This week’s self esteem-busting trivia text message chronicled the fact that Mozart wrote over 30 symphonies between the age of 8 and 19. Crazy talk, right? Right.
Another fun fact. His birth name was super long! Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart. Yup.
Below is an excerpt from Mozart’s Symphony No. 1, written at the age of 8.
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Staying Cool with Classical Music and Salon97
by Holly Payne, Skywriter Books
Last but not least! Holly wrote a beautiful story about her experience attending a Salon97 listening party. Thank you, Holly!
Finding America’s Composers
by Rob Deemer, NY Times
A fabulous accounting of how one musician’s career morphed from aspirations of being a band teacher to becoming a composer and radio curator — and who he met along the way.
Brazil’s Orchestral Crisis
by Norman Lebrecht, Slipped Disc
Drama, classical style. Conductor who forced many musicians to re-audition for their seats now has to take a reduced role with the orchestra.
San Francisco Opera’s Ring Cycle a Financial Hit
By Sarah Duxbury, San Francisco Business Times
How lucky we were to have this amazing production here in San Francisco! It’s fantastic to hear that the hall was at nearly 100% capacity every night and that they reaped financial success. Bravo, SF Opera!
Since Salon97 exists to school you on the awesomeness of classical music, we’re adding a new feature to our website! Each week we’ll post a selection of interesting/funny/inspiring articles collected over the past seven days (and a few extra days this time since this is our first post of this nature). Have something to add? Please leave a comment!
Vivaldi: A Canadian composer, eh?
By Murray Charters, Brantford Exhibitioner
Is there a connection between Antonio Vivaldi and Canada? You be the judge.
Last week my dear friend Holly shared a poem she came across in Writer’s Almanac. It’s simple beauty speaks for itself, and I wanted to share it with all of you.
Bach and My Father by Paul Zimmer
Six days a week my father sold shoes
To support our family through depression and war,
Nursed his wife through years of Parkinson’s,
Loved nominal cigars, manhattans, long jokes,
Never kissed me, but always shook my hand.
Once he came to visit me when a Brandenburg
Was on the stereo. He listened with care—
Brisk melodies, symmetry, civility, and passion.
When it finished, he asked to hear it again,
Moving his right hand in time. He would have
Risen to dance if he had known how.
“Beautiful,” he said when it was done,
My father, who’d never heard a Brandenburg.
Eighty years old, bent, and scuffed all over,
Just in time he said, “That’s beautiful.”
If you were never curious about J.S. Bach‘s Brandenburg Concerti before, you probably are now! Here is the most famous segment of Bach’s Brandenburg Conerti–Brandenburg Concerto No. 1, First Movement:
b. January 29, 1862 in Bradford, Yorkshire, England
d. June 10, 1934 Grez-sur-Loing, France
Born to German parents, Frederick Delius was born Fritz Albert Theodore Delius; he anglicized his name in the early 1900s.
Delius spent time apprenticing with his father, a wool distributor, before leaving for the United States to run an orange plantation in Florida. He spent a year-and-a-half there and was endlessly fascinated with the songs of the plantation workers he saw every day. While in Florida, he spent the majority of his time studying music theory and absorbing the local sounds and music. He went on to Virginia to teach music.
Delius later studied at the Leipzig Conservatory before moving to France, where he remained for the rest of his life.
This iconic composer drew his influences from many sources — the African American music he heard in the plantations, Nordic folk songs and Wagner were all included in the mix.
Delius managed to continue composing late into his years of being stricken with syphilis, largely due to the gracious help of young composer Eric Fenby, who agreed to work as a scribe for Delius.
And now for some awesome music by Frederick Delius!
Do you get seasick? Igor Stravinsky didn’t. He got sea drunk. A big difference, he said! If you’re subscribed to our weekly trivia SMS, you saw his direct quote–”I never am seasick. Never. I am sea drunk.”
We know and love Stravinsky for his ground-breaking and riot-inducing Rite of Spring.
Another bit of trivia — though Russian-born, Stravinsky was a naturalized citizen of the United States *and* France! Are you itching to learn more? The coming week’s trivia SMS involves Stravinsky as well.
Just text SALON97 to 41411 or enter your number in the red box on the right-hand side of this site. It’s easy, fun, and FREE.
Franz Peter Schubert, a chamber music extraordinaire and one of the few truly Viennese composers, lived a short but very prolific life. He’s our Composer of the Week and he rocks!
b. January 31, 1797 in Vienna, Austria
d. November 19, 1828
Schubert was the youngest of five out of nine surviving children. He was taught to play the violin by his schoolmaster father and piano by his oldest brother.
It became apparent quite quickly that Schubert was musically talented, and soon after this realization he became a choir boy and was admitted to the Imperial and Royal City College. While at Royal City College he wrote his first compositions and also met the great Antonio Salieri.
At age 17, Schubert set Goethe’s Faust to create “Gretchen am Spinnrade”–his first lieder masterpiece. A year later he wrote symphonies, attempted 4 operas, chamber music and 150 songs. In 1819 he spent a summer in the countryside, which inspired the writing of the famed Trout Quintet.
Schubert was known to be slovenly in appearance–he often slept in his clothes and glasses. Despite this he was always very diligent about composing and wrote every morning. He was his most prolific while on composition retreats and wrote significantly less at times when he was teaching.
Though it is Symphony No. 8 that is referred to as the infamous “Unfinished Symphony” all but one of his symphonic projects were unfinished and Symphony No. 9 “The Great” was the only completed symphony he wrote.
A selection from Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 “Unfinished”:
The Moonlight Sonata is among the most recognized compositions by one of the most recognized composers. Filmmakers know this, so when they decide to use it, it’s not the musical counterpart to the hero getting out of bed (unless there’s a corpse in there with her) or buying a mop (unless it’s to stab a pursuing serial killer). The Moonlight Sonata (given name Piano Sonata No. 14) can’t help but call attention both to itself and heighten the drama of the scene it supports. Which means its mostly reserved for climaxes, montages and closing credits.
My favorite exception is Gus Van Sant’s 2003 film Elephant which has the piece stuck way down in the sound mix of a sequence early on in the movie. Van Sant and cinematographer Harris Savides open on the athletic field of a high school, a pickup game of football being in the foreground, gym class mid-session in the distance. Students jog in and out of frame. One of the kids the movie has been paying attention to thus far enters, looks up at the sunless low sky and walks away. Another enters, puts on a sweatshirt and walks towards the school building. The remaining three minutes follow the student wearing the sweatshirt walking into school, passing a group of girls who eye him and finally meeting up with his girlfriend at the end of the hall. The scene lasts nearly six minutes and is photographed in a single unbroken shot. Nothing of consequence happens. But the music tells us that something soon will.
Elephant is a fictional retelling of the 1999 Columbine High School Massacre. It begins as an ordinary day at an ordinary high school and ends with two students gunning down their classmates and teachers. It does not explain their motivation nor give us, the audience, a chance to speculate. The closing credits begin as the final bullet is fired.
Elephant won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2003 and generated plenty of controversy. It was the first fictional retelling of the Columbine tragedy. Van Sant’s unwillingness to offer explanations, solace or answers was viewed in many circles as callous and self-serving. In 2005, Jeff Weise killed 9 people at his high school in Red Lake, Minnesota and had apparently watched Elephant as a tutorial a few weeks prior.
Knowing none of that, Elephant will still make you uneasy. And that has everything to do with the director’s choice of tone and music. The tagline of the film is “An ordinary high school day, except that it’s not,” and the most important word here is “ordinary.” A movie is by definition the photographic capture of a set of exceptional circumstances but Van Sant works extra hard to make this one seem workaday. His young cast is entirely non professionals who use their real first names. The day in question is overcast, probably midweek, early spring or fall, no pep rallys, no graduation or prom coming. There are no obvious turns of plot, no scene stealing performances, no fancy camera tricks. Even the lead up to the massacre feels meandering and incidental, an inevitable horror made more so by how little effort the film makes in calling attention to it.
The only music of note in Elephant is Beethoven and a small assortment of the composer’s best known pieces. Within the score resides the film’s uncomfortable, contradictory heart. The music is iconic, the film an interpretation of modern day folklore. Yet by making it all seem so everyday, Van Sant yanks the comfort icons provide out from under us. We cannot say the horrible things that occur here are exceptional or rare. We must instead acknowledge that they are all too common and that part of what makes us human is our bottomless capacity to turn our own madness and rage on one another.
Elephant was the second film in Gus Van Sant’s “Death Trilogy.” He had been a successful studio director with movies like Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester but wished to return to his origins both in smaller-of-scale, lower-budget arthouse projects and Portland, Oregon where he lived. Beethoven was 31 when he composed The Moonlight Sonata and had just begun to lose his hearing. Historians have argued that he composed the piece for a young student whom he loved, even though Beethoven himself wrote that his inspiration was sitting at the bedside of a dying friend.
The Moonlight Sonata emerges from those archetypal brambles–music by an artist losing his instrument, motivated by both love and death. Van Sant, another artist in a time of great personal and creative transition, took the piece and re-engaged it with its contradictions. We know the music, we know nothing is happening in the scene where it is used. Its beauty and horror comes from knowing something will and that nothing on this ordinary day can protect us. We must, like the students at this high school, wait, then watch.
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