Archives: Anekdote

Mastery of an instrument doesn’t guarantee mastery of your tongue. The English cellist Lindley was famous on stage—but off stage he stuttered badly. Walking through London with friends, he stopped at a shop window where a parrot was for sale. Pointing at the bird, he asked the shopkeeper, stuttering: “C-c-can he t-t-talk?” The dealer, assuming…

Composers have always been masters of strange working habits. Haydn believed he couldn’t write without the ring Frederick the Great had given him—and he demanded the whitest, best paper. Gluck worked best sitting in the middle of a field. Rossini claimed he was most productive when “fortified” with good wine, and both he and Paisiello…

Handel wasn’t the only great musician to fight a duel. Ole Bull had his own episode—and by all accounts he handled a sword as confidently as a bow. As a student in Germany, Bull fell in with a rowdy group of students headed for a concert. Their violinist was drunk beyond usefulness, so they persuaded…

In 1831, twenty-one-year-old Norwegian violinist Ole Bull walked to Paris with almost no money and no introductions, desperate to be heard. Within days, both his clothes and his violin were stolen. In despair he considered ending it all in the Seine. A chance acquaintance—who turned out to be Vidocq, the famous detective—offered a plan: go…

The English musician Thomas Rosengrave once attended an evening gathering in Italy where a quiet, unassuming young man was asked to play. Rosengrave wrote that when the young man began, he felt as if “ten hundred devils” had taken over the keyboard—he’d never heard such passages and effects. The playing so completely outclassed him that…

The pianist Vladimir de Pachmann was famous for equal parts brilliance and eccentricity—faces, gestures, and sudden mood swings included. After a New York recital, a colleague went backstage to congratulate him and found him pacing, furious. “Ach Gott! These American people—how they do! They know no music. I will go back to my Germany. Here…

Running an opera company means living with surprises—especially when a star singer decides she’s “too ill” at the last minute. When Mme. Gerster was billed to sing *Lucia* in St. Louis, she suddenly informed the manager she couldn’t perform that night. He suspected the illness wasn’t serious and asked for a doctor’s certificate to show…

On the last night of her Dublin run in 1868, soprano Mlle. Titiens got a level of adoration that even opera stars rarely see. After Weber’s *Oberon* aria “Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster,” the house leapt to its feet—some shouting for an encore, others demanding Irish favorites. She chose “The Last Rose of Summer,” but the…

A musical work edited years ago by Dr. William Crotch reminds us of something striking: it’s hard to find a more extraordinary display of musical genius in a child barely out of infancy than Crotch himself. He was born in 1775, and by the age of two he already showed intense delight in music. He…

The young Mozart may not have been the most extreme prodigy in history, but he was one of the rare ones whose early brilliance didn’t burn out or disappoint. His musical life kept growing—steadily, continuously. Wild stories were told about him, and some were surely exaggerated. But whenever Mozart or his parents made a claim…