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

We celebrate the birth on August 5, 1397 – 622 years ago today – of the composer Guillaume Du Fay. He was, by every standard, one of the greatest composers to have ever lived and was admired as such in his own lifetime. A lovely performance of Guillaume Du Fay’s Nuper rosarum flores by the Quire Cleveland, conducted by Ross W. Duffin, and recorded at the Mary Queen of Peace Church in Cleveland, Ohio on Sept. 27, 2014 Guillaume Du Fay (1397-1474) He was born in the Flemish (today Belgian) town of Bersele (today Beersel), just south of Brussels. He died 77 years later, on November 27, 1474, just across the border in northern France, in the town of Cambrai.  Du Fay is a principal member of the fraternity of Franco-Flemish (that is, French-Belgian) composers who dominated European music in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. That fraternity boasted some pretty heavy compositional hitters, including Jacob Obrecht, Heinrich Isaac, Orlando de Lassus, Johannes Ockeghem, and the über-great Josquin Des Prez. With the exception of Ockeghem, all these guys spent a significant portion of their careers in Italy, where the climate was swell and the pay was sweet. The Italians called them the “oltremontani”, literally “the dudes from the other side of the alps.” We don’t know much about Du Fay’s early life. We know that he was the illegitimate child of an unmarried woman named Marie Du Fayt (F-A-Y-T) and an unknown priest. (We shall resist comment on that tidbit.) We know that early on, Marie Du Fayt moved to Cambrai – in France – where she had family, and that her son Guillaume (or “William”) was educated at the cathedral in Cambrai, where he was chorister as well.  Du Fay’s musical star burned bright, and in 1428 – now a singer and composer of considerable renown – he joined the papal choir in Rome. Said to have been founded by Pope Gregory the Great his very self (who reigned from 590 to 604 and for whom “Gregorian Chant” is named), the papal choir was the greatest choir in the world at the time, the choral equivalent of the 1927 Yankees, the 1972 Miami Dolphins, the 2017 Golden State Warriors. While in Rome, Du Fay became a friend of Cardinal Gabriele Condulmer. Du Fay chose his friend wisely, because in 1431 Cardinal Condulmer became Pope Eugene IV. Gabriele Condulmer (1383-1447); Pope Eugene IV (1431-1447 Eugene IV was the second post-schism pope to rule over a reunited church. (The “Western Schism” – 1378-1417 – was a period that saw two, and even three men simultaneously claim to be the one, “true” pope, each one excommunicating the others.) Unfortunately, the end of the schism did not mean that peace reigned in Rome, and just three years into his reign – in 1434 – a rebellion once again forced the pope to flee Rome (which is what had caused the schism in the first place). The papal court, including the papal choir, went north and set up shop in Florence. Along with being thin and rich, location and timing are everything. For Du Fay, the timing of the papacy’s move to Florence could not have been more fortuitous. Florence was at the height of her wealth and power, and in 1436 Florence’s great cathedral – under reconstruction since the 1290s – was ready to be rededicated. On March 25, 1436 (the Feast of the Annunciation and the Florentine New Year’s Day), Florence’s distinguished guest, Pope Eugene IV, conducted the consecration ceremony himself. The cathedral, to that time known as Santa Reperata, was renamed Santa Maria del Fiore (“St. Mary of the Flowers”) in honor of the Virgin Mary. To commemorate the occasion, the pope commissioned Guillaume Du Fay to compose a motet.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) in 1839 We mark the death on July 29, 1856 – 163 years ago today – of the German composer, pianist, and music critic Robert Schumann at the age of 46. The actress Valerie Harper was back in the news this week. Now nearly 80 years old (her birthday is on August 22nd), she is best remembered for her role as Rhoda Morgenstern on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and then its spin-off, Rhoda, in the 1970s. Ms. Harper was diagnosed with lung cancer back in 2009, and she has fought like the proverbial tiger since. Her time is almost up; this week’s news was about her husband’s refusal to ship her off to a hospice. Valerie Harper, b. 1939, in the day circa 1975 During the course of her illness, she has pointed out – correctly, if painfully for us all – that we are all “terminal.” I know, I know, I know: it’s not something anyone wants to think about, especially not on a Monday, which by itself is depressing enough. Yes, our time will come when it comes, but I, for one, want to spend as little energy as possible thinking about it. But having buried three beloved family members long before their time should have been up, I am as aware as anyone of the randomness of disease and death and the emotional catastrophe it leaves in its wake. Are you still with me?  Death sucks; no two ways about it. But there is such a thing as a good death: quick, painless, and in old age. And, tragically, there is such a thing as a bad death: slow, painful, and at a young age.  Robert Schumann, bless him, suffered a very bad death. He was a big, sweet, talented bear of a man with bi-polar disease. In 1831 – at the age of 21 – he acquired syphilis from a prostitute known to us as only “Christal” or “Charitas.” Writing in his diary at the time, Schumann referred to a “wound” that caused him “biting and gnawing pain”, in all likelihood a reference to a penile lesion. Not long before his death he scribbled a note recorded by his doctor: “In 1831 I was syphilitic and treated with arsenic.” Schumann was one of the very few to not just emerge from the first two stages of syphilis physically intact but into a 20-year-long latency, during which he was non-infectious and symptom-free. He must have believed he was one of the blessed few to have been cured of what was, at the time, an otherwise fatal disease.  But between January and November of 1853, Schumann – now a married father of six, living and working in the Rhineland city of Düsseldorf – experienced a series of increasingly worrisome neurological disorders, among them an inability to speak or write for days at a time, rheumatoid pain, dizziness, aural disturbances and enlarged pupils in both eyes. Whether he realized it or not, Schumann’s syphilis had entered its mortal, tertiary stage. In February of 1854, his mind gave way.  During the evening of February 10, he was tormented by what he called: “very strong and painful aural disturbances.”  Within a week, the sounds in Schumann’s ears had taken shape; he reported hearing: Clara (1819-1896) and Robert Schumann in 1850 “Magnificent music, with instruments of splendid resonance, the like of which has never been heard on earth before.” His wife Clara was becoming more and more frightened. She wrote in her diary: “My poor Robert suffers terribly. All sounds are transformed for him into music . . . He has said several times that if it does not stop, he’ll go out of his mind.”  On February 18,

On July 22, 1969 – 50 years ago today – Aretha Franklin (1942-2018) was arrested for disorderly conduct in Highland Park, Michigan, a community within the metropolitan area of her native Detroit. She had been involved in a minor traffic accident in a parking lot. Two Detroit policemen had responded; Ms. Franklin took offense at something or other, swore at the officers and then tried to slap them. Never, ever a good idea. She was placed under arrest and hauled off to the local police station, where she posted $50.00 bail and was released. On driving away from the station, she ran down a road sign; not a good idea, either. Aretha Franklin during a recording session on January 10, 1969, in New York Franklin was, admittedly, going through a rough patch in her life at the time. Her meteoric rise to stardom in 1967 had changed her life almost entirely, and not necessarily for the better. In 1968 she separated from her physically abusive husband (and manager) Ted White; they were divorced in 1969. Following the separation, she was reportedly drinking heavily (although alcohol was not cited in her parking lot fracas with the police).  That Aretha Franklin was a passionate and potentially temperamental woman is obvious to anyone who has ever heard her sing; there’s not a snowball’s chance in Mali that a shrinking violet could sing and sell a song the way she could. Nevertheless, she was not known as someone who went around trying to smack officers of the law, which has made me wonder – given the weather this past weekend – whether climatological factors played a role in her actions that day 50 years ago.  The article below appeared two days ago, on Saturday, July 20th:  The Braintree, Massachusetts Police Department (CNN) It’s dangerously hot across much of the country this weekend — so hot, in fact, that police in Braintree, Massachusetts, are imploring would-be criminals to hold off on illegal activity until Monday. The Braintree Police Department asked the community to put a pin in crime until the heat wave passes in a Facebook post Friday. “It is straight up hot as soccer balls out there,” the department wrote in the post.  Yes, a police department really used the phrase “hot as soccer balls.” While temperatures in the area could reach 102 degrees, it’ll likely feel even worse: the heat index, or the more accurate temperature your body feels when air temperature and humidity are both factored in, could be as high as 115 degrees, the weather service said. That’s simply too hot for lawbreaking, Braintree police said. Committing a crime in this sort of weather is “next level henchmen status,” the department said, not to mention dangerous to the offender’s health.In the post, the department suggested everyone wait out the heat wave indoors and suspend the illegal stuff until things cool down. “Stay home, blast the AC, binge Stranger Things season 3, play with the face app, practice karate in your basement,” police said. “We will all meet again on Monday when it’s cooler.”The message is signed, “The PoPo.” While I’m sure we all think it’s swell that the Braintree Police Department is concerned for the health of potential law breakers, I’m just cynical enough to believe that they were motivated by two factors other than the health of those potential law breakers. One, the “PoPo” themselves did not want to have to go out in the heat if they didn’t have to, and two, they know – as we’ve known for over 100 years – that our heart rates, blood pressure, and testosterone levels rise with the mercury, which means that irritability, aggressive behavior, and violent crime rise with the heat as well. We all know this to be true; it’s built into our very language.

We mark the death on July 15, 1857 – 162 years ago today – of the Austrian composer, pianist and teacher Carl Czerny.  Carl Czerny (1791-1827) in 1833 What would we do without him? Indeed. Excepting Ferdinand Ries (who was, like Czerny, a student of Beethoven’s), no one has left us more numerous and more accurate first-hand accounts of Beethoven than Czerny. He was a great pianist and perhaps the greatest pianist who never played in public. (I would qualify that statement, because as a young man Czerny did indeed play in public a handful of times; for example, Beethoven entrusted the 21-year-old Czerny with the first public performance in Vienna of his Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, the “Emperor”, on February 12, 1812. But in fact, Czerny hated the pressure of performing in public, hated travelling, and felt that “my playing lacked the type of brilliant, calculated charlantry that is usually part of a travelling virtuoso’s essential equipment.” So he stayed home in Vienna, where he performed in private, composed, and taught.) He was, very likely, the single most important piano teacher of the nineteenth century. According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians he was “a central figure in the transmission of Beethoven’s legacy”, a piano teacher who numbered among his star students Stephan Heller, Sigismond Thalberg, Theodor Leschetizky, and Franz Liszt.   Flow-chart of Czerny’s impact as a piano teacher as of 1927, from The Etude magazine (In late August of 1819 Liszt’s father Adam brought his son to Czerny’s studio in Vienna. Czerny remembered: “One morning in 1819, a man with a small boy approached me with a request to let the youngster play something on the piano.  He was a pale, sickly-looking child who, while playing, swayed about on the stool as if drunk, so that I thought that he would fall to the floor. His playing was also quite irregular, and he had so little idea of fingering that he threw his fingers quite arbitrarily around the keyboard. But that notwithstanding, I was astonished at the talent nature had bestowed upon him. He played something which I gave him to sight-read like a pure ‘natural’. It was just the same when, at his father’s request, I gave him a theme on which to improvise. Without the slightest knowledge of harmony, he still brought a touch of genius to his rendering. The father told me that he himself had taught the boy till now; but he asked me whether if I would myself accept his little ‘Franzi’. I told him I would be glad to.” Czerny later wrote: “Never before had I had so eager, talented, or industrious a student. After only a year I could let him perform publicly, and he aroused a degree of enthusiasm in Vienna that few artists have equaled.”  Czerny, who taught from 8 am to 8 pm, giving twelve lessons a day – a workload he himself called “lucrative but taxing.” – taught Liszt for free, giving him lessons every evening after having finished his day’s work. Liszt became a de-facto member of the Czerny family, and was grateful to Czerny – whom he always referred to, no matter how famous he got, as “My Dear, Revered Master” – for the rest of his life.) Czerny as a young man Czerny was a tireless composer, who churned out thousands of works and whose final opus number was a staggering Op. 861(!!!) Harold Schonberg describes Czerny’s method of composing: “A skullcap on his head, he would work on four or five compositions simultaneously, running from one to the other as the ink dried enough for him to turn the pages, while carrying on an animated conversation with anybody who hap...

A robotic performance of George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique (sans airplane engines) staged at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in March 2006 We mark the birth on July 8, 1900 – 119 years ago today – of the composer, pianist, author, inventor and self-described “bad boy of music”, George Antheil (pronounced Ann-tile).  George Antheil (1900-1959) in 1927 Antheil lived a fascinating life. He composed a lot of music, including six operas, twenty works for orchestra (including six numbered symphonies); 15 major works of chamber music (including three string quartets and four violin sonatas); scores for over 30 movies and lots of music for TV. He wrote magazine and newspaper articles, and wrote three books, including a crime novel edited and published in 1930 by his friend T. S. Eliot entitled Death in the Dark. And he invented stuff.  For all of this, he is remembered – when he is remembered at all – for his firstmajor composition, a work entitled Ballet Mécanique and for having invented and patented, along with a woman known best by her stage name as Hedy Lamarr, a system for the radio control of airborne torpedoes that made them impervious to jamming. (Yes, I will tell that story!) Antheil was born and grew up in Trenton New Jersey and died in New York City (a heart attack) on February 12, 1959.  He started piano lessons at six, and by the time he was in his late teens he had become a formidable (if idiosyncratic) pianist.  Margaret Caroline Anderson, the founder, editor and publisher of the extremely influential art and literary magazine The Little Review described the roughly 20-year-old Antheil as being short, as having a strangely shaped nose, and as someone who played on the piano: “a compelling mechanical music [that used] the piano exclusively as an instrument of percussion, making it sound like a xylophone or a cembalo.” Antheil was a technology nut, and the music he composed in the early 1920s was obsessed with the “machine” as a metaphor for modern life. But more than just a good pianist with a modernist bent, and despite the fact that he never formally graduated from high school or college, Antheil had a combination of chutzpah, charisma and enthusiasm that enabled him to ingratiate himself to a wide variety of older people who today would be called “influencers.” These people included the aforementioned Margaret Anderson; the photographer Alfred Stieglitz; the conductor Leopold Stokowski; and the publishing heiress Mary Louise Curtis Bok, who founded the Curtis Institute of Music in 1924 and who underwrote Antheil’s career for twenty years, giving him the financial freedom to “follow his muse.” It was as a self-styled “musical prophet” that the not-quite 22-year-old George Antheil set sail for Europe on May 30, 1922, intent on making a name for himself as – in his own words – “a new ultra-modern pianist composer” and a “futurist terrible.” He started out in Berlin but moved to Paris on the advice of none-other-than Igor Stravinsky (who Antheil temporarily managed to charm but who dropped him like a hot pierogi when he found out that Antheil was telling people that “Stravinsky admired his work”). Antheil circa 1925, photographed by Man Ray Paris was a hotbed of intellectual and artistic experimentation in the 1920s. Antheil rented a one-bedroom apartment above the famous left-bank bookshop “Shakespeare and Company.” Its founder and owner, Sylvia Beach – who was the first to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses – described him as:  “a fellow with bangs, a squished nose and a big mouth with a grin in it.

On June 24, 1374 – 645 years ago today – the men, women, and children of the Rhineland city of Aachen began to dash out of their houses and into the streets, where – inexplicably, compulsively and uncontrollably – they began to twist and twirl, jump and shake, writhe and twitch until they dropped from exhaustion or simply dropped dead. Real disco inferno, boogie-fever stuff. It was the first major occurrence of what would come to be known as “dancing plague” or “choreomania”, which over the next years was to spread across Europe. The authorities typically had music played during outbreaks of dancing plague, as it was believed to somehow “cure” the mania. A painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, after drawings by his father. Pieter Breughel the Younger, painting. There had been small outbreaks before, going back to the seventh century. An outbreak in 1237 saw a group of children jump and dance all the way from Erfurt to Arnstadt in what today is central Germany, a distance of some 13 miles. It was an event that might very well have given rise to the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. But the outbreak in Aachen 645 years ago today was big: before it was over thousands upon thousands of men, women and children had taken to the streets as the “dancing plague” spread from Aachen to the cities of Cologne, Metz, Strasbourg, Hainaut, Utrecht, Tongeren, and then across Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. This huge outbreak came to be called “St. John’s Dance”, though at other times and in other places it was called “St. Vitus’ Dance”. (These names were coined based on the assumption that the “plague” was the result of a curse cast by either St. John the Baptist or St. Vitus, the former having been beheaded by Herod Antipas between 28 and 36 CE and the latter martyred in 303 during the persecution of Christians by the co-ruling Roman Emperors Diocletian and Maximian.)  Writing in his book The Black Death and the Dancing Mania, the German physician and medical writer Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker (1795-1850) describes St. John’s Dance this way: “They formed circles hand in hand and appearing to have lost all control over their senses, continued dancing, regardless of the bystanders, for hours together, in wild delirium, until at length they fell to the ground in a state of exhaustion. They then complained of extreme oppression, and groaned as if in the agonies of death, until they were swathed in cloths bound tightly round their waists, upon which they again recovered, and remained free from complaint until the next attack.” The American medical sociologist Robert Bartholomew (born 1958) is an expert on mass hysteria, mass psychological illness, and hysterical contagion. Writing in his book Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-Hunting Panics: A Study of Mass Psychogenic Illness and Social Delusion (Macfarland, 2001), Bartholomew observes that sometimes tens of thousands of people would dance for hours, days, weeks, and even months at a time and that throughout, dancers screamed, laughed or cried.  And while we do not know whether the dancing was spontaneous or organized, the dancers themselves appeared to be unconscious and unable to control themselves. Bartholomew further notes that some dancers “paraded around naked, made obscene gestures and acted like animals”, while still others managed to have sexual intercourse while they danced. (This is all starting to sound like Studio 54 in New York City during the 1970s.) Choreomania with Disco Granny at Studio 54, 1978 So to the question each and every one of us is asking: what could cause such mass frenzy? Regrettably (but not unexpectedly), the answer is that no one really knows for sure. Of course,

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) circa 1968 We offer up our very best birthday wishes to Igor Stravinsky, who was born 137 years ago today, on June 17, 1882. A word of warning: saying Happy Birthday! to a Russian born before February 14, 1918 — as Stravinsky was — is an exercise in asterisks and parentheses. This is because it wasn’t until February 14, 1918 that Russia stopped using the Julian Calendar (which was named for Julius Caesar and went into effect on January 1, 45 B.C.E.) and joined pretty much the rest of world in using the Gregorian Calendar (which was introduced in October 1582 and named for Pope Gregory XIII). According to the old-style Julian Calendar, Stravinsky was born on June 5, 1882. For reasons entirely his own, Stravinsky made everything that much more complicated by celebrating his birthday on June 18. Whatever; June 17th is Stravinsky’s Gregorian Calendar birthday and a happy birthday we wish him. Stravinsky in 1910, at the time of the premiere of The Firebird Stravinsky was the defining composer of the twentieth century. He began his compositional life as a Russian musical nationalist, writing in the style of his teacher, the great Russian nationalist composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov. But even as he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, the young Stravinsky fell under the spell of Claude Debussy, and so inspired, he composed a number of works that reflect Debussy’s so-called Impressionist style. It was thanks to one of these works that he came to the attention of the impresario and visionary Serge Diaghilev in 1909. Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky to compose a series of scores for the Ballet Russes, The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (composed in 1912). The Firebird made the 28-year-old Stravinsky an international star, and the brutal (“Fauvist”) The Rite of Spring — inarguably the most important single work composed in the twentieth century — vaulted Stravinsky to the forefront of Western music, where he remained until his death (on April 6, 1971). Stravinsky in 1914, at the age of 32 Like so many of his generation, Stravinsky was appalled by the catastrophic destruction and incomprehensible barbarity of World War One (1914–1918). In the years immediately following the war, he turned away from the explicit musical modernism of his pre-war music and looked for inspiration to the musical styles of the past, principally the Baroque and Classical eras, music that appeared, on its surface, to represent simpler, more “humane” times. Stravinsky in 1927, at the age of 45 During the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, he was equally swept away by the force and energy of such “popular” musical idioms as ragtime, tango, and big-band jazz, and he composed works that evoked all of these idioms. And then in the mid 1950s and 1960s Stravinsky — now in his seventies and early eighties — underwent yet another compositional transformation and began writing ultra-modern, serial music. (For many if not most of his friends and fans, Stravinsky’s late-in-life conversion from neo-Classicism/neo-tonalism to serialism was considered a betrayal of historic import, on the lines of those perpetrated by Judas, Brutus, Benedict Arnold and Fredo Corleone. In the 1950s, the great oppositional poles of neo-Classicism/neo-tonalism versus serialism defined the compositional politics of the day. Consequently, to see Stravinsky cross the line and not just fraternize but mate with the serialist enemy was seen by many as being as heretical as it was inexplicable!) Stravinsky conducting in 1965, at the age of 82 Stravinsky’s last major work — Requiem Canticles — was completed and pre...

On June 10, 1865 – 154 years ago today – Richard Wagner’s magnificent music drama Tristan und Isolde received its premiere in Munich under the baton of Hans von Bülow (with whose wife, Cosima, Wagner was carrying on an affair).  Ludwig and Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld as Tristan and Isolde at the first performance of Tristan und Isolde on June 10, 1865 (The parts of Tristan and Isolde were sung by the real-life husband and wife team of Ludwig and Malvina Schnorr von Carolsfeld. Having sung the role of Tristan four times, Ludwig dropped dead on July 21, 1865, prompting the rumor than the role of Tristan – one of the most difficult in the repertoire – had flat-out killed him. Malvina was so distraught that though she lived for another 38 years, she never sang again.)   Tristan und Isolde is a three-act music drama, or what Wagner himself called “eine Handlung” (which means “a drama” or“an action”; by mid-career Wagner refused to use the word “opera”, claiming that it represented the debased pseudo-art of anyone not named “Wagner”.) Tristan und Isolde’s libretto (or “poem”, as Wagner would have us call it) was written and its music composed by Wagner between 1855 and 1859. Richard Wagner (1813–1883) in 1860 Wagner based his “poem” on a twelfth-century romance entitled Tristan by Gottfried von Strassburg, who died circa 1210. Wagner’s poem tells the story of two presumed “enemies” – the Irish princess Isolde and the Cornish (southern English) knight Tristan – who fall madly in love when they are duped into drinking a love potion. (Many modern observers – yours truly included – believe that this “love potion” was nothing but a placebo, one that allowed Tristan and Isolde to, like, get in touch with their feelings. Unfortunately, their love for each other is illicit (Isolde is scheduled to marry the King of Cornwall) and unconsummated (despite their best efforts, T and I never manage to “do the dirty”, perhaps because they just can’t stop singing about how much they love each other). In the end, Tristan is cut down by a fellow knight of Cornwall and Isolde, on finding Tristan dying, expires over his now dead body in an orgasmic haze. Critics of Tristan und Isolde have referred to Wagner’s linked infatuation with sex and death as “perfumed obscenity” and its orgasmic and deathly conclusion as “snuff opera”.  Those nattering nabobs of critical negativism aside, I would happily argue that Tristan und Isolde is Wagner’s single greatest work. There’s nothing else even remotely like it in the repertoire. Richard Wagner was a great composer. The magical beauty and dramatic power of his music, combined with the breathtaking grandiosity of his artistic vision together created a “Wagner cult”, one that began in his lifetime and lives on to this day. There are “Wagnerians” out there – Wagnerites, Wagnerfiles, and at its most extreme, Wagnerpaths – who will travel across the country to see a Wagner production, across continents and oceans to attend a Ring Cycle, who at least once in their lifetimes will make Hajj to the Wagnerian Mecca that is the Bavarian city of Bayreuth; Wagnerians whose knowledge of Wagner singers and recordings is outdone only by their opinions of same.  There is no other composer in the great history of Western music who has inspired such quasi-religious adulation as Richard Wagner. Like Shakespeare before him and J. R. R. Tolkien, George Lucas, and George R.R. Martin after him,

George Bizet (1838-1875) in 1875 We mark the death of the French composer Georges Bizet, who passed from this vale of tears on June 3, 1875, 144 years ago today. He was but 36 years, 7 months, and 9 days young when he passed. The title for today’s post is the epitaph that appeared on Franz Schubert’s original tombstone, written by Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872): “Here music has buried a treasure, but even fairer hope.” Franz Grillparzer in 1841 Ain’t that the truth. Schubert’s life-span was even shorter than Bizet’s: 31 years, 9 months, and 20 days.  (Grillparzer was a Vienna-born dramatist who, despite his contemporary fame as a playwright, is best remembered today for having written Beethoven’s funeral oration and Schubert’s epitaph!) We contemplate “regret”. I am a collector of certain antique/vintage items, and I have learned the hard way the truism that “you only regret that which you do not buy.” For example, I will go to my grave regretting the fact that I walked away from a complete, pristine Sterling Silver Erik Magnussen “Skyscraper Cocktail Set” in 2003.  Gorham silver cocktail set (1925-1929, designed by Erik Magnussen (1884-1961) I had my reasons (financial) for not buying the set at the time, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, never to be had again; should a like set come to market again, it will go for ten to twenty times the amount I could have bought it for. Dang. Double dang. I regret not having taken that plunge. (Yes, I know: this does not really qualify as a problem. I am, however, reflecting on the nature of “regret.”) As emotions go, on a scale of ten (one being grief; ten being euphoria), I would rank regret at about a four: a generally negative emotion that, nevertheless, is useful if it allows us to avoid a like mistake in the future. Back to the Music Back to Georges Bizet, Franz Schubert, and that gaggle of other great (or potentially great) composers who died before turning forty: Henry Purcell (dead at 36), Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (26), Wolfgang Mozart (35), Vincenzo Bellini (33), Frédéric Chopin (39), Felix Mendelssohn (38), Lili Boulanger (24), Juan Arriaga (19), and George Gershwin (who died at the age of 38). All of us should deeply regret their early passing, and find it well-nigh impossible not to reflect on what they might have accomplished had they at least lived for Beethoven’s life span (56 years), or Sebastian Bach’s (65 years), or Richard Strauss’ (85 years), or Elliott Carter’s (103 years) or Leo Ornstein’s (106 years!). Franz Schubert (1797-1828) in 1825 I don’t know about you, but not only do I regret the early deaths of these composers, but I can’t help but feel regret over what they might have created had they lived longer lives. And while I would think that most of us feel the same way, I know that not everyone actually does. For example, apropos of Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann wrote back in the mid-nineteenth century that: “It is pointless to guess at what more Schubert might have achieved. He did enough; and let them be honored who have striven and accomplished as he did.”  Rather more recently, the pianist András Schiff said that: “Schubert lived a very short life, but it was a very concentrated life. In 31 years, he lived more than other people would live in 100 years, and it is needless to speculate what could he have written had he lived another 50 years. It’s irrelevant,

Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) in 1819) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres We mark the death of the violinistic wizard, composer, and showman extraordinaire Niccolò Paganini, who died 179 years ago today in the Mediterranean resort city of Nice on May 27, 1840. Woman with Marfan Syndrome, making us squirm. Marfan Syndrome (or “MFS”) is a genetic disorder of the connective tissue. The syndrome is named after the French pediatrician Antoine Marfan, who first identified it in 1891. For those – like me – who must know, the gene linked to the condition was identified in 1991 by Francesco Ramirez at New York City’s Mount Sinai Medical Center. Folks with Marfan Syndrome are characteristically tall and slim; with long arms, legs, fingers and toes. Their joints are typically flexible; sometime crazy flexible, the sort of crazy flexible that makes the rest of us squirm with discomfort when we see such a person casually twist him or herself up like a human pretzel. Marfan Syndrome can affect the heart as well, and thus the American Heart Association, ever the Helpy Helperton, has made recommendations regarding the sorts of activities folks with Marfan can and should not engage in.  The American Heart Association lists as “high risk” activities for Marfan sufferers bodybuilding, weightlifting (non-free and free weights), ice hockey, rock climbing, windsurfing, surfing, and scuba diving. (Should we assume that bungee jumping, sky diving, and alligator wrestling – which are not on the list – are all okay? Just asking.) Conversely, we are told that “probably permissible activities” include bowling, golf, skating (but not ice hockey), snorkeling, brisk walking, treadmill, stationary biking, modest hiking, and doubles tennis. Let us now add to this list of “probably permissible activities” playing the violin. Niccolò Paganini almost certainly had Marfan Syndrome, which allowed him – physically – to do things on the fiddle that no one before him had considered possible. He was also a genius (in the true spirit of that word and certainly not in our modern and trivialized sense), and thus his violin playing and his compositions advanced violin technique more, in a couple of decades, than might otherwise have occurred over the course of a century.  For example. While he did not invent it, Paganini “institutionalized” the left hand pizzicato by using it constantly in his performances and employing it in his compositions. Likewise, his use of harmonics: a technique used only occasionally before him became a standard feature in his violin music. The flexibility of his wrist allowed him to rapidly alternate bowing techniques in a manner unheard of to his time; we’re talking here about the rapid alternation of such bowing techniques as legato (where the bow stays on the string; notes are smoothly connected with a single stroke of the bow); détaché (each note played by a separate bow stroke, though the bow stays on the string); staccato (played in a single bow stroke, though the bow springs slightly off the string between notes); spiccato (rapid detached bowing: each note is played by a separate bow stroke while the bow bounces off the string after each note), saltando or jeté (a sort of “super staccato” in which repeated notes are played in a single bow stroke but the bow is allowed to bounce off the string between notes); and martellato (“hammer-stroke” bowing, typically played using downbows only, employing the bottom third – or the “frog” – of the bow).

Clara Schumann in 1857, age 38 With our heads bowed and our hands on our hearts, we mark the death – 123 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Clara Wieck Schumann, who died of a stroke at the age of 76 on May 20, 1896. She was among the most outstanding pianists of her time, a child prodigy whose performances were described with awe by her contemporaries. She was a composer of outstanding promise, who – for reasons having to do with the world in which she lived and her own self-doubts – never had the opportunity to fulfill that promise. She was the compositional muse for her fiancé and husband, the great Robert Schumann, and the spiritual muse of her best friend, the even greater Johannes Brahms. And she was a survivor: someone whose life reads like some endlessly tragic Victorian novel, only without the “happy ending” tacked on at the end. Honestly: whenever any of us get into one of those self-pitying funks (of which I am an especial virtuoso), during which we stand convinced that our personal lives represent the very nadir of human existence, I would recommend that we think of Ms. Wieck-Schumann and her life as an example of how very badly things can go if fate is not on one’s side. If such reflection doesn’t shame our own self-absorbed misery, frankly nothing will. Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873); nice comb-over Clara Josephine Wieck was born on September 13, 1819 to Marianne Tromlitz-Wieck and Johann Gottlob Friedrich Wieck. Daddy was a creep: an uncompromising, unrelentingly ambitious autocrat who brooked no interference with his plans to make his little Clara the greatest pianist of her time. He was a horror to live with; in 1824, after five years of marriage, Clara’s mother Marianne could take no more and left him. Under Saxon law their three children were the “property” of the father, and so a distraught Marianne Weick had to be satisfied with the occasional visit and letter from her Clara. Wieck controlled every aspect of Clara’s life in his efforts to mold her into a great pianist. In this Wieck was very, very lucky, in that Clara’s innate musical genius responded brilliantly to his training; she did indeed become a great pianistic prodigy.  In 1828, at the age of 9, Clara met another of her father’s students at a recital: an 18-year-old lapsed law student named Robert Schumann. Wieck’s “method” did not work for Schumann: the eight-hour-a-day exercise regimen Wieck prescribed for Schumann permanently ruined the ring finger on Schumann’s right hand, destroying his future as a professional pianist (though, gratefully, assuring that his energies were turned to composition).  Clara and Robert fell in love when she was 16 and he was 25. Wieck behaved like a madman for 5 years in his attempts to keep them apart, but to no avail, and they were married on September 12, 1840. Clara did not know at the time that Robert was both bi-polar and syphilitic. Despite the fact that he was in his latency stage at the time they married – meaning that he was non-infectious and symptom free – it remains a miracle that he didn’t pass his syphilis on to her at some point, as they continued to reproduce well into his tertiary stage. (Their first child, Marie, was born in 1841; their eighth child, Felix – named for their dearly departed friend, Felix Mendelssohn – was born in June of 1854, four months after Robert’s mind had snapped and he had been institutionalized.) Robert and Clara in 1847; he is 38, she is 29 Robert’s slow, excruciatingly painful descent into madness pushed Clara to the brink herself. His mind finally gave way on February 27, 1854, when he attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge in Düsseldo...

On this day in 1767 – 252 years ago today – Wolfgang Mozart’s first opera, entitled Apollo and Hyacinthus received its premiere in Mozart’s hometown of Salzburg. The composer was 11 years old. Mozart in 1777. Mozart’s father Leopold wrote of this portrait, ”It has little value as a piece of art, but as to the issue of resemblance, I can assure you that it is perfect.” In a letter written to his father in October of 1777, the 21-year-old Mozart expressed his passion for opera and the opera theater in no uncertain terms: “I have only to hear an opera discussed, I have only to sit in a theater, hear the orchestra tuning their instruments – oh, I am quite beside myself at once.”  I would suggest that it is difficult for us, today, to fathom the full meaning of Mozart’s comment because, in our electronic, mass media-dominated videocracy, we have no single cultural equivalent to the opera house of Mozart’s time. For people living in late eighteenth century Europe, the opera house was a combination theater; Super Bowl half-time show; major league ballpark; rock concert; carnival mid-way; high-end fashion show; IMAX-style movie palace; theme park; special effects extravaganza: in sum, a total-sensory-immersion facility. The opera theater was for Mozart a virtual “virtual reality,” where things could happen, be seen, and be heard that very simply could not happen, could not be seen or heard anywhere else. Opera lighting and stage machinery of the time represented cutting-edge technology in the eighteenth century, just as CGI (computer-generated imagery) represents the cutting edge today. Production crews at major opera houses in Paris, London, Hamburg, Dresden, Rome, Venice, Naples, Prague, and Vienna were the Industrial Light and Magic, the Pixar of their time.  For Mozart and his contemporaries, the opera theater was not just a place you went in order to hear people sing and watch them act; much more, it was a place where dreams came true, a place where anything was possible, a place where every aspect of the arts – literature, singing, dancing, acting, instrumental music, costuming, stage design, and technology – combined to create an experience like nothing else on earth. “I have only to hear an opera discussed, I have only to sit in a theater, hear the orchestra tuning their instruments – oh, I am quite beside myself at once.”  Anna Gottlieb (1774-1856) in 1795 For Mozart, the backstage experience of the opera house was almost as intoxicating as a performance. Mozart was himself a professional performer who toured extensively, and we would observe that a powerful camaraderie exists between performing artists who spend their lives on the road playing and singing before audiences.  Mozart especially liked hanging out with singers, particularly with the ladies; there’s no doubt that Mozart had affairs after he was married in 1782 and those affairs were very likely all with singers. For example, during the rehearsals for The Magic Flute, he had affairs with both Barbara Gerl and Anna Gottlieb, the original Papagena and Pamina. And perhaps the only reason why he didn’t sleep with the singer playing the other leading female role in the opera – the Queen of the Night – was that that singer was someone named Josepha Weber Hofer, who happened to be Mozart’s sister-in-law!  Mozart absolutely thrived on preparing a performance: the rehearsals and coaching of the singers and the orchestra; observing the construction of the sets and machinery; choosing costumes, makeup, and lighting. And most of all, Mozart loved to watch these “children of his imagination” – his operas – come to life before his very eyes and ears.

Keith Richards (born 1943) in 1965 It was most likely sometime during the evening of May 6, 1965 – 54 years ago today – that Keith Richards, the lead guitar player for the Rolling Stones, worked out the opening riff for the song (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Satisfaction went on to become one of the most important rock ‘n’ roll songs of all time; in 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine went so far as to rate it number two on its list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” (Number “two” on Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time?” Duh. Perhaps, maybe, “The 500 Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Songs of All Time,” although I’m not sure I’d even go that far. I will rant about this rather extensively in tomorrow’s “Dr. Bob Prescribes” post, which can be accessed on my Patreon site.) But back to Satisfaction and what makes it truly memorable. I would assert that more than Richard’s rising/falling eight-note riff that generates the song’s melody; and much more than Mick Jagger’s cynical, rebellious, but nevertheless (we must be honest, here) borderline-insipid lyrics, it is the “sound” of Keith Richard’s guitar that gives Satisfaction its dramatic edge and its wonderful sense of sleaze: its defining character. (It is a defining character that, to a huge degree, went on to define the Stones as well!) A 100% reliable account of the creation of Satisfaction has yet to emerge because the one person who could provide it – Keith Richards – keeps changing the story. For example, writing in his autobiography entitled My Life (Little, Brown, & Co., 2010), Richards claims that he recorded the riff that powers Satisfaction on a portable cassette player while he was asleep. (I must assume this means that he was experiencing the effects of some non-prescription pharmaceutical or another.) Whatever: Richards asserts that had no idea he had recorded anything until he listened to the tape the next day, which consisted of two minutes of guitar playing followed by forty minutes of snoring. The given location of this parasomnial recording session has been variously identified as being the Jack Tarr Harrison Hotel in Clearwater Florida; a house in the Chelsea section of London; or the London Hilton Hotel. The location momentarily aside, the one irrefutable fact is that Richards’ immediate inspiration for Satisfaction was a toy he acquired, presumably on the day of Satisfaction’s creation. The most commonly told version of the story goes like this. The Rolling Stones – in the middle of a North American tour – were performing in Clearwater Florida, on the Gulf Coast. Sometime immediately prior to or on the day of May 6, 1965, Keith Richards acquired a device called a “Maestro Fuzz-Tone”, made by the Gibson (guitar) company of Kalamazoo, Michigan.  Maestro Fuzz-Tone advertisement, 1962 Gibson released its Fuzz-Tone FZ-1 pedal under its “Maestro” brand in 1962; the unit retailed for $40.00. Here’s how it works. You plug an electric guitar or bass into the unit and the unit into an amplifier. The Fuzz-Tone converts (“clips”) the smooth, rounded sine-waves received from the guitar (or electric bass) into square waves, which are sent on to the amplifier. These amplified square waves produce a gritty, dirty, raw and distorted sound which can resemble horns: saxophones and brass instruments.  According to its patent application, filed on May 3, 1962,

A rather flattering portrait Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) by Johann Carl Rößler, 1799 On April 29, 1798 – 221 years ago today – Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation was first performed before a star-studded, invitation-only audience at the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna.  Getting older, or “when I’m 65.” An ugly confession. Eleven days ago, on April 18, 2019, I turned 65 years old. Don’t get me wrong; I am aware that growing older is generally preferable – generally – to the alternative. But it is, nevertheless, an ongoing shock to the system. Like many of us, I fully intended to be Peter Pan (Bob Panberg?): the eternal boy. And while one may not inaccurately assert that that is a fair appraisal of my emotional age, it cannot be said of my physical age. My eyes continue to weaken. My joints – crapped up by years in the gym – remind me of their ever-greater unhappiness by making ever more noise. My ability to dredge up names has become increasingly more difficult (although, curiously, dates and numbers come to me instantly). As my hairline beats an increasingly hasty retreat, thick, disgusting fly hairs on my shoulders and back continue to grow in ever greater profusion (this is so gross I don’t know where to start).  My father, who lived to 92, liked to say that age was “only a numbah”, even as – like Jeff Goldblum in the movie The Fly – he’d put one piece after another of his body into his medicine cabinet for safekeeping.  My “baby” brother the radiologist, who is only 63, has observed that “you’re only as old as you smell,” a claim that has given me cause for hope as I haven’t taken on that sickly-dry smell of desiccation, at least not yet. Oprah Gail Winfrey (born 1954) Having said all of this, there is someone who has given me true hope, solace, and perspective in this whole aging thing, and that person is none-other-than the awesome/magnificent Oprah Winfrey. Oprah and I were born in the same year: 1954 (although she is some 10 weeks older than I am, har-har!). When Oprah has a landmark birthday she tends to make some wonderful, optimistic statement that, 10 weeks later, applies to me as well. Accordingly, in 2004 Ms. Winfrey announced that “50 is the new 30”; in 2014 she told us that “60 is the new 40.” And while she hasn’t commented yet on 65, I’m hoping for something on the lines of “65 is the new 14” which will, at least, square me with my emotional age. If Oprah Winfrey is correct – and given the state of modern medicine, nutrition, hygiene, relatively clean water and air, etc. “60 might very well be the new 40” – then for Joseph Haydn, living in 1798, his 66 years would be the equivalent, today, of – what? – perhaps 96 years (give or take).  In 1798, 66 years of age was old: a foot in the grave old; farting dust old; walking as if treading on glass and sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons old.  So what was “old” Joe Haydn doing in 1798? Having recently returned from his second triumphant residence in London, the Vienna-based Haydn was overseeing the first performance of his single greatest masterwork, the oratorio The Creation, even as he was thinking about the composition of his next masterwork, the oratorio The Seasons, which would receive its premiere in 1801, when he was 69-years-old. Joseph Haydn’s Death Mask; nothing flattering here

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) in 1746, by Elias Gottlob Haussmann On April 22, 1723 – 296 years ago today – the 38-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach was elected music director and cantor of St. Thomas church in Leipzig. Despite the fact that it was a prestigious position, Bach felt scant enthusiasm for the job and considered it a step down from his previous position. Bach’s reticence was shared by the Leipzig authorities’ reticence towards Bach, who was – in fact – their fourth choice for the job. Bach and Leipzig were “a marriage of convenience” and therein lies the story for this week’s Music History Monday. Sebastian Bach (as he was known to his friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances) was born on March 21, 1685 in Eisenach, Thuringia, in what today is central Germany. He was the eighth and last child (of five surviving children) born to Elisabeth and Johann Ambrosius Bach.  To say that Sebastian Bach had a genetic predisposition towards music is like saying that giraffes are genetically predisposed to necking. For generations, music had been the Bach family trade. In 1735, the 50-year-old Sebastian Bach compiled a list of forty-two family members who had been professional musicians during the previous 150 years. It was a “short list”, as the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians today lists 85 musical Bachs spanning the nearly 300 years from 1555 to 1846. Writing in a biography published in 1802, Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749-1818), described a typical Bach family gathering this way: “As it was impossible for them to all live in the same place, they liked to get together at least once a year, probably in Erfurt, Eisenach or Arnstadt. Their favorite occupation during these gathering was to engage in some form of musical activity. Naturally enough, as they were all choirmasters, organists or town musicians, connected in some way with the church, and also since custom demanded a religious framework, they would start with the singing of a chorale. This solemnity, however, would soon give way to more light-hearted music-making, which was often in strong contrast with what had gone before. They liked to sing folksongs of a light or sometimes ribald nature, singing two or more [folksongs] simultaneously and extemporizing upon them so that choral harmony resulted. These quodlibets, as they called them, not only made the performers laugh heartily, but anyone who happened to hear them was irresistibly affected by laughter too.” We’re glad to know that some members of the Bach family “laughed heartily”, because our impression of Sebastian Bach is one of grim seriousness, though in fact, we know little about Bach the man. The well-known Elias Gottlob Hausmann portrait of the 61-year-old Bach at the top of this post is one of the very few indisputable images of him that have come down to us. It shows us a man with sharp, calculating eyes, an outthrust chin, and a severe mouth with ever so slightly twisted lips. Is this what passed for a smile from Bach? Or perhaps it’s a sneer of disdain, a sign of resentment for having to sit still in an artist’s studio while there was important work to do?  Whatever; it’s the face of a most intelligent man who knew his worth; a stubborn, unyielding, sometimes irascible guy who nevertheless loved his wives (two in number) and children (20 in number); a man who liked his tobacco, food, and drink (beer and brandy); someone who’d been around the block more than a few times and who did not suffer fools (or his employers) gladly.  Bach’s provincial career was centered on the churches, courts, and municipalities of his native central Germany, a career that was an exercise in disappointment management. In Weimar, in 1717,