Great music wouldn’t be quite as great without the colourful characters that over the centuries created great music for us to listen to. Colourful they were and what I find as interesting or enchanting as their music are their life stories and their quips. I have my own favourites and I thought I would share them with you.
‘Ah music! What a beautiful art! But what a wretched profession!’
Aaron Copland was browsing in a bookshop when he saw a customer holding a copy of his book: What to Listen for in Music and also a Shakespeare play. ‘Shall I sign it for you,’ he asked. ‘Which one’, she replied.
Philip Hale was no admirer of Johannes Brahms. He wrote to the New York Herald: ‘someone should request manager Ellis to have a special door built in Symphony Hall with a sign over it in red letters: ‘Emergency Exit in Case of Brahms.’
Composer Daniel Auber (1782 – 1871) refused to attend his own operas and hated listening to new composers. When the work of an aspiring composer was placed before him, he remarked: ‘This boy will go far, when he has less experience.’
If you thought that scathing: A young man sat before Rossini and enthusiastically played through his first composition. As he finished it, the gifted Italian composer raised his hand: ‘That will do, I prefer the second piece.’
A young composer approached Johannes Brahms and asked if he might play for the maestro a funeral march he had composed in honour of Beethoven. Permission granted the young man played his composition. When finished he asked the great man’s opinion: ‘I tell you, said Brahms with disarming candour. ‘I’d be much happier if you were dead and Beethoven had written the march.’
Listening to great music can have a remarkable effect on the listener; especially when experienced in the concert hall. When Hector Berlioz first heard Beethoven’s 7th Symphony he left the theatre. He said afterwards; he was in such a daze he couldn’t find his head to put his hat on.
Not everyone likes Richard Wagner’s musical dramas but those who do can be counted as ecstatic enthusiasts. After a promenade concert which concluded with the third act of his Gotterdammerung, the young audience cheered for half an hour after its end. Then, the performers went to their homes and the theatre’s lights were switched off. The audience carried on cheering in the dark.
The definition of a true musician: when he hears a lady singing in the bathroom, he puts his ear to the keyhole.