Mendelssohn's Liebestod?

Did Felix Mendelssohn nurse a fatal passion for the "Swedish nightingale," Jenny Lind?

So one British scholar, Curtis Price, suggests, citing an affidativ from Lind's husband mentioning his destruction of "an 1847 missive from the composer to the soprano declaring passionate love for her, begging her to elope with him to America, and threatening suicide if she refused. Lind, one infers, did refuse. Several months later, Mendelssohn was dead," Jessica Duchen reports in The Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/conspiracy-of-silence-could-the-release-of-secret-documents-shatter-felix-mendelssohns-reputation-1300405.html

Mini-renaissance for vinyl

"Amid otherwise gloomy music sales numbers released by Nielsen Co. [for 2008], vinyl record sales doubled compared with the year before," Canwest News Service's Grant Surridge reports:

http://www.vancouversun.com/Entertainment/Vinyl+record+sales+double+2008/1142874/story.html

Surridge quotes Roy Trakin, editor of the music website Hits, as saying, "[S]trangely enough, it's the younger generation that are really kind of going back to [vinyl]" as "a nostalgic throwback to listening to music in a traditional way." I doubt that this is a mass movement; not long ago, I had to explain to a 20-something what records are and how they work.

Record sales numbers were miniscule compared with other formats – 1.88 million records sold in the U.S. in 2008, vs. 361 million CDs and 66 million digital albums.

The article doesn't say so, but I presume the Nielsen data don't include sales of used records.

Opera: Small is beautiful?

With opera companies cutting back and shutting down, does the medium's future lie in chamber opera? Could be, but that may require a change of scene from the large venues in which so many companies perform, Edward Ortiz writes in NewMusicBox:

http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5825

Update: Small can also be impermanent. Anthony Amato, shuts down his venerable chamber opera company in New York because, at 88, he's ready to retire and fears the Amato Opera's "quality would suffer without his dedication," Daniel J. Wakin reports in The New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/arts/music/13amat.html?_r=1&ref=arts

Cello workshop at VCU

Cellist Bonnie Hampton, a longtime faculty member at the San Francisco Conservatory now teaching at the Juilliard School, will conduct a workshop on Feb. 21 at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

The workshop includes master classes for young cellists and for chamber musicians, a cello choir and technique class and a solo recital by Hampton. Participants also may purchase tickets for the Jan. 21 Richmond Symphony concert, featuring the orchestra’s principal cellist, Neal Cary, playing Boccherini’s Cello Concerto in B flat major, for the discounted price of $5.

Registration is open to cellists of all ages. Fees are $70 for participants, $40 for non-playing observers and educators. The deadline for registration is Jan. 12. Auditions to participate in master classes will be held on Jan. 24.

Details on the workshop:

http://www.vcu.edu/arts/music/dept/study/strings/events/hampton.html

Weimar soundbite

Leftist American and European pop culture has long been wedded to the notion that Weimar Germany is the template for Western society, that we are waiting for the social and economic hammer to fall, producing a right-wing backlash that will usher in the next Hitler – portrayed, successively, by Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms and Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

The latest example of this dystopian genre – oddly, premiering on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration as president – is “Addicted to Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s 20th Century,” a cabaret-style musical described as a “punk Songspiel,” starring Lorre impersonator Jack Terricloth and his band, the World/Inferno Friendship Society.

Ben Sisario, in The New York Times, is not making this up:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/arts/music/08worl.html?_r=1&ref=music

Isn't this shtick getting pretty shopworn? And if, as the pundits predict, the political right is in for a long spell out of power, who will be the dystopians' new demons? Are Sarah Palin and Rick Warren scary enough to sustain this cultural cottage industry?

The last piano roll

QRS Music Technologies, the last manufacturer of piano rolls, ended 108 years of production on Dec. 31 with a copy of the Rodgers & Hart tune "Spring Is Here," The Buffalo News reports:

http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/story/538967.html

The piano roll, a scroll of perforated paper that activates the keys of a player piano, was a popular medium in the late-19th and early 20th centuries. Piano rolls provide some of the most listenable documents of the work of leading performers and composers of the period, notably Gustav Mahler, Feruccio Busoni, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Scott Joplin and George Gershwin.

QRS "is now a leading manufacturer of digitized and computerized player-piano technology that runs on CDs," The Buffalo News' Mark Sommer writes.

DG signs Wang

Yuja Wang, the Chinese-born pianist who created a sensation in her November 2007 appearance with the Shanghai Quartet and a solo recital three months later at the University of Richmond, will release her debut recording, "Sonatas and Etudes" (Liszt, Chopin, Scriabin, Ligeti) on Feb. 17 on Deutsche Grammophon.