Lives of our Composers

• Google Composer
• The New Hutchinson 20th Century Encyclopedia
• Baker Richard, The Magic of Music, Publ Hamish Hamilton, London, England: 1975 [excellent overview of musical developments and historical data]
• Krull Kathleen, Lives of the Musicians, Harcourt, Brace and Co, Orlando, Florida: 1993 [informal style recounting good times, bad times and what the neighbors thought about the composers...makes a great read!...amusing illustrations!]
  

Anderson Leroy

1908 - 1975

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Beethoven was born in Bonn, the son of a singer at the court of the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne. Beethoven's father was an alcoholic and rapped his young son's knuckles whenever the boy made a mistake. By the time Beethoven was 16, he caught Mozart's attention who said: "Keep your eyes on him. Someday he will give the world something to talk about." Beethoven lived up to that prediction, giving the world nine great symphonies and a variety of piano concertos, sonatas and chamber music. Like Mozart before him, Beethoven was hired, at times, to write dance music for social occasions. An example of this less grand style of music was Beethoven's Twelve German Dances. The structure of these dances is similar to Mozart’s earlier Six German Dances. These dances were written in 1795 when Beethoven was 25 years old and living in Vienna. As his prowess grew, Beethoven grew contemptuous of the rich, idle and talentless nobility. Once he became angry with a prince and is reported to have said: "There are and will be thousands of princes. There is only one Beethoven!" Beethoven not only became known for his tempetuous temper but also for his uncontrolled hairdo. The fashion of the day was well groomed pigtails, but he rebelliously let his hair grow long and wild. He also earned a reputation for rude manners, one time dumping a plate of food on a waiter's head. He would leave restaurants without paying and sometimes writing music on the bill. Like Bach, he loved his coffee though, making it himself, exactly 60 beans to the cup! His musical drive and genius were clear, however, there was only one Beethoven! He never married...but he was always in love with some inaccessible, unattainable female. The biggest tragedy about his life was his gradual deafness, which started in his late twenties. Beethoven died of liver failure, in 1827, at the age of 57. Mozart's Requiem was played at Beethoven's funeral.

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Antonin Dvorak was a Czech composer, born near Prague. He was the son of a butcher and showed talent for music early. When Dvorak was 16, he was sent to Prague to enroll in an organ school. There he supported himself by playing viola in cafes. At the age of 21, he joined the orchestra of the Prague National Theatre and later was given an appointment as a church organist. He also taught to supplement his income. Dvorak achieved his first measure of fame when he composed a patriotic hymn for chorus and orchestra in 1872. Three years later, the Austrian government gave him an annual allowance, thus giving him financial independence and more time to compose. His series of Slavonic Dances were published in 1877. International fame followed after his Stabat Mater  was performed by the London Musical Society in 1883. Dvorak was always open to new things. He moved to America in 1892 and assumed the post of director of the National Conservatory in New York. His interest in Black American music is evident in the New World Symphony (1893). He moved back to Prague, however, in 1895. There he soon became head of the Conservatoire. Dvorak is also remembered for his operatic and choral works, as well as various overtures and concertos.

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"Duke" Ellington was born in Washington, U.S.A., of part Black American origin finding his niche in jazz music. The Duke played piano in New York's Cotton Club  in 1927 before forming his own band. He became one of the world's finest jazz composers, producing such famous pieces as: Mood Indigo, Sophisticated Lady, In my Solitude and Black and Tan Fantasy. Ellington earned the moniker "Duke" because of his refined and impeccable taste in clothes.

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Edvard Grieg was the most important Norwegian composer of the later 19th century. A friend of his parents, the violinist Ole Bull, took note of the musical gift in Grieg as a child and encouraged his parents to steer the young Grieg in that direction. By 15, Grieg was enrolled in the Leipzig Conservatory. When he grew older, Grieg was influenced by Norwegian folk tunes and the rising sense of national consciousness for Norway in his compositions. He also linked his music to inspirations from the landscape and the way of life of the people around him. Grieg used musical notes to paint the people, the scenery, and the moods of Norway. In the Peer Gynt Suites, Grieg composed "Morning" yielding a mood and feeling of a glorious rising sun. A chase scene is perfectly depicted in "The Hall of the Mountain King." He married the singer, Nina Hagerup. During his lifetime he and his wife would stroll through the streets of Bergen. Children would follow after them, whistling tunes he had composed (so popular had Grieg's music become to the Norwegian people). Today, those same tunes are whistled and hummed by people of many nationalities, and played by orchestras all over the world. Grieg died in Bergen at the age of 64.

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Handel was born in Halle, Germany, but became a British subject in 1726 at the age of 41. He studied law briefly, abandoning that to become a violinist at Keiser's Opera House in Hamburg where his first opera, Almira, was performed. His visits to Italy inspired him to write more operas and oratorios. Handel ignored his appointment as Kapellmeister to the elector of Hanover, instead choosing to move to London, England in 1712. Ironically, the elector moved to London as well, taking the English throne as George I, only two years after Handel settled there. Handel's talent helped to patch things up with the King. Handel wrote The Water Music in 1715 for George I, which also added to Handel's fame in England. And from 1720 on, Handel directed the opera at the King's Theatre in Haymarket. Handel's Messiah was considered a success on its first performance in Dublin, Ireland, in 1742. However, Handel had no easy life despite his talent and fame. He became totally blind in 1751 and throughout his career suffered from money problems. A portrait by Thomas Hudson, in 1756, shows Handel sitting at his study desk, dressed in a rich 18th century frock coat, hand on a genteman's cane and wearing a powdered white wig.

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• Black American ragtime king, born in Texarkana, Arkansas, died at the end of the First World War
• 10 years as an itinerant musician
• by 1893 worked in saloons and brothels in Chicago
• interested in ragtime (ragged time = syncopated)
• his 1899 “Maple Leaf Rag” marks the start of ragtime as a serious artform
• full recognition did not come until the 1970’s for Joplin with “The Entertainer” made popular by pianist Marvin Hamlisch in the movie “The Sting”

Scott Joplin's parents were musical, the father playing the fiddle and the mother playing the banjo. Mother Joplin nurtured her son's musical ability having him play Stephen Foster tunes on the piano while she did housework. Even though scott Joplin came to education later in his teens (education was still frowned upon for black children in those days), his favourite book was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The young Scott set out at the age of 17 to make his living playing in bars. During his career, Joplin published many of his own pieces, fifty in all, with a white publisher named John Stark. This cross-race friendship and business arrangement was unusual for the times. Joplin was married twice. He liked beer and gambling. He died at the age of 49 from advanced syphilis and was buried on Long Island in an unmarked grave. Scott Joplin enjoyed success with "Maple Leaf Rag"(1899), published while living in Sedalia, Mo. He also lived in St. Louis and later in New York City. Other works included "The Entertainer"(1902), "The Sycamore"(1904), "Gladiolus Rag"(1907), "Sugar Cane Rag"(1908), "Wall Street Rag"(1909), ragtime opera Treemonisha (1911; first full performance 1972).

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• When the Angels make music for God, they play Bach. When they make music for themselves, they play Mozart. God eavesdrops and asks, "What is that beautiful music?"
• Father, Leopold, tried to run Mozart’s life, as evidenced in the frequent letters to his son: “stay away from musicians, they are of the lowest social order”
• Leopold also gave financial advice: to get paid in cash and not in praise, if there is no money to be had, then leave, the rent had to be paid!

By the time Mozart was 5, he already had two good years of music behind him, imitating his older sister Maria Anna on the clavier at 3 and learning to play the violin at 4.  At 5, he stayed up late practicing by candlelight. By the time he was 6, he was on tour, travelling the roads of Europe by stagecoach. Mozart learned to speak 15 languages. At 7, Mozart proposed marriage to Marie Antoinette; at 8, he composed symphonies and at 11, he composed his first opera. Mozart liked animals and elegant clothes. He was often ill and his skin was scarred from smallpox. Aloysia Weber, the cousin of Carl Maria von Weber, rejected Mozart's adult proposal of marriage. However, Constanze, Aloysia's sister accepted him. Constanze was musical but not very attractive and Mozart playfully called her, "Little Mouse". The marriage produced six children, four of whom did not make it into adulthood. Mozart liked liver dumplings and sauerkraut and often wrote down his musical ideas at meals. There is a story that he once held his wife's hand during childbirth, while with the other, he wrote down pieces of music. Mozart's best music came when he was in a good mood and by himself. He once wrote, "What a delight this is I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing, takes place in a pleasing, lively dream." Many people did not like Mozart, thinking him rude, immature and irresponsible. He died of kidney failure and malnutrition at age 35. Mozart's most expensive possessions were his walnut piano and his pool table. The movie Amadeus shows him being unceremoniously dumped into an unmarked pauper's grave. During the final year of his life in 1791, Mozart wrote the Six German Dances. We most often associate the great composers with grand symphonies and splendid operas but Mozart, while he lived, also had to make his living. He, like other composers, was at times employed in the practical business of providing dance music for court and social occasions. Each of Mozart's Six German Dances  begins with two repeated sections followed by a trio. Once the trio is repeated, the dance goes back to the first two themes which are each played once again creating wonderful musical symmetry. That, in essence, was Mozart: "wonderful musical symmetry." It is estimated that to play all of his music in a row would take 202 hours.

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Born in Indiana, Cole Porter was of the same vintage as Noel Coward and Rodgers and Hammerstein. He wrote music and lyrics for musical comedies, including Gay Divorce, Around the World in Eighty Days, Kiss Me Kate and the film High Society. "Night and Day" is his best-known song. On Stage With Cole Porter  is a medley of his most popular melodies. Cole Porter's name comes from the surnames of his parents, Kate Cole and Sam Porter. Porter's grandfather was the son of a shoemaker, but his shrewd business sense and his drive for acquiring money made him the richest man in Indiana. Porter's mother, Kate, therefore, had the best of everything growing up: education and music lessons. Sam, the father, was on the shy side, a druggist from Peru, Indiana. Porter learned piano and violin at age six, but he preferred the piano. To make long practice sessions more palatable for her son, mother Kate parodied popular tunes on the piano. When Porter became a young man, he attended Yale where he wrote zany musicals. He also put in a brief stint at Harvard Law School but abandoned that direction for music. His first Broadway show, See America First, was a flop in 1916. Cole Porter set out for Paris in 1917 where he flourished socially. He lied to the American press about his involvement in the War, making up stories about his collaboration with the French Foreign Legion. Porter earned a reputation as a wealthy socialite in the American press. In the 1920's, he succumbed to the lure of Hollywood to write music for the film industry. He apparently pursued a gay life-style despite being married to a woman. He fractured his legs in a horse riding accident in 1937. He could not adjust to his crippled condition, struggling with it for years, because he put so much emphasis on health and good looks. His leg was amputated in 1958. Woody Allen movies still use Cole Porter's music in their soundtracks.

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Richard Rodgers was born in New York City. He attended Columbia University. His fame is synonymous with American musical theater, producing a rich heritage of beloved songs through collaboration with the two great lyricists, Lorenz Hart and later Oscar Hammerstein. Rodgers began work with Hart on amateur shows in 1919. Through the 1920's and 1930's, the two of them made musical comedy a well developed art form in the States. Many people are familiar with the popular love song ,"Blue Moon", which was a product of Rodgers' collaboration with Hart.  The collaboration, however, disintegrated eventually due to Hart's alcoholism and personal problems. Hart died in 1943. Shortly before Hart's death, Rodgers had already been working with Hammerstein looking for a more stable partnership. Rodgers' musical inspirations came to full fruition with Hammerstein and their combined fame flourished, giving the public great songs in musicals like: Oklahoma (1943), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951) and The Sound of Music (1959). Richard Rodgers won a Pulitzer Prize in drama for South Pacific.

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Franz Schubert was born in Vienna, the son of a schoolteacher. Schubert became a schoolteacher himself for three years but gave that up at the age of 19 to compose full time. He gained some security in 1818 when he was appointed a music teacher for the rich nobility in West Hungary, i.e. the Esterhazy family. However, it was not long, before he quit and moved back to Vienna where he lived a Bohemian life-style. He died when he was only 31 years old. Schubert's musical output was huge during his short life-time. He wrote sonatas, fantasias, chamber music, and music for pianoforte. His songs, of which there are nearly 300, are a real treasure. Of his nine symphonies, The Unfinished Symphony is perhaps the best known. A water colour painting, dated 1825, by W.A. Rieder hangs in the Historical Museum in Vienna. It shows a pudgy faced Schubert wearing wire-rimmed spectacles, posing nonchalantly with one arm dangling over the back of a chair.

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Jean Sibelius was born in Finland, in Hämeenlinna (Tavastehus), December 8, 1865. He died in Järvenpää on September 20, 1957. He studied in Helsinki from 1886 with Wegelius and fostered ambitions as a violinist. In 1889 he went to Berlin to continue composition studies with Becker. Sibelius retumed to Helsinki in 1891 and immediately made a mark with his choral symphony Kullervo, though it took him another decade to establish a wholly consistent style. Important stages on his compositional journey were marked by the Karelia suite, the set of four tone poems on the legendary hero "Lemminkäinen", the grandiose Finlandia and the first two symphonies. He was encouraged in his music by the Finnish nationalist movement (until 1917 Finland was a grand duchy in the Russian empire). In 1904 he bought a plot of land outside Helsinki and built a house where he spent the rest of his life with his wife and daughters, removed from the city where he had been prone to bouts of heavy drinking. Also, his music gained a large international following, and he visited England (four times in 1905-12) and the USA (1914). After World War I, he produced only four major works. Sibelius lived for another three decades, but published only a few minor pieces in his later life.

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In the 19th century, Viennese dance music was dominated by Johann Strauss Sr. and his three sons Johann Jr., Josef and Eduard.  Johann Jr. composed over 170 waltzes including the Emperor Waltz written in 1888. The waltz (from the German word walzen, which means "to revolve" or “roll”) describes a graceful, romantic couple dance in 3/4 time. The first of the three beats has a strong pulse; it’s followed by two lighter beats, the second of these an upbeat "pushing" into the new first beat. Developed in central Europe, the waltz, with its fast whirling of partners held as if in an embrace, shocked polite society when it was first introduced about 1800. It became the outstanding ballroom dance of the 19th century.

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Johann Strauss Sr. was born in Austria on March 14th 1804, the son of an innkeeper. The inn was located near a harbour on the Danube where sailors from around the world stayed and played music that would influence Johann Sr. and spark his enthusiasm for popular dance music. In 1816 he began studying the violin and was eventually hired to play in Joseph Lanner’s orchestra but soon after decided to become independent with his own orchestra. He toured throughout Europe where he steadily gained popularity even conducting at the crowning of Queen Victoria in London. Around 1835, Strauss began composing music for the Austrian Emperor’s court and became conductor of Austria’s first civil regiment, where he composed the "Radetzky March". Strauss Sr. had decided early on that one musician in the family was enough and went to great lengths to keep his sons from following in his footsteps. But encouraged by their mother Anna, all three sons went on to achieved success as musicians.

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Arthur Sullivan was born in London, England and became a choirboy at Chapel Royal.  Later, he studied music at Leipzig, Germany. He composed oratorios, but became famous for the light hearted operas written in collaboration with librettist Sir W.S. Gilbert. These included H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1879), The Mikado (1885), and The Gondoliers (1889). These musicals have achieved a lasting popularity. Unfortunately, the Gilbert and Sullivan partnership eventually broke down owing to "temperamental incompatibility." Gilbert was tall, of a grouchy disposition and sloppy. Sullivan was short and charming with people. It's a wonder they ever got together to create the music and words to their great successes. Most of it was done by correspondence. Sullivan dated some well-to-do and beautiful women but he never married. Like his contemporary, Tchaikovsky, he smoked endless cigarettes and had very expensive tastes in food, clothes, and gambling. Sullivan wrote the serious opera, Ivanhoe and the ballad of "The Lost Chord " which showed that his musical capability had a broader scope than his adept skill in writing light tunes for musical comedies. Sullivan died of bronchitis at the age of 58. The last words in his diary were, "I am sorry to leave such a lovely day."

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Born in a small industrial town east of Moscow, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was musically precocious, but his interest in the subject was not encouraged because his parents believed it would have an unhealthy effect on an already neurotically excitable child. He began playing the piano in early childhood but didn't seriously pursue music until early adulthood. After a brief stint as a civil servant he decided to devote his life to his true love, music. Tchaikovsky entered the St. Petersburg Music Conservatory at the age of twenty-two. He learned how to play the organ and mastered the flute, which he then played in the Conservatory orchestra. As a young man, he supported himself by teaching pupils of his own. When Tchaikovsky finally made money, however, he was not frugal with it, giving half of it away and spending the rest on his expensive tastes in clothes, the best food, wines and cigarettes (he smoked constantly). He dressed impeccably, often being seen on the streets of St. Petersburg with his trade-mark top hat, white gloves and cane. When he wanted to go "in cognito", he wore huge dark glasses. For entertainment, Tchaikovsky played whist and solitaire. He suffered from constant headaches and indigestion. These infirmities, however, did not impeed his musical ideas from coming to him quickly. On May 25, 1888, the director of the Imperial Theatre in St. Petersburg wrote to Tchaikovsky asking him to compose music for a ballet based on Charles Perrault´s version of the Grimm Brother’s fairy tale Sleeping Beauty. Tschaikowsky wrote the music for the ballet that would become his personal favorite that year and it was premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg on January 15th, 1890. Music from the Sleeping Beauty Waltz has become world-renowned. Tchaikovsky was homosexual in a day when that orientation was stricly taboo. He was married to a woman briefly for nine weeks. He died at the age of 53, some say of a cholera epidemic and others say of poison. His untimely passing happened within 10 days of the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathetique, which he considered his best work.

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Philip Heseltine (aka Peter Warlock) was born in London on October 30, 1894. He died in London on December 17, 1930. In his short life he won public acclaim for the songs he wrote under the pseudonym Peter Warlock, yet some details of his life remain unclear. Undoubtedly he was the composer of some 120 of the finest of all English solo songs. In his early years inspiration came from Roger Quilter and Frederick Delius, as can be heard in a song from 1911, The Wind from the West. An uncle had introduced the young Warlock to Delius in 1910 and they remained lifelong friends. Warlock (or Heseltine) spent some time in Ireland learning Irish. He spent 1919 to 1921 mainly concerned with journalism. He was editor of The Sackbut, a forthright periodical which was not only a vehicle for Warlock and his friends to present their views on music but which also promoted comparatively unknown music and poetry - by Purcell, Van Dieren, Sorabji and Roy Campbell, amongst others. By the mid-1920s Warlock was considered an authority on Elizabethan music and in the course of his life he edited over three hundred Elizabethan and Jacobean lute songs for voice and keyboard or for choir, working with Philip Wilson. Interestingly, these scholarly editions were published under the name Philip Heseltine. He lived in mid-Wales for a while but returned to Chelsea in 1924. Chelsea was central to Warlock's life: he had lived there in his youth and returned many times (he lived at more that a dozen addresses in the area). It was also to be the place of his death. Early in 1925 Warlock, Moeran and Collins moved to a cottage in Eynsford, Kent, and there followed the third prolific period. He also wrote many more transcriptions- vocal and instrumental - and the three versions of the popular Capriol Suite. The music from the Eynsford years shows the love of (and affinity to) Elizabethan poetry which so characterizes all of Warlock's work. In London he was busy visiting publishers, selling the songs and transcriptions, but he also took part in Chelsea's musical activities, associating with John Goss, John Barbirolli, John Ireland and others.