Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Copyright laws vary from country to country and pertain to music composed after the start of the twentieth century, when these laws went into effect, and are generally based on the number of years since the death of the composer.

2. According to Otto Klemperer, who assisted Mahler for the world premiere of his Symphony no. 8 in 1910, “he always wanted more clarity, more sound, more dynamic contrast. At one point during rehearsals he turned to us and said, ‘If, after my death, something doesn’t sound right, then change it. You have not only a right but a duty to do so.’ ” Peter Heyworth, Otto Klemperer: His Life and Times (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 48.

CHAPTER I

1. It would have been a surprise to both composers that their music is still played centuries after their deaths. There was no such thing as “new music” in their day, because all music was new, and rarely did anyone—including composers—know, or show much interest in, music that was older than one generation.

2. The four beats could be notated as four quarter notes per bar or four half notes or four anything notes. At a certain point, the quarter note became the default note length, and thus we have 4/4 time. A waltz, which is in three, is usually noted as three quarter notes per measure, and thus is known as three-quarter time. It does not mean three quarters as in “¾ of a cup of sugar.” It means that there are three quarter notes in each measure or bar.

3. The metronome is a clocklike device that ticks a precise tempo or speed measured against a minute. A pulse of 60 means 60 ticks per minute, or one a second. A pulse of 120 is twice as fast, or one beat every half second.

4. This often-told history is probably more complicated, but let us leave this to a simple fact: opera started being composed in Italy around 1600 as a direct result of the astonishing findings about our Greek ancestors’ theater—which was musical theater.

5. Letter by Verdi from July 10, 1871, cited and translated in Hans Busch, Verdi’s Aida: The History of an Opera in Letters and Documents (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978).

CHAPTER 4

1. “Why the oboe?”, you ask. There are conflicting theories, one of which is that the oboe was the instrument with the least flexibility, so everyone had to tune to it. Today, the oboist has an electronic tuning device that generates the precise pitch agreed to by the orchestra and measured in cycles per second. The A-natural you hear at this moment in the concert experience is 440 cycles per second. Some orchestras tune to a higher A, like 444 cycles per second. This creates more brilliance but also more stress on the various instruments. “Why an A-natural?”, you ask. The strings are the original-cast members of the orchestra, and every string instrument—violins, violas, cellos, and basses—has an A string.

2. Rhetorica ad Herennium from ca. 80 BCE is the basis for this technique, known in English as “memory of loci.” It is the oldest surviving book on rhetoric and is still in current usage as a memory aid. Studies have found that those who use it are not necessarily brilliant people. They are merely “memory athletes” due to their training.

CHAPTER 6

1. Leonard Slatkin, Conducting Business (Milwaukee: Amadeus Press, 2012), p. 148.

2. Wrong notes occasionally do appear in well-known classical masterpieces, as in a 1971 critical edition of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony.

3. Arthur Abell, Talks with Great Composers: Candid Conversations with Brahms, Puccini, Strauss and Others (New York: Carol Publishers Group, 1955), pp. 124–25.

4. Filippo Ghignatti, interview by Ben Grauer, Toscanini: The Man Behind the Legend, NBC Radio, 1960s, as quoted in Cesare Civetta, The Real Toscanini (Milwaukee: Amadeus Press, 2012), p. 91. Years later, the American director and conductor Sarah Caldwell (1924–2006) was doing research in the archives of the Milan music publishing house Ricordi when she struck up a conversation with an elderly archivist about the golden age of Puccini and Toscanini. “Yes,” he said, “they were great days, but when the materials would come back to me, they were covered with pencil markings, and it took weeks to erase them.”

5. Carl Bamberger, The Conductor’s Art (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).

6. Norman Lebrecht, Slipped Disc, blog posting, April 2, 2016.

7. Roslyn Sulcas, “A Return to the Stage, If Only for a Movie,” The New York Times, May 28, 2016.

CHAPTER 7

1. “At His New Podium Finding a Different Tempo,” The New York Times, January 19, 2016.

2. In the early days of synchronizing music to a sound track, one method was to provide a metronome-like click track for the conductor (and sometimes the orchestra) heard on headphones. It is still in use today, but usually only when music is in a strict and uninflected tempo.

CHAPTER 9

1. During a performance I was conducting at La Scala, Vienna State Opera officials met with Bernstein about producing A Quiet Place there. Lenny told me afterward they wanted A Quiet Place, but only if he conducted it. I said, “That makes me feel bad,” to which he said, “How do you think it makes me feel?” Point well taken.