Ein Heldenleben might be the most egotistical piece in the orchestral repertoire—a musical depiction of one Richard Strauss battling villainous music critics, romancing a lady, reminiscing over past triumphs, and settling into a happy ending.
“You are to imagine, then, an American, visiting Paris, swinging down the Champs-Elysees on a mild, sunny morning in May or June.”
At the 1961 New York Philharmonic gala, probably the entire Carnegie Hall audience had seen West Side Story, owned the LP, and could hum its tunes. But Bernstein wanted to do more than a medley of hits for this special concert.
Citizens of Leipzig who attended the 1724 Good Friday Vespers service at St. Nicholas Church would have heard the first performance of St. John Passion, written by the town’s new director of religious music, J.S. Bach.
The style of the early 18th century would soon seem antiquated, and nearly irrelevant to the modern orchestra of the mid-19th century and beyond. But none of it would have been possible without the innovations of the Baroque era.
Before the symphony gained prestige in the second half of the 18th century, concertos and arias were the star genres of the Baroque era.
Mozart wrote the Rondo in D Major in 1782 as an alternate finale to his Piano Concerto No. 5, which he had composed almost a decade earlier. In the intervening years, he had quit his job in Salzburg and moved to Vienna with “a kick on my arse” from the Archbishop.
In 1885 the New York philanthropist Jeannette Thurber founded the National Conservatory of Music of America, and in 1892 recruited Dvořák to be its director. In the words of H. L. Mencken, he was hired to “introduce Americans to their own music.”
Led by the clarinetist Simeon Bellison, the Zimro Ensemble grew out of the Jewish art music movement. Prokofiev agreed to write a piece for them based on Ashkenazic melodies.
You can hear the icy snow and the “harsh breath of a horrid wind.” Rarely if ever before had instrumental music so vividly depicted real-life scenes.