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

Bessie Smith performing W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues in a 16-minute movie of that name, filmed in 1929. It is the only known movie of Empress Smith” Today we celebrate the birth – on April 15, 1894, 125 years ago today, in Chattanooga, Tennessee – of the American contralto Bessie Smith. Bessie Smith We Reflect on “GOAT” When I was growing up, the word “goat” had two distinct meanings. First, there was the animal: a quadruped mammal, a member of the family Bovidae and subfamily Caprinae. There are presently over 300 distinct breeds of goat, both wild and domesticated. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, in 2011 there were more than 924 million goats alive across the planet. (One can only wonder why there hasn’t been a more recent census.) When I was growing up, the second meaning of the word “goat” was a loser: a derisive term for an athlete who, as a result of some monumentally boneheaded mistake, was responsible for his or her team’s loss. For example: Mike Torres, the Boston Red Sox pitcher who gave up a three-run homer to light-hitting, New York Yankee second baseman Bucky Dent in a one-game playoff following the 1978 regular season; or Bill Buckner, the Boston Red Sox first baseman who booted an easy grounder to lose game six of the 1986 World Series against the New York Mets; or Dan Duquette, general manager of the Boston Red Sox (is there a pattern here?) who in 1996 let pitcher Roger Clemens leave the team as a free agent, claiming that Clemens was in “the twilight of his career.” After leaving the Red Sox, Clemens went on to win four more Cy Young Awards, 2 World Series Titles, and 162 more games. Some twilight. Amazingly, the word “goat” has undergone a 180-degree shift in meaning in recent years, as the acronym G.O.A.T. has come to refer to the “greatest of all time.”  By what standard(s) should anyone be considered the “greatest of all time” are entirely subjective. For example, should numbers/statistics be the sole determining factor in choosing a “greatest of all time”, or should intangibles factor in, and – if so – what intangibles? George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth (1895-1948) I’ll admit that I’m an “intangibles” sort of guy, and therefore I will introduce a criterion without which no one should be considered a G.O.A.T. That criterion is that true G.O.A.T.-hood requires not just great stats, but that the individual in question should have redefined the game for everyone who followed. Based on my criterion, determining the greatest baseball player of all time is easy: he is Babe Ruth, because more than anyone else, it was George Herman Ruth (1895-1948) – the Babe, the Great Bambino, the Sultan of Swat, the Big Bam – whose style of play laid the groundwork for the game as we understand it today. Based on my criterion, determining the greatest basketball player of all time is not easy, because so many great players have contributed so many different things to the game.  (Speaking of old-style goats – meaning losers – let us not for a moment forget Harry Frazee, the owner of – yes – the Boston Red Sox who sold Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1919 and having done so, initiated the “Curse of the Bambino”, Boston’s World Series draught between 1918 and 2004!) Does the concept of G.O.A.T. have any relevance to the world of the music beyond idle,

I am aware – nay, more than aware – that this present post is an example of unconscionable conceit and vanity. Of this I stand justly accused; my head droops in shame and my present auto-flagellation will continue for minutes – perhaps for even the half-an-hour – to come. What, you rightly ask, could have prompted this pre-emptive outburst of self-loathing? (“Pre-emptive” in that having abused myself, it is my hope that you will feel no need to do so as well.) What has brought this on? Just this: I am dedicating this week’s “Music History Monday” to an event that at the time of this writing has not yet occurred and once having taken place – on Monday evening, April 8, 2019 – will almost certainly not qualify as “music history.”That event? The world premiere of my piano trio, The Daughters of Atlas this evening in Berkeley, California. Talking about your own music is like talking about your children or, worse, your grandchildren: it is almost impossible to do so without becoming a soporific bore, inducing drooling paralysis in those within earshot. Nevertheless, I am asked constantly how I go about writing a piece of music. Since I know how fascinated I am by the stories of how other composers do their thing, I’ve decided – casting my ordinarily Marianas Trench-deep humility aside – to share with you the process that created The Daughters of Atlas (or “DOA” as I’ve been referring to the piece in private). Trio Foss, left to right: Hrabba Atladottir, Nina Flyer, Joseph Irrera At this point of my life, I prefer not to write a piece of music unless I have performers in mind. Duke Ellington’s famous line, to the effect that he couldn’t compose for someone unless he knew how that person played cards, is, for me, on the mark. I need to know something about the musicians I’m writing for: their personalities; their abilities; and in particular, what I perceive as their strengths. (Since we’re talking about professionals here, there are no such things as “weaknesses”.) DOA was written for a piano trio (that is, violin, cello, and piano) called Trio Foss. Trio Foss is a fairly new group; it made its concert debut in March of 2018. But there’s nothing new about the experienced pros who make up the trio: violinist Hrabba Atladottir; cellist Nina Flyer; and pianist Joseph Irrera.  Miles Graber (Joe Irrera is currently having back problems, so he has been sidelined and replaced for now by Miles Graber, a Juilliard-trained pianist and family practice doc who has been a mainstay on the Bay Area music scene for decades.) I have heard violinist Hrabba Atladottir perform many times since she settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2008. She plays with fire (not with matches), passion and intense lyricism, which I showcased in particular in the central movement of DOA, a movement entitled “Siren’s Web: Calypso’s Song and Dance”. I’ve known cellist Nina Flyer for over 25 years. She has played scads of my music and she is a ROCK; yes: think a tall, elegant woman with the musical muscles of Duane “the Rock” Johnson and you’ve got Nina. Her cello makes a big, sweet sound and she is equally adept at providing rock steady support in the bass and playing singing, lyric solo lines in any register. There’s hardly a measure in DOA where I wasn’t thinking “Nina Flyer” when I put pencil to the cello part. Pianist Joseph Irrera is a formidable virtuoso, a fellow Steinway artist, so as I have an unfortunate tendency to do, I wrote a piano part the likes of which I wish I was able to play myself.

Scott Joplin On April 1, 1917 – 102 years ago today – the American composer and pianist Scott Joplin died at the Manhattan State Hospital on New York City’s Ward’s Island, which straddles the Harlem River and the East River between Manhattan and Queens. He was 48 years old. During the course of his compositional career – which spanned the nineteen years from 1896 to 1915 – Joplin composed 44 ragtime works for piano, a ragtime ballet and two operas. (A musical “vaudeville act”, a musical comedy, a symphony and a piano concerto were purportedly composed as well near the end of Joplin’s life. These works were never published, and the manuscripts have, presumably, been lost, leading some to wonder whether they ever really existed at all.) Embraced today as being among the greatest and most original of American composers; creator of the single most famous ragtime work of them all, Maple Leaf Rag of 1900; inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970; awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1976; and featured on a first-class postage stamp in 1983; Joplin died in almost total obscurity there at the Manhattan State Hospital, which was then – with 4,400 beds – the largest psychiatric hospital in the world. He was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave at St. Michael’s Cemetery in the East Elmhurst section of Queens, New York, not far from LaGuardia Airport. His grave was finally given a marker in 1974, the year that the movie The Sting – the score of which featured his music, most notably The Entertainer – won seven Academy Awards, including best picture and best score.  Joplin’s Grave (That “best score” Oscar went to Marvin Hamlisch, which rubbed many a person’s rhubarb the wrong way. According to the American composer and jazz musician Gunther Schuller, who played a not-insignificant part in the ragtime-revival prior to the making of The Sting:  “[Hamlisch] got the Oscar for music he didn’t write (since it is by Joplin) and arrangements he didn’t write, and ‘editions’ he didn’t make. A lot of people were upset by that, but that’s show biz.”) Joplin’s life reads like a Victorian novel in which the heroic principal character suffers one spectacular disaster/indignity after another until, finally – mercifully! – the chaos ends and that principal character lives happily ever after. The difference between Victorian fiction and Joplin’s reality is that the disasters never stopped, and that the end of his life was as terrible as anything that preceded it.   He was born in either Texarkana or Linden Texas, the second of six children. His father, Giles Joplin, was an ex-slave from North Carolina who worked as a laborer for the railroad; his mother, Florence Givens, was a freeborn Black American from Kentucky who worked as a maid. Though Scott Joplin celebrated his birthday on November 24, the actual date of his birth is unknown; it was sometime between late 1867 or early 1868.  Early on, the Joplin family moved to Texarkana, Arkansas, where Scott grew up. As a young child he received a rudimentary music education from his father (who played the violin) and his mother (who sang and played the banjo). The child showed tremendous promise as a musician, to the degree that his mother was convinced that he had a professional career in front of him. According to Joplin biographer Susan Curtis, Florence Joplin’s ambitions for her son played a major part in the breakup of her marriage when, sometime in the early 1880s,

Some birthday greetings to four wonderful musicians before diving into the rather more grim principal subject of today’s post. Four Birthdays Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) ca. 1900 A buon compleanno (“happy birthday” in Italian) to the legendary Italian conductor (and cellist) Arturo Toscanini, who was born on March 25, 1867 – 152 years ago today – in the north-central Italian city of Parma (the home of Parmigiano-Reggiano, or “parmesan” cheese and the simply exquisite cured ham known as Prosciutto di Parma). Toscanini was as famous for his incendiary temper as he was for his streamlined, rhythmically propulsive, honor-the-composer’s-score-at-all-costs performances. Decorum and good taste precludes me from sharing many of the nicknames he was awarded by his performers; one such nickname I can share is “The Towering Inferno.” Béla Bartók (1881-1945) in 1903 A boldog születésnapot (“happy birthday” in Hungarian) to the killer-great Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartók, who was born on March 25, 1881 – 138 years ago today – in what was then the town of Nagyszentmiklós, in the Kingdom of Hungary in Austria-Hungary. (It was a source of ever-lasting pain for the adult Bartók that the town and district in which he grew up was ceded to Romania in 1920 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up by the post-World War One Treaty of Trianon. Today Bartók’s home town is known as Sânnicolau Mare, which can be found on the westernmost edge of Romania.)  (Under the heading of way too much information, in the Banat Bulgarian dialect the town is known as Smikluš; in Serbian as Сент Николаш /Sent Nikolaš, in German as Groß Sankt Nikolaus, and in English as “Great St. Nicholas”. Yup: Old St. Nick!) Aretha Franklin (1942-2018) in 1967 A rather melancholy happy birthday to the recently, dearly departed singer, songwriter, pianist and activist Aretha Louise Franklin, who was born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 25, 1942: 77 years ago today. She passed away just seven months ago, in Detroit, on August 16, 2018. Respect. Elton Hercules John (born 1947) in 1968 Finally, a rousing happy birthday to the singer, songwriter, pianist, and philanthropist Reginald Kenneth Dwight, who was born on March 25, 1947, 72 years ago today. For our information, on January 7, 1972, Dwight legally changed his name to Elton Hercules John. Sir Elton’s coat-of-arms In 1987, John was granted the honor of a formal coat-of-arms. Though I’m certainly not an expert on these things, I would nevertheless suggest the Sir Elton’s coat-of-arms has got to be among the coolest ever. Set in black, white, red and gold, the crest features a piano keyboard and four records. The Spanish motto reads “el tono es bueno”, which means “the tone is good” and which features his name – “el-tono” – Elton. Finally, a medieval helmet above the crest is featured with its visor open, an indication that John was knighted as a “Commander of the Order of the British Empire”, or a “CBE”.  A Painful Death On an entirely different note, this day also marks the death of the superlative French composer and musical revolutionary extraordinaire, Achille-Claude Debussy, who died in Paris on March 25, 1918 – 101 years ago today – at the all-too-young age of 55.  For myself, I will confess to having a grim interest in how composers died. (I’m not talking about anything as perverse as the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner’s fascination with corpses; Bruckner’s idea of a hot date was a trip to the Vienna morgue to see the bodies.

On March 11, 1829 – 190 years ago today – the 20-year-old Felix Mendelssohn conducted a heavily edited version of Johann Sebastian Bach’s sacred oratorio St. Matthew’s Passion at the Singakademie in Berlin. Located just north of the Unter den Linden and know today as the “Maxim Gorky Theater”, the Singakademie was, for many years, the largest and most prestigious concert venue in Berlin Composed in 1727, 102 years before that sold-out performance in Berlin, Mendelssohn’s performance of the passion was the first to take place outside of Leipzig, and it caused a sensation. It single-handedly initiated what is now known as the “Bach Revival”, which brought the music of Johann Sebastian Bach – in particular his large-scale works – to the attention of a broad-based listening public for the very first time. At the time of Mendelssohn’s performance, the great man himself had been dead for nearly 79 years. Bach’s Death Forensic reconstruction of Bach’s head based on a laser scan of his skull Sebastian Bach (as his contemporaries knew him) was built like a bull and had the constitution of one as well. At no point in his life had he suffered a serious illness until the late spring of 1749, when at 64 his body began to give out: among other things, he suffered from neuropathy (numbness and pain in his hands and feet, the result of damage to the peripheral nerves of same) and eye pain and vision problems (likely a result of inflammation of the optic nerves, and/or glaucoma, and/or cataracts). The most likely culprit for Bach’s poor health was type-2 diabetes, a disease that was not separately diagnosed until 1936, 186 after Bach died.  Such was the pain in Bach’s eyes that in March of 1750, he allowed them to be operated on by the famous English quack, the “oculist” Chevalier John Taylor, who had come to Leipzig to lecture at the University. The operation took place sometime between March 28 and April 1; rather predictably, it failed. A second operation took place sometime between April 5 and 8; rather predictably, it failed as well. We are told that: “matters were made worse by ‘harmful mendicaments and other things’, possibly including rubbing the eye with a brush and draining the eye and its surrounding area of blood, up to half a teacup full – treatments known to have been applied by Taylor.” We squirm together. William Hogarth’s print entitled The Company of Undertakers (A Consultation of Quacks) (1736). John Taylor is depicted at the upper left. (For our information: this same, self-styled “Chevalier” John Taylor performed the same operation on George Frederick Handel – blinding him as well – some months before Handel’s death in 1759!) After the second surgery Bach’s body fell apart. He went completely blind; inflammation and infection set in. On July 18 he suffered a stroke followed by what was called “a raging fever”. On Tuesday, July 28, at roughly 8:15 in the evening, the 65-year-old Bach gave up the ghost and, we can only hope, joined his beloved maker. His funeral took place three days later, on July 31.  What followed remains a cultural tragedy of the first order,

Probable portrait of Antonio Vivaldi, ca. 1723 On March 4, 1678 – 341 years ago today – the Italian composer, violinist, priest and rapscallion Antonio Vivaldi was born in Venice. Yes, I know we are all “one-of-a-kind” and that that phrase is way overworked, but truly, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi was a genre unto himself! Vivaldi came to be known il prieto rosso (“The Red Priest”) for two excellent reasons: he had bright red hair and was trained as a Catholic priest. He might just as easily – and accurately – have been called “The Red Violinist” or Il Rosso Compositore: “The Red Composer”. All together, Vivaldi composed 49 “serious operas” in the ornate Venetian style that was all the international rage at the time. For better or for worse, the great bulk of these operas have fallen into obscurity; their artificial story lines and formulaic construction don’t resonate well with modern audiences. However, Verdi’s concerti do indeed resonate, and there are a lot of them: over five hundred in number. (49 operas. 500-plus concerti. Add to that hundreds upon hundreds of sacred works. These are crazy numbers, and despite the formulaic construction of much of this music, we must stand in awe of Vivaldi’s amazing fecundity. Let’s hear it for living in an age without electronic distractions!)  Just under half of Vivaldi’s concerti – roughly 230 of them – are for solo violin and orchestra. Modern scholarship has confirmed that virtually all of them were written for performance at a Venetian convent-slash-orphanage-slash-conservatory of music called the Pio Ospedale della Pietà (the “Devout Hospital of Mercy”), or “Pietà” for short.  Venice in 1650 Ah, Venice! The city of Venice was not just – once upon a time – the capital of a maritime empire and one of the wealthiest and most populous cities in Europe. It was (and remains) a work of art; an urban theme park that to this day induces visitors to shake their heads in disbelief. The city is built in the middle of a shallow lagoon on 118 tiny islands. It is crisscrossed by 177canals and connected by 409 bridges. For hundreds of years Venice has been a necessary destination, an essential stop on everyone’s “grand tour”.  At the time of Vivaldi’s birth – in 1678 – Venice was the most decadent, licentious, anything-goes city in the Western world. With its many opera houses and theaters; its Carnival season; its world-famous casinos and prostitutes, Venice was the Las Vegas of the seventeenth century: hey baby, what happened in Venice stayed in Venice! In a seaport city and destination like Venice, filled with sailors and tourists and prostitutes, what often “happened in Venice” was unwanted children. Thus, the presence in Venice of four orphanages for girls: the Pietà, the Incurabili, the Mendicanti, and the Ospedaletto. These facilities dated back to the crusades, when they were opened as hostels (in Italian, ospidali) for pilgrims. By Vivaldi’s time they had become orphanages for foundling girls: infant girls abandoned by their mothers and left in a “baby hatch” (or what was called a “foundling wheel”) in the wall of an orphanage.  The girls in these orphanages were educated and taught trades, and no trade was more important in Venice than music. By the seventeenth century, these orphanages operated the city’s most important conservatories of music, where the standards were so high that the nobility enrolled their own daughters in them for study. By Vivaldi’s time, the orphanages had become a center of Venetian musical activity.  Writing in 1739, the travel writer Charles de Brosses – the Rick Steves of his day – described the concert scene in Venice t...

Myra Hess (1890-1965) On February 25, 1890 – 129 years ago today – the pianist Julia Myra Hess was born in Hampstead in North West London. In a “Dr. Bob Prescribes” post, I rather energetically took the pianist Keith Jarrett to task for behaving like a brat – for haranguing and cursing at his audiences and often just walking off the stage in mid-set – if, heaven forbid, an audience member should have the unmitigated gall to cough during one of his performances. Expectorate in my presence?! The nerve!  In the course of that “Dr. Bob Prescribes” post, I referenced the pianist Myra Hess, who produced and performed in concerts in London for the duration of World War Two, on occasion performing during bombing raids. Her courage mirrored the indomitable spirit of the British people during the second world war. Coughing? Coughing? Dame Julia Myra Hess, CBE (Commander of the British Empire, 1936), DBE (Dame of the British Empire, 1941) was not just a great artist but a certifiable hero in the truest sense of the word. Coughing? Mr. Jarrett, you couldn’t hold Ms. Hess’ panties.  (For our information, Hess herself had a tangential connection to American jazz: in the 1920s, she numbered among her piano students Elizabeth Ivy Brubeck, the mother of Dave Brubeck.) Here then, on the occasion of her 129th birthday, let us honor Myra Hess and in doing so, let us honor the British people in what was, truly, their “Finest Hour.” The youngest of four children, Hess was born and raised in a strict Orthodox Jewish household. She never bought in to the restrictive traditions of Orthodox practice (we are told, for example, that she was constantly fighting with her parents about not being allowed to ride her bicycle on the sabbath!). Though she was a serious and hardworking student and musician, she developed an outrageous sense of humor to go along with her rebellious streak. Her friends referred to her as being “Rabelasian”: meaning “relating to or characteristic of Rabelais or his works” (Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary). What that means is that she took great pleasure in being vulgar, funny, raunchy, and crude; that she was a relentless enemy of hypocrisy and utterly immovable in matters of truth; and that she went out of her way to tweak the social mores of her time. (For example, she delighted in smoking in public at a time when nice young Jewish girls and older female concert artists did not do so!) O.M.G. Myra Hess was a great pianist. She began her piano lessons at five and quickly climbed the musical education ladder in London. At seven, she entered the Trinity College of Music and became the youngest student to receive a Trinity College Certificate. From there it was off to the Guildhall School of Music and finally, at the age of 12, admittance to the Royal College of Music.  Hess made her formal debut in 1907 at the age of 17, when she played Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto and Saint-Saëns’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the New Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Thomas Beecham; she performed Chopin’s F-sharp minor Nocturne and A minor Etude op. 25 no. 11 as encores.

Cover page of the first edition of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in F Minor, Op. 57 On February 18, 1807 – 212 years ago today – Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, nicknamed by the publisher the “Appassionata”, was published in Vienna. The “Appassionata” is one of Beethoven’s most spectacular works, a piano sonata that over the years has evoked some pretty spectacular comparisons: the German-born, American musicologist Hugo Leichtentritt compared it to Dante’s Inferno; the German-born musicologist Arnold Schering likened it to Shakespeare’s Macbeth; Romain Rolland, the French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic (who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915) compared the Appassionata to Corneille’s tragedies; and the English musicologist and music theorist Donald Francis Tovey set it side-by-side with nothing less than Shakespeare’s King Lear. Sir Donald Francis Tovey (1875-1940) That’s Sir Donald Francis Tovey, and yes, even Sir Donald – that paragon of English restraint, dignity, and self-control (stiff upper lip and all that rot) – becomes a breathless, idolatrous, Beethoven fan-boy when attempting to describe the expressive content of the Appassionata Sonata: “This sonata is a great hymn of passion, which is born of the never-fulfilled longing for full and perfect bliss. Not blind fury, not the raging of sensual fevers, but the violent eruption of the afflicted soul, thirsting for happiness, is the master’s conception of passion. In all of Beethoven’s passionate outbursts there is a moral element, a conquest of self, an ethical victory. And this is true, of course, of Opus 57, this deeply personal avowal and one of the most moving documents of a great and fiery soul that humanity possesses.”  Beethoven in 1806 Rarely was Beethoven’s “great and fiery soul” more in-our-faces apparent than in late October or early November of 1806, during a visit to his patron Prince Karl Lichnowsky’s country estate near the Bohemian city of Troppau. (“Troppau” is today known as Opava and is located in the Czech Republic.) Despite the fact that Beethoven composed the great bulk of the Appassionata in 1804, it was during this stay at Lichnowsky’s place in 1806 that he applied the finishing touches. The story of that stay must be told, not just for its own sake, but for the light it sheds on Beethoven’s attitude towards his patrons and most importantly, towards himself. Prince Karl Lichnowsky (1761-1814) Karl Alois Johann-Nepomuk Vinzenz Leonhard Prince Lichnowsky (1761-1814) was a Chamberlain at the Imperial Austrian Court and a very rich man. He was a friend, Masonic Lodge Brother and patron of Mozart’s. When Beethoven arrived in Vienna in late November of 1792 – almost exactly a year after Mozart’s death – he carried with him a letter of introduction to Prince Lichnowsky written by his hometown patron Count Ferdinand Ernst Joseph Gabriel von Waldstein (to whom Beethoven dedicated his Piano Sonata in C Major Op. 53, appropriately nicknamed the “Waldstein Sonata”).  Beethoven’s letter from Count Waldstein to Prince Lichnowsky was worth its weight in Berkshire-Hathaway stock certificates. It secured him both a small apartment in the attic of Lichn...

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) in 1843 On February 11, 1843 – 176 years ago today – Giuseppe Verdi’s opera I Lombardi alla Prima Crociata (The Lombards of the First Crusade) received its first performance at the Teatro La Scala in Milan. It was the 29-year-old Verdi’s fourth opera. His third opera, the monumentally successful Nabucco (as in Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon) – which had premiered just 11 months before – in March 1842, had put Verdi on the Italian opera map. I Lombardi secured his position on that map; as an unnamed critic wrote in his review of I Lombardi in the Gazzetta di Milano: “We would just say that if Nabucco created this young man’s reputation, I Lombardi has served to confirm it.” The “reputation” to which the critic refers was not just Verdi’s standing as a composer, but his growing status as a hero of the Risorgimento, the movement that would eventually see Italy achieve nationhood. Verdi was indeed “the right composer at the right time and the right place” and therein lies a remarkable story. Risorgimento Risorgimento means, “rising up again”. Verdi lived the bulk of his life during the so-called “Italian Risorgimento”, a period that saw the Italian people “rise up again” to achieve cultural renewal and nationhood. Running from the Italian conquests of Napoleon in 1796 to the unification of Italy in 1870, the Risorgimento was, for Verdi, an essential spiritual influence in his life.  Background Between 1800 and 1808, much of the Italian peninsula was invaded and annexed by Napoleonic France. Napoleonic Italy collapsed like an undercooked soufflé in 1813, the year of Verdi’s birth. (An interesting historical tidbit: Verdi was born in the village of Le Roncole, in the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza. At the time of his birth, the Duchy was still part of the French Empire, and as such, Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi was born a French citizen!) The Italians themselves had nothing to do with the defeat of Our Little Corsican Friend and as a result, Italy’s fate was left to the allies who did in fact defeat France – Austria, Britain, Prussia, and Russia – who met at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The Congress chose to slice up the peninsula like a Pizza Margherita into a hodge-podge of states controlled primarily from abroad. The big winner was Austria, which outright annexed the northern states of Lombardy and Veneto and took control of the rich lands of Tuscany and Modena.  Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) Among the very few things the diverse population of the Italian peninsula had in common was their growing mutual hatred for the Austrians. At the same time, “heroes” were emerging: writers and politicians who believed that they’re calling was to build a sense of Italian pride, nationalism, and self-awareness. In doing this, no single individual was more important than Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872). (For our information, Verdi’s beard – grown in his late-teens – was a “Mazzini-style” beard, and no Italian looking at Verdi would have failed to recognize Verdi’s furry imitation of and therefore sympathy with this great Italian patriot and revolutionary.) As a young man, Mazzini had studied literature and philosophy, and he became involved in revolutionary politics in his twenties. While in exile for those activities in Marseilles, he founded a secret society called “Giovine Italia” (“Young Italy”), which campaigned for Italian unity under a republican government. Mazzini was a tireless traveler and revolutionar...

John Lennon in 1972 On February 4, 1972 – 47 years ago today – Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina sent a memo to John Mitchell, the Attorney General of the United States, in which he demanded that John Lennon be deported! Why would the not very nice Mr. Thurmond want to do such a thing to nice Mr. Lennon?  Therein lies a remarkable story! John Sinclair in 1968 The story begins with the poet, cultural revolutionary, political activist and pothead John Sinclair, who was born in Flint, Michigan in 1941. Sinclair was the chairman of the “Rainbow People’s Party” of Ann Arbor and a founding member and chairman of the “White Panther Party” (which he created in support of the Black Panther Party). He was, by every measure, one of the major “hippie-dippy agitator-types” operating during those troubled days of unrest over the Viet Nam War. “The Man” (meaning the law enforcement community) decided that Sinclair needed to be silenced. A sting operation was put together, and on January 27, 1967 Sinclair was arrested after passing two joints (marijuana cigarettes, for you youngsters) to two undercover Detroit narcotics police: Patrolman Vahan Kapagian and Policewoman Jane Mumford Lovelace. The trial that followed was marked by what are now referred to as “irregularities.” The upshot: Sinclair was sentenced to ten years confinement at the state prison in Jackson, Michigan. Sinclair requested an appeal; the request was denied. 10 years for 2 joints. Clearly, the sentence was politically motivated. Sinclair writes:  “The powers-that-be in Michigan had it in for me. They didn’t like what we were doing, establishing an alternative community, defying their authority, smoking grass. They fixed on me because I was the most outspoken, and also because somehow I was successful in bringing young people around to my way of thinking.” Sinclair immediately became a cause celeb for the counterculture. Sinclair’s wife Leni and his brother David organized concerts and rallies; they enlisted the help of celebrities, including the beat poet Allen Ginsburg, Jane Fonda, and the anarchist Yippie Abbie Hoffman. Pete Townshend about to brain Abbie Hoffman at Woodstock, August 17, 1969 (Hoffman, for one, made quite a scene at the Woodstock Festival/lovefest on Sunday August 17, 1969. He jumped on stage during a set by The Who, grabbed a microphone and began making an impassioned pitch for Sinclair before Pete Townshend smacked him on the head with his guitar and chased him from the stage!) The climax of the “free John Sinclair” movement occurred on December 10, 1971 when the “John Sinclair Freedom Rally” was held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor’s Crisler Arena. The rally was huge. It featured speeches by Allen Ginsburg, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale, the radical priest Father James Groppi and others; and it featured performances by, among others, Stevie Wonder, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Archie Shepp, and Roswell Rudd. But the climax of the event was the appearance – at 3 am in the morning on December 11 (things were running late) – of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The couple – who had donated their $500 appearance fee to “the John Sinclair Freedom Fund” – sang about the Attica uprising, about Northern Ireland, and about women’s liberation. They closed their set with a song Lennon had written for the event about John Sinclair:  “It ain’t fair, John Sinclair They gave him ten for two What else can Judge Colombo do? Gotta gotta gotta set him free.”

Pravda, page 3, January 28, 1936: “Muddle Instead of Music” is on the bottom left quadrant On January 28, 1936 – 83 years ago today – an article entitled “Muddle Instead of Music” appeared on page 3 of Pravda, the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The article – dictated by Joseph Stalin himself to one of hit principal literary hit men, a writer named David Zaslavsky – condemned in the most brutal terms Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. In one swell foop, the 29 year-old Shostakovich went from being the brightest artistic star in the Soviet firmament to a cultural enemy of the people, in desperate fear for his life. The condemnation and the terror the article inspired irreparably damaged Shostakovich’s psyche; though he lived for another 39 years, it’s something from which he never recovered. Dmitri Shostakovich in 1933 Shostakovich completed his second opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, in 1932. It’s based on a nasty/gnarly story written by the Russian novelist and playwright Nikolai Leskov (1831-1895) in 1864. Katerina Izmailova is the young, bored, illiterate, and sexually frustrated wife of a provincial merchant. She goes gaga over a handsome, macho workman named Sergei. Katerina and Sergei become lovers, and in order to keep things going with Sergei Katerina finds it necessary to murder both her husband and her father-in-law. Eventually she is caught and along with Sergei, she is exiled to Siberia. While on the road to Siberia Sergei takes up with another woman named Sonyetka. Crazed with jealousy, Katerina kills herself by jumping into the Volga River, dragging Sonyetka with her. Lovely.  The opera historian Donald Grout writes: “The music is brutal, lusty, vivid in the suggestion of cruelty and horror, full of driving rhythm and willful dissonance.”  Katerina and Sergei doing their thang in a Munich production of Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District I would further point out that the music that represents Katerina and Sergei’s rutting (there’s no other word for it) is pure audio pornography, to the point that we as an audience actually must laugh out loud when we hear it.  The opera was first performed on January 22, 1934, in Leningrad, and opened in Moscow two days later. From the first, Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth was a hit, SRO: “standing room only”. It was declared a masterpiece, a stunningly original dramatic work, the best Russian opera since Mussorgsky; one reviewer said that such an opera: “Could only have been written by a Soviet composer brought up in the best traditions of Soviet culture.” Thanks to Lady Macbeth, the 26 year-old Shostakovich’s international reputation as the leading Soviet composer was assured. By 1936, Lady Macbeth had been performed 83 times in Leningrad and 97(!) times in Moscow; within five months of its premiere it was broadcast five times. Within two years of it’s premiere Lady Macbeth had been performed in New York, Stockholm, London, Zurich, Copenhagen, Argentina and Czechoslovakia. Inside the Soviet Union, Shostakovich became a celebrity. His artistic plans and progress, his comings and goings,

Saturday Night Fever Album Cover On January 21, 1978 – 41 years ago today – the soundtrack album for the movie Saturday Night Fever, which featured the Bee Gees (the Brothers Gibbs), went to #1 on the Billboard Album Chart.  It proceeded to stay at number one for an astonishing 24 weeks – nearly 6 months – and by doing so, it is tied for the fourth most weeks at number one. Be still our hearts! The epic success of this album is indicative of the extraordinary popularity of disco in the 1970s. The Bee Gees in Gold Lamé and, perhaps, fake chest hair as well An upfront confession: I have owned this album – first as a record and now as a CD – for upwards of 30 years.  I originally acquired it in order to have Walter Murphy’s wonderfully ludicrous disco version of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a number appropriately entitled A Fifth of Beethoven, which does for Beethoven’s Fifth what Florence Foster Jenkins did for the Queen of the Night’s aria “Hell’s revenge cooks in my heart!” by Mozart.  But I have kept my Saturday Night Fever album because of the classic Bee Gees songs on it: “Stayin’ Alive”, “How Deep Is Your Love”, “Night Fever”, “More Than A Woman”, “Jive Talkin’”, etc.   HEY, YO: this is good stuff, iconic of its time. My disco shirt, purchased in 1975 (yes, I’ve kept it!) I will also confess that in 1975 and 1976 I played in a disco band.  Look, I had to eat.  I wore a powder blue leisure suit with a patterned silk shirt (I kept it for old times sake, although now I couldn’t even fit a thigh into it); white belt and white shoes.  Looking back, we (the band) collectively looked like Pennywise the Clown.  Anyway, I would observe that most disco music was not as good as the Bee Gees stuff, and as I realized that too many repetitions of songs like “Kung Foo Fightin’” and “Philadelphia Freedom” were liable to cause sterility, I jumped musical ship and hung up my leisure suit for good.   Historical Context Disco is about the United States in the 1970s.  Generally but accurately speaking, it was a crappy decade, dominated by dashed hopes, disillusionment and outright cynicism.  A CIA agent helps evacuees onto an Air America on April 29, 1975, a day before Saigon fell The student movement and anti-Vietnam War movement that had so galvanized the young in the late 1960s had, by the early 1970s, seem to have failed.  Nixon was still vigorously pursuing the war: the United States was bombing Cambodia and the body counts were still pouring in.  The horrific waste that was the Viet Nam debacle reached its denouement with the sham “Paris Peace Accords” – a treaty officially titled the “Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam” – that was signed on January 27, 1973.  With the United States finally out of the way North Vietnam invaded the South and took Saigon on April 30, 1975.  At the same time, the Watergate Scandal – which broke on June 17, 1972 and ended on August 9, 1974 with Nixon’s resignation – convulsed the nation and proved that Richard Nixon was indeed a crook.  Across the span of the decade inflation reached double digits,

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) On January 14, 1900 – 119 years ago today – Giacomo Puccini’s three-act opera Tosca received its first performance at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome.  Based on a play by the French playwright Victorien Sardou (1831-1908) and adapted for opera by the librettists Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Gioacosa, Tosca has been an audience favorite since the day of its premiere. According to Operabase, an online database of opera performances, Tosca is the fifth most popular opera in the repertoire today.  Of course, we will want to know which operas are numbers one through four! They are, starting with number one: La Traviata (1853), by Giuseppe Verdi; The Magic Flute (1791), by Wolfgang Mozart; Carmen (1875), by Georges Bizet; and La bohème (1895), by Giacomo Puccini.  We would observe that Puccini is the only composer with two operas in Operabase’s top five. Based on number of performances worldwide, the five most popular opera composers today are, in order one through five: Verdi; Puccini; Mozart; Wagner; and Rossini.  Unfortunately, unlike Verdi, Mozart, Wagner and Rossini, Puccini’s popularity with audiences has not been matched with equal acclaim from the critics. No doubt, some critics have said nice things about Puccini’s operas, but they remain in the minority. And unlike so many composers whose music was critically rejected in their lifetimes only to become critically celebrated at a later date, it can be honestly said that the critical disfavor of Puccini’s operas has actually grown since his death in 1924!  Harold Schonberg (1915-2003) For example, Harold Schonberg (1915-2003), for over 20 years the chief music critic for the New York Times (and the first music critic to win a Pulitzer Prize in Criticism, in 1971), wrote: “The Puccini operas may be naïve; and musicians have accused them of pandering to a listener’s baser instincts. There is no denying that many Puccini operas are frank tearjerkers, and those who regard [opera] as an art of spiritual betterment reject them out of hand.” Many of Puccini’s fellow professionals have been equally unkind. According to the composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): “[I am] sickened by the cheapness and emptiness of Puccini’s music.” Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) (what’s he smokin’?) According to composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951): “There are high and lower means [of artistic expression]. Realistic, violent incidents – as for example the torture scene in [the second act of] Tosca – which are unfailingly effective should not be used by an artist, because they are too cheap, too accessible to everybody.” (One wonders if having the name Schonberg/Schoenberg actually requires one to disapprove of Puccini?) Arnold Schoenberg’s comment addresses Tosca specifically, and indeed, no one of Puccini’s twelve operas has been more consistently lambasted by critics than Tosca. My mentor Joseph Kerman (1924-2014), who just last week I correctly identified in a Music History Monday post as being “the greatest musicologist of his generation”, wrote in his tremendously influential book Opera as Drama (1956; revise...

Frances Poulenc (1899-1963) We celebrate the birth – on January 7, 1899, 120 years ago today – of the French composer and pianist Francis Jean Marcel Poulenc. Long considered a compositional lightweight – a composer for whom (heaven forbid!) traditional tonality, attractive melody and musical charm assumed pride of compositional place – Poulenc’s music was routinely rejected by the academy and by the modernists that dominated the musical scene in the years after the end of World War II in 1945. Les Six at the Eiffel Tower in 1921: left-to-right Germaine Tailleferre, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, the artist Jean Cocteau, and Georges Auric (missing: Louis Durey) Over the last 40 years, my personal opinion of Poulenc’s music has traversed a full 180 degrees. As a young, academy-trained composer working in the 1970s, I adopted my teachers’ various prejudices without question. Among other things, this meant that with the exception of the music of Claude Debussy and Pierre Boulez, pretty much all French music going back to the seventeenth century was considered beneath contempt, and none more so than that of the loose group of Gallic compositional confectioners known as “les six Français et M. Satie” – “The Six French [composers] and Mister Satie”: Georges Auric (1899–1983), Louis Durey (1888–1979), Arthur Honegger (1892–1955), Darius Milhaud (1892–1974), Poulenc (1899–1963), Germaine Tailleferre (1892–1983), and the group’s spiritual mentor, Erik Satie (1866-1925). Erik Satie We consider. One of the primary reasons we go away to college at 18 is to escape from our parents and, having done so, to begin the process of molding our own adult personalities. But escaping from the opinions and biases of our undergraduate (and graduate school) teachers is a whole different story. In a field like music, where one’s education is dominated by extremely intense, one-on-one relationships with our primary teachers, the opinions and biases of those teachers are often hard-wired into us: they become intrinsic elements of our own psyches, “givens” we carry around with us for the rest of our lives. Which is why – for example – the prejudice against French music continues to dominate American music departments, music departments founded by German-trained composers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, departments in which an anti-French prejudice has been handed down like a treasured heirloom from generation to generation.  My “education” was no different, though thankfully, while it has taken me a while, I have become deeply enamored of most French music, with the notable exception of the music of the previously mentioned Monsieur Boulez.  Which brings me back to the birthday boy, Frances Poulenc. In my advancing age, I find his music utterly delightful, a musical reminder that the first half of the twentieth century was not only about death, depravity, and cultural destruction.  It’s not that his music is escapist or culturally irrelevant; it is clearly the work of a twentieth century artist. Rather, it is the work of a self-taught-cum-compositional virtuoso who chooses to dwell on the lighter, more brilliant side of human experience and expression, a composer unwilling to abandon such traditional Western musical constructs as thematic melody and tonal centricity. Indulge me for a moment, because I just used a term that must first be defined and then applied...

John Denver (1943-1997) Today we begin by marking a birth and a death, two anniversaries related to one another in tragedy. You rightly ask: what can be “tragic” about a birth? Nothing in itself. So let us begin by celebrating the birth on December 31, 1943 – 75 years ago today – of the singer-songwriter, record producer, actor, activist, and humanitarian Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. (I would tell you that Deutschendorf, Jr. got involved in the folk music scene in Los Angeles in his early twenties. It was there in L.A. that he met and befriended Randy Sparks (born 1933), the founder of the New Christy Minstrels. Sparks told the young man that the name “Deutschendorf” would never fit on a marquee, and suggested a name change. According to Deutschendorf, “I chose Denver because my heart longed to live in the mountains”.)  John Denver in 1961 John Denver (as we will now refer to him) was born in Roswell, New Mexico, of Area 51 fame. As an Air Force brat, he grew up a nomad, rarely living more than a few years in one place before moving on once again. He took up the guitar at the age of 11; studied architecture at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas; dropped out, moved to L.A., changed his name and started his career. And an impressive career it was. He recorded some 300 songs, of which 200 (or so) were of his own composition. All told, he sold over 33 million records worldwide and earned 12 gold albums (meaning sales of 500,000 units) and four platinum albums (meaning sales of one million units). His signature songs dealt with his relationships, his love of nature and dislike of city life, and the joy he found in his adopted home state of Colorado. Those songs include “Leaving on a Jet Plane”; “Annie’s Song”; “Thank God I’m a Country Boy”; “Take Me Home, Country Roads”; “Sunshine on My Shoulders”; and “Rocky Mountain High.” Like his father, Air Force Captain Henry John “Dutch” Deutschendorf, John Denver was a pilot, with over 2,700 hours of flight experience. And while Denver was a painter, photographer, skier and golfer, he’d be the first to tell us that after music, his next greatest love was flying. He owned a Learjet, with which he flew himself to concerts. He owned a Christen Eagle aerobatic plane, two Cessna 210s and a collection of vintage biplanes. A Rutan Long-EZ In 1997, he purchased what was considered an experimental plane: a Rutan Long-EZ that had been built – by a hobbyist – from a kit. On October 12, 1997, the 53 year-old Denver was killed when that Rutan Long-EZ – registration number N555JD – crashed into Monterey Bay about 100 yards from the beach at Pacific Grove, California. He had been making touch-and-go landings from the nearby Monterey Peninsula Airport when the plane – which was estimated to be at an altitude of between 350 and 500 feet – dove nose first into the water. (According to the National Transportation Safety Board – NTSB – Denver accidentally pushed the right rudder pedal while he twisted to the left in an attempt to operate the plane’s fuel selector valve, which the previous owner had put behind the pilot’s seat.) The plane disintegrated on impact, as did Denver’s body. Facial and dental recognition were impossible; in the end, he could only be identified via fingerprints. The cause of death was listed as “blunt force trauma.” Yes: very tragic.  Here is the tragically related anniversary. Rick Nelson (1940-1985) in 1966 Rick Nelson On December 31, 1985 – 33 years ago today – the 45 year-old singer, songwriter, and actor Eric Hilliard (nicknamed Rick) Nelson died when his four...