Tama Matheson
speaker
770 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Tama Matheson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It was an eccentricity.
In his case.
It was an eccentricity that would be overlooked.
He was a strange character and who knows what all that stuff meant.
I think I've never been as happy as I was the four years that I worked in the Conservatoire.
I studied, I practised piano, I wrote until my fingers bled, I absorbed Beethoven and Weber... You say you wrote until your fingers bled.
I wrote piece after piece after piece, a tone poem called Fatum, I tried my hand at a symphony, operas, I wrote and wrote chamber music...
I would usually tear them up again afterwards because I was ill-satisfied with them.
And I absorbed all the great masters.
Beethoven left me rather cold.
Schubert I loved.
Schumann I loved the most of all because he was so unashamedly emotional, something I would try to emulate all my life.
I tried for a while to write as Schumann, but imitation is not art, and I had to find my own style.
And then, of course, I had this support, let's say, from Anton Rubinstein, who sort of thought I was the best of all his pupils.
But I did finally get a terribly bad review at the end of my schooling from a composer called Cesar Cui, who was one of the mighty handful, who were the five great composers who hung around.
Balakirev, Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Baradin.
I've only heard of the last two.
Right, right.
And Cesar Cui was also a critic.
And when I wrote my final assessment, Cantata, which was a setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy, if you please, as though there weren't a good setting of that already, he wrote a review that said that this Tchaikovsky has no talent whatsoever.
Showing 321–340 of 770 · page 17 of 39
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