Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, S.244/2, is the second in a set of 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies by composer Franz Liszt, and is by far the most famous of the set. Few other piano solos have achieved such widespread popularity, offering the pianist the opportunity to reveal exceptional skill as a virtuoso, while providing the listener with an immediate and irresistible musical appeal.
In both the original piano solo form and in the orchestrated version this composition has enjoyed widespread use in animated cartoons. Its themes have also served as the basis of several popular songs.
It is probable that you have heard this piece of music somewhere at one time or another because it is perhaps the most prominent piece of classical (romantic, actually) music featured in animated cartoons across the years.
Now, let the anvils fall and dynamite explode!
And, in real life, Valentina Lisitsa plays Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2
This piece is available in Piano Pronto Movement 5 and several anthologies of classical music.
1803 ~ Adolphe Adam, Opera Composer, composer of Oh, Holy Night
More information about Adam
• 1849 ~ Georgetown University in Washington, DC, became the first college to offer a doctor of music degree. It was presented to Professor Henry Dielman.
• 1880 ~ Ernest Bloch, Swiss-born American composer, and conductor
More information about Bloch
• 1908 ~ Cootie (Charles) Williams, Trumpeter with Echoes of Harlem born. He performed with Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman; band leader for Cootie Williams Sextet and Orchestra
• 1915 ~ Bob Eberly (Robert Eberle), Singer born. He performed with Kitty Kallen, sang with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra & on TV’s Top Tunes; brother of singer Ray Eberle
• 1921 ~ Billy Taylor, Jazz Piano. He was also the leader of the Billy Taylor Trio, Orchestra; co-founder of Jazzmobile ’65; the music director of The David Frost Show; and performed jazz segments on Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt
• 1938 ~ Clarinet virtuoso and big band leader Artie Shaw recorded his now-classic, Begin the Beguine, for Bluebird Records in New York City. Shaw was married to Ava Gardner at the time.
• 1941 ~ Barbara Jean Love, Singer with Friends of Distinction
• 1942 ~ Heinz Burt, Musician, bass with The Tornados
• 1947 ~ Mick Fleetwood, British rock drummer
• 1947 ~ Peter Serkin, American pianist
• 1951 ~ Lynval Golding, Musician, guitarist with The Specials
• 1956 – After a decade together as the country’s most popular comedy team, Dean Martin, and Jerry Lewis called it quits this night. They did their last show at the Copacabana nightclub in New York City. The duo ended their relationship exactly 10 years after they had started it.
• 1958 ~ Pam Tillis, Country Singer
• 2000 ~ Violinist Oscar Shumsky, a brilliant performer who trained generations of successful younger artists, died at the age of 83 from heart disease. Shumsky displayed his musical talent at an early age, first picking up a violin when he was 3 years old. His father, an amateur player who recognized his son’s brilliance, took him to the Curtis Institute of Music, where he was accepted as a student by violinist Leopold Auer and was later taught by Efrem Zimbalist. At the age of 9, Shumsky performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and after graduating from Curtis in 1936, he began playing around the world to widespread critical acclaim. He later branched into conducting. Shumsky was featured at Lincoln Center’s “Great Performer Series.” He trained generations of violinists at some of the nation’s most prestigious music schools, including the Curtis Institute, the Peabody Conservatory, Yale University and, for 25 years, at the Juilliard School.
• 2001 ~ Charles Henderson, editor of The American Organist, died at the age of 84. Henderson, who edited the journal for more than a decade, starting in 1973, conducted a production of Britten’s “Noye’s Fludde” broadcast nationally on CBS television in 1964. He was on the faculty of the Union Theological Seminary’s School of Sacred Music, and from 1976 to 1983 was the organist at the First Presbyterian Church in Milford, N.J. Born in West Chester, Pa., Henderson studied music at Bucknell University, the Juilliard School, Syracuse University and the Fontainebleau School in France.
• 2016 ~ Marni Nixon, American singer (for Audrey Hepburn, Natalie Wood & Deborah Kerr), died at the age of 86. She is now well-known as the real singing voices of the leading actresses in films, including The King and I, West Side Story, and My Fair Lady, although this was concealed at the time from audiences.
• 1782 ~ Placidus Cajetan von Camerloher, Composer, died at the age of 63
• 1797 ~ Franz Schoberlechner, Composer
• 1865 ~ Robert Kahn, Composer
• 1870 ~ Josef Strauss, Austrian composer, died at the age of 42
• 1896 ~ Jean Rivier-Villemomble France, Composer
• 1898 ~ Ernest Willem Mulder, Composer
• 1898 ~ Sara Carter, Vocalist/guitarist with the Carter Family
• 1903 ~ Theodore Karyotakis, Composer
• 1906 ~ Daniel Ayala Perez, Composer
• 1915 ~ Floyd McDaniel ~ blues singer/guitarist
• 1920 ~ Isaac Stern, American concert violinist
Read quotes by and about Stern
More information about Stern
• 1920 ~ Manuel Valls Gorina, Composer
• 1921 ~ Billy Taylor, Orchestra leader on the David Frost Show
• 1922 ~ Kay Starr (Katherine Starks), Pop Singer
• 1925 ~ Lovro Zupanovic, Composer
• 1926 ~ Albert Fuller, American harpsichordist
• 1926 ~ Norman Jewison, Director of Jesus Christ, Superstar, Fiddler on the Roof
• 1927 ~ Stefan Niculescu, Composer
• 1931 ~ Leon Schidlowsky, Composer
• 1931 ~ Ted Husing was master of ceremonies for the very first CBS-TV program. The gala show featured singer Kate Smith, composer George Gershwin and New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker.
• 1935 ~ Kaye Stevens, Singer and comedienne on the Jerry Lewis Show
• 1938 ~ Anton Emil Kuerti, Composer
• 1938 ~ Paul Hindemith and Leonide Massines ballet premiered in London
• 1947 ~ Cat Stevens (Steven Demitri Georgiou) (Muslim name: Yusuf Islam), British folk-rock singer and songwriter
• 1948 ~ Donald Nichols Tweedy, Composer, died at the age of 58
• 1950 ~ Albert Riemenschneider, Composer, died at the age of 71
• 1958 ~ The last of Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts programs aired on CBS-TV. Many artists got their start on Talent Scouts, including Tony Bennett, Pat Boone, The McGuire Sisters and a singer named Connie Francis, who not only sang but played the accordion, as well.
• 1969 ~ Just one day after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Duke Ellington and a portion of his band performed a 10-minute composition on ABC-TV titled Moon Maiden. The work featured piano, drums, bass and vocals.
• 1973 ~ Bad, Bad Leroy Brown reached the top spot on the Billboard pop singles chart, becoming Jim Croce’s first big hit. Croce died in a plane crash two months later (September 20, 1973).
• 1976 ~ “Guys & Dolls” opened at Broadway Theater New York City for 239 performances
• 1994 ~ Dorothy Collins, Singer on Your Hit Parade, died at the age of 67
• 1995 ~ Edwin “Russell” House, Saxophonist, died at the age of 65
• 2000 ~ Iain Hamilton, the Scottish composer who turned Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” into an opera at the age of 78. Hamilton wrote four symphonies and dozens of orchestral and chamber works but is known best for his vocal music, which includes a cantata based on the poems of Robert Burns. “Anna Karenina” premiered at the English National Opera in 1981 to critical acclaim. His other operas include “Agamemnon”, “The Catiline Conspiracy”, based on a Ben Jonson play, and an adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s play “The Royal Hunt of the Sun”. From 1961 to 1978 he was a professor of music at Duke University in North Carolina.
• 2001 ~ Norman Hall Wright, the last surviving writer who worked on the Disney film Fantasia 2000, died at the age of 91. Wright studied at the University of Southern California before being hired by Walt Disney Productions. He started as an animator but later became a writer, producer and director. Wright developed the story of The Nutcracker Suite sequence for Fantasia 2000. He also was responsible for a sequence in Bambi. He wrote several cartoon shorts for Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy and also produced several Wonderful World of Disney television programs.
• 2002 ~ Gus Dudgeon, a respected music producer who worked on many of Elton John’s hit recordings, died in a car crash in western England. He was 59. Dudgeon produced Rocket Man,Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,Your Song,Daniel and Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me. Dudgeon also produced David Bowie’s Space Oddity and worked with other stars, including Chris Rea and Joan Armatrading. But it was his partnership with Sir Elton in the 1970s for which he will be best remembered. Dudgeon began his career in the early 1960s as a tea boy, running errands at Olympic Studios in London before joining Decca Records. He engineered the Zombies’ classic She’s Not There and the groundbreaking Blues Breakers album by John Mayall with Eric Clapton, before moving into producing.
• 2015 ~ Theodore Meir Bikel, Austrian-American actor, folk singer, musician, composer, and activist, died at the age of 91.
Today’s piece is Solfeggietto by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (aka C.P.E. Bach). The piece is commonly assigned to piano students and appears in many books because it fosters the playing of an even sixteenth note rhythm by alternating hands.
Bass guitar
Clarinet starting about a minute in:
On harp
Find it on IMSLP, in several anthologies of music at the O’Connor Music Studio, in Piano Pronto: Encore
Today’s Listening Assignment is Country Gardens by Percy Grainger.
“Country Gardens” is an English folk tune collected by Cecil Sharp from the playing of William Kimber and arranged for piano in 1918 by Percy Grainger.
The tune and the Grainger arrangement for piano and orchestra is a favorite with school orchestras, and other performances of the work include morris dancing.
A piano version:
Piano duet (four-hands)
Clarinet solo
Orchestra
From the Muppets
And, how a Morris Dance is done:
Find Country Gardens on IMSLP, Piano Maestro (under the method book section) and Piano Pronto: Movement 2
Today, we’ll listen to the Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67, of Ludwig van Beethoven. It was written between 1804–1808. It is one of the best-known compositions in classical music, and one of the most frequently played symphonies. As is typical of symphonies in the classical period, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is in four movements.
I’m sure you’ve heard the first 8 notes before…
Since it was written for orchestra, each instrument has its own line:
A piano version, transcribed by Liszt
From Disney’s Fantasia 2000:
Pink learns to play the violin, and interrupts a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with the Pink Panther theme played on various instruments.
Beethoven’s Wig:
Arrangements of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony can be found in Piano Maestro and lots of books including Piano Pronto’s Movement 2, Movement 5 (Victory Theme) and Beethoven: Exploring His Life and Music.
Johann Sebastian Bach’s towering monument of organ music, with its deep sense of foreboding, will forever be associated with Halloween.
Get a free copy of the sheet music at IMSLP or borrow a copy from the O’Connor Music Studio. I have this arranged for organ, piano, duet, 2-piano, simplified…
It’s also available in Piano Maestro, Piano Pronto Encore and Coda
Humoresques Op. 101 (B. 187), is a piano cycle by the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák, written during the summer of 1894. One writer says “the seventh Humoresque is probably the most famous small piano work ever written after Beethoven’s Für Elise.
Yo Yo Ma (cello) and Itzhak Perlman (violin
Orchestra:
Ragtime:
Jazz with Wynton Marsalis on trumpet
Zez Confrey gave this a makeover and included Way Down Upon the Swanee River:
Find the original Humoresque on IMSLP.. The O’Connor Music Studio Lending Library has versions of Humoresque available at several levels and Confey’s Humorestless played in the video above.
Today’s piece is one of those that piano students often try to learn on their own – or a friend will teach them the first 9 notes. It’s usually played too fast and, often in the wrong octave, or the first couple notes are repeated too many times.
This is one of two pieces that are so often played incorrectly that they have the distinction of being banned from competition in Northern Virginia Piano Teacher competitions.
Stay tuned for the other one!
Fur Elise was not published during Beethoven’s lifetime, having been discovered by Ludwig Nohl 40 years after the composer’s death. The identity of “Elise” is unknown.
The very basic melody:
The actual beginning is a little more involved.
And, there’s more!
If you’d like to learn to play this piece correctly, find the sheet music at IMSLP, Beethoven: Exploring His Life and Music, and countless compilations of classical music available at the O’Connor Music Studio.
Follow along:
By Valentina Lisitsa:
Ragtime!
A variety of instruments (Piano, Guitar, Cat Piano, Cello, Launchpad, Ukulele)
The Big Piano at FAO Schwartz in NYC:
Glass harp:
Youtube has many, many more versions. Beethoven would probably go nuts!
1803 ~ Adolphe Adam, Opera Composer, composer of 
MaryO'Studio 