Composers Datebook

When Franz Schubert died in Vienna in 1828, he left behind several manuscripts of symphonies unpublished, and in some cases unperformed during his short lifetime. It wasn’t until today’s date in 1865—37 years after Schubert’s death—that his most famous Symphony received its premiere performance in his hometown of Vienna.

This Symphony in B minor came to be called the “Unfinished,” since its manuscript score contained only two completely finished movements. A normal Viennese Symphony of Schubert’s time should contain four movements, and, in fact, a fairly complete piano sketch of the third movement exists, as does a full score of just the first nine measures of that same movement.

When Johann van Herbeck conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in the first performance in 1865, he tacked on the last movement of Schubert’s Third Symphony as a finale. More recently, some scholars have argued that a portion of Schubert’s “Rosamunde” incidental music, was in fact the missing final movement of his symphony.

Despite these attempts to finish the “Unfinished,” most performers and audiences seem content to hear the score as Schubert left it—romantically cut short, just like the composer’s tragically short life.

Nostalgic fans of old-time radio and TV shows will have no trouble recognizing the overture to Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek’s comic opera “Donna Diana” as the signature theme for Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, an adventure series set in the far North which chronicled the exploits of a Royal Canadian Mountie and his loyal husky, Yukon King.

This music, however, had its real birth on today’s date in the year 1894 at the New German Theater of Prague, when Reznicek’s opera had its first performance. Reznicek wrote a number of other operas, but “Donna Diana” was his one international hit. Gustav Mahler thought highly of it, and conducted its premiere in Vienna in 1904.

In 1932, Reznicek and another famous composer, Richard Strauss, formed an international society for composers. When Reznicek resisted a Nazi takeover of that organization in 1942, the 82 year-old was punished by having his music confiscated by the Propaganda Ministry. His death three years later amid the bombed-out rubble of Berlin was a sad one. Reznicek died in 1945 of typhoid fever aggravated by starvation.

A tragic end for a composer best known for such light-hearted music!

A color wheel is a circular chart showing the relationship of the colors of the spectrum. It was originally fashioned by Sir Isaac Newton back in 1666, and still serves as a useful tool for painters and graphic designers today.

“Color Wheel” is also the title of an orchestral showpiece by the American composer Aaron Jay Kernis–a work that premiered on today’s date in 2001 by the Philadelphia Orchestra at the opening concerts of the then brand-new Verizon Hall at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia.

“The honor of being asked to compose the first music played in this new hall led me to conceive of a ‘miniature’ concerto for orchestra which treats it as a large and dynamic body of sound and color,” said Kernis.

“I sometimes see colors when I compose,” Kernis confessed, “and the qualities of certain chords do elicit specific sensation in me—for example, I see A major as bright yellow. I’ve also been fascinated with Sufi whirling dervishes and their ecstatic spinning. This work may have some ecstatic moments but it is full of tension, continuous energy and drive.

On today’s date in 1918, the Metropolitan Opera in New York offered the world premiere performance of not one, not two, but three brand-new operas by Giacomo Puccini.

The three one-act operas are collectively billed as “Il Trittico” or “The Triptych.” In order of their presentation at the Met, the triptych consisted of “Il Tabarro” (or “The Cloak”), a rather sordid tale of passion and murder, followed by a sentimental tear-jerker titled “Suor Angelica” (or “Sister Angelica,” after its Romantic heroine), and, for a comic finale, “Gianni Schicchi,” titled after the resourceful hero of its comic plot.

Musical America reported a warm welcome for the three new Puccini operas, but did find “Il Tabarro” “in the main, black and brutal.” In that journal’s opinion, the hit of the evening was the comic opera, “Gianni Schicci.” In particular, one brief soprano aria from that opera so pleased the first night audience that it had to be encored.

Over time, this little aria, “O mio babbino caro,” has become one of Puccini’s “Greatest Hits,” and has even cropped up in the soundtracks of a movies like “A Room With a View” and “G.I. Jane.”

On today’s date in 1836, Chopin held a soiree in his apartment in Paris. The famous tenor Adolphe Nourit sang some Schubert songs, accompanied by Chopin’s friend, Franz Liszt. Liszt and Chopin then played a new Sonata for piano four-hands by Ignaz Moscheles.

In attendance was a petite, olive-skinned Baroness turned writer known by her pen name, George Sand. Sand was notorious for her racy novels and for her highly unorthodox lifestyle. She liked cigars, for example, and often showed up at parties wearing men's clothing without the required permit.

Chopin had met her earlier and was NOT at first impressed. The 26 year-old composer was engaged to a much younger woman back home in Poland, a pale beauty who couldn’t be more unlike the 32-year-old Sand. But, anxious to make a good impression, Sand showed up for Chopin’s soiree wearing white pantaloons and a scarlet sash (the colors of the Polish flag)—and left her stogies at home!

All it took was a “Dear Frederic” letter from the girl back home, and before long the Chopin-Sand romance was the talk of Paris. “My heart was conquered,” wrote Chopin in his journal, “She understood me.”

1685 was a good year for composers: Bach, Scarlatti, and Handel were all born in 1685, as was, on today’s date, an Italian composer named Lodovico Giustini.

Like Bach, Giustini came from a family of musicians, and Lodovico began his career by succeeding his father as church organist, eventually landing the prize organ post at his hometown cathedral, a position he retained for the rest of his life. Giustini also took up a new-fangled keyboard instrument known as the forte-piano, which, unlike the harpsichord, struck the instrument’s strings with small hammers rather than plucking them like a harp. This new technology allowed music to be played loud and soft (piano and forte), with a more nuanced range of dynamics and phrasing.

Giustini’s claim to fame is that in 1732 he published the very first collection of sonatas written specifically for the instrument we now call the piano. Although Giustini’s sonatas attracted little attention when they were first published, since only a few wealthy royals could afford to own these new and very expensive instruments, over the next two centuries thousands of pianos–and piano sonatas–began appearing in even the most modest of musical households.

On today’s date in 1918, the celebratory “American Fantasy” of the Dublin-born American composer Victor Herbert opened the first program of the newly-formed Cleveland Orchestra.

Cleveland had reason to celebrate. World War I had ended one month earlier, and, for some time, city organizers had been trying to build a hometown orchestra. In December of 1918, Father John Powers of St. Ann’s Church wanted to give a concert to raise some money for his parish, and, as Father Powers also happened to be a fine Irish tenor, offered to perform on the same bill as the new orchestra, just in case the untried ensemble of 54 didn’t prove to be a sufficient box-office attraction.

So, along with Father Power’s songs and Herbert’s “American Fantasy,” conductor Nikolai Sokoloff lead the Orchestra in Bizet’s “Carmen” Suite, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, Liadov’s tone poem “The Enchanted Lake,” and, for a rousing closer, Liszt’s tone poem “Les Preludes.”

Over the next 100 years, especially during the period when George Szell was music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, the ensemble came to be regarded as one of the best in the world.

Wolfgang Mozart died on December 5th, 1791, leaving behind an unfinished Requiem Mass, commissioned anonymously by Count Franz von Walsegg, a 28-year-old Austrian nobleman who had the ignoble habit of passing off works he commissioned as his own. The Requiem was intended to be a memorial to the Count’s 20-year-old wife, Anna, who had died earlier that year.

Mozart’s wife Constanza arranged for some of Mozart’s pupils to complete the unfinished Requiem, and eventually delivered it to Count Walsegg in order to receive the full commission fee promised her husband.

But just five days after Mozart’s death in 1791, the portions of the Requiem that Mozart himself had completed were sung at a memorial service organized by his friend and collaborator Emanuel Schikaneder.

Schikaneder was the librettist for Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute,” and ran his own opera house at the Theater auf der Wieden in a Viennese suburb. It was there that Mozart’s “Magic Flute” had premiered, and it was Schikaneder’s musicians who performed parts of Mozart’s Requiem for the first time on today’s date in 1791, at St. Michael’s Church in the center of Vienna.

What’s your favorite season? And how would you describe it in words? And if you’re a composer, how would you describe it in music?

The most famous musical depiction of “The Four Seasons” is a set four violin concertos by the Italian Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi, but other composers have evoked the mood and sounds of the seasons. On today’s date in 2009, the American composer Philip Glass tossed his hat into the ring with the Toronto Symphony premiere of a new work entitled “The American Four Seasons.”

Glass’s seasonal tone painting, like Vivaldi, is a set of four concertos, written for violinist Robert McDuffie, who also performed the premiere. But when McDuffie finally saw the finished score, he felt Glass’s view of some of the seasons did not quite match his own, so they came up with an unusual solution: in the published score, Glass did not provide titles for any of the four concertos, letting each listener (or performer) decide for him- or herself which concerto matched which season.

So, in this case of THIS “Four Seasons,” it’s all up to you.

At Carnegie Hall on today’s date in 1908, Gustav Mahler conducted the New York Symphony, the 200-voice Oratorio Society chorus, and two vocal soloists in the American premiere of his Symphony No. 2, his “Resurrection Symphony.”

These days, Mahler’s Second ranks among his most popular works. But how was this new music received by New Yorkers back in 1908? An unsigned review in the New York Daily Tribune noted:

“It was by demonstrations of far more than mere politeness that the large audience found vent for its feelings of interest and pleasure in this new music ... After the Schubertian second movement there was long continued applause, and at the close of the composition… there was cheering and waving of handkerchiefs until Mr. Mahler was compelled to appear several times to bow his thanks and appreciation.”

As for the music itself, the review opined: “… of the beauty and insight of certain episodes there can be no doubt… there seems, however, a lack of significant and commanding originality. It is more cerebral than passionate, more intellectual than compellingly emotional.”