2 posts tagged “classical music”

As I was posting a comment on VOX, this ad appeared at the bottom of the page:

Honestly, I thought this must be some kind of joke.

But, it's not.

There is a company that is making replicas of the funny little chair Glenn Gould used to use at the piano.

As a kid, I was fascinated by Gould's odd low-rider position at the piano.

Though I'm certainly not in the market for the chair, the site has a very interesting history of the chair.

Before the holidays, I finished The Librettist of Vencie - a biography of Lorenzo Da Ponte. Though the title and book cover would seem that most of the book takes place in Venice,  Da Ponte in fact spent most of his life on the run from one set of financial trouble or another. He eventually wound in America (New York). His attempts to establish 18th-century style Italian opera in early19th-century America were for me the most interesting part of the book. His attempts were a financial failure, mostly because the kind of aristocratic posturing central to supporting opera in Europe was just not apart of young, democratic America.

I'm now reading Wagner Nights, which covers the huge, frenzied following Wagner had in America (particularly among women) in the late 19th century. Where the Da Ponte book ends in New York (in 1838, when Da Ponte died), Wagner Nights picks up in NYC circa 1860 - and ends at the turn of the century.

For Christmas, Drake bought me Understanding Toscanini: A Social History of American Concert Life. This will pick up classical music in American in the 20th century.

Though I had planned Wagner Nights as a follow-up to the Da Ponte bio, the Toscanini book now makes this a nice little three-part series.