Great musicians and their amusing stories - Nadia Koval

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mood with which his Italian Symphony begins bears all the hallmarks of a happy man, eager to make his mark on the work and express his travels through music.

      7. Mendelssohn was a lover of Britain and the people of Britain loved him and his music back in equal measure. He traveled throughout the country, with trips to Scotland sparking two of his best loved works – Scottish Symphony and Hebrides Overture.

      8. Mendelssohn was an excellent watercolor painter. He also maintained an enormous correspondence which illustrates his wit. Sometimes he would draw sketches and cartoons in the text of his letters.

      9. Along with composing, Mendelssohn was a highly proficient conductor, being given the position of music director at the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1835 when he was just twenty-six years of age. His concert programs included many of his own works as well as pieces by his contemporaries. He was deluged by offers of music from rising composers including Richard Wagner.

      10. Mendelssohn suffered from poor health in the final years of his life. A hectic final tour of England left him exhausted and ill. He died aged 38 after a series of strokes. Mendelssohn once described death as a place “where it is to be hoped there is still music, but no more sorrow or partings.” Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn died November 4, 1847.

      Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

      W.A.Mozart (1756—1791)

      1. Baptized as Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart, born on January 27, 1756 in Salzburg in what is now Austria. His parents had six children, but only he and his eldest sister, Maria Anna, nicknamed “Nannerl” survived infancy.

      2. His father, Leopold Mozart, was a native of Germany and also composed music, but was primarily a musician for the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg and pedagogue. He wrote a violin textbook which was well received when published in the same year Mozart was born.

      3. Mozart began his training at the age of five and could play the clavier faultlessly. He had already begun composing small snippets of music by that time. Wolfgang’s father was his teacher, instructing him in languages and other academic areas.

      4. From the time he was seven in 1762, he began traveling with his family to perform in various locations around Europe. While traveling with his father to Rome, having heard Allegri’s Miserere in the Sistine Chapel, Mozart transcribed it by ear, creating an unauthorized copy of a work which was jealously guarded by the Vatican.

      5. Constanze Weber was Mozart’s wife, and her father Fridolin’s half-brother was the father of composer Carl Maria von Weber. Constanze had three sisters, Josepha, Aloysia and Sophie, who were all were trained as singers and later performed in premieres of a number of Mozart’s works.

      6. His first symphony was written when he was only eight years old. He composed over 600 works which are cataloged in the “Kochel” and numbered according to the order in which they were composed. Mozart’s Requiem Mass was composed in 1791 and was left unfinished at the time of his death. Mozart composed Requiem with the belief it was for himself. The work was commissioned by an anonymous nobleman, who had intended to pass off the work as his own. The catalog’s number for Requiem is K 626.

      7. Mozart was awarded the Order of the Golden Spur, a prestigious papal order of knighthood bestowed upon individuals who have contributed to the fame of the Church, by Pope Clement XIV in 1770 for his many religious compositions.

      8. The Magic Flute was the last opera Mozart composed and premiered on September 30, 1791, roughly three months before he died. Mozart himself conducted the orchestra, while the librettist, Emanuel Schikaneder, sang the role of Papageno.

      9. Interestingly, his lifelong rival Antonio Salieri claimed he had poisoned Mozart, but this was never verified and regarded to have been false. No one is quite sure of the exact cause of his untimely death, although many people have speculated on the source.

      10. Mozart died on November 20, 1791. Joseph Haydn once told Mozart’s father, “I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition.”

      Carl Nielsen

      Carl Nielsen (1865—1931)

      1. Nielsen the seventh of twelve children born to a poor peasant family in 1865 at Nørre Lyndelse near Sortelung, south of Odense on the island of Funen.

      2. His poor, but not unhappy, rural youth Nielsen described in a moving memoir, My Childhood (1927), a classic of Danish literature.

      3. Taking up the fiddle as a boy to accompany his father at dances, he used it to make a living while composing and landed a job as a second violinist in the Chapel Royal. After 16 years he had still not made it into the firsts. In 1905, a year before the premiere of his opera Maskarade and when he was by now conducting regularly, he was humiliated by the management when they stated he could either return to the second violins or leave. For everyone else’s sake, the Swedes at the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra were more appreciative.

      4. Nielsen’s opinions on other composers was often very catty. Richard Strauss, for instance, was “a most unsympathetic person; a social climber who is already trying to play the great man.” Nor was he afraid to be provocative – “Beethoven, for all his great compositional power, is really only a lyricist.” In most cases, though, history has proved him right.

      5. In 1908, Nielsen became the conductor of the Royal Theater. Though he was met with some criticism and public resistance for his continued departure from the traditions of romanticism in such works as his Third Symphony (Sinfonia espansiva, 1910—1911) and his Violin Concerto (1911), he was emerging to undeniable predominance in Danish music.

      6. Visiting London in 1923 to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra with his Violin Concerto and Fourth Symphony, he had studied up on English in a Hundred Hours sufficiently to crack a joke, “Gentlemen, I am glad to see you. I hope I also will be glad to hear you.”

      7. He once went to tea with the Danish Queen Alexandra, the Queen Mother, and sat with the top button of his trousers undone throughout the proceedings. Perhaps making room for some Danish pastries.

      8. Nielsen found the inspiration for his Second Symphony, “The Four Temperaments,” while sitting in one. As the great Dane himself explained, “On the wall of the room where I was drinking a glass of beer with my wife and some friends hung an extremely comical colored picture, divided into four sections in which “The Temperaments” were represented and furnished with titles: “The Choleric,” “The Sanguine,” “The Melancholic” and “The Phlegmatic.”

      9. He was in his 60s and already suffering from heart disease when he participated in the rehearsals for a new production of Maskarade in Copenhagen. When there was some trouble with the ropes during the dress rehearsal, he offered to hoist himself up into the fly loft by his arms to fix the snags.

      10. Nielsen was admitted to Copenhagen’s National Hospital (Rigshospitalet) on October 1, 1931 following a series of heart attacks. He died there at ten minutes past midnight on October 3rd, surrounded by his family. His last words to them were, “You are standing here as if you were waiting for something.”

      Sergei Prokofiev

      Sergei Prokofiev (1891—1953)

      1.

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