Composers Datebook

The November 7th, 1950 issue of Look magazine included a record review of a new LP of music by the avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse. “Varèse is unlike anything else in music,” suggested the review, “and well worth knowing.”

A young Californian named Frank Zappa, just short of his 10th birthday, was fascinated by the Look magazine photo of Varèse accompanying the review, which made the composer look a little like a mad scientist in vintage horror films. The young Zappa felt compelled to hunt down the record and begin composing music himself. For his 15th birthday, Zappa chose to spend a $5 gift from his parents on a long-distance phone call to Varèse, who Zappa correctly guessed must live in New York’s Greenwich Village.

Today, Frank Zappa is best remembered as the head of the iconoclastic rock band of the 60s and 70s, The Mothers of Invention, but in 1983, Zappa also conducted works of Varèse at a San Francisco concert honoring the composer’s centenary, and always acknowledged Varèse as a major influence. One of Zappa’s final projects, recorded in 1993, the last year of his life, was an orchestral tribute to Varèse.

The American composer Florence Price wrote three symphonies in all. Her Symphony No. 1 was premiered by the Chicago Symphony in 1933 and marked the first time a composition by an African-American woman was played by a major American orchestra. The score for her second symphony is lost. Her third symphony, commissioned by the WPA Federal Music Project, was premiered on today’s date in 1940 by the Detroit Civic Orchestra.

Price was born in 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas, one of three children in a mixed-race family. Her mother was a music teacher who guided Florence's early musical training. At age 14, she enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music, where she pretended to be Mexican to avoid the Ivy League racial prejudice of that time.

After teaching in the South, Price moved to Chicago in 1927, where she became acquainted with the writer Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson, both prominent figures in the African-American arts scene, who both helped promote Price's music.

Price died in 1953. After decades of neglect, early 21st century performances and recordings of her works have helped revive interest in her life and career.

“Into the Woods,” a new musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, opened on Broadway on today’s date in 1987, and brought to the stage characters from the world of fairy-tales: Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and not one, but TWO Prince Charmings.

But in Lapine and Sondheim’s fairy tale, bad things happen to good people who make morally questionable decisions in their quest to “live happily ever after.”

At the time, Sondheim said, “All fairy tales are parables about steps to maturity. The final step is when you become responsible for the people around you, when you feel connected to the rest of the world.”

The New York Times review noted that this fairy tale’s quest was “the same painful, existential one taken by so many adults in Sondheim musicals past.” Granting the musical was “potent stuff,” some complained there was simply too much of it, with multiple plot lines resulting in a complicated story hampering Sondheim’s lyrical gifts from really taking off on their own.

Even so, since its 1987 premiere, “Into the Woods” has gone on to become one of the most performed and popular of all Sondheim’s musicals.

Today we honor one of America’s greatest patrons of chamber music, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who died on this date in 1953.

Born in 1864, Elizabeth was the daughter of a very wealthy wholesale grocer. She put her inheritance to good use. In 1924, she proposed to the Library of Congress that an auditorium be constructed in Washington DC, which would be dedicated to the performance of chamber music. A year later it was built, and Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress still stands today.

Not content with just a superb venue for chamber music, Mrs. Coolidge diligently commissioned new works to be played there. The list of important chamber pieces her Foundation commissioned is impressive, and includes Bartok and Schoenberg string quartets, the original chamber versions of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” Stravinsky’s “Apollo” ballets, and modern works by American composers as diverse as Samuel Barber, Milton Babbitt, George Crumb, and John Corigliano.

Mrs. Coolidge was herself an amateur composer and accomplished pianist. Her passion for music and enthusiasm for the creation of new works was all the more remarkable considering that tragically she herself battled deafness from her mid-thirties.

At Carnegie Hall on today’s date in 2002, the American Composers Orchestra presented new works inspired by the Hebrew Psalms. The program included the premiere of a new work by the American composer David Lang entitled “How to Pray.”

In his program note, Lang wrote: “[The] Psalms are so central to religious experience [because] they are a comprehensive catalogue of how to talk to the Almighty... Of course, it's like reading one side of a correspondence... I am not a religious person. I don't know how to pray. I do, however, know some of the times and places and formulas that are supposed to help make prayer possible. Sometimes I find myself sending those messages out. And then I wait, secretly hoping that I will recognize the response.”

The minimalist-style, patterned repetition in Lang’s “How to Pray,” reminded some listeners of a “mandala”—those intricate graphic patterns intended to be an aid to meditation for Hindu or Buddhist believers.

Stravinsky fans with sharp ears might also recognize the running piano line from the beginning of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, which Lang borrows and weaves into the pattern of “How to Pray” as both a tribute and inspiration.

On today’s date in 1979 a new play by Peter Schaffer titled “Amadeus” opened at the National Theatre in London.

Schaffer’s play tells the story of Mozart’s final years in Vienna, including some posthumous gossip that it was the petty jealousy and back-stabbing intrigue of Mozart’s Italian contemporary Antonio Salieri that hastened Wolfgang’s untimely demise. There was even a Romantic legend that Salieri had actually poisoned Mozart, a legend Shaffer gave a psychological spin.

Music historians were quick to attack Shaffer’s play as wildly inaccurate and downright unfair to poor old Salieri, who, they said, was not all that bad a fellow. Accurate or not, Schaffer’s play was a big hit, and five years later was made into a wildly successful film. That movie version of “Amadeus” prompted millions of new classical music fans to snap up any recordings of Mozart’s “Requiem” they could find.

And what about the music historians? They couldn’t even find comfort in the old public relations adage, “There’s no such thing as bad press as long as they spell your name right!” They felt even the movie’s title was bogus. Mozart never signed his middle name “Amadeus,” preferring the French version, “Amadé.”

On today’s date in 1830, the Polish composer Frederic Chopin said farewell to his native land at a bon voyage dinner thrown by his friends in Warsaw. It was all quite jolly, with singing, dancing, and drinking lasting well into the night. On a more melancholy note, Romantic legend has it that someone presented Chopin with a vessel of Polish soil, which ended up being buried with him when he died in Paris 19 years later.

Chopin was an ardent Polish patriot, and, thanks to the repressive new czar of Russia, things were looking bad for Poland, politically, in 1830.

Musically, in Chopin’s view, things weren’t much better. “One thing’s for sure,” Chopin wrote to a friend, “I’m not staying in Warsaw. You have no idea how dreary it is here.” Chopin had kept busy by writing two piano concertos. “My second concerto is so original I’m afraid even I’ll never learn to play it right,” he confessed in a letter. Even so, these new works were well received in Warsaw, and one critic even suggested, with prophetic foresight, “Fate has blessed the Poles with Mr. Chopin just as she gave the Germans Mozart.”

On today’s date in 1955, Leopold Stokowski gave his first concert as the new music director of the Houston Symphony—or, as Stoki pronounced it, the “HOOSTON Symphony.” It was a major cultural event in those days. NBC even televised a bit of the famously white-maned conductor rehearsing the Texans in a brand-new work that Stokowski himself had commissioned for the occasion: the second symphony of Alan Hovhaness, subtitled “Mysterious Mountain.”

At the time, Hovhaness explained his subtitle as follows: “Mountains are symbols, like pyramids, of man’s attempt to know God. Mountains are symbolic meeting places between the mundane and spiritual worlds.” The new piece proved to be a terrific success for all concerned. The next day, the Houston Post’s music critic wrote, “The real mystery of Mysterious Mountain is that it should be so simple, sweetly, innocently lovely in an age that has tried so terribly hard to avoid those impressions in music.” For his part, Hovhaness once said, “Things that are complicated tend to disappear and get lost. Simplicity is difficult, not easy.”

Before his death in the year 2000, Hovhaness would complete 67 symphonies.

The American opera composer Jake Heggie and his librettist Terrence McNally decided to follow their “Dead Man Walking”–a successful but harrowing opera about capital punishment–with a lighter, more comic work, entitled “Great Scott.”

Now, librettist McNally winced when people called “Great Scott” a “comic” opera, since it deals with a serious topic– for opera lovers, at least, namely, “Does opera still matter?”

“Great Scott” is set in a large American city with a respected–but struggling–opera company. The city also has a powerhouse professional football team. In “Great Scott,” international opera star Arden Scott returns to her hometown to save the opera company by staging the world premiere of a long-lost Italian Bel Canto work, “Rosa Dolorosa, Figlia di Pompei.” Unfortunately, the scheduled premiere falls on the same day as the home team’s first Super Bowl.

Does the diva save the opera company? And who wins the Super Bowl?

Well, you’ll just have to listen to the opera to find out!

Fortunately, a Dallas Opera recording of “Great Scott” was made at its premiere on today’s date in 2015–featuring the powerhouse American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato in the title role.

On today’s date in 1739, Mr. George Frideric Handel took out an advertisement, announcing that he was now accepting subscriptions for his new set of 12 Grand Concertos for strings. He had, in fact, finished the first concerto one month before, on September 29th, and spent the next five weeks polishing off the other 11 at the rate of one every two or three days.

Handel’s publisher was John Walsh, Jr, who had a shop in London at the sign of the harp and oboe in Catherine Street on the Strand. One hundred twenty-two copies of the music were to be printed and sold at a pre-publication price of two guineas each. Among the initial 100 subscribers were three royal princesses and the Duke of Cumberland, and two copies each were sold to the Academy of Music in Dublin and a certain Mr. Charles Jennens.

It was Mr. Jennens who was to provide the text for Handel’s next major oratorio, “Messiah,” and the city of Dublin the venue for its famous premiere.

So, in 1739, just as today, it pays to advertise!