Hanging out around classical music, you hear good stories — stories that illustrate some weird wrinkle in human nature it’s impossible to articulate otherwise. Some of my favorites are below, offered with no interpretation.
I don’t know if any of these events actually happened. The events don’t matter, because the stories are true.
Whenever he took a bow after one of his operas, Giacomo Puccini would make a member of the stage crew push him out of the wings and onto the stage. Then Puccini would fight back — so that he would appear as if he didn’t really want to take a bow before taking a bow.
When Olivier Messiaen was imprisoned in a German camp during WWII, a barrel of water was delivered into the prison courtyard. Delirious with thirst, all the prisoners swarmed the barrel and began to fight over it. Messiaen remained seated on the ground. A companion asked: “What’s wrong with you? Why aren’t you trying to get any water?” Messiaen replied: “It is not the will of God.”
Uruguayan guitarist Agustín Barrios kept a jar with one hundred pebbles inside. He would dump the jar out, play a piece of music from memory, put one pebble back in the jar, play the same piece from memory again, put a second pebble back in the jar, and so on. If he had a memory slip — even if it were on the 99th pebble — he would dump the jar back out, and begin again.
Near the end of his life, while composing his only opera, Eugene Ysaÿe marked a stage direction in the score indicating that a bomb should go off. At that moment, a box of matches on Ysaÿe’s desk spontaneously combusted.
When he was young, Luciano Pavarotti once found a bent nail backstage, pocketed it, and gave a great performance. Convinced the bent nail had brought him good luck, Pavarotti began searching for bent nails before performances. For the rest of his career, people would scatter bent nails on the backstage floor, ensuring that Pavarotti gave a great performance.
While visiting New York, Antonín Dvořák drank six neat Manhattans in a row, and showed no signs whatsoever of inebriation.
Heitor Villa-Lobos’ father was a civil servant and amateur musician who had absolute pitch. Young Villa-Lobos did not have absolute pitch. Whenever they heard a tone — the squeaking of a hinge or the call of a bird — Villa-Lobos’ father would ask him to name the note. If Villa-Lobos answered incorrectly, his father would smack him on the head. Villa-Lobos developed absolute pitch.
Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Nose was performed in Moscow in 1929, then forgotten. In 1974, a set of parts to the opera was discovered under some lumber in the Moscow Opera House. From the parts a score was reconstructed, and a revival performance arranged. Shostakovich, old and in ill health, had nothing to do with the process until he was brought in to view a dress rehearsal. Without having seen the score in nearly 50 years, Shostakovich began to call out corrections to the performers from memory — using rehearsal marks and measure numbers accurately.
Arnold Schoenberg suffered from triskaidekaphobia. He became terrified of dying at age 76, since 7 + 6 = 13. On Friday, July 13, 1951 — at age 76 — he became especially afraid, and was bedridden all day. Gradually his wife talked him out of his paranoia. He began to recover, and it seemed the worst was over. Then, at a quarter to midnight, Schoenberg died.
A pianist — whose name was lost in the telling — always began concerts by carrying a loaded pistol onstage, placing it conspicuously on the piano, and leaving it there while he played. He did this, he said, because he imagined it made the audience listen more attentively.