Masks and Bergamasks--Nicolas Slonimsky, Notes on some of the music world's more eccentric moments. [missing pages]
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the quill pen) did not deter the Ludwigomaniacs from overdramatizing the event.
But there are other indications that Beethoven kept sound respect for his great contemporary.
(Napoleon was born a year before he was.) In a letter to his publishers several months after the proclamation of the Empire, Beethoven referred to the Eroica as " eigentlich Buonaparte genannt" (really called Buonaparte). Some fifteen years later, when Napoleon was in exile on the island of St. Helena, the publisher Peters paid a visit to Beethoven and mentioned the fact that the Vienna composer Eybler was commissioned to write a Mass for Napoleon to be performed at his chapel in St. Helena and added that the work should have been commissioned to Beethoven. Thanks to the composer's providential deafness, all communications with him had to be in writing, so this conversation has been preserved in the Konversations hefte. That such a proposition could have been made at all, and that Beethoven countenanced it, shows that in his heart he never ceased to admire the fallen emperor.
Triskaidecaphobia is a morbid fear of the number 13. Rossini had it, and like so many Italians he also regarded Friday as a bad-luck day. Indeed, the chronology of his life would provide a numerologist with a lot of intriguing speculation. Rossini was born on leap-year day, February 29, 1792. In the year of his death, 1868, he joked that he was only nineteen, for he had celebrated only that many birthdays in his life. He approached every 13th of the month that fell on Friday with superstitious apprehension. He died on November 13, 1868, which was a Friday! Casals was proud of having in his possession the original manuscript of Brahms's String Quartet in B flat, op. 67, a gift from a Vienna admirer. He called it "my personal quartet," for, he said, Brahms began its composition on the exact day Casals was conceived and finished it nine months later, on the day Casals was born, Alas, the chronology does not support this affinity. Brahms completed the quartet in 1875, and Casals was not born until more than a year after its public performances. And besides, the date of conception has never been scientifically verified.
In 1899 W . J. Henderson listened to a performance of Till Eulenspiegel and wrote in disgust: "No gentleman would have written that thing. There are places for such music, but surely not before musical assemblages of ladies and gentlemen." Major Higginson, the founder of the Boston Sym phony Orchestra, an amateur musician, and a successful banker, held it as an article of faith that only Germany produced good musicians and that no conductor could lead an orchestra competently except a German. Since he was the main financial supporter of the Boston Symphony, the orchestra had a succession of German conductors from its founding in 1881 to the time of the American entry into World War I, when, as a result of an agitation among super-patriotic New England women, the dignified and socially impeccable Karl Muck, conductor of the Boston Symphony for several years, was placed in a detention camp as an unregenerate Hun and a self-confessed friend of the kaiser.
The first conductor of the Boston Symphony, Georg Henschel, was actually of Polish-Jewish extraction, but Major Higginson was not concerned about racial origin as long as the incumbent was born and educated in Germany. The concerts of the embryonic Boston Symphony were gemütlich affairs. At one concert, on November 9, 1882, Henschel, who began his musical career as a singer, performed with his wife, a duet, "Oh that we two were Maying," of his own composition, "for the benefit of the widow and four children of a Ger man musician and composer of merit who succumbed to fever in Texas in the thirty-fifth year of his age." The identity of the beneficiary remained nameless.
Turgenev, who spent long years in Paris, was periodically in love with young actresses, while living on a fairly permanent basis with the French singer Pauline Viardot. He wrote to one of his loves: "My passion for you is like a chromatic scale mounting in crescendo." In a similar vein, so the story goes, Haydn became friendly in his youth with a charming lady of the Viennese aristocracy. Years passed, and he met her again. "Do you remember me?" she asked him.
"You wrote this for me," and she sang:
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"Oh, yes. Unfortunately, now the tune is," Haydn
In Haydn's oratorio The Creation, there is a pas sage in pizzicato that precedes the sentence, "And there was light!" According to a plausible report, attributed to Haydn himself, this pizzicato represents God striking a piece of sharp flint against whetstone, producing a spark that illuminated the primeval darkness.
The key of C major has for centuries represented the exaltation of the soul and triumph of man.
Beethoven expressed this quality in the finale of the Fifth Symphony, and Scriabin in the orgiastic joy of the concluding pages of his Poem of Ecstasy, in which he holds on to the deep pedal point on C for fifty-three bars. But the modernists of the Viennese school of composition renounced C major as the petit-bourgeois product of Biedermeier culture. Alban Berg used the C major triad in his op era Wozzeck to illustrate the lines, "Da ist wieder Geld, Marie" ( Here is money again, Marie), with the obvious intent to emphasize the vulgarity of money.
Dissonance is the mustard of music. "Discords mingled with concords not onlie are tolerable, but make the descant more pleasing if they be well taken," Thomas Morley declares sententiously in his famous treatise, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke. Alexander Pope said, "All discord, harmony not understood." And Jean Cocteau extolled the aesthetical value of ugliness: "La laideur est toujours la forme le plus récente de la beaute" (Ugliness is always the most recent form of beauty). It is probably possible to train a child to react favorably to a series of unmitigated discords, and to be repelled by triadic harmonies.
The experiment is worth trying in kindergarten.
An apparently non-apocryphal story concerns Paderewski's last years of life. After the destruction of Poland during the Nazi invasion of 1939 and the fall of France, he came to the U.S. and lived in Westchester County. Still vigorous in his eighties, he used to take daily walks. Once he passed by a modest cottage from which there emanated a familiar tune, his classical Minuet in G. But, oh horror, the player neglected the essential F sharp. Paderewski approached the cottage and saw a shingle: "Helen Springle, Teacher of Piano." He knocked at the door, and Miss Springle--it must have been she, for the music stopped-appeared at the door.
"My name is Paderewski," the great man declared. "May I ask a favor of you?" Overwhelmed by this unexpected honor, Miss Springle muttered, "Why, Maestro Paderewski, anything, anything at all!" "Will you please play F sharp in my minuet?" Paderewski requested.
A few days later he happened to pass by the same cottage, and once more the familiar strains of his minuet resounded from the music room. But this time F sharp was firmly in place. There was also a new shingle on the door, which read: "Helen Springle, Teacher of Piano, Only American Pupil of Paderewski." Reading the same words in the wrong language may convert a sincere sentiment into a gross insult. During his professorship at Columbia University, MacDowell received a testimonial from his students with the inscription in large letters: "O singe fort" (0 sing forth), quoting from the line of Flosshilde, one of the nymphs of the Rhine, in the first act of Das Rheingold. MacDowell was momentarily shocked, for in French the words mean "O powerful ape"! Isaac Stern was asked his opinion about his own position among the world's violin virtuosos. " I am the second best violinist in the world," he said.
"And who is the first?" he was asked.
"I can't tell," Stern replied. "They are all friends of mine." An orchestral librarian asked the conductor for the exact duration of a work he had on his pro gram. "With feeling," the conductor replied, "twenty minutes. Without feeling, fifteen minutes." Max Reger used to take his students to the nearest Bierstube for pork sausages and beer after his classes at the Leipzig Conservatory. "Pigs and composers have one thing in common," he re marked. "They are appreciated only after they are dead." A lady admirer of Reger complained that she could not see his face when he conducted an orchestra. Reger reassured her that he looked exactly the same from the front and back, just like his name, which is a palindrome.
A sampler from college examination papers: Lieder are leading German composers.
Arpeggio is faster than allegro.
Classical music is sonatas, cantatas, and traviatas.
Boris Godunov was a modern composer who wrote the opera Faust.
Rimsky-Korsky wrote The Golden Cockle.
The real name of the Moonlight Sonata is Beethoven's Ninth.
Basso ostinato is a mechanical device used by the Italian castrati.
Rossini used to address his letters to his mother as follows: "To Signora Rossini, mother of the celebrated Maestro." Moritz Rosenthal boasted that he could identify any Chopin piece from only two bars. Another Chopin specialist stumped him by sitting down at the piano and playing nothing for three seconds.
The quotation was two bars of rests in Chopin's Scherzo in B flat minor.
From an old advertising column: Piano for sale, the property of a lady leaving the country in a remarkably elegant walnut case.
Piano wanted for a young lady, a beginner with carved legs.
Piatigorsky helped Stravinsky to fix the details of the cello part in his Suite italienne. He advised that in one spot a pizzicato should be followed by a staccato. Stravinsky made the corresponding notation, murmuring, "One belch, one fart."
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(High Fidelity, Jan. 1976)
Also see:
Classical: Milstein's Bach ... Die tote Stadt ... Beethoven choral works.