#pedagogue

(Captain America Volume 1 #267)

OTD in Music History: Important composer, pianist, pedagogue, and pioneering ethnomusicologist Bela Bartok (1881 - 1945) arrives in New York City onboard a steamer ship in 1940. Fleeing Europe to escape WWII, he will never again set foot in his beloved Hungary. A small and sickly child, Bartok spent much of his youth indoors studying music and started composing before he turned 10. Following the lead of one of his closest friends and mentors -- fellow Hungarian nationalist composer Erno Dohnanyi (1877 - 1960) -- Bartok pursued his professional studies in Budapest at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music, rather than taking the more traditional route and moving to Vienna. After Bartok received his degree, he and fellow composer Zoltan Kodaly (1882 - 1967) began venturing out into the countryside to document the vast reservoir of "authentic" Hungarian folk music that still existed there. Their initial collection of this material was undertaken with the sole intention of preserving vanishing Hungarian musical traditions... but soon enough, both men found themselves increasingly incorporating idiosyncratic melodic, rhythmic, and textural folk elements into their own original compositions... In Bartok's case, this resulted in a body of work that easily ranks among the most powerful and original music written in the 20th Century. PICTURED: An intense photo portrait of Bartok (c. 1920s). Also shown is a copy of a concert program that was handed out to attendees at a historic concert which took place just two years before Bartok fled from Europe, on November 8, 1938. This concert featured an all-Bartok program (performed by Bartok himself) and included the Belgian premiere of one of his finest masterpieces: “Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta” (1937). Bartok signed this copy.

pedagogue by Amina Mehmood

OTD in Music History: Legendary composer, conductor, pianist, and pedagogue Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886) makes his public debut as a concert pianist, at the age of 11, in Vienna in 1822. Well, sort of. Liszt’s father had begun teaching Franz the piano at age seven, and Franz was already composing in an elementary manner within a year. Technically, the young Liszt appeared in a handful of concerts in present-day Slovakia in October / November 1820. In the wake of those concerts, however, a group of wealthy sponsors offered to finance his further musical education in Vienna... and it was only after he had received two years of formal piano lessons from Carl Czerny (1791 - 1857), himself a former student of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827), that Liszt considered himself to be a “finished” performing artist. Accordingly, Liszt always considered his first concert in Vienna in 1822 to be the *true* start of his legendary performing career. (It was also thanks to Czerny that the young Liszt met Beethoven, which was an event that he always marked out as one of the single most important and formative experiences of his life.) PICTURED: A c. 1900 real photo postcard showing Liszt as he appeared sixty years later, at the very end of his career.

Here we see this antique postcard from 1916 with a nice pencil drawing from the famous young Composer, Pianist, Conductor, Teacher and Writer Franz Liszt (1811-1886).

ONCE UPON A TIME: “Tristan and Isolde”, Cologne Opera Festival on June 11, 1911. The wonderful scene photo from the second act shows the American Edyth Walker (1867-1950) as Isolde. Jacques Urlus sang Tristan, Paul Bender sang King Marke and Margarete Matzenauer sang Brangäne. Max von Schillings conducted. The production was done by Alexander d’Arnals and the set was created by Hans Wildermann.