Dr. Sanna Pederson, University of Oklahoma
In order to survive in their first decades, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra had to play concerts almost every day during the concert season of October through April. Their four months of summer season in Holland at the seaside was even more rigorous, with concerts twice a day. After reading that the conductor Joseph Rebicek died … Read more
Joseph Joachim participated in a staggeringly long list of fund raisers, festivals and memorials over the course of his life. This includes the Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven Denkmal in the Tiergarten that was installed in 1904, a year after the Wagner statue. Joachim had started raising money almost ten years earlier, and when the concert celebrating Joachim’s 60th … Read more
A monument for Richard Wagner, and the first for any composer in Berlin, was unveiled as part of a five-day festival in 1903. (A Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven Denkmal followed in 1904.) The statue of Wagner was by the sculptor Gustav Eberlein, who had also made some of the figures of German heroes and leaders lining the Siegesallee. Wagner … Read more
This item from the Musical News of 1902 reports on the Beethoven Society of Tokyo, a chamber music club founded by an English amateur, who has engaged as its leader “Herr Junker, a pupil of Joachim,” who was a teacher at the “Tokio Conservatoire,” where “he has turned out some excellent Japanese pupils as far … Read more