# The everyday life of composers



## emiellucifuge (May 26, 2009)

Our greatest connection to a composer, is through his music. And as a lot of the music we listen to is so exceptional, it is easy to imagine that the person who created it is also entirely exceptional. While there is no doubt s/he would have had exceptional musical talent and artistic insight, this almost makes it impossible for us to look at the other parts of their personality and life. Everyone has weaknesses, and everyone is normal in some way. I would love to hear any random anecdotes you can produce about a composer's everyday life or some event that demonstrates their ordinariness. These can come for example from letters or diary entries.

Here is a rather funny one I found yesterday. It shows quite clearly the relationship between Bruckner and Wagner.



> That it was Bruckner's original intention to make this Third a "Wagner" symphonyis clear from the actual note-for-note quotations from the already widelydiscussed Ring. He had apparently, by now, summoned up the courage to go toWagner and ask him for his artistic approval. Fortunately his arrival atBayreuth, armed with his last two symphonies, caught the Master of Wahnfried inmost friendly humor. Bruckner's own description of his emotions as Wagnerexamined the scores is eloquent: "I was just like a schoolboy watching histeacher correct his note-book. Every word of comment seemed like a red mark onthe page. At last I managed to stammer forth the hope that he would accept thededication of one of the symphonies, for that was the only and also the highestrecognition I wanted from the world." Wagner's answer, one of the few happymoments in Bruckner's tragic life, is surely recorded by the angels. "Dearfriend, the dedication would be truly appropriate; this work of yours gives methe greatest pleasure."After that, Bruckner went on, "We discussed musical conditions in Vienna, drankbeer, and then he led me into the garden and showed me his grave!" Theyapparently spent a most delightful afternoon together. On the authority of thefamous sculptor Kietz, who was present part of the time, we have it that a mostamusing sequel developed on the two following days. Bruckner had had not onlysome, but in fact so much beer, the hospitable Wagner continually filling hismug and urging him to empty it (for a whole barrel had been ordered for theoccasion), that the next morning found the Austrian quite muddled and at a losswhich of the two symphonies the master had preferred. Ashamed to return toWagner, he sought out the sculptor and appealed to him fof help in this dilemma,but the latter, highly amused, pretended not to have paid attention to thediscussion, saying he had heard some talk about D-minor and a trumpet. Now inthe sculptor's own words, "Bruckner suddenly threw his arms about me, kissed me,and cried, 'Thank you, dear Mr. Councilor (I don't know to this day how I cameby the title) thank you! I know it's the one in D-minor the Master has accepted!Oh, how happy I am that I know which it is!'" Next day, however, he was oncemore doubtful, for he sent the following message to Wagner on a slip of bluepaper (now a treasured museum possession): "Symphony in D-minor in which thetrumpet introduces the theme. A. Bruckner." The same leaf came back to himpromptly with the following addition: "Yes, yes! Hearty greetings! Wagner." Thuscame Bruckner's Third to bear the name Wagner Symphony. Whenever Wagner heard​Bruckner's name mentioned thereafter, he would exclaim, "Ah! Yes, the trumpet."


- Gabriel Engel, 'The Life of Anton Bruckner'

Does anyone know if Mahler ever met Wagner?

In a biography I have of Dvorak, there is also a fantastic anecdote about some pencils. Ill be sure to post it as soon as Im home.


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

Bruckner also kept a diary-like notebook in which he wrote down which prayers he said, every single day.


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## jani (Jun 15, 2012)

Sibelius drank a lot of alcohol and he was melancholic both of those things match to the " Finnish sterotype"


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Whenever I went to say hello to Schubert during the day he would reply "Hello, how are you? Good!" whereupon I would leave the room feeling slightly annoyed.


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## emiellucifuge (May 26, 2009)

Andreas said:


> Bruckner also kept a diary-like notebook in which he wrote down which prayers he said, every single day.


Id love to hear some excerpts if you can provide..


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## jani (Jun 15, 2012)

This site has a lots of info about Sibelius, his thoughts etc...
http://www.sibelius.fi/english/index.htm


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## StevenOBrien (Jun 27, 2011)

There's a wonderful documentary about Philip Glass you might enjoy that follows him through his everyday routine. It even includes the composition and premiere of his 8th symphony, and his opera "Waiting for the Barbarians".


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

^That's one documentary I've seen 10+ times!


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I've got some bits of various composer's modus operandi in my head. They had routines like all of us. I think people would know these, I can come back with quotes later, but here's some from memory -

When he woke up in the morning, *Brahms* would smoke a pipe and have some strong (I think black) coffee. He made it himself.

One great anecdote about Brahms is that he was at a pub after lecturing at Vienna university. Some students came to the pub and asked Brahms, who was having a quiet drink with a colleague, to play piano. So Brahms obliged, playing his waltzes on the upright piano, while the students danced. This shows how Brahms liked to have a good time as well.

*Tchaikovsky* would compose every day, from early (eg. 5am), then in the afternoon (after lunch) go on a stroll. I think its said he only composed in the morning - a.m. - but not in p.m. time.

*Kodaly *would take daily walks through the city of Budapest, his mansion situated in the heart of the city. Sometimes he'd do a short sprint on the pavement (& he continued this to old age, he was in good health).

There are many others. I've found it interesting, for example, how *Chopin* loved going to the opera on a regular basis, yet never composed one himself. But of course, his piano music does have this song like quality.

These threads are also of interest, I made the first one myself -

http://www.talkclassical.com/4581-hobbies-composers.html

http://www.talkclassical.com/10858-composers-hobbies-sports.html


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Percy Grainger was ahead of his time when designing sports bras.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Bela Bartok liked to practice piano and compose in the nude.


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## MaestroViolinist (May 22, 2012)

Mozart walked down the street and a beggar asked him for money, of course he didn't have any, so he quickly composed a piece and gave it to the beggar and told him to take it to the publishers and they will pay him.


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

emiellucifuge said:


> Id love to hear some excerpts if you can provide..


I can't, unfortunately. I've only heard Georg Solti talk about this. He said Leopold Nowak once showed this prayer book to him. It's propbably part of the music collection of the Austrian National Library together with Bruckner's manuscripts and other papers.

Another thing on Bruckner: He was extremely fond of Schubert. So when Schubert's remains were exhumed in order to be moved to the Vienna Central Cemetary, Bruckner was there. Another witness of the event later recalled that Bruckner even asked if he could touch the remains. His wish was granted and Bruckner laid his hand on Schubert's skull, becoming the last person ever to touch his remains.


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## emiellucifuge (May 26, 2009)

Heres the pencil anecdote:



> ...Shortly before this he had received a great official honour when he, as the first ever compose... were nominated by the Emperor as members of the second house of the Austrian Parliament, the 'House of Lords'. Dvorak put on his tail-coat to take the oath (in Czech) in the senate,.... His first appearance there was also his last.... Every member of the Austrian Parliament had a desk with a drawer in front of him, an inkwell, a sand-shaker, blotting-paper, pens and a few sharpened pencils, Hardtmuth no 2, which were soft, yet firm, the best product of their kind. He put them all in his pocket. When he left the parliament building he showed them to his wife who was waiting for him and said: _"Look at these, they're just the thing fro writing music"!_


Dvorak, by Kurt Honolka


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Andreas said:


> ...
> Another thing on Bruckner: He was extremely fond of Schubert. So when Schubert's remains were exhumed in order to be moved to the Vienna Central Cemetary, Bruckner was there. Another witness of the event later recalled that Bruckner even asked if he could touch the remains. His wish was granted and Bruckner laid his hand on Schubert's skull, becoming the last person ever to touch his remains.


I've read that anecdote, but in relation to Beethoven's remains, not Schubert's. I don't know if Bruckner touched the remains, but he looked so hard at the corpse, his pince-nez (those clip-on eyeglasses they had back then) almost fell in the coffin!


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

This is one of my favorite Bruckner anecdotes. I may have posted it somewhere else previously, and if so, at least it bears repeating, because it speaks of Bruckner's humility: 

"Anton Bruckner had a chubby, fat pug dog named Mops," Fritz Kreisler, a former pupil of Bruckner's once recalled. "He would leave us with Mops munching our sandwiches while he himself hastened off to luncheon. We decided we'd play a joke on our teacher which would flatter him. So while the Meister was away, we'd play a motif by Wagner, and as we did so, would slap Mops and chase him. Next we'd start Bruckner's Te Deum, and while this music was in progress, would give Mops something to eat. He soon showed a convincing preference for the Te Deum! When we thought we had trained him sufficiently so that he would automatically run away when Wagner was played and joyfully approach us at the sound of a Bruckner strain, we deemed the moment appropriate for our prank.

"'Meister Bruckner,' we said one day as he returned from lunch, 'we know that you are devoted to Wagner, but to our way of thinking he cannot compare with you. Why, even a dog would know that you are a greater composer than Wagner.'

"Our guileless teacher blushed. He thought we were serious. He reproved us, paid tribute to Wagner as unquestionably the greatest contemporary, but was nevertheless filled with enough curiousity to ask what we meant by claiming even a dog could tell the difference.

"This was the moment we had waited for. We played a Wagner motif. A howling, scared Mops stole out of the room. We started in on Bruckner's Te Deum. A happy canine returned, wagging his tail and pawing expectantly at our sleeves. Bruckner was touched."


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## Andreas (Apr 27, 2012)

The Austrian poet Franz Grillparzer wrote a short piece called Memories of Beethoven. Grillparzer and Beethoven were once working together on an opera (based on one of Grillparzer's plays) which, however, never came to be.

Grillparzer recalls the following event:

He once went to visit Beethoven. Together with Schindler, Beethoven's assistant, they went for a walk. Beethoven was already restricted to writing notes for conversation. When they returned home and sat down to have a meal, Beethoven fetched five bottles of wine: one for Schindler, one for himself and three for Grillparzer.

When Grillparzer left and got on his carriage, Beethoven insisted on accompanying him for a bit. But instead of getting off somewhere along the way, Beethoven stayed with Grillparzer for the entire ride. After they said goodbye, Beethoven began walking back home, a one-and-a-half hour walk.

Grillparzer suddenly noticed an envelope in the carriage, which Beethoven must have forgotten there. He shouted and waved at Beethoven, but Beethoven simply laughed and waved back. Grillparzer opened the envlope and in it he found the money for the carriage ride.

On a related note, I have also heard that Beethoven was generally very fond of sweet wine and drank a lot of it. This was unfortunate, though, because the wine at the time was sweetened with some harmful substance which ultimately caused Beethoven's deadly health problems and his early death.


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## Jeremy Marchant (Mar 11, 2010)

emiellucifuge said:


> In a biography I have of Dvorak, there is also a fantastic anecdote about some pencils. Ill be sure to post it as soon as Im home.


_Please _put some paragraph breaks in it when you do.


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## emiellucifuge (May 26, 2009)

emiellucifuge said:


> Heres the pencil anecdote:
> 
> Dvorak, by Kurt Honolka





Jeremy Marchant said:


> _Please _put some paragraph breaks in it when you do.


Its been posted already, and its very short


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Being obsessed with the Russian composers, I delve into the personal lives of many of them, of what I can dig up. At my School of Music's Library, I found a great book about Glazunov, and read it in like 2 days.  Tons of quotes of his talking about himself and events, but more official than I would have liked because it emphasized his composing career as opposed to his personal relations to people, which is what I want to know. He wrote no diaries or memoirs about himself, though he did write some memoirs about others, like Tchaikovsky. It was the first time I really went into his mind a little bit. I probably should reread it again, only I found the book missing the last time I went there.

I can recite a number of stories by heart, although I would have to paraphrase the things he said. They have taken *years *to compile into my head. Besides the obvious scandals some of us know, he secretly orchestrated a major composition project for a friend's cousin (not bribed, but certainly begged), used threat of imprisonment on a professor to do something for a student, and turned down a major gift from the Soviet government to their faces. The nerve! :tiphat:

Will tell some others too if anyone likes.


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

In some obscure corner of the internet I found a Dutch translation of a postcard that Scriabin sent to his wife while he was in the Netherlands and preparing for a trip to the US. Among other things he wrote that in case of a fire (at the appartment she was staying in Amsterdam) she should save herself and not try to save the sketches of the Poem of Ecstasy, because he wouldn't want her to burn her pretty face and he would write a thousand more poems as long as she was safe. Something like that... 
It's nice to see the human side of him, even though apparently he thought very highly of his music.


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## emiellucifuge (May 26, 2009)

I read this in Bryan Magee's 'Wagner and Philosophy'.


> For instance we have this account of his behavior during rehearsals for the first performance of Tristan: 'If a difficult passage went particularly well he would spring up, embrace or kiss the singer warmly, or out of pure joy stand on his head on the sofa, creep under the piano, jump up on to it, run into the garden and scramble joyously up a tree...' (Sebastian Rockl, _Ludwig II und Richard Wagner_).
> 
> Standing on his head was something he did quest often, usually as an expression of delight. So was climbing. Once, arriving at a friend's house, the first thing he did was climb up the front of the house. On another occasion, visiting a friend for lunch, he immediately clambered to the top of the tallest tree in the garden - and this at the age of fifty seven. He was always much given to sliding down the banisters - again well into middle age.... an almost surrealist expression of... an uncontainable _joie de vivre._


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