“Anecdotes and maxims are rich treasures to the man of the world.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The universe of classical music is jam-packed with musical anecdotes. Frequently these short narratives delineate subtle stories that highlight specific traits of a classical composer or a performer. Often humorous, anecdotes of classical composers don’t simply provoke laughter but can reveal a more general and subtle truth. We find Sophia Corri escaping her inattentive husband in an empty harp case, Beethoven being thrown in jail for vagrancy, and Rossini and Pavarotti both cooking their favorite meals. Napoleon gave free reign to his infatuation with an opera singer, Bach was challenged to a duel, and Frederick the Great had not only a great passion for music but also for a handsome Lieutenant in the Royal Guard. A musical anecdote is part of the process of telling a story, but it means sharing an experience with someone and not simply supplying him or her with information. And don’t worry, embellishment, exaggeration or fictitious invention are all part of the process. Anecdotes of classical composers impart the sense of a lived experience, as they usually involve real people in recognizable places and locations. In fact, musical anecdotes exhibit a special kind of realism and an identifiable historical dimension. Check back with us for more insightful and delightful musical anecdotes.
The year 1802 was a year of despair for Beethoven. His hearing had been declining since 1796 and he had been consulting doctors everywhere. Finally, in mid-1801 he found Professor Johann Schmidt, who became his personal physician until his death
In 1914, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, having entered there ten years earlier at age 14 as the youngest-ever student to enter the Conservatoire. His teachers were the finest in Russia: Glazunov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Lyadov. He
Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 opera L’Orfeo wasn’t the first opera, Jacopo Peri’s Dafne (1598) bears that honour. However, L’Orfeo is the earliest opera that is still on our opera stages, and for an opera to hold our attention for over 400
To begin his new neo-classical period, Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) took a story by Alexander Pushkin and had Boris Kochno, Serge Diaghilev’s personal secretary, create a libretto for a little one-act comic opera. In Pushkin’s poem, a widowed mother and her
In 1936, the French composer Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) wrote incidental music for Le médécin volant (The Flying Doctor), a play by Charles Vildrac based on Molière’s play of the same name, which uses Italian commedia dell’arte characters. The title of
Written in an unusual small format, and with only three movements, the Chamber Symphonies of Darius Milhaud (1892-1974) are perfect pocket symphonies. Begun while he was in Brazil in 1917, while he was serving as the secretary to Paul Claudel,
In the twelve-year cycle of animals that appear in the Chinese zodiac, the mighty tiger surprisingly only comes in as number three. When the Jade Emperor invited all the animals of the world to take part in a race, the
How does a composer look at himself? In these works, covering some 400 years, we’ll see composers’ self-portraits in music and try to discern how they saw themselves. Seeing himself in an allemande rhythm, the French composer François Couperin (1668-1733)
