Spiegelgasse today (Franz Jachim, Vienna)

Mozart’s 40th symphony is one of his most emotionally charged (dare I say Romantic?) works. It’s one of only two major symphonies he composed in dark minor keys (the other is #25, also in g minor). And it’s one of three late, lonely symphonies that he actually meant to be played in a casino.

The wonder is that he wrote the fortieth at all.

Over a period of 16 years (he started at age 8!) Mozart composed well over 3 dozen symphonies, and several more that were really slightly tweaked opera overtures. But once Archbishop Colloredo’s literal kick in the pants had launched Mozart into his life as a freelance musician in Vienna, he had little further use for symphonies. In the nine years he had left in this world, Mozart created only a half-dozen more.

No wonder. By 1781, when Mozart descended on Vienna, symphonies were falling out of fashion there. What the Viennese clamored for, at least at first, was Mozart at the keyboard. They filled the theatres for his operas, and for a while they even were willing to pay him handsomely - in advance, no discounts or refunds, thank you very much - for music lessons. His purse jingled a happy tune. Symphonies? There was no money to be made from them, so why write them?

He did knock out a few symphonies for specific occasions - in seven years, all of three. But the big symphonic revival came 1788. Mozart composed three more, his last, all in that one year. They’re the ones we call numbers 39, 40, and 41.

Why symphonies? Why then?

Seven years on, Vienna had begun to drift away from Mozart. The needy composer had mined the virtuoso vein voraciously, and it was nearly played out. Then there were matters over which Mozart had no control. The emperor’s reforms - exactly what Mozart admired about him - had taken money out of the pockets of the wealthy, so they were less interested in concerts and commissions. The reforms had benefitted the rising middle class, and they’d filled seats at Mozart’s concerts a few years before. But the Turkish War had sapped everyone’s resources and enthusiasm.

Mozart’s operas were still doing decent box office, but rumors circulated that the Opera would soon be disbanded. It was running a deficit, and the imperial treasury was rapidly draining away into the war. In the end, the Opera survived, but the whispering (and some actual pink slips) drove away some of the best singers - and the audiences.

Mozart’s income was sliding. But Mozart had rubbed elbows with nobility! Surely he deserved to live just as graciously as his musical colleagues - Salieri included - who had steady salaries from their court positions.

So he did. Between his profligate ways and Constanze’s worsening health (no surprise, since he kept her in a nearly constant state of pregnancy), Mozart was spiraling downward into debt. He wrote to his fellow Mason J M Puchberg, “Life becomes impossible when one must bide one’s time between various odd bits of income.”

Mozart was writing to ask Puchberg for - what else? - money. Nor was Puchberg the only one. By 1788 Mozart’s letters to his sister Maria Anna speak ever less of his full datebook, and ever more of his empty pockets.

Finally, desperate for some income, Mozart made plans for an autumn concert series. Phillipp Otto had just opened a new casino in the Spiegelgasse in Vienna. A couple of years before, Mozart had had some success with a "concerts in the casino" series at Trattner’s casino. Maybe Otto’s would work even better.

Initially Mozart sketched out a piano concerto for this series. He gave it up, though, maybe realizing that Mozart at the keyboard wasn’t quite the draw it had been. Instead, perhaps ready to try anything that might attract the jaded and uneasy Viennese, Mozart turned back to the symphonic world he’d mostly neglected.

Mozart had moved yet again, trying to cut his expenses. Although the new digs were cheaper, he now he had an idyllic garden in which to put pen to manuscript paper. There Mozart composed the turbulent 40th, along with its sunnier neighbors the 39th and 41st, during a 2-month period that summer.

Legend has it that Mozart never heard the 40th symphony performed, but that’s very unlikely. It’s tough to be certain, because Mozart’s letters, usually our best map of his musical life, are maddeningly thin on details. However, it appears that he did succeed in mounting at least one of the autumn concerts: Mozart wrote to Puchberg, offering him tickets. Alas, there’s no date on the letter. Although we’re pretty sure that Salieri used it in a benefit for the Tonkünstlersocietät in April of 1791, we may never know for sure whether Mozart’s 40th symphony was actually played where he intended it to be - in the casino in the Spiegelgasse.

Royal Fireworks (Wikimedia Commons)

The War of the Austrian Succession sapped Europe’s prosperity and will from 1840 to 1848. As soon as the ink was dry on the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, England was ready for a celebration. It was set for 27 April, 1749, and it was to be a magnificent party with fireworks and music provided by none other than the great Handel.

For some reason, though, apparently King George wasn’t too keen on the idea of having any music at all! Or so we read in a series of rather huffy letters which flew among Handel, the king’s Master General of Ordnance (who had the say-so over military music), and Charles Frederick, who had been assigned the remarkable title of Comptroller of his Majesty’s Fireworks for War as for Triumph. However, once Handel had assured the King that the music wouldn’t be overly long, "he was better satisfied."

But he "hoped there would be no fiddles."

There were none.

Handel did try a few times to sneak a few violins into the band, but in the end (perhaps placing some significant value on his own head) he bowed to George’s wishes — and to practicality, since for outdoor performance in such a situation, strings wouldn’t really have added much. His ensemble was as "warlike" as they come. And it was big: 9 trumpets, 9 horns, 24 oboes, 12 bassoons, 3 pair of kettledrums, and an unspecified number of side drums. What a magnificent amount of volume it must have made!

A public rehearsal of Handel’s music on 21 April in Vauxhall Gardens drew a record crowd of 12,000, causing a 3-hour traffic jam on London Bridge. Maybe the tie-up was more newsworthy than the music; the press tells us much more about the rehearsal than about the actual performance at Green Park on the 27th. However, one report identifies Handel’s music by its alternate name — A Grand Overture of Warlike Instruments.

Though we know it today as Music for the Royal Fireworks, it appears that Handel’s music didn’t actually play during the fireworks display. That was a good thing for the musicians. The display was apparently a bit disappointing: "The rockets and whatever was thrown up into the air succeeded mighty well; but the wheels, and all that was to compose the principal part, were pitiful and ill-conducted, with no changes of coloured fires and shapes: the illumination was mean, and lighted so slowly that scarce anybody had patience to wait the finishing." But more significantly, one of the pavilions — almost exactly where Handel’s band had been playing the hour before — caught fire during the fireworks and burned to the ground.

Not one to let good music lie, Handel programmed his Grand Overture of Warlike Instruments on many other occasions, including a performance at the Foundling Hospital a month later.

And yes, he often added strings.

Louise Farrenc was a student of Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and later studied with Anton Reicha at the Paris Conservatory.

In 1842, when she was 38 years old, Farrenc started a nearly 30-year career as Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatory. Hers was considered one of the most prominent musical positions in all of Europe. That made her the only female professor of music to be hired in the nineteenth century at the famous Paris Conservatory.

One day in late 1884, after his daily walk to the railway station in Prague, Dvorak said "The first subject of my new symphony flashed into my mind on the arrival of the festive train bringing our countrymen from Pest." The Czechs he was talking about were in fact coming to the Prague National Theatre for a concert. But there was a darker side of the event. The concert was in support of the political struggles of the Czech nation. That night, Dvorak resolved that his new symphony would reflect this struggle.

Hector Berlioz saw a performance by the famous Irish actress, Harriet Smithson, and fell in love with her. Today, the authorities might watch him, because it was more of an obsession — almost to the point to breaking modern stalking laws.

He remembered the exact date. It was a performance of Ophelia, on September 11th, 1827. He began writing love letters to her while she was still in Paris, one after another. She never answered them. That might have had something to do with the fact that his English was worse than her French. They did not meet while she was in his Paris.

Hurt by her non-response (though he blamed unreliable mail delivery), Berlioz did what any broken-hearted musician would do — he composed the largest symphony since Beethoven’s Ninth. When it premiered in Paris on December 5, 1830, it shocked its audience — but not Harriet Smithson, who wasn’t there. As a matter of fact, it would not be for another two years, when he sent a bunch of the best tickets to a mutual friend, that Smithson would hear the piece, and read the notes that all but mention her by name. Only then did she know of this composer who had been trying to get her attention. They met months later, and eventually married.

The marriage was a pretty happy one at first, despite the serious problem of the aforementioned communication gap. But her career was on the wane while his was on the rise, and she had trouble dealing with that. Her long-term drinking problem worsened, until she was totally debilitated, and deeply in debt.

Though Berlioz never stopped worshiping Smithson for the rest of her life, and never stopped caring for her and trying to pay her many debts, he forced himself to move on. He and Smithson had one son, Louis, who joined the merchant navy, and eventually made it to the rank of commander. When Louis died in 1867 of yellow fever while on duty at Havana, it hit Berlioz so hard that he could not recover. In less than two years, Hector Berlioz too was dead. He was 65.

Felix Mendelssohn (Wikimedia Commons)

Two hundred years ago today, February 3rd, 1809, Abraham and Lea Mendelssohn welcomed a baby boy who would eventually produce, introduce and reintroduce the world to his and other composers’ (notably JS Bach’s) elegant and inventive music.

Many of Felix Mendelssohn’s greatest compositions have never been published, but thanks to the work of an organization called The Mendelssohn Project, some of these lost compositions are now coming to light and to the concert hall.

Listen to Unearthing Mendelssohn’s Lost Works at NPR.org

The “Rach 3″ (Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto) is one of the 20th-century masterpieces. Sergei Rachmaninoff composed it on his family’s country estate, Ivanovka. In the photo, he is looking over the final proofs of the concerto at Ivanovka.

The estate had been in the family for generations, but within a decade after these photos were supposedly taken, as was common after the Revolution with aristocratic families in Russia, the Bolsheviks confiscated the estate. After that, Rachmaninoff was never able to go home again, and that is the main reason he ended up in New York.

In New York, Rachmaninoff made do with decorating the place to look like Ivanovka.

He composed the third concerto for a premiere in the U.S. on his first trip here, and as a matter of fact, too rushed for time; he did not have a chance to rehearse it at all before leaving and had to practice it on a silent keyboard while on the ship.

From the Middle Ages, Italy’s Medici family was a magnet for artists and artisans, who created extraordinary works under the family’s generous patronage. In 1688, Florence’s Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici hired Barolomeo Cristofori, then 33 years old, to look after his collection of harpsichords. This was an important position: Cristofori was paid as much as any court musician.

The harpsichord of Cristofori’s time was a well developed instrument, responsive and flexible. But it lacked one feature: variable dynamics. The harpsichord’s mechanism plucked the strings of the instrument. There was no practical way (then) to make it pluck them more gently. The only way to vary volume was to change stops or combine manuals. The possibilities for dynamic variety were fairly limited.

Some time in the 1690s, Cristofori had a brainstorm. He realized that if he replaced the harpsichord’s plucking mechanism with one which struck the string instead, the force of the strike — and thus the volume of the sound — could be under complete control of the player.

The idea of a keyboard instrument that struck the strings rather than plucking them wasn’t really new. The clavichord had existed since at least the 15th century. A clavichord had tangents fastened to the keys. Instead of controlling jacks and quills which plucked the strings, the tangents themselves struck the strings inside the instrument’s case.

The problem with the clavichord was that while it was capable of extraordinarily sensitive dynamic expression, its volume range was from almost inaudible to barely audible. Let’s face it, the force that a keyboard player can transmit through his or her fingers is limited. The clavichord’s tangents couldn’t strike its strings hard enough to make a sound that could be heard, say, in a church sanctuary. This meant that the clavichord wasn’t suitable for anything other than the most intimate music-making. (It made a magnificent instrument for late-night keyboard practice, however.)

Cristofori solved this problem by adding a mechanical action. It multiplied the player’s string-striking force by four (eight, in his later instruments) and used that force to drive a hammer against the string. He also added an escapement mechanism. The escapement allowed the hammer to fall back after striking the string, so the string would keep vibrating. (Think of the way a fine crystal goblet rings when you tap it with a spoon — as long as you don’t keep the spoon touching the glass after you tap it.)

Cristofori called his invention “arpicimbalo che fa il piano e il forte” — harpsichord with soft and loud. Today, we shorten that name a bit. We call it the piano.

Maybe you’re expecting me to say here that Cristofori’s piano “took Europe by storm” (or some similar cliche’!) and almost immediately eclipsed the harpsichord.

That didn’t happen. Truth to tell, keyboard players didn’t like the touch. The Florentine piano was harder to play, and the keys just didn’t feel right when pressed. They didn’t like the tone, either; it was too soft, too muffled. Besides, who really needed that much variety in volume anyway?

It would remain for later piano makers to solve these problems. But Cristofori had begun the process of breaking the harpsichord’s lock on public keyboard performance. It’s not hard to imagine that without the financial and moral support of the Medici family, Cristofori probably couldn’t have pushed keyboard technology ahead — but that’s another story for another day.

Now back to 1700, and over to Naples. That’s when and where Domenico Scarlatti, one more musical member of a hugely talented musical family, was named organist and composer of the Royal Chapel. He was even granted a special additional salary for his work as chamber harpsichordist.

Domenico Scarlatti was only 15 years old.

Two years later, Scarlatti and his father Alessandro made the first of two visits to Florence. Their host was none other than Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici, Cristofori’s patron. Did Domenico play one or more of Cristofori’s Florentine pianos on these visits? Perhaps. History doesn’t tell us. So far no documentation has surfaced — no letters home raving about (or excoriating!) the new-fangled instrument, no eyewitness reports, no newspaper articles.

By 1708, Domenico had joined his father in Rome. There he attended the weekly concerts originated by Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. In 1709, Prince Ferdinando sent the Cardinal a lavish gift from Florence: one of Cristofori’s pianos. Did Scarlatti play or hear that instrument? Again, history doesn’t tell us.

In 1719, Scarlatti left Rome, ostensibly for England. In actuality, he was on his way to Lisbon, Portugal, where he had a job offer — he was to be master of the Royal Chapel there. In Lisbon he encountered an exceptionally talented royal youngster — the infanta Maria Barbara, who, as a contemporary report said, “Surprise[ed] the amazed intelligence of the most excellent Professors with her Mastery of Singing, Playing and Composition.”

In January of 1729, Maria Barbara married Ferdinando, the Spanish infante. It was a rather uncomfortable union whose purpose was entirely political. Maria Barbara soon found herself in the hostile company of the jealous Queen Isabella of Spain. Isabella even refused to allow Maria Barbara to bring along her personal servants — all but one, that is: her music teacher, Domenico Scarlatti. During the remaining 28 years of his life, Scarlatti composed and catalogued over 550 keyboard exercises for Maria Barbara — from 1746, queen of Spain.

Scarlatti and the Florentine piano are linked (if only circumstantially) at several other times and places, but what’s undeniable is that Maria Barbara herself was a point of intersection.

Maria Barbara owned pianos. We know this because she died just over a year after Scarlatti did, and at her death, her instruments were inventoried. Of her dozen (!) keyboard instruments, three were pianos, and two more were harpsichords which had been converted from pianos (perhaps because their actions failed, or because they were judged unsatisfactory as pianos). It thus becomes rather difficult to deny that Scarlatti was acquainted with the piano.

But did he play them? Did he intend for Maria Barbara to play his sonatas on them?

Ralph Kirkpatrick didn’t think so. Kirkpatrick was an American harpsichordist (1911 - 1984). He had a distinguised career as a performer, but his magnum opus was his biography of Domenico Scarlatti. It occupied him for 16 years, from 1937 to 1953. When it came to Scarlatti’s sonatas, Kirkpatrick’s views in that 1953 publication were enormously influential, guiding the performance practice of a generation of historically-oriented keyboard musicians.

Kirkpatrick pointed out that 73 of Scarlatti’s 550-some sonatas required more keys than the queen’s pianos had. This is pretty hard to argue with! It seems very unlikely that either Maria Barbara or Scarlatti played those 73 sonatas on any of the pianos to which they had known access. That’s a carefully qualified statement, but it’s about as definitive as we can really get in this discussion.

Kirkpatrick thought that was sufficient evidence to declare that Scarlatti probably had the harpsichord in mind for playing all of his sonatas. There is more to his argument, but it’s mostly conjectural, related to what he saw as the musical suitability of the piano of the time to the sonatas. What else can one do without definitive surviving documentation?

But from 1970, other historically-oriented musicologists and performers began to question Kirkpatrick’s assessment. Their re-evaluation of the evidence, sketchy as it was and is, led to harpsichord maker David Sutherland’s 1995 article in Early Music magazine, “Domenico Scarlatti and the Florentine Piano.”

Sutherland argued that, in making his recommendation, Kirkpatrick should have given more weight to the circumstantial evidence connecting Scarlatti and the early Florentine piano. Sutherland also questioned Kirkpatrick’s judgement of the Florentine piano as unsuited to Scarlatti’s sonatas, but in all honesty it’s difficult to see Sutherland’s view of this matter as any less subjective than Kirkpatrick’s. Finally, he took issue with Kirkpatrick’s argument that the piano was mostly used at court for accompanying singers. Sutherland’s evidence here seems about as persuasive as Kirkpatrick’s. Stalemate.

Who’s right? I don’t know.

Keyboard isn’t my instrument, so maybe I’m able to view this whole discussion with a bit of detachment. We’ve invested over 70 years in poring over what little documentation exists (reckoning from when Kirkpatrick began his research for Domenico Scarlatti). We have more informed opinions than ever (and thank goodness for that), but informed as they are, they’re still opinions. We don’t have a definitive answer as to whether Scarlatti intended his sonatas for the harpsichord or the piano. Perhaps he intended some of them for one and some for the other, but we have no way of knowing that. If he did, the 73 I mentioned before are the only ones which we currently have much hope of assigning. Actually, we don’t know whether Scarlatti even cared which instrument they were played on. We may never know. There just isn’t enough evidence to say.

Meanwhile, players of the modern piano, from Dame Myra Hess to Vladimir Horowitz — and countless others since — have never stopped playing Scarlatti. Why should they? For them, I suspect that the question of what instrument Scarlatti had played was pretty much academic. His music worked for them on their chosen instrument. They gave Scarlatti a voice, and also found their own expressive nuances in the sonatas. Audiences loved it. I imagine that was enough for them.

What I do know is that I’ve heard successful and musically enlightening performances of Scarlatti sonatas on harpsichords, Florentine pianos, and modern pianos. But don’t take my word for it; compare for yourself. Here are three short clips from Scarlatti’s Sonata in f minor, K519 — played on modern piano, a reproduction of Cristofori’s Florentine piano, and harpsichord.

Scarlatti’s K519 sonata on modern piano (Beatrice Long)

Scarlatti’s K519 sonata on Florentine piano (David Schrader)

Scarlatti’s K519 sonata on harpsichord (Colin Tilney)

I’ve also heard some pretty good Scarlatti on other instruments, including harp and guitar. His music seems to suit many different instruments, and I for one am glad that one more avenue of timbre and style has opened up for interpreting Scarlatti sonatas.

Further reading:

Domenico Scarlatti. Ralph Kirkpatrick, 1953 (1983 revision).

Domenico Scarlatti and the Florentine Piano. David Sutherland, Early Music, 1995 (Note: JSTOR access is required to read this article. A public-access computer associated with a university or library will usually connect immediately, but most home or business computers will not.)

A Florentine Piano c.1730 for Early Piano Music. Denzil Wraight.

Domenico Scarlatti, a brief biography. Chris Whent, Here of a Sunday Morning, WBAI, New York.

Cristofori, Inventor of the Piano. Roy E. Howard, Cantos Para Todos.

Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto in d minor does not have an Opus number. It has instead "WoO 23." That simply means "Without Opus." The reason it didn’t get assigned one was that, frankly, the people who knew him best and saw his behavior at the time he was composing it were afraid the public might somehow discover a side that they did not want. They thought that his deteriorating mental health was evident in the sound of the piece. So it was kept hidden for more than 80 years.

Schumann started on it on September 11, 1853 and was finished with it in 22 days. The whole thing was on paper in just three weeks. But I should add an asterisk there because of what happened before he was totally finished. A young man named Johannes Brahms showed up on October 1st. Schumann had barely started the 3rd movement. There was something about that first meeting (that has been mentioned many times as one of the most important in Classical Music history). After that first night, although Robert Schumann composed this violin concerto for his old friend, Joseph Joachim, there was something about his new friend that motivated him to compose virtually the entire third movement in just three days!

The concert in which it was to premiere was later that month. Joachim did play the Schumann Fantasie in C major, Op. 131, but he did not play the concerto, and never would. But he held onto the manuscript the rest of his life. Schumann tried to kill himself 5 months later and ended up in a sanitarium. What happened only added to Joachim’s suspicions that a very different man had composed the piece than the one he knew. So, he began a quiet campaign to make sure the concerto would rmain unperformed. He went to Schumann’s widow Clara, and even to his new friend Brahms to get them to agree that the piece should stay out of the public’s hands, hopefully forever. Interesting though, if Joachim felt so strongly that way, why didn’t he destroy it? In his will, he stipulated that it would not be destroyed and should end up in the Prussian State Library in Berlin. It would not be performed for anther hundred years after the composer’s death — which would have made it 1956.

But, in March 1933, during a spiritualist séance in London with two of Joachim’s grandnieces, at least one claimed to have heard the spirit-voice of Robert Schumann requesting that they pull out the manuscript and perform it. It took a while to find it, and then four years later, it just so happened that Yehudi Menuhin was given the music as he was asked for his opinion of it. Menuhin dropped everything he was doing and began to get ready for the premiere.

However, one of the grand nieces of Joachim, who had a reputation as a decent violinist, claimed that the ‘spiritualist’ had told her she should be the one to premiere it. And then the German government (the Nazis) got involved and said that it had to be premiered by a German. So, on November 26, 1937, with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and a relatively unknown (German) violinist, it was premiered. But about a week later, it was Menuhin who gave the second performance (with piano accompaniment), at Carnegie Hall. The niece gave it the third performance.

I’m leading somewhere with all of this. Okay, Robert Schuman was definitely not doing well mentally by the time he composed his violin concerto. He had always been haunted by the fact that his mother had lost her sanity and committed suicide. And now that he had had to fight the onset of syphilis, he knew that often the greatest devastation from it was insanity. So, as so many people did in those days, for it he took mercury. It causes insanity.

We must remember that in those days, people wanted to hide anyone with mental illness…almost to the point of making it look as though mental illness did not exist. So was Joseph Joachim correct in convincing Clara Schumann that her husband’s illness showed up too clearly in this piece?

There is no doubt that the beginning opens with an intensity rarely heard, and if we were aware of what was going on in his mind, then we could understand a bit more what he was trying to say. But why should we dismiss a potential masterpiece just because we’re too afraid of ‘going inside’ the piece, to let it take ua away? We won’t become insane by listening to it. Actually, because of the intensity in which Schumann composed it, we might be allowed to experience more of the art of it (the music as pure art). Schumann, more than just about anyone in his trade, looked at music as art. Long before he was a composer, he was serious observer of music (including being a well-respected critic and publisher of a highly touted music magazine). Should we not look at a later Van Gogh because we might see insanity?

Was Joachim right? Or should the man, Schumann, be known for everything he was?