Composers Datebook

Say the phrase “BBC Proms” to most music lovers, and they’ll conjure up a mental image of the rowdy “Last Night of the Proms” at which normally staid and reserved Britons don funny hats and make rude noises during Sir Henry Wood’s arrangement of British sailor songs. But the raucous “Last Night of the Proms” is only the festive finale of several weeks of fairly SERIOUS music making: dozens of concerts covering a wide range of old and new music

From the very beginning of the Proms in 1895, Sir Henry, who started the whole thing, had this specific agenda: “I am going to run nightly concerts to train the public in easy stages,” he explained. “Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical AND modern music.”

On today’s date in 1996, for example, violinist Gidon Kremer premiered a

brand-new violin concerto by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho at a Proms concert. The work had an unusual title—“Grail Theater.” “I like the unusual combination of these two words,” explained Saariaho, “because it represents two such different things. One is the search for the Grail, and the other the theatrical aspect.”

The life story of George Gershwin usually runs something like this: an incredible string of successes cut short by Gershwin’s tragically early death. But on today’s date in 1922, Gershwin suffered one of his rare flops when his one-act opera “Blue Monday” opened and closed on the same day.

For five years, beginning in 1920, Gershwin had provided the music for an annual Broadway review entitled “The George White Scandals.” The impresario Mr. White provided the money and the leggy showgirls, Mr. Gershwin the catchy tunes and light-hearted dances.

But in 1922, Gershwin was eager to try something different: a modern, jazz-age version of an Italian verismo opera. The plot was simple: he does her wrong, and then she shoots him. The reviews were devastatingly bad—one critic suggesting the soprano with the pistol should have shot the rest of the cast before ANYONE had a chance to sing.

And so Mr. White pulled “Blue Monday” from his revue before it could have a second performance. A concert revival by the Paul Whiteman band at Carnegie Hall in 1925, and a 1953 CBS-TV production didn’t fare all that much better.

Even today “Blue Monday” is rarely staged.

Around this time in 1956, the hot ticket on Broadway was for a musical based on the old Greek legend of Pygmalion, a sculptor so good that he fell in love with one of his beautiful female statues. The playwright, George Bernard Shaw, had updated the legend to modern-day London, and in 1956, the Broadway team of Lerner and Loewe had in turn transformed Shaw’s stage play into the smash Broadway musical, “My Fair Lady.”

But 208 years before all that, on today’s date in the year 1748, ANOTHER very successful musical adaptation of the Pygmalion legend opened in Paris. This “Pygmalion” was an opera-ballet by the great French Baroque composer, Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Rameau was born in 1683, two years earlier than Bach and Handel, but unlike them, was something of a late bloomer. He was 50 before he became famous, and his opera-ballet “Pygmalion” opened shortly before his 65th birthday.

Rameau was famous for imitating natural sounds and noises in his music. One of Rameau’s contemporaries, in praising the overture to “Pygmalion,” even suggested the repeated notes of Rameau’s theme represented the chipping of Pygmalion’s chisel as he worked on his lovely creation.

Piero della Francesca was a 15th century Renaissance painter, whose series of frescoes entitled “Legend of the True Cross” inspired one of the best orchestral works of a 20th-century Czech composer named Bohuslav Martinu.

In 1952, Martinu made a trip to the Tuscan hill town of Arezzo, where he saw the frescoes and got the idea for a new symphonic work that would attempt to capture in music what Piero had captured in painting.

What Martinu sought to replicate was, as he put it, “a kind of solemn, frozen silence and opaque, colored atmosphere… a strange, peaceful, and moving poetry.”

Martinu linked the first movement of his score to one Tuscan fresco showing the Queen of Sheba and some women kneeling by a river; and the second to another depicting the dream of the Emperor Constantine. The third movement was intended, in Martinu’s words, as “a kind of general view of the frescoes.”

Martinu’s orchestral triptych, entitled “The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca,” received its premiere performance on today’s date at the 1956 Salzburg Festival in Austria, with the Vienna Philharmonic led by the eminent Czech conductor, Rafael Kubelik.

On today’s date in 1959, Leonard Bernstein celebrated his 41st birthday in Moscow. The New York Philharmonic was embarked on an extensive world tour, which included three weeks in the Soviet Union.

Their August 25th concert proved controversial, offering two works of Igor Stravinsky, a composer still condemned in the Soviet Union as “bourgeois” and “decadent.” Even more daring, Bernstein opened his concert with “The Unanswered Question,” a short piece by the American composer, Charles Ives.

Even worse, Bernstein broke traditional Soviet protocol by talking directly to the audience through an interpreter, explaining Ives’ unusual philosophy of music. The enthusiastic audience response after the Ives led to it being encored.

This really upset the Soviet authorities, and the music critic of the Ministry of Culture wrote, “Before this four-minute piece Bernstein spoke for six minutes. Only the good manners of the hospitable public resulted in a ripple of cool applause. Nevertheless, the conductor, setting modesty aside, himself suggested that the piece be repeated.”

Bernstein, although furious at what he called “an unforgivable lie,” was persuaded to forgo any further controversial lectures from the podium for the remainder of the Soviet tour.

We tend to think OUR time has had a monopoly on bitter religious conflicts, but on today’s date in 1572, which happened to be St. Bartholomew’s Day, the Catholic queen dowager of France, Catherine de Medici, and her son, King Charles IX, decided that the best way to rid their kingdom of troublesome Protestants would be simply to kill them off.

A few days earlier, Catholic and Protestant nobles from across France had come to Paris to attend a noble wedding which, ironically, was intended to bring the rival religious factions closer together.

Things quickly turned ugly, and on the 24th of August the infamous “Massacre of St. Bartholomew” began and quickly spread across the entire country. Among those who perished was a French Protestant composer named Claude Goudimel, who was killed when the massacre reached Lyons.

Fortunately for posterity, not ALL Reformation era rulers were so bloodthirsty. The English Catholic composer Thomas Tallis managed to keep his head through the reigns of alternating Catholic AND Protestant monarchs, and the Protestant Queen Elizabeth the First admired and supported the music of William Byrd, despite his openly Catholic sympathies.

Tanglewood is one of America’s most famous summer-time classical music festivals and can boast a long and impressive list of premieres and performances by famous American composers and conductors. It takes place each year around this time in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.

Tanglewood has been the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home for more than 60 years, but it wasn't the symphony's first location in the Berkshires. In August of 1936, the first in a three-concert series was performed at Holmwood, a former Vanderbilt estate.

The great Russian-born conductor of the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitzky, moved the festival to Tanglewood and expanded the concert series into a kind of intensive summer camp for young musicians and composers. Among those who particularly benefited were two young composer-conductors named Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss.

In 1940, the Berkshire Music Center (now the Tanglewood Music Center) opened, and to mark the occasion, American composer Randall Thompson's famous choral work titled Alleluia received its premiere performance.

Opera-goers today often lament the rise of intrusive stage directors who feel the need to reinterpret a composer’s work in startling and often deliberately provocative ways. One recent staging of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” at the Bayreuth Festival, for example, featured the chorus dressed up as laboratory rats.

But contemporary directors would have to go pretty far to top a ballet staging that took place at the Venice Festival on today’s date in 1961.

In this case, music by the Italian Baroque composer Alessandro Scarlatti was specially arranged into a short ballet score for which sets, story, and choreography were provided by two leading avant-garde artists of the day: the surrealist Spanish painter Salvador Dali and the Belgian choreography Maurice Bejart, with an important contribution by La Maison Guerlain, a pricey French perfume manufacturer.

And when we said French perfume played an important role in the staging, we meant it—since big barrels of the stuff were placed on stage to mask the odor of a rotting cattle carcass that was a feature of Bejart’s scenario.

To paraphrase the late Walter Cronkite, “And that’s the way it was—and smelled—August 22, 1961.”

At the BBC Proms on today’s date in 2004 Proms a new piece by the British composer Judith Bingham was premiered by the BBC Chorus.

Entitled “The Secret Garden,” it was inspired by several events: a conversation about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, a BBC TV series entitled “The Private World of Plants,” some rather racy descriptions of the sex life of plants by the 18th century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, and a disturbing news story about the bombing of the so-called “Adam Tree” in Iraq at a site that locals believe was where the Garden of Eden once stood. Bingham wrote her own text, which includes many Latin names of plants, which led to “The Secret Garden’s” subtitle: “Botanical Fantasy.”

“This is meant to be a magical piece,” says Bingham. “It has a Christian framework with opening and closing quotations from Genesis and Matthew … but the piece also seems to wonder whether the world is better off without humans, and that, should humans cease to exist, Paradise would very soon re-establish itself …”

If pressed to name a famous 20th century Danish composer, most concert-goers would say, “Carl Nielsen”–after all, he wrote six symphonies that get performed every now and then. But if pressed to name a 20th century Danish composer who wrote thirteen symphonies, fewer would be able to say, “Vagn Holmboe, of course–and he also wrote 20 string quartets!”

To be fair, the works of Vagn Holmboe, a Dane who lived from 1909 to 1996, don’t show up on the programs of American orchestras or string quartets very often these days, which is a shame, since his music is quite intriguing.

The prolific Mr. Holmboe wrote as many string quartets as Bartok and Shostakovich’s combined, and both those composers influenced his style. Holmboe’s String Quartet No. 13, for examples, is in 5 movements, like some of Bartok’s, and premiered in Copenhagen on today’s date in 1976.

In addition to being a prolific composer and respected composition teacher, Holmboe was a nature lover: in 1939 he settled in the idyllic Danish countryside of Zealand, where he personally planted 3000 trees on his land by Lake Arreso.