What Charitable Causes Did These Eight Great Composers Support?

by Emily E. Hogstad

Over the centuries, classical composers have used their fame and fortune to support various philanthropic causes.

Whether raising funds for wounded soldiers, supporting abandoned children, or helping fellow musicians in need, all of these composers felt compelled to give back to society after their musical successes…and it’s fascinating to know what causes were closest to their hearts.

Here are eight composers and the causes they supported.

George Frideric Handel and the Foundling Hospital

Portrait of George Frideric Handel by Thomas Hudson, 1756

The Foundling Hospital was founded in 1739 for the “education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children.”

As its name suggests, the institution focused on improving child health, but it also provided housing and basic clothing. At fourteen, boys were apprenticed into a trade; at sixteen, girls were apprenticed as servants. It was a grim future, but certainly better than the alternatives!

The Foundling Hospital became a popular cause for wealthy and artistic types to support. Supporters include William Hogarth, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and others.

In May 1749, Handel conducted a benefit concert for the Foundling Hospital. He wrote a special work for the occasion, the “Foundling Hospital Anthem.” At the end, Handel tacked on his Hallelujah Chorus, before that work had become famous.   

The following year, Handel donated a pipe organ to the hospital chapel and gave two more benefit concerts there.

In fact, an annual performance of Messiah began to be held at the hospital, which helped grant that work its place in the musical canon.

Handel’s concerts raised around £7000 (the rough equivalent of £1 million plus today).

Ludwig van Beethoven and Wounded Austrian Soldiers

Christian Honeman: Ludwig van Beethoven, 1803 (Beethovenhaus Bonn)

The Battle of Hanau occurred between Austro-Bavarian forces and French Napoleonic forces in late October 1813. The French won.

Five weeks later, in early December 1813, Ludwig van Beethoven participated in a fundraising concert in Vienna meant to benefit injured Austrian soldiers. The orchestra was made up of the stars of Viennese music, like Ignaz Schuppanzigh, Spohr, Hummel, Meyerbeer, and Salieri.

Beethoven’s remarks included the observation “We are moved by nothing but pure patriotism and the joyful sacrifice of our powers for those who have sacrificed so much for us.”

At this performance, he premiered his seventh symphony and his overture “Wellington’s Victory.” Both works were received enthusiastically by the audience   

Franz Liszt for Flood Victims

Franz Liszt in 1870

In March 1838, a massive Danube River flood devastated towns and cities like Buda and Pest. The flood that year was especially severe due to melting ice and ice dams, and thousands lost their homes.

Although he was an international touring artist, Franz Liszt took his Hungarian roots extremely seriously. The next month, he took time out of his busy schedule to perform in Vienna to benefit the flood victims.

However, his partner Countess Marie d’Agoult was angry with him for his charity work. Their relationship was already fracturing, and she was frustrated that he left her to give (what she felt were) self-indulgent charity concerts. Liszt certainly didn’t assuage her concerns when he wrote letters to her on the stationery of wealthy society women who were helping with the fundraising!

Clara Schumann for Widowed Josephine Lang

Clara Schumann

Josephine Lang was a composer and pianist who was born in 1815. Robert and Clara Schumann befriended her; in fact, Robert Schumann published one of her songs in his magazine Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1838.

In 1842, Lang married a lawyer and poet named Christian Reinhold Köstlin. Their marriage was relatively short-lived, as he died tragically in 1856, leaving her an impoverished widow.

Josephine Lang

After struggling for a while, she reached out to Clara Schumann. She arranged a benefit concert for Lang and played in it for her friend.    

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and Wounded Serbian Soldiers

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1893

In 1876, Russia supported Serbia in the Serbian-Ottoman War.

That summer, a music education organisation known as the Russian Music Society commissioned an orchestral work from Tchaikovsky. They wanted a work to be performed at a Red Cross fundraiser, with proceeds going to wounded Serbian soldiers.

He came back with his famous Marche Slav. The first section portrays the repression of the Serbs, and later sections depict the Russians coming to their aid.

The work has become incredibly popular over the ensuing years, but few know its philanthropic origins.   

Edward Elgar for Belgian and Polish War Victims

Charles Frederick Grindrod: Edward Elgar, ca. 1903

World War I broke out in the summer of 1914. In August, Germany invaded neutral Belgium, to the horror of Britain.

Not long afterwards, Elgar wrote Carillon, a recitation of a patriotic poem by Belgian poet Émile Cammaerts to orchestral accompaniment. It premiered that December.

The next year, he wrote Polonia in honour of Poland. He included quotations from the Polish national anthem, patriotic songs, and themes by Polish musical heroes Chopin and Paderewski.

Elgar conducted the premiere of Polonia at the Polish Victims’ Relief Fund Concert in London in July 1915.    

Leonard Bernstein for AIDS Activism

Leonard Bernstein

Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein contributed to a number of charitable causes over his career, championing anti-war causes, Amnesty International, racial equity, and others.

One of the causes he helped fundraise for was AIDS activism, back when doing so was controversial due to the disease’s association with the gay community.

In 1986, he approached Mathilde Krim, the founding chairman of the American Foundation for AIDS Research, suggesting a fundraising concert.

In Krim’s words:

“And so it was that six short weeks later, on a cold December night, Aaron Neville and Linda Ronstadt sang ‘Ave Maria’ together, Isaac Stern played ‘Fiddler on the Roof;’ Bernadette Peters performed the First World War song ‘My Buddy,’ and Hildegard Behrens sang, ‘Falling in Love Again.’ The evening ended with a standing and swaying audience joining the performers singing ‘Somewhere’ from West Side Story. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. It was another Lenny ‘miracle night,’ unforgettable for its intensity, beauty and depth of emotion. It also provided manna from heaven to several unfunded but most deserving AIDS research projects.”

This was at the beginning of the worst part of the AIDS crisis in America. Bernstein continued supporting the cause until his death in 1990.   

Giuseppe Verdi for Impoverished Elderly Musicians

Giuseppe Verdi, 1844

Thanks to his string of hugely successful operas, Giuseppe Verdi ended up becoming one of the wealthiest composers in the history of classical music. He wanted to give back.

In 1895, he planned and endowed a home for impoverished musicians in Milan, known as the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti (which became known as the Casa Verdi). He wrote that he wanted a safe place for “old singers not favoured by fortune, or who, when they were young, did not possess the virtue of saving.”

Verdi died in 1901. The following year, a handful of musicians moved into Casa Verdi.

Amazingly, the institution is still in existence today! According to a 2018 New York Times article:

The successful applicants get to spend their last years in a place where, in addition to room, board and medical treatment, they have access to concerts, music rooms, 15 pianos, a large organ, harps, drum sets and the company of their peers.

Eight of the Saddest Piano Concerto Slow Movements

by Emily E. Hogstad 

If you’re a classical music fan drawn to sad, slow movements in piano concertos, this is the list you’ve been looking for.

Whether it’s Chopin’s gentle melancholy, Ravel’s elegant wistfulness, or Rachmaninoff’s romantic despair, each of these slow movements paints a picture of a particular kind of sadness.

© chopinacademy.com

Although every ranking having to do with classical music is subjective, we numbered our picks anyway, from least sad to saddest. Find out which concerto we’ve dubbed the saddest at the end.

8. Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1, Mov. 2  

Chopin wrote this concerto in 1830 when he was just twenty years old.

The inspiration behind this piece is unclear…but we know there was one.

Frédéric Chopin in 1849

In a letter, Chopin wrote a cryptic observation to his best friend (and potential crush or even lover) Tytus Woyciechowski:

“Here you doubtless observe my tendency to do wrong against my will. As something has involuntarily crept into my head through my eyes, I love to indulge it, even though it may be all wrong.”

It’s a mysterious confession. Some believe he’s referring to his other crush, singer Konstancja Gładkowska. Others wonder if he’s referring to Woyciechowski, with whom he exchanged a number of romantic letters as a young man.

Chopin wrote to Woyciechowski about the slow movement in particular:

“It is not meant to create a powerful effect; it is rather a Romance, calm and melancholy, giving the impression of someone looking gently towards a spot that calls to mind a thousand happy memories. It is a kind of reverie in the moonlight on a beautiful spring evening.”

The specific sadness of this music is a gentle, possibly flirtatious melancholy.

7. Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2, Mov. 3   

Brahms’s second piano concerto covers similar emotional territory to the Chopin Romance. Save for a brief stormy interlude in the centre of the movement, this is not overtly tragic music: it’s more brooding, repressed melancholy.

Johannes Brahms, ca 1875

The movement begins with a soulful cello solo (an idea that Brahms may have lifted from his dear friend Clara Wieck Schumann, who had included similar instrumentation in the piano concerto she’d written as a teenager decades earlier).

The final portion of the movement, where the cello returns again and moves with the piano through a number of keys together, is the absolute epitome of bittersweet regret.

6. Bartók: Piano Concerto No. 3, Mov. 2   

Béla Bartók composed his third piano concerto in 1945 when he was 64 years old. He was terminally ill with leukaemia at the time.

That October, his wife, pianist Ditta Pásztory-Bartók, was set to celebrate her 42nd birthday. He began working on a third piano concerto for her as a birthday present. He was hopeful that after his death, whenever it occurred, she could tour with it and make money.

Béla Bartók in the 1920s

Tragically, he died in late September, a month before her birthday. Fortunately, the piano concerto, save for the final seventeen measures, was completed.

The slow movement of this concerto feels like a hushed, tender, intimate goodbye. Regret and wistfulness are mixed in with profound gratitude.

5. Ravel: Piano Concerto, Mov. 2   

Ravel wrote of his piano concerto:

“My only wish…was to write a genuine concerto, that is, a brilliant work, clearly highlighting the soloist’s virtuosity, without seeking to show profundity. As a model, I took two musicians who, in my opinion, best illustrated this type of composition: Mozart and Saint-Saëns…”

Maurice Ravel

In particular, he looked to Mozart’s clarinet quintet for inspiration. That melody is an unusual twenty measures long. In his concerto, Ravel’s melody is an astonishing thirty-four.

“That flowing phrase!” he wrote later. “How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!”

This long melody calls to mind a long, wistful train of thought from the middle of the night, when nothing in the darkness interrupts the thought.

This music is sad in a restrained way. A listener can feel a great depth of sorrow hiding just beneath the surface.

4. Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2, Mov. 2   

Shostakovich wrote his second piano concerto for his pianist son Maxim’s nineteenth birthday in 1957. Maxim premiered it at his graduation concert at the Moscow Conservatory that May.

Over the past few years, father and son had suffered a great deal together. In 1954, Maxim’s physicist mother, Nina, had died suddenly. Maxim was just sixteen. Shostakovich was forced to become a single father overnight: a role he was completely unprepared to play.

Dmitri Shostakovich

The slow movement of this concerto evokes emotions that a father and son might feel upon seeing a son graduate after the death of a beloved wife and mother: pride, yearning, and a sadness that is simultaneously quiet and deeply intimate.

3. Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 23, Mov. 2   

Mozart wrote his 23rd piano concerto in early 1786, two months before the premiere of one of his best-loved operas, The Marriage of Figaro.

A listener can immediately hear the influence of opera here. It’s especially dramatic because the piano is alone when it enters with its atmospheric, aria-like, minor-key melody.

Croce: Mozart Family Portait (detail), 1781

Starting the movement with a solo part creates a kind of sudden, intense intimacy between the soloist, composer, and audience.

2. Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 4, Mov. 2   

The orchestral introduction to this slow movement is loud and brutally unforgiving. The piano answers with a sense of quiet despair.

That conflict and dialogue create the narrative that drives the entire movement.

Beethoven in 1803

Three movements into their unnerving conversation, the piano takes over for a solo turn. We discover that the piano still has fight in it, with a series of loud ringing trills, before sinking back down into a whisper again.

When the orchestra returns, it is also quiet, witnessing the piano’s unraveling.

1. Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2, Mov. 2   

Here it is: the saddest slow movement of a piano concerto: the Adagio sostenuto from Rachmaninoff’s second piano concerto.

This movement begins with slow, hushed chords in the strings, followed by a mournful chain of arpeggios in the piano.

The winds contribute hushed fragments of a heartbreaking theme to the steady accompaniment of the piano.

When the soloist and the orchestra players begin interacting with one another, it feels like a confessional conversation. The music conveys all kinds of sadness: grief, regret, yearning, and more, appearing in all different types of musical colours and textures.

Kubey-Rembrandt Studios: Sergei Rachmaninoff, 1921

Rachmaninoff wrote his second piano concerto while coming out of a severe period of depression. For a while, he was seeing a therapist daily. It seems that writing this concerto helped him to process what he needed to.

His composing career continued for decades afterwards, and this work became one of the most beloved piano concertos ever written. It’s sad music…but it had a happy ending.

Ten Greatest Women Violinists of All Time

 by Emily E. Hogstad  

For generations after the invention of the instruments, the violin was widely considered to be a masculine instrument.

Despite this, from the eighteenth century on, women have flocked to this instrument and succeeded at the highest levels.

Today, we’re looking at the life and work of ten women from the history of violin playing, all of whom have made huge impacts on the art.

Maddalena Laura Lombardini Sirmen (1745–1818)

Portrait of Maddalena Laura Sirman (artist unknown)

Maddalena Laura Lombardini was born in 1745 in Venice.

As a girl, she studied at the music school at the San Lazzaro dei Mendicanti. While there, she showed special musical promise and went to Padua, Italy, to study with Giuseppe Tartini (composer of the famous Devil’s Trill sonata).

She graduated in 1767 and married violinist Ludovico Sirmen that same year. The two performed together and co-wrote music, including a double violin concerto that sadly has not survived.

In the late 1760s, when she was in her early twenties, she published her six violin concertos. Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang’s father, praised the first, calling it “beautifully written.” 

She became one of the first composers to write string quartets, publishing a collection in 1769, shortly after Haydn’s early efforts in the genre.

In the 1770s, she began appearing as a singer, but her singing was not as successful as her violin playing had been.

As tastes changed, her violin-playing eventually came to be seen as too “old-fashioned.” She died in 1818, having lost much of her net worth after Napoleon’s invasion of Italy.

Teresa Milanollo (1827–1904)   

Teresa Milanollo was born in 1827 in Savigliano, Italy, to a violin maker and his wife. When she was four, she heard a violinist play at church and demanded to be taught.

Initially, she took lessons locally, then moved to Turin for further studies when she was eight. By nine, she was studying in Paris in between extensive concert tours.

In 1838, she began teaching her younger six-year-old sister Maria how to play the violin. The two would become frequent performance partners.

Teresa Milanollo

Before the Milanollo sisters began touring Europe, the violin was widely seen as an instrument unsuitable for women. The charming sisters changed that.

Audiences weren’t the only people impressed; so were critics and composers. Berlioz wrote a glowing review of Teresa in 1841. A few weeks later, she performed for Chopin. The following year, they played with Liszt before royalty.

The Milanollos continued their triumphant tours until the summer of 1848, when sixteen-year-old Maria became sick with tuberculosis. She died that October.

After the death of her sister, a devastated Teresa began playing only for the benefit of charity. She would hold one concert for a paying audience, then hold an identical one for impoverished schoolchildren and their families, and distribute the money she’d just earned.

On 16 April 1857, she gave her farewell performance. Hours later, she married a military engineer named Theodore Parmentier. She followed societal custom and retired from the stage after her wedding, although she continued to play privately and occasionally performed for charity or at home.

She died in 1904.

Wilhelmina Norman-Neruda (1839–1911)

Wilhelmina Norman-Neruda

Wilhelmina Neruda was born in Brno, Moravia, to the organist at Brno Cathedral and his wife, who had several children who went on to become child prodigies. Wilhelmina would become the most famous of all of them.

Her father initially wanted her to play piano, but when she was a child, he caught her playing her brother’s violin. She was so naturally talented that he permitted her to continue.

The family moved to Vienna, and she began studying with Leopold Jansa. Wilhelmina gave her first public performance at seven. She and her talented siblings later began touring Europe to acclaim.

In 1864, when she was thirty-three, she married composer Ludvig Norman. She had two sons with him before the marriage deteriorated, and they separated.

Norman died in 1885, and three years later, Wilhelmina married renowned conductor and pianist Charles Hallé. When he was knighted, she became known as Lady Hallé.

Wilhelmina became famous across Europe, but especially in her adopted homeland of Great Britain. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle famously had Sherlock Holmes attend one of her concerts in the 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet.

She especially enjoyed performing chamber music and gave many incredible performances. These were striking at the time because she was one of the first women players to publicly perform chamber music with men in integrated ensembles. This would eventually help pave the way for women to play in orchestras with men.

She was widowed for a second time in 1895, and in 1898, her son was killed in a mountaineering accident. She retired from the concert stage the following year and moved to Berlin to focus on teaching.

She died in 1911.

Camilla Urso (1840–1902)

Camilla Urso

Camilla Urso was born in Nantes, France, in 1840, to an Italian flute player and his French singer wife.

Like Wilhelmina Norman-Neruda, she first heard the violin in church when she was a little girl and begged her father for lessons. She began playing the violin when she was six years old, and began playing for hours a day.

She enrolled at the Paris Conservatoire in 1849, the month she turned nine. (Rossini was on her audition panel.) She became the first woman violinist allowed to study there and graduated in 1852.

Later that year, she and her family sailed to New York, where she began touring America. During this decade, while Wilhelmina Norman-Neruda was inspiring European girls to take up the violin, Camilla Urso was doing the same in America.

In the mid-1860s, she returned to Europe to tour. Over the following decades, she would appear on four continents: North America, Europe, Australia, and Africa.

After fifty years of concertizing, she retired from the stage and began focusing on teaching. She died in 1902.

Maud Powell (1867–1920)

Maud Powell

Maud Powell was born in 1867 in Peru, Illinois, a small town a hundred miles southwest of Chicago. She began taking violin and piano lessons when she was seven years old. Her talent quickly became obvious.

When she was thirteen, her parents sold their house to fund studies in Europe. While there, she studied with Henry Schradieck in Leipzig, Charles Dancla in Paris, and Joseph Joachim in Berlin.

She made her Berlin Philharmonic debut in 1885, at the age of eighteen. It was the beginning of a major career.

Powell became the first great American violinist, male or female.   Her legacy lives on in three important ways.

First, she used her fame to spotlight contemporary composers. She gave the American premieres of the Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, and Dvořák violin concertos, all of which have since entered the permanent repertoire. She was also a strong advocate for the work of American women and Black composers.

Second, she was also on the cutting edge of recording technology, making dozens of recordings between 1904 and 1919, the year before her death.

Third, during her American tours, she made a point to stop in dozens of tiny towns in between her big city appearances, sparking interest and curiosity about classical music across America.

Her intense workload was presumably one of the triggers of a fatal 1920 heart attack, which happened immediately after playing her transcription of the Black spiritual “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See.” She collapsed onstage and died.

Marie Hall (1884–1956)

Marie Hall

Marie Hall was born in 1884 in Newcastle upon Tyne, England. Her father, a harpist with a touring opera company, was her first teacher.

The family had very little money, and despite her extraordinary natural talent, her training was intermittent. She studied violin with composer Edward Elgar in 1894, August Wilhelmj in 1896, and Johann Kruse in 1900.

In 1901, at the age of seventeen, she finally found funding to pay for studies with Otakar Ševčík in Prague, one of the best-known teachers of the era.

She made her London debut in 1901 with a staggeringly difficult program: Paganini’s first concerto, Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto, and Wieniawski’s Fantasy on Themes from Faust.

She would go on to perform in Europe, North America, Australia, and Asia.   

She also made a number of wonderful recordings, including, in 1916, the first recording of excerpts from the Elgar violin concerto, with the composer conducting from the podium. She performed in a cone with the orchestra behind her.

Ralph Vaughan Williams dedicated his famous showpiece, The Lark Ascending, to her. She played the premiere of the violin and piano version in 1920 and the violin and orchestra version in 1921.

In 1911, she married her manager and had one child, a daughter. She died in 1956.

Ginette Neveu (1919–1949)

Ginette Neveu

Ginette Neveu was born in Paris in 1919. She was the grand-niece of composer Charles-Marie Widor.

She was an astonishingly talented little girl who made her debut in Paris at the age of seven, playing the Bruch concerto.

She went to study at the Paris Conservatoire and studied with Nadia Boulanger, George Enescu, and Carl Flesch. She was so talented that Flesch gave her lessons free of charge.

In 1935, when she was fifteen, she won the Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition. (Legendary violinist David Oistrakh, twenty-seven, placed second.) The win catapulted her to the forefront of the classical music world.   

After World War II ended, she began making her major international debut. She and her accompanist brother embarked on a series of performances across Europe, North America, and South America.

Tragically, both Neveus died in a plane crash in 1949, flying between Paris and New York.

Her early death robbed the classical music world of one of its brightest stars. She had fewer opportunities to record than other violinists who lived longer, but the recordings she left behind are deeply beloved.

Kyung-Wha Chung (1948–)

Kyung-Wha Chung

Kyung Wha Chung was born in Seoul in 1948. She began playing piano at four and violin at seven. At nine, she made her debut in the Mendelssohn violin concerto with the Seoul Philharmonic.

Her six siblings all played musical instruments, and when she was thirteen, the family moved to the United States to further their educations. She began studying at Juilliard under Ivan Galamian. 

In 1967, when she was nineteen, she, along with Pinchas Zukerman, won the prestigious Leventritt Competition, which helped launch both of their respective careers.

Three years later, she stepped in as a replacement for Itzhak Perlman in London. The performance was so sensational that she was immediately hired to make a recording of the Tchaikovsky and Sibelius violin concertos with the orchestra.

In 2008, she withdrew from the concert platform due to injury and poor health, but returned to the stage in 2014.

In 2016, she made her first recording in fifteen years: a recording of the six sonatas and partitas for solo violin by Bach, widely considered to be the Mount Everest of the repertoire.

Anne-Sophie Mutter (1963–)

Anne-Sophie Mutter

Anne-Sophie Mutter was born in the town of Rheinfelden, Germany, on the border between Germany and Switzerland, in 1963. Her family was not musical, but loved classical music.

She began studying the piano when she was five, but soon switched over to the violin after hearing a recording of the Mendelssohn and Beethoven concertos. She gave her first public concert in 1972, when she was nine.  

When she was thirteen, Herbert von Karajan, legendary conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, heard her playing and became her mentor. She made her first recording of two Mozart concertos when she was just fifteen.

She made her American debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1980, kicking off a decade of touring and recording.

Starting in the 1990s, she became increasingly interested in contemporary music. Over the ensuing decades, a number of composers have written concertos and other works for her.

She has earned a reputation as someone interested in ambitious projects. For instance, in 1998, she spent an entire year playing and touring the Beethoven violin sonatas. Later, to observe the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth in 2006, she toured performing all of the concertos.

In addition to her musical activities, she has also played benefit concerts to support charitable causes, from famine relief to Holocaust awareness, among many others. In 2021, she was elected President of German Cancer Aid.

Hilary Hahn (1979–)

Hilary Hahn

Hilary Hahn was born in 1979 in Virginia and grew up in Baltimore. She began playing the violin in a Suzuki program there when she was three years old.

When she was ten, she began studying at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with Jascha Brodsky. At the time, Brodsky was eighty-three years old and a former student of Eugene Ysaye, who had himself been born in 1858. This training gave her unique direct insight into musical ideas from the early twentieth century.

She made her American orchestral debut with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in 1991 and her European debut in Hungary in 1994. Her debut recording was made when she was just sixteen: one of the finest recordings ever of three solo works by Bach.  She graduated from Curtis with her bachelor’s degree in 1999 at the age of twenty, but by that time her international career was already in full swing.

Over the past two and a half decades, she has demonstrated a flawless technique and an intellectually probing musical curiosity. She has proven to be one of the greatest violinists alive, male or female.