1891, THE MUSIC HALL AKA CARNEGIE HALL OPENS IN NYC

Today, The Grandma has been listening to some music, and she has remembered the Music Hall in New York City (later known as Carnegie Hall), a wonderful place that had its grand opening and first public performance, with Tchaikovsky as the guest conductor.

Meanwhile, The Grangers have been practising some English vocabulary about Animals and Clothes.

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Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It is at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east side of Seventh Avenue between West 56th and 57th Streets.

Designed by architect William Burnet Tuthill and built by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1891, it is one of the most prestigious venues in the world for both classical music and popular music.

Carnegie Hall has its own artistic programming, development, and marketing departments and presents about 250 performances each season. It is also rented out to performing groups. The hall has not had a resident company since 1962, when the New York Philharmonic moved to Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall, renamed Avery Fisher Hall in 1973 and David Geffen Hall in 2015.

Carnegie Hall has 3,671 seats, divided among three auditoriums. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962, and the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building as a city landmark in 1967.

Carnegie Hall is on the east side of Seventh Avenue between 56th Street and 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park, in the Midtown Manhattan neighbourhood of New York City. The site covers 2,565.8 m2. Its lot is 61 m wide, covering the entire width of the block between 56th Street to the south and 57th Street to the north, and extends 46 m eastward from Seventh Avenue.

More information: Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall shares the city block with the Carnegie Hall Tower, Russian Tea Room, and Metropolitan Tower to the east.

It is cater-corner from the Osborne Apartments. It also faces the Rodin Studios and 888 Seventh Avenue to the west; Alwyn Court, the Louis H. Chalif Normal School of Dancing, and One57 to the north; the Park Central Hotel to the southwest; and the CitySpire Center to the southeast. Right outside the hall is an entrance to the New York City Subway's 57th Street–Seventh Avenue station, served by the N, ​Q, ​R, and ​W trains.

Carnegie Hall is part of an artistic hub that developed around the two blocks of West 57th Street from Sixth Avenue west to Broadway during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Its opening in 1891 directly contributed to the development of the hub. The area contains several buildings constructed as residences for artists and musicians, such as 130 and 140 West 57th Street, the Osborne Apartments, and the Rodin Studios. In addition, the area contained the headquarters of organizations such as the American Fine Arts Society, the Lotos Club, and the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Carnegie Hall is named after Andrew Carnegie, who funded its construction. It was intended as a venue for the Oratorio Society of New York and the New York Symphony Society, on whose boards Carnegie served. Construction began in 1890, and was carried out by Isaac A. Hopper and Company.

Although the building was in use from April 1891, the official opening night was May 5, with a concert conducted by Walter Damrosch and Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

The hall was owned by the Carnegie family until 1925, when Carnegie's widow sold it to a real estate developer, Robert E. Simon. When Simon died in 1935, his son, Robert E. Simon, Jr., became owner.

More information: Classic New York History

On the corner of 57th and 7th Avenue sits
the most famous concert hall in the world.
No less a figure than when Tchaikovsky
led the first performances in 1891.
Virtually every major artist has performed there.
There is simply no place like it.
The first time I stepped foot in Carnegie Hall was in 1964.

Leonard Slatkin

PYOTR TCHAIKOVSKY, A ROMANTIC CLASSICAL COMPOSER

Today, The Grandma has been reading about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the Russian composer of the Romantic period.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, in Russian Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский (7 May 1840-6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period.

He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. 

He wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, the Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy, several symphonies, and the opera Eugene Onegin. Although musically precocious, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant as there was little opportunity for a musical career in Russia at the time and no system of public music education. When an opportunity for such an education arose, he entered the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1865.

The formal Western-oriented teaching that he received there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five with whom his professional relationship was mixed.

Tchaikovsky's training set him on a path to reconcile what he had learned with the native musical practices to which he had been exposed from childhood. From that reconciliation, he forged a personal but unmistakably Russian style.

The principles that governed melody, harmony and other fundamentals of Russian music ran completely counter to those that governed Western European music, which seemed to defeat the potential for using Russian music in large-scale Western composition or for forming a composite style, and it caused personal antipathies that dented Tchaikovsky's self-confidence.

More information: Tchaikovsky Research

Russian culture exhibited a split personality, with its native and adopted elements having drifted apart increasingly since the time of Peter the Great. That resulted in uncertainty among the intelligentsia about the country's national identity, an ambiguity mirrored in Tchaikovsky's career.

Despite his many popular successes, Tchaikovsky's life was punctuated by personal crises and depression. Contributory factors included his early separation from his mother for boarding school followed by his mother's early death; the death of his close friend and colleague Nikolai Rubinstein; and the collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck, who was his patron even though they never met.

His homosexuality, which he kept private, has traditionally also been considered a major factor though some musicologists now downplay its importance.

Tchaikovsky's sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera, but there is an ongoing debate as to whether cholera was indeed the cause, and also whether the death was accidental or intentional.

While his music has remained popular among audiences, critical opinions were initially mixed. Some Russians did not feel it was sufficiently representative of native musical values and expressed suspicion that Europeans accepted the music for its Western elements. In an apparent reinforcement of the latter claim, some Europeans lauded Tchaikovsky for offering music more substantive than base exoticism and said he transcended stereotypes of Russian classical music. Others dismissed Tchaikovsky's music as lacking in elevated thought and derided its formal workings as deficient because they did not stringently follow Western principles.

More information: Classic FM

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, a small town in Vyatka Governorate (present-day Udmurtia) in the Russian Empire, into a family with a long history of military service. His father, Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, had served as a lieutenant colonel and engineer in the Department of Mines, and would manage the Kamsko-Votkinsk Ironworks. His grandfather, Pyotr Fedorovich Tchaikovsky, was born in the village of Nikolayevka, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine), and served first as a physician's assistant in the army and later as city governor of Glazov in Vyatka. His great-grandfather, a Zaporozhian Cossack named Fyodor Chaika, distinguished himself under Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava in 1709.

On 16/28 October 1893, Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, in Saint Petersburg. Nine days later, Tchaikovsky died there, aged 53. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, near the graves of fellow-composers Alexander Borodin, Mikhail Glinka, and Modest Mussorgsky; later, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Mily Balakirev were also buried nearby.

While Tchaikovsky's death has traditionally been attributed to cholera from drinking unboiled water at a local restaurant, there has been much speculation that his death was suicide.

More information: U Discover Music

 Inspiration is a guest that 

does not willingly visit the lazy.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

1891, THE MUSIC HALL AKA CARNEGIE HALL OPENS IN NYC

Today, The Grandma has continued listening to some music. She has chosen classical music, and she has remembered how on a day like today in 1891, the Music Hall in New York City (later known as Carnegie Hall) has its grand opening and first public performance, with Tchaikovsky as the guest conductor.

Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. It is at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east side of Seventh Avenue between West 56th and 57th Streets.

Designed by architect William Burnet Tuthill and built by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1891, it is one of the most prestigious venues in the world for both classical music and popular music.

Carnegie Hall has its own artistic programming, development, and marketing departments and presents about 250 performances each season. It is also rented out to performing groups. The hall has not had a resident company since 1962, when the New York Philharmonic moved to Lincoln Center's Philharmonic Hall, renamed Avery Fisher Hall in 1973 and David Geffen Hall in 2015.

Carnegie Hall has 3,671 seats, divided among three auditoriums. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962, and the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission designated the building as a city landmark in 1967.

Carnegie Hall is on the east side of Seventh Avenue between 56th Street and 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park, in the Midtown Manhattan neighbourhood of New York City. The site covers 2,565.8 m2. Its lot is 61 m wide, covering the entire width of the block between 56th Street to the south and 57th Street to the north, and extends 46 m eastward from Seventh Avenue.

More information: Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall shares the city block with the Carnegie Hall Tower, Russian Tea Room, and Metropolitan Tower to the east.

It is cater-corner from the Osborne Apartments. It also faces the Rodin Studios and 888 Seventh Avenue to the west; Alwyn Court, the Louis H. Chalif Normal School of Dancing, and One57 to the north; the Park Central Hotel to the southwest; and the CitySpire Center to the southeast. Right outside the hall is an entrance to the New York City Subway's 57th Street–Seventh Avenue station, served by the N, ​Q, ​R, and ​W trains.

Carnegie Hall is part of an artistic hub that developed around the two blocks of West 57th Street from Sixth Avenue west to Broadway during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Its opening in 1891 directly contributed to the development of the hub. The area contains several buildings constructed as residences for artists and musicians, such as 130 and 140 West 57th Street, the Osborne Apartments, and the Rodin Studios. In addition, the area contained the headquarters of organizations such as the American Fine Arts Society, the Lotos Club, and the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Carnegie Hall is named after Andrew Carnegie, who funded its construction. It was intended as a venue for the Oratorio Society of New York and the New York Symphony Society, on whose boards Carnegie served. Construction began in 1890, and was carried out by Isaac A. Hopper and Company.

Although the building was in use from April 1891, the official opening night was May 5, with a concert conducted by Walter Damrosch and Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

The hall was owned by the Carnegie family until 1925, when Carnegie's widow sold it to a real estate developer, Robert E. Simon. When Simon died in 1935, his son, Robert E. Simon, Jr., became owner.

More information: Classic New York History

On the corner of 57th and 7th Avenue sits
the most famous concert hall in the world.
No less a figure than when Tchaikovsky
led the first performances in 1891.
Virtually every major artist has performed there.
There is simply no place like it.
The first time I stepped foot in Carnegie Hall was in 1964.

Leonard Slatkin

'SWAN LAKE' AT THE BOLSHOI THEATRE IN MOSCOW

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Today, The Grandma is spending her last day at home. She is totally recovered of her flu and tomorrow she will start her activity again.

She has been relaxed at home studying a new lesson of her Intermediate Language Practice manual (Grammar 9 & 10).

After doing her homework, The Grandma has watched one of her favourite ballets, Swan Lake, which was composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in the 19th century and received its premiere at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, on a day like today in 1877.

More information: Future 2

Swan Lake is a ballet composed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1875–76. Despite its initial failure, it is now one of the most popular of all ballets.

The scenario, initially in two acts, was fashioned from Russian and German folk tales and tells the story of Odette, a princess turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer's curse. The choreographer of the original production was Julius Reisinger.

Although it is presented in many different versions, most ballet companies base their stagings both choreographically and musically on the 1895 revival of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, first staged for the Imperial Ballet on 15 January 1895, at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. For this revival, Tchaikovsky's score was revised by the St. Petersburg Imperial Theatre's chief conductor and composer Riccardo Drigo.

There is no evidence to prove who wrote the original libretto, or where the idea for the plot came from. Russian and German folk tales have been proposed as possible sources, including The White Duck and The Stolen Veil by Johann Karl August Musäus, but both those tales differ significantly from the ballet.

Olga Spessiva in Swan Lake costume

One theory is that the original choreographer, Julius Reisinger, who was a Bohemian and therefore likely to be familiar with The Stolen Veil, created the story.

Another theory is that it was written by Vladimir Petrovich Begichev, director of the Moscow Imperial Theatres at the time, possibly with Vasily Geltser, Danseur of the Moscow Imperial Bolshoi Theatre, a surviving copy of the libretto bears his name.

Since the first published libretto does not correspond with Tchaikovsky's music in many places, one theory is that the first published version was written by a journalist after viewing initial rehearsals, new opera and ballet productions were always reported in the newspapers, along with their respective scenarios.

Some contemporaries of Tchaikovsky recalled the composer taking great interest in the life story of Bavarian King Ludwig II, whose life had supposedly been marked by the sign of Swan and could have been the prototype of the dreamer Prince Siegfried. However, Ludwig's death happened 10 years after the first performance of the ballet.

Begichev commissioned the score of Swan Lake from Tchaikovsky in May 1875 for 800 rubles. Tchaikovsky worked with only a basic outline from Julius Reisinger of the requirements for each dance. However, unlike the instructions for the scores of The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, no written instruction is known to have survived.

More information: ThoughtCo

From around the time of the turn of the 19th century until the beginning of the 1890s, scores for ballets were almost always written by composers known as specialists, who were highly skilled at scoring the light, decorative, melodious, and rhythmically clear music that was at that time in vogue for ballet. Tchaikovsky studied the music of specialists such as the Italian Cesare Pugni and the Austrian Ludwig Minkus, before setting to work on Swan Lake.

Tchaikovsky had a rather negative opinion of the specialist ballet music until he studied it in detail, being impressed by the nearly limitless variety of infectious melodies their scores contained. Tchaikovsky most admired the ballet music of such composers as Léo Delibes, Adolphe Adam, and later, Riccardo Drigo.

He would later write to his protégé, the composer Sergei Taneyev, I listened to the Delibes ballet Sylvia... what charm, what elegance, what wealth of melody, rhythm, and harmony. I was ashamed, for if I had known of this music then, I would not have written Swan Lake. 

Tchaikovsky most admired Adam's 1844 score for Giselle, which used the Leitmotif technique: associating certain themes with certain characters or moods, a technique he would use in Swan Lake, and later, The Sleeping Beauty.

Tchaikovsky drew on previous compositions for his Swan Lake score. According to two of Tchaikovsky's relatives –his nephew Yuri Lvovich Davydov and his niece Anna Meck-Davydova– the composer had earlier created a little ballet called The Lake of the Swans at their home in 1871.

This ballet included the famous Leitmotif, the Swan's Theme or Song of the Swans. He also made use of material from The Voyevoda, an opera he had abandoned in 1868. The Grand adage from the second scene of Swan Lake was fashioned from an aria from that opera, as was the Valse des fiancées from the third scene. Another number which included a theme from The Voyevoda was the Entr'acte of the fourth scene.

More information: Classic FM

By April 1876 the score was complete, and rehearsals began. Soon Reisinger began setting certain numbers aside that he dubbed undanceable. Reisinger even began choreographing dances to other composers' music, but Tchaikovsky protested and his pieces were reinstated. Although the two artists were required to collaborate, each seemed to prefer working as independently of the other as possible.

Tchaikovsky's excitement with Swan Lake is evident from the speed with which he composed: commissioned in the spring of 1875, the piece was created within one full year. His letters to Sergei Taneyev from August 1875 indicate, however, that it was not only his excitement that compelled him to create it so quickly but his wish to finish it as soon as possible, so as to allow him to start on an opera. Respectively, he created scores of the first three numbers of the ballet, then the orchestration in the fall and winter, and was still struggling with the instrumentation in the spring.

By April 1876, the work was complete. Tchaikovsky's mention of a draft suggests the presence of some sort of abstract but no such draft has ever been seen. Tchaikovsky wrote various letters to friends expressing his longstanding desire to work with this type of music, and his excitement concerning his current stimulating, albeit laborious task.

More information: The Guardian

I love anything by Tchaikovsky.

He was the real pop star of his day.

Sufjan Stevens