Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1992, lovers of the tango had good reason to be sad. Argentinean composer and bandoneón virtuoso Astor Piazzolla had died in Buenos Aires at the age of 71.

The bandoneón is a close relation of the accordion, and for it Piazzolla composed new music inspired by the tango, an Argentinian dance form that originated in working-class dancehalls. While still a teenager, he had played bandoneón in the orchestra of Carlos Gardél, the most famous tango singer of the 1930s. Eventually, he formed his own band, which became famous throughout South America.

But Piazzolla had a burning desire to write concert music, and won a scholarship to study composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. She encouraged him to explore the possibilities inherent in the music he knew best, so he set about reinventing the tango. The result was dubbed “nuevo tango,” as vital as the old ones, but often dark and brooding.

When asked why these new tangos were so melancholy, he replied, “Not because I’m sad. Not at all. I’m a happy guy … no, my music is sad because the tango is sad — sad and dramatic, but not pessimistic.”

Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992): Tres Minutos con la Realidad; Nestor Marconi, bandoneon; Yo Yo Ma, cello; ensemble; Sony Classical 63122

Weather permitting, there’s a good chance you’ll be attending an outdoor symphonic concert tonight that will close with Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with a volley of booming cannon shots, church bells, and dazzling fireworks.

It’s become an American tradition to perform the 1812 Overture on July 4, even though it has nothing to do with the 1776 War of Independence — or America’s War of 1812, for that matter.

No, it’s all down to Arthur Fielder and the Boston Pops.

For years, a wealthy American businessman named David Mugar financed an outdoor Pops concert on Boston’s Esplanade on the Fourth of July. But by the mid-1970s, attendance started to decline, so Mugar suggested that if Fiedler would close the annual concert with the 1812 Overture, people might be lured back by the live cannon fire Tchaikovsky asks for in the piece.

Well, it worked. Outdoor concerts with the 1812 Overture plus cannons quickly became a tradition, and in 1976, 400,000 people attended the Boston Pops’ outdoor Bicentennial Fourth of July concert — setting a Guinness World Record for best-attended classical concert.

And, a year after his death in 2022, a bronze statue of Mugar was unveiled on the Boston Esplanade.

Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893): 1812 Overture; Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra; Antal Dorati, conductor; Mercury Living Presence 434360

Country Gardens is the best-known work of Australian-born American composer, arranger, and pianist Percy Grainger. Its score bears this note: “Birthday-gift, Mother, July 3, 1918.” His mother Rose was responsible for his excellent early musical training.

In 1918, he arranged a folk tune given to him in 1908 by Cecil Sharp, a major figure in the folklore revival in England. He titled this arrangement Country Gardens, and it went over so well at his recitals that he decided to have it published.

It was a big hit and broke sales records. In fact, until his death in 1961, its sales generated a significant portion of Grainger’s annual income. Like other composers with a mega-hit, Grainger came to resent being known for just one tune and would say to audiences: “The typical English country garden is not often used to grow flowers. It’s more likely to be a vegetable plot. So you can think of turnips as I play it”.

In 1931, Country Gardens was arranged for wind band by someone other than Grainger, but around 1950, at the special request of a Detroit band director, Grainger prepared his own wind band arrangement, which likewise became a hit.

Percy Grainger (1882-1961): Country Gardens; Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra; Timothy Reynish Chandos 9549

In German, “Gluck” means “luck,” and today’s date marks the birthday of a German composer named Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose good fortune it was to be credited with reforming the vocally ornate but dramatically static form of Baroque opera.

In the 18th century, opera was the biggest and most high-profile of all musical forms, and Gluck wrote 49 of them during his 67 years of life. Like many 18th century opera composers, the stories Gluck chose were often based on ancient Greek myths such as “Orpheus and Eurydice.”

It wasn’t the matter of Gluck’s operas that was revolutionary, but the manner in which he set these stories to music. When the British music historian Charles Burney visited Gluck in 1771, he recorded the composer’s own words on the subject.

“It was my design to divest music of those abuses which the vanity of singers, or the complacency of composers, had so long disfigured Italian opera and made the most beautiful and magnificent of all public exhibitions into the most tiresome and ridiculous,” said Gluck.

To sum it all up, Gluck told Burney, “My first and chief care as a dramatic composer was to aim at a noble simplicity.”

Christoph Willibald von Gluck (1714-1787): Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Orpheus; Academy of Ancient Music; Christopher Hogwood, conductor; L’Oiseau-Lyre 410553

On today’s date in 1937, a two-piano suite by French composer Darius Milhaud had its premiere. It was titled Scaramouche, after a stock character in the Italian commedia dell arte, and the music’s upbeat, carefree mood made it an instant hit. For his part, Milhaud was in an apprehensive mood. When he and his wife Madeleine had visited the 1937 Paris International Exposition, they saw premonitions of war reflected in many of its exhibits.

“Picasso’s Guernica adorned the walls of the Spanish pavilion, but the Spanish Republic had been murdered. Placed face to face, the German and the Soviet pavilions seemed to challenge each other to mortal combat. One evening, as we watched the sun set behind the flags of all nations, Madeleine clutched my arm in anguish and whispered, ‘This is the end of Europe!’” Milhaud recalled.

In 1940, Milhaud was forced to leave France when the Germans occupied Paris and his music was promptly banned due to his Jewish heritage. But in 1943, two French pianists performed Scaramouche in concert, tricking the German censors by listing its composer’s name as Hamid-al-Usurid — a fictitious Arabic composer whose name just happens to be an anagram of Darius Milhaud.

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974): Scaramouche; Anthony and Joseph Paratore, pianos; Four Winds 3014

In 1971, American film composer Bernard Herrmann confessed, “the only thing I ever did that was foolhardy was to write an opera.” The opera was based on the 19th century novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. Herrmann began work on it in April of 1943, and didn't finish until today's date in 1951 — at 3:45 p.m., as he noted in its score.

In those years, Herrmann was juggling three careers. He was conducting the CBS Orchestra, producing music for New York radio plays and occasional Hollywood films, and trying to write serious concert hall works. It's no wonder it took him eight years to finish a big opera score that clocked in at over three hours in length.

Now, writing an opera is hard enough, but getting it staged is even harder. Herrmann liked to quote Franz Liszt, that “to write an opera you have to have the soul of a hero — and the mentality of a lackey — to have it produced.” Even if an opera company expressed interest, Herrmann refused to cut or alter his score. He felt Wuthering Heights was his masterpiece, and refused to compromise.

The opera was never staged during his lifetime, so Herrmann had to content himself with making his own studio recording of Wuthering Heights at his own expense. After Herrmann’s death in 1975, the Portland Opera staged an edited-down version, and more recently, in 2011, the Minnesota Opera staged and filmed a critically acclaimed revival.

Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975): Wuthering Heights; soloists; Pro Arte Orch; Bernard Herrmann, conductor; Unicorn UKCD -2050/52

Today’s date in 1914 marks the birthday of famous Czech conductor Rafael Kubelík. He was the son of a very musical father, namely the violin virtuoso Jan Kubelík, known as the Czech Paganini.

Kubelík studied violin, composition, and conducting at the Prague Conservatory, and was an excellent pianist to boot — good enough to accompany his father on several concert tours. At the age of 19, he made his conducting debut with the Czech Philharmonic, and later became that orchestra’s artistic director.

In 1950, Kubelík became director of the Chicago Symphony; in 1955, the director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; and in 1961, conductor of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra. It was with the Bavarian orchestra that he made the bulk of his recordings, including a critically-acclaimed set of the Mahler symphonies. Like Mahler, he was both a conductor and a composer.

“In public, I am practicing more as a conductor, but I could not live without composing, just as I would not be able to conduct without composing,” he said. He wrote five operas and three symphonies as well as many chamber music pieces, choral works and songs.

Rafael Kubelík died at 82 in 1996, in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Rafael Kubelik (1914-1996): Orphikon: Symphony in Three Movements; Bavarian Radio Symphony; Rafael Kuybelik, conductor; Panton 1264

On today’s date in 1745, 73-year-old French composer Antoine Forqueray died in Mantes-la-Jolie outside Paris, where he had lived after his retirement as a court musician to King Louis XIV of France.

Forqueray was a virtuoso on the viola da gamba, a bowed string instrument popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, but nowadays only played by specialists in old music. At the tender age of 10, Forqueray played before Louis XIV. Seven years later, he landed a job at the Court of Versailles.

In his day, the other great French gamba virtuoso and composer was Marin Marais, noted for his introspective, sweet and gentle style of playing. Forqueray’s style was extroverted and bold, even brash. People said Marais played like an angel, and Forqueray like the devil.

Forqueray’s style was so distinctive that three other French composers of the day, Jean-Philippe Rameau, François Couperin and Jacques Duphly, each composed a piece named La Forqueray in tribute to him.

An obituary notice suggested that Forqueray had composed some three hundred works, but a selection of thirty-two pieces published by his son two years after his father’s death is the only music by Antoine Forqueray that survives.

Antoine Forqueray (1671-1745): Piece for viola de gamba

The name George Templeton Strong crops up frequently in both the Ken Burns documentary on the Civil War and Ric Burns’ history of New York City. That George Templeton Strong was a lawyer and music lover who lived from 1820-1875, whose diary entries offer a detailed picture of daily life in New York City.

But there’s another member of the family we’d like to tell you about — the son of the famous diarist, George Templeton Strong, Jr., born in New York in 1856, and died in Geneva, Switzerland on today’s date in 1948.

The younger Strong became a fine oboist who played in various New York orchestras of his day. His father was not very happy about that. He wanted his son to study law. Moreover, Junior rebelled against his father’s ultra-conservative tastes in music: Strong Senior detested the music of Liszt and Wagner, whereas Junior, who became a composer, modeled his works on those very composers.

The sad father-son relationship is documented painfully in the final entries of the elder Strong’s diaries. After a bitter argument, Junior left home and moved to Europe, eventually settling in Switzerland, where he pursued a dual artistic career as composer and watercolorist.

George Templeton Strong (1856-1948): Evening Dance from Suite No. 2; Moscow Symphony; Adriano, conductor; Naxos 8.559078

It was Mozart who wrote the first great piano concertos, with Beethoven, Brahms and others following suit in the 19th century. Closer to our own time, the tradition continues, with new contributions appearing each year.

On today’s date in 1986, American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s piano concerto received its premiere by the Detroit Symphony with Marc-Andre Hamelin the soloist.

“My piano concerto does not cast the pianist as the prototypical 19th-century hero battling the orchestral forces and triumphing through overwhelming virtuosity,” said Zwilich. “My concerto calls for a blending of forces — a joint exploration of the piano soloist and orchestra. The pianist is even asked to merge with various sections of the rather large orchestra at times.”

She continued, “To me, a part of the nobility of the piano is that it can change its color, chameleon-like without losing its special identity … One composer treats the piano as a percussion instrument, another as a singer … Certainly the vast and wonderful piano repertoire explores this remarkable range. And the world of composer-pianists is large enough to embrace Serge Rachmaninoff and Art Tatum.”

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1939): Piano Concerto; Joseph Kalichstein, piano; Florida State Orchestra; Michael Stern, Koch 7537