Piano – The Scholarly Dilettante

March 31, 2022April 2, 2022

What the Fiocco: Investigating the Allegro

Every Suzuki violin student who reaches Book 6 learns the Fiocco Allegro. I remember studying it in high school; it’s a lot of fun to play. But I realized recently that I didn’t know anything about it—like, the first name of the composer, or what century he lived in, or if the Allegro is part of a larger piece, and if so, which one?

The first two questions were easy enough to answer. My Suzuki book from the 1970s provided only the composer’s first initials—G.H. Fiocco—but it took no time at all to establish that his full name was Joseph-Hector Fiocco (some sources give his name as Gioseffo Hectore). I had guessed that the piece was written in the eighteenth century, and my musicological instinct turned out to be sound: Joseph-Hector Fiocco lived from 1703-1741. Despite his Italian name, Fiocco lived his entire life in what is now Belgium. His father Pietro Antonio Fiocco (1653-1714) had left Venice to work as a musician and composer at the ducal court in Brussels. Both Joseph-Hector and his older half-brother Jean-Joseph Fiocco (1686-1746) followed in their father’s musical footsteps, holding positions in Brussels and Antwerp.¹

The answers to my third and fourth questions turned out to be more complicated, and more interesting, than I had imagined. I had assumed that the piece was something like the Allegro movement of a Baroque violin sonata, but that is not the case. It was not originally written for the violin at all; it was originally written for harpsichord. It comes from Fiocco’s Pièces de Clavecin, Opus 1, published in 1730 and consisting of 24 pieces divided into two suites. The Allegro is number 10 of the first suite.

Title Page of Pieces de Clavecin — Title page of the Pieces de Clavecin

There are several recordings on youtube of the two suites performed on the harpsichord. Here is one by Ewald Demeyere; the Allegro begins at 32:28. The suite continues here.

Allegro from the Pieces de Clavecin — The original Fiocco Allegro, from the Pieces de Clavecin

What I found most interesting, and most unexpected, was what I learned in investigating how the Fiocco Allegro became a violin piece. It entered the violin repertoire in the early twentieth century when several movements from the Pièces de Clavecin, including the Allegro, were arranged for violin and piano by Norman O’Neill and Arthur Bent. Both these names were completely unknown to me, but Norman O’Neill was easy to find information about. He’s well-known enough to have a Wikipedia entry and a brief article in Grove’s Dictionary.² I was also able to consult a biography written by his son-in-law Derek Hudson, originally published in 1945,³ and even a website put together by the Royal College of Music.

Norman O’Neill (1875-1934) was a British composer. He studied composition in the 1890s at the Hoch Conservatorium in Frankfurt, where he became friends with a group of British and Australian composition students, collectively known as the Frankfurt Group or the Frankfurt Gang. They all had careers as composers; a few, like Roger Quilter and Percy Grainger, became quite well-known.⁴ It was also in Frankfurt that O’Neill met his future wife Adine Ruckert (1875-1947), a pianist who was studying with Clara Schumann.

Back in Britain, O’Neill became the music director for the Haymarket Theatre in London’s West End. In those days, even “straight” plays were often accompanied by music that provided an effect similar to today’s movie soundtracks. Known as “incidental music,” it might include an overture, scene-change music, and music to set a mood or underlie dramatic action. Norman O’Neill was best known for his incidental music, although he also composed vocal music, chamber music, works for piano, and orchestral music. The Bridge Quartet recorded some of his chamber works in 2012; some of his incidental music can also be heard on youtube. It’s all quite lovely; I’m delighted to have discovered him.

At first I thought that Arthur Bent was going to remain an International Man of Mystery (no Wikipedia, no Grove’s article, nothing in the Hudson biography, no info. on the O’Neill website). However, when I used the “Contact us” feature on the O’Neill website, I received a prompt response from one of the site’s creators, Katherine Jessel, who turned out to be Derek Hudson’s daughter and therefore Norman O’Neill’s granddaughter. She was able to consult a British reference book, the 1935 edition of Who’s Who in Music, which informs us that Arthur Bent (b. 1868) was a violinist who taught at the Royal College of Music and, like O’Neill, was an examiner for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM), which is likely how they knew each other (they also both lived in the same part of London, in Kensington). Who’s Who also includes the tantalizing fact that Arthur Bent was “Musician in Ordinary to the King.”⁵ My guess is that Bent’s role in the Fiocco arrangements was to lend his violinistic expertise.

Norman O’Neill doesn’t seem to have been a prolific arranger; his website lists only one arrangement apart from the Fiocco collection, an orchestration of Three-Fours, a suite for piano by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.⁶ I don’t know for certain what prompted O’Neill to do the Fiocco arrangements, but I suspect it may have been his wife Adine. At a time when Baroque music was not very well-known, Adine O’Neill performed works by Scarlatti and other Baroque keyboard composers on the BBC. From 1903-1937, her day job was Head Music Mistress at St Paul’s Girls’ School in London; one of the instructors she hired was Gustav Holst, who wrote the St Paul’s Suite for his pupils there. In a 1932 letter to Adine, Holst wrote, “Amongst all you have done for me the two things I am most grateful for are, firstly, introducing me to Scarlatti and then bringing me here [St Paul’s].”⁷ It’s more than likely, therefore, that it was Adine O’Neill who discovered the works of Fiocco and brought them to the attention of her husband.⁸

In addition to the violin and piano arrangements, Norman O’Neill also arranged some of Fiocco’s harpsichord music for his orchestra at the Haymarket Theatre. A review from The Times of a production of the now-forgotten play All that Matters has this to say:

Two charming little pieces by Fiocco, one of the family of 18^th century musicians who came from Venice and settled in Brussels, have been gracefully scored for the modern orchestra and are delightful to hear in the first interval. ⁹

According to Katherine Jessel, “unfortunately the orchestral arrangements have gone missing but were last performed by the BBC in an anniversary tribute in 1975.”¹⁰

Happily, the violin and piano arrangements have not disappeared. Bent and O’Neill published seven movements from Fiocco’s Pièces de Clavecin in 1910; O’Neill added three more movements in 1931. All ten are still available from Schott, the original publisher, although only as individual pieces, not as a collection. Bent and O’Neill changed a few of the movement titles, which threw me for a bit. I was able to identify them by comparing the violin arrangement to the original harpsichord version. This table sorts it out:

First Suite for Harpsichord	Arrangement for Violin and Piano
1. L’Angloise	L’Anglaise
6. L’Inconstante	L’Inconstante
8. La Francoise	Menuetto
9. Adagio	Arioso
10. Allegro	Allegro
Second Suite for Harpsichord	Arrangement for Violin and Piano
13. Allemande	Allemande
14. La Legère	La Legère
18. Gavotte	Deux Gavottes
22. Les Zephirs	Rondo
24. La Fringante	La Fringante

Only the 1910 collection with seven movements is available from imslp; they are the Arioso, La Legère,¹¹ Allegro, Allemande, L’Anglaise, Menuetto, and La Fringante.

O’Neill’s website has two of the three movements that he added in 1931 available for download—the Deux Gavottes and the Rondo. However, if you want L’Inconstante, you’ll have to order it from Schott.

Surprisingly, I couldn’t find any recordings of any violinists playing any of the movements other than the Allegro. The Allegro, however, entered the standard violin repertoire in the early twentieth century. Yehudi Menuhin recorded it at age 12 in 1928, accompanied on the piano by his teacher, Louis Persinger. There is also a recording by Artur Grumiaux from 1958. Itzhak Perlman included the Fiocco Allegro on his 1994 album Bits and Pieces.¹² Of course, there are also innumerable videos made by Suzuki students.

When I compared my Suzuki versions in Volume 6 to the 1910 Bent and O’Neill arrangement of the Allegro, I discovered that not only are they note-by-note identical, but they are also laid out on the page exactly the same way. While the Suzuki violin part does change a few bowings and dynamic markings and add fingerings, the two piano parts are identical down to every accent and pedal mark. With the exception of the name of the composer, which Suzuki gives as G.H. Fiocco instead of J.H, and Suzuki’s total omission of the names of the arrangers, they look like Xerox copies of each other.¹³ I checked the latest edition of Suzuki Volume 6; the piano part has been re-engraved, but Bent and O’Neill are still uncredited.¹⁴

oneill allegro — O’Neill and Bent arrangement

I think that, just as with Suzuki’s use of the Tivadar Nachéz editions of the Vivaldi concertos (also originally uncredited), the inclusion of the Fiocco Allegro is another example of how the Suzuki repertoire is a product of the musical influences of Shinichi Suzuki’s youth in the early twentieth century. It is regrettable that except for the Allegro, the other violin arrangements of the Pièces de Clavecin have been forgotten. I’ve put them on my list of pieces to learn someday, and violin teachers ought to consider adding them to their teaching repertoire. Some of the movements in the original harpsichord suites look like they might be easy enough for me to learn them on piano. Maybe I’ll organize a Fiocco Festival!

February 2, 2020

A Musical Palindrome

As many people on the internet have pointed out, today (February 2, 2020) is an 8-digit calendrical palindrome—02/02/2020. A palindrome, of course, is a word or phrase that reads the same backwards and forwards. Some of the classics are

“Madam, I’m Adam”

(the first words ever spoken?). Or Napoleon’s supposed lament,

“Able was I, ere I saw Elba.”

Palindromes can also be musical, and I thought today was the perfect day to talk about a musical palindrome composed by Franz Joseph Haydn.

Haydn has always been one of my favorite composers, ever since I was a child and my mother supplied me with Lives of the Composers children’s books (still probably the source of much of my knowledge of music history). I loved the music, of course—I think I’m a classicist at heart—but I was also attracted to the way these biographies presented Haydn’s personality. The Haydn of my youthful reading was playful, with an irreverent sense of humor.

One example of this playfulness is his Symphony no. 94 in G major, composed in 1792 during the first of his visits to London. It is known as the “Surprise Symphony” from the fortissimo chord in the second movement that follows several bars of a pianissimo melody. According to legend, the chord was supposed to have awakened sleepy concert-goers who had feasted too heavily on English roast beef.¹ Or take Symphony no. 45 in F# minor (1772), nicknamed the “Farewell” Symphony. Haydn spent much of his career as the Kapellmeister at the court of Prince Esterhazy in Hungary, composing and directing music for the entertainment of the court. When the Prince kept the musicians working for too long a time without a vacation (no Musicians’ Union in those days), Haydn responded by composing the Finale of the symphony so that one by one the musicians leave the stage, extinguishing their candles as they go until finally there is nothing but silent darkness. The Prince got the message.

With these examples in mind, I was delighted to discover an instance of Haydn’s musical wit in a piano composition that is playable for someone at my level. This is the Minuet movement from Haydn’s Piano Sonata in A major, Hob. XVI.26² The movement is marked “Minuet al Rovescio,” which means “Minuet in Reverse.” The first half of the Minuet is ten measures long, followed by another 10 measures that are the reverse of the first ten. In my edition, produced for student use, the second half is written out, but in the original publication, the pianist was expected to play the second half by starting at the end and reading backwards—right to left and bottom to top. What a mental workout that would be!

To make it clearer, here are the first and last measures of the Minuet. You can see how the second is the reverse of the first.

Measure 1 of Haydn’s “Minuet al Rovescio”

Final measure of Haydn’s “Minuet al Rovescio”

The twelve measures of the Trio section work the same way—measures one to twelve are played forwards, and then twelve to one are played backwards.

I was so intrigued by the structure of this Minuet that I decided to see what else I could find out about it, and I discovered that Haydn must have liked it so much that he used it twice. He originally composed it in about 1772 as the Minuet movement for his Symphony no. 47 in G major, which I was delighted to discover has the nickname “Palindrome” from this very movement.

I was also delighted to discover, when I went to imslp.org to get the music for the above images, that the site also had a transcription of the Minuet for violin and piano, done by Ferdinand David, the violinist for whom Mendelssohn wrote his violin concerto. That’s going on my to-be-played list!

I’m sure that Haydn was more complex, both as a man and as a composer, than the way he was presented in the biographies I read as a child, but I am delighted to be able to learn to play this small example of his inventiveness.

December 16, 2019

Pseudo-Beethoven

Or, WoO Hoo! It’s Beethoven Day!

Obligatory public domain portrait of Beethoven

Happy Beethoven Day! Have you made your plans yet for #Beethoven250? This will be a year-long celebration in 2020 to mark the 250^th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth.

I got an early start on the festivities on Saturday, when I performed Beethoven’s Sonatina in F major at this semester’s recital for adult music students at Frederick Community College (FCC), where I study piano. Or did I? That is, I really performed it (from memory, I might add), but is it really by Beethoven?

Linda Benoit (left) and me, two adult piano students of John Wickelgren at the December 2019 recital at FCC. Linda has a private piano studio and plays advanced repertoire; I’m, well, a dilettante.

Soon after I started learning it, my teacher at FCC, Dr. John Wickelgren, casually mentioned one day, “This probably isn’t by Beethoven.”

I said, “What are you talking about? It says ‘Beethoven’ right there on the music.”

He explained, “It’s got an Anhang number. That’s the appendix to the Kinsky-Halm Beethoven catalog. It means that the attribution is probably spurious.”

I asked, “On what grounds? What’s the evidence?”

He replied, “I don’t know. You’ll have to look in Kinsky-Halm. I’m not even sure if that’s a hyphenated name or if it’s two different people.”

RESEARCH PROJECT!!!

The Mount Saint Mary’s library didn’t have the Kinsky-Halm catalog, so while I was waiting for the Interlibrary Loan to arrive I tried to see what I could find out online. First of all, Kinsky and Halm were two people, Georg L. Kinsky and Hans Halm. Georg Kinsky (1882-1951), according to Grove Music Online, was a lecturer in musicology at the University of Cologne from 1921-1932, after which, his biography states ominously, “he worked privately.” The bio doesn’t say, but I assume he was Jewish, especially since it notes that he was sentenced to hard labor in 1944 (no further details). Kinsky survived the war and worked on the Beethoven catalog until his death in 1951. The catalog was completed by Hans Halm (1898-1965), the music librarian at the Munich State Library, and published in 1955 as Das Werk Beethovens / Thematisch-Bibliographisches Verzeichnis seiner sämtlichen vollendeten Kompositions (Beethoven’s Works / Thematic-Bibliographic List of His Completed Compositions).

Once the catalog arrived, I eagerly looked to see what it said about my Sonatina. It’s one of a group of two, along with a Sonatina in G major. Both of them are staples of the intermediate piano repertoire. Neither has an opus number, which means they were not published by Beethoven during his lifetime.

Nor are the two Sonatinas listed among the Werke ohne Opuszahl (“WoO”), or “Works without opus number,” pieces that Kinsky determined were definitely by Beethoven but that remained unpublished during his lifetime. There are over 200 works in this category, some of them never or rarely performed but others quite well-known. The most famous of these is probably WoO 59, more commonly known as “Für Elise.”¹ The two Sonatinas are in another category, the Anhang, or appendix. These are works that have been attributed to Beethoven, but the attribution is doubtful. The Sonatinas are Anhang 5, numbers 1 and 2.

Two questions need to be answered. First, how did the Sonatinas come to be attributed to Beethoven? Second, why is that attribution now considered to be spurious? In other words, why are they in the Anhang and not the WoO? The entry in Kinsky-Halm provides information to help answer both questions.²

In answer to the first, the Sonatinas were published under Beethoven’s name, during his lifetime, as early as 1807 (Beethoven died in 1827). The 1807 publication was by a publisher named Louis-Rudolphus, located in Altona (near Hamburg, in northern Germany). The title-page reads, “II SONATINES / pour le Piano-Forte / Composées par / L. van Beethoven. / Altona chéz Louis Rudolphus.”

In answer to the second, Beethoven had no known relationship with the publisher in Altona. Furthermore, no manuscripts of the Sonatinas survive, nor did Beethoven ever mention them in any of his writings. It appears that the publisher thought that the Beethoven name would sell sheet music, so he attached it to someone else’s composition, and the attribution stuck.³ If this is true, then two people were cheated: Beethoven, who never received a pfennig for the use of his name, and the unknown actual composer, whose two charming works have been performed for over 100 years without his receiving credit.

So it looks like the two Sonatinas that are typically the first Beethoven works a beginning pianist learns—even before “Für ~~Elise~~ Therese”—are not by Beethoven at all. And I’ve got to admit, they don’t actually sound very much like Beethoven. They’re lovely, but they have no particularly Beethovenian characteristics (like sforzandi, sudden strong accents in unexpected places). They sound like the works of a run-of-the-mill classical-era composer.

In classical and medieval studies, we have a way of referring to exactly the scenario I’ve described regarding the two Beethoven Sonatinas. If a work was at one time ascribed to a particular author (perhaps because of the subject matter, or because it was included in a manuscript with other works by that author), but further research has shown that it couldn’t have been by that person (typically on chronological or linguistic grounds), and there’s no evidence to determine who really wrote it, then the work is identified as being by “Pseudo-[name].” For example, one of the sources I used in my dissertation was an early-medieval theologian referred to as “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite.” In my recently-concluded Ancient Greece class, we read a description of Athenian democracy originally attributed to Xenophon but now identified as “Pseudo-Xenophon.”⁴

I’ve never seen this usage applied in a musicological context, but I propose that it should be. Henceforth, the Sonatinas in F and G, Anhang 5 nos. 1 and 2, shall be identified as having been composed by “Pseudo-Beethoven.” You heard it here first.

BONUS: Here’s an unusual performance of the F major Sonatina, by Tobias Koch, who added his own improvisatory flourishes.

September 2, 2019

Paderewski, Parlor Music, Piano Professors, and Progress: The Piano at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Part 4

Progress and Piano Professors

While white women were pushed to the margins of the Fair, the contributions of African-Americans to the story of American progress were not simply marginalized; they were erased. Not for nothing was the Fair nicknamed the “White City.” Only European-derived culture and achievements could be displayed in those gleaming neo-classical buildings. Visitors to the Fair could see Africans themselves displayed on the Midway in Dahomey Village, one of the living ethnological villages whose purpose was to set the utopian vision of progress in the adjacent White City into sharper relief.¹ But no African-Americans were on the Fair’s planning commissions; no building was dedicated to the progress they had made since the abolition of slavery. There was a “Colored American Day,” analogous to other special “Days” at the Fair arranged to boost attendance. Antonin Dvořák, who was summering that year in Spillville, Iowa, conducted his Eighth Symphony and other works on Bohemian Day, for example. African-American musicians Harry T. Burleigh and Will Marion Cook (both of whom studied with Dvořák at the National Conservatory in New York) joined poet Paul Laurence Dunbar for a program on Colored American Day at which Frederick Douglass also spoke. Otherwise, African-American participation was unofficial and undocumented.

It is generally believed, based on oral traditions, that several “Piano Professors,” as they were called, playing music that would soon be known as “ragtime,” performed either on the Midway or at various establishments in the neighborhood of the Fair. Despite a lack of written documentation, scholars concur that Scott Joplin, the “King of Ragtime Writers,” was probably one of these Piano Professors. Ragtime has been called the first indigenous American musical style. Joplin established the ragtime form in his “Maple Leaf Rag” of 1899, which also became his biggest hit. Joplin composed over forty other rags after “Maple Leaf,” including the “Cascades” Rag inspired by the 1904 St Louis Fair commemorating the Louisiana Purchase, which he definitely did attend.²

The World’s Columbian Exposition closed over 125 years ago, on October 31, 1893. Little of the physical Fair remains today. The buildings of the White City, which were never intended to be permanent, are all gone, except for the Fine Arts building, now the Museum of Science and Industry. Besides its name, the Midway survives only as a wide grassy strip on the University of Chicago campus. The legacy of the Fair remains, however, in perhaps unexpected places. If you’ve ever ridden on a Ferris Wheel or enjoyed the midway at a county fair; drunk Welch’s grape juice or eaten Cracker Jack (both introduced at the Fair); recited the Pledge of Allegiance (written for the Fair’s Dedication Day ceremonies) or sung the fourth verse of “America the Beautiful” (with its reference to “alabaster cities”), you can thank the Chicago World’s Fair.

The Fair also left a musical legacy. Concert-goers who attend classical performances still mostly hear the music of dead European males, although, after being mostly forgotten after her death in 1944, Amy Beach has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. Similarly, ragtime faded in popularity in the early twentieth century (although not before it influenced jazz), but experienced a revival in the 1970s, especially after the 1972 movie The Sting used Joplin tunes in its soundtrack. (For a time, it seemed that every piano student in the land was playing an arrangement of “The Entertainer.”) The issues raised by the experience of music at the Chicago World’s Fair—what to play, who should play it, how do you get an audience to come hear it, and how do you pay for it—are familiar to every classical music organization today.

For Further Reading:

Berlin, Edward A. King of Ragtime: Scott Joplin and his Era. New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994.

Curtis, Susan. Dancing to a Black Man’s Tune: A Life of Scott Joplin. Columbia and London: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1994.

September 1, 2019September 1, 2019

Paderewski, Parlor Music, Piano Professors, and Progress: The Piano at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Part 3

Progress and Parlor Music

Both Thomas’ program of concerts and the Fair as a whole were designed to display progress. But progress is by its nature a comparative concept. The idea of progress as it arose in the Enlightenment implies that a society has journeyed from a worse state to a better one. So demonstrating progress requires showing its opposite— knowledge to compare with ignorance, reason with superstition, civilization with barbarism. This ideology of progress was mapped onto the geography of the Fair. Although Bertha Honoré Palmer, President of the Fair’s Board of Lady Managers, had negotiated a Women’s Building to celebrate female accomplishment, and engaged a woman architect, Sophia Hayden, to design it, the Women’s Building was not deemed worthy of a prime location on the Court of Honor.¹ Rather, it was pushed, literally, to the margin of the Fair, on the extreme edge of the main Fair grounds adjacent to the Midway. In the Fair’s hierarchy, white women occupied a borderline space, on the threshold between the civilization of the White City and the barbarism of the Midway.

Women’s music was marginalized as well. Like Chadwick and Paine, composer Amy Beach is also considered a member of the Second New England School. Like Chadwick and Paine, she was commissioned to write a work for Dedication Day in October 1892. Unlike Chadwick and Paine, however, Beach was not to hear her piece performed at that ceremony. After much back-and-forth between male Fair officials and Bertha Palmer, Beach’s composition, the “Festival Jubilate” for chorus and orchestra, a setting of Psalm 100, “O be joyful in the Lord, all ye lands” (Opus 17), was instead performed at the dedication of the Women’s Building on May 1, 1893. The lack of music by women composers at Paderewski’s concert was typical of the programming of the rest of the Music Hall concerts (and, of course, typical of much classical music programming even today).²

Although Beach had already written one large-scale work, a Mass in E-flat (Opus 5, 1890), which could have been performed at one of the Choral Hall concerts, she was not given a place in any of the concerts planned by Thomas. She did return to the Fair on July 5-7 for the Women’s Musical Congress. The Fair’s organizers sponsored numerous International Congresses that ran concurrently with the Fair, meeting in downtown Chicago’s newly-constructed Art Institute. The Congresses assessed the state of the topic, discussed controversial issues, and debated what progress had been made and what remained to be done.³

Beach performed her own compositions on each of the Congress’ three days. The pieces she chose for these performances were not the large-scale works like symphonies and concertos that were featured in the Music Hall series. Rather, Beach highlighted smaller-scale genres whose very names— parlor songs, salon pieces, chamber works—emphasize the domestic setting that women musicians were associated with. On July 5, she played two piano pieces, “In Autumn” and “Fireflies,” from her Opus 15, Sketches, published the previous year. The following day she premiered her Romance for violin and piano, Opus 23, with Maud Powell, the first American violin virtuoso, as the soloist. The final day of the Congress, she accompanied vocalist Jeannette Dutton on Beach’s song “Sweetheart, Sigh no More,” whose melody she had adapted for the Romance. Although much of Beach’s oeuvre falls into these domestic genres, she did not confine her creative output to the parlor. In the years following the Fair, she composed her Gaelic Symphony in E minor, opus 32 (1897) and her Piano Concerto in C# minor, opus 45 (1900), both premiered by the Boston Symphony (the Concerto with Beach as the soloist).

Next: Progress and Piano Professors

For Further Reading:

Block, Adrienne Fried. Amy Beach, Passionate Victorian: The Life and Work of an American Composer, 1867-1944. New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998.

Feldman, Ann E. “Being Heard: Women Composers and Patrons at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.” Notes, 2nd series, 47, no. 1 (Sept. 1990), 7-20.

August 31, 2019

Paderewski, Parlor Music, Piano Professors, and Progress: The Piano at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Part 2

Paderewski Concert: The Event

Let’s return to the Paderewski story. Theodore Thomas, a prominent conductor in late-nineteenth-century America, had recently become the conductor of what would later be known as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; the Exposition Orchestra was in fact mostly made up of Chicago Symphony musicians. Thomas was also the Director of the Music Bureau of the Fair, and he had planned an ambitious series of concerts for the Fair’s six-month run. The Paderewski concert was the first of what was intended to be a series of orchestral concerts in the Music Hall; additional concerts were planned for the Choral Hall, the Fair’s other indoor music venue, as well as outdoor band concerts.

Paderewski Concert: The Program

The program for Paderewski’s concert was all well-known works by European composers, all (except for Paderewski himself) dead and all (except for the Poles Paderewski and Chopin) German. The program choices fit in with one of Thomas’ stated aims, to educate the American public and elevate their musical taste: “to bring before the people of the United States a full illustration of music in its highest forms, as exemplified by the most enlightened nations of the world.” To Thomas, the “highest form” of music was symphonic; the “most enlightened nation” was Germany. This aim perhaps conflicted with Thomas’ other goal, “to make a complete showing to the world of musical progress in this country.”¹ Thomas had commissioned two works by American composers for the Fair’s Dedication Day in October 1892, the “Columbian Ode” by George Whitefield Chadwick and “Columbus March and Hymn” by John Knowles Paine, two leading American composers of the day and members of what is now known as the Second New England School.² But when it came time to inaugurate his concert series, he chose a European musician performing European repertoire.

Portrait of Paderewski by Lawrence Alma-Tadema
The Program for the opening concert

Paderewski Concert: The Instrument

Paderewski played the concert on a Steinway piano. He was what we would now call a “Steinway Artist”—Steinway and Sons supplied the instrument for his entire U.S. tour.³ Many pianos were on display in the immense Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building on the Fair’s Court of Honor. Piano-makers like Chickering, Kimball, Everett, and many others now forgotten showcased their latest models. Makers of accessories like piano stools and component parts like piano wire were also present. Some displays were quite creative: Alfred Dolge and Son, maker of hammers, dampers, and, as the official report on the display of musical instruments put it, all the “woolly parts” of instruments, adorned his display with lampposts in the shape of giant piano hammers.⁴

The Alfred Dolge company’s exhibit in the Manufactures Building. Note the Lampposts in the shape of piano hammers.

It is not surprising that pianos should be featured so prominently at the Fair. 1893 was in the midst of the Golden Age of the piano—it was standard equipment in every middle-class home, and a standard part of the education of every middle-class young girl, one of the “accomplishments,” along with drawing and needlework, that would show she was a lady. Many of the piano companies exhibiting at the Fair employed such accomplished young ladies, referred to as “pianistes,” to demonstrate their products.

Furthermore, the piano conformed to the Fair’s ideology of progress. The design and manufacture of pianos underwent significant improvements in the course of the nineteenth century. In 1895, Charles Daniell asserted that if Bartolomeo Cristofori, the 18^th-century inventor of the modern piano, had “visited the World’s Columbian Exposition he would have been amazed at what he saw.” Daniell explained that “the evolution of the piano has been very great, from the tinkling little clavichord of the early eighteenth century to the perfect instrument of today.” He concluded that the exhibitors at Chicago “proved their spirit of progressiveness as never before.”⁵ It is fitting, therefore, that the first Music Hall concert should feature the piano.

The piano exhibitors, however, did not find it fitting at all. They had nothing against Paderewski himself or the choice of repertoire; it was his Steinway piano they objected to. Steinway and Sons, as well as some other eastern piano companies, had chosen not to exhibit at the Fair because they objected to the procedure to be used for awarding prizes. When the exhibitors heard that Paderewski planned to play his accustomed Steinway, they protested, demanding that he use a piano from one of the exhibiting companies. He refused, and what we would now call a flame war ensued in the Chicago and New York papers. Supported by Theodore Thomas, Paderewski prevailed, but it was not an auspicious beginning to Thomas’s concert series.

The inauspicious beginning didn’t get much better. After Paderewski’s opening concerts, which probably benefited from the soloist’s celebrity status (not to mention the publicity generated by the piano controversy), the remainder of Thomas’ carefully-planned Music Hall concerts played to near-empty houses. Maybe it was the one-dollar admission fee—twice the cost of admission to the Fair itself—that kept the crowds away. The Panic of 1893, a serious economic depression that began that summer, probably also contributed. Maybe it was Thomas’ insistence on programming “serious” music with no concession to popular taste, since the more pops-oriented concerts, which were free, packed them in. In fact, the most popular musical performances were the open-air band concerts. By August 12, Thomas’ accumulated problems led to his loss of support by the Fair’s organizers, and he resigned.

Next: Progress and Parlor Music

For Further Reading:

Abbott, Frank D., and Charles A. Daniell. Musical Instruments at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Chicago: The Presto Company, 1895.

Guion, David M. “From Yankee Doodle Thro’ to Handel’s Largo: Music at the World’s Columbian Exposition.” College Music Symposium 24, no. 1 (Spring, 1984), 81-96.

Hume, Paul, and Ruth Hume. “The Great Chicago Piano War.” American Heritage 21, issue 6 (1970), 16-21.

Mazzola, Sandy R. “Bands and Orchestras at the World’s Columbian Exposition.” American Music, vol. 4, no. 4 (Winter 1986), 407-24.

McKinley, Ann. “Music for the Dedication Ceremonies of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1892.” American Music, vol. 3, no. 1 (Spring 1985), 42-51.

Miller, Kiri. “Americanism Musically: Nation, Evolution, and Public Education at the Columbian Exposition, 1893.” 19th-Century Music 27, no. 2 (Fall 2003), 137-55.

Taylor, David A. “Paderewski’s Piano.” Smithsonian March 1999.

August 30, 2019September 1, 2019

Paderewski, Parlor Music, Piano Professors, and Progress: The Piano at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Part 1

On May 2, 1893, Polish piano virtuoso Ignaz Paderewski performed at the inaugural concert of the Music Hall on the grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (also known as the Chicago World’s Fair). The program opened with the 114-member Exposition Orchestra, conducted by Theodore Thomas, playing Beethoven’s “Consecration of the House” overture, followed by Paderewski performing as the soloist in his own piano concerto, playing his preferred Steinway instrument. This was followed by a selection of solo piano works by Chopin and Schumann. The orchestra returned to conclude the concert with Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger.

This apparently unremarkable story of a performance actually encapsulates the story of music, particularly piano music, at the Chicago World’s Fair. Every aspect of the performance—the event itself, the program, and the instrument—can serve as a window into the context of the Fair’s musical activities. At the same time, this seemingly routine account masks tensions regarding American identity, between highbrow and lowbrow forms of entertainment, and over the status of women and African-Americans that disturbed not only the Fair but also Gilded Age American society as a whole.

The Chicago World’s Fair

The Fair commemorated the 400^th anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of America. It was located in Jackson Park on the shore of Lake Michigan, seven miles south of the Loop, where landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted and supervising architect Daniel Hudson Burnham created what became known as the “White City.” The individual fair buildings, although designed by different architects, adhered to a common Neo-Classical style, known as “Beaux-Arts” from the school in Paris where many architects trained, and were all painted white. The main exhibition buildings, such as Machinery Hall, the Agriculture Building, and the gigantic Manufactures and Liberal Arts building, were arranged around a basin carved by Olmsted out of the marshy lakeshore and called the “Court of Honor.” Perpendicular to the fairgrounds proper ran the “Midway Plaisance,” a wide boulevard about a mile long. Here were gathered not only food concessions, rides, and other entertainment options—giving its name to the “midway” of every subsequent state and county fair with their carnival rides and cotton-candy stands—but also living ethnological exhibits and the Fair’s signature attraction, the great Wheel designed by George Washington Gale Ferris and intended to surpass the iron tower constructed by Gustave Eiffel for the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1889.

The Court of Honor
The Ferris Wheel

The World’s Columbian Exposition was dedicated on October 21, 1892. Hold on, you say, isn’t Columbus Day October 12? Yes it is, but New York City had scheduled its Columbus commemoration for that day and Chicago didn’t want to compete either for attention or for dignitaries—they were hoping U.S. President Benjamin Harrison would attend. So they creatively reasoned that if the Gregorian calendar had been in use in 1492, the day Columbus sighted land would have been October 21, not October 12, which makes October 21 the “real” Columbus Day. As it turned out, Benjamin Harrison couldn’t come, as his wife was dying, but he sent Vice President Levi Morton in his place. Morton expressed the overall purpose of the Fair when he dedicated it “to the world’s progress in arts, in science, in agriculture, and in manufacture.”¹ The new President, Grover Cleveland, did attend the Opening Day of the Fair on May 1, 1893. The building of the Fair continued through the winter of 1892-93, and it opened to the public on May 1, 1893, closing six months later on October 31.

Next: The Paderewski Concert

For Further Reading:

Badger, R. Reid. The Great American Fair: The World’s Columbian Exposition and American Culture.

Harris, Neil, Wim de Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert W. Rydell. Grand Illusions: Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893. Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1993.

Larson, Erik. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.

Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1988.

Mucigrosso, Robert. Celebrating the New World: Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993.

Rydell, Robert W. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916. Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984.

Rydell, Robert W., John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle. Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000.