Settling Scores

Liszt in Weimar

“Do I care how fast you can play your octaves?”, Liszt remarked to a pupil in a master class, clearly unimpressed with the playing “what I wish to hear is the canter of the horses of the Polish cavalry before they gather force and destroy the enemy!”

Philip Glass and La Boulangerie

In his recently published memoirs, Words Without Music (2015), the American minimalist composer Philip Glass tells the story of a lesson in musical counterpoint he had one afternoon with the formidable Nadia Boulanger.

A Bohemian in New York

Antonín Dvořák (1841 – 1904) was a genial, unassuming man for whom life was “a very wonderful, uncomplicated thing”. Arriving in New York in 1892, his patron handed him over to the music critic James Huneker for the day’s excursion. This started innocently enough with Mass at a Bohemian church, but it soon degenerated into…

Béla Bartók, Out of Doors

Budapest – a fine city. Formerly a provincial backwater made up of three small towns (Buda, Pest and Obuda), at the turn of the 20th century it was Europe’s fastest growing metropolis and a symbol of Hungarian national pride, the population ballooning from around 300,000 in 1870 to over a million in 1910.

The Four Temperaments

The Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865 – 1931) once noticed a panel of four amateurishly coloured pictures hanging on the wall of a village inn. “I laughed out loud and belittled these pictures”, he later recalled “but my mind constantly returned to them … these crude pictures contained some type of seed or idea”. His…

Sabre Dance

Together with Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev, Aram Khachaturian (1903 – 1978) is considered one of the three giants of Soviet music, albeit the most conservative for he wrote colourful, evocative and unashamedly tuneful music with a broad popular appeal.

Scenes from Childhood

It was during a visit to Maxen Castle in 1846 that Robert Schumann (1810 – 1856) had his head examined. He lived in fear of the streak of manic depression that had claimed the life of his elder sister through suicide. However this was no ordinary examination. It was performed by Robert Noel, the famous English…

The Carnival of the Animals

The attitude of the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw towards Saint-Saëns’ music was fairly typical for the time. He accused him of plagiarism, saying that if Bach, Meyerbeer and Gounod were taken out of the scores, all that would remain would be “nothing but graceful knick-knacks, barcarolles, serenades, ballets and the like”.

Brave New World

In December 1790, shortly before his departure for London, Joseph Haydn (1732 – 1809) dined with his friend and former pupil Mozart, and the Dutch aristocrat, Baron Gottfried van Swieten. Mozart was uneasy; Haydn was famous internationally but had rarely travelled, having spent most of the previous 30 years ensconced in rural Eisenstadt as the…

Murder, He Wrote …

In his day, Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (c1561 – 1613) was known as “il musical macellaio di Venosa” (the musical butcher of Venosa), not for his provocative musical harmonies but for his unseemly penchant for murder.