February 25, 2019.  Chopin.  Frédéric Chopin was born on March 1^st of 1810.  Here’s a brief sketch of Chopin’s first 20 years.  He was born in Żelazowa Wola, not far from Warsaw, in what then was the short-lived Duchy of Warsaw, created by Napoleon three years earlier (the Duchy would disappear five years later, following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, with that part of Poland reverting back to Russia).  His father, Nicolas Chopin, was French, his mother, Tekla Justyna Krzyżanowska, – Polish.  The first 20 years Frédéric lived in Poland, mostly in Warsaw, where his family moved when Nicolas received an appointment at the newly-established Warsaw Lyceum.  Frédéric was a child prodigy (“Second Mozart,” the local press called him), both as a pianist and as a composer: a lithograph of a polonaise he wrote at the age of eight, survives to this day.  He studied composition and the piano with the composer Józef Elsner, then entered the Warsaw Conservatory, where he also studied the organ.  The organ played its role, even though Chopin never composed for this instrument: at the time, several attempts were made to combine the organ and the piano; one of these hybrids was called the “aeolopantaleon.”  Young Chopin played this unusual instrument at a concert attended by Tsar Alexander I of Russia; the Tsar was very impressed and presented the 15-year-old Frédéric with a diamond ring.  Even though the Chopins were well established, Frédéric felt stifled: compared to the European capitals or St.Petersburg, Warsaw was musically quite provincial.  In November of 1830 he went on a European tour; the first stop was in Vienna.  One week after his arrival he had learned of the Warsaw uprising against the Russians.  Frédéric stayed in Vienna for half a year; in July of 1831 he left for Paris which would become his home for the rest of his life: he was never to see Poland again.  By then, Chopin’s reputation as a brilliant pianist had been firmly established, but his creative genius was to flourish in France.

February 18, 2019. Handel.  February 23^rd is the birthday of George Frideric Handel, one of the greatest composers of the first half of the 18^th century.  A couple years ago we posted an entry describing Handel’s move to London and his first years there, covering the period roughly between 1709 and 1719.  In 1719 Handel was living in Cannons, a home of James Brydges, the Duke of Chandos, about 13 miles northwest of London’s center.  The Duke, Handel’s patron, was a musician himself and maintained an orchestra of 24 players.  Handel’s stay at Cannons was comfortable and productive: he composed, among other things, Chandos Anthems (eleven in total), and the first English oratorio, Esther.  (Here is Chandos Anthem no. 11, "Let God Arise."  It’s performed by The Sixteen, directed by Harry Christophers).  In 1719 an opera company, called “Royal Academy of Music” was organized.  The Academy was set up as a joint stock company; the original issue was oversubscribed, so many people wanted to get involved.  The funding partners were members of the nobility, well-traveled and familiar with opera, often amateur musicians themselves.  Their goal was to create a permanent home for Italian opera in London.  Handel was tasked with finding the singers, for which he traveled to Germany rather than Italy, but the singers he engaged for the Academy were all Italians, the famous castrato Senesino among them.  Upon returning to London Handel was appointed “Master of the Orchester with a Sallary.”  The first opera season was short, though Handel produced a new opera, Radamisto; it premiered in April of 1720, the performance attended by King George I and the Prince of Wales, the future George II.  Originally the role of Radamisto was sung by a soprano, but during the next season, in a revised version, it was Senestino in his first year in London.  That season saw the premier of Handel’s Floridante, very successful and revived in the following seasons.  Again, Senesino sung the title role.  It’s interesting that the singers were considered much more important than composers and commanded much higher salaries (Senesino’s salary the first year at the Academy was above £2000, an enormous sum).  Handel was known to quarrel with the singers often, even with his favorite Senesino: eventually they broke up and Senesino joined the rival Opera of the Nobility. 

February 11, 2019.  Praetorius and Cavalli.  A prolific and talented German composer of the late Renaissance, Michael Praetorius was born on February 15^th of 1571.  We dedicated an entry to him quite recently, so this time we’ll just play one of his pieces.   Praetorius wrote more than 1000 sacred compositions and only one secular collection of French dances, which he called Terpsichore.  Here’s one of them, La Bourrée.  The unusual and very refreshingly sounding wind instrument you hear in this piece is called Rackett.  Racketts come in four sizes, from soprano to great bass.  Praetorius, who was not only a composer but also a musicologist, wrote about racketts in his book Syntagma Musicum: “In resonance racketts are quite soft, almost as if one were blowing through a comb. They have no particular grace when a whole consort of them is used together; but when viols da gamba are used with them, or when a single rackett is used together with other wind or stringed instruments and a harpsichord or the like, and is played by a good musician, it is indeed a lovely instrument. It is particularly pleasing and fine to hear in bass parts.”  Hard to disagree, it is a lovely instrument indeed.

Francesco Cavalli was born Francesco Caletti on February 14^th of 1602 in Crema, Lombardy.  His first patron, the Venetian Governor’s name was Federico Cavalli.  Cavalli heard Francesco sing in the local cathedral and convinced the boy’s family to let him take Francesco to Venice.  Some years later, already a well-known composer, Francesco assumed the name of his first patron.  In 1639 Cavalli won a competition to become the second organist at St. Mark’s; that same year he composed his first opera, Le nozze di Teti e di Peleo.  Even though at the time operas had been played in private houses for about 40 years, it had just been two years since this art form became available to a broad paying public.  Le nozze was staged at Teatro San Cassiano, Venice’s first public opera house, opened in 1637.  During the following 10 years Cavalli wrote eight more operas, Giasone becoming one of the most popular in all of Italy.  In the following years, Cavalli, together with his favorite librettist, Giovanni Faustini, worked in the newly established Sant' Apollinare theater, famous for its advanced stage machinery.  Faustini died in 1661, and Cavalli moved to the Teatro Santi Giovanni e Paolo, which was managed by Marco Faustini, Giovanni’s brother.  Santi Giovanni e Paolo was considered the most comfortable of all opera theaters in the city (by the end of the 17^th century Venice had 10 of them).   These years saw the creation of Egisto, Xerse and Erismena, which, together with Giasone, became the staples of the opera repertoire and were performed all over Italy, in cities large and small.  In 1660 Cardinal Mazarin, the French Prime Minister (he was an Italian born Giulio Raimondo Mazzarino) invited Cavalli to Paris to compose an opera for the planned marriage of Louis XIV to Maria Theresa, daughter of the King of Spain.  The visit, which lasted almost two years (the new Tuileries theater, where the opera was supposed to be staged, had not been completed, as promised) was not a happy affair. 

February 4, 2019. Berg, Leinsdorf, Björling.  We have three anniversaries this week, that of a composer, a conductor, and of a tenor.  The composer is Alban Berg, born on February 9^th of 1885 in Vienna.  One of the greatest modernists of the 20^th century, he is mostly known for two groundbreaking operas: Wozzeck, the first atonal opera of the 20^th century, which Berg completed in 1922, and Lulu, which he started in 1929 and worked on for the next seven years till his death in 1935, still leaving it incomplete.  The libretto for Wozzeck Berg wrote himself, following Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck; Berg also wrote the libretto for Lulu, this time based on the play, Erdgeist, by another famous German playwright, Frank Wedekind.  By the time of Berg’s death, anti-Semitism was rampant not just in Nazi Germany but in Austria as well.  Berg’s “problem” was that he was a student of Arnold Schoenberg, a Jew.  Wozzeck stopped being performed  in 1932, and all of Berg’s music was prohibited in Germany in 1935 as “degenerate music.”  Wozzeck, as complex as it was, proved that an atonal work could bring enough auditory, rhythmical and emotional dynamics to keep listeners rapt for 100 minutes.  Lulu was even more difficult and, at approximately three hours, much longer.  It was premiered, in its incomplete form, in 1949: Berg’s widow, Helen, wanted Schoenberg to complete the score but the master declined; Helen wouldn’t let anybody else touch it.   Following Helen Berg’s death in 1976, Austrian composer Friedrich Cerha completed the orchestration of the 3rd act.  The first performance of the complete opera took place in Paris’s Palais Garnier in 1979 with Pierre Boulez on the podium.  This became the standard version, performed in major opera houses.  Here are five minutes from Act III ("Wer ist das?" – “Who is this?”).  Teresa Stratas (she was one of the best Lulus on the opera scene) sings the role of the protagonist; Franz Mazura is Jack.  Pierre Boulez conducts Orchestre de l'Opéra de Paris.

January 28, 2019.  Old and new; composers and performers.  This week has so many anniversaries that they turn our post into a list, but we’d rather that than omit anybody.  Five composers were born this week; they span two and a half centuries, from the Baroque to today.  The oldest is Alessandro Marcello, born on February 1^st of 1673.  His younger brother, Benedetto Marcello, is better remembered these days, but Alessandro’s Oboe Concerto (here) was good enough for Bach to transcribe it for the keyboard solo; we now know it as Bach’s Concerto BWV 974.

Franz Schubert  was born on January 31^st of 1797 in Himmelpfortgrund, now part of Vienna’s 9^th district.  Undoubtedly one of the greatest composers in the history of European music, he wrote, during his short thirty-one-year life, an astounding number of masterpieces.  In their profundity, his late piano sonatas could be compared only to those of the late Beethoven.  His symphonies are among the best in the 19^th century literature, his sacred works are very interesting, but it’s the Lieder, the art songs, that truly set him apart.  His song cycles, Die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise, Schwanengesang, are works of pure genius.  And so are some individual songs.  Here, for example, is An Sylvia.  It’s sung by a young American mezzo,  Clara Osowski.  Mark Bilyeu is on the piano.

Felix Mendelssohn was also born this week, on February 3^rd of 1809.  We just talked about Schubert; Mendelssohn was one of the key people who promoted Schubert’s music which – inexplicably – faded from people’s memory soon after Schubert’s death.  He, for example, premiered Schubert’s Symphony no. 9 in 1839 (the manuscript was discovered by Robert Schumann).  You can read about Mendelssohn here and here.  We understand that Mendelssohn, one of the greatest composers of the 19^th century, deserves much more, and we’ll try another time.  For now, here’s Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 6 in F minor, Op. 80.  It’s his last large-scale work and was completed in September of 1847, as a “Requiem” for his beloved sister Fanny, who died in May of that year.  Felix would be dead two months later, on November 4^th of 1847.  The performers are the Artemis Quartet.

Four great performers were also born this week.  None of them need an introduction: Arthur Rubinstein, on January 28^th of 1887, Fritz Kreisler – on February 2^nd of 1875, Jascha Heifetz – on the same day but in 1901, and Renata Tebaldi, the great soprano and Maria Callas’s rival – on February 1^st of 1922.

January 21, 2019.  Mozart and more.Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born this week, on January 27^th of 1756.  We write about him regularly – it couldn’t be otherwise as Mozart is the seminal figure in the history of Western music.  So this time, to celebrate Mozart we’ll play a celebratory music composed by Mozart himself.  The story of this piece starts with the Haffners, a prominent Salzburg family whom Mozart knew well.  Sigmund Haffner the Elder was the mayor of Salzburg; Sigmund Haffner the Younger was Mozart’s friend.  In 1776 Haffner Jr. commissioned Mozart to write music for the wedding of his sister, Marie Elisabeth.  Mozart came up with a Serenade in D Major (K. 250), which we know as Haffner Serenade.  Six years later the occasion was the ennoblement of Sigmund Haffner himself.  Again, Mozart was asked for a musical accompaniment, and even though Mozart was very busy at the time, he composed yet another serenade, except that he didn’t stop there but developed the serenade into a symphony, which we know as Symphony No. 35 in D major, K. 385, Haffner.  Here it is, performed by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields under the direction of Iona Brown.

Several talented musicians were also born this week.  Wilhelm Furtwängler, one of the most important conductors of the 20^th century, was born on January 25^th of 1886 in Schöneberg, a district of Berlin.  Furtwängler is such an immense and complicated figure that we would need more than one entry to even begin to describe him.  So for now, here’s a brief sketch of the first half of his life.  Even though he was born in Berlin, Furtwängler spent his childhood in Munich, were his father, a prominent archeologist, received a professorship.  When it became obvious that Wilhelm is an extremely gifted child, his parents took him out of public school and hired tutors to educate him privately.