Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1966, a symphonic work by the 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 entitled “Variations for Orchestra (The Mask of Night)” for orchestra and soprano soloist. For the premiere performances, the vocal soloist was Argento’s wife, the soprano Carolyn Bailey.

The music was composed in Florence, Italy.

“I vividly remember the circumstances that inspired it,” wrote Argento. “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 concludes, “these Variations are much indebted to my favorite city, my favorite writer, my favorite composer, and my favorite soprano.”

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

Strauss had begun work on this 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 increasingly anxiety about her fate and that of the Strauss grandchildren as the Nazi’s race laws tightened their noose.

In a post-war 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 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom and irreplaceable monuments of architecture and works of art were destroyed.”

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

Tavener’s cantata was titled, “The Whale.” 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 own 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, Tavener’s 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’s coffin as it left Westminster Abbey.

On today’s date in 1935, at the Church of Saint François-Xavier in Paris, organist Geneviève de la Salle gave the first complete performance of the three-movement Suite, Op. 5, by the 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,” Op. 9, which premiered some 12 years later.

Now, if Duruflé’s Op. 5 premiered in 1935, and his 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, Op. 5 consist of a brooding Prélude, a Sicilienne that 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 like César Franck and Louis Vierne, and Duruflé’s own 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 … Duruflé evolved and amplified the old traditions, making them his own."

In January of 1980, the famous American film music composer John Williams was named conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra, and on today’s date that year 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 has 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.

In 1968, Senator Eugene McCarthy was running for President on an anti-war 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 entitled “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 Eugene McCarthy, became President in 1968, and was re-elected in 1972, and 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.

On today’s date in 1939, pianist John Kirkpatrick gave a recital at Town Hall in New York City which included the New York premiere of the “Concord” Sonata by the 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 the then-prominent composer and teacher Rubin Goldmark, who, in 1921, was giving composition lessons to the 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, John 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.”

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 story-line.

Reviewing a New York production in 1862, the 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 – receive a devastating send-up at the hands of the Marx Brothers.

On today’s date in 1962, President John F. Kennedy received two memos regarding a dinner party at the White House scheduled the following evening honoring composer Igor Stravinsky and his wife Vera. The Kennedys were famous for inviting the finest artists and performers to the White House for special presentations. Mrs. Kennedy was a true arts maven, but JFK was not, and needed background information on figures like Stravinsky, which the first memo provided. The Kennedy’s Social Secretary even worked out secret signals and cues for the President when he attended White House recitals so he wouldn’t applaud at the wrong time.

The second memo informed JFK that after a photo shoot with the Stravinskys, they would join the others invited that evening for cocktails in the Blue Room. After dinner, the 80 year-old Stravinsky expressed his gratitude and told the press that the Kennedys were “nice kids.”

Four months after President Kennedy’s assassination in November of 1963, Stravinsky asked poet W.H. Auden for “a very quiet little lyric” that he might set to music in tribute to Kennedy’s memory. The resulting work, “Elegy for J.F.K.” for medium voice and three clarinets, that premiered in 1964.

On today’s date in 1994, at 4:30 a.m. Pacific Coast time, an earthquake struck Southern California. It was located some 20 miles west-northwest of Los Angeles and centered 1 mile south-southwest of Northridge. It registered 6.7 on the Richter scale and caused 44 billion dollars in damage.

The event also generated a rock musical entitled “I Was Looking at the Ceiling and Then I Saw the Sky,” which premiered in Berkeley, California, the following year. This was a collaboration among the composer, John Adams, stage director, Peter Sellars, and librettist, June Jordan.

Adams spent about a year working on this, his third stage work, which was billed as an “earthquake romance.” The story, told in twenty-five pop songs accompanied by an eight-piece rock band, is both a romantic comedy and a social satire centered on the lives of seven young Americans of varied ethnicities, all living in Los Angeles at the moment of the Northridge earthquake.

The original production played in an extended five-month tour of Montreal, New York, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Paris, and Hamburg, and a Nonesuch compact disc recording followed, featuring performances by some rising stars of the American music theater, including Audra MacDonald.