MOZART
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Fun Facts

A Bit of Trivia from the Land of Isacoff.

By Kathy Geisler

FROM THE WRITINGS OF STUART ISACOFF

June 1, 2025

You could say that Stuart Isacoff has a fascination with facts—especially those that hover around the study of music: music of all kinds, across various genres, with a particular focus on the piano, his own personal instrument of choice.

In his four books and many articles, including in The Wall Street Journal, we find a history unraveled and presented in terms that reveal the deeper context of music in a world that has otherwise lost what music always was—an indissoluble part of life and learning.

Fun Fact No. 1: Pythagoras was a mystic and a cult leader.

His program included righteous polity (the equality of men and women, communal ownership), austere living (no eating of beans, speaking obscurely, or sacrificing of white roosters), and contemplation.

—Stuart Isacoff, from Temperament, How music became a battleground for the great minds of Western Civilization

pythagoras-2.jpeg

Pythagoreans Celebrate Sunrise – Painting by Fyodor Bronnikov

It was a life bathed in study, living with a bunch of math ninjas who spent their days exploring the numerical wisdom left by the ancient Egyptians in a book called Directions for Knowing All Dark Things.

Fun Fact No. 2: Mozart Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466 was given its premiere by Mozart on February 11, 1785, on a pedal piano.

pedalpiano.jpeg

Pedal Piano, attributed to Johann Schmidt, ca. 1790–95, Austria.

J. S. Bach owned one. A little-known caricature published in Warsaw shows Chopin playing one with his bare feet.

—Stuart Isacoff, from A Natural History of the Piano

Fun Fact No. 3: While there was chaos in the tuning of instruments, there was also a similar problem with the calendar. It took decades for various countries to go along with the idea of subtracting days from certain months so that the year would be in relative sync with the sun. Science, math, religion, philosophy, and stubbornness were all on a constant collision course across Europe.

clavius.jpeg

Portrait of Cardinal Christopher Clavius, designer of the Gregorian Calendar, by Francesco Villamena, Italian, 1606

In Frankfurt am Main and Bristol, people rioted against the pope’s attempt to rob them of ten days. Protestants declared it a trick of the Antichrist to impose the will of the devil (Gregory’s coat of arms contained a dragon, which was pointed to as further evidence of the plot).

—Stuart Isacoff, from Temperament, How music became a battleground for the great minds of Western Civilization M

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Notes from the Piano Underground - Part 1

Notes from the Piano Underground - Part 2

Notes from the Piano Underground - Part 3

Temperament, How music became a battleground for the great minds of Western Civilization

In this engaging and accessible account, Stuart Isacoff leads us through the battles over that scale, placing them in the context of quarrels in the worlds of art, philosophy, religion, politics and science. The contentious adoption of the modern tuning system known as equal temperament called into question beliefs that had lasted nearly two millenia–and also made possible the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Debussy, and all who followed. Filled with original insights, fascinating anecdotes, and portraits of some of the greatest geniuses of all time, Temperament is that rare book that will delight the novice and expert alike.

A Natural History of the Piano

A beautifully illustrated, totally engrossing celebration of the piano, and the composers and performers who have made it their own.

With honed sensitivity and unquestioned expertise, Stuart Isacoff—pianist, critic, teacher, and author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization—unfolds the ongoing history and evolution of the piano and all its myriad wonders: how its very sound provides the basis for emotional expression and individual style, and why it has so powerfully entertained generation upon generation of listeners. He illuminates the groundbreaking music of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, and Debussy. He analyzes the breathtaking techniques of Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Arthur Rubinstein, and Van Cliburn, and he gives musicians including Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia, Menahem Pressler, and Vladimir Horowitz the opportunity to discuss their approaches. Isacoff delineates how classical music and jazz influenced each other as the uniquely American art form progressed from ragtime, novelty, stride, boogie, bebop, and beyond, through Scott Joplin, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor, and Bill Charlap.

A Natural History of the Piano distills a lifetime of research and passion into one brilliant narrative. We witness Mozart unveiling his monumental concertos in Vienna’s coffeehouses, using a special piano with one keyboard for the hands and another for the feet; European virtuoso Henri Herz entertaining rowdy miners during the California gold rush; Beethoven at his piano, conjuring healing angels to console a grieving mother who had lost her child; Liszt fainting in the arms of a page turner to spark an entire hall into hysterics. Here is the instrument in all its complexity and beauty. We learn of the incredible craftsmanship of a modern Steinway, the peculiarity of specialty pianos built for the Victorian household, the continuing innovation in keyboards including electronic ones. And most of all, we hear the music of the masters, from centuries ago and in our own age, brilliantly evoked and as marvelous as its most recent performance.

With this wide-ranging volume, Isacoff gives us a must-have for music lovers, pianists, and the armchair musician.

When the World Stopped to Listen: Van Cliburn’s Cold War Triumph, and Its Aftermath

April of 1958–the Iron Curtain was at its heaviest, and the outcome of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition seemed preordained. Nonetheless, as star musicians from across the globe descended on Moscow, an unlikely favorite emerged: Van Cliburn, a polite, lanky Texan whose passionate virtuosity captured the Russian spirit.

This is the story of what unfolded that spring–for Cliburn and the other competitors, jurors, party officials, and citizens of the world who were touched by the outcome. It is a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most remarkable events in musical history, filled with political intrigue and personal struggle as artists strove for self-expression and governments jockeyed for prestige. And, at the core of it all: the value of artistic achievement, the supremacy of the heart, and the transcendent freedom that can be found, through music, even in the darkest moments of human history.

Musical Revolutions: How the Sounds of the Western World Changed

From the critically acclaimed author of Temperament, a narrative account of the most defining moments in musical history—classical and jazz—all of which forever altered Western culture

“A fascinating journey that begins with the origins of musical notation and travels through the centuries reaching all the way to our time.”—Semyon Bychkov, chief conductor and music director of the Czech Philharmonic

The invention of music notation by a skittish Italian monk in the eleventh century. The introduction of multilayered hymns in the Middle Ages. The birth of opera in a Venice rebelling against the church’s pious restraints. Baroque, Romantic, and atonal music; bebop and cool jazz; Bach and Liszt; Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In telling the exciting story of Western music’s evolution, Stuart Isacoff explains how music became entangled in politics, culture, and economics, giving rise to new eruptions at every turn, from the early church’s attempts to bind its followers by teaching them to sing in unison to the global spread of American jazz through the Black platoons of the First World War.

The author investigates questions like: When does noise become music? How do musical tones reflect the natural laws of the universe? Why did discord become the primary sound of modernity? Musical Revolutions is a book replete with the stories of our most renowned musical artists, including notable achievements of people of color and women, whose paths to success were the most difficult.

Temperament, How music became a battleground for the great minds of Western Civilization

Few music lovers realize that the arrangement of notes on today’s pianos was once regarded as a crime against God and nature, or that such legendary thinkers as Pythagoras, Plato, da Vinci, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton and Rousseau played a role in the controversy. Indeed, from the time of the Ancient Greeks through the eras of Renaissance scientists and Enlightenment philosophers, the relationship between the notes of the musical scale was seen as a key to the very nature of the universe. In this engaging and accessible account, Stuart Isacoff leads us through the battles over that scale, placing them in the context of quarrels in the worlds of art, philosophy, religion, politics and science. The contentious adoption of the modern tuning system known as equal temperament called into question beliefs that had lasted nearly two millenia–and also made possible the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Debussy, and all who followed. Filled with original insights, fascinating anecdotes, and portraits of some of the greatest geniuses of all time, Temperament is that rare book that will delight the novice and expert alike.

A Natural History of the Piano

A beautifully illustrated, totally engrossing celebration of the piano, and the composers and performers who have made it their own. With honed sensitivity and unquestioned expertise, Stuart Isacoff—pianist, critic, teacher, and author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization—unfolds the ongoing history and evolution of the piano and all its myriad wonders: how its very sound provides the basis for emotional expression and individual style, and why it has so powerfully entertained generation upon generation of listeners. He illuminates the groundbreaking music of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, and Debussy. He analyzes the breathtaking techniques of Glenn Gould, Oscar Peterson, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Arthur Rubinstein, and Van Cliburn, and he gives musicians including Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia, Menahem Pressler, and Vladimir Horowitz the opportunity to discuss their approaches. Isacoff delineates how classical music and jazz influenced each other as the uniquely American art form progressed from ragtime, novelty, stride, boogie, bebop, and beyond, through Scott Joplin, Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Cecil Taylor, and Bill Charlap. A Natural History of the Piano distills a lifetime of research and passion into one brilliant narrative. We witness Mozart unveiling his monumental concertos in Vienna’s coffeehouses, using a special piano with one keyboard for the hands and another for the feet; European virtuoso Henri Herz entertaining rowdy miners during the California gold rush; Beethoven at his piano, conjuring healing angels to console a grieving mother who had lost her child; Liszt fainting in the arms of a page turner to spark an entire hall into hysterics. Here is the instrument in all its complexity and beauty. We learn of the incredible craftsmanship of a modern Steinway, the peculiarity of specialty pianos built for the Victorian household, the continuing innovation in keyboards including electronic ones. And most of all, we hear the music of the masters, from centuries ago and in our own age, brilliantly evoked and as marvelous as its most recent performance. With this wide-ranging volume, Isacoff gives us a must-have for music lovers, pianists, and the armchair musician.

When the World Stopped to Listen: Van Cliburn’s Cold War Triumph, and Its Aftermath

From the acclaimed author of A Natural History of the Piano, the captivating story of the 1958 international piano competition in Moscow, where, at the height of Cold War tensions, an American musician showed the potential of art to change the world. April of 1958–the Iron Curtain was at its heaviest, and the outcome of the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition seemed preordained. Nonetheless, as star musicians from across the globe descended on Moscow, an unlikely favorite emerged: Van Cliburn, a polite, lanky Texan whose passionate virtuosity captured the Russian spirit. This is the story of what unfolded that spring–for Cliburn and the other competitors, jurors, party officials, and citizens of the world who were touched by the outcome. It is a behind-the-scenes look at one of the most remarkable events in musical history, filled with political intrigue and personal struggle as artists strove for self-expression and governments jockeyed for prestige. And, at the core of it all: the value of artistic achievement, the supremacy of the heart, and the transcendent freedom that can be found, through music, even in the darkest moments of human history.

Musical Revolutions: How the Sounds of the Western World Changed

From the critically acclaimed author of Temperament, a narrative account of the most defining moments in musical history—classical and jazz—all of which forever altered Western culture “A fascinating journey that begins with the origins of musical notation and travels through the centuries reaching all the way to our time.”—Semyon Bychkov, chief conductor and music director of the Czech Philharmonic The invention of music notation by a skittish Italian monk in the eleventh century. The introduction of multilayered hymns in the Middle Ages. The birth of opera in a Venice rebelling against the church’s pious restraints. Baroque, Romantic, and atonal music; bebop and cool jazz; Bach and Liszt; Miles Davis and John Coltrane. In telling the exciting story of Western music’s evolution, Stuart Isacoff explains how music became entangled in politics, culture, and economics, giving rise to new eruptions at every turn, from the early church’s attempts to bind its followers by teaching them to sing in unison to the global spread of American jazz through the Black platoons of the First World War. The author investigates questions like: When does noise become music? How do musical tones reflect the natural laws of the universe? Why did discord become the primary sound of modernity? Musical Revolutions is a book replete with the stories of our most renowned musical artists, including notable achievements of people of color and women, whose paths to success were the most difficult.

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AI SUMMARY:

Stuart Isacoff’s fascination with music history brings to life captivating insights from ancient times to modern day. In his books and The Wall Street Journal articles, Isacoff explores the deep connection between music, culture, and society. From Pythagoras’ mystical teachings, to Mozart’s pedal piano premiere, to the chaos surrounding the Gregorian calendar, Isacoff weaves a narrative of how music and math have shaped human civilization. His work reminds us that music has always been an inseparable part of life, influencing everything from philosophy to science with its timeless resonance.

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Kathy Geisler is a contributing writer and editor for MOZART – the magazine for everyone in classical music.

One Comment

Kathy Geisler July 15, 2023

Stuart is very cool!!!

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