Peculiarities with Composers....

[perfect_pitch]

Just for fun... Just wanted to get peoples info on strange things that Composers did. I'll start the ball rolling.

There was a composer (sadly I don't know who???) who apparently stacked his upright pianos up on top of each other. Then one day as he was playing, a piano Fell on top of him and crushed him. One of my old lecturers told me this.

Apparently 2 composers were having a contest to see who could sight read the best. They kept swapping compositions, until one day one of the composers got this really hard piece of music that started at the middle register and worked in contrary motion... he kept going until he realised that while he was playing a very low note and a very high note... he also had to hit middle c at the same time.... soooo he bent over and hit middle c with his nose...   

again.... I don't know who the composer was....



Post some interesting stories. Share them all.

[keys]

“In 1938 Schoenberg fled from Germany to Barcelona; during the year he lived there, the International Society of Contemporary Music scheduled a festival concert there and Webern wished to conduct Schoenberg’s Music for a Film Sequence. Schoenberg refused permission. He had made many friends in Barcelona, and played tennis with them, and what would they think of him, he said, when they heard that horrible music?”  - from Charles Rosen’s Piano Notes

[alzado]

Erik Satie was very eccentric.

When he was about 40 years old, he bought 12 identical gray velvet suits.  He would wear one until it started to get shabby, then discard it and take another out of the closet.  At the time he died, he had worn out 6, thus leaving 6 new suits stored in his closet.

Once a friend saw him walking through a downpour with a folded up umbrella under his arm.  The friend asked why he did not open his umbrella.  He replied, "this umbrella is quite valuable, and I can't allow it to get wet."

When Satie died, approx. 24 umbrellas were found stored in his room.

In some ways, Erik Satie reminds me of Adrian Monk, the TV detective.  Monk has a closet with a number of identical sport jackets and a number of identical shirts.  He always dresses exactly the same, day after day. 

[perfect_pitch]

Here's something that is pretty weird... There was a rumour a couple of hundreds of years ago that anyone who attempted to write 9 or more symphonies would die... And sadly enough.... Beethoven - Carked it after his 9th, Bruckneras and Dvorak,
meanwhile Schubert and Mahler attempted to write a 10th and both died during it.

[pianonut]

beethoven was always attracted to unattainable women (aristocratic) whom he then idolized.


agreed about satie, too.  there's a children's book entitled "Strange Mr. Satie" by MT Anderson.  it tells about how he, picasso, and others put on a wild ballet called 'parade' and used dancers wearing models of buildings.

also, he kept a diary he called 'diary of an amnesiac'  in which he recorded his lunch (quite hours, quite short, and other odd eccentric stuff.

[tolkien]

Mahler too was aware of this "just-9-symphonies-then-drop-dead curse" (he was kind of superstitious) and disguised his ninth symphony under the unasssuming title of... Das Lied von der Erde. The curse, apparently, hit him after he used the dreaded number 9 in the next one he managed to finish (and he thought he circumvented that one!)

And, allegedly, Alkan was crushed to death by his bookcase, but this likely never happened (the bookcase, not the death)...

[jam8086]

In some ways, Erik Satie reminds me of Adrian Monk, the TV detective.  Monk has a closet with a number of identical sport jackets and a number of identical shirts.  He always dresses exactly the same, day after day. 

GREAT show...sometimes Monk reminds me of myself...

[jas]

Not so much strange, but pretty funny...

From Louis Spohr's autobiography:

Beethoven was playing a new piano concerto of his, but already at the first ‘tutti’, forgetting that he was the soloist, he jumped up and began to conduct in his own peculiar fashion. At the first ‘sforzando’ he threw out his arms so wide that he knocked over both the lamps from the music stand of the piano. The audience laughed and Beethoven was so beside himself over this disturbance that he stopped the orchestra and made them start again. Seyfried, worried for fear that this would happen again in the same place, took the precaution of ordering two choir boys to stand next to Beethoven and to hold the lamps in their hands. One of them innocently stepped closer and followed the music from the piano part. But when the fatal ‘sforzando’ burst forth, the poor boy received from Beethoven’s right hand such a sharp slap in the face that, terrified, he dropped the lamp on the floor. The other, more wary boy, who had been anxiously following Beethoven’s movements, succeeded in avoiding the blow by ducking in time. If the audience had laughed the first time, they now indulged in a truly bacchanalian riot. Beethoven broke out in such a fury that when he struck the first chord of the solo he broke six strings. Every effort of the true music-lovers to restore calm and attention remained unavailing for some time; thus the first Allegro of the Concerto was completely lost to the audience. Since this accident, Beethoven wanted to give no more concerts.

And apparently Mozart's mother used to get him out of bed by playing a dominant 5th chord on the piano. The unresolved chord maddened him so much he had to get out of bed and resolve it himself.

Jas

[trix]

Two memorable anecdotes related in a Schumann bio I read a looooong time ago:

1)  Schumann inexplicably walks, uninvited and unexpected, into a friend's home, sits at the piano,  plays a cadence,  then gets up and leaves without saying a word to, or  even acknowledging, his friend.

2)  While being visited by a friend in Schumann's home, Schumann offers the friend a cigar which he accepts whereupon Schumann lights a cigar for himself and proceeds to smoke it without ever giving his friend the offered cigar.

I'm sure more will come to me-oh yeah like Rossini dropping a page to an opera and simply writing a new one, apparently thinking it  an easier  exertion than picking up the one he dropped, or Bach drawing his sword!....

[Skeptopotamus]

Daniel Kellogg won't eat kelloggs brand cereals because he thinks that would be like eating part of his soul.

[phil13]

Czerny had a lot of pianos. He also had a lot of cats. The way he would write his music was by setting a cat down and waiting until it jumped up to a piano. Then he would continue composing whatever score was on that piano. He never chose it himself. Bit eccentric, huh?

Phil

[perfect_pitch]

Schoenberg (the guy who created the 12-tone Movement) suffered from Triskaidecaphobia   (Fear of the number 13.)

I would so laugh if he was afraid of the number 12...   

The reason Moses und Aron was missing an A in the name Aaron... was that with that extra a, the number of characters in the title would have been 13. he never completed that Opera.

[whynot]

Well, Handel was rehearsing one of his pieces and there was an uncooperative soprano (imagine) who wouldn't sing an aria the way he wished it.  He picked her up, dangled her out the window and said something like, "You may be a she-devil, but I am Beelzebub!" 

Rossini wrote a piece every year for his dog's birthday.

[jeremyjchilds]

then there's always Scriabin.

Considering he thought he was diety, but still died from a septic boil on his lip...

that's peculiar

love his work though