Archives: Anekdote

Manuel Garcia had a beautiful voice—and a furious temper. His daughter Maria, who would later become one of the world’s most celebrated prima donnas, inherited some of that fire, and it didn’t make for a peaceful household. When Monsieur Malibran offered to marry Maria, Garcia exploded and refused to approve the engagement. The home was…

Moscheles—the virtuoso, composer, and teacher—had a weakness many teachers share: he loved to talk. Lessons could drift from the student’s work into stories, memories, and name‑dropping from his long career. Entertaining? Absolutely. Efficient? Not always. And the students, truthfully, didn’t mind. One morning, however, something was clearly wrong. His class included Sir Arthur Sullivan and…

Among great musicians, jealousy has often been a default setting. Not so with Mozart and Haydn. Whatever rivalries existed in their world, these two simply didn’t play that game. Haydn had been writing symphonies before Mozart had made any real mark. But Mozart’s rise was so fast that he soon caught up—and even outpaced—the older…

Lablache was perhaps the greatest basso the stage has ever known—towering in stature, powerfully built, with a head people called “the finest that ever decorated a human body.” His voice was huge, yet perfectly controlled. And he had a taste for jokes. Once, in Paris, he happened to be in town at the same time…

Santley, the English baritone, was known not only for his experience and ability, but for something even more useful onstage: steady nerves and common sense. That showed one night in 1865 while he was singing Papageno in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The theatre in London was packed, and in the last act a piece of…

Haydn loved much about London, but there was at least one kind of “student” he might have been happy to leave behind—though Vienna surely had them too. One day a nobleman visited him, praised music warmly, and offered to take a few composition lessons at one guinea a lesson. Haydn agreed and asked when they…

Boucher was a violinist who won the favor of Charles IV of Spain and ended up appointed as the king’s special violinist. He also had an unusual advantage: he strongly resembled Napoleon I. While traveling in Russia, he caught the attention of Emperor Alexander. The Czar summoned him and produced a French uniform: a three-cornered…

Composers constantly borrow from nature: a rhythm, a call, a sound that lingers in the ear. Nature offers raw material; art refines it. Felix Mendelssohn was open about such debts. He once told a friend that, unlike Beethoven—who could paint the rugged and the heroic like a musical Jupiter—he could at least turn woods and…

Henrietta Sontag didn’t start at the top. Early in her career, supporters of her rival, Amelia Steininger, hissed her off the Vienna stage. Most singers would have been crushed. Sontag kept going—until she was celebrated across Europe as the leading German singer of her day. Years later, at the height of her fame, she was…

Plutarch reports that Solon once stirred the Athenians into war by singing an elegy of a hundred verses which he had written himself. That sounds plausible: forcing a crowd to sit through a hundred‑verse song could inflame passions in any age. Yet another tradition may be even more astonishing. The author of this book owned…