Archives: Anekdote

Jenny Lind was famous not only for her voice but for a temperament that stayed sweet and generous even when life got difficult. Her marriage to Otto Goldschmidt—whom she met on her American tour in 1851—is well known. At that time she was under P. T. Barnum’s management, and Goldschmidt served as the company’s pianist.…

Musicians do get lucky sometimes—but the windfalls are rare enough that they stick in the memory. Everyone loves the story of Paganini’s gift to Berlioz. Some artists are born rich, some earn fortunes, and a very small number have money simply thrust upon them. Here’s what happened to the composer Michael William Balfe one day…

People love to claim they can “read anything at sight.” In reality, that kind of unfailing sight‑reading is rarer than the bragging suggests. Many can read almost anything—but “anything” is another story. Even Bach, whose reading and execution were said to surpass Liszt, Mendelssohn, Mozart, and others, once started believing his own legend. He told…

Plenty of great composers benefited from royal patronage—Haydn, for instance, owed a great deal to Prince Esterházy. Over time, from Haydn to Wagner, courts increasingly learned to value musical genius. But patronage could come with a price: some musicians grew servile, while others kept their independence. Mozart was in the second camp. After the first…

Johann Sebastian Bach had a teasing nickname for composers who couldn’t write unless they first tried everything out at a keyboard: he called them “harpsichord knights.” Felix Mendelssohn, though, was cut from a different cloth. One day a friend stopped by and found him in the middle of composing. The visitor offered to come back…

Hans von Bülow was a brilliant orchestral conductor—and famously stubborn. In one city he could count on loud applause almost no matter what he programmed. Once he put a long, dense Brahms symphony on the bill. Brahms isn’t always easy listening, and that night the applause mostly sounded like relief that the marathon was over,…

Giving credit where it’s due isn’t always a musician’s strong suit. But there’s a funny rule of thumb: the more real talent someone has, the faster they recognize it in others. Constantly cutting down colleagues usually says more about the critic than the music. A neat example came at Niccolò Paganini’s first appearance in England.…

Beethoven’s genius came with peak chaos. Nearly deaf, he’d still hammer the piano, pace the room, and shout melodies at the top of his lungs. To cool off he’d dump a pitcher of water over his hands—flooding rooms below and getting evicted by angry landlords. He moved constantly (sometimes paying rent on multiple places), stormed…

Handel’s father had a plan: law school, not a life in music. Instruments were off-limits—so the boy found a workaround. An old clavichord sat up in the attic, and Handel would sneak up there to play while the household slept. When he was six, his father set off for the court of a prince where…

Schröder‑Devrient, the first big Leonore in Beethoven’s *Fidelio*, obsessed over doing the role right—weeks of study trying to match the composer’s intention. At the key moment where Leonore points the pistol, she was so terrified of not being perfect that her whole body trembled… and the audience erupted. Her takeaway: the effect she couldn’t “act”…