Composers Datebook

One of Handel’s “greatest hits” had its premiere on today’s date in 1749 at London’s Covent Garden Theatre, as part of his new Biblical oratorio, “Solomon.”

The text of Handel’s oratorio praises the legendary Hebrew King’s piety in Part 1, his wisdom in Part 2, and the splendor of his royal court in Part 3.

As the instrumental introduction to the third part of “Solomon,” Handel composed a jaunty sinfonia he titled “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.” In the Book of Kings, the Queen of Sheba travels from afar to visit the splendid court of King Solomon, arriving, as the Bible puts it, "with a very great retinue, with camels bearing spices, and very much gold, and precious stones."

Handel’s music admirably captures the excitement of a lavish state visit of an exotic foreign Queen, and first-night London audiences would have had no problem reading into Handel’s depiction of an elaborate compliment of their reigning monarch, King George II.

Speaking of reigning monarchs, at the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, Handel’s Sinfonia was used to accompany a video of James Bond (aka actor Daniel Craig) arriving at Buckingham Palace, where 007 was received by Elizabeth II.

In Saint Petersburg on today’s date in 1897 the First Symphony of Sergei Rachmaninoff had its disastrous premiere.

Now, there are bad reviews and then there are REALLY bad reviews. When Rachmaninoff opened up a newspaper the next day he read: “If there were conservatory in Hell, and if one of its students were instructed to write a symphony based on the seven plagues of Egypt, and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff's, he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and delighted the inmates of Hell.”

Ouch!

What must have really hurt was that the review was written by a fellow composer, Cesare Cui, and the premiere was conducted–poorly, it seems–by another composer colleague, Alexander Glazunov.

The whole affair was so painful that Rachmaninoff needed therapy before he could compose again, and when he left Russia for good in 1917, he left the symphony’s manuscript behind, and in the turmoil of the Bolshevik revolution it was lost. The original orchestral parts for the 1897 premiere, survived, however, and they were rediscovered in 1945, two years after Rachmaninoff’s death, and a belated, and this time successful, SECOND performance took place that same year.

The Palladium Ballroom once stood at the corner of 53rd Street and Broadway in New York City. It opened on today’s date in 1946, and in its heyday, was the mambo capital of the world, showcasing performances by Latin superstars like Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez, and Machito.

The Palladium closed in 1966, but its dance floor and bandstand were recreated for the 1992 film The Mambo Kings, in which Tito Puente plays himself.

The spirit of the Palladium was also evoked in a more recent chamber work by the Puerto Rican composer Dan Román. Fascinated by both the music of contemporary minimalist composers and the popular dance forms of Puerto Rico, Román combines the two in his four-movement work entitled “Musica de Palladium” for violin, viola, cello, and piano.

The work’s final movement, is entitled “Sensacional,” and is, according to Román, “a collage of aural images taken from mambos and other dance music of Machito, Tito Puente, and Tito Rodríguez.”

“Musica de Palladium” was written for The New World Trio, and recorded by them, joined by violist Steve Larson.

Johann Strauss the Elder, patriarch of the famous waltz dynasty, was born in Vienna on this day in 1804. His music became immensely popular across Europe, and he dreamed of–but never realized–a tour of America.

At the height of his fame, the elder Strauss visited Britain, providing music for the state ball on the occasion of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne. His waltz “Homage to the Queen of England,” quotes ‘Rule, Britannia’ at its start and ‘God Save the Queen’–in waltz tempo, of course–for its finale. The Times reported that in this case, Victoria WAS amused, as were her subjects. In the spring and summer of 1838, the Strauss orchestra gave 79 performances in London alone.

Unfortunately, back home, the elder Strauss was something of a cad. He abandoned his wife and his three talented musical children, Josef, Eduard, and Johann Jr. for a mistress with whom he started a new family. He died of scarlet fever, contracted from one of his illegitimate children, at the age of 45.

The elder Strauss wrote some 300 works, the most famous being his “Radetzky March,” the obligatory clap-along selection on every Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Day Concert.

Today’s date in 1962 marks the birthday in New Orleans of Terence Blanchard, the American jazz trumpeter, composer, and educator. “I come from a family of musicians,” says Blanchard. “My father was an opera singer, my mother played piano and taught voice, my grandfather played the guitar. What I wanted was to be a jazz musician, have a band, travel and create music.”

Well, he got his wish!

Blanchard started piano at age 5 and trumpet at 8, playing music with childhood

friends Wynton and Branford Marsalis at summer music camps and studied composition with their father, Ellis Marsalis. In 1980, while still in his teens, Blanchard began performing with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and later Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.

In the 1990s Blanchard started writing film and TV scores and has composed more than forty of them to date. In 2019 was nominated for an Academy Award for his music for Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman.”

In addition to holding major teaching positions and touring with his quintet, the E- Collective, the amazingly energetic and productive Terence Blanchard is also working on an opera titled Fire Shut up In My Bones that is scheduled to be premiered at the Metropolitan Opera.

On today’s date in 1943, at the height of World War II, Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” had its premiere performance in Cincinnati. The Cincinnati Symphony’s conductor in those days, the British-born Eugene Goosens, had commissioned 18 fanfares for brass and percussion. “It is my idea,” he wrote, “to make these fanfares stirring and significant contributions to the war effort.”

Besides Copland, the 18 composers commissioned included Henry Cowell, Paul Creston, Morton Gould, Howard Hanson, William Grant Still, and Virgil Thomson.

Most of the 18 composers dedicated their fanfares to either a unit of U.S. military or one of its wartime allies, Copland’s fanfare stood out, both musically and by virtue of its title.

Among the titles Copland considered — and rejected — were “Fanfare for the Spirit of Democracy” and “Fanfare for Four Freedoms,” the latter in reference to President Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Address that called for the freedom of speech and religion, and from want and fear. He settled on “Fanfare for the Common Man,” because, as Copland recalled, “it was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army. He deserved a fanfare.”

On today’s date in 1829, a 20-year-old German composer named Felix Mendelssohn conducted the first public performance of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” in almost a hundred years. Earlier, Mendelssohn had written to friend:

“You may know from the papers that I intend to perform the Passion by Sebastian Bach, a very beautiful and worthy piece of church music from the last century, on March 11th at the Berlin Academy of Music. I ask if it would be possible for you to grant us the pleasure of your company that evening ... to honor an old master and dignify our celebration by your presence.”

Mendelssohn’s 1829 performance sparked a revival of interest in Bach’s music, generally considered too unmelodic, mathematical, dry and incomprehensible for the audiences in Mendelssohn’s day. It really took some doing for Mendelssohn to pry the score of Bach’s Passion from the Berlin musician who owned it, and who said it was a total a waste of time to perform such an outmoded, unfashionable piece of music.

But, in fact, the performance was so well received that Bach’s Passion was presented again ten days later, to even greater acclaim, on March 21st the anniversary of Bach’s birth.

On this date in 1785, a new Piano Concerto in C major was given its premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna, with its composer, Wolfgang Mozart, at the keyboard.

Years later this piano concerto was labeled as Mozart’s 21st, and given the number 467 in the chronological list of his works compiled by Ludwig, Ritter von Koechel, an Austrian botanist, mineralogist, and Mozart enthusiast.

Today this work is popularly referred to as the “Elvira Madigan” Concerto, for the simple reason its romantic slow movement was used to great effect in a 1967 Swedish film of that name to underscore a passionate love story.

That Swedish movie helped to bring Mozart’s concerto to the attention of a far wider audience than ever before, as did the 1984 movie “Amadeus,” with Mozart’s music in general.

Musicologists may wince when they hear the title “Amadeus”–it’s a matter of historical record that Mozart signed his name “Amadeo” or “Amadé.” Others object that a Swedish film should provide a nickname for one of Mozart’s most sublime works–but, for better or worse, both “Amadeus” and “Elvira Madigan” are labels that seem to have stuck to Mozart’s name and his concerto.

On today’s date in 1902, composer Gustav Mahler, age 41, married Alma Schindler, age 22. Mahler was the famous director of the Vienna Court Opera, and by 1902 had written four symphonies. Alma was considered one of the most beautiful women in Vienna, and also an independent, unpredictable, and remarkably free-spirited one.

Perhaps that, as much as her beauty, appealed to Mahler, but many of the composer’s long-time friends did not approve and predicted disaster. One of them even suggested that the composer convert to Protestantism, which would make getting a divorce easier in ultra-Catholic Vienna.

On today’s date in 1902, a large crowd of curious onlookers gathered in Vienna’s majestic Baroque Karlskirche at 5:30 p.m, the time the wedding was thought to take place, only to discover they had been married hours earlier in the privacy of its sacristy with just the immediate family present.

The next symphony that Mahler wrote, his Fifth, contains a lovely Adagietto movement that Mahler’s friend, the Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg claims was inspired by Alma: “It was his declaration of love. Instead of a letter, he confided it in this manuscript without a word of explanation. She understood. He tells her everything in music.”

At Carnegie Hall on today’s date in 2015, the MET Chamber Ensemble gave the posthumous premiere of a new work by the American composer Elliott Carter, who died in November of 2012, a month or so shy of what would have been his 104th birthday.

The 2015 Carnegie Hall debut of “The American Sublime” marked the last world premiere performance of Carter’s 75-year-long composer career.

Hearing Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” at Carnegie Hall in the 1920s inspired Carter to become a composer. A high school teacher introduced him to Charles Ives, who became a mentor. By the mid-1930s, Carter was writing music in the “populist modern” style, ala Copland, but during a year spent in the Arizona desert in 1950, Carter finished his String Quartet No. 1–forty minutes of music uncompromising in both its technical difficulty and structural intricacy.

"That crazy long First Quartet was played in Belgium," Carter recalled. "It was played over the radio, and I got a letter from a coal miner, in French, who said, 'I liked your piece. It's just like digging for coal.' He meant that it was hard and took effort."