“The only love affair I have ever had was with music.”
Maurice Ravel
The history of classical music, however, is full of fabulously gifted individuals with slightly more earthy ambitions. Love stories of classical composers are frequently retold within a romanticized narrative of sugarcoated fairy tales. To be sure, happily-ever-after stories do on rare occasions take place, but it is much more likely that classical romances lead to some rather unhappy endings. Johannes Brahms had an overriding fear of commitment, Claude Debussy drove his wife into an attempt at suicide, Francis Poulenc severely struggled with his sexual identity, and Percy Grainger was heavily into whips and bondage. And that’s only the beginning! The love life of classical composers will sometimes make you weep, or alternately shout out with joy or anguish. You might even cringe with embarrassment as we try to go beyond the usual headlines and niceties to discover the psychological makeup and the societal and cultural pressures driving these relationships. Classical composer’s love stories are not for the faint hearted; they are heightened reflections of humanity at its best and worst. Accompanying these stories of love and lust with the compositions they inspired, we are able to see composers and their relationships in a completely new light.
The most important and influential address for artistic matters at the turn of the 20th century Budapest was the salon of Emma Gruber. Mrs. Gruber was born Emma Schlesinger in the southern Hungarian town of Baja, daughter of wealthy merchants.
As long as anybody could remember, Niels Gade had always been in love with music! He taught himself to play a variety of instruments, and started composing at a super early age. Once his musical education was formalized, he steadfastly
All great composers have one! And legacy composers have several! I am talking about biographies, offering basic facts about education, work, relationships, and possibly, analysis of the composer’s personality. Any detailed, scholarly or interpretive study of music starts with solid
Although he was born in a suburb of London, Sir Arthur Bliss was half American. His father Francis Edward Bliss, a successful businessman from Massachusetts, had settled in England after marrying his second wife Agnes Kennard Davis. When Agnes died,
In the summer of 1830, the 20-year-old Robert Schumann abruptly ended his law studies at Heidelberg University and decided to become a musician. His mother arranged a musical apprenticeship with Friedrich Wieck in Leipzig, and the 11-year-old Clara Wieck writes
Working on tape-based techniques of looping and phasing by using recordings of fragments of speech, Steve Reich created a compositional process involving structures of minimalist art and musical technique. Simultaneously, Beryl Korot was working along very similar lines in the
Simultaneously completing his compositional requirements at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and working as a freelance music teacher, Alexander Grechaninov and Vera Ivanovna Röhrberg had trouble making ends meet. Luckily, Vera received a small monthly allowance from her father so that
Although his father was set steadfastly against it, Alexander Grechaninov was determined to become a musician. He abruptly left High School and was accepted at the Moscow Conservatory on a partial scholarship. During his years of study he witnessed the