Archives: Anekdote

If music reporters had to invent fresh praise every week, many would run out of ink fast. Outside major cities, the person covering concerts often isn’t required to know music at all, so reviews collapse into recycled lines: “Miss A played beautifully,” “Miss B sang sweetly,” “Mrs. C shows the result of careful practice,” “Mr.…

Armies don’t usually take orders from a prima donna, but a story from the siege of Hamburg suggests otherwise. During the bombardment, the opera supposedly kept going, and the besieged officers and soldiers adored hearing Madame Fodor sing. Like many famous vocalists, she insisted she needed her favorite “stimulant” to perform. Hers was harmless—fresh milk—except…

Not every priest is musical—and, just as oddly, not every musician is especially religious. One writer once questioned a priest about the musical symbols in an antiphonal and breviary, and found him completely lost: note values, pitch indications, even basic signs meant nothing to him. When shown a breviary dated 1692, the priest saw that…

In 1823, twelve‑year‑old Franz Liszt was billed for a concert. At Anton Schindler’s urging, Beethoven came to hear—and encourage—the prodigy. When Liszt walked on stage and spotted Beethoven in the front row, he didn’t freeze; he caught fire. He played with intensity and abandon. After the applause erupted, Beethoven stepped onto the platform, lifted the…

Felix Mendelssohn had a strong dislike for Giacomo Meyerbeer’s music. To him, his own writing was polished, elegant, and scholarly—free of cheap “clap‑trap” effects aimed at showy applause. Meyerbeer, though often genuinely skillful (especially in orchestration), also leaned into blunt, sensational tricks. The irony was that the two men looked oddly alike. Both were of…

It sounds unlikely, but history has plenty of stories where the human voice outlasted—and outshone—wind instruments. Luigi Lablache, the legendary bass, was famous for sheer volume: people said his tone could dominate an entire orchestra and chorus combined. Then there’s Farinelli. In Rome he once went head‑to‑head with a trumpet player and beat him at…

Old‑school prima donnas used to bump along in stagecoaches. By the late 19th century, that idea looked almost quaint. When star sopranos ruled the box office, “regal” still wasn’t regal enough. Adelina Patti, for instance, toured in a private rail car said to have cost about £11,600. It was basically a palace on wheels: walls…

Few things test an audience’s patience like a sloppy “tuning up” session—especially when the orchestra is amateur (and, yes, sometimes when it’s professional). Random scraping and blowing at full volume can jolt the nerves before the concert even starts, and it can take truly great playing to undo the damage. Soloists can be just as…

Hans von Bülow was a brilliant pianist and, according to the authorities, a public nuisance—because he kept slipping political commentary into his concert speeches. In Leipzig the police forced this “concert preacher” to sign a promise not to say a single word at concerts, not even to announce his next appearance. Berlin was worse. After…

Angelica Catalani was a vocal superstar—and famously clueless about anything outside singing. At a court dinner in Weimar she sat next to the most important guest and, quite sincerely, asked what instrument he played. It was Goethe. Someone told her he was the author of *Werther*. She turned to him, beamed, and said how much…