Program Details

Classical 101: Facts That Might Surprise You

• Paderewski visited Paso Robles in 1914 and bought over 2,800 acres in the area later that year. Epoch Winery is now the steward of the vineyard he planted. In 1917, Paderewski extended his local presence, purchasing over 2,600 acres in Santa Maria with oil exploration on his mind. Oil was never found there and he sold that property in 1933
• Paderewski was the prime minister of Poland in 1919 and signed the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I
• Paderewski’s opera “Manru” is the only opera by a Polish composer ever performed by the Metropolitan Opera in New York
• Mozart died just two months after the premiere of “The Magic Flute”
• The “opus” number – abbreviated “Op.” – designates the order in which the piece was issued. For example, the Paderewski piano concerto is his opus number 17 – the seventeenth piece in his catalog
• For Mozart, a different term is used. The “K” or “KV” number refers to its “Köchel Catalogue” number (in German, “Köchel-Verzeichnis,” published in 1862 by Austrian musicologist Ludwig Ritter von Köchel). “The Magic Flute” is the 620th composition in Mozart‘s catalog!
• “Pictures at an Exhibition” is not the only Mussorgsky piece that Ravel orchestrated. In 1913, Ravel and Igor Stravinsky (fresh off “The Rite of Spring”) updated the orchestration for Mussorgsky’s opera “Khovanshchina.” That was the second of three re-orchestrations of the opera, having been orchestrated by Stravinsky’s teacher Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1882 and later in 1958 by fellow Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich
• Paderewski’s close friend Zygmunt Stojowski (1870-1946) was one of the founders of what eventually became the Juilliard School of Music