Stories Behind the World's Great Music

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Stories behind the World’s Great Music

By

SIGMUND SPAETH

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

Preface 6

I — Some Ancient History 8

II — The Private Life of J. S. Bach 14

III — Battling Handel and His Victories 21

IV — Pluck and Gluck 28

V — Papa Haydn’s Little Jokes 33

VI — Mozart Writes His Own Requiem 39

VII — Beethoven Learns about People 44

VIII — Weber and the Fields of Fantasy 54

IX — Franz Schubert Gets His Music Paper 58

X — The Schumann Love Story 64

XI — Chopin’s Pianistic Romances 72

XII — The Fortunes of Felix Mendelssohn 78

XIII — Wagner, Women, and Song 84

XIV — The Liszt Cooperative Program 95

XV — Verdi’s Mass Production 101

XVI — So This is Brahms 108

XVII — The Troubles of Tschaikowsky 117

XVIII — Odds and Ends 127

XIX — Some World-famous Tunes 140

XX — Songs of the British Isles 146

XXI — Songs of Germany, France, and Italy 156

XXII — Famous American Songs 163

EPILOGUE 173

Bibliography 174

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 178

DEDICATION

To K. L. S.

Appreciatively

Preface

IT WAS fun to write this book. I am surprised that no one has thought of writing it before. I would not have thought of it myself, except for some rather insistent requests from libraries, book and music stores, and various individuals, including a practical publisher.

My contention has always been that music itself is more important than any person creating or interpreting it, just as baseball is more important than Dizzy Dean or even Babe Ruth. And yet, after discovering that many composers of music actually led more interesting lives than such athletic heroes, I am willing to admit that people could easily become fascinated by the adventures of a Beethoven or a Wagner or a Schubert or a Chopin, without being previously aware of just what they did. Therefore this book is written for a much wider circle than that limited company that we call music lovers.

The material, of course, is unlimited, and it would have been foolish to attempt exhausting or even faintly fatiguing the subject. All that can be done in one volume like this is to touch the high spots and draw attention to the most interesting and exciting events connected with outstanding compositions. I have made no effort to appraise or comment upon the music itself, merely referring to what has become established as important, and assuming that any reader can easily become familiar with any of the music mentioned. Practically all of it, including even some of the obscure folk-music, is now available on phonograph records, which I still consider the best possible aid to a musical background.

But for once I do not insist that my readers listen to a lot of music. I want them to read these stories as they would read fiction, and I have not hesitated to include some which may actually be fiction, simply because they are good stories. As far as possible, however, I have indicated what is fact and what is fancy.

A great deal of beautiful music has been written for no particular reason, and without any special background of the romantic sort. Many such pieces are not even mentioned, and, where their story consists of little more than a date and the name of a place, these details have been covered as briefly as possible. The surprising thing is that so many great compositions offer interesting stories of their creation, which may be considered authentic.

It is surprising also to find how many composers died young, although generally this can be explained on the simple grounds of starvation and bad living conditions. Almost equally surprising is the number of musicians who lived to an almost overripe old age.

The great composers were all human beings, with the good and bad qualities of their more prosaic fellow men. They were all distinctly aware of their genius, but took different methods of impressing the fact on others. Like most artists of any kind, they were full of absurdities of all kinds, with a full share of that complacent vanity that is both irritating and incomprehensibly fascinating to the layman.

But it would be a mistake to think of all composers as vain and absurd and selfish and unreasonable. There were simple and kindly and considerate and modest men among them, as well as mean and vicious and irascible and unmannerly ones. The varieties of human character appear among composers just as they do among cobblers and ditch diggers and manufacturers and salesmen and clergymen.

This book has required a lot of research, and its materials can be found scattered through the dictionaries, the histories, the biographies, and the program notes of other writers, often in far greater detail. I can only say that it has been hard work as well as fun to go through all these sources of information, and that perhaps the hardest part of the job was to leave out things that could be of interest only to scholars and critics and confirmed music-fans. The bibliography at the close indicates to some extent what is available to those who want to make a closer study of the backgrounds of musical composition. Translated quotations are usually taken from these common sources, with occasional touches of my own.

I want to express my thanks to various members of the staff of G. Schirmer and of the public libraries of New York for their generous help, and also to my good friend Katharine Lane Spaeth, a fast and accurate reader and a grand reporter, Now go on with the stories.

SIGMUND SPAETH

WESTPORT, CONN.,

I — Some Ancient History

EVEN the common scale has a story behind it. The word comes from the Latin and Italian scala, and means a staircase. There are many steps in the gradual discovery of this musical staircase by human beings.

About the year 530 B.C., a Greek philosopher named Pythagoras was making some experiments with musical sounds, created by regular vibrations. He had a very good ear, and he was also a very good man, so it was believed by some people that he could actually hear the music of the spheres, a series of harmonizing tones supposedly given out by the whirling planets.

Pythagoras made his experiments with a monochord, that is, a string stretched over a piece of wood. He found that when he held down or stopped the string at a point exactly halfway between its two ends, and then twanged it, each half vibrated twice as fast as the entire string, and gave out a tone which sounded exactly like the original tone, but on a higher level of pitch. He had discovered the interval now known as the octave, and the discovery was one of the most important in the whole history of music.

Just why two tones an octave apart sound so similar is still a bit of a mystery, although scientists have given learned explanations. The important thing is that to any human ear that interval represents the closest consonance that two tones can have, outside of actual unison, or agreement of pitch. The moment Pythagoras discovered the octave, the problem was merely to fill in the possible spaces between the upper and lower tones showing this curious relationship.

Today almost anyone can do it by ear, but it took over two thousand years for the world to arrive at a real consensus of opinion concerning the scale, and there are still plenty of possible arguments. After the octave, the next interval to be discovered was the fourth, and Greek music was for a long time built on a system of tetra-chords, so called because it was assumed that there could be no more than two tones between the upper and lower notes of an interval, making a total of four. For this interval of the fourth, the monochord of Pythagoras would be stopped at a point representing a ratio of 3:4, as compared with the 1:2 of the octave. Later the interval of the fifth was added, with a ratio of 2:3 in its vibrations. (The Greeks called the octave diapason, the fourth diatessaron, and the fifth diapente, but only the first of these names is used nowadays, and most people don’t know what it means.)

It is astonishing how long music managed to exist with no more of a scale than the fourth, fifth, and octave. The Greeks considered the third and the sixth discords, and nobody even thought of such a possibility as a seventh interval.

But gradually the spaces were filled up, for melodic if not harmonic purposes, and about 310 B.C. a pupil of Aristotle’s named Aristoxenus worked out a system of seven octaves. (The word system actually corresponds to the Greek word for the scale itself.)

The seven octaves of Aristoxenus were improved by Ptolemy in the middle of the second century A.D., and he gave them the names Mixolydian, Lydian, Phrygian, Dorian, Hypolydian, Hypophrygian, and Hypodorian. You can find these octaves (or modes, as they were by this time called) by simply striking seven notes in a row on the white keys of the piano, starting at any point. Each progression will sound different, depending on where you start, and the only one that sounds natural and right to modern ears is the one starting on C.

The addition of a lower note (Proslambanomenos) and an extra mode (Hypermixolydian) completed the system that became the basis of all the early church music. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, who lived from A.D. 340 to 397, established the Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, and Mixolydian as the four authentic modes, these corresponding to white-key scales starting on D, E, F, and G respectively. Later Pope Gregory (A.D. 540-604) added four plagal modes, starting on the notes that are now known as Α, B, C, and D.

Gregory’s eight modes or scales were the foundation, of the Gregorian Chant, which adhered to rigid rules, but without harmony or measured time. It was the monk Hucbald of Flanders (A.D. 840-930) who made the first experiments in those directions. The Greeks had sung only in unison, but unconsciously arrived at the perfect harmony of the octave by having men and women sing together. (A woman’s voice, singing the same tones as a man’s, is actually an octave higher.) Hucbald invented a type of harmonizing which he called organum, merely letting two voices sing the same melody four or five tones apart. To find out how it sounded, just play a tune like America starting on F with the right hand and on C with the left, keeping it going in both hands simultaneously. No modern barbershop quartet would stand for it, and unquestionably the later restrictions against consecutive fourths and fifths (now ignored by all composers) were due to the horrors of Hucbald’s organum.

Meanwhile the Christian Church had been getting more and more of a strangle-hold on music, insisting that only the monks had brains enough to write or perform it, and surrounding it with a mass of rules that are totally incomprehensible to the layman, and even to many students of the art. Ironically enough, there were natural musicians all over the world, just as there are today, and these instinctive minstrels and creators of folk-song were arriving at exactly the same results, without benefit of clergy or the scholastic atmosphere of the monasteries. This conflict between labored and natural music is eternal, and has always resulted eventually in the borrowing of natural melodies by the scholars. It is also significant that the Church, which originally tried to preserve a monopoly on music and keep it away from the rest of the world, now leans heavily upon it as a drawing-card, because of its widespread popularity.

GUIDO’S CONTRIBUTIONS

Credit goes to Guido of Arezzo, another monk, (A.D. 995-1050), for the invention of notation and the determination of the scale as we know it today. He also created the sol-fa system of reading music by syllables. This came about through a Latin hymn to St. John the Baptist, each line of which started on a different step of the scale. The Latin words were as follows:

Ut queant laxis

Resonare fibris

Mita, gestorum

Famuli tuomm

Solve pollute

Labii reatum

Sancte Johannes.

A free translation would be: In order that Thy servants, with loose vocal chords, may sing again and Again the wonders of Thy deeds, absolve our polluted lips from blame, O Saint John! The significance of this hymn lies in the opening syllable to each line, which Guido used as a name for the tone of the scale that it represented. Ut was later changed to do, and for a seventh tone (which did not appear in Guido’s original scale) the initials S.I. of the final line provided the symbol si, now often changed to ti. Guido added an extra tone below ut, for which he used the Greek letter gamma. Thus gamma-ut created the word gamut, applying to the scale as a whole, and eventually to the whole compass of emotions, etc., Guido also used the letters C, G, and F, on various lines of the musical staff, to indicate pitch, and these letters were later transformed into the clefs of modern music.

In the thirteenth century Franco of Cologne worked out the system of measures and notes of different time values, from the shortest (brevis) to the longest (maxima), and these names survive in the breves, minims, etc., of English notation. (In America the preference is for a system of whole, half, quarter, eighth, and sixteenth notes, figured according to fractions.)

Among the earliest Latin hymns is Veni Creator Spiritus, of which many stories are told. It has been considered an Ambrosian chant of the fourth century, but there are those who attribute its composition to Charlemagne. This theory rests on the fact that Charlemagne’s grandson, Charles the Bold, sent the hymn as his own in return for a composition by Notker, Sancti Spiritus adsit nobis gratia, supposedly inspired by the sound of a mill wheel. It has been well established that the troops of Joan of Arc sang Vent Creator Spiritus before every battle, just as Tipperary and The Long, Long Trail were sung in the World War.{1}

Another old Latin hymn famous in history is the Dies Irae, written by St. Thomas of Celano early in the thirteenth century. Its words tell of the day of wrath as prophesied by Zephaniah, and it has always been used as a hymn for the dead, being substituted in the Requiem Mass for the Gloria and the Credo. (Its author was the close friend and biographer of St. Francis of Assisi.) The words were later set to music by Mozart, Cherubini, Berlioz, Verdi, and others, and the original hymn figured prominently in the French Revolution.

An early Te Deum, attributed to St. Ambrose, and now known as the Roman version, is still widely sung, and its melody was used by Palestrina and other composers. The words have naturally enjoyed a great variety of settings, of which Handel’s are perhaps the most important. One of the earliest versions of the Ave Maria still in use goes back to the Gregorian music of the tenth century. There is also a Kyrie Eleison of this period, utilized by Frescobaldi, Bach, and others.

One of the most famous compositions of all time is the English song, Sumer is icumen in. It is the oldest piece of harmonized music still sung today, the oldest known example of a canon (round) and of a ground bass, the oldest six-part composition in existence, one of the oldest examples of the major mode in music (most of the Gregorian and Ambrosian chants had the effect of minor), and the oldest known manuscript having both sacred and secular words. This remarkable specimen, of which the original is in the British Museum, is usually dated about 1240, although it might have been as early as 1227. The English words are in the Wessex dialect, and it seems to have been written down by John of Fornsete at Reading Abbey. The original composer may have been Wulfstan of Winchester. A Latin text (Perspice Christicola) was added for performance at Reading. Technically, Sumer is icumen in is an infinite canon or round, for four voices, all starting on the same level of pitch, with two extra parts, also in canon form, acting as ground basses. The importance of the piece lies not only in its indication of the antiquity, of polyphonic music in England, but in its evidence that the churchmen could produce something more than the routine and rather dreary progression of ecclesiastical chants.

No physical conclusion is of musical value which the ear does not endorse, said Guido d’Arezzo. While the Church was proceeding laboriously to build up a technique and a science of music, the art was developing naturally and spontaneously in all the other walks of life, from simple rhythms required for the easing of manual labor, through easily remembered melodies, to the unconscious beauty of popular and national expression which the scholars were eventually forced to recognize.

Ancient music of the civilized type seems to have originated in Assyria and Egypt and to have spread gradually over the rest of the world. But there is evidence that even the most savage tribes had some sort of music, if nothing more than the rhythm of drums.

By the time of the Middle Ages, the spirit of minstrelsy had spread throughout Europe in various forms. The bards of the northern countries go back to very ancient times (the Grecian Homer was of the same type), and these were ultimately distinguished from the minstrels, who not only sang and composed words and music, but did tricks and took part in plays as well. In France musical knights or gentlemen were called troubadours or trouvéres, as distinguished from the jongleurs or jugglers and the menestrels. In Italy a troubadour was known as trovatore, as in Verdi’s opera. The German Minnesinger ("singer of love-songs’ ‘) was of the same type.

SOME FAMOUS TROUBADOURS

Richard Cœur de Lion was a troubadour, and so was his friend, Blondel, who found him in prison through singing a song that was familiar to them both. But musically the most significant man of this type was Adam de la Halle, known as the Hunchback of Arras, who went to Naples to help the Duke of Anjou in avenging the Sicilian Vespers (also turned into an opera by Verdi; see page 202), There he composed what may be considered the earliest opera, Robin and Marion, a pastoral drama with music. It contained one of the most popular of old French tunes, L’Homme armé, which was actually introduced into the church service and made the basis of some specially written Masses.

The contests of the Minnesingers were held at the Wartburg, in Eisenach (later the birthplace of Bach) and the characters of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, Walter von der Vogelweide, and Tannhäuser himself, were all real men in history. Gottfried von Strassburg, another Minnesinger, was responsible for the Teutonic version of Tristan und Isolde, while Wolfram von Eschenbach put the stories of Lohengrin and Parsifal into the form used by Wagner. The Mastersingers came later, representing various guilds, and they also held competitions, but more in the spirit of technical rules than of the romantic flights of the Minnesingers. Hans Sachs, the shoemaker of Nuremberg, was the best known Meistersinger, later also immortalized by Wagner.{2}

As part-singing developed, everyone became interested in the complexities of harmony, not as it is known today, but in the so-called polyphonic or many-voiced style, with each part essentially an independent melodic line. This type of music grew so complicated, particularly in the madrigals of England, Italy, and the Netherlands, that instruments were finally needed to play the parts, which had gone beyond the limits of the human voice.

Meanwhile the music of the Church had become corrupted by the growing inclusion of popular melodies and an increasing disregard for the traditions of style. (What modern organist was it that first thought of playing A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight as an anthem?) The man who saved the situation and proved for all time how effective ecclesiastical music could be, without loss of dignity or sacrifice of convention, was Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (the last name being that of his birthplace).

One of the most popular of all musical stories concerns Palestrina, and it is worth telling even though it may be entirely untrue. It is said that the Council of Trent had definitely decided to drop music from the Church because of the abuses that had crept in. Palestrina, who at the time was choirmaster at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome, but without experience as a composer, had a vision in which he was told to write a Mass in a certain style and take it to the Pope (Pius IV). The result was the famous Missa Papae Marcelli which became a model for such music and resulted in Palestrina’s appointment at the Vatican. It is true that the Council of Trent seriously criticized and perhaps thought of abandoning the music of the Church, but the Mass in question seems to have been written earlier than this historic meeting. Actually Palestrina had been working for years to arrive at the perfection of style which marks his finest work. He remains the greatest figure in ecclesiastical music before the time of Bach.

It was Bach who, in his Well-tempered Clavichord, put the final touches on the scale, showing how it could be adapted to the convenience of human ears and how it is the logical basis of all civilized music; and it is Bach who is the logical leader in a great procession of master composers, each offering a wide variety of stories behind the music that he created.

II — The Private Life of J. S. Bach

OUR organist—what is the young man’s name?—oh, yes, Johann Sebastian Bach! He seems badly in need of discipline. We gave him a month’s leave of absence that he might hear the great Dietrich Buxtehude in Lübeck. It is now three months since he left, and we hear nothing of him."

These ominous words are spoken by one of the deacons of the New Church in Arnstadt, where Bach has been employed since his eighteenth year.

Remember he has to walk over two hundred miles each way. That takes time, suggests a milder pillar of the church.

Not three months, insists the first speaker. Besides the lad is strong and has had good practice in walking.

There is considerable discussion of what should be done to this independent young musician, who three years ago had won the post of organist and choirmaster by a brilliant display of musicianship which left them all gasping for breath. It is decided that there must be at the very least a citation, meaning a formal complaint, demanding explanation of his conduct, with hints of possible dismissal.

Various items appear in the citation, as more and more of Bach’s indiscretions are revealed. He is charged with having played unseemly variations on the organ during chorales, throwing the congregation off. There is objection also to the great length and unseemly figuration of his preludes, intermixing many strange sounds so that thereby the congregation were confounded.

Someone stops to ask, Who is the strange maiden who now regularly appears to make music in the choir? and the question is duly entered in the citation. (They found out when Bach married her a year later that she was his cousin, Maria Barbara, an excellent singer, who bore him seven children before she died in 1720.)

This Johann Sebastian Bach seems to have been a very determined person, even in his youngest days. There is a story that as a boy he copied an entire volume of music by moonlight, a task requiring six months, only to have his manuscript confiscated by the cruel brother who had refused to lend him the original. He had walked repeatedly from his school at Lüneburg to Hamburg, a distance of twenty-five miles each way, merely to hear some good music.{3}

Bach’s desire to hear Buxtehude was a natural one. This Danish musician had made an international reputation, not only by his organ playing, but by