Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840) in 1819) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

We mark the death of the violinistic wizard, composer, and showman extraordinaire Niccolò Paganini, who died 179 years ago today in the Mediterranean resort city of Nice on May 27, 1840.

Woman with Marfan Syndrome, making us squirm.

Marfan Syndrome (or “MFS”) is a genetic disorder of the connective tissue. The syndrome is named after the French pediatrician Antoine Marfan, who first identified it in 1891. For those – like me – who must know, the gene linked to the condition was identified in 1991 by Francesco Ramirez at New York City’s Mount Sinai Medical Center.

Folks with Marfan Syndrome are characteristically tall and slim; with long arms, legs, fingers and toes. Their joints are typically flexible; sometime crazy flexible, the sort of crazy flexible that makes the rest of us squirm with discomfort when we see such a person casually twist him or herself up like a human pretzel.

Marfan Syndrome can affect the heart as well, and thus the American Heart Association, ever the Helpy Helperton, has made recommendations regarding the sorts of activities folks with Marfan can and should not engage in. 

The American Heart Association lists as “high risk” activities for Marfan sufferers bodybuilding, weightlifting (non-free and free weights), ice hockey, rock climbing, windsurfing, surfing, and scuba diving. (Should we assume that bungee jumping, sky diving, and alligator wrestling – which are not on the list – are all okay? Just asking.)

Conversely, we are told that “probably permissible activities” include bowling, golf, skating (but not ice hockey), snorkeling, brisk walking, treadmill, stationary biking, modest hiking, and doubles tennis.

Let us now add to this list of “probably permissible activities” playing the violin.

Niccolò Paganini almost certainly had Marfan Syndrome, which allowed him – physically – to do things on the fiddle that no one before him had considered possible. He was also a genius (in the true spirit of that word and certainly not in our modern and trivialized sense), and thus his violin playing and his compositions advanced violin technique more, in a couple of decades, than might otherwise have occurred over the course of a century. 

For example.

While he did not invent it, Paganini “institutionalized” the left hand pizzicato by using it constantly in his performances and employing it in his compositions. Likewise, his use of harmonics: a technique used only occasionally before him became a standard feature in his violin music. The flexibility of his wrist allowed him to rapidly alternate bowing techniques in a manner unheard of to his time; we’re talking here about the rapid alternation of such bowing techniques as legato (where the bow stays on the string; notes are smoothly connected with a single stroke of the bow); détaché (each note played by a separate bow stroke, though the bow stays on the string); staccato (played in a single bow stroke, though the bow springs slightly off the string between notes); spiccato (rapid detached bowing: each note is played by a separate bow stroke while the bow bounces off the string after each note), saltando or jeté (a sort of “super staccato” in which repeated notes are played in a single bow stroke but the bow is allowed to bounce off the string between notes); and martellato (“hammer-stroke” bowing, typically played using downbows only, employing the bottom third – or the “frog” – of the bow).

Clara Schumann in 1857, age 38

With our heads bowed and our hands on our hearts, we mark the death – 123 years ago today – of the pianist and composer Clara Wieck Schumann, who died of a stroke at the age of 76 on May 20, 1896.

She was among the most outstanding pianists of her time, a child prodigy whose performances were described with awe by her contemporaries. She was a composer of outstanding promise, who – for reasons having to do with the world in which she lived and her own self-doubts – never had the opportunity to fulfill that promise. She was the compositional muse for her fiancé and husband, the great Robert Schumann, and the spiritual muse of her best friend, the even greater Johannes Brahms. And she was a survivor: someone whose life reads like some endlessly tragic Victorian novel, only without the “happy ending” tacked on at the end.

Honestly: whenever any of us get into one of those self-pitying funks (of which I am an especial virtuoso), during which we stand convinced that our personal lives represent the very nadir of human existence, I would recommend that we think of Ms. Wieck-Schumann and her life as an example of how very badly things can go if fate is not on one’s side. If such reflection doesn’t shame our own self-absorbed misery, frankly nothing will.

Friedrich Wieck (1785–1873); nice comb-over

Clara Josephine Wieck was born on September 13, 1819 to Marianne Tromlitz-Wieck and Johann Gottlob Friedrich Wieck. Daddy was a creep: an uncompromising, unrelentingly ambitious autocrat who brooked no interference with his plans to make his little Clara the greatest pianist of her time. He was a horror to live with; in 1824, after five years of marriage, Clara’s mother Marianne could take no more and left him. Under Saxon law their three children were the “property” of the father, and so a distraught Marianne Weick had to be satisfied with the occasional visit and letter from her Clara.

Wieck controlled every aspect of Clara’s life in his efforts to mold her into a great pianist. In this Wieck was very, very lucky, in that Clara’s innate musical genius responded brilliantly to his training; she did indeed become a great pianistic prodigy. 

In 1828, at the age of 9, Clara met another of her father’s students at a recital: an 18-year-old lapsed law student named Robert Schumann. Wieck’s “method” did not work for Schumann: the eight-hour-a-day exercise regimen Wieck prescribed for Schumann permanently ruined the ring finger on Schumann’s right hand, destroying his future as a professional pianist (though, gratefully, assuring that his energies were turned to composition). 

Clara and Robert fell in love when she was 16 and he was 25. Wieck behaved like a madman for 5 years in his attempts to keep them apart, but to no avail, and they were married on September 12, 1840.

Clara did not know at the time that Robert was both bi-polar and syphilitic. Despite the fact that he was in his latency stage at the time they married – meaning that he was non-infectious and symptom free – it remains a miracle that he didn’t pass his syphilis on to her at some point, as they continued to reproduce well into his tertiary stage. (Their first child, Marie, was born in 1841; their eighth child, Felix – named for their dearly departed friend, Felix Mendelssohn – was born in June of 1854, four months after Robert’s mind had snapped and he had been institutionalized.)

Robert and Clara in 1847; he is 38, she is 29

Robert’s slow, excruciatingly painful descent into madness pushed Clara to the brink herself. His mind finally gave way on February 27, 1854, when he attempted suicide by jumping off a bridge in Düsseldo...

On this day in 1767 – 252 years ago today – Wolfgang Mozart’s first opera, entitled Apollo and Hyacinthus received its premiere in Mozart’s hometown of Salzburg. The composer was 11 years old.

Mozart in 1777. Mozart’s father Leopold wrote of this portrait, ”It has little value as a piece of art, but as to the issue of resemblance, I can assure you that it is perfect.”

In a letter written to his father in October of 1777, the 21-year-old Mozart expressed his passion for opera and the opera theater in no uncertain terms:

“I have only to hear an opera discussed, I have only to sit in a theater, hear the orchestra tuning their instruments – oh, I am quite beside myself at once.” 

I would suggest that it is difficult for us, today, to fathom the full meaning of Mozart’s comment because, in our electronic, mass media-dominated videocracy, we have no single cultural equivalent to the opera house of Mozart’s time. For people living in late eighteenth century Europe, the opera house was a combination theater; Super Bowl half-time show; major league ballpark; rock concert; carnival mid-way; high-end fashion show; IMAX-style movie palace; theme park; special effects extravaganza: in sum, a total-sensory-immersion facility. The opera theater was for Mozart a virtual “virtual reality,” where things could happen, be seen, and be heard that very simply could not happen, could not be seen or heard anywhere else. Opera lighting and stage machinery of the time represented cutting-edge technology in the eighteenth century, just as CGI (computer-generated imagery) represents the cutting edge today. Production crews at major opera houses in Paris, London, Hamburg, Dresden, Rome, Venice, Naples, Prague, and Vienna were the Industrial Light and Magic, the Pixar of their time. 

For Mozart and his contemporaries, the opera theater was not just a place you went in order to hear people sing and watch them act; much more, it was a place where dreams came true, a place where anything was possible, a place where every aspect of the arts – literature, singing, dancing, acting, instrumental music, costuming, stage design, and technology – combined to create an experience like nothing else on earth.

“I have only to hear an opera discussed, I have only to sit in a theater, hear the orchestra tuning their instruments – oh, I am quite beside myself at once.” 

Anna Gottlieb (1774-1856) in 1795

For Mozart, the backstage experience of the opera house was almost as intoxicating as a performance. Mozart was himself a professional performer who toured extensively, and we would observe that a powerful camaraderie exists between performing artists who spend their lives on the road playing and singing before audiences.  Mozart especially liked hanging out with singers, particularly with the ladies; there’s no doubt that Mozart had affairs after he was married in 1782 and those affairs were very likely all with singers. For example, during the rehearsals for The Magic Flute, he had affairs with both Barbara Gerl and Anna Gottlieb, the original Papagena and Pamina. And perhaps the only reason why he didn’t sleep with the singer playing the other leading female role in the opera – the Queen of the Night – was that that singer was someone named Josepha Weber Hofer, who happened to be Mozart’s sister-in-law! 

Mozart absolutely thrived on preparing a performance: the rehearsals and coaching of the singers and the orchestra; observing the construction of the sets and machinery; choosing costumes, makeup, and lighting. And most of all, Mozart loved to watch these “children of his imagination” – his operas – come to life before his very eyes and ears.

Keith Richards (born 1943) in 1965

It was most likely sometime during the evening of May 6, 1965 – 54 years ago today – that Keith Richards, the lead guitar player for the Rolling Stones, worked out the opening riff for the song (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction. Satisfaction went on to become one of the most important rock ‘n’ roll songs of all time; in 2004, Rolling Stone Magazine went so far as to rate it number two on its list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” (Number “two” on Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of “The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time?” Duh. Perhaps, maybe, “The 500 Greatest Rock ‘n’ Roll Songs of All Time,” although I’m not sure I’d even go that far. I will rant about this rather extensively in tomorrow’s “Dr. Bob Prescribes” post, which can be accessed on my Patreon site.)

But back to Satisfaction and what makes it truly memorable. I would assert that more than Richard’s rising/falling eight-note riff that generates the song’s melody; and much more than Mick Jagger’s cynical, rebellious, but nevertheless (we must be honest, here) borderline-insipid lyrics, it is the “sound” of Keith Richard’s guitar that gives Satisfaction its dramatic edge and its wonderful sense of sleaze: its defining character. (It is a defining character that, to a huge degree, went on to define the Stones as well!)

A 100% reliable account of the creation of Satisfaction has yet to emerge because the one person who could provide it – Keith Richards – keeps changing the story. For example, writing in his autobiography entitled My Life (Little, Brown, & Co., 2010), Richards claims that he recorded the riff that powers Satisfaction on a portable cassette player while he was asleep. (I must assume this means that he was experiencing the effects of some non-prescription pharmaceutical or another.) Whatever: Richards asserts that had no idea he had recorded anything until he listened to the tape the next day, which consisted of two minutes of guitar playing followed by forty minutes of snoring. The given location of this parasomnial recording session has been variously identified as being the Jack Tarr Harrison Hotel in Clearwater Florida; a house in the Chelsea section of London; or the London Hilton Hotel.

The location momentarily aside, the one irrefutable fact is that Richards’ immediate inspiration for Satisfaction was a toy he acquired, presumably on the day of Satisfaction’s creation. The most commonly told version of the story goes like this.

The Rolling Stones – in the middle of a North American tour – were performing in Clearwater Florida, on the Gulf Coast. Sometime immediately prior to or on the day of May 6, 1965, Keith Richards acquired a device called a “Maestro Fuzz-Tone”, made by the Gibson (guitar) company of Kalamazoo, Michigan. 

Maestro Fuzz-Tone advertisement, 1962

Gibson released its Fuzz-Tone FZ-1 pedal under its “Maestro” brand in 1962; the unit retailed for $40.00. Here’s how it works. You plug an electric guitar or bass into the unit and the unit into an amplifier. The Fuzz-Tone converts (“clips”) the smooth, rounded sine-waves received from the guitar (or electric bass) into square waves, which are sent on to the amplifier. These amplified square waves produce a gritty, dirty, raw and distorted sound which can resemble horns: saxophones and brass instruments. 

According to its patent application, filed on May 3, 1962,

A rather flattering portrait Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) by Johann Carl Rößler, 1799

On April 29, 1798 – 221 years ago today – Joseph Haydn’s oratorio The Creation was first performed before a star-studded, invitation-only audience at the Schwarzenberg Palace in Vienna. 

Getting older, or “when I’m 65.”

An ugly confession. Eleven days ago, on April 18, 2019, I turned 65 years old. Don’t get me wrong; I am aware that growing older is generally preferable – generally – to the alternative. But it is, nevertheless, an ongoing shock to the system. Like many of us, I fully intended to be Peter Pan (Bob Panberg?): the eternal boy. And while one may not inaccurately assert that that is a fair appraisal of my emotional age, it cannot be said of my physical age. My eyes continue to weaken. My joints – crapped up by years in the gym – remind me of their ever-greater unhappiness by making ever more noise. My ability to dredge up names has become increasingly more difficult (although, curiously, dates and numbers come to me instantly). As my hairline beats an increasingly hasty retreat, thick, disgusting fly hairs on my shoulders and back continue to grow in ever greater profusion (this is so gross I don’t know where to start). 

My father, who lived to 92, liked to say that age was “only a numbah”, even as – like Jeff Goldblum in the movie The Fly – he’d put one piece after another of his body into his medicine cabinet for safekeeping. 

My “baby” brother the radiologist, who is only 63, has observed that “you’re only as old as you smell,” a claim that has given me cause for hope as I haven’t taken on that sickly-dry smell of desiccation, at least not yet.

Oprah Gail Winfrey (born 1954)

Having said all of this, there is someone who has given me true hope, solace, and perspective in this whole aging thing, and that person is none-other-than the awesome/magnificent Oprah Winfrey. Oprah and I were born in the same year: 1954 (although she is some 10 weeks older than I am, har-har!). When Oprah has a landmark birthday she tends to make some wonderful, optimistic statement that, 10 weeks later, applies to me as well. Accordingly, in 2004 Ms. Winfrey announced that “50 is the new 30”; in 2014 she told us that “60 is the new 40.” And while she hasn’t commented yet on 65, I’m hoping for something on the lines of “65 is the new 14” which will, at least, square me with my emotional age.

If Oprah Winfrey is correct – and given the state of modern medicine, nutrition, hygiene, relatively clean water and air, etc. “60 might very well be the new 40” – then for Joseph Haydn, living in 1798, his 66 years would be the equivalent, today, of – what? – perhaps 96 years (give or take). 

In 1798, 66 years of age was old: a foot in the grave old; farting dust old; walking as if treading on glass and sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons old. 

So what was “old” Joe Haydn doing in 1798? Having recently returned from his second triumphant residence in London, the Vienna-based Haydn was overseeing the first performance of his single greatest masterwork, the oratorio The Creation, even as he was thinking about the composition of his next masterwork, the oratorio The Seasons, which would receive its premiere in 1801, when he was 69-years-old.

Joseph Haydn’s Death Mask; nothing flattering here

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) in 1746, by Elias Gottlob Haussmann

On April 22, 1723 – 296 years ago today – the 38-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach was elected music director and cantor of St. Thomas church in Leipzig. Despite the fact that it was a prestigious position, Bach felt scant enthusiasm for the job and considered it a step down from his previous position. Bach’s reticence was shared by the Leipzig authorities’ reticence towards Bach, who was – in fact – their fourth choice for the job. Bach and Leipzig were “a marriage of convenience” and therein lies the story for this week’s Music History Monday.

Sebastian Bach (as he was known to his friends, family, colleagues and acquaintances) was born on March 21, 1685 in Eisenach, Thuringia, in what today is central Germany. He was the eighth and last child (of five surviving children) born to Elisabeth and Johann Ambrosius Bach. 

To say that Sebastian Bach had a genetic predisposition towards music is like saying that giraffes are genetically predisposed to necking. For generations, music had been the Bach family trade. In 1735, the 50-year-old Sebastian Bach compiled a list of forty-two family members who had been professional musicians during the previous 150 years. It was a “short list”, as the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians today lists 85 musical Bachs spanning the nearly 300 years from 1555 to 1846.

Writing in a biography published in 1802, Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749-1818), described a typical Bach family gathering this way:

“As it was impossible for them to all live in the same place, they liked to get together at least once a year, probably in Erfurt, Eisenach or Arnstadt. Their favorite occupation during these gathering was to engage in some form of musical activity. Naturally enough, as they were all choirmasters, organists or town musicians, connected in some way with the church, and also since custom demanded a religious framework, they would start with the singing of a chorale. This solemnity, however, would soon give way to more light-hearted music-making, which was often in strong contrast with what had gone before. They liked to sing folksongs of a light or sometimes ribald nature, singing two or more [folksongs] simultaneously and extemporizing upon them so that choral harmony resulted. These quodlibets, as they called them, not only made the performers laugh heartily, but anyone who happened to hear them was irresistibly affected by laughter too.”

We’re glad to know that some members of the Bach family “laughed heartily”, because our impression of Sebastian Bach is one of grim seriousness, though in fact, we know little about Bach the man. The well-known Elias Gottlob Hausmann portrait of the 61-year-old Bach at the top of this post is one of the very few indisputable images of him that have come down to us. It shows us a man with sharp, calculating eyes, an outthrust chin, and a severe mouth with ever so slightly twisted lips. Is this what passed for a smile from Bach? Or perhaps it’s a sneer of disdain, a sign of resentment for having to sit still in an artist’s studio while there was important work to do? 

Whatever; it’s the face of a most intelligent man who knew his worth; a stubborn, unyielding, sometimes irascible guy who nevertheless loved his wives (two in number) and children (20 in number); a man who liked his tobacco, food, and drink (beer and brandy); someone who’d been around the block more than a few times and who did not suffer fools (or his employers) gladly. 

Bach’s provincial career was centered on the churches, courts, and municipalities of his native central Germany, a career that was an exercise in disappointment management. In Weimar, in 1717,

Bessie Smith performing W.C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues in a 16-minute movie of that name, filmed in 1929. It is the only known movie of Empress Smith”

Today we celebrate the birth – on April 15, 1894, 125 years ago today, in Chattanooga, Tennessee – of the American contralto Bessie Smith.

Bessie Smith

We Reflect on “GOAT”

When I was growing up, the word “goat” had two distinct meanings. First, there was the animal: a quadruped mammal, a member of the family Bovidae and subfamily Caprinae. There are presently over 300 distinct breeds of goat, both wild and domesticated. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, in 2011 there were more than 924 million goats alive across the planet. (One can only wonder why there hasn’t been a more recent census.)

When I was growing up, the second meaning of the word “goat” was a loser: a derisive term for an athlete who, as a result of some monumentally boneheaded mistake, was responsible for his or her team’s loss. For example: Mike Torres, the Boston Red Sox pitcher who gave up a three-run homer to light-hitting, New York Yankee second baseman Bucky Dent in a one-game playoff following the 1978 regular season; or Bill Buckner, the Boston Red Sox first baseman who booted an easy grounder to lose game six of the 1986 World Series against the New York Mets; or Dan Duquette, general manager of the Boston Red Sox (is there a pattern here?) who in 1996 let pitcher Roger Clemens leave the team as a free agent, claiming that Clemens was in “the twilight of his career.” After leaving the Red Sox, Clemens went on to win four more Cy Young Awards, 2 World Series Titles, and 162 more games. Some twilight.

Amazingly, the word “goat” has undergone a 180-degree shift in meaning in recent years, as the acronym G.O.A.T. has come to refer to the “greatest of all time.” 

By what standard(s) should anyone be considered the “greatest of all time” are entirely subjective. For example, should numbers/statistics be the sole determining factor in choosing a “greatest of all time”, or should intangibles factor in, and – if so – what intangibles?

George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth (1895-1948)

I’ll admit that I’m an “intangibles” sort of guy, and therefore I will introduce a criterion without which no one should be considered a G.O.A.T. That criterion is that true G.O.A.T.-hood requires not just great stats, but that the individual in question should have redefined the game for everyone who followed. Based on my criterion, determining the greatest baseball player of all time is easy: he is Babe Ruth, because more than anyone else, it was George Herman Ruth (1895-1948) – the Babe, the Great Bambino, the Sultan of Swat, the Big Bam – whose style of play laid the groundwork for the game as we understand it today. Based on my criterion, determining the greatest basketball player of all time is not easy, because so many great players have contributed so many different things to the game. 

(Speaking of old-style goats – meaning losers – let us not for a moment forget Harry Frazee, the owner of – yes – the Boston Red Sox who sold Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1919 and having done so, initiated the “Curse of the Bambino”, Boston’s World Series draught between 1918 and 2004!)

Does the concept of G.O.A.T. have any relevance to the world of the music beyond idle,

I am aware – nay, more than aware – that this present post is an example of unconscionable conceit and vanity. Of this I stand justly accused; my head droops in shame and my present auto-flagellation will continue for minutes – perhaps for even the half-an-hour – to come.

What, you rightly ask, could have prompted this pre-emptive outburst of self-loathing? (“Pre-emptive” in that having abused myself, it is my hope that you will feel no need to do so as well.) What has brought this on? Just this: I am dedicating this week’s “Music History Monday” to an event that at the time of this writing has not yet occurred and once having taken place – on Monday evening, April 8, 2019 – will almost certainly not qualify as “music history.”That event? The world premiere of my piano trio, The Daughters of Atlas this evening in Berkeley, California.

Talking about your own music is like talking about your children or, worse, your grandchildren: it is almost impossible to do so without becoming a soporific bore, inducing drooling paralysis in those within earshot. Nevertheless, I am asked constantly how I go about writing a piece of music. Since I know how fascinated I am by the stories of how other composers do their thing, I’ve decided – casting my ordinarily Marianas Trench-deep humility aside – to share with you the process that created The Daughters of Atlas (or “DOA” as I’ve been referring to the piece in private).

Trio Foss, left to right: Hrabba Atladottir, Nina Flyer, Joseph Irrera

At this point of my life, I prefer not to write a piece of music unless I have performers in mind. Duke Ellington’s famous line, to the effect that he couldn’t compose for someone unless he knew how that person played cards, is, for me, on the mark. I need to know something about the musicians I’m writing for: their personalities; their abilities; and in particular, what I perceive as their strengths. (Since we’re talking about professionals here, there are no such things as “weaknesses”.) DOA was written for a piano trio (that is, violin, cello, and piano) called Trio Foss. Trio Foss is a fairly new group; it made its concert debut in March of 2018. But there’s nothing new about the experienced pros who make up the trio: violinist Hrabba Atladottir; cellist Nina Flyer; and pianist Joseph Irrera. 

Miles Graber

(Joe Irrera is currently having back problems, so he has been sidelined and replaced for now by Miles Graber, a Juilliard-trained pianist and family practice doc who has been a mainstay on the Bay Area music scene for decades.)

I have heard violinist Hrabba Atladottir perform many times since she settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2008. She plays with fire (not with matches), passion and intense lyricism, which I showcased in particular in the central movement of DOA, a movement entitled “Siren’s Web: Calypso’s Song and Dance”.

I’ve known cellist Nina Flyer for over 25 years. She has played scads of my music and she is a ROCK; yes: think a tall, elegant woman with the musical muscles of Duane “the Rock” Johnson and you’ve got Nina. Her cello makes a big, sweet sound and she is equally adept at providing rock steady support in the bass and playing singing, lyric solo lines in any register. There’s hardly a measure in DOA where I wasn’t thinking “Nina Flyer” when I put pencil to the cello part.

Pianist Joseph Irrera is a formidable virtuoso, a fellow Steinway artist, so as I have an unfortunate tendency to do, I wrote a piano part the likes of which I wish I was able to play myself.

Scott Joplin

On April 1, 1917 – 102 years ago today – the American composer and pianist Scott Joplin died at the Manhattan State Hospital on New York City’s Ward’s Island, which straddles the Harlem River and the East River between Manhattan and Queens. He was 48 years old. During the course of his compositional career – which spanned the nineteen years from 1896 to 1915 – Joplin composed 44 ragtime works for piano, a ragtime ballet and two operas. (A musical “vaudeville act”, a musical comedy, a symphony and a piano concerto were purportedly composed as well near the end of Joplin’s life. These works were never published, and the manuscripts have, presumably, been lost, leading some to wonder whether they ever really existed at all.)

Embraced today as being among the greatest and most original of American composers; creator of the single most famous ragtime work of them all, Maple Leaf Rag of 1900; inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970; awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1976; and featured on a first-class postage stamp in 1983; Joplin died in almost total obscurity there at the Manhattan State Hospital, which was then – with 4,400 beds – the largest psychiatric hospital in the world. He was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave at St. Michael’s Cemetery in the East Elmhurst section of Queens, New York, not far from LaGuardia Airport. His grave was finally given a marker in 1974, the year that the movie The Sting – the score of which featured his music, most notably The Entertainer – won seven Academy Awards, including best picture and best score. 

Joplin’s Grave

(That “best score” Oscar went to Marvin Hamlisch, which rubbed many a person’s rhubarb the wrong way. According to the American composer and jazz musician Gunther Schuller, who played a not-insignificant part in the ragtime-revival prior to the making of The Sting: 

“[Hamlisch] got the Oscar for music he didn’t write (since it is by Joplin) and arrangements he didn’t write, and ‘editions’ he didn’t make. A lot of people were upset by that, but that’s show biz.”)

Joplin’s life reads like a Victorian novel in which the heroic principal character suffers one spectacular disaster/indignity after another until, finally – mercifully! – the chaos ends and that principal character lives happily ever after. The difference between Victorian fiction and Joplin’s reality is that the disasters never stopped, and that the end of his life was as terrible as anything that preceded it.  

He was born in either Texarkana or Linden Texas, the second of six children. His father, Giles Joplin, was an ex-slave from North Carolina who worked as a laborer for the railroad; his mother, Florence Givens, was a freeborn Black American from Kentucky who worked as a maid. Though Scott Joplin celebrated his birthday on November 24, the actual date of his birth is unknown; it was sometime between late 1867 or early 1868. 

Early on, the Joplin family moved to Texarkana, Arkansas, where Scott grew up. As a young child he received a rudimentary music education from his father (who played the violin) and his mother (who sang and played the banjo). The child showed tremendous promise as a musician, to the degree that his mother was convinced that he had a professional career in front of him. According to Joplin biographer Susan Curtis, Florence Joplin’s ambitions for her son played a major part in the breakup of her marriage when, sometime in the early 1880s,

Some birthday greetings to four wonderful musicians before diving into the rather more grim principal subject of today’s post.

Four Birthdays

Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) ca. 1900

A buon compleanno (“happy birthday” in Italian) to the legendary Italian conductor (and cellist) Arturo Toscanini, who was born on March 25, 1867 – 152 years ago today – in the north-central Italian city of Parma (the home of Parmigiano-Reggiano, or “parmesan” cheese and the simply exquisite cured ham known as Prosciutto di Parma). Toscanini was as famous for his incendiary temper as he was for his streamlined, rhythmically propulsive, honor-the-composer’s-score-at-all-costs performances. Decorum and good taste precludes me from sharing many of the nicknames he was awarded by his performers; one such nickname I can share is “The Towering Inferno.”

Béla Bartók (1881-1945) in 1903

A boldog születésnapot (“happy birthday” in Hungarian) to the killer-great Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartók, who was born on March 25, 1881 – 138 years ago today – in what was then the town of Nagyszentmiklós, in the Kingdom of Hungary in Austria-Hungary. (It was a source of ever-lasting pain for the adult Bartók that the town and district in which he grew up was ceded to Romania in 1920 when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken up by the post-World War One Treaty of Trianon. Today Bartók’s home town is known as Sânnicolau Mare, which can be found on the westernmost edge of Romania.) 

(Under the heading of way too much information, in the Banat Bulgarian dialect the town is known as Smikluš; in Serbian as Сент Николаш /Sent Nikolaš, in German as Groß Sankt Nikolaus, and in English as “Great St. Nicholas”. Yup: Old St. Nick!)

Aretha Franklin (1942-2018) in 1967

A rather melancholy happy birthday to the recently, dearly departed singer, songwriter, pianist and activist Aretha Louise Franklin, who was born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 25, 1942: 77 years ago today. She passed away just seven months ago, in Detroit, on August 16, 2018.

Respect.

Elton Hercules John (born 1947) in 1968

Finally, a rousing happy birthday to the singer, songwriter, pianist, and philanthropist Reginald Kenneth Dwight, who was born on March 25, 1947, 72 years ago today. For our information, on January 7, 1972, Dwight legally changed his name to Elton Hercules John.

Sir Elton’s coat-of-arms

In 1987, John was granted the honor of a formal coat-of-arms. Though I’m certainly not an expert on these things, I would nevertheless suggest the Sir Elton’s coat-of-arms has got to be among the coolest ever. Set in black, white, red and gold, the crest features a piano keyboard and four records. The Spanish motto reads “el tono es bueno”, which means “the tone is good” and which features his name – “el-tono” – Elton. Finally, a medieval helmet above the crest is featured with its visor open, an indication that John was knighted as a “Commander of the Order of the British Empire”, or a “CBE”. 

A Painful Death

On an entirely different note, this day also marks the death of the superlative French composer and musical revolutionary extraordinaire, Achille-Claude Debussy, who died in Paris on March 25, 1918 – 101 years ago today – at the all-too-young age of 55. 

For myself, I will confess to having a grim interest in how composers died. (I’m not talking about anything as perverse as the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner’s fascination with corpses; Bruckner’s idea of a hot date was a trip to the Vienna morgue to see the bodies.