During his later years, the German composer Johannes Brahms was a frequent visitor to the town of Meiningen, where the Grand Duke had a fine orchestra that gave stellar performances of Brahms’ music.
Early in 1891, Brahms heard one member of that orchestra, the clarinetist Richard Mülhfeld,...Episode details...
The American composer Virgil Thomson was fond of writing what he called “portraits”—musical sketches of people he knew. When asked how he did this, Thomson replied: “I just look at you and I write down what I hear.”
This music by Thomson was a portrait in disguise. It premiered on today’s date...Episode details...
In 1871, one year after the premiere in Munich of Richard Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre,” a German-born American conductor named Theodore Thomas wrote to Wagner asking if he might perform some excerpts of this new work in the United States. Wagner turned him down, probably worried that loose...Episode details...
There’s a fun little book entitled “Great Operatic Disasters,” which chronicles some of the humorous—and some of the harrowing—mishaps that have befallen opera singers and productions over the last few centuries… and September 16th seems to have been a particularly unlucky day in the history of...Episode details...
On today’s date in 1946, at the Yaddo Music Festival in Saratoga Springs, New York, the Walden Quartet gave the first professional performance of the String Quartet No. 2 by the American composer Charles Ives.
Ives’ String Quartet No. 1 was his first major work—its manuscript is dated 1896, back...Episode details...
The year 2002 marked the 10th anniversary of BBC Music Magazine, and to commemorate the occasion, the magazine’s editor asked the British composer Colin Matthews to coordinate a bold commissioning idea: a set of seven orchestral variations on a theme by Henry Purcell, a tune entitled “Hail,...Episode details...
The Grove Dictionary of Music defines the word “aleatory” as follows: “A term applied to music whose composition and/or performance is, to a greater or lesser extent, undetermined by the composer.”
But isn’t music supposed to be organized, planned, determined sound? Isn’t “aleatoric music” a...Episode details...
Today, a love story.
In the year 1840, the immensely talented German pianist Clara Wieck was eagerly awaiting the eve of her 21st birthday, when she would be free to legally marry the 30-year-old composer and music critic Robert Schumann. The couple had hoped to wed years earlier, but the match...Episode details...
On today’s date in 1733, the French composer François Couperin, known as “François Couperin the Great,” died in Paris. The building where Couperin lived for the last decade of his life still stands in Paris at the corner of the rue Radziwill and the rue des Petits Champs, and like the building,...Episode details...
