Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1871, Hermann Levi conducted the premiere of a new choral work by Johannes Brahms titled “Schicksalslied” or “Song of Destiny.” It’s a setting of a poem by Friedrich Hoelderlin, contrasting in its first part the blissful Greek Gods on Mt Olympus, and in its second, the miserable suffering of we mortals below.

Brahms discovered the poem in the summer of 1868 while visiting his friend Albert Dietrich on the shores of the North Sea. As Dietrich recalled, during one sea-side stroll: “Brahms, usually so lively, was quiet and grave. Earlier that morning (he was always an early riser), he had found Hölderlin’s poems in my bookcase and was deeply impressed. Later on, some of us were lounging by the sea, when we saw Brahms a long way off sitting by himself on the shore writing.”

Brahms originally planned to repeat the blissful opening words of the poem as the ending of his setting, but that didn’t ring true to the poem. He was stuck. The conductor Hermann Levi suggested a solution: repeat the serene opening music, yes, but as a wordless, instrumental-only close.

Brahms had his solution, and, as a reward, Levi his premiere.

On today’s date in 1941, the Boston Symphony gave the first performance of a new symphony by a 31-year old American composer named William Schuman.

It is numbered as Schuman’s Third Symphony but, in reality, you might as well say it’s his First.

Now, Schuman was not an early devotee of the New Math. The explanation is a fairly simple one: Schuman had written two earlier symphonies, but these were composed very much under the influence of his teacher, the American composer Roy Harris. Schuman wrote his first symphony in 1935 and a second in 1937. The Second was very well received, and had even been played by the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky. It was Koussevitzky who commissioned Schuman to write a Third Symphony, and conducted its premiere on today’s date in 1941.

It was with this work that Schuman felt he really found his own distinct voice as a composer. He withdrew his two earlier symphonies, and they were never published.

By the time of his death in 1992, William Schuman had completed a Symphony No. 10. So—subtract the first two, and that makes eight “authentic” and “officially authorized” William Schuman symphonies in all.

Of all the works of Richard Strauss, the one that premiered in Dresden on today’s date in 1925 ranks amount the least-known.

For starters, it has an odd title, “Parergon to the Symphonia Domestica.” “Parergon” means “an ornamental accessory or embellishment,” and Strauss meant his new work, written for piano left-hand and orchestra, as a follow-up to his “Symphonia Domestica” tone-poem of 1903 , which depicted one day in the Strauss family household, complete with baby’s bath.

The baby in question was Strauss’s son Franz, who by 1925 was a young man setting up his own household, and recently recovered from a near-fatal case of typhus contracted while on his honeymoon in Egypt. For Strauss, this “Parergon” was a private celebration of his son’s survival.

For Paul Wittgenstein, the wealthy one-handed concert pianist who commissioned the new work, this was one of several he had requested from leading composers of his day, all designed as to showcase his talent. Wittgenstein’s contract with Strauss stipulated that Wittgenstein alone would have exclusive rights to the “Parergon” as long as he wished, and so it wasn’t until 1950 that any other pianist could perform it.

Liverpool may be renowned as the birthplace of The Beatles, but it has other claims to fame as well. On today’s date in 1946, for example, one of Benjamin Britten’s best-known orchestral works received its first concert performance in that British city.

“The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” was its title, with “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell” offered as an explanatory subtitle. Britten himself preferred the “Young Person’s Guide” as its official title and complained whenever the BBC tried call it just “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell” when announcing the piece on the radio.

Originally conceived as the soundtrack to a British education film on the instruments of the orchestra, Britten’s score can be performed with a spoken narration, or, as is more common, as a purely instrumental work. In fact, the 1946 Liverpool concert premiere actually preceded the first showing of the film by a month or so.

A spectacular display of instrumental sounds and colors, the “Young Person’s Guide” is a kind of mini-concerto for orchestra, showcasing each section of the modern symphony and culminating in a grand fugue on the Purcell theme for the whole orchestra.

On today’s date in 1883, the premiere of Antonín Dvořák’s Violin Concerto was given in Prague by the Czech violinist František Ondrícek with the National Theatre Orchestra led by a Czech conductor named Moric Anger, an old friend of the Dvořák’s and his one-time roommate.

The concerto was commissioned by the distinguished violinist Joseph Joachim, an old friend and collaborator of the German composer Johannes Brahms. Brahms had sent Joachim two of Dvořák’s chamber works for strings. Joachim expressed enthusiasm for these pieces and urged Dvořák to write a concerto for him.

So far, so good.

Dvořák had a finished score by December 1879, but Joachim had what we now would call “some issues” with the score, and, by the time Dvořák was finishing the last revisions, three years had elapsed with no talk of a premiere. Dvořák realized Joachim was unlikely to ever premiere the new Concerto, so he offered it to Ondrícek, a young virtuoso who eagerly championed it in Prague and abroad.

We should note that Joseph Joachim finally did perform Dvořák’s Concerto in Berlin in 1894, some 15 years after he had commissioned it.

At Carnegie Hall on today’s date in 1991, Dennis Russell Davies conducted American Composers’ Orchestra in the premiere performance of a new orchestral work entitled “Black Light.”

Its composer was Daniel Asia, a Seattle native who has emerged as one of the most productive contemporary composers of orchestral works. Asia has written several symphonies to date, and a number of concertos and shorter orchestral works.

The final page of the score for Asia’s “Black Light” is inscribed, “October 15, 1990—In Memoriam Leonard Bernstein.” Bernstein had died the previous day, as Asia was just finishing his new score, and a year later, almost to the day, Asia’s “Black Light” was premiered in New York.

Bernstein was a composer that Asia openly acknowledges as a big influence in his own work. But it would be wrong to suggest that “Black Light” was conceived as an elegy for Bernstein. Asia has been associated with the University of Arizona in Tucson, and says the closing section of “Black Light” is “suggestive of the fierceness of the appearance of the sun, particularly in the Southwest, in all its glory at that first instant of daybreak.”

As far as housewarming gifts go, a nice bottle of champagne is common, or maybe a bouquet of flowers. But if you’re a composer, and the occasion is the ceremonial opening performance at a new concert hall, you write a celebratory piece of music.

On today’s date in 1984, for the inaugural concert of the Indianapolis Symphony’s new home, the Circle Theater, American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich wrote an orchestral work entitled, appropriately enough, “Celebration.”

“In writing this work,” said Zwilich, “I was motivated by three complementary goals. First, I wanted to celebrate a joyous and historic occasion with all its inspiring symbolism of beginning and renewal. My second goal was to write a kind of “toccata” or test piece for the new Circle Theater. Finally, I wanted to celebrate the orchestra itself, which is, after all, the centerpiece of the occasion. Thus ‘Celebration’ is like a mini-concerto for orchestra.”

Zwilich’s housewarming gift was dedicated to the Indianapolis Symphony’s music director in 1984, conductor John Nelson. Despite its origins as an occasional piece for a particular event, “Celebration” has gone to become one of Zwilich’s most popular and frequently performed orchestral works.

By a coincidence, the last two symphonies of the Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev both premiered on today’s date: Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony premiered in Leningrad in 1947, and his final, Seventh Symphony, in Moscow, in 1952.

The Sixth Symphony is tragic in tone, and Prokofiev confided that it was about the physical and emotional wounds suffered by his countrymen during the Second World War. The Sixth was premiered at the opening concert of the Leningrad Philharmonic’s 1947 season and was applauded warmly by both audiences and the official Soviet critics. But early in 1948, Prokofiev somehow ran afoul of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and his Sixth was quickly withdrawn from further performances.

Prokofiev’s Seventh was intended to be a symphony for children, a kind of symphonic “Peter and the Wolf,” written in a deliberately populist style and with a wary eye on the dictates of the Central Committee. It’s an airy, almost transparently melodic score. Originally it had a wistful, somewhat melancholic ending, with the music trailing off into silence. During the final dress rehearsals, however, Prokofiev wrote an alternative, perhaps more “politically correct” finale, decidedly chipper and up-beat in tone.

The American jazz composer and pianist Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on today’s date in 1917. Largely self-taught, he began playing piano at age 6. At 17, Monk dropped out of New York’s esteemed Stuyvesant High School for gifted students to serve as organist for a touring evangelist. In his 20s, he became the house pianist at Minton's, a Manhattan jazz nightclub.

Monk’s original compositions, marked by dissonances and angular twists of melody, became jazz standards. They also had great titles: “’Round Midnight,” “Straight, No Chaser,” “Ruby My Dear,” and “Well, You Needn’t.”

Monk made the cover of TIME magazine and is credited with being the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington.

Monk's biographer Robin D.G. Kelly, who spent 14 years researching Monk’s life and music, said, “He was Janus-faced [looking backwards and forwards] … Monk pulled as much from his roots, the old-style [stride] piano traditions he never left, as from the really futuristic musical territory he was the first to visit. He's always going to be associated with the founding of Bebop, with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. I don't place him on the Bebop school, though—I place him in his OWN school. “

On today’s date in 2001, the release of a CD of Vivaldi’s oratorio “Juditha Triumphans” launched a very ambitious project – to record nearly 450 works of the famous Italian Baroque composer that exist as manuscript scores in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin, Italy.

It’s the largest collection of manuscript scores by any 18th century composer in existence, and includes many Vivaldi works unperformed since his lifetime.

Susan Orlando, the director of the recording project, explained how that came to be: “When Vivaldi died in Vienna in 1741 he had debts, so the authorities immediately sealed off his home. We have the inventory that they made. It included no musical manuscripts, but there was a big, empty chest. It seems Vivaldi’s brother had got hold of the music and sold it off.”

Back then, Vivaldi’s scores ended up with various wealthy collectors, but in 1930 the scattered music was consolidated and bequeathed to the library in Turin.

The French label Naïve has released over 60 Vivaldi Edition CDs so far, including 17 Vivaldi operas. More than a dozen additional titles are planned for release by 2028, the year that will mark the 350th anniversary of Vivaldi’s birth.