His colleagues in the Carl Theater in Vienna promised in writing to donate their services. Goldmark recruited an ensemble of instrumentalists and singers and lined up a soloist to sing a ballad. When he had gotten commitments from several singers with the Court Opera Company, he sent out notices advertising the concert and the names of the performers.

Then a setback came in the form of professional jealousy. Seeing the names of the other participants, one by one, the singers withdrew from the concert until just a single soloist remained. Goldmark spent his meager savings on posters, tickets, and renting the hall. He had planned just one rehearsal–to take place the day before the concert, but when he stepped up to conduct it, he found that fewer than half of the orchestra members had bothered to show up, forcing him to cancel the concert and forfeit his funds.

Luckily for Goldmark, he found a patron to cover the cost of a second attempt. The rehearsal was well attended, and the concert took place on March 12, 1858. Goldmark recalled later that the audience reception was friendly, the reviews mixed, and the concert not exactly earth-shattering, although he did benefit from some much needed publicity.

Many years later, Goldmark encountered one of the singers, who mentioned that he still had a manuscript of Goldmark’s ballad from the concert. Without success, Goldmark begged him for it then pleaded at least to have a copy, which was forthcoming, but with Goldmark’s solemn ending replaced by a cheerful yodel. Karl Goldmark never bothered to publish the rest of the works from that first concert because he came to recognize their complete lack of originality.

Like many a great musician before him, Argentine composer Ástor Piazzolla went to Paris to take lessons from the celebrated Nadia Boulanger. Although his lessons with her went on for less than four months, long after they were over, he would declare that he owed her “absolutely everything.”

He was born on March 11, 1921, and so was already thirty-three years old when he came to take his first lesson from Boulanger. She had tutored some of the greatest composers of the twentieth century, and she spoke of them without awe. She dismissed a package in the mail as the latest work by Stravinsky, who sent her a copy of every new work he wrote, and added, “I don’t have time to look at them all!”

Piazzolla showed her a hefty stack of his own manuscripts, and as she sifted through them she concluded, “This music is well-written. Here you are like Stravinsky, like Bartók, like Ravel, but you know what happens? I can’t find Piazzolla in this.”

She asked him what sort of music he played in Argentina.

Reluctantly, he admitted that he played tangos in nightclubs.

“I love that music!” she exclaimed. She asked him what instrument he played.

He confessed that he played a concertina-like instrument called the bandoneón. He had images of her throwing him out of her fourth floor window.

She had heard of the bandoneón. She convinced Piazzolla to play one of his tangos on the piano.

He chose one called “Triumfal.” At the eighth bar she stopped him, took him by the hands, and told him in no uncertain terms, “That is Piazzolla. Don’t ever leave it!”

It was a formative moment. “I took all of the music I had composed,” Piazzolla said later, “ten years in my life, and sent it to hell in two seconds.”

He was one of the most famous men in Europe, and even though he was feeling unwell, Niccolò Paganini had come to Berlin to perform. The audience of nine hundred or so included Friedrich Wilhelm III, King of Prussia, and all the royal family.

Writing four days later, on March 8, 1829, Adolph Bernhard Marx, the editor of a major German music periodical, was still enthralled:

The man seemed to be enchanted and he had an enchanting effect, not just on me or on this or that person, but on everyone. He came onstage and launched at once into the Ritornelle, in which he conducted the orchestra and shot the orchestral texture through with sparks of tone like bolts of lightning--then passed into the most melting and audacious melody ever to come from a violin.

He sails casually, unconsciously, over all technical challenges with flashes of the most daring and biting satire till his eyes glow with a deeper, darker passion, and the tones become more piercing and headlong so that he seems to be flailing the instrument....Then he stamps his foot and the orchestra plunges in and fades away in the thunderous enthusiasm of the audience, which he hardly notices or acknowledges with a disdainful glance or a smile in which his lips part in a curious way and show his teeth....

There’s something curious about this man. The outward aspects of his playing, all the seemingly impossible tours de force, the combination of rapid arco and pizzicato runs, the octave passages on one string--all of those things are just vehicles that actually mean nothing to him. The inward poetry of his imagination, forming the creations before our very eyes--that’s what enthralled his listeners.

“This was not violin playing,” the reviewer concluded. “This was not music–it was witchcraft–and yet it was still music, but unlike anything else we’ve heard.”