburg” prize, the city’s greatest honor.  Only twelve people had ever received the prize, the most recent two being Otto von Bismarck and the Prussian general Helmut von Moltke. …

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A quick comment in reference to the title of today’s post, “Papa’s Last Appearance.” Not that you really need me to tell you, but by “Papa” we are not referring to Papa John Schnatter, who founded “Papa John’s Pizza” in 1984.  Neither are we referring to the stand-up comedian Tom Papa, the sportscaster Greg Papa, the American rock band Papa Roach, nor the American Paul Karason (1950-2013), also-known-as “Papa Smurf,” whose skin turned to a purplish-blue color as a result of ingesting a home-made brew of silver chloride colloid.

By “Papa,” we are referring to Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) who was once-and-forever nicknamed “papa” while still in his thirties by the grateful musicians who worked for him!

We mark what turned out to be the final public appearance of “Papa” Joseph Haydn on March 27, 1808 – 215 years ago today – at a concert held in honor of his upcoming 76^th birthday.  The gala concert, held at Vienna’s University Hall, featured a performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, which had been completed ten years before, in 1798.  The concert was what we would call today a “star-studded event”: everyone who was anyone in Vienna’s musical world was there, including Ludwig van Beethoven, Antonio Salieri, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel.

Background

Haydn was born on March 31, 1732, in the Austrian village of Rohrau, which at the time was just a hop-and-a-skip from the border with Hungary.  He was a small, wiry, energetic, and genial boy, and he grew up to be a small, wiry, energetic, and genial man.  

At a time when the average European life expectancy was just 33.3 years, Haydn remained a remarkably healthy man well into what was then considered to be old age.  Having never travelled outside the immediate vicinity of his birth, Haydn undertook the arduous journey to England in 1791 at the age of 59, and then again in 1794, at the age of 62.  Still composing masterworks into his 69^th year (he completed his oratorio The Seasons in 1801), Haydn was considered an ageless wonder by everyone around him.

Unfortunately, no one of us is in fact “ageless,” and time caught up with Haydn when he was in his late sixties.  Though he lived until May of 1809, his last years were marred by increasingly bad health.  His symptoms – swollen legs, exhaustion, failing memory – point to a general case of arteriosclerosis, or “hardening of the arteries.” While symptoms of the disease first became apparent in 1799, Haydn’s health declined precipitously after 1805, by which time, at the age of 73, he was for all intents and purposes an invalid.  

However, Haydn had the rare pleasure of knowing that in his old age he had not been forgotten.  His ongoing popularity was astonishing, and from every corner of Europe, medals, awards, honors, and proclamations poured into his home in the Viennese suburbs. …

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We mark the premiere performance, on February 20, 1816 – 207 years ago today – of Gioachino Rossini’s comic opera masterwork, The Barber of Seville, at Rome’s famed Teatro Argentina.

The Natural

Gioachino Antonio Rossini was born on February 29 (bummer of a birthday!), 1792 in the Italian city of Pesaro, on the Adriatic Sea. He died of colorectal cancer on November 13, 1868, in his villa in Passy, which today is located in Paris’ chic, 16^th arrondisement.

He was the only child of Giuseppe Rossini (1758-1839) and Anna (née Guidarini) Rossini (1771-1827). 

Rossini’s father Giuseppe was a professional trumpet and horn player, and as such was Gioachino’s first music teacher.  (The adult Rossini liked to say that:

“Sono figlio di corna,” “I am the son of a horn!”)

“Son of a horn” he might have been, but when it came to his real musical education, it was as the son of an opera singer.  Rossini’s mother Anna was, at the time of his birth in 1792, a seamstress by trade.  But changes in Italian society allowed her to make a second career as a professional singer.  According to Rossini’s biographer Richard Osborne (Rossini; Oxford University Press):

“Italian Society began to change in the late 1790s, not least in the arts, where a process of democratization set in.  Admission to academic institutions became easier for ordinary folk; new music was encouraged from a wider variety of sources; ticket prices fell; women found it easier to take paid employment on the stage.  The last development had enormous repercussions for the Rossini family, as it allowed Anna Rossini to earn useful money as a singer.”

According to her son Gioachino, Anna Rossini was a “natural,” with a voice, to quote her son:

“as sweet as her appearance.”

She wasn’t able to read music, but like her son Gioachino, she had a phenomenal musical memory.  All together, she mastered and performed 15 roles, all of them from comic operas.

Anna Rossini began her singing career in the 1797-1798 season at Ancona’s Teatro della Fenice, where she performed as the second soprano in operas by Giovanni Paisiello (1740-1816), Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801), and Giovanni Battista Martini (1706-1784). She concluded her career in the fall of 1808 as the prima donna assoluta (“the absolute first lady”: the starring soprano) at the Teatro Communale in Bagnacavallo, a town about 50 miles northwest of Pesaro.

By the time Gioachino was ten years old, he was going on tour with his mother, watching rehearsals from the house and following performances from backstage. It was a musical and operatic education like no other, and by the age of 13, he was hooked: he was a person of the theater. 

As it turned out, Anna wasn’t the only musical “natural” in the Rossini clan. …

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We mark the death, on February 13, 1883 – 140 years ago today – of the German composer Richard Wagner, in Venice, at the age of 69.  He had been born in the Saxon city of Leipzig on May 22, 1813.

Wagner’s Health

Writing in Hektoen International – A Journal of Medical Humanities, George Dunea, MD, states that:

“[Richard] Wagner was an extraordinarily highly strung individual.”

Do you think, Dr. Dunea?  

In fact, he was a pathologically overwrought individual, a certifiable narcissist who required maximum stimulation at all times whether he was awake or asleep.  (Yes, even asleep.  As a young child he kept his many siblings awake at night by shouting and talking while he slept.)

Wagner was not born a particularly healthy person, and as an adult, his personal habits and constant excitability exacted a considerable toll on his already compromised constitution. 

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association back in 1903 (Gould, George M.; The Ill-health of Richard Wagner, JAMA 1903; 51: 293 and 368; as articles go, this is an oldie but a goodie!), Dr. George Gould described Wagner as having the collective symptoms of:

“[Thomas] DeQuincy [best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater]; [Thomas] Carlisle; [Charles] Darwin, [Thomas Henry] Huxley; [Robert] Browning, [Herbert] Spencer, and [James] Parkinson all together and all at once.”

The illnesses shared by these illustrious individuals included migraine headaches, severe gastric issues, anxiety, depression, and insomnia. They were all workaholics who, according to Dr. Gould, drove themselves until they were:

 “threatened either by disease or by despair.”

From childhood on, Wagner suffered recurrent skin disease that has been variously diagnosed as eczema or erysipelas.  He suffered from what were likely migraine headaches his entire life, complaining about “the nerves of his brain.” As an adult he suffered from depression and severe anxiety, and thought obsessively about death.  (As early as 1852, as a young man of 39, he wrote: “I am daily thinking of my death.”)

He was an insomniac and subject to rheumatic pains and constant gastric discomforts.  Physically, he was a mess.  But migraines and dyspepsia were not likely to kill Wagner, as opposed to his problems with his heart.

Those problems began in December of 1873, when Wagner was 60, at a time when he was desperately trying to put together the funding for his Bayreuth Festival, his grand monument to himself and his art (more on the festival in just a moment).  The anguish and stress he put himself through and the anxiety and depression he experienced began to affect his heart.  (According to Wagner’s wife Cosima, writing in her diary:

“by starting the festival, he signed his own death-warrant; he seldom had a good night and his attacks of cramp about the heart became more and more frequent.”)

The Bayreuth Festival

The Bayreuth Festival – held in the picturesque, medieval Bavarian city of Bayreuth in southern Germany – is an annual music festival/Wagner lovefest dedicated to performing the works of Richard Wagner his very self.…

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We mark the death on February 6, 1497 – 526 years ago today – of the composer and singer Johannes Ockeghem, in Tours, France, at the age of 87 (or so).  He was born circa 1410 in the French-speaking city of Saint-Ghislain in what today is Belgium, about 5 miles from the border with France. 

The title of this post – “Johannes Ockeghem and the Oltremontani” – employs a Italian word that may not be familiar to everybody: “Oltremontani.”  It’s a word that means, literally, “those from the other side of the mountains.”  The mountains in question are the alps, so in fact, generally, the word refers to people “from the other side of the alps”: from northern and northwestern Europe.  But when used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it meant something quite more specific than that: it referred to musicians from what today are northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg. 

Johannes Ockeghem was just such an oltremontano, having been born in Belgium close to the northern border of France.

Johannes Ockeghem (circa 1410-1497)

“Born circa 1410, died 1497.”  Back in the fifteenth century, if someone became famous – and at the time of his death, Johannes Ockeghem was famous across Europe – their death date was (and remains) common knowledge.  But for people born in the fifteenth century (and earlier), birth dates and early accounts of their lives before they became famous, well, that’s a different matter entirely.  Generally, we know next to nothing about the birth dates and early lives of ordinary people born in the fifteenth century and before, and that includes Johannes Ockeghem.  In fact, we’re not even sure how he spelled his name.  We use “Ockeghem” today because that spelling came from a document – now lost – in which he supposedly signed his name using that spelling.  But other spellings of his name include Ogkegum, Okchem, Hocquegam, and Ockegham.

Here’s some stuff we do know.  

Johannes Ockeghem was considered by his contemporaries, as he is considered today, to be – along with Guillaume DuFay (circa 1397-1474), Antoine Busnois (circa 1430-1492), and Josquin Desprez (circa 1450-1521) – the greatest and most influential composer of the fifteenth century.  

(For those of us who may not be familiar with the names of the oltremontani Ockeghem, DuFay, Busnois, and Desprez, I would be so bold as to suggest that they were equivalent, in their time, to the Vienna-based quartet of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. 

In terms of these Renaissance composers’ talent and impact on the history of Western music, I am not exaggerating.)

For reason’s already explained, we know nothing about Ockeghem’s early life.  Like most composers of his time, he almost certainly started his musical life as a church chorister, likely in the city of Mons, a few miles east of his hometown of Saint-Ghislain.

The first documentary mention of Ockeghem’s activity as a musician date to June, 1443, when he is listed as being among the chanteurs – the singers – at the Church of Our Lady, in Antwerp. His initial fame was, indeed, as a singer: he was a basso and was reputed to have a rich, flexible, and unerringly accurate voice.  

He was described by the people that knew him, including the famed humanist Erasmus, as being:

“exceptionally engaging: honest, virtuous, kind, generous, charitable, and pious.” 

Ockeghem’s friend, the cleric Francesco Florio (1428-1484) described him this way in the 1470s:

“I am sure you could not dislike this man, so pleasing is the beauty of his person, so noteworthy the sobriety of his speech and of his morals, and his graciousness. He alone of all the singers is free from vice and abounding in all virtues.”

Okay: combine a brilliant singer and composer with physical beauty, a great attitude, and a long life and you have the prescription for success.  

And Ockeghem was nothing if not successful.…

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We mark the death on January 30, 1963 – exactly sixty years ago today – of the French composer and pianist Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc, in Paris.  A Parisian from head to toe, he was born in the tres chic 8^th arrondisement in that magnificent city on January 7, 1899.  He died of a heart attack not far from where he’d been born, in his flat opposite the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris’ 6^th arrondisement. 

Before we can get down with the magnifique Monsieur Poulenc, we have an important event in rock ‘n’ roll history to mark.

On January 30, 1969 – 54 years ago today – the Beatles, joined by the keyboard player Billy Preston, performed their final live concert.  The venue was unusual: a hastily constructed stage on the rooftop of their five-story Apple Corps (their record company) headquarters, at 3 Savile Row: smack dab in the middle of the fashion district in London’s tony Mayfair neighborhood. 

(I cannot resist the joke: how do you get a rock band onto a roof?  You tell them the beer is on the house.)

Badaboom.

A couple of weeks before the rooftop concert eventually took place, Paul McCartney had suggested that the Beatles should perform a concert:

“in a place we’re not allowed to do it … like we should trespass, go in, set up and then get moved. Getting forcibly ejected, still trying to play your numbers, and the police lifting you.”

The shock value of such a “concert” was sure to generate awesome publicity for the Beatles just released (on January 13, 1969) Yellow Submarine album.  Still, it wasn’t until January 26 – just four days before the concert – that the Beatles and their management decided to go ahead with their impromptu, rooftop recital.  

No announcement of the event was made ahead of time.  Instead, the Beatles and Billy Preston took their places on the rooftop stage and started playing at around 12:30 pm, smack-dab in the middle of London’s lunchtime break, with lots of people out and about.  Word quickly spread that a sensational event was taking place on Savile Row, and it wasn’t the opening of a new haberdashery; after all, The Beatles had not played in public for 2½ years: not since their performance at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park on August 29^th, 1966.   

Crowds quickly began to assemble in the surrounding streets, and in the windows and on the roofs of surrounding buildings.  (So much for George Harrison’s fear that they would be performing “only for chimneys.”)  Soon enough, streets became impassable and the doors to businesses blocked.  Given that the blocked streets included Savile Row and Regent Street (the latter a major thoroughfare); and that the blocked businesses constituted some of the ritziest in the city, not everyone was overjoyed with the spontaneous concert.  …

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We mark the death on January 23, 1976 – 47 years ago today – of the American bass-baritone singer, stage and screen actor, civil rights activist, professional football player, and graduate of Columbia University Law School Paul Robeson at the age of 77, in Philadelphia.  Born in Princeton, New Jersey on April 9, 1898, the son of an escaped slave turned Presbyterian minister, Robeson had more intellectual, artistic, and athletic gifts and lived more lives than any 10 (20? 50? 100?) so-called “normal” people.  And he had to fight for every one of those lives, growing up a black person in early twentieth century America.

“Larger than Life”

The English-language idiom “larger than life” describes people “who are better and stronger and smarter than the average Joe”: individuals imbued with characteristics and abilities far beyond those of “ordinary” human beings. Typically, the idiom is reserved for fictional characters, who are gifted with superhuman (or nearly so) qualities and abilities. The heroes, warriors, gods, and goddesses of myths and legends are, by definition, “larger than life.” Achilles, Hercules, Zeus, Odysseus, Thor, Brünnhilde (and many, many more) would all qualify. 

Comic book characters and superheroes are likewise, by their nature, “larger than life.” Certain other fictional characters become larger than life thanks to their singular identity: thanks to their stature, their presence, and their flair. Love them or hate them, we remember them.  For example, Harry Potter and Frodo Baggins; Cruella de Vil and Scarlet O’Hara; Nancy Drew and Sherlock Holmes would all qualify.

Employed judiciously, “larger than life” can also be used to describe an actual human being, providing that person’s life, abilities, personality, and accomplishments truly distinguish them from the rest of us.  When used to describe an actual person, the idiom gets its power from its use of figurative license, since, in fact, it’s impossible to actually quantify the “size” of a life.

According to an entry in languagehumanities.org:

“The use of exaggeration is what gives this phrase its particular power. Especially when it is used in reference to an actual person, there can hardly be a greater compliment than to call someone “larger than life.” That is why it is usually reserved for only the most noteworthy personalities, or else its impact would be somewhat lessened.”

Paul Robeson (1898-1976) was truly “larger than life.”

Robeson’s life as a singer, actor, athlete, intellectual, and activist; as a Black American aggressively and publicly battling racism and Jim Crow; as a socialist and, to many, a communist dupe and traitor to America defies easy telling.  As such, this post is going to focus on Robeson’s preternatural talent and artistry, and will trace his life though 1933, the year he made the film, The Emperor Jones. Through interviews and archival footage, tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will briefly observe his political awakening and subsequent activism, finally focusing on the controversial but still breathtaking The Emperor Jones, “breathtaking” thanks to Robeson’s for-the-ages performance.…

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We mark the death on January 16, 1864 – 159 years ago today – of Anton Felix Schindler, in Frankfurt, at the age of 68.  Born on June 13, 1795, in the town of Medlov in today’s Czech Republic, Schindler was, for a time, Beethoven’s “factotum”: his secretary and general assistant.  He was also a scoundrel and a profiteer, who after Beethoven’s death lied about his relationship with Beethoven, stole irreplaceable objects and documents from Beethoven’s estate, and falsified and destroyed many of those documents (some of which he later sold off) in order to make himself look better in the eyes of history.  Boo-hoo for Schindler: the “making-himself-look-better-in-the-eyes-of-history” thing didn’t work, and today he is regarded as the patron saint of lying and thieving employees.

Among the Beethovenian documents Anton Schindler took upon himself to “remove for safekeeping” were Beethoven’s so-called “Conversation Books.”

Beethoven’s Conversation Books

It took an agonizingly long time for Beethoven to go completely deaf. His hearing loss began in 1796, in his 26^th year: a buzzing in his ears and a slow but progressive loss of high frequency hearing.  By the fall of 1802, Beethoven had cut himself off from much of his world out of fear his infirmity would be discovered.  Having been assaulted by doctors and the useless (and often painful) remedies they prescribed, Beethoven had come to realize that his condition was incurable and irreversible, and he considered suicide.  But he survived his crisis by convincing himself that like the great man of his age – Napoleon Bonaparte (1767-1821) – he (Beethoven) would struggle against his “enemies” (fate, despair, and physical disability) and emerge victorious through his music!

Beethoven was still playing the piano in public and attempting to conduct as late as 1812.  Between 1816 and 1818 he employed various ear-trumpets built for him by his erstwhile friend (and the presumed inventor of the metronome) Johann Nepomuk Mälzel (1772-1838).  

Sadly, by 1818 Beethoven’s deafness had advanced to the point where the ear-trumpets had become useless.

From 1818 to 1827 (the year of his death), Beethoven carried around blank books in which friends and acquaintances could write down their side of a conversation, conversations during which Beethoven would speak out loud.  Beethoven also used the books for “private” purposes: to jot down notes and ideas, drafts for letters and other documents, shopping lists, and even some brief compositional sketches.  …

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We mark the birth on January 9, 1902 – 121 years ago today – of the opera impresario Rudolf Bing, in Vienna Austria.  The general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1950 to 1972, Bing died in Yonkers, New York in September 1997 at the age of 95.  His was a long life by any standard, but particularly by the standards of an opera impresario, whose professional livesare marked by a degree of life-threatening stress and anxiety that, perhaps, only has its equal in combat and divorce court.  

Impresario

The term “impresario” originated in the world of Italian opera in the 1750s.  Deriving from the Italian word “impresa,” which is “an enterprise or undertaking,” an impresario was that single individual who organized, financed, and produced operas (and later, concerts).  It was a job similar to what a film producer does today; a high stress job not for the faint of heart or weak of bladder.

Apropos of the impresarios of his day, the great Gioachino Rossini (1792-1868) wrote in reference to how he went about composing his opera overtures:

“Wait until the evening before the opening night.  Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it’s the presence of a copyist waiting for your work or the prodding of an impresario tearing at his hair.  In my time, all the impresarios of Italy were bald at 30.”

For our information, Rudolf Bing was bald at thirty.

Rudolf Bing (1902-1997)

Rudolf Franz Joseph Bing was born into a well-to-do Jewish family in Vienna 121 years ago today.  By his own admission a terrible student, Bing’s parents allowed him to drop out of high school (or gymnasium) at sixteen.  He went to work at the prestigious Viennese bookshop of Gilhofer & Ranschburg before moving on to the shop of a bookseller named Hugo Heller, who also ran a theatrical and concert agency.  By the age of 19, Bing was deeply immersed in the running of Heller’s concert operation, and he was hooked, later writing in his memoir 5000 Nights at the Opera:

“I enjoyed the atmosphere of the theater, with its nightly deadline; only journalism and the theater give you this daily excitement, and it is a poison far more habit forming than coffee or nicotine.”

(For our information, Bing grew up speaking German and English, and as such, was completely fluent in English.  His two memoirs, 5000 Nights at the Opera [of 1972] and A Knight at the Opera [of 1981] were both written in English.)…

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We mark the birth on December 19, 1915 – 107 years ago today – of the French singer and actress Édith Piaf in the Belleville district of Paris.  Born Édith Giovanna Gassion, she came to be considered France’s national chanteuse, one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century, a French combination of Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, and Billie Holiday.  She died in Plascassier, near the French Riviera city of Nice, on October 10, 1963, all-too young at the age of 47.  

Way Too Personal

I will be forgiven for making today’s post personal. (It’s just going to happen sometimes.)

I was first married in August of 1981.  I was 27 and my betrothed was 23 at the time of our marriage.  We were . . . young.  Frankly, chronological years notwithstanding, I was far “younger” than my bride.  Together, we made two wonderful babies: our daughter Rachel, now 36 years old, and our son Samuel, now 32.   Our marriage lasted for seventeen years.  Based on the frankly terrifying statistics out there, our marriage lasted considerably longer than the seven-to-eight-year average of the 50% of marriages that fail in the United States.  

Three years after our breakup, I became involved with another woman, someone who was twenty years my junior.  Yes, the age difference was extreme (and it did not go over well with my ex).  But once again, chronological age meant nothing.  Diane was an old soul, with an emotional age many decades beyond mine.  She was smart, funny, and a brilliant, professional-grade flutist.  I was smitten, besotted, hopelessly and forever taken with her. 

We moved in together in 2000.

On September 11, 2001, our phone rang at a little after 6am Pacific Time; we were still asleep.  It was my daughter Rachel, 15 years old at the time and an early riser, telling us to turn on our television.  We did so and proceeded to watch – like every one of us, with our jaws hanging open – as that awful day’s events unfolded.  (My parents were among the many millions who watched everything live and in real time from their apartment terrace high on New Jersey’s Palisades, overlooking the Hudson River and Manhattan.)

Looking back, it’s difficult to believe – given our present national dysfunctionality – how united we were as a nation during that post-9/11 autumn of 2001.  I can only wish that we could recapture something of that spirit without first having to suffer a national trauma. …

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December 12 is a crazy day in American jazz and popular music history, a day that saw the births of five – count ‘em, five – significant musicians, three of whom have something very special in common.

Let us first recognize the birthdays of the two jazz/pop musicians who do not share this special commonality.

We start with a big, happy birthday to the jazz singer Joe Williams, who was born on December 12, 1918, 104 years ago today.  Born Joseph Goreed, he came into this world in Cordele, Georgia, and left it on March 29, 1999, in Las Vegas at the age of 80.  Big Joe had a gorgeous, warm baritone voice that was as smooth as a peeled onion.  Long associated with Count Basie (1904-1984) and his big band, Williams sings one of his trademark songs – Alright, Okay, You Win – with the Basie Band in the link below, recorded circa 1970.

Another big, happy birthday to the singer, drummer, and percussionist Sheila E. (“E” for Escovedo), who was born right here in Oakland, California, on December 12, 1957, 65 years ago today.  Sheila Escovedo came by her musical bona fides honestly.  Her father is the Latin jazz percussionist Peter (“Pete”) Escovedo (born in 1935 in the San Francisco Bay Area city of Pittsburg, California), and her Godfather was the great American Latin, Afro-Cuban, and mambo musician, songwriter, bandleader, and record producer Tito Puente (1923-2000).  She is a singer of talent and a killer-fine drummer.  The link below dates to 1987, with Sheila E. playing a knockout drum solo with her frequent collaborator, Prince.

And now, three more birthday babies, all with something special in common beyond the shared date of their births, and that is their roots (or “ruts”, as it might be locally pronounced) in the great Garden State of New Jersey! …

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Here We Go Again . . .

It has come to pass. I have been writing these Music History Monday posts for long enough that Monday dates and events have begun to repeat. And as a result, December 5, which was a Monday in 2016, once again falls on a Monday today. Ordinarily there are enough events on any given Monday to keep me from having to deal with the same topic. But December 5 is a special date for one particularly terrible musical event, an event that demands to be revisited.

Dates That Will Live in Infamy

We consider: there are some dates that, for events that marked them, will live in infamy.

I would suggest that what qualifies as an “infamous date” – that is, a date we will all remember to our dying day – is generally dependent upon when one was born. For example, for someone born in the United States in 1854 (that’s 100 years before I was born), those dates of infamy might include:

March 6, 1857: the date of the Dred Scott decision, which saw the U.S. Supreme Court rule 7-2 that an enslaved human being (Dred Scott) who had resided in a free state and territory where slavery was prohibited was not entitled to his freedom; that African Americans were not and could never be citizens of the United States; and that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which had declared all territories west of Missouri and north of latitude 36°30′ to be free from slavery) was unconstitutional.

Some other such infamous dates for someone born in the United States in 1854:

April 12, 1861: the opening of the bombardment of Fort Sumter near Charleston, South Carolina, which initiated the American Civil War.

April 14, 1865: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, who died early in the morning of April 15.

Now: for me and my generation, such “dates of infamy” would include:

November 22, 1963: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.

April 4, 1968: the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, in Memphis, Tennessee.

September 11, 2001. We all know what happened on that day.

January 6, 2021. Again, we all know what happened on that day.

For those good people who will be born in 2054, their dates of infamy will – again – reflect their own time and experience.

However, there are some dates of infamy we can all agree on, whether we were born in 1854, 1954, or 2054. Among them is December 5, 1791, 231 years ago today: the day Wolfgang Mozart died in his Viennese flat at the age of 35 years, 10 months, and 9 days.

As previously observed, December 5 last fell on a Monday in 2016. My Music History Monday post for that day was entitled “Mozart: A diagnosis.” Based on contemporary reports of Mozart’s symptoms and modern interpretations of those reports and symptoms, that post offered up what is almost certainly the correct cause of Mozart’s death: a relapse of Rheumatic fever.

Today’s post – “Myths of Murder and Mayhem!” – will deal with some of the many falsehoods that came to surround Mozart’s death almost from the moment of his death!

But first, a little background.…

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We mark the New York premiere on November 28, 1925 – 97 years ago today – of Aaron Copland’s Music for the Theater, at a League of Composer’s concert conducted by Serge Koussevitzky at New York’s Town Hall. The actual world premiere of the piece took place eight days before, when Koussevitzky conducted Music for the Theater in Boston. But Copland was a native New Yorker and Music from the Theater is about the New York theatrical and musical world. So – and for this you’ll have to excuse me, particularly the Bean Town babies among us – the so-called “Boston Premiere” was nothing but a warmup, a preview, a promo, an hors d’oeuvre akin to trying out a Broadway play in New Haven or Philadelphia before taking it to the house, to the big time, the Apple, to the city that never sleeps, to the burg so big they had to name it twice: New York, New York!

Coming Clean

We all have to make decisions, the vast majority of which are, gratefully, relatively insignificant. (I cannot imagine having to make decisions that would affect the health and welfare of entire communities. It’s difficult enough for me to figure out what to make for dinner.) The decisions I do make are for myself and for my families: my immediate family and my Patreon family.

Here’s a decision I made for my Patreon family two weeks ago today, on November 14. You see, November 14 is one of those crazy dates when so much happened in the world of music that I was hard put to decide what to feature in that day’s Music History Monday. Check it out.

On November 14, 1719, the composer, violinist, teacher, and tennis-father-supreme Leopold Mozart (father of you-know-who) was born in the German city of Augsburg.

On November 14, 1778, the composer and pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel was born in the city of Pressburg, today Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia.

On November 14, 1805, the composer and pianist Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel was born in the German city of Hamburg.

On November 14, 1831, the Austrian-French composer and piano builder Ignaz Joseph Pleyel died in Paris at the age 74.

On November 14, 1900, the composer Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York.

On November 14, 1939, the composer and synthesizer virtuosa Wendy (“don’t call me ‘Walter’”) Carlos was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

On November 14, 1946, the Spanish composer Manuel de Falla died in Alta Gracia, Argentina, at the age of 69.

(And finally, on that very day two weeks ago – November 14, 2022 – the wonderful Robert Flack [born 1937) revealed that she is suffering from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and is no longer able to sing.)

Heavens: and to think that on some dates, nothing happened.

Okay; when deciding what to write about two weeks ago on November 14, I was able to knock a couple of names off this list. My Music History Monday post for June 18, 2018, celebrated the birth of Ignaz Pleyel (1757-1831), and Music History Monday of October 17, 2022 (six weeks ago today) noted the death (and celebrated the life) of Johann Nepomuk Hummel.

As it turned out, I chose to feature Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel in my Music History Monday post of November 14 past (and my Dr. Bob Prescribes post on November 15). I was comforted in making this decision by the fact that I knew I’d be writing about the November 14 birthday boy Aaron Copland in today’s Music History Monday (and in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes as well).

Aaron Copland in New York (?)

The question mark attached to the post title above is appropriate, because as a native New Yorker who lived the great bulk of his life in that singular town, we might rightly wonder when was Aaron Copland not in New York?

In fact, the title of today’s post refers to two very specific periods of Copland’s life in New York: his childhood and the period after his return to New York in 1924 after three years of study abroad, primarily with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.…

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We mark the death on November 21, 1695 – 327 years ago today – of the English composer and organist Henry Purcell, in London. He lies buried today in a place of singular honor, adjacent to the organ on which he performed in Westminster Abbey in London. He had been born there in London on (or about) September 10, 1659, making him only 36 years old when he died. But like both Mozart and Schubert after him, Purcell’s terribly premature death did not preclude him from writing a tremendous amount of music of the very highest quality.

Purcell’s music – sacred and secular – utterly defined his time, a time known in British history as the Restoration.

Timing

I know that the realtors among us will tell us that in the end, everything is all about location, location, and location. Well, sorry to disagree but, in fact, in the end, nothing is more important than timing, timing, and timing. Hey: I love the city of Paris; it is my favorite urban location. But a successful visit to that magnificent location is dependent on timing.

Had I chosen to visit in August 1348, I would have arrived simultaneously with the Black Death and may very well have perished along with roughly 80,000 Parisians, fully one-third of the population.

When I bought my first house in 1986, I would have loved to have been able to buy one in a location called Piedmont, a lovely enclave located in the heart of Oakland.

A great location, yes. But I (we; my wife and I) couldn’t buy in Piedmont because we didn’t have the bucks at the time (or at any time, for that matter). The message? Location without timing is useless.

So: location verses timing. Henry Purcell could have been born in any major metropolitan area in England in 1659: in London, Norwich, York, Bristol, Newcastle, Exeter, Ipswich, Great Yarmouth, or Oxford. Every one of those locations had institutions that would have allowed Purcell to be educated as a musician. But the extraordinary opportunities that allowed him to not just become a composer but to thrive as a composer were strictly a matter of timing.

Writes Robert King:

“Purcell began his musical upbringing as a boy chorister. There is nothing inherently unusual about that, for many British musicians have, over the years, been fortunate enough to have that unequalled education. But had he been born just a few years earlier, this [Purcell’s musical education] would have been impossible. Fortunately, within a few months of his birth the puritan rule of Oliver Cromwell came to an end, and the monarchy and the Anglican Church were restored to Britain, releasing with it a burst of musical creativity and life that has never since been repeated. By the 1680s, when Purcell’s genius was flowering, London was buzzing with newly written music for the church, the royal and private chapels, the newly founded concert halls, the theaters and even the taverns.”

Timing.…

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We mark the birth on November 14, 1805 – 217 years ago today – of the German composer, pianist, wife, mother, and hausfrau Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel, in the Hanseatic city of Hamburg.  She died on May 14, 1847, all-too-young at the age of 41, at her home in the Prussian capital of Berlin.

Fanny Cäcille Mendelssohn was the first child (of an eventual four) of Lea and Abraham Mendelssohn. Lea Mendelssohn took one look at her infant daughter’s hands and famously exclaimed:

“Look!  She has Bach fugue hands.”

And that she did.

The next Mendelssohn child was born three years and three months later, Fanny’s baby brother – the “genius” – Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847).  

“Genius”

The word “genius” is so overused as to be almost useless.  Nevertheless, it is necessary that we define it and then discuss an aspect its usage.  

Definition.  Admittedly, while there is no precise, scientific way to measure and define genius, the following definition, by Walter Isaacson, will do. (Isaacson “knows” genius; his biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci are must reads.) 

“Genius is a characteristic of original and exceptional insight in the performance of some art or endeavor that surpasses expectations, sets new standards for future works, establishes better methods of operation, or remains outside the capabilities of competitors. Genius is associated with intellectual ability and creative productivity, and may refer to a polymath who excels across diverse subjects.”

A most intriguing question: when was the last time any of us heard of a woman being referred to as a “genius”? 

Before setting out to write this blog, I’d never asked myself that question.  But after a proper bit of brain wracking, my personal answer is never.

Yes, Marie Curie (1867-1934) remains the only woman to have won the Nobel Prize twice. (Perhaps Walter Isaacson would consider writing a biography of Madame Curie?)  The actress Hedy Lamar (1914-2000) was a self-taught inventor who, among many other things, helped create frequency-hopping, a technology that today lies at the heart of wi-fi and Bluetooth.  As a mathematician for NASA, it was Dr. Katherine Johnson (1918-2020) who calculated the flight paths for the Apollo moon missions.

I could go on, but I don’t need to, because whatever we choose to call them, there always have been and always will be geniuses that are women.  The issues for us, right now, are, one, whether or not their societies allow women to develop their genius and two, whether their societies are willing to designate them as being geniuses. 

Alas, male-dominated societal machinations have traditionally conspired against smart women.  Sadly, it’s an undeniable fact: such women have historically been perceived as presenting a threat to patriarchal order, and were kept at home, there to protect the patrilinear family.  As such, writes Françoise Tillard:

“the notion of ‘genius’ belongs to a world of masculine concepts that do not include female creativity.”

The distinction between “talent” and “genius” was formulated by German writers and philosophers in the eighteenth century.  By the nineteenth century, the prestigious French Le Robert Dictionary defined “genius” (génie) as (the following italics are mine):

“a superior aptitude of the mind that lifts a man above the common measure and renders him capable of creations, inventions and undertakings which seem extraordinary or superhuman to his peers.” 

“Man”, “him”, and “his.” This is not just old-style pronoun usage.  It is a mindset that takes as an ironclad given that men create and women procreate, and never shall that twain meet!…

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We mark the birth on November 7, 1926 – 96 years ago today – of the dramatic coloratura soprano Dame Joan Alston Sutherland, in Sydney, Australia.  She died on October 10, 2010, in Montreux, Switzerland at the age of 83.  

I want you all to know upfront that Joan Sutherland was the first singer on whom I had a major crush, both because of her stupendous voice (hey: she wasn’t called “La Stupenda!” for nothing) and for reasons to be described below.

In this post I will be using the occasion of Ms. Sutherland’s birth to not just talk about her extraordinary talent, but to wax nostalgic, for which I trust you’ll indulge me.  While that nostalgia might dominate this post, be assured that tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post will be dedicated entirely to Joan Sutherland’s artistry and recordings.  

Records and Record Players 

I’m going to talk about “sound reproducing equipment” for a bit.  Please: though it might, momentarily, appear that I am geeking out here, I am – in fact – not.  Because for people of a certain age, our records and the gear on which we played our records were for our younger selves (and perhaps our older ones as well) an essential, irreplaceable part of our lives.

Like most kids born around the time I was (1954), I (actually we: my brother and I) had a portable record player on which we played the 45-rpm records our family bought for us.  The two records I remember as being my six-or-seven-year-old self’s favorites were Shadrach, Meshack & Abednego and Gerald McBoing-Boing at Professor Wumple’s Music School.  Thanks to the world-wide-web, I found both recordings online and offer up links below!

The Wanderers: Shadrach, Meshack & Abednego (recorded 1959).

Gerald McBoing-Boing at Professor Wumple’s Music School (circa 1957):

I remember feeling that there was magic in those records, with their tiny grooves somehow containing music.  And I was mesmerized by the record player itself: the tone arm swinging back-and-forth, the spinning turntable and, of course, the music that came out of the thing.  It was the best toy I ever owned!

Downstairs, in the living room, my parents had a somewhat higher fidelity record player, not at all unlike the one pictured below.

My parents had an eclectic mix of records: “classical” (mostly orchestral), jazz (mostly piano players), Broadway shows, lots of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, and lots of Joan Sutherland (more on those Sutherland recordings in a moment).

And then came 1965.  For the wonderful musical satirist and math professor Tom Lehrer, 1965 was “That Was the Year That Was.”  For the Greenberg family at 11 Belhurst Lane in Willingboro, N.J., that was the year we went from being technologically deficient to the techno-forefront!  Because that was the year we got our first color TV (an RCA) and the year that my father (who was a fine musician in his own right) upgraded to what we all considered, at the time, to be a high-fidelity system: a monaural rig consisting of Dynakit/Dynaco tube preamplifier and amplifier, a Garrard turntable, and a single Acoustic Research AR2 speaker.  

It was a rather crude system by modern standards, but considering what we were coming from (the “record player” above!), it was a revelation, and the pleasure it gave my father could not have been greater had it consisted of Wilson Audio WAMM Master Chronosonic Speakers (at $850,000 a pair), Ultrasound Otello amplification (at $650,000) and a Goldmund Reference II turntable (a relative bargain at $250,000).

(However, let it be noted that the pleasure I myself would receive from the equipment just mentioned would indeed exceed what I felt listening to my father’s system.  So should any of you have any of that rather pricey gear hanging about unused and unwanted, you will let me know.)

To the point.  As often as not on Sunday afternoons, particularly during the winter, I would find my father on the living room couch, listening primarily to opera singers on his new semi-hi-fi.  Not to operas, per se, but to albums of arias.  Far and away, the singer whose albums he listened to the most – and I know this because I listened with him – was Joan Sutherland.  The result, for me, was that Joan Sutherland’s was the first operatic voice I got to know well, a voice that became – for the younger me – the benchmark of what an operatic soprano was supposed to sound like.

Admittedly, as a kid, I had no reference point for what a coloratura soprano (FYI, an operatic soprano who specializes in music distinguished by its virtuosity) was supposed to sound like. I was completely ignorant of other extraordinary contemporary coloraturas, an amazing bunch of singers that included Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi, Beverly Sills, Lucia Popp, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Margaret Price, Monserrat Caballé, and Leontyne Price.

So: when it came to the female voice, the 11-year-old me didn’t know you-know-what from Shinola, but I still understood – at a gut level – that Joan Sutherland was, well, stupendous.

What I heard was a voice that even I could recognize as being the size of an Olympic swimming pool. …

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Before moving forward, the title of this post – “The Grandmother of All Drop Parties!” – demands an explanation-slash-definition.  

A “grandmother” is the mother of a parent, though in this usage, thank you, it is meant to indicate the ultimate example of what follows, as in “the grandmother of all drop parties.”

I know you knew that.  On to the important definition.

A “drop party” or “release party” or “launch party” is a festive event sponsored by someone or some corporate entity to celebrate the release of a new product or service. 

In these here parts – meaning the San Francisco Bay Area – the most familiar sort of drop parties are those usually lavish affairs thrown by tech companies to launch new hardware or software (as opposed to underwear, overwear, everywhere, nowhere, or whatever-ware).  Certainly, the pandemic put a major crimp on such parties, but I have little doubt they will be back, and that’s because they check off so many important boxes.  They allow a company to celebrate itself and to entertain its employees and clients while also drawing in potential customers at the same time. They increase brand visibility and status, and presumably serve as venues for networking.  

They can also cost a freaking fortune as companies continue to up the ante in order to one-up the competition. Yes: of course such parties will be held in desirable, exclusive, high-end venues.  Of course they will offer copious amounts of the best quality food and drink, often prepared by celebrity chefs and bartenders.  And of course there will be entertainment, typically provided by everyone from famous musicians to circus performers, and perhaps even a few “celebrity guests” circulating around as well, celebrity guests that will press the flesh, take selfies with, and provide autographs for the attendees.  And let’s not forget the freebies and gift bags, containing everything from branded clothing to expensive foodstuffs to jewelry, electronics, and so forth.  

Writes tech industry observer Mary McMahon:

“In the late 1990s, the launch party took off, with some cities such as San Francisco hosting upwards of 20 such parties a week in spaces ranging from exclusive venues to rented convention centers. As more companies started to have these events, the pressure to have a catchy gimmick or draw increased, with most companies consulting with party planning firms for their expensive soirees. Many firms also hoped to use the launch party for new employee recruitment, projecting a forceful, trendy image of the company to prospective new employees.”

Question: are such launch parties, in fact, outdated rituals, resource-wasting exercises in corporate hubris?  Many folks today would say yes.  But there are a lot of event planners and caterers out there desperate to get back into business, so I wouldn’t count them out just yet.

The Musical Launch or Drop Party

For our information, it wasn’t the high-tech industry that created the lavish, over-the-top launch party.  Long before the phrase “high-tech” ever entered our vocabulary, there was the musical drop party.

A musical “drop party” or “release party” or “launch party” is a gathering held to celebrate the release of a new song or album (or even the creation of a new record label!).  

We’re not talking about the smallish, ultra-civilized, wine-and-cheese soirees that pass for the parties surrounding the release of a concert recording.  No, no: we’re talking about pop and rock ‘n’ roll drop parties, which are (or at least were) a different animal entirely.  

Which brings us, finally, to the grandmother of all drop parties, what is generally considered the craziest drop party of all, one that took place 48 years ago today.

Swan Song Records

On October 31, 1974 – 48 years ago today – the band Led Zeppelin threw a drop party to celebrate both their new, in-house record label called “Swan Song Records” as well as the label’s first United Kingdom release, an album called Silk Torpedo by the band “Pretty Things.” 

It was the drop party by which all subsequent musical drop parties have been measured and found wanting.  

Led Zeppelin had initially launched their new label – named after an unfinished and unreleased instrumental number called Swan Song – in May of 1974.  In an interview conducted in 1977, Jimmy Page (born 1944), guitarist and founder of the band, explained why the members and management of Led Zeppelin had created their own record label:

“We’d been thinking about it for a while, and we knew if we formed a label there wouldn’t be the kind of fuss and bother we’d been going through over album covers and things like that.  Having gone through, ourselves, interference on the artistic side by record companies, we wanted to form a label where the artists would be able to fulfill themselves without all of that hassle.”

In introducing/launching Swan Song Records, Led Zeppelin initially hosted two drop parties in Los Angeles, the second of which was held at the five-star luxury “Hotel Bel-Air” on May 10, 1974.  This party featured a bevy of then A-list celebrity guests, including Groucho Marx, David Geffen, Lloyd Bridges, Dr. John, Michelle Phillips, and Mickey Dolenz of the Monkees.

(Wow: to think that there was a time when Mickey Dolenz was considered to be “A-list” material!)

However, these parties in The City of Angels were but a prelude, a warm-up act for the main event, the Swan Song Records drop party to be held back home in Britain, which was scheduled for October 31, 1974.…

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Before moving on to Carl Ruggles, the featured composer of today’s post, we would offer the warmest of happy birthdays to one of the most brilliant composers of the twentieth century, who also happened to be one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met, George Crumb.  He was born in Charleston, West Virginia on October 24, 1929 – 93 years ago today – and died at his home in the Philadelphia suburb of Media, Pennsylvania, on February 6, 2022, at the age of 92.

I offered up an appreciation of Crumb in my Music History Monday post on the occasion of his 87^th birthday on October 24, 2016.  We will revisit Crumb in my Music History Monday and Dr. Bob Prescribes posts for March 13 and 14, 2023 (yes, I plan ahead!) when we tackle his Black Angels for electric string quartet.

On to the featured event for today’s post.

We mark the death on October 24, 1971 – 51 years ago today – of the American composer, teacher, and painter Charles Sprague (“Carl”) Ruggles, in Bennington Vermont.  Born in Marion, Massachusetts on March 11, 1876, Ruggles was 95 years old at the time of his death.

C-level People

Ordinarily when we refer to “C-level people”, we are talking about those people who constitute the upper echelons of a corporation’s senior executives and managers.  “C” means “chief”, and such “C-level” individuals include CEO (chief executive officer); CFO (chief financial officer); COO (chief operating officer); and CIO (chief information officer).  

Much as I’d love to discuss the leadership issues and workforce empowerment challenges faced by such C-level/C-suite executives, we’d observe that there is another sort of “C-level people”, folks who are, by their nature:

Crusty.  Curmudgeonly.  Cantankerous.  Crabby.  Cranky.  And Cross.

Let us now get a bit more specific.  Let’s talk about “C-level Composers.”

BTW, this isn’t to say that the individuals on the following list of (C-level) composers didn’t have good reason to be the way they were; that they didn’t have “hearts of gold” and various saving graces: and that they weren’t capable of the warm-‘n’-fuzzies.  Just that on a day-to-day basis they could be . . . crotchety.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827).  Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901).  Johannes Brahms (1833-1897).  Charles Ives (1874-1954). Carl Ruggles (1876-1961). 

(Those people in-the-know will wonder why I didn’t put the American composer David Diamond [1915-2005] on this C-level composers list.  A truly wonderful composer whose Symphony No. 2 was featured in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post on May 21, 2019, David Diamond, bless him, crossed the line from being a just a curmudgeon to genuine douchebag.  Sorry, but that’s just how he was.)

(Neither is Richard Wagner on my “C-level” composer list.  See David Diamond, above.)

Carl Ruggles (he changed his first name from “Charles” to the German equivalent of “Carl” out of his love for things German) was of that generation of American modernists (which included his friend, Charles Ives), who were bound up in a “dissonance equals machismo” thing.  Born in New England (as was Ives) in 1876, Ruggles grew up at a time when real American men weren’t professional musicians, a career considered fit only for “foreigners” and “effeminates.”  The result was an overcompensating, exaggerated machismo on the part of both Ives and Ruggles, both of whom felt that purposely “pretty” music (like that of Debussy) was the compositional equivalent of a limp handshake.   Instead, they each cultivated edgy, chromatic music that, in their own minds, reinforced their masculinity.…

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Name the Composer/Pianist: he was a student of Wolfgang Mozart, Antonio Salieri, Muzio Clementi, and Joseph Haydn; friend to Franz Schubert and a friend (and rival!) of Ludwig van Beethoven; and teacher of – among many others – Carl Czerny, Ferdinand Hiller, Sigismond Thalberg, and Felix Mendelssohn; in his lifetime considered one of the greats and in ours almost entirely forgotten?

With a title like that, the subject of this post better be good.

And good he was!

We mark the death on October 17, 1837 – 185 years ago today – of the composer and pianist Johann Nepomuk Hummel in the Thuringian city Weimar.  Born in Pressburg (today Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia) on November 14, 1778, Hummel was 59 years old at the time of his death.

A Preliminary: What’s in a Name?

Listen, the last thing in the world I want to be accused of (okay, maybe not the last thing . . .) is name shaming: making fun of someone’s name.  But let’s be serious: what sort of middle name is “Nepomuk”?  And it’s not just Hummel: “Nepomuk”, a name that most certainly does not ring beatific for native English speakers, was a fairly common middle and surname among central Europeans, particularly those in Czech lands.  

The name comes from the town of Nepomuk, in the Plzeň Region of the Czech Republic, some 60 miles southwest of Prague.  The town’s claim-to-fame is as the birthplace of Saint John of Nepomuk, who was born there around 1345.  John of Nepomuk earned his sainthood by defending the sanctity of the Confessional.  As the story goes, he was the confessor of Queen Sophia of Bohemia, the wife of King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia (1361-1419).  King Wenceslas suspected his queen of indulging in extra-marital hanky-panky and demanded that John of Nepomuk – as her confessor – spill the beans.  But John refused, even under torture.  On March 20, 1393, he was – we are told – thrown off the newly completed Charles Bridge (in Prague) into the Vltava River.  Whether he died under torture or was drowned is unknown.  Whatever; John of Nepomuk’s martyrdom in defending the sanctity of the confessional eventually earned him his sainthood (although not until March 19, 1729, when he was canonized by Pope Benedict XIII).

o the name Nepomuk became an honorable – and common – name in Czech lands.  

Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778-1837)

Again: Hummel was born in Pressburg – as previously observed, what is now Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia – on November 14, 1778.  He died in Weimar, in what today is central Germany, on October 17, 1837, where he held the position of Kapellmeister for eighteen years.  

Hummel was a spectacular child prodigy as both a pianist and as a violinist.  His father, Johannes, was himself a string player, conductor, and music educator, and like Leopold Mozart before him, he observed his son’s musical development with slack-jawed amazement. According to Johannes Hummel, young Johann could read music at four, play the piano and violin like a seasoned pro at five, and sing with perfect intonation.  Hummel’s parents realized that Pressburg (Bratislava) could not offer their prodigious son anywhere near the musical education and experience that he required, so in 1786, when Johann was eight years old, they pulled up stakes and moved to Vienna.

It took the 8-year-old Johann Nepomuk Hummel but a few weeks to make his mark in Vienna.  Soon after arriving there, he played piano for Wolfgang Mozart who, no exaggeration, flipped his gourd.  Writes musicologists Joel Sachs and Mark Kroll in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians:

“Mozart was so impressed by the young prodigy that he taught him free of charge; and as was often the arrangement at the time, Hummel lived with the Mozarts and became a de facto member of the family. He played billiards with Mozart and tried out his teacher’s newest compositions, and the pair were often seen together on the streets of Vienna. While living at the Mozarts,’ Hummel also had the opportunity to meet, or at least observe, the distinguished guests who frequently visited the Mozart household during this period. These included Lorenzo da Ponte and none other than Haydn, who would sometimes come over to read through string quartets, with Mozart playing viola, Vanhal the cello and von Dittersdorf the second violin.”

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