Composers Datebook

The Viennese are notorious for the passion with which they can despise a composer one moment and lionize them the next. Here, for example, is one critic’s reaction to the 1886 Vienna premiere of the Fourth Symphony by Johannes Brahms:

“Conspicuous is the crab-like progress in the output of Brahms. It has, to be sure, never reached beyond mediocrity, but such nothingness, emptiness, and hypocrisy as prevails throughout this E-minor symphony has not appeared in any previous work of Brahms in so alarmingly. The art of composing without ideas has found in Brahms its worthiest representative. Just like the good Lord, Herr Brahms is a master at making something from nothing.”

And yet, 11 years later, on today’s date in 1897, when this same symphony was performed again in Vienna, each movement was greeted by prolonged cheers from the audience.

Not only had the Viennese come to admire the music, but also the man–and they knew their beloved Herr Brahms was dying. And so, when the gaunt and sickly composer attended a matinee performance of his 4th symphony, at the Musikverein’s Golden Hall, the audience took the opportunity to acknowledge him and his music for the very last time.

Ever send someone an e-mail that you regretted the second you hit the “send” key? Even in the 19th century, it was often prudent to sleep on a message before sending off words written in the heat of passion.

On today’s date in 1853, Giuseppe Verdi sent a barrage of short notes to friends after what he felt was the disastrous premiere of his latest opera at the Teatro la Fenice in Venice.

"I am sorry," wrote Verdi to his publisher, "but I cannot conceal the truth from you. Let's not investigate the reason. It happened. Goodbye, goodbye." To another colleague Verdi wrote: “It was a fiasco. My fault. Or the singers? Time alone will tell.”

But, apparently after a little more thought, he wrote to another friend: “The audience laughed. Well, what of it! Either I’m wrong or they are. I personally don’t think that last night’s verdict will be the last word.”

After a year waiting for just the right cast, Verdi allowed his new opera to be staged again–in Venice once again, but this time at a different theater. Much to his satisfaction, this time, his new opera “La Traviata” was a big hit.

On today's date in 1889 at New York’s Chickering Hall, a 28-year-old American composer named Edward MacDowell played the solo part at the premiere performance of his Piano Concerto No. 2.

The critic of The New York Tribune confessed he derived keener pleasure from MacDowell’s Concerto than he had from the Fifth Symphony of Tchaikovsky, another new work that had just premiered in New York that year. Others compared MacDowell's Concerto favorably to those of Brahms.

Ah, the fickle finger of fame — today MacDowell’s music is taken to task for exactly the reasons it was praised during his lifetime. Critics back then LIKED the fact that MacDowell’s music reminded them of famous European composers like Schumann or Grieg, while today’s critics complain it’s not “original” enough.

But in his day, MacDowell was a major figure on the American music scene. At age 36, he became the first professor of music at Columbia University and served as the president of the newly formed Society of American Musicians and Composers. He arranged for his summer home in New Hampshire, now known as the MacDowell Colony, to become a working retreat for composers, which it remains to this day.

Antonio Lucio Vivaldi came into the world on today’s date in 1678 a few days after an earthquake shook Venice. The newborn was baptized immediately–just in case little Antonio’s first day also turned out to be his last.

Vivaldi’s father was a violinist, and even though Antonio quickly became a virtuoso on that instrument himself, he became a Roman Catholic priest.

Vivaldi complained of chest pains whenever he said Mass–a medical excuse that allowed him to forego his priestly duties and to concentrate on writing music, including dozens of operas and hundreds of concertos.

By his mid-40s, Vivaldi was a major figure on the European musical scene, but his fortunes gradually took a turn for the worse. The Church ordered him to stop composing music for the theater and, for heaven’s sake, to stop gadding around Europe in the company of female opera singers!

Vivaldi came to Vienna in 1740, hoping to find a court position with the Austrian Emperor Charles VI, a big fan of his music, but after eating some bad mushrooms, the Emperor died. And the following year, Vivaldi himself died–from an internal infection, not an earthquake–at age 63 and heavily in debt.

Today’s date marks the birthday in 1913 of the American composer Margaret Bonds. Her mother was a church musician in Chicago; her father was a physician and one of the founders of a medical association for black physicians denied membership in the American Medical Association.

One of the visitors to Margaret’s childhood home was composer Florence Price, with whom she studied composition. At 16, Bonds became one of the few black students enrolled at Northwestern University, although she was not allowed to reside on campus. At the 1933 World’s Fair, Bonds performed Price’s Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony, becoming the first African-American woman soloist to appear with a major American orchestra.

After earning her Master’s degree, she moved to New York to study at the Juilliard School. She met and became a close friend of the poet Langston Hughes, with whom she collaborated on many projects.

Margaret Bonds wrote around 200 works, but only 47 were published during her lifetime, and only some 75 of her scores are known today–the rest exist as privately- held manuscripts scattered all over the country.

One of her best-known works is “Troubled Water,” a solo piano fantasia on the spiritual “Wade in the Water.”

On today’s date in 1965, the now-classic and mega-iconic musical film “The Sound of Music” officially debuted at the Rivoli Theater at Broadway and 49th Street in New York City.

Since we at COMPOSERS DATEBOOK are notorious for mentioning “little known facts,” let us state for the record, that the FIRST test audiences to see the film did so in fly-over country–first in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and subsequently in Tulsa, Oklahoma, about a month before the film’s New York debut.

The Midwestern audiences were ecstatic, and director Robert Wise knew he'd have a hit on his hands when his film starring Julie Andrews opened on Broadway, not far from where the stage version, starring Mary Martin, had originally debuted back in 1959.

The 1965 New York Times film review was a little snarky–well, what else is new? It began by referring to (quote) “the perceptible weakness of its quaintly old-fashioned book,” while grudgingly admiring, “the generally melodic felicity of the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein score,” and ended by opining, “Business-wise, Mr. Wise is no fool.”

No fool, indeed. Mr. Wise’s film won five Oscars and displaced “Gone with the Wind” as the highest-grossing film of all-time.

For most of the 20th century, women's history was almost totally ignored in American schools. To address this situation, an Education Task Force in Sonoma County, California, initiated a "Women's History" celebration in March of 1978. What began as an annual “Women’s History Week” grew over the years into a national celebration, and in 1987, Congress declared the whole of March to be Women's History Month.

Appropriately enough, 1987 also saw the premiere performance of Joan Tower’s “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman” — music written for the same instrumentation as Aaron Copland’s famous “Fanfare for the Common Man.”

Originally, Tower chose to let the title of her “Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman” serve as a generic, built-in dedication to all the unsung heroes of women’s struggles past and present. But eventually, Tower added a specific dedication to the conductor Marin Alsop, a champion of new music.

“I don’t think you can play a piece of music and say whether it’s written by a man or a woman,” says Tower. “I think music is genderless.”

But festivals and celebrations of women in music remain important, in Tower’s view, in helping to get the word out about their accomplishments.

For most music lovers, the phrase “Italian composers of the 19th and 20th centuries” means first and foremost OPERA composers.

But during the 1920s and 1930s, when the great Italian opera conductor Arturo Toscanini was music director of the New York Philharmonic, American audiences heard many non-operatic, symphonic works by modern Italian composers.

On today’s date in 1929, for example, Toscanini led the New York Philharmonic in the world premiere performance of the “Concerto dell ‘estate” or “Summer Concerto of the contemporary Italian composer, Ildebrando Pizzetti.

In addition to premieres by Pizzetti, New York audiences heard recent Italian symphonic works by Respighi, Tommasini, Martucci, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Wolf-Ferrari, and others.

Absent from Toscanini’s New York programs were new works by the rising AMERICAN composers of the day. There were no Toscanini premieres—or even performances—of works by Copland, Harris, or Piston. Those composers had to look to the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky if they wanted a hearing.

The American composer Daniel Gregory Mason complained in 1931 that the Philharmonic was run by (quote): “fashion-enslaved, prestige-hypnotized minds... totally devoid of any American loyalty to match the Italian loyalty” that was, as Mason admitted, “rather likeable” in the charismatic Italian maestro.

Today’s date marks the birthday of a 20th century Czech composer you perhaps have never heard of. Viktor Kalabis was born in 1923 and by age 6, was giving public piano performances. All the signs pointed to a brilliant career. But first Kalabis had to face – and surmount–two major political hurdles.

First, his formal musical studies were delayed by the Nazi occupation of his country in 1938, when he was forced into factory work; then, after the war, Kalabis met and married a young harpsichordist named Zuzana Ruzickova, who was a concentration camp survivor. Victor was a Gentile, but in Stalinist Czechoslovakia, anti-Semitism was rampant and marrying a Jew was frowned upon. To make matters worse, both Victor and Zuzana refused to join the Communist Party, hardly what one would call “a smart career move” in those years.

Even so, Kalabis began to attract commissions and performances of his music at home and abroad, and following the 1989 Velvet Revolution, Kalabis assumed a more prominent position in his country’s musical life.

His symphonies, concertos, and chamber works are now regarded as some of the most important contributions to Czech music in the late 20th century.

On today’s date in 1832, the Polish pianist and composer Frederic Chopin made his concert debut in Paris at the Salle Pleyel. Among the enthusiastic audience members was another composer-pianist by the name of Franz Liszt, who would rapidly become Chopin’s close friend and advocate.

Chopin dedicated his recently completed Piano Etudes, Op. 10, to Franz Liszt, and Chopin once wrote to a friend: “I am writing without knowing what my pen is scribbling, because at this moment Liszt is playing my etudes and putting honest thoughts out of my head. I should like to rob him of the way he plays them!”

The failure of the Polish Insurrection of 1831 had driven a large number of Polish refugees to Paris, where they joined émigré groups of Italians and Austrians who had also fled political repression at home for the more liberal, welcoming atmosphere of the French capitol.

Increasing ill-health and crippling stage fright made Chopin’s public concert appearances in Paris rare events. When Chopin did perform in public, he liked to share the stage with a sympathetic singer like Pauline Viardot-Garcia, or a fellow pianist like Liszt. Despite his fame, Chopin’s concert appearances in Paris numbered less than a dozen.