Composers Datebook

In Berlin on today’s date in 1915, the prolific German composer Max Reger conducted the premiere performance of what would become his most popular orchestral work.

Like Bach, Reger was a master of counterpoint and the fugue, and, like Beethoven, loved writing variations. Reger’s “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart” starts off simple enough, quoting a familiar theme from a Mozart’s Piano Sonata. Some thirty minutes later, the simple theme develops into massive fugue. It’s all very grand and clever if you like it, or bombastic and tiresome if you don’t.

The witty Nicolas Slonimsky, in his “Music Since 1900,” described it as follows: “Mozart’s ingenuous theme… is subjected to torturous melodic anamorphoses, contrapuntal contortion, canonic dislocation, rhythmic incrustation, and harmonic inspissation.”

To save you the trouble of Googling the definition of “inspissation,” let’s just say it’s not a condition you would wish on anybody!

Whether you’re a fan or not, “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart” is quintessential Max Reger, and one is tempted to say, “What did you expect? It’s Reger to the Max!”

By 1837, the symphonies of Beethoven had become quite popular in Paris. Beethoven had been dead for ten years, but surprisingly, much of his chamber music had yet to be performed publicly in Paris.

So Franz Liszt organized a series of chamber concerts at the Salle Erard to introduce Beethoven’s Piano Trios. Liszt would play the piano part, of course, joined by finest Parisian violinist and cellist available.

One of the programs fell on today’s date in 1837, and was to feature on the first half, one of Beethoven’s Trios, then, on the second half, a brand new Piano Trio by another German composer named Johann Peter Pixis, a contemporary composer whose works Liszt admired.

At the last minute, the performers decided to reverse the printed order of the program, performing the new Pixis Trio first. The audience (and critics), following the printed program, warmly applaud the Pixis, mistakenly thinking it was the Beethoven, and reacted coolly to the Beethoven, assuming it was by Pixis.

Among the many newspaper critics who attended the concert, only one noticed the switch and wrote his review accordingly—and that music critic’s name happened to be a famous composer, Hector Berlioz.

If he hadn’t turned composer, Johannes Brahms might have made an excellent travel agent. He was in the habit of spending his summer vacations working on his music, and consequently was always on the lookout for scenic spots and comfortable rooms at a decent price. In the summer of 1865, Brahms rented rooms from a certain Widow Becker in Lichtental near Baden-Baden. The rooms offered a wonderful view of a mountain hillside covered with fir trees—and the rent was irresistibly low. “I came, I saw, I rented,” wrote Brahms to a friend.

Brahms composed his String Sextet No. 2 there, between jolts of bracing coffee in the morning and afternoon hikes up the aforementioned hillside. Not surprisingly, this sextet turned out to be one of his happiest and most genial chamber works.

But on today’s date in 1867 at the Sextet’s first performance in Vienna, the critic of the Wiener Zeitung heard desert sands rather than shady forests, and wrote: “We are seized with a kind of foreboding whenever Herr Johannes Brahms, this new John the Baptist emerges from the wilderness. This prophet makes us quite disconsolate with his impalpable, vertiginous tone-vexations, pleasing to neither body nor soul.”

On today’s date in 1890, the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak conducted the first performance of his Symphony No. 8 in Prague, on the occasion of his election to the Bohemian Academy of Science, Literature and Arts.

By 1890, Dvorak was a world-famous composer, honored in his own country and abroad. Within a year of its premiere, Dvorak conduced his Symphony No. 8 again in London, Frankfurt, and at Cambridge University, where he received an honorary Doctor of Music degree in 1891.

Despite some mysterious and melancholy passages, Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony is usually described as “sunny,” “idyllic,” and “pastoral.” Its final movement opens with a brass fanfare, perhaps a reference to a century-old tradition of signal trumpeters playing from the towers and parapets in Prague, a sight and sound that visitors to the famous Astronomical Clock tower in that city’s Old Town Square can still experience today.

It’s amusing—and perhaps revealing of something deep in the national spirit—that at a rehearsal of this finale, the legendary Czech conductor Rafael Kubelik quipped to his players, "Gentlemen, in Bohemia the trumpets never call to battle—they always call to the dance!"

In 1881, the posthumous premiere of Jacques Offenbach’s final work, “The Tales of Hoffmann,” had been announced for February 1st at the Opera Comique in Paris—and in fact WAS performed on that date, but as a closed dress rehearsal attended only by theater staff and Offenbach’s family.

Offenbach knew he was dying as he wrote this opera and had completed a full piano score and extensive sketches for its orchestration. For its premiere, Ernest Guiraud faithfully orchestrated “Hoffmann,” but, at the request of the Opera Comique’s director, replaced the original, quick-paced SPOKEN dialogue between its musical numbers with slower, SUNG recitatives in the style of a grand opera.

At private premiere, the opera ran MUCH too long. In something of a panic, drastic cuts and a wholesale rearrangement of Offenbach’s score were made before the public premiere nine days later. In its drastically altered form, “Hoffmann” proved a great success, and remained so for decades. For the opera’s centenary in 1981, however, musicologists painstakingly prepared new performing versions of “Hoffmann,” restoring Offenbach’s original plan for the work.

Consequently, opera companies today are faced with a dilemma: do they stage the familiar—or the faithful—version of Offenbach’s masterpiece?

Since the 18th century, Paris and Prague have been famous for producing some of the greatest wind players of Europe. And in the 19th century, Anton Reicha, who was born in Prague but died in Paris, wrote for those wind players a sizeable body of quintets to showcase the agreeable blend of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and French horn.

In our own time, the number of professional wind quintets has increased dramatically, and, not surprisingly, contemporary composers are eager to create new works for them.

On today’s date in 1987, at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in New York, the Manhattan Wind Quintet premiered a piece by the American composer David Maslanka—his Wind Quintet No. 2.

A clarinetist himself, Maslanka is particularly known for his works for wind ensembles, large and small. He describes his three-movement Wind Quintet No. 2 as follows:

“The first movement is fierce and somewhat daunting in its technical demands; the second is moody and elusive; the third is sweet and resigned.”

This recording features the Bergen Woodwind Quintet of Norway, an ensemble that has taken Maslanka’s music very much to heart, recording three of Maslanka’s Wind Quintets for the BIS label from Sweden.

In 1985, the musical world was celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of Georg Frideric Handel. On today’s date that year, a Minnesota-based composer named Libby Larsen, then in her mid-thirties, was celebrating the premiere performance of her Symphony No. 1.

Larsen titled her symphony “Water Music,” and says its first movement was a deliberate homage to Handel’s famous “Water Music.” As a resident composer of a state with over 10,000 lakes, Larsen admits her own love of sailing also had something to do with the symphony’s descriptive title.

Since 1985, Larsen has gone on to write a few more symphonies, each with its own particular title. And Larsen frequently gives individual movements of each symphony their own descriptive tags. For example, one movement from her “Solo” Symphony No. 5, from 1999, is entitled “The Cocktail Party Effect.”

Rather than the wallop of a stiff drink, Larsen says she means the ability of human hearing to pick out a single voice among the extraneous noise one encounters at a crowded cocktail party. “It’s a kind of musical ‘Where’s Waldo?’” says Larsen. “In this case, Waldo is a melody, introduced at the beginning … then hidden amidst the other music.”

If Mozart’s widow, Constanza, is to be believed, the happiest days of his life occurred in 1780, when he was 24 years old and writing the music for “Idomeneo,” an opera that premiered in Munich on today’s date in 1781.

Mozart had good reasons to be happy. For starters, the best orchestra in Europe, the Mannheim Court Orchestra, had relocated to Munich, and they would be the pit band for his new opera. The lead role was being written for Anton Raff, a famous tenor of his day, and, even better, there were some exceptionally talented – and exceptionally good-looking – young sopranos in the cast. Mozart promptly fell in love with one of them, a strikingly beautiful diva named Aloysia Weber, but ended up marrying her sister Constanza instead.

By contemporary accounts, Aloysia, with her high cheekbones and magnificent carriage, was close to the ideal beauty of the day. But Mozart came to appreciate Constanza’s more sympathetic personality, not to mention, in his own words, her “black eyes and pretty figure.”

Mozart had written several operas already, but the canon of truly great Mozart operas begins with “Idomeneo,” a work that must have been, literally and figuratively, a labor of love.

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 in 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.

To say that the American composer and jazz pianist Vijay Iyer is a multi-faceted artist would be quite the understatement. The son of Tamil immigrants, Iyer was born and raised in New York and began classical music training at age 3. His undergraduate degree at Yale was in mathematics and physics, but music retained its strong pull, and at UC 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, Vijay Iyer started attracted a lot of attention. Reviewing “Break Stuff,” his 20th CD release, the 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 entitled “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,” says Iyer. “But when you’re an artist, a composer, a creative person .. you find a lot of different sides of yourself opening up.”