Composers Datebook

It’s nice when talent in one field recognizes and appreciates it in another. But this is not always the case. Take, for example, Jonathan Swift, one of the greatest English writers of the 18th century, and Georg Frideric Handel, one of that century’s greatest composers.

In 1742, Handel was in Ireland, preparing for the premiere of his sacred oratorio Messiah at the Music Hall on Dublin’s Fishamble Street, and wanted to use the choirboys from Dublin’s two cathedrals, Christ Church and St. Patrick’s. Swift was the Dean of Patrick’s, and, on today’s date, the author of “Gulliver’s Travels penned a flaming reply to his sub dean:

“I do hereby require and request not to permit any of the choristers to attend or assist at any public musical performances ... and whereas it hath been reported that I gave a license to assist a club of fiddlers in Fishamble Street, I do annul said license, entreating my said Sub-Dean to [refuse] such songsters, fiddlers, pipers, trumpeters, drummers, drum-majors or any [such] sonic quality.”

History does not record Handel’s response, but he did, in point of fact, eventually get to use the St. Patrick’s choir boys and other “songsters” he requested.

George Frederic Handel (1685-1757) Messiah; Oregon Bach Festival; Helmuth Rilling, cond. Hännsler 98.198

To say that American composer and jazz pianist Vijay Iyer is a multifaceted artist would be quite the understatement. The son of Tamil immigrants, he was born and raised in New York and began classical music training at 3. His undergraduate degree at Yale was in mathematics and physics, but music retained its strong pull. At the University of California, Berkeley, his 1998 Ph.D. dissertation was titled, “Microstructures of Feel, Macrostructures of Sound: Embodied Cognition in West African and African-American Musics.”

As a pianist, Iyer started attracting a lot of attention. Reviewing Break Stuff, his 20th CD release, critic Steve Greenlee wrote, “He may be the most celebrated musician in jazz.”

On today’s date in 2005, Iyer and the Ethel String Quartet gave the premiere performance of his chamber work Mutations, a suite that combines improvisatory elements of jazz with the meticulously organized scoring of contemporary classical music. The work was recorded for the ECM label, a home for many cross-discipline composers and performers.

“The world likes to put us in boxes,” Iyer says. “But when you’re an artist, a composer, a creative person … you find a lot of different sides of yourself opening up.”

Vijay Iyer (b. 1971) Mutations; Vijay Iyer, p; Ethel String Quartet ECM 2372

On today’s date in 1966, a symphonic work by American composer Dominick Argento received its premiere performance by the Minneapolis Civic Orchestra at the St. Paul Campus Student Center of the University of Minnesota. The work was titled Variations for Orchestra (The Mask of Night) for orchestra and soprano soloist. For the premiere performances, the vocal soloist was Argento’s wife, soprano Carolyn Bailey.

The music was composed in Florence, Italy.

“I vividly remember the circumstances that inspired it,” Argento wrote. “Our seventh-floor apartment in the Piazza Pitti overlooked the Boboli Gardens and behind it, out of sight, was a military barracks. Every night at 10 o’clock, a bugle solemnly intoned the Italian equivalent of taps. The sound seemed to be the voice of the garden itself — moonlit, deserted, cypress-scented and mysterious. ... The trumpet theme is a 12-tone row whose first six notes, I later realized, form the opening phrase sung by the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, a role my wife had often performed.”

“Consequently,” Argento concluded, “these variations are much indebted to my favorite city, my favorite writer, my favorite composer and my favorite soprano.”

Dominick Argento (1927-2019) Variations for Orchestra (The Mask of Night); Plymouth Music Series Orchestra; Philip Brunelle, cond. Virgin 91184

On today’s date in 1946, the octogenarian German composer Richard Strauss conducted the final rehearsal of his latest work, Metamorphosen, a study for 23 strings. Paul Sacher, the Swiss conductor and music patron, had commissioned the work and conducted the public premiere later that day in Zurich.

Strauss had begun work on the piece on March 13, 1945, one day after the Vienna State Opera house had been bombed by the Allies. When the Nazis had come to power in 1933, Strauss was at first fêted as the greatest living German composer, but he soon fell out of favor. While his music was not banned, official Nazi support for Strauss eventually fell away, and the fact that Strauss’ beloved daughter-in-law was Jewish meant increasing anxiety about her fate and that of his grandchildren as the Nazi’s race laws tightened their noose.

In a postwar memorandum, Strauss wrote, “The most terrible period of human history has come to an end, the 12-year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany’s 2,000 years of cultural evolution met its doom and irreplaceable monuments of architecture and works of art were destroyed.”

Richard Strauss (1864-1949) Metamorphosen; Vienna Philharmonic; Simon Rattle, cond. EMI 56580

On today’s date in 1968, London witnessed a double debut: the first concert of the London Sinfonietta, a chamber group that would go on to become one of Britain’s most famous new music ensembles, and, on its debut program, the premiere performance of The Whale, a dramatic cantata by John Tavener, who would go on to become one of Britain’s most famous contemporary composers.

The London Sinfonietta’s premiere attracted the attention of both the BBC, which broadcast the work that same year, and the Beatles, who released a recording of the work on their newly formed Apple label.

After Tavener’s religious conversion to the Greek Orthodox faith in 1977 and a near-death experience during surgery in 1990 to remove a tumor from his jaw, his music became ever more liturgical, even other-worldly, and was described as “mystic minimalism.”

In 1997, when the funeral service for Princess Diana was broadcast worldwide, it was Tavener’s serenely lyrical anthem Song for Athene that was chosen to accompany the princess’ coffin as it left Westminster Abbey.

John Tavener (1944-2013) The Whale; London Sinfonietta and Chorus; David Atherton, cond. Capitol 98497

On today’s date in 1935, at the Church of St. François-Xavier in Paris, organist Geneviève de la Salle gave the first complete performance of the three-movement Organ Suite, by French composer and virtuoso organist Maurice Duruflé.

If you sing in a choir or are a fan of choral classics, you probably know Duruflé’s serene and tranquil Requiem, which premiered about 12 years later.

Now, if Duruflé’s Organ Suite, Op. 5, premiered in 1935 and his Requiem, Op. 9, in 1947, you might reasonably conclude the composer was a slow, meticulous worker, which he was. In all, Duruflé’s output comprises less than 15 published works, of which seven are for organ. His Organ Suite consists of a brooding “Prélude,” a “Sicilienne” — which evokes the harmonies and inflections of Ravel — and a brilliant, concluding “Toccata.”

Duruflé’s music is firmly embedded in the French tradition of organ composers such as César Franck and Louis Vierne, and Duruflé’s composition teacher, Paul Dukas. The great French organist Marie-Claire Alain described Duruflé’s music as “perfectly honest art.”

“He was not an innovator but a traditionalist,” she said “… Duruflé evolved and amplified the old traditions, making them his own."

Maurice Durufle (1902-1986) Organ Suite; Todd Wilson (Schudi organ at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Dallas, Texas) Delos 3047

In January 1980, famous American film music composer John Williams was named conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra. On today’s date that year, he led the Pops in the premiere performance of a concert overture based on his score for the John Wayne film The Cowboys.

Now, by 1980, Williams had scored dozens of classic American films but not all that many westerns — The Cowboys, from 1971, for one, and Missouri Breaks, a quirky 1976 western starring Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando, for another.

If both The Cowboys and Missouri Breaks are somewhat unconventional samples of the western genre, Williams’ music is in the grand tradition of the classic film scores by Jerome Moross, who composed the music for The Big Country; Elmer Bernstein, who wrote the score for The Magnificent Seven; and Jerry Goldsmith, who has done that service for a number of other classic westerns.

All these composers, however, owed a collective debt to an unlikely cowboy music composer: Brooklyn-born Aaron Copland, whose Billy the Kid and Rodeo ballet scores from the 1930s and '40s helped define the symphonic equivalent of the wide-open American landscape.

John Williams (b. 1932) The Cowboys Overture; Boston Pops; John Williams, cond. Philips 420 178

In 1968, Sen. Eugene McCarthy was running for president on an antiwar platform. The war in question was in Southeast Asia, and many American artists were, like Senator McCarthy, openly calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam.

On today’s date at a New York fundraising event for the anti-war movement Broadway for Peace, a song by Leonard Bernstein received its premiere performance, with the composer at the piano accompanying Barbra Streisand.

The song was titled “So Pretty,” with lyrics describing the tragedy of the Vietnam War from a child’s point of view.

Richard Nixon, not McCarthy, became president in 1968 and was re-elected in 1972. At his special request, the final piece on his January 1973 inaugural concert was Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, which struck many as a deliberately bellicose selection, considering that the Vietnam War was still raging.

Bernstein, McCarthy and others arranged a counter-concert at Washington’s National Cathedral, scheduled at precisely the same time as Nixon’s, but presenting Haydn’s Mass in Time of War instead of Tchaikovsky.

Whether Tchaikovsky or Haydn ultimately made any difference in resolving the conflict, history does note that a Southeastern Asian armistice was signed in Paris a few days later.

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) So Pretty; Roberta Alexander, soprano; Tan Crone, piano Etcetera 1007

On today’s date in 1939, pianist John Kirkpatrick gave a recital at Town Hall in New York City that included the New York premiere of the Concord Sonata, by American composer Charles Ives.

Ives had self-published his Concord Sonata some 20 years earlier and sent copies of it free to anyone he thought might be interested, including then-prominent composer and teacher Rubin Goldmark, who, in 1921, was giving composition lessons to young Aaron Copland. Copland recalled seeing the Concord Sonata on Goldmark’s piano but was not allowed to borrow it.

“You stay away from it,” Goldmark warned him. “I don’t want you to be contaminated by stuff like that.”

In 1934, Kirkpatrick saw a copy of the Concord Sonata in Paris and wrote Ives: “I have decided quite resolutely to learn the whole sonata.”

It would take him five years, but Kirkpatrick’s Town Hall recital would put both him and Ives on the map.

A New York Times critic wrote, “This sonata is exceptionally great music — it is, indeed, the greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply felt and essential. ... Kirkpatrick’s performance was that of a poet and a master, an unobtrusive minister of genius.”

Charles Ives (1874-1954) Piano Sonata No. 2 (Concord, Mass., 1840-1860) Marc-André Hamelin, piano New World 378

On today’s date in 1853, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore (or The Troubador) had its premiere performance at the Teatro Apollo in Rome.

It proved an immediate hit. True, some did complain at the time about its gloomy, complicated and downright confusing plot. But Verdi’s music setting had such great tunes and such energetic verve that Il Trovatore quickly became the most popular of all his operas in the 19th century.

Its tunes were soon heard emanating from street corner barrel-organs, and, as a true sign of popularity, there were even comic parodies of its melodramatic blood and thunder storyline.

Reviewing a New York production in 1862, American composer and music critic William Fry had these observations: “Il Trovatore has a wonderful plot, beyond human comprehension. ... As to the music, there are some charming, popular, ingenious, artistic, great points; then, there are some others egregiously vulgar and rowdy. The ‘Anvil Chorus,’ for example, is about equal to a scene of mending a sewer set to music.”

And as for parodies, in the 1935 film A Night at the Opera, Il Trovatore — and opera, in general — receives a devastating sendup at the hands of the Marx Brothers.

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1902) [arr. Franz Liszt] Miserere, fr Il Trovatore; Daniel Barenboim, piano Erato 75457; and Anvil Chorus, fr Il Trovatore; Chicago Symphony and Chorus; Georg Solti, cond. London 466 075