Archives: Anekdote

One classic fault line between “older” opera and the modern school is modulation—how often, and how suddenly, the music changes key. Mozart, Cimarosa, Spontini and their peers tended to modulate sparingly, and when they moved away from the home key, they did it in a clear, formal way. In the later style—associated with Wagner, Mascagni,…

A lot of musical titles make no real sense. Sometimes they’re just marketing—an attempt by a publisher to make a piece sound special. And sometimes the name is born from an incident as random as this. One day Joseph Haydn received a visit from a butcher who said that he and his daughter adored Haydn’s…

Thomas Britton lived in London in Handel’s time, and his story makes you wonder whether music once connected social classes more easily than it does now. Britton earned his living as a coal dealer—“a small‑coal man,” as the English put it. Yet he adored music. Over his coal warehouse he fitted up a loft that…

Queen Victoria had a famously accurate ear and, by many accounts, played the piano well herself. Baroness Bloomfield tells a small moment that captures both her musical alertness and her dry sense of humor. At one gathering the Queen asked Bloomfield to sing. Nervous and trembling, the baroness sang one of Giulia Grisi’s well‑known airs—but…

There’s no shortcut to virtuosity—only stubborn, endless practice. More than one great musician proved it, but the story of the violinist Lolli makes the point in one clean arc. When Lolli arrived in Stuttgart, he encountered a rival: Nardini, a player so superior that Lolli felt completely eclipsed. Instead of pretending it didn’t matter, he…

Some people can’t resist turning art into arithmetic. One writer even tried to calculate what famous musicians earned per note. The claim goes like this: Rossini supposedly “made” eighteen pence for every note he wrote in his opera *Semiramide*. Not bad—until you remember that the singer can do even better. Each time Adelina Patti sang…

Franz Liszt’s childhood reads like a sequel to Mozart’s legend. His musical gifts showed early, and he gave his first public concert when he was only nine. Soon after, he played for a gathering of nobles at the palace of Prince Esterházy, where his father worked as an assistant steward. The performance made such an…

People today often file Muzio Clementi away as “the sonatinas guy,” but in his own lifetime he was a major force in piano history. Born in Rome in 1752, Clementi was already known as a player and composer by his mid‑teens. An Englishman spotted the talent and brought him to England for a wider education,…

This book tells elsewhere how Mozart, still a boy, heard Allegri’s famous Miserere and kept it in his head so well he could write it down afterward. He wasn’t the only one blessed (or burdened) with that kind of memory. Take Battishill, an English musician whose recall was so strong that even the longest works…

Prima donnas, like plenty of ordinary people, often have a soft spot for pets. Adelina Patti certainly did. She owned a tiny dog of a rare Mexican breed—a gift from one of the Mexican presidents—and the little creature lived in luxury, traveling everywhere with the famous singer. During an American tour, the dog died. Patti…