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

Leopold Mozart and his children Wolfgang and Marianne in Paris 1763/4; watercolor by Louis Carmontelle. Ludwig had a lithograph made from this painting which he widely distributed as an advertisement On November 18, 1763, 256 years ago today, the Mozart family – father Leopold, mother Anna Maria, daughter Marianne (12 years old) and son Wolfgang (7 years old) – arrived in Paris. They were in the midst of their “Grand Journey”, a 3½ year concert tour of Central and Western Europe that was to change the history of Western music.  I would suggest that few peacetime activities are more harrowing and exhausting than concert tours. The endless travel wreaks havoc on the human body; the cookie-cutter hotels, restaurants, airports and airport lounges wreak havoc on the human psyche; the schlepping and rehearsing and having to summon the energy to treat every audience as if it were the only audience wreaks havoc on the human soul. And yet to make a living, musicians must perform, and that means they must tour. In doing so, they leave their wives, husbands, children, friends, and homes behind – and in the process anything approaching normalcy and routine – for the untamed wilderness of the road.  I’m burning out just thinking about it. Some tours go on for months, and some go on for years. Between 2002 and 2005, Cher’s “Living Proof: The Farewell Tour” played 326 concerts, was attended by 3.5 million people and grossed $250 million (that’s $329 million in 2019 dollars). Between 2014 and 2017, “The Garth Brooks World Tour with Trisha Yearwood” played 366 concerts, was attended by 4.7 million people and grossed $364 million.  (In terms of sheer attendance, the Ed Sheeran “÷ [‘Divide’] Tour” attracted 8.787 million live attendees over the course of its 255 shows between 2017 and 2019. In terms of sheer gross $, the present champion is the “U2 360° Tour”, which generated $820 million in 2019 dollars in 110 shows. Nearly a billion dollars. That’s a lot of money.) However: the great-grandmother of all of these tours, the one that put the phrase “concert tour” into our modern lexicon, was the tour taken by the Mozart family between June 9, 1763 and November 30, 1766, a tour that has come to be known as “The Grand Journey”. Leopold Mozart (1719-1787) On November 21, 1747, the 28-year-old Leopold Mozart – a musician from Augsburg (in today’s Germany) presently living in Vienna – married Anna Maria Pertl. The couple had seven children, though only two of them survived their infancy. The first was Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia, known as Marianne and nicknamed Nannerl; she was born on July 30 or 31, 1751. 4½ years later, a son was born on January 27, 1756 and named Johannes Christian Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart. Anna Maria Pertl Mozart (1720-1778) When she was 7 and her baby brother Wolfgang 3, Marianne began keyboard (harpsichord) lessons with her father. Almost immediately the young Wolfgang began to imitate his sister, initially, perhaps, to earn his share of attention from his father, Leopold. However, it quickly became apparent that this was no ordinary three-year-old boy banging upside a harpsichord. Leopold began giving Wolfgang lessons as well, and his progress was nothing short of astonishing. By four the child could learn to play fairly long pieces in a half an hour’s time; a few weeks after his fifth birthday he had written his first compositions; by six he had taught himself to play the violin well enough to participate in the playing of trios and quartets with adults. According to eyewitnesses, Wolfgang’s passion for music was so all-encompassing that he was interested in nothing else; even children’s games had to have some sort of ...

Barbara Strozzi, Amor domiglione (“Sleepyhead Cupid”, 1651); Molly Netter, soprano; Avi Stein, harpsichord; and Ezra Seltzer, cello We mark the death on November 11, 1677 – 342 years ago today – of the composer and singer Barbara Strozzi at the age of 58.  Madame Strozzi saw eight volumes of her music published in her lifetime, making her the most extensively published composer of her time.   Barbara who? Fame and memory are fickle, to say the very least.  It takes very little time for us to forget people who were even recently front-page important.  Quickly, off the tops of our heads, who were the vice-presidential candidates on the losing tickets going back to 2000?  Who ran with Al Gore?  John Kerry? Mitt Romney? Hillary Clinton? (Yes, we remember John McCain’s 2008 running-mate Sarah Palin, but for all the wrong reasons.) (For our information, those recent vice-presidential candidates were, respectively Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, Paul Ryan, and Tim Kaine, respectively.) Fame and memory are fickle, often most unfairly so.  Certainly, that is the case with Barbara Strozzi, who was a prolific composer of the highest quality working – with some success – in what was most definitely a man’s world.  Hers is a fascinating story. Giulio Strozzi (1582-1652) in 1627 She was born “Barbara Valle” in 1619 in Venice, the illegitimate daughter of a woman named either Isabella Griega or Isabella Garzoni who went by the nickname of “La Greghetta.” Admittedly, when a woman goes by such a nickname – particularly in a place like Venice, which was the Bangkok and Las Vegas of its time – we generally assume that she makes her living, well, you know, on her back.  But La Greghetta was, in fact, a domestic servant in the employ of the poet and librettist Giulio Strozzi (1582-1652).  Strozzi was the real deal whose opera libretti were set by, among many other composers, Francesco Cavalli and Claudio Monteverdi.  Giulio Strozzi was almost certainly Barbara’s father; he referred to her as his “adoptive daughter”; she and her mother lived in his home; and at the age of 18, Barbara took the name Strozzi as her own.   It was Giulio Strozzi who recognized and cultivated Barbara’s extraordinary talent as a singer and a composer.  Guilio arranged for her to take lessons in both voice and composition, the latter with one of the most important composers of the time, Francesco Cavalli (born Pietro Francesco Caletti-Bruni; 1602-1676). Francesco Cavalli (1602-1676) For Barbara Strozzi, it was a prescription for success.   Growing up in what was then the opera capital of the world, in the house of a famous librettist, surrounded by and hobnobbing with singers and composers and studying with the best of them, Barbara developed rapidly.  When she was 15, she was described as being “la virtuosissima cantratrice di Giulio Strozzi”: “the virtuosic singer of Giulio Strozzi.”  Barbara’s first publication – of an eventual eight – is a volume of madrigals appropriately entitled Il primo libro de’madrigali (“First Book of Madrigals”).  Published in 1644 when she was 25 years old, the volume contains madrigals for two to five voices set to texts by her father, Giulio Strozzi. That she was acutely aware of the special challenges of being a woman composer is made explicitly clear in the preface, in which she wrote: “Being a woman, I am concerned about publishing this work. Would that it lie safely under a golden oak tree and not be endangered by swords of slander which have already been drawn to battle against it.”

Feast or famine. November 4 is one of those days that is a veritable musical-historical feast, during which so many important musical events took place that we can only wish we could spread them about, so worthy of note are each of them. Among these events are four that I would certainly have written about had not a fifth event pre-empted them. Here are those four, sadly “pre-empted” events. Mozart Mozart (1756-1791) circa 1780, detail from a portrait by Johann Nepomuk della Croce On November 4, 1784 – 235 years ago today – Wolfgang Mozart completed his String Quartet No. 17 in B-flat major, nicknamed the “Hunt”, K. 458. It is the fourth of the 6 string quartets that Mozart dedicated to his friend and mentor, Joseph Haydn. (Mozart had been inspired to compose those six string quartets by Haydn’s own 6 string quartets of Op. 33, composed in 1781.) Papa Haydn might rightly be called the “father of the modern string quartet” although Mozart should just as rightly be called the “Ayatollah of the modern string quartet” such are the compositional complexity, expressive intensity, and sheer joyful virtuosity of the six quartets he dedicated to Haydn. Joseph Haydn himself was the first person to admit that. When he first heard Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet performed at Mozart’s central Viennese flat on February 12, 1785 (at Domgasse 5 right around the corner from St. Stephens Cathedral), the 53-year-old Haydn took Mozart’s father Leopold Mozart aside and told him that: “I, as an honest man, tell you before God that your son is the greatest composer I know in person or by name. He has taste and, moreover, the most thorough knowledge of composition.” Darn straight. Brahms Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) circa 1877 On November 4, 1876 – 143 years ago today – the 43-year-old Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 received its premiere in the German city of Karlsruhe, conducted by his friend Felix Otto Dessoff. The symphony had taken twenty-one years for Brahms to complete, not because he dawdled but because he was pathologically terrified that by going public with a symphony he would be compared to his numero uno hero, the big cahuna, the geeter with the heater, the boss with the sauce, Ludwig van freakin’ Beethoven.  Brahms’ fears were well founded: his Symphony No. 1 was indeed referred to – by both friends and foes alike – as the “Tenth” (as in “Beethoven’s Tenth”). But the symphony was a success, and Brahms’ sympho-phobia thus broken, his final three symphonies followed in comparatively quick succession.  (It was thanks to his Symphony No. 1 that to Brahms’ public horror though secret pleasure, the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow began using Brahms’ name in alliteration with Bach and Beethoven’s, creating for all time “the three B’s”, aka “the killer B’s”.)  On November 4, 1924 – 95 years ago today – the French composer, organist, pianist and teacher Gabriel Urbain Fauré died in Paris at the age of 79. I am a huge fan of Fauré’s music, and so inspired by this anniversary of his death I will feature his superb Piano Quartet No. 1 in C minor, Op. 15 (of 1879 and revised in 1883) in tomorrow’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post on Patreon. Schoenberg Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) in 1948

We would acknowledge two date-appropriate musical events before moving on to the pirozhki and potatoes of this post. On October 28, 1896 – 123 years ago today – the American composer, conductor, and educator Howard Hanson was born in Wahoo, Nebraska. For an up-close-and-personal on Maestro Hanson and his Symphony No. 2, the “Romantic”, I would direct your attention to my Dr. Bob Prescribes post of March 19 of this year. It can be found at my subscription site a Patreon.com/RobertGreenbergMusic.  The groin/pelvis/hips in question On October 28, 1957 – 62 years ago today – Elvis (“the pelvis”) Presley’s groin was once again in the news. Having performed a show at the Pan Pacific Auditorium in Los Angeles, Presley was informed by the Los Angeles Police Department that he would no longer be permitted to “wiggle his hips on stage.” The local press made its two cents known when headlines demanded that Elvis “clean up his act.” The following night – October 29, 1957 – the Los Angeles Vice Squad filmed Elvis’ entire show at the Pan Pacific Auditorium, the better to study the details of his performance. (Did the L.A. Police and the local press realize that by their actions and statements they guaranteed Elvis standing-room-only audiences at his subsequent appearances? Presley’s agent – Colonel Tom Parker – must have been rubbing his hands together in unalloyed glee: you can’t buy publicity like that; then again, Parker himself was behind the whole thing!) Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) on March 14, 1893 On to today’s primary topic. We celebrate, on October 28, 1893 – 126 years ago today – the first performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, the “Pathétique” in St. Petersburg, with Tchaikovsky conducting. Tchaikovsky’s Sixth was his final symphony and is considered, by consensus, his greatest symphony and among his finest masterworks. Composed between February and the end of August of 1893, Tchaikovsky himself – typically self-critical to a fault – believed the symphony to be his best; while composing it he wrote his brother Modest: “I am now wholly occupied with the new work . . . and it is hard for me to tear myself away from it. I believe it comes into being as the best of my works. I must finish it as soon as possible, for I have to wind up a lot of affairs and I must soon go to London. I told you that I had completed a Symphony which suddenly displeased me, and I tore Background By 1892 – at the age of 52 – Tchaikovsky had attained a level of fame rarely accorded a living artist. He was celebrated and honored everywhere he went. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Cambridge University. He received standing ovations from audiences and, like some musical Godfather, was kissed on the hand by musicians. Of the many triumphs and anecdotes of these last years of his life one stands out in particular. In January of 1892 Tchaikovsky traveled to Hamburg, there to conduct a performance of his opera Eugene Onegin. With only one(!) rehearsal allocated to the opera – which was to be sung in German – Tchaikovsk, quickly decided to bow out and hand the baton over to the local conductor, a man,

Georg Solti (1912-1997) We mark the birth, on October 21, 1912 – 107 years ago today – of the Hungarian-born pianist and conductor György Stern (better known as Sir Georg Solti) in Budapest, Hungary. Considered one of the greatest conductors to have ever lived, Solti is the Michael Phelps, the Simone Biles of the musical world, having received a record 31(!) GRAMMY® Awards. We contemplate, for a nonce (or even two nonces), “disproportionate numbers”: why and how certain relatively small populations produce large numbers of great performers.  For example. The Dominican Republic, the Caribbean nation that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. In 2017, the World Bank put the Dominican Republic’s population at 10.77 million people, making it equal to the population of North Carolina. Yet, incredibly, over 10% of the active players in Major League Baseball are of Dominican origin. Even a partial list of past and present Dominican baseball players reads like a catalog of the very best and brightest, a catalog that should make any baseball fan shiver with gratitude: the Alou brother, Felipe, Matty, and Jesus; Juan Marichal; Pedro Martinez; Vladimir Guerrero; Rico Carty; George Bell; Manny Mota; César Cedeño; Tony Peña; Sammy Sosa; David Ortiz; Manny Ramirez; Robinson Canó; Albert Pujols; Miguel Tejada; Bartolo Colón; José Bautista; Julio Franco; Melky Cabrera; Francisco Liriano; Edwin Encarnación; and Johnny Cueto (to name but a few!).  Why are there so many great Dominican baseball players? With 40% of the Dominican population living in poverty, baseball is perceived as the “field of dreams”: a ticket out into wealth and stardom. But that’s all it would be – a “dream” – if there wasn’t a Dominican culture that worships baseball perhaps to a fault, a player development infrastructure in place to teach and train these young athletes, and a climate that allows that training to go on 12 months of the year.  Disproportionate numbers.  Eliud Kipchoge (b. 1984) Nine days ago, on October 12, the Kenyan long-distance runner Eliud Kipchoge did the once unthinkable when he ran a sub-two-hour marathon, clocking in at 1:59:40 (Kipchoge already held the “official” world record for a marathon, 2:01:39, set in Berlin in 2018. In doing so, he broke a record set by his fellow Kenyan Dennis Kipruto Kimetto in 2014. In setting his record, Kimetto broke a record set by his fellow Kenyan Patrick Makau Musyoki. Are we seeing a pattern here?).  Kenyan women marathoners are hardly less dominant than the men.  Why are so many of the world’s greatest marathoners from the Western Rift Valley highlands of Kenya (and, for that matter, the adjacent highlands of Ethiopia?)  Various explanations have been put forth. Once again, poverty plays a role: competitive running offers a way out for a successful athlete. The distances between villages, schools, and stores and a lack of ready transportation requires that children in these regions walk (and run) barefoot for considerable distances on a daily basis. Living and working and running at the high altitudes in which they live has given these Kenyans (and neighboring Ethiopians) an almost off-the-charts VO2 max, meaning the maximum amount of oxygen an individual can utilize during intense exercise. Put these good people down at sea level and they can – as they have proven over and over again – run circles around most of their competitors.  Disproportionate numbers. In 2017, the population of the nation of Hungary sat at under 10 million people, making it less populous than the Dominican Republic.

Harry Lillis “Bing” (Der Bingle) Crosby (1903-1977) We mark the death on October 14, 1977 – 42 years ago today – of the American singer and actor Harry Lillis “Bing” Crosby of a so-called “widow maker”: a massive, dead-before-he-hit-the-ground heart attack. We sense that he went out the way he would have chosen to go out. An avid golfer and member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, he flew to Spain on October 13, 1977 to hunt partridge and play golf. The next day, on October 14, having finished an 18-hole round at the La Moraleja Golf Course near Madrid, Crosby and his golfing partners were walking back the clubhouse. Crosby then uttered his last works, “That was a great game of golf, fellas. Let’s get a Coke.” Moments later, at about 6:30 pm, about 20 yards from the clubhouse, Crosby dropped dead. (As last words go, well, had Crosby the opportunity, he probably would have taken a Mulligan on “let’s get a Coke.” We would recall the last words of his friend, performing partner, and golfing chum Bob Hope, who when asked where he wanted to be buried, replied “surprise me.”) Anyway, Crosby went out with his cleats on. Rarely would it seem that someone’s public persona was so different from his private persona. On stage, Crosby’s chocolaty bass-baritone voice virtually defined the sobriquet “crooner”. His on-screen persona was that of a pipe-smoking, smooth-as-a-peeled-onion gentleman: preternaturally calm, wise, and loving: everyone’s favorite uncle or priest (that would be Father O’Malley in the movie Going My Way of 1944).  In reality, Crosby was a sharp, calculating, entrepreneurial, sometimes ruthless perfectionist and businessman with a propensity for drink. He was also a harsh disciplinarian whose four sons from his first marriage (he was to have three more children from his second marriage) not-infrequently felt the bite of a special, metal-studded belt with which Crosby beat them.  (After Crosby died, his son Gary – the eldest – wrote a tell-all memoir called Going My Own Way, in which he depicted his father as “cruel, cold, remote, and physically and psychologically abusive.” Gary Crosby wrote: Crosby as Father O’Malley in Going My Way (1944), NOT beating two recalcitrant teenagers “When I saw Going My Way I was as moved as they [the audience] were by the character he played. Then the lights came on and the movie was over. All the way back to the house I thought about the difference between the person up there on the screen and the one I knew at home.” Bing Crosby’s son Phillip took his brother Gary to task for his description of their father, claiming that: “Gary is a whining, bitching crybaby, walking around with a two-by-four on his shoulder and just daring people to nudge it off. . . My dad was not the monster my lying brother said he was.” However, Bing’s other two sons by his first marriage – Dennis and Lindsay Crosby – confirmed that Crosby was indeed abusive. In reference to his brother Gary’s tell-all, Lindsay Crosby said: “I’m glad [Gary] did it. I hope it clears up a lot of old lies and rumors.” Crosby’s treatment of his first-born sons after his death cannot be disputed. His will created a blind trust that stipulated his sons only receive their inheritance when they reached the age of 65. Only one of the four boys lived so long. Lindsay Crosby died in 1989 at the age of 51 of a self-inflicted gunshot. Dennis Crosby died in 1991 at the age of 56 of a self-inflicted gunshot. Gary Crosby died in 1995 at 62 of lung cancer. Only Phillip Crosby lived to see his inheritance; he died in 2004 at the age of 69 of a heart attack.

José Feliciano performing the Star-Spangled Banner on October 7, 1968 José Feliciano circa 1968 On October 7, 1968 – 51 years ago today – the Puerto Rican-born singer and songwriter José Feliciano (b. 1945) performed the Star-Spangled Banner in Detroit, before the fifth game of the World Series between the Detroit Tigers and the St. Louis Cardinals. His rendition caused a firestorm of controversy, one that did serious damage to his career. The Star-Spangled Banner has been back in the news over the last few years, ever since the quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers – Colin Kaepernick – chose not to stand when it was played before an exhibition game against the Green Bay Packers on August 26, 2016. (I don’t know about you, but 2016 feels like a hundred years ago.)  Depending upon where you stand, Kaepernick was either exercising his constitutional right of free speech or grossly insulting everything the national anthem stands for, including the right to free speech. We need not weigh in here on one side or the other, because the point is that the national anthem means many things to many people, and that many people will get very upset when they perceive that someone has messed with the Star-Spangled Banner. Christina Aguilera (b. 1980), howling and fumbling the words to the national anthem at Super Bowl XLV on February 6, 2011 Taking a knee is one thing but performing the anthem in a manner that can be perceived as a desecration is another thing altogether. I’m not referring to the canine ululations of such singers as Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera, whose melisma-packed (or plagued) performances of the Star-Spangled Banner can run the length of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal. Neither am I referring to those brick-brained performers who, on national television, have managed to disgrace themselves (and their progeny, for generations to come) by forgetting its words: Michael Bolton, Keri Hillson, Sami Hagar, and once again, Christina Aguilera. Rather, I’m referring to performances that in their unique interpretive style have, for whatever reason, caused genuine controversy.  I would ask a rhetorical question: has there ever been a sweeter, gentler, less offensive performer than José Monserrate Feliciano García, best known simply as José Feliciano? Born blind due to congenital glaucoma, he took up the acoustic guitar at the age of nine. Blessed with a clean, flexible, extremely attractive voice, he began performing professionally in 1962, at the age of 17. In 1963 he was “discovered” while performing at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village and was immediately signed by RCA Victor, which released his first single (that is, a 45-rpm record) in 1964. He had his first million seller in 1968, when RCA released a 45-rpm of Feliciano singing Michelle and John Phillips’ California Dreamin’ on side “A” and the Doors’ Light My Fire on side “B”. 1968 was indeed a career year for Feliciano; he took home two Grammy Awards that year, one for Best New Artist and one for Best Pop Male Performance. He had, at the age of 23, achieved international stardom as “an innovative crossover artist with soul, folk and rock influences, infused with a substantial Latin flair.” Ernie Harwell (1918-2010) in 1966 His fame peaking, Feliciano was invited to sing the national anthem by the Detroit Tigers’ broadcast announcer Ernie Harwell. Feliciano ventured out onto the field with his guide dog and an acoustic guitar. A video of his rendition that day – soulful, deeply expressive and to my ears very beautiful – can be found at the top of this post. No doubt: Feliciano took liberties with the Star-Spangled Banner, although compared to the screeching,

It was on September 30, 1791 – 228 years ago today – that Wolfgang Mozart’s opera-slash-singspiel, The Magic Flute, received its premiere at the Freihaustheater auf der Wieden in Vienna, conducted by Mozart himself.  Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791) in 1789, by Doris Stock In terms of its story arc, The Magic Flute is a mess. Like a Hollywood screenplay re-written by one (or two or three) too many writers, its libretto is all over the place, all of the time, projecting five parallel simultaneous storylines.  Storyline number one The Magic Flute is a fairytale farce, featuring dancing animals, dragons, a bird-man and a bird-lady, an evil queen, a noble brotherhood of priests, a clownish Blackamoor, and your basic stock-in-trade prince and princess. Storyline number two The Magic Flute is a love story about successful and unsuccessful couplings. On one hand, the prince ends up with the princess, and the bird-man with the bird-lady. On the other hand, the minions of the evil queen hunger desperately for men but dine only on death; the Blackamoor lusts for the princess but eats only her dust. Storyline number three The Magic Flute is a “coming of age” story, one that traces the prince’s journey from post-adolescence to manhood, from a fainting wimp with no arrows in his quiver (literally) to a heroic, death-defying stud. Diane Damrau as the Queen of the Night Storyline number four The Magic Flute is a feminist tract. Yes. At its heart, it’s about the struggle between matriarchal and patriarchal worldviews. The opera’s essential protagonist – the Queen of the Night – is an old-world matriarch: a tough, savvy, professional woman who has hit the glass ceiling and is now enraged by her betrayal at the hands of men. Conversely, the Queen’s daughter, the Princess Pamina, is rewarded by those very same men for her bravery and purity and is made a priest in the society of men, presumably reconciling mankind and womankind. (Boy, does that ever tick off her mother, the Queen of the Night!) Storyline number five The Magic Flute is a depiction (for those cognoscenti “in the know”) of the Masonic rites of initiation, from the rituals of selection to enlightenment, a journey from darkness, fear and superstition (that is, from ignorance) to light, courage, and wisdom (that is, enlightenment). If The Magic Flute is indeed such a confusing mish-mash of plot and insider information, why is it considered an epic masterwork? That’s an easy question to answer. Because Wolfgang Mozart wrote the music. Mozart’s music so elevates the genre of singspiel, breaths such life and depth and humanity into what are stock characters, renders so complex the interaction of those characters during ensembles and finales, and imbues the moments of ritual in the opera with such sublimity and majesty that the opera as a wholistic experience transcends entirely the weaknesses of its libretto.  (It’s one thing to create a great opera by composing great music to a great libretto, as Mozart did in his operas The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, with libretti by the wonderful Lorenzo da Ponte. It’s another thing altogether to create a great opera by writing great music that elevates, completely, a klutzy libretto filled with cardboard characters, specious dramatic situations, and endless obscure Masonic references and at the same time make the piece appealing to the general public for whom it was written. The Magic Flute might very well be Mozart’s greatest masterwork, just because of the distance between its libretto and the final prod...

Paul McCartney (b. 1942) in 1966 On September 23, 1969 – 50 years ago today – the venerable English tabloid the London Daily Mirror reported that Paul McCartney of the Beatles was dead. It was the first time the rumor was printed in the mainstream press. In 2009, for what was then the 40th anniversary of the moon landing (or was it just a spectacular hoax?), Time Magazine printed a list of 10 of “the world’s most enduring conspiracy theories.” The list is as relevant today as it was 10 years ago, or so I think. According to Time, the top five conspiracy theories are as follows. At number one is the “Kennedy Assassination”. At number two, the “9/11 Cover-Up”. At number three, and never more relevant than it is today, “Area 51 and the Aliens”. At number four is “PAUL IS DEAD”, and at number five is that “Secret Societies Control the World.” (Okay; one more: at number six is the “Moon Landings Were Faked.”) I used to giggle about people who believed in crazy “theories” and considered such folks to be essentially harmless. Then I met a “true believer” and I stopped laughing. Between 1999 and 2003, I worked out at a 24-Hour Fitness gym in Walnut Creek, California. There was a very nice, soft-spoken guy – mid-40s, I’d say, with a trim van dyke beard, 6’ tall (or so), in decent shape – with whom I became friendly in the way you become friendly with someone in a gym. He claimed to be a research biologist and I had no reason to doubt him: he was intelligent and extremely articulate. Then one day, while we were sharing a weight machine, he casually mentioned something that made my ears stick up. I asked him if he was joking, and then I heard it all, calmly and logically expressed and without a hint of hysteria, doubt, or embarrassment. According to this self-proclaimed scientist, the earth was some 6000 years old; evolution was a secular lie perpetrated by the Masons (or the Jews, or the Rockefellers and Standard Oil; I honestly don’t remember so gobsmacked was I at this point); the creation story as described in the Old Testament was accurate scientific fact, and that the scientific community as a whole was already drifting in this direction and that within just a few years evolution would be refuted for the ungodly lie that it is. I was astounded. My initial reaction was that the guy was as whacked as those 39 unfortunate members of “Heaven’s Gate”, the UFO Millenarian religious cult who had not long before committed mass suicide wearing identical black shirts, sweat pants, and brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, convinced – as they were – that this was how they were going to reach and board an extraterrestrial spaceship that was presumed to be following the Hale-Bopp Comet. So my workout partner was nuts. But no, he wasn’t. But yes, he was. But no, he wasn’t.  I suddenly understood something I’d never really understood before, and that is that we will – each and every one of us – believe precisely what we choose to believe and, given the right (or wrong) circumstances, we can (and will) convince ourselves of pretty much anything. Under the right (or wrong) circumstances, “reality” becomes friable; “fact” becomes flexible, “common sense” merges with the delusional. I suddenly had an insight into how a great and civilized nation like Germany could, in a time of mass hysteria, embrace a Hitler; how religious extremists, in the name of their “god”, could perpetrate heinous crimes against their fellow people; how governments can keep making the same absurd, misguided, delusional mistakes over and over again. (Though the definition has been improperly attributed to both Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, it still hits the nail on the head: “insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over a...

(What, you don’t “like” my title?  Please, don’t get testes about it.) Carlo Broschi, “Farinelli” (1705-1782) in 1734 by Bartolomeo Nazari We note the death on September 16, 1782 – 237 years ago today – of one of the greatest opera singers to have ever lived, the celebrated Italian castrato Carlo Maria Michelangelo Nicola Broschi, who went by the stage name of “Farinelli”. How often in our search for cultural equivalence – how tiresomely often – do we hear statements on the lines of, “Like, Mozart was, like, the rock star of his time.” No, like, he wasn’t.  We’ve talked about this before, and here I’ve brought it up again.  Composers of concert music, even one as flamboyant as Wolfgang Mozart, never had the fame, notoriety, visibility, wealth, and necessary sexual charisma for what we, today, would consider the prototypical “rock star.” Robert Plant; oh please, TMI Let us consider the exaggerated sexuality that is the first and perhaps most important aspect of “rock stardom.”  On one hand there are the alpha males, the walking phalluses with tin foil wrapped cucumbers stuffed into their leather pants (thank you for that enduring image, Spinal Tap), rockers who reduce their female audience members to whimpering pools of fluid: Elvis, Mick, Keith, Paul (the “cute” one!), James Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Gene Simmons, and Jared Leto, to name just a few.   Rihanna in 2013 Then there are their female equivalents, stunningly beautiful caricatures of the perfect sex machine; dressed like high-end hookers, women in (seemingly) complete control of their sexuality, whose pseudo-copulatory, strip joint gyrations on stage drive their male audience members (pun intended) to near madness with desire: Grace Slick, Debbie Harry, Tina Turner, Gwen Stefani, Joan Jett, Britney Spears, Stevie Nicks, Amy Winehouse, Pink, to name just another few.   Lady Gaga putting the “A” in “androgyny” Most intriguing, I think, are the pan-sexuals: those rock stars whose provocative, flamboyant, often outrageous, sometimes androgynous personas have imbued them with the reputation of erotic taboo breakers:  David Bowie, Michael Jackson (may he rest in pieces), Madonna (Madonna Louise Ciccone), Prince (Prince Rogers Nelson), Freddie Mercury (Farrokh Bulsara), Elton John (Reginald Kenneth Dwight), and Lady Gaga (Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta), for example. In a critique, the feminist and social critic Camille Paglia asserted something about Lady Gaga that can be applied to all of the pan-sexuals listed above; that she is “an identity thief: a mainstream manufactured product.” Well, duh.  In fact, Ms. Paglia takes nothing away from the good Gaga by pointing out that she is part of a mainstream music industry, one that goes back nearly 400 years, an industry for which provocation, flamboyance, androgyny, and sex, sex, and more sex sells.  That “industry” was created in Italy and goes under the blanket designation of “opera”.   An opera is stage play in which the words are intensified a gazillion fold (give or take) by setting them to music.  Since the birth of opera around 1600, and particularly since opera went public in 1637, it has been acknowledged that nothing puts derrieres in seats (and money in the box office) better than sex, violence, religious controversy, sex, great costumes, beautiful singing, sex,  and celebrity: the celebrity of the singers themselves.  Who were the real “rock stars” of the seventeenth and eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries? Opera singers, that’s who.  And who were the biggest, baddest, most flamboyant,

Elvis Presley (1935-1977) and Ed Sullivan (1901-1974) On September 9, 1956 – 63 years ago today – Elvis Presley made his first appearance, live, on The Ed Sullivan Show. (The show was indeed broadcast live in the Eastern and Central time zones, though delayed for the Mountain and Pacific time zones.) It has been suggested that this appearance on that evening 63 years ago marked the ascendance of rock ‘n’ roll as the dominant musical genre in the Western world.  Television changed everything. Yes, we all know that, but in thinking about this post I’ve realized that so ubiquitous are the screens around us that we should remind ourselves of how recent a phenomenon TV is and the degree to which it has forever changed not just our everyday lives, but our very perceptions of time, distance, shared experience, and collective memory. Philco “Custom 400” television set, 1955 Television did not become a national mass media in the United States until the mid-1950s, and it didn’t become a cultural force until the 1960s.  Between 1949 and 1969, the number of American homes with at least one television set rose from under 1 million to over 44 million. During that same period, the number of commercial television stations in the United States went from 69 to 566. Correspondingly, during this same period, advertising revenues paid to American television stations and networks increased from $58 million to $1.5 billion. The television industry – as we understand it today – wasn’t in place until the 1960s. Since the 1960s, TV has evolved from a fairly homogeneous mass media dominated by the “big three” networks (for you youngsters, those would be ABC, CBS, and NBC) to, in the words of James Poniewozik – chief television critic for The New York Times – “the polarized, zillion-channel era of cable-news fisticuffs and reality shocker-entertainment” that it is today. Johnny Carson (1925-2005 In the process of its evolution, television has, for better or worse, gone a long way towards eliminating regional cultural differences and accents (for example, we read that Johnny Carson’s Iowa/Nebraska twang became the standard “American” accent thanks to his 44-year television career). Television has changed our sense of time and distance, in that with the advent of live TV, there is no such thing as “time” or “distance”, as we have come to expect instant updates from every corner of the globe, an expectation now fulfilled to a fault by our smart phones. Television changed forever the way we consume information and entertainment, as we have come to expect instant aural (that’s “aural” with an “a”!) and visual gratification. Among the many earth-shaking changes it has wrought, television has given our species instant and effortless access to live events, allowing us to see and hear life-changing current events from the comfort of our homes as they happen. In last week’s Dr. Bob Prescribes post, I mentioned that on Sunday, November 24, 1963, the 9-year-old me was among the many millions of people who saw Jack Ruby shoot (and kill) President Kennedy’s alleged assassin – Lee Harvey Oswald – in the basement of the...

45-rpm single of The Doors Light My Fire, recorded in August 1966 and released in January 1967 This post – Music History Monday – would not be possible without the internet. In a matter of seconds, I – or any one of us – can access a seemingly innumerable number of sites that will afford us all sorts of date-related info: what happened and to whom on any particular date. I rely on a number of such music-related sites for gathering possible subject matter for Music History Monday, and nine-out-of-ten times (nineteen-out-of-twenty? whatever, most of the time) I find a date-related topic about which I can comfortably write between 1500 and 2000 words.  I’ve been writing this post for a bit over three years now (for those inclined towards masochism, all of these posts – going back to August 2016 – can be found here). Early on, on the rare occasion that I could not find something to write about, I “borrowed” an event from the day before or the day after. Sometime during the first year I decided that that was cheating and that I had to be cleverer than just borrowing stuff. So I began to use those occasional “dead” dates to editorialize: to bloviate on topics of personal musical interest. And while I deeply appreciate your forbearance – my dear, wonderful readers – I am so accustomed to hearing myself rant and rave and opine that at this point doing so bores me to the point of tears. So over the course of the last year or so, I’ve attempted to gut my way through the occasional dry date – of which today is obviously one (I wouldn’t be wasting all this space ruminating on the problem if it weren’t) – by either writing about relatively obscure births and deaths (though such events were by no means obscure to those people whose births and deaths they represent) or figuring a way to shoe horn some musical commentary into a non-musical event.  So that you might understand what I mean by “obscure”, here are the more outstanding musical events that occurred on this day. September 2 saw the births of the composers Georg Böhm (1661); Johann Trier (1716); Pehr Frigel (1750); Felix Wolfes (1892); Rene Amengual (1911); Dai-Keong Lee (1915); Hans Joachim Koellreutter (1915); Tzvi Avni (1927); Miloslav Istvan (1928); Andrey Petrov (1930) (you are getting sleepy!); David Leonard Blake (1939) and John Zorn (1953). With the exception of the first and last of these folks – Georg Böhm and John Zorn – the music of these lovely people has, sadly, been flushed down the toilet of time (as I expect mine will be as well).  Keanu Reeves, born September 2, 1964, in 1999 (For our information, Keanu Reeves was born in Beirut, Lebanon on this date in 1964, but I am hard put to come up with any pertinent musical connection to The One.) The deaths on this date – with the exception of Rudolf Bing, who died in 1997 after a storied career as the manager of the Metropolitan Opera – are equally meagre.  However, when it comes to major world events, September 2nd is indeed a big day. I would offer up a few for purely pedagogic purposes: On September 2, 44 BCE, the great Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tulius Cicero launched the first of would be 14 oratorical attacks on the lumpish Roman politician and general Marc Antony. (I will happily admit to having become a Cicero fan-boy after reading Robert Harris’ superb historical trilogy, set in the dying days of the Roman Republic, Imperium, Conspirata, and Dictator. I would be so bold as to suggest that by recommending these novels this post has now offered something of value!) Other September 2 events.

Lotte Lehmann (1888-1976) circa 1935 “She had only to walk on stage to reduce the audience to a melting blob” On August 26, 1976 – 43 years ago today – the German-born soprano, opera star, lieder singer, movie actress, internationally renowned teacher, music historian and author, published poet, painter and illustrator Lotte Lehmann died in Santa Barbara, California at the age of 88. In 2004 and 2005, I had the honor of speaking at The Music Academy of the West in Montecito, California, just east of Santa Barbara. The Academy, which was founded in 1947, is one of the great summer music conservatories and festivals in the world. It is also among the most beautiful music facilities anywhere. Perched on over ten acres of beachfront property in the beyond-toney enclave of Montecito, the Academy occupies the former site of the Santa Barbara Country Club. (For our information, along with The Music Academy of the West, other residents of Montecito include Drew Barrymore, Patrick Stewart, Rob Lowe, Al Gore, Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bridges, Gwynwth Paltrow, and Kirk Douglas. The median price for a house there is a cool four million dollars. Heaven knows how much those ten-plus acres on which the Music Academy sits are now worth!) Lehmann Hall, Music Academy of the West My presentations at the Academy took place in the main concert hall, a 300-seat theater called Hahn Hall, and the post-lecture receptions were held in a magnificent, Mediterranean Revival-styled room called Lehmann Hall. I inquired as to the name of the room and was told that it was named for one of the principal founders of the music academy, the soprano Lotte Lehmann. My brain preceded to short-circuit in a manner unusual then but rather more often today, and I responded on the lines of, “Wow. A performance space named for Rosa Klebb!” (“Rosa Klebb” was the SPECTRE agent in the second James Bond film From Russia With Love, a Soviet bloc harridan who killed her victims with a poisoned blade that would emerge from the toe of her right shoe. She was played by the Vienna-born Tony Award-winning singer and actress Lotte Lenya. Lenya rose to fame playing Jenny in the original Berlin production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, with music composed by her husband, Kurt Weill.) Lotte Lenya (1898-1981) as Rosa Klebb and the shoe With great tact, the lovely lady with whom I was talking gently observed that the room in which we were standing was named for Lotte Lehmann, and not, marvelous though she was as Agent Klebb, Lotte Lenya.   Duh. The founding mothers and fathers of the Music Academy of the West were an impressive bunch, and include along with Lehmann the conductor Otto Klemperer, the violinist Roman Totenberg, the pianist and harpsichordist Rosalyn Tureck, the operatic baritone John Charles Thomas, and the composers Ernest Bloch, Darius Milhaud, Roy Harris, and Arnold Schoenberg (Schoenberg was the Academy’s first composer in residence). Impressive, yes, though not a one of them has a hall named after him or her except Lehmann. That’s because Lehmann was instrumental (no pun intended) in the founding of the Academy; she was a resident of Santa Barbara and after her retirement from the stage in 1951 she taught there for many years. How this German-born diva got to Santa Barbara, and what she accomplished along the way, should be an inspiration for all of us. Lehmann circa 1910, age 22 She was born on February 27, 1888 in Perleberg, in the northeastern German state of Brandenburg, midway between Berlin and Hamburg. Trained in Berlin, she made her operatic debut in Hamburg in 1910, at the age of 22. In 1916 she joined the company of the Vienna Court Opera (later th...

Monteverdi (1567-1643) in 1630, painted by Bernardo Strozzi On August 19, 1613 – 406 years ago today – Claudio Monteverdi was appointed Maestro di Capella di San Marco: the director of music at Venice’s St. Mark’s Basilica. It was the gig of a lifetime! There’s no doubt about it: Claudio Monteverdi was one of the very, very greatest composers, up there with that handful (give or take) of dead Austrian and German cats whose marble, plaster, and chalk busts grace our pianos and music rooms. He was born in the northern Italian city of Cremona on May 15, 1567. Located on the north bank of the Po River in the middle of the Po Valley, Cremona is famous for its vegetable and olive oils, mustard, sweets, and preserved meats. However, Cremona’s most famous product is not its foodstuffs, yum-licious though they may be, but rather, the stringed instruments built there. It was in Cremona that the violin family of instruments was born and where some of the all-time greatest violin builders (or “luthiers”) plied their trade. Cremona was home to the Amati family and its greatest violin-building son, Nicolò Amati (1596-1684); home to the Guarneri family, and its greatest luthier, Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù (1698-1744); finally, Cremona was the home of Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737).  The oldest surviving violin was built by Nicolò Amati’s grandfather, Andrea Amati (who lived from ca. 1520-ca. 1578). Known today as the “Charles IX” (because it bears the coat of arms of Charles IX of France), the violin was built in Cremona in 1564 (which was the same year William Shakespeare was born). Monteverdi as a young man Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi was born in Cremona three years later. He was a musically gifted child, and at an early age, he developed into an excellent violinist. (Most appropriate for a native Cremonese!) The outline of Monteverdi’s musical life can be stated quickly: he learned his craft in Cremona; he matured in Mantua; he flourished in Venice. Monteverdi’s early musical education was supervised by Marc’Antonio Ingegneri, an important composer of the Counter-Reformation and the maestro di capella of Cremona. In 1582, at the age of fifteen, young Claudio had his first publication: a collection of three-part motets printed by the prestigious Venetian publishing house of Gardane. Further publications followed, underwritten by the various Cremonese patrons to whom they were dedicated, including his first book of madrigals (of an eventual five), which was published in 1587. In 1590, at the age of 23, Monteverdi was hired on as a suonatore di vivuola – a string player – in the court of Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua. Monteverdi also composed for the Mantuan court, and he very quickly became one of Mantua’s leading musicians.  Monteverdi was an ambitious young man who longed for advancement. In May of 1601, when Benedetto Pallavicino, maestro di capella of Mantua, went into retirement, the 34-year-old Monteverdi was convinced that his time had come, and that the job was his. But six months passed, and no appointment was made. In November of 1601, Monteverdi – simmering, stewing, and finally boiling in his own juices – wrote a letter to the Duke, demanding to be appointed maestro di capella. It is an extraordinary letter, one that Monteverdi biographer Hans Ferdinand Redlich calls “a remarkably malicious document”. (Knowing what we know, today, about Monteverdi’s bad treatment there at Mantua, we would modify Herr Redlich’s evaluation and call the letter “a justifiably malicious letter.”) Over its course, Monteverdi points out that he has waited patiently for his many superiors to die off, and now that they were all dead,

John Milton Cage (September 5, 1912 to August 12, 1992) On August 12, 1992 – 27 years ago today – the American composer, inventor, philosopher, facilitator, agent provocateur, shaman, clown, and guru, John Cage died in New York City at the age of 79. Background. My May 14, 2019 Dr. Bob Prescribes post (which can be found on Patreon; if you’ve not yet subscribed, please do so!) featured the American composer Henry Cowell (1897-1965). Cowell, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, was a musical polymath, a Universalist, a walking encyclopedia: someone who was as deeply knowledgeable of so-called “world music” (particularly central and east Asian music) as he was of Western art music and folk music. Henry Cowell (1897-1965) Cowell was a charismatic human dynamo, and a composer and teacher of genius, someone whose pioneering impact on the American musical community in the 1920s and 1930s was singular. Among the many young American musicians on whom Cowell had a decisive impact was a native Los Angelino and graduate of Los Angeles High School named John Milton Cage, Jr. According to Cage, Cowell was nothing less than “the open sesame for new music in America.” Cage took Cowell’s teachings and beliefs about the universal, pan-cultural nature of music and sound to an entirely new level, and in doing so changed forever the way twentieth-century composers thought about music.  (Pardon me a brief personal comment. To my adored East Coast academic colleagues who, upon reading the paragraph above, will only roll their eyes and shake their heads: I would remind you that Ivy League music departments and their offshoots across the U.S. constitute but a tiny part of the international musical and artistic community, which was in fact deeply – even profoundly – influenced by Cage during the mid and late-twentieth century. To my beloved readers who only know Cage from such works as 4’33” and assume that he was a charlatan, well, he was most certainly not, as even a cursory examination of his music for prepared piano will bear out. He was in fact a brilliant, personable, extremely funny man, someone who refused to live by any rules other than his own. Knowing Cage as I do, I’ve no doubt that if someone called him a “charlatan”, he’d put an index finger in the air, smile his big toothy grin, and say something on the lines of “Yes, but a charlatan of genius!”) Cage as a young man Despite some early piano lessons, Cage came to music relatively late in life, after having worked for a time as an architectural apprentice. Along with Henry Cowell, Cage’s most important composition teacher was – of all people – Arnold Schoenberg, who was teaching at U.C.L.A. when Cage studied with him and who Cage worshipped. In a lecture entitled “Indeterminacy”, Cage told this story: “When Schoenberg asked me whether I would devote my life to music, I said, ‘Of course.’ After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle; that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’” Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)