Podcast | Robert Greenberg | Speaker, Composer, Author, Professor, Historian

We mark the death, in Vienna, on March 2, 1830 – 190 years ago today – of the violinist and conductor Ignaz Schuppanzigh. Born in Vienna on November 20, 1776, he was 53 at the time of his death, reportedly of “paralysis”, whatever that’s supposed to mean.

We mark the first performance on February 24, 1607 – 413 years ago today – of Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo, in Mantua, Italy.

We mark the world premiere performance on February 17, 1904 – 116 years ago today – of Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly at the storied opera house of La Scala, in the Italian city of Milan.

We would note two major events on this day from the world of opera. We will mark the first event in a moment; the second event – which constitutes the body and soul of this post – will be observed only after we’ve had a chance to do some prep. Leontyne Price (born 1927) We mark the birth on February 10, 1927 – 93 years ago today – of the glorious soprano Leontyne Price. (More than just a soprano, Price in her prime was a lyric-spinta, or “pushed lyric soprano”, meaning that she had all the high notes of a lyric soprano but could also push her voice to realize dramatic climaxes without any strain. The great lyric-spinta roles include Aida, Desdemona from Verdi’s Otello, the Marschallin from Richard Strauss Der Rosenkavalier, and Floria Tosca.) Every inch the true diva (in the best sense), Price is alive and we trust well at her home in Columbia, Maryland. Happy birthday, you stunning goddess you.  Preliminaries A “malaprop” (or “malapropism”) “is the use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical, sometimes humorous utterance.” “Gibberish” (a.k.a. jibber-jabber or gobbledygook) is a tad different; it is defined as being “nonsense speech that may include speech sounds that are not actual words, or language games and specialized jargon that seems nonsensical to outsiders.” Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra (1925-2015) in 2008, age 83 I would suggest that the greatest English language-speaking master of both malaprops and gibberish was the baseball catcher, coach, manager, and Hall-of-Famer Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra (1925-2015). Malaprops and gibberish poured forth from his 5’7” frame like that proverbial poop from a goose; that they were uttered inadvertently make them all the funnier.  Should we want to (and I will admit that I am tempted), the remainder of this post could consist entirely of what have come to be known as “Yogi-isms.” Among the untold number of malaprops he uttered over his 90 years of life are such gems as: “It ain’t the heat; it’s the humility.”“I take that with a grin of salt.”“Texas has a lot of electrical votes.” (As opposed to “electoral” votes.) But truly, Berra’s greatest verbal creations are his gibberish: nonsense sentences, some of which have actually become part of our everyday lexicon. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations features eight such Yogi-isms. A quick sampling must include such gems as: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”“You can observe a lot by just watching.” “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”“No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.”“Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.”“Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”“If you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else.” And finally,  “Never answer an anonymous letter.” Thank you, Maestro Berra; these are wonderful; just wonderful.  Such was Yogi Berra’s reputation that every now and then he was credited with having said something he never in fact said. Perhaps the most famous such misattribution (aside from “anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined”, which was, in fact, articulated by the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn) is: “It ain’t over until the fat lady sings.” (Yes, Yogi Berra did indeed coin the phrase “it ain’t over till it’s over”, but there was no rotund, obese, zaftig, corpulent or Rubenesque lady in his utterance.)

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1593) We mark the presumed birth on February 3, 1525 – 495 years ago today – of the Rome-based Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Unlike virtually every other great composer of the Renaissance, a list of which includes such formidable names as Josquin des Prez, William Byrd, Giovanni Gabrieli, Guillaume Dufay, Orlande de Lassus, and Johannes Ockeghem, Palestrina’s name, reputation, and music have never faded from view since his death in 1593. The staying power of his name, reputation, and music can be attributed to three of factors, all of which will be explored in today’s Music History Monday post and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post (which can be accessed at Patreon.com/RobertGreenbergMusic). These factors are, one, Palestrina’s posthumous reputation as the ostensible “savior” of Catholic church music during the conservative, austere artistic climate of the Counter Reformation (which will be discussed in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes); two, his personal compositional style, which was (and still is) embraced as a paradigm of utopian perfection and has thus been employed in teaching counterpoint since the early seventeenth century; and three (and most importantly), the fact that he wrote a tremendous amount of first rate music, the great bulk of which is sacred.  His collected works include 104 Masses (an extraordinary number and by strange coincidence the same number of symphonies attributed to Joseph Haydn); well over 300 motets (which are vocal liturgical works of varying length); over 140 madrigals (secular vocal works of varying length); 68 offertories (that is, music that accompanies the procession of the faithful bearing the bread and wine – the symbolic body and blood of Christ – as well as other gifts/offerings for the Church); 35 magnificats (which means “magnifies”, as in “My soul magnifies the Lord”), a setting of the “Song (or canticle) of Mary”, the text of which comes from the Gospel of Luke; 72 hymns; 11 litanies; numerous sets of lamentations; etc.; all told, a lot of music.  Giovanni Pierluigi was born in Palestrina, an ancient city in the Sabine Hills 22 miles (or so) east-southeast of Rome. While his earliest education took place there in Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi (or “Gianetto” as he was nicknamed) spent the great bulk of his student days, apprenticeship, and career within the confines of the three most important churches in the holy city of Rome:  Santa Maria Maggiore, Saint John Lateran, and Saint Peter’s. Pope Julius III, born Giovanni Maria Ciocchi del Monte (1487-1555), pope from 1550-1555 In 1554, the 29-year-old Palestrina dedicated his first published book of masses to Pope Julius III, who had previously been known to Palestrina as the Bishop of Palestrina. (The truism holds: it’s not just what you know, but who you know.) The dedication to Pope Julius was clearly the politic thing to do, because just a few months later, on January 13, 1555, Palestrina was appointed as a chorister in the single most prestigious choir in Christendom: that of the Sistine Chapel, the pope’s “personal” chapel. Palestrina’s hiring was controversial: he was neither a priest nor even celibate, but rather married (*gasp!*). According to the “Diarii Sistina” – the diaries of the Sistine Chapel – Palestrina was hired: “on the orders of His Holiness Pope Julius, without any examination and without the consent of the singers.”  We can safely assume that Palestrina’s extraordinary talents quickly overcame any residual resistance from his fellow choristers.

A portrait of Mozart dating from 1782/83 by his brother-in-law, Joseph Lange. The portrait is incomplete; Lange planned to depict Mozart playing a piano. Incomplete or not, Lange’s portrait was considered by Mozart’s contemporaries to be the most accurate depiction of Mozart ever made. We mark the birth on January 27, 1756 – 264 years ago today – of Wolfgang Mozart.  There are certain dates that are so universally recognized that once invoked they can mean only one thing for a majority of people living on this planet. For example. Did we all know that January 1 is, among other things, Apple Gifting Day? It is also Bonza Bottler Day, Copyright Law Day, Ellis Island Day, Global Family Day, National Bloody Mary Day, and Public Domain Day. Did we all know that? And really, do any of us care? Because January 1 is New Year’s Day and every other observance shrinks to insignificance by comparison (excepting, perhaps, “National Bloody Mary Day”). Despite the fact that December 25 is Constitution Day in Taiwan and National Pumpkin Pie Day in the United States, the mention of that date can mean only one thing in much of the world: Christmas Day. May 1 is, in the northern hemisphere, May Day: a traditional celebration of spring. Planet wide, it is International Workers’ Day.  Since at least the fourteenth century, April 1 has been “international prank day”: April Fool’s Day. From its beginnings as a Celtic harvest festival, Halloween (a.k.a. October 31, Hallowe’en, Allhallowe’en, All Hallows’ Eve, and All Saints’ Eve) has today become an international celebration, the promotion of which can be cynically attributed to a dark element within the international dental community, whose ministrations must repair the tooth damage perpetrated by all that ingested candy.  We must now acknowledge another date that can only mean one thing, a date that once uttered should be recognized by each and every one of us as representing something wonderful, something miraculous, a gift without which our lives would be bereft: the birth of Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart. (We would also take a moment to acknowledge the horrific irony that January 27 is also both Auschwitz Liberation Day and International Chocolate Cake Day.) Where do we start when talking about Mozart? His music is so consistently glorious, his life was so tragically short, and his impact on global culture so immense that he stands as a singularity even among the giants of Western art. And yet for all of his fame and visibility, there is no major composer whose life and personality are more shrouded in myth and mistruth than Mozart’s.  I’ve written extensively about the so-called “Mozart myths”: the half-truths and un-truths that have accreted over Mozart’s memory like guano on sea-side rocks. He was not the fair-haired, boy-god of music created by nineteenth century Romantic era mythologists. Neither was he an idiot savant or autistic, as some biographers have suggested. Nor was he – as has been claimed – “the Hegelian apotheosis of musical perfection taken to god’s bosom at 35, once all his musical branches had borne fruit, the Christ of music.”  For now, we are going to deal with the most outrageous and familiar of the Mozart myths, “familiar” because it was set-in-stone in our communal consciousness by that movie: Amadeus.  Tom Hulce (born 1953) as Mozart in Amadeus That Movie Our most enduring image of Mozart today is the one we’ve received from Amadeus. The movie was – and remains – excellent entertain...

Józef Hofmann (1876-1967) January 20 is indeed an interesting day in music history, particularly notable for anniversaries of births and deaths. Among those born on this day was the outstanding Polish/American pianist Józef Hofmann, born in 1876 (and died in 1967; my grandmother took some lessons with Hofmann at the New York Institute of Musical Art between 1914 and 1916, after which he went on to became the director of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, from 1927-1938); also born on this date in 1888 was the 12-string blues guitarist Huddie William Ledbetter (a.k.a. “Leadbelly”; he died in 1949); the Russian/American violinist Mischa Elman was born on January 20, 1891 (and died 1967); the American composer Walter Piston was born on this date in 1894 (he died in 1976 and was featured in my Dr. Bob Prescribes post on March 19, 2019); and Yvonne Loriod, an exceptional French pianist and wife of the composer Olivier Messiaen, was born on this date in 1924 (and died in 2010).  Bettina Brentano (1785-1859) circa 1805 Notable deaths on this date include the Italian conductor Claudio Abbado, who died at the age of 80 in 2014, and the composer, publisher, writer, singer, visual artist, illustrator, patron of young talent, and social activist (wow) Bettina Brentano, the Countess of Arnim, who died on this date in 1859 at the age of 73. (Elisabeth “Bettina” Catharina Ludovica Magdalena Brentano more than deserves a post of her own. She was a polymath who numbered among her best friends both Beethoven and Goethe. She personally knew and her work was admired by Robert and Clara Schumann, Franz Liszt, and Johannes Brahms among many others. She was the sister of the German writer Clemens Brentano and the wife of the writer Achim von Arnim. Together with her brother Clemens and her husband Achim, she helped gather up and edit the folk poems that were published under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”), which were set to music by scores of composers (pun intended), most notably Gustav Mahler. Antonie Brentano (born Birkenstock, 1780-1869) Bettina met Beethoven in May of 1810 when she was 25 years old. An extroverted beauty, she charmed the composer to his cockles – the location of which we will not presently discuss – and for many years had been a leading candidate for the “Immortal Beloved”, the otherwise unnamed woman with whom Beethoven had a torrid love affair in 1812. However, today the identity of the “Immortal Beloved” is generally understood to be Bettina’s sister-in-law Antonie Brentano, who Bettina introduced to Beethoven in 1810.) Birthdays and death days: causes for, respectively, celebration and grief; days of seminal importance to the individuals involved. But I would point out that birth and death, except in the most tragic cases of the latter, are not issues of willful, conscious choice. Rather, they are natural events over which we have no control. It is not our births (or deaths) that make us who and what we are, that change our lives and the lives of those around us, but rather, the choices we make while we are abroad in this vale of tears. Choice. What a shockingly loaded word. Really, is there any such thing as free will – choice – or are we (as Dmitri Shostakovich was wont to say) nothing more than marionettes, dancing through our miserable and meaningless lives in a manner directed/predetermined by higher (or lower) forces?  We will presently resist a lengthy and speculative philosophical discussion on whether or not there is truly such a thing as “choice”, just as we will avoid – for now – grappling with other such weighty questions as “Certs: breath mint of candy mint?” or, like, “does anyone really know what time it is”? Rather,

Cute, but would you date an accordionist We would recognize a number of date-worthy events before moving on to the admittedly painful principal topic of today’s Music History Monday. Johann Christoph Graupner Johann Christoph Graupner (1683-1760) We recognize the birth on January 13, 1683 – 337 years ago today – of the German harpsichordist and composer Johann Christoph Graupner in the Saxon town Kirchberg. (He died 77 years later, in Darmstadt, in 1760.) Herr Graupner was known as a good and conscientious man, highly respected by his employers and students alike. He was also a competent and prolific composer, with more than 2000 surviving works in his catalog. Nevertheless, he would be totally forgotten today but for a single event in 1723. In 1722, Johann Kuhnau (1660-1722) – the chief musician for the churches and municipality of Leipzig – went on to that great clavichord in the sky. The famous Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767), unhappy with his salary in Hamburg, applied for and was offered the job in Leipzig. But it was all a ploy to leverage a higher salary in Hamburg, which he received and where he remained. In early 1723, the paternal units of Leipzig then offered the job to Graupner, who accepted but whose boss – the Landgrave Ernst Ludwig of Hesse Darmstadt – refused to release him from his contract. Then the Leipzig authorities asked the violinist and composer Johann Friedrich Fasch (1688-1758) to apply for the job but having done so, Fasch had second thoughts and withdrew his application. Finally, with no other viable candidates in sight, the authorities in Leipzig grudgingly offered the job to their distant fourth choice: a keyboard and violin player and composer with a (well deserved) reputation for insubordination named Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). Bach took the job and stayed on the job for the remaining 27 years of his life. Why then do we remember Johann Christoph Graupner? Because he was the second choice for a job for which Sebastian Bach was the fourth choice. Ferdinand Ries Ferdinand Ries (1784-1838) We mark the death on January 13, 1838 – 182 years ago today – of the German composer Ferdinand Ries at the age of 53. Ries composed some 200 works, including 8 symphonies, 8 piano concerti, a violin concerto, 3 operas and 26 string quartets. But it is not for his music that Ries is remembered but rather, for his association with Beethoven. Ries was Beethoven’s student and later, his secretary. But most of all, he was Beethoven’s friend, someone whose reminiscences of Beethoven stand as the single most indispensable first-person account of the great man that has come down to us. For which we are forever in Herr Ries’ debt. Richard Wagner Richard Wagner (1813-1883), ca. 1880 On January 13, 1882 – 138 years ago today – the German composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) put the finishing touches on the words and music of his final music drama, Parsifal.  Never, in the long and storied history of Western music, has music more sublime and glorious been appended to words more vile and grotesque than in Parsifal. For a complete explanation of that statement I would humbly implore you to listen to or watch my Great Courses survey, The Music of Richard Wagner. The Accordion Early accordion, circa 1860 Finally, on January 13, 1854 – 166 years ago today – a Philadelphia-based inventor named Anthony Foss received a patent for the accordion. Also known in English as a squeezebox and a squashbox,

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872-1915), looking every inch the dandy that he was On January 6, 1872 – 148 years ago today – the composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin was born in Moscow. He died in Moscow just 43 years later, on April 27, 1915. Scriabin was not just “the odd person out” of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Russian composers; he was, very arguably, one of the two or three “oddest-people-out” in the history of Western Music. Scriabin didn’t start out as an oddball. He was a piano prodigy and a friend and classmate of Sergei Rachmaninoff, first in the piano studio and private school of Nikolai Zverov and later at the Moscow Conservatory. When they graduated together in 1892 (at which point Rachmaninoff was nineteen and Scriabin was twenty), Rachmaninoff received the “Great Gold Medal” and Scriabin the “Little Gold Medal”, somehow appropriate given that Rachmaninoff stood 6’6” tall while Scriabin stood just over 5’ tall. (That variance of physical stature notwithstanding, the Moscow Conservatory Class of 1892 was pretty impressive!) Scriabin’s early career was not marked by any particular “oddness” either. He began his career as a touring pianist and composed charming piano miniatures a la Chopin. He married and quickly fathered four children. When he wasn’t on tour, he taught at the Moscow Conservatory. Scriabin and Tatiana Schloezer Then, in 1902, at the age of 30, something in his mind sparked and fizzled and started giving off smoke. Suddenly pre-occupied with issues philosophical and mysterious, he quit his teaching job, took up with a former student named Tatiana Schloezer, and abandoned his family, telling his wife Vera that he was going to live with Tatiana as “a sacrifice to art.”  I’m not even going to contemplate what would happen to me if I tried that line on my wife. Depending upon who you talk to, Scriabin went on to become either one of the great visionaries in the history of Western music or a total crackpot. However, the one thing we must all agree on is that Scriabin proceeded to create an extraordinary body of utterly original, intensely lyric, and marvelously crafted music. Behavioral Issues Based on even the most cursory reading of the biographical literature, it’s pretty much impossible not to conclude that Alexander Scriabin was a narcissistic egomaniac whose behavior bordered on megalomania. Some writers attribute his developing behavior to mental illness. Others attribute it to overcompensation for his diminutive size (as a pianist, he could not reach more than an octave in either hand and almost ruined his right hand trying to learn to play Mily Balakirev’s virtuosic showpiece Islamey). Still others claim that his narcissism and egomania were the result of his upbringing. (Scriabin’s mother died of tuberculosis when he was just one year old, and his father, who was a member of the Russian consular service, was posted to Turkey. As a result, according to the English musicologist Hugh Macdonald writing in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians:“Scriabin was brought up by his aunt Lyubov, his grandmother and his great aunt, all of whom doted passionately on the boy, pampered him endlessly and set his mind towards the fastidiousness and egocentricity of his later years as well as giving him a certain effeminacy in his manners[!].” ) Scriabin spent the years after 1902 contemplating the work that would have been his magnum opus: an apocalyptic, Wagner-inspired, all-inclusive-art-work-on-steroids entitled Mysterium, a massive, no-holds-barred, everything-including-the-kitchen-sink “happening” that would combine:

Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) We mark the death on December 30, 1979 – 40 years ago today – of the American composer Richard Rodgers at the age of 77. A life-long New Yorker, Rodgers was one of the most prolific American composers of all time, having written the music for – among other works – 43 Broadway musicals and over 900 songs. He is one of only two people to have scored an EGOT, meaning that he received an Emmy, a GRAMMY® (three of them, actually), an Oscar, a Tony (seven in all) along with a Pulitzer Prize (for the musical South Pacific, in 1950). (For our information, the only other person to have won all five awards was the phenomenal Marvin Hamlisch, 1944-2012.) We will discuss Maestro Rodgers as an exemplar of the “American crucible” in a bit. But first, permit me some first-person information that, believe it or not, will eventually have a direct bearing on this post. An observation: we all do things to our bodies when we are young (or relatively young) that, in retrospect, we should not have. For me it was fairly serious weightlifting, which I took up in my early 30’s and continued until I was 51. Regarding weightlifting, the truism applies: our joints give out long before our muscles do. By the time I had to quit, I had wrecked both of my shoulders, though for years I did my level best to ignore the damage and the chronic pain that went with it. 3½ years ago I finally bit the bullet and had my right shoulder repaired: all four of the tendons that make up my rotator cuff were torn and had to be reconnected, as was my bicipital tendon; rather severe damage to my humerus bone (the large bone in my upper arm) necessitated a cadaver bone graft as well. On December 4 of this year – 26 days ago – I had my left shoulder repaired. Again, all four tendons of the rotator cuff had to be reattached and the bicipital tendon repaired, though thankfully there was no bone damage to deal with this time around. A sling as accessory; very natty Advice: if you can avoid such surgery, do so. It is painful and the recovery is slow. For the first two weeks after the surgery I could not drive, shower, or type (which means, for me, I could not work). Given my inability to do anything else, I did something I hadn’t done since my last shoulder surgery, and that was binge-watch Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu television shows. Among the shows I consumed was Amazon’s/Ridley Scott’s The Man in the High Castle, a series loosely based on a book of the same title by Philip K. Dick. (Dick’s book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the basis for Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Blade Runner.) The Man in the High Castle takes place between 1962 and 1964. The basic premise is that in a parallel universe, the United States lost World War Two and as a result, the eastern and midwestern states are presently part of the “Greater Nazi Reich” and the western states constitute the “Japanese Pacific States”, with the Rocky Mountains acting as a Neutral Zone between them. The opening credits are chilling. Black and white imagery depicts a destroyed United States Capitol Building (Washington, D.C. was nuked by the Germans in 1945), and various other American monuments – Mt. Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, etc. – despoiled by the occupiers. The predominately Nazi imagery depicted during the credits is accompanied by a breathy rendition (think Marilyn Monroe singing Happy Birthday to J.F.K.) of the song Edelweiss, with its now sinister closing line, “bless my homeland forever.” Opening credits for The Man in the High Castle The choice of Edelweiss as the theme music for the credits was both a brilliant stroke and is, at the same time,

As readers of this blog and/or listeners to this podcast are aware, some Mondays present us with a plethora, a Mother’s Day buffet of musical topics from which to choose, while others are as dry as a perfect martini. During such days of topical feast or famine, coming up with a topic is equally challenging: in the case of feast, the challenge is choosing one topic over the others and in the case of famine, manufacturing a post out of topical crumbs, dust motes, and bed mites. A Festivus pole in all of its holiday glory Having said that, December 23 presents us with a situation I have never before faced in the 3½ years I’ve been writing this post. Yes, there are a couple of events – a birth and a death – that we will mark in a moment. But in doing my research, I have discovered a gaggle of strange, even horrific musical events associated with December 23, making me wonder whether there is some genuine weirdness in the air on this date. Is it the proximity of December 23 to Christmas Eve Day (the 24th) or the Winter Solstice (the 21st)? Is it a reflection of “The Night of the Radishes”, an annual celebration held on December 23 in Oaxaca, Mexico dedicated to carving oversized radishes? Perhaps it is a function of “Operational Servicemen Day”, a military holiday observed by all service personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine? Or maybe it’s all a result of the spirit of Festivus (“Festivus for the rest of us”), a secular holiday presumably “celebrated” on December 23 as an antidote to the materialism and commercialism of Christmas? (Festivus was invented in 1966 by the writer Daniel O’Keefe, though it gained prominence thanks to a 1997 Seinfeld episode called The Strike, which featured a Festivus dinner and such “traditional” Festivus activities as “The Airing of Grievances”, “Feats of Strength”, the labeling of commonplace events as “Festivus miracles”, and the display of a “Festivus pole”: a plain aluminum pole mounted on a wooden stand.  Whatever. Let us mark a birth and a death, and then get on to some of the musical weirdness (and mayhem) that has taken place on this date. Edita Gruberová (born 1946) as the Queen of the Night, from Mozart’s The Magic Flute A birth. We mark the entrance into this world on December 23, 1946 – 73 years ago today – of the coloratura soprano Edita Gruberová in Bratislava, Slovakia. OMG, what a voice, what an actress, what a Queen of the Night, what a total, perfect DIVA in the best possible sense! I would lay down on a train track for Madame Gruberová (that’s provided that the track was out-of-service; hey: it’s the thought that counts!) Oscar Peterson (1925-2007) A death. We mark the passing, on December 23, 2007 – 12 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Oscar Peterson, at the age of 82. We will all note that I didn’t say “jazz pianist”, because Peterson’s pianism and musicality transcended genre or classification. A gentle giant, soft-spoken, articulate, and a true student of his art, Peterson’s fellow musicians referred to him as “Hercules”, so overpowering was his technique and imagination. I would have given this post over entirely to Maestro Peterson had I not already dedicated a Dr. Bob Prescribes post to him on June 25 of this year. On to the strange/weirdness. Chuck Berry (1926-2017) in 1957 On December 23, 1959 – 60 years ago today – the rock ‘n’ roll legend Charles Edward Anderson (“Chuck”) Berry (1926-2017) was arrested for having sex with a 14-year-old waitress named Janice Escalante,

Beethoven (1770-1827), portrait in oils (detail) by Joseph Carl Stieler, 1820 We mark the birth on December 16, 1770 – 249 years ago today – of Ludwig, or Louis, or Luigi (he went by all three names) van Beethoven, in the Rhineland city of Bonn. Although there is no documentary evidence confirming that Beethoven was actually born on the 16th, we assume – with that proverbial 99.99% degree of certainty – that he was. This is because the Catholic parishes of the time required that newborns be baptized within 24 hours of birth and Beethoven’s baptism was registered at the church of St. Remigius on December 17, 1770. The font at which Beethoven was baptized at the church of St. Remigius on December 17, 1770 As we brace ourselves for the hoopla celebrating the 250th year of Beethoven’s birth, we pause and ask ourselves, honestly, why Beethoven: why do we, as a listening public, so adore his music? I would answer that question by drawing on some material from my recently published “Audible Original Course”, Beethoven: The First Angry Man (which, gratuitously, will be the topic of tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post).  The evidence of our ongoing passion for Beethoven’s music is everywhere to be found. “Classic FM” is one of the United Kingdom’s three independent National Radio Stations and one of the most listened-to “classical music” radio stations in the world. The station conducted a favorite composer poll in 2016 that attracted 170,000 votes; according to Classic FM, that response made the poll “the biggest public vote in the world on classical music tastes.” The winner of this not-particularly-scientific-but-nevertheless-not-uninteresting popularity contest was Ludwig van Beethoven. Encyclopedia Britannica’s on-line site lists the “10 Classical Music Composer to Know” in the order in which we should presumably “know” them. Number one on that list? Beethoven. (Yes, of course I will name the remaining nine. In order they are: J.S. Bach, Wolfgang Mozart, Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Peter Tchaikovsky, Frédéric Chopin, Joseph Haydn and Antonio Vivaldi.)  “YouGov”, an internet site that specializes in polling, lists “The most popular classical composers in America.” At number one is Beethoven, followed by Mozart, Bach, Chopin, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Leonard Bernstein and Handel.  “DigitalDreamDoor’s” list of “100 Greatest Classical Composers” begins with Beethoven.  The internet site “Ranker” puts Beethoven at the top of its list of “The Best Classical Composers,” as does the site “List 25” in its “25 of the Most Celebrated Composers in History” AND the site “The Top Tens” in its list of “Greatest Classical Composers.” (Bucking the trend, the New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini named Johann Sebastian Bach – or just “Sebastian” Bach, as his friends and family knew him – as the number one composer on his “The Top Ten Greatest Composers” list, published in 2011. For our information, Beethoven himself would have agreed entirely with Tommasini’s estimation of Bach. Number two on Tommasini’s list? Beethoven.) Anthony Tommasini (born 1948), bucking the trend! According to The League of American Orchestras, between 2006 and 2012 (the most recent data I could find), American orchestras performed the music of Beethoven more than that of any other composer: in that six-season span,

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804-1857) in 1840 On December 9, 1836 (or November 27, 1836 in the old style, Russian Julian calendar), Mikhail Glinka’s opera A Life for the Tsar received its premiere at the Imperial Bolshoi Theater in St. Petersburg, Russia. More than just an opera and a premiere, the opening night of A Life for the Tsar – 183 years ago today – marks the moment that a tradition of cultivated Russian music came into existence! Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857) was the right musician at the right place at the right time. Born in the village of Novospasskoye, in the Smolensk Oblast (or “province”), he came from a wealthy, highly cultured, land-owning family. As a child he studied piano and violin and received a first-rate education, first at the hands of his governess Varvara Fedorovna Klammer, and then in St. Petersburg at the Blagorodny School, an exclusive private school for the children of nobility. When he graduated, he did what young men of his class did, and that was take a cushy civil service job. In Glinka’s case, he became assistant secretary of the Department of Public Highways.  It was a do-next-to-nothing, light-weight post, one that allowed Glinka lots of time to indulge his musical interests: playing piano and composing drawing-room music for the amusement of his high-society friends in St. Petersburg’s toniest salons. And then something in Glinka clicked (might we say “Glinked”?). Tired of his dilettante existence, Glinka – already in his mid-twenties – decided that he wanted to be a real composer. His family was against it, but in 1830, at the age of 26, Glinka left home. Three years in Italy (including a stay at the Milan Conservatory) were followed by a year of intense study in Berlin.  Glinka learned his lessons well. When he returned to St. Petersburg in 1834, he was determined to compose an opera that would be recognizably, authentically Russian.   Glinka got involved in a high-end salon run by the Imperial Court poet Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky (1783-1852). It was through Zhukovsky that Glinka got to meet and be inspired by a group of artists who were in the process of defining Russian literature and art and putting it on the international map. Dropping names faster that gulls drop guano, Glinka recalled: “I continued to visit Zhukovsky in the evenings. He was living at the Winter Palace, and each week a select group gathered there. To mention a few: [Alexander] Pushkin, Prince Petr Vyazemsky, [Nikolai] Gogol, and [the poet and critic Petr] Pletnev. [Various] others turned up as well. Sometimes, instead of [a] reading, there would be singing and piano playing. When I mentioned my desire to undertake a Russian opera, Zhukovsky wholeheartedly approved my intention and suggested a subject: Ivan Susanin.”  Monument to Ivan Susanin in Kostroma, Russia Background.  The period between 1598 and 1613 is known in Russian history as the “Time of Troubles.” And that it was: a catastrophic time of dynastic struggles and pretenders to the throne of the Tsars; famine; and invasion and occupation by the hated Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.  On February 21, 1613, a sixteen-year-old nobleman (nobleboy?) named Mikhail Romanov was elected Tsar of Russia by a Grand National Assembly. Having elected Mikhail Romanov Tsar, there was a priceless moment when it was realized that no one knew where he was. He was finally tracked down at the Ipatiev Monastery near the city of Kostroma, about 150 miles northeast of Moscow. When he was informed that he’d been elected Tsar, he reportedly burst into tears, no doubt aware that the Tsars of recent memory had rather short shelf lives. 

December 2 is – was – a great date for world premieres, as well as for one unfortunate and extremely notable exit.   Brahms’ Symphony No. 3 received its first performance on December 3, 1883 – 136 years ago today – in Vienna, when it was performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Hans Richter.   On this date in 1949 – 70 years ago today – Béla Bartók’s Viola Concerto, completed posthumously by Tibor Serly [TEE-bor SHARE-ly] (Bartók himself had died four years earlier, in 1945), received its premiere in Minneapolis, where it was performed by violist William Primrose and the Minneapolis Symphony, conducted by Antal Dorati.    We would note the unfortunate exit, on December 2, 1990, of the composer Aaron Copland.  He died at the age of 90 in North Tarrytown (known today as “Sleepy Hollow”), New York, about 30 miles north of New York City. There’s one more premiere to note, which will occupy the remainder of today’s post.  We mark the premiere, in Boston on December 2, 1949 – the same day as the premiere of Bartók’s Viola Concerto – of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein.  In my less-than-humble opinion, the symphony must be numbered among the most thrilling and original works composed during the twentieth century, and it will occupy us for two days.  This Music History Monday post will discuss Messiaen’s life and the creation of the symphony, and tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post (which can be found on Patreon) will get into the particulars of the piece – which is Messiaen’s one-and-only symphony – and my recommended recording.   Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992, left) in 1913 with his brother Alain and his mother Cécile Sauvage Olivier Messiaen was born in Avignon, France, on December 10, 1908.  His mother, Cécile Sauvage, was a well-respected poet, and his father, Pierre Messiaen, taught English.  Among Messiaen pere’s accomplishments was having translated the complete works of Shakespeare into French.  In such a highly cultured household, Olivier’s musical precocity was recognized early and carefully cultivated.  He began composing at the age of seven.  When he was ten years old, his harmony teacher, Monsieur de Gibon, gave his precocious young charge a score of the then just deceased Claude Debussy’s one and only opera, Pelleas and Melisande.  It was, for Messiaen, a revelation; he later wrote that receiving and then studying the score was: “Probably the most decisive influence in my life.”   Without any doubt, it was Debussy’s extraordinary and utterly original treatment of harmony, tonality, and rhythm – rhythm liberated from a predictable pulse and the tyranny of the bar line – that inspired Messiaen to even greater tonal and rhythmic freedoms in his own music.  If any single composer can be said to be the successor of Debussy – in terms of both musical syntax and sheer originality – it is Olivier Messiaen. The year after he received that oh-so-important score of Pelleas and Melisande, the eleven-year-old Messiaen entered the Paris Conservatory.  He put the place on its ear, truly; I have been told that they still talk about him at the Conservatory to this day, so amazing was his tenure there.  In 1926, at the age of 18, he won first prize in harmony, counterpoint, and fugue.  In 1928, he won first prize in piano accompaniment.  In 1929, he won first prize in music history.  And in 1930,

Virgil Thomson in 1947 We recognize the birth on November 25, 1896 – 123 years ago today – of the American composer and music critic Virgil Thomson in Kansas City, Missouri.  Mr. Thomson was one of the most important American musicians and music critics of the twentieth century. But before we move on to him, we’ve an additional topic of nearly equal import with which we must deal, albeit, sadly, in a cursory fashion, here on the august and dignified pages of Music History Monday. The love birds in 2002 On November 25, 2002 – 17 years ago to this very day – the Academy Award-winning actor Nicolas Cage (born Nicolas Kim Coppola in 1964) filed for divorce from the so-called, self-styled “Princess of Rock ‘n’ Roll” Lisa Marie Presley (born 1968). The loving couple had been married for all of 107 days. The marriage ended due to what was euphemistically called “irreconcilable differences”. A brief perusal of internet tabloids (“interbloids”? “tabnets”?) would confirm the “irreconcilable” part. For his part, Cage comes up relatively clean (I’ve used the word “clean” advisedly, as Cage is known for his aversion to deodorant). Indeed: he is impetuous in his actions and spending, which resonates with the spontaneity of his over-the-top, sometimes even surreal acting style. But being impetuous is not, in itself, a particularly damning trait except when it comes to choosing a marital partner. Impetuous and ill-advised was Cage’s choice of Ms. Presley; he should have done a little due diligence over Lisa Marie, who had just recently ended her sham (illegal), public relations-stunt marriage to Michael Jackson. During the course of their “marriage” (that’s “marriage” in scare quotes), Cage and Presley never lived together because they couldn’t agree on where they wanted to live. According to Cage (and Michael Jackson before him), Presley was a jealous control freak who would phone him and harangue him constantly, to the point that Cage could not conduct business meetings or rehearsals. She once had her bodyguards physically throw him out of a recording studio because his presence “made her nervous.” But the clincher – for a fellow collector like myself – is that according to Cage, Lisa Marie “made him” sell his huge and fabled comic book collection, something he regrets to this day. “I should have stood up for myself,” says Cage. Uh-huh. Grow a pair, says we.  I will be forgiven for the previous sentence, despite the fact that I know it was critical of me to say what I said, jumping to a conclusion – perhaps rashly – that Maestro Cage was/is cajone-challenged.  But that’s what critics do, yes? They judge and draw conclusions based on their own opinions and experience, more often than not with hardly a clue as to the true intentions of the individual or object being critiqued. Ah, critics. We can’t live with them and we can’t live with them (you read that correctly). Having said that, I have no intention – here – of getting into a conversation/screed on the role and responsibilities of the critic; that would take up three or four entire posts and would only, in the end, showcase my own frustration with “criticism” as it is generally practiced.  (“But”, one might say, “critics help me decide what restaurants to go to and what movies to watch.” And well they might. But the soaring prose, scalpel-sharp wit, professional jealousy and personal agendas of many of the “best” critics effectively cloud their judgment and cause them – not infrequently – to overstate their critical case and to thus render their critiques as subjective as any laypersons.)  Painful to the critical community though it may be,