Music History Monday Robert Greenberg

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







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









Read on Patreon









Become a Patron! 







Listen and Subscribe to the Music History Monday Podcast













The Robert Greenberg Store

Anton Diabelli (1781-1858)





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







Quick Work







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







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







Anton Diabelli (1781-1858)







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







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







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







Important Programming Note







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







Continue reading, and listen, on Patreon!







Become a Patron! 







Listen to the Music History Monday Podcast













Related Robert Greenberg Courses













The String Quartets of Beethoven



$199.95 – $319.95



Select options



a href="https://robertgreenbergmusic.

Bob Dylan (born 1941) in 2017





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







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









“Spirits were high. Champagne was had.”









Sara Danius in 2017





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









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









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







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









“This is an unprecedented situation.”









He then criticized Dylan as being:









“Impolite and arrogant.”









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







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







Continue reading, and listen without interruption, only on Patreon!







Become a Patron! 







Listen and Subscribe to the Music History Monday Podcast













The Robert Greenberg Store

Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) circa 1890





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







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







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







The Toscanini family tomb at the Monumental Cemetery of Milan





What Made Toscanini So Special







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







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







The First “Modern” Conductor







Toscanini in 1885, at the age of 18





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







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







Continue reading, and listen without interruption, only on Patreon!







Become a Patron! 







Listen and Subscribe to the Music History Monday Podcast













The Robert Greenberg Store

Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), painted in 1896 by Ilya Repin





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







Fake It ‘til You Make It







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







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







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







Assumption two: adults are emotionally mature.







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







Assumption three: adults know what they’re doing.







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







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







The Purnell School, Pottersville, New Jersey, main entrance





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







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







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







Continue reading, and listen without interruptions, only on Patreon!







Become a Patron! 







Listen and Subscribe to the Music History Monday Podcast













The Robert Greenberg Store

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







Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) in 1852, a year after the premiere of Rigoletto





We set the scene.  







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







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







Stifellio







Francesco Maria Piave (1810-1876)





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







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







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







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







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







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







a href="https://www.