Composers Datebook

Back in the 18th century, Frederick the Great of Prussia was a prolific composer of sonatas, concertos, and even a few symphonies. In the 19th century, Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria, composed songs and choral pieces. There have been other composers who were members of the European nobility, but more often they crop up as patrons of music rather than creators of it.

But in our time, a Belgian composer named Jacqueline Fontyn, who was born in Antwerp on today’s date in 1930, was made an honorary baroness by the King of Belgium in 1993 in recognition of her contributions to music in her native country and around the world.

Now, Baroness Fontyn is probably a composer you never heard of until today, but she has a sizeable body of orchestral and chamber works and enjoyed an international career as a composition teacher, holding positions at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland, as well as in Los Angeles, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Seoul, and her native Belgium.

Her music might be described as “European modern.” Today, you can find all the manuscript scores of Jacqueline, Baroness Fontyn have been kept in the Library of Congress.

On today’s date in 1734, the second cantata from the “Christmas Oratorio” of Johann Sebastian Bach had its first performance in Leipzig, Germany. This cantata takes its inspiration from Luke’s Gospel describing shepherd keeping watch over their flocks and opens with a purely instrumental Sinfonia that sets the scene, evoking the sound of the shepherds’ rustic pipes.

In Bach’s day, a famous builder of wind instruments lived in Leipzig. His name was J. H. Eichentopf, and he is credited with inventing an “oboe da caccia”—that’s Italian for "hunting oboe." This instrument was curved with a big brass horn bell at its end. Bach calls for this instrument in his Christmas Oratorio, but after Bach’s time, it fell out of use, and knowledge of its exact sound and construction was lost.

In the 20th century, two well-preserved (but unplayable) “hunting oboes” built by Eichentopf survived in museums in Denmark and Sweden, and from their measurements, modern-day copies were made. These were used for the first time in over 200 years for the period-instrument recording of the Christmas Oratorio conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt that appeared in 1973.

In the 1930s, many Americans had a hard time making ends meet. During the Great Depression, opera and concert tickets didn’t always figure into most family’s budgets, but thanks to live radio broadcasts, American families enjoyed a veritable “Golden Age” of operatic and symphonic music in the comfort of their own homes.

On Christmas Day in 1931, the NBC network made radio history when they broadcast a matinee performance of Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera “Hansel und Gretel” live from the stage of the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York City to radio listeners coast to coast. The on-air host was the American composer Deems Taylor, whose own opera, “Peter Ibbetson,” would be included in a live Met broadcast the following spring.

And on Christmas Day in 1937, music of Antonio Vivaldi opened the first live NBC Symphony broadcast conducted by the legendary Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. Live NBC Symphony broadcasts under Toscanini would continue until the famous conductor’s retirement in 1954. Along with Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, Toscanini included a handful of American works in his programs, and in 1938, conducted the broadcast premiere of Samuel Barber’s famous “Adagio for Strings.”

On today’s date in 1871, the Opera House of Cairo, Egypt, presented the world premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida.” The Khedive of Egypt commissioned the opera for his new theater, which had opened in 1869 with a production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”

Here’s how Verdi himself described it to his publisher, in Verdi's customary laconic fashion: “I was invited to write an opera for a very distant country. I replied ‘no’. I was approached again and offered a very large sum. I still said ‘no’. A month later I was sent a printed synopsis, and told it was the work of a person in high authority (which I don’t believe). Even so, I found it excellent and replied that I would set it to music on such and such terms. Three days later I received a telegram that read: accepted.”

For his efforts, the 58-year-old Verdi received four times his usual fee—and the honorary title of “Commendatore of the Ottoman Order.” The Cairo premiere was a great success, even though Verdi chose to spend his Christmas Eve at home, arranging for the Italian premiere of his Egyptian opera at Milan’s La Scala opera house early the following year.

Oh, to have been in Vienna on today’s date in 1785! Wolfgang Mozart had just finished a new piano concerto a week earlier, and quite likely performed it himself for the first time as an intermission feature at a performance of the oratorio “Ester” by Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf conducted by Antonio Salieri.

Now wouldn’t that have made for a good scene in the movie “Amadeus?”

Fast forward 11 years for another memorable concert at the Theater an der Wien, when on today’s date in 1806, it was Beethoven’s turn to premiere one of his new concertos in Schikaneder’s Viennese theater. Alongside works of Mozart, Méhul, Cherubini, and Handel, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was introduced to the world, with Franz Clement as the soloist.

Beethoven’s friend Czerny recalled that Clement’s performance was greeted with “noisy bravos,” but a contemporary Viennese music critic wrote, “while there are beautiful things in the concerto … the endless repetition of some commonplace passages could prove fatiguing.” The reviewer’s final assessment? “If Beethoven pursues his present path, it will go ill with him and the public alike.”

Whether you live in sunny California or snowy Minnesota, the arrival of the solstice means “It’s official: winter is here!” And if you were born someplace sunny, but moved to someplace snowy, the arrival of winter is pretty hard to ignore.

Winter must have made an impression on the transplanted Italian composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, who was born in Florence but settled in Paris and ended up as the court composer for King Louis XIV.

One of Lully’s operas, “Isis,” had its premiere in the winter of 1676, and contains a chorus of ‘Trembleurs,” or “Trembling People from the Frozen Climes,” whose teeth chatter in slurred tremolos. This chorus became particular famous for the wintry pantomime ballet that accompanied it, as well as for its evocative music.

Of course, the most famous of all Baroque “Winter” music was also served up by another Italian, Antonio Vivaldi, who was born in Venice but traveled widely in Northern Europe as well and died in Vienna.

Vivaldi’s “Winter” Violin concerto from “The Four Seasons” includes its own musical shivers, not to mention a musical depiction of slipping and sliding on icy streets.

On today’s date in 1934, on a radio broadcast from Moscow, the orchestral suite Prokofiev culled from his film score to “Lt. Kije” received its first performance. The original film recounted the efforts of 18th century Russian bureaucrats to invent a suitably impressive life and death for a nonexistent Russian solider, whose unusual name, actually a typographical error on a list of real soldiers’ names, caught the attention of the Czar.

If the fictional Russian bureaucrats in “Lt. Kije” were terrified lest they displease the Czar, real-life composers living in the Soviet Union of the 1930s were desperately anxious to keep on the good side of their ruler, the dictator Joseph Stalin. It was, to put it mildly, a matter of life and death.

For Stalin’s 60th birthday, which fell on December 21st, 1939, Prokofiev composed a choral tribute entitled “Zdravitza,” which translates as “A Congratulatory Toast.” It, too, was broadcast on today’s date, this time booming over loudspeakers throughout Moscow’s squares and side streets. Prokofiev’s son Oleg recalls running home through the swirling snow eager to tell the big news: “Daddy! They’re playing you outside!”

On today’s date in 1738, a once-successful French composer died destitute in an asylum of Charenton. It was a lamentable end for the 56-year-old Jean-Joseph Mouret, who had once served the French King at the Palais Royal and whose operas had once graced the stage of the Paris Opéra.

How ironic, then, that Mouret would achieve belated fame in 20th century America when the "Rondeau" from his “Symphonies and Fanfares for the King's Supper” was chosen as the theme for the “Masterpiece Theatre” TV series on PBS. Christopher Sarson, the original executive producer of “Masterpiece Theatre,” recalls how this came about.

“In 1962 my future wife and I went to one of the Club Med villages in Italy. We were in these little straw huts and every morning we were summoned to breakfast by that theme. It was just magic... I wanted to use it for Masterpiece Theatre but there was no way I could bear to put a FRENCH piece of music on something that was supposed to be English. I went through all kinds of English composers and nothing worked. So, Mouret became the theme.”

The short career of Charles Tomlinson Griffes is one of the more tragic “might-have-beens” of American music history. Griffes died at 35 years old, in 1920, just as his music was being taken up by the major American orchestras of his day.

As most American composers of his time, Griffes studied in Germany, and his early works were, not surprisingly, rather Germanic in tone. But beginning around 1911, Griffes began composing works inspired by French impressionism and the art of Asia.

The Boston Symphony under Pierre Monteux premiered his tone-poem “The Pleasure Dome of Kubla-Khan,” and the New York Symphony under Walter Damrosch his “Poeme” for flute and orchestra. On today’s date in 1919, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski premiered four orchestral pieces: “Nocturne,” “Bacchanale,” “Clouds,” and one of his best works, entitled “The White Peacock.” The Philadelphia newspaper reviews of the premieres called Griffes’ work, “one of the hopeful intimations for the future of American music.”

A severe bout of influenza left Griffes too weak to attend these Philadelphia premieres under Stokowski, and he died of a lung infection the following spring.

In the section of his autobiography on the 1960s, Aaron Copland wrote: “I have often called myself a ‘work-a-year’ man… and 1964 belonged to the band piece ‘Emblems.’ Among the invitations I received to compose new pieces was one from clarinetist Keith Wilson, who was president of the College Band Directors National Association, for a work to be played at the organization’s national convention.

“I hesitated for a moment,” continued Copland, “but accepted when I was told that the piece would be bought sight unseen by at least two hundred bands!”

“Emblems” premiered in Tempe, Arizona, on today’s date in 1964, performed by the USC Band, conducted by William Schaefer. Here’s how Copland explained the work’s title: “An emblem stands for something… I called this work ‘Emblems’ because it seemed to me to suggest musical states of being: noble or aspirational feelings, playful or spirited feelings.”

Close listeners may hear harmonic echoes of the spiritual “Amazing Grace” in the slow opening and close of “Emblems.” Copland said, "Curiously, the harmonies had been conceived without reference to that tune. It was only by chance that I realized a connection between my harmonies and "Amazing Grace!"