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Beethoven
Chopin Copland
Grofé Mendelssohn
Menotti |
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While Mozart was a timid supplicant to the nobility, expected to eat with the servants after a performance, Beethoven felt it was the aristocracy’s good fortune that he consented to dine with them. He believed he was creating music for the ages and, as an artist, he was superior to kings and nobles. 'Aristocrats were easy to manage if you have something to impress them with,’ he noted. To give the aristocracy its due, it recognized the greatness of his music and somewhat in awe, forgave his deplorable manners and personal habits. He fell in and out of love with married and unmarried noble women for most of his life, enjoying a contemporary reputation that Casanova might have envied. For all his love affairs, he remained a bachelor, living in an incredibly messy home because no servant could put up with his tantrums. One worthy described Beethoven’s quarters:
Before being recognized as a composer, Beethoven gained fame as a pianist. The Viennese were used to the smooth fluid style of Mozart and Hummel. Beethoven was different. He held his hands high, smashing at the piano, breaking strings and seeking a new sound from the keyboard. He begged Vienna’s piano makers to give him a better instrument than the light-actioned pianos that, he complained, sounded no better than harps. Almost every European pianist of note came though Vienna, but as Harold Schonberg, the former New York Times critic, put it, Beethoven played every one of them under the table. Beethoven could control many aspects of his life by force of personality. Deafness, a disaster for a pianist, was not one of them. Eventually he could only hear compositions in his mind, although at rehearsals he would use his eyes to follow the bows and correct any slight imperfection in tempo or rhythm. Many of his greatest works, the Violin Concerto, the Ninth Symphony, were composed after he was enveloped in silence. His last works seem to be created so deep in his mind that they are very difficult to perform and understand. That, he would have considered, was the world’s misfortune. It was the world’s job to adapt to him. Back to top
Frédéric
Chopin (1810-1849)
Chopin devised new ways to play the piano. His ideas about pedaling, fingering, rhythm and color were immediately taken up by every one of the younger pianists and composers of his day and the concepts dominated the second half of the 19th century. Chopin also favored rubato, a kind of displacement where the right hand is hesitant or impatient but the left always holds the rhythm steady. "Look at these trees!" Franz Liszt told one of his pupils, "the wind plays in the leaves, stirs up life among them, the tree remains the same. That is Chopinesque rubato." More established professionals had a difficult time getting a hold on the Chopin’s ideas. Mendelssohn, one of the best musical minds of the time, initially found Chopin’s music disturbing. However, in a short while he wrote, “…there is something entirely original in his piano playing and it is, at the same time, so masterly that he may be called a perfect virtuoso.” Chopin has been described as somewhat feline, with a personality that was witty, malicious, suspicious and charming. Although a great pianist as well as a composer, he realized his physical frailty and style were better fitted to intimate venues than large halls. This contributed to the unease and envy in his long relationship with Liszt. Chopin was the pianist’s pianist. Liszt was the public’s pianist, a showman with power, good looks, an extraverted personality and a Teflon ability to cheerfully ride out one scandal after another. He sincerely admired Chopin’s music, and could use it hypnotize a large audience in a way that Chopin could not. Chopin and Sand decided to escape the press by wintering in Majorca. The tryst became a nightmare. The rain was constant, their rented house was eternally damp and Chopin became extremely ill. Sand found herself taking an unplanned detour from lover to nurse. The three best doctors on the island had, according to Chopin, completely different ideas about his condition. Chopin claimed one had decided he was dead, the next that he was dying and the third that he was going to die. Fortunately, it took sixteen years for any of diagnoses to prove true and the lovers were both able to move on to other affairs. Back to top
Aaron Copland (1900-1990) "I was born on Nov. 14, 1900, on a street in Brooklyn that can only be described as drab,” wrote Aaron Copland. “It had none of the garish color of the ghetto, none of the charm of an old New England thoroughfare, or even a pioneer street. I mention it because it was there that I spent the first 20 years of my life. Also, because it fills me with mild wonder each time I realize that a musician was born on that street." Copland was determined to leave Brooklyn and hone his musical skills in Paris, which, at that time was the center of the artistic universe. Stravinsky, Ravel, Prokofiev, Milhaud and Poulenc were all composing there. Picasso, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Joyce were savoring life in the Left Bank. Copland saved his money, supplemented it by winning a scholarship, and in the summer of 1921, set sail for France. Every art form was in ferment during the first part of the 20th century. Composers, like painters, playwrights and authors, were under great self-imposed pressure to find new ways to articulate their art. Back home from Europe, Copland tried combining jazz with polyrhythmic music with some critical success. However, he decided the form lead to a dead end and turned to a dissonant, abstract form. He eventually admitted this music “is difficult to perform and difficult for an audience to comprehend.” Taking a step back, he decided that he and other contemporary composers were frantic to look ‘modern.’ They were essentially composing for each other while audiences ignored their music because they found it too impersonal, obscure and contemptuous of those outside an inner circle. Copland changed styles again and for a short period of about ten years from 1935 to 1946 worked in a more popular idiom. Using elements of American folk music, Copland produced lyrical compositions such as the ballets ‘Billy the Kid’ (1938) for Eugene Loring, ‘Rodeo’ (1942) for Agnes de Mille, and ‘Appalachian Spring’ for Martha Graham (1944). He composed music for films, including ‘Of Mice and Men’ (1937), ‘Our Town’ (1940), and ‘The Heiress’ (1949). Additional works of this period include ‘Lincoln Portrait’ (1942), ‘Third Symphony’ (1946), and’ El Salon Mexico,’ an orchestral piece based on Mexican folk music. "Most of 'Appalachian Spring' was composed at night at the Samuel Goldwyn studios in Hollywood," Copland recalled. "An air of mystery hovers over a film studio after dark. Its silent and empty streets give off something of the atmosphere of a walled medieval town. This seclusion provided the required calm for evoking the peaceful, open countryside of rural Pennsylvania depicted in 'Appalachian Spring.' " In the early 1950’s, Copland moved towards 12-tone system. Leonard Bernstein, for one, lamented the new style. In 1970, Bernstein wrote: "One of the sadnesses I recall in recent years occurred at the premiere of Copland's 'Inscape,' when he said to me, 'Do you realize there isn't one young composer here, there isn't one young musician who seems to be at all interested in this piece -- a brand new piece which I've labored over?' "The truth is,” said Bernstein, “that when the musical winds blew past him, he tried to catch up -- with 12-tone music, just as it, too, was becoming old-fashioned to the young." From 1963 until his death in 1990, Copland gave up composing and concentrated on writing, conducting, educating young students at Tanglewood, and being honored for forty years of creating music while being remembered for ten of them. Back to top
Ferde
Grofé (1892-1972)
At night, he took any musical job that produced a paycheck, sometimes playing the piano in a bar for two dollars a night. In 1909, at 17, he toured Californian mining-camps with Albert Jerome, a dance teacher. By day, the pair operated a cleaning and pressing establishment while at night Grofé played dance tunes as Jerome attempted to teach his pupils the latest steps from back east. It was also in 1909 that Grofé wrote his first commissioned work, The Grand Reunion March, for an Elks Clubs convention in Los Angeles. At the end of the year, he was offered a position with the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra, playing the viola. He held the post for eight years. At 25, in 1917, he was spotted by Paul Whiteman and joined Whiteman’s orchestra as pianist, arranger, assistant conductor and librarian. He got his first real break seven years later when he orchestrated Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue on short notice. The work was originally to be Concerto in Blue but Gershwin had forgotten about his commitment to Whiteman until he read a newspaper story announcing his non-existent concerto was to be premiered the following month. He called Whiteman in a panic and after considerable negotiation it was it was agreed that the work would be shortened and Whiteman would have his own arranger, Ferde Grofé, do the orchestration. It was Grofé's good fortune that among the audience at the premiere, according to Andrew Litton, something of a Gershwin scholar, were a number of music legends including composers Sergei Rachmaninoff and John Philip Sousa, Leopold Stokowski the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Walter Damrosch, conductor of the New York Philharmonic along with world-famous violinists Jascha Heifetz and Fritz Kreisler. Whiteman then asked Grofé to compose an original work which became the Grand Canyon Suite. Grofé said was derived from the desert and mountain country he saw as an itinerant pianist. He started writing the composition in Chicago but finding the noise and bustle of the city a mismatch with the solitude of the Grand Canyon, he finished the Suite in a small lakeside cottage in Wisconsin. Regardless of the difficulties of composition, the Suite was a success at its premiere and remains a favorite to this day. The legendary Arturo Toscanini, the principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic and the NBC orchestra, described Cloudburst, the last movement, as one of the most vivid and terrifying of musical pictures. Ten years later, Grofé returned to New York, the city of his birth, and joined Toscanini at NBC as a staff conductor. He also performed twice as guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic. In 1939 he joined the faculty of the Juilliard School, teaching orchestration and composition. Everything being possible in his view, he rose to the challenge offered by a friend who suggested he could even write music about a bicycle pump. He could and did. Then he wrote another. The pieces are called Theme and Variations on Noises from a Garage and Free Air. Over the next thirty years, he continued to compose original works, film scores and orchestrate piano works for other composers including Gershwin and Ravel. One of his movie scores, Minstrel Man, gained him an Oscar nomination. Back to top
Felix Mendelssohn
(1809-1847)
In his own time, Mendelssohn was universally accepted by the public across Europe as a master composer, conductor and musician. His music was particularly popular in England where he was also in demand as a conductor. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were enthusiasts and enjoyed piano recitals at Windsor Castle by their friend Mr. Mendelssohn whenever he visited the country. As well as leaving a large body of music, Mendelssohn had a major influence on the art of conducting. In 1835, he became Director of the Gewandhaus concerts in Leipzig and, in short order, made the town the musical capital of Germany. He also established an orchestral model that would be familiar to today’s concert-goers. The orchestra’s size was increased from forty to fifty, a top flight concertmaster was engaged and pensions were secured for each player. His spirited, dictatorial, high-strung approach produced a precision unit where his players suffered his frequently lost temper if they didn’t meet his expectations. He was one of the first conductors to use a baton, used gestures sparingly and was very insistent on accurate rhythm and smooth ensemble. Mendelssohn revised the orchestra’s repertory by tossing out now forgotten composers like Fesca, Neukomm and Ries, making Mozart and Beethoven the backbone of the schedule with Haydn, Bach and Handel not far behind. At the time there was little interest in Bach's music, but Mendelssohn used his own popularity and the four hundred singers and soloists of the Singakademie to help renew interest in the great composer's work. He also introduced Leipzig audiences to newer composers like Rossini, Chopin and the almost unknown Schubert. He also got rid of the customary variety programs which promoters felt sugar-coated serious music for a larger audience. A Beethoven symphony would be stopped after two movements and a harpist or cellist or singer would entertain the audience before the symphony resumed. Mendelssohn died of a stroke at thirty-eight, living only three years longer than Mozart. Back to top
Gian Carlo Menotti (1911-
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His first mature work, the one-act opera buffa, 'Amelia Goes to the Ball,' was premiered in 1937. Its success led to a commission from the National Broadcasting Company to write an opera especially for radio. The opera, 'The Old Maid and the Thief,' was broadcast by NBC in 1939. His first ballet, 'Sebastian,' followed in 1944, and for this he wrote the scenario as well as the score. After the premiere of his 'Piano Concerto' in 1945, Menotti returned to opera with 'The Medium,' shortly joined by 'The Telephone,' both enjoying international success. 'The Consul,' Menotti's first full-length work, won the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle award as the best musical play of the year in 1954. By far Menotti's best-known work is the Christmas classic 'Amahl and the Night Visitors,' composed for NBC-TV in 1951. Born in Italy, Menotti came to the United States at 17 to study composition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. He ensured his enrollment with a letter from Arturo Toscanini, a family friend. Menotti had a long friendship with fellow-composer Samuel Barber who was also a student at the Curtis. They were exact opposites. Barber, was an affluent, small-town, aristocratic, disciplined American, acerbic, solitary, and reserved. Menotti, was the volatile European, amusing, dramatic and eccentric. They were necessary catalysts for each other and for 30 years between 1943 and 1973 they lived together in a large L-shaped house in the countryside north of New York. A painful separation triggered Menotti’s move to Scotland. Not waiting on other people to foster his works, Menotti the impresario devised the Festival of Two Worlds, in Spoleto, Italy. Started in 1958, it is devoted to the cultural collaboration of Europe and America in a program embracing all the arts. The Spoleto Festival wraps itself in enough glamour to attract both the jet set and music lovers. Since 1977, with the founding of Spoleto USA in Charleston, SC, the festival now runs both sides of the Atlantic, operating in America during June and Italy in July. A friend described Menotti as the ‘headmaster of Spoleto.’ As such, he sometimes treated himself to non-singing walk-on parts in performances of his own operas while also acting as ‘administrator, rescuer from perennial bankruptcy, talent scout, father confessor of bruised egos, savior of major and minor disasters, and master politician.’ Back to top
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Somebody of Mozart’s musical skills should have had no problem in landing a well paying job at the court of his choice but he spent his life looking for such a position and never found it. Everybody recognized his talent. They just had a problem with his personality. He had a reputation for being lightheaded, temperamental and obstinate, sullen and insubordinate. In addition, he was tactless and impulsively said exactly what he thought about other musicians. Given that he was truly better than other musicians and had an unerring eye for mediocrity, his opinions were almost always uncomplimentary and delivered with a mix of arrogance and superciliousness. Child prodigies do not always grow up to be well rounded adults. His father, Leopold, ruthlessly exploited Mozart’s musical talent at the expense of every other aspect of growing up. Seeing his son as the ticket to a comfortable retirement, he took him on tour from the age of six. By thirteen he had performed in Vienna, Munich, Coblenz, Frankfurt, Brussels, Paris, London, Lyons, Milan, Bologna, Naples, Venice, Innsbruck and Mannheim. His education in non-musical subjects was ignored, most of his time was spent with adults, he often saw his name in the news and his skills were extravagantly praised wherever he went. Leopold Mozart was intelligent but unimaginative and unbending, a precise and pedantic, well organized man. Wolfgang was easygoing, gregarious, undisciplined, and an easy touch for money. The father only saw the son’s flaws and had no comprehension of the level of the son’s talent. Wolfgang, pushed by musical genius could not be the sober, thrifty bourgeois his father demanded. Growing up, he had been taught to lean on his father but when he eventually rebelled and pushed the prop away, he had few skills to manage his life. In 1793, Mozart’s first biographer, Friedrich Schlichtegroll, wrote that “For although this rare person early became a man so far as his art was concerned, he always remained in almost all other matters a child. He never learned to rule himself. For domestic order, for sensible management of money, for moderation and wise choice in pleasures, he had no feeling. He always needed a guiding hand.” Mozart died penniless at thirty-five. Back to top
Franz
Schubert (1797-1828)
Very little of his music was published in his lifetime. A few pieces were published privately by friends. His single public concert went unreviewed because the critics chose to attend a concert featuring Paganini that took place on the same evening. He lived in the shadow of Beethoven who was esteemed as the great composer of Vienna and Europe. Beethoven’s aristocratic connections and reputation as a brilliant pianist ensured a wide audience for his compositions while Schubert lived in a different world known in the city’s bohemian circles but invisible to the upper-class Viennese concert going audience. It was as though Schubert was famous on Avenue Q while Beethoven was adored at Lincoln Center. Schubert was always short of money but never quite broke, and was driven to write down the compositions that flowed from his brain without seeming to care if they were performed. He didn’t need a piano. He couldn’t afford one and he said it made him lose his train of thought. What he needed was paper. Even on his deathbed, he is said to have cried that new ideas were running through his head. There was something about Schubert that created a fierce loyalty among his friends. He was about five feet, one inch tall, very shy, suffered from bad eyesight and nicknamed ‘Schwammer’ (Tubby). Women wanted to mother him. Nothing is really known about the private side of his life. One friend said ‘he was of two natures foreign to each other. and his craving for pleasure dragged down his soul.’ The public Schubert normally organized his day around composing between nine in the morning, subject to hangovers, until two in the afternoon at which time he went to one of the local cafés to hold court, smoke, drink wine and coffee and read the papers until midnight. His teachers understood his potential. As an eleven year old student he was a good pianist and violinist and a prolific composer. One of his teachers said, “This one is from God,” and that he had nothing to teach the boy. Another wrote “If I wanted to instruct him in something new, he already knew it.” The long deferred recognition of the genius seen by his teachers began in 1839, eight years after his death. In that year, Robert Schumann unearthed Schubert’s Ninth Symphony and conducted its world premiere in Leipzig. In a letter to his daughter Clara, Schumann declared, with some over-exuberance, that the work was on a par with Beethoven’s Ninth. Respect for Schubert’s work grew steadily and the search for his original manuscripts became something of a late 19th century cottage industry. As they were published and gained wide circulation, his music began to influence composers like Dvořák, Bruckner and Mahler. By the 1930’s, a hundred years after his death, pianists like Artur Schnabel began to play the Schubert sonatas with regularity. Back to top |
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GREAT MUSIC AT A FAIR PRICE AND A SHORT DRIVE |
The
citizens of Vienna recognized Beethoven as a
colorful, eccentric genius and
twenty thousand of them turned out for his funeral. Those who came
in direct contact with him found
themselves in the stressful
company of a personality that filled every corner of a room with an enormous
presence. 
Chopin was born
in 1809 or 1810 in Zelazowa Wola, a town not far from Warsaw, of a Polish
mother and French father. He studied composition under Joseph Elsner, a
teacher who was wise enough to recognize that Chopin was something
special and needed to be treated carefully. Elsner wanted Chopin to
compose symphonies, sonatas and perhaps Polish national opera but
allowed his pupil to develop naturally. In 1835 Chopin moved to Paris
which in the 1830s and ‘40s was in one of its cycles as the temporary
center of the artistic universe. 
Chopin had fame
and contacts. His titled fellow Polish émigrés in Paris had introduced
him to the Rothschilds who acted as a ticket into the highest
levels of society. Chopin was able to charge unprecedented amounts as
teacher and lived in luxury and had more than his share of love affairs,
which he kept to himself, being somewhat prudish. This
changed when Liszt introduced him to Aurora Dudevant, who, was descended
(illegitimately) from the king of Poland and had written
two notorious and very successful novels under the pen name of George
Sand. Nominally married with two children, she had a long succession of
lovers, probably including Liszt, and an unerring instinct for keeping
herself in the public eye. Wearing men’s clothes for a time and smoking
cigars, her independence and disdain for social propriety were catnip
for the Paris newspapers. This year, being the bicentenary of her
birth, she is the subject of exhibitions, music festivals and
conferences across France.
Ferde Grofé, the
descendant of four generations of classical musicians, was born in New
York City and grew up in Los Angeles. He had a natural instinct for
music and, before leaving home at fourteen, studied the piano, violin
and harmony with his mother and the viola with his grandfather. It was
tough, then as now, to make money as a musician, especially at fourteen,
so he took a succession of jobs as usher, newsboy, milkman, elevator
operator, lithographer, bookbinder, typesetter, steelworker, and truck
driver. 
While
Wagner provided a mythology for the Nazis, Mendelssohn presented a
problem. The Nazis tried to discredit him, taking down his statue in
Leipzig, forbidding the study and performance of his music and ordering
all the Mendelssohn descendants still living in Germany to leave the
country. Mendelssohn himself, was presumably indifferent since he
had been dead for almost a hundred years. His music had become tainted because his
parents, dead even longer, and members of a wealthy, conservative
banking family, were Jews although they had found it prudent to convert
to Christianity in order to blend with Berlin Society in the early 19th
century. Further, Mendelssohn had retained his grandparent’s last name instead of
using Bartholdy, the name taken by his parents. (Most biographies split the
difference with a hyphen -- Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.) 
Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart was the supreme master of composing -- opera, symphony, chamber,
vocal, piano, choral music -- anything. He was the finest conductor,
pianist and organist in Europe. He could have been the best violinist
if he had worked at it. He could think out a quartet and write the
individual parts before creating the full score. He could perfectly
sight read any piece of music placed in front of him or hear a piece of
music for the first time and immediately write it out note for note. At
three he could pick out tunes on a piano, by four he could tell his
elders that a violin was a quarter tone out of tune and at six he
started composing. 
Some people
marked with genius, Picasso, Beethoven, or Frank Lloyd Wright, for
example, compel the world to recognize their value and are rewarded with
fame and adulation. Franz Schubert was wired differently. He had
little skill or interest in self promotion and his reputation was
established by others long after his death. When he died at the age of
thirty-one in 1828, he was viewed by his Viennese contemporaries as a
respected composer of songs but ranking somewhere below Hummel, Spohr
and Weber.