"The Virtuosi"

[fiefoe]

There is a chapter on Jean and Edouard de Reszke, the singing brothers. This got me thinking of other duos: the Wright brothers, the Coen brothers, the Chudnovsky brothers, the Motley Fools, the Cartalk guys... One hears much less about sisters working together.

<Chopin>
    ... in 1831 charged 20 francs ($4) a lesson. Clara Schumann, a few years later, only charged $1. She had wanted to ask for $1.50 but Mendelssohn {so typical of him} talked her out of such an outlandish figure.

<Paganini, the original goth>
     ... suffered a wealth of physical woes: measles, scarlet fever, pneumonia, a chronic colitis, a pulmonary hemorrhage, insomnia, bad eyes, hemorrhoids, rectal stenosis, rheumatism, syphilis, prostate trouble, tuberculosis of the larynx.
    There is no evidence that he ever played his Caprices in public.
    {He is nothing like the matinee idol-ish figure in Manuel Komroff's "Magic Bow". I wonder if I own the only surviving copy of this book - a hand-copied copy passed down by my mother, no less.}

<Joseph Joachim>
     On Liszt: "Instead of taking him for a mighty errant spirit striving to return to God, I have suddenly realized that he is a cunning contriver of effects, who has miscalculated."
    After Capet played the Bach Chaconne (German musicians can be very arrogant, especially when confronted with French musicians), "Couldn't you play something typically French?"

<Paderewski>
    "Spirit of the Times" review: "His admirers would have admired him just as much had he played with his toes. Like Samson, he depends for his effects not on his fingers but upon his hair."

<Sarasate>
    According to Flesch, he approached Beethoven timidly, with the "shy respect" that Romantics musicians then had for the classics.