In August, I travelled to New York City with our CEO and Artistic Administrator on an especially exciting mission: we were headed to the Steinway factory to choose a new concert grand piano for Jacoby Symphony Hall. While good pianos in our homes can last for generations, the sheer volume of use on concert instruments means they usually need to be replaced every twenty years, and our existing piano was at the end of its distinguished career. With a season full of Mozart piano concertos on the horizon, we needed to get something new quickly.  Founded in 1853, Steinway & Sons has two factories, one in Hamburg in Germany, and another in Queens, New York. Their pianos are among the finest in the world; their

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Historians often use the term “the long 19th century” to refer to the period from the French Revolution (1789) to the First World War (1914).  In music, this roughly corresponds with period we call “Romanticism”, from Mozart’s late works through Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz and Wagner all the way to Richard Strauss. The period ends, abruptly, with the advent of modernism, ushered in by Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring”, and Schoenberg’s atonal works. From that point on, Romanticism was passé, no longer reflecting the spirit of the age.  As a young composer, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) was seen as a modernist. His operas “Salome” and “Elektra” did everything modern music was supposed to: pushed the limits of harmony, expanded the size of the orchestra and shocked

Continue readingMusic’s “Long 19th Century”: Eroica and Metamorphosen