Composers Datebook

Today a tip of the hat to a much-beleaguered and frequently unacknowledged species: the piano teacher. All the great pianists had one—as did the not so great... Do you, for example, remember the name of YOUR first piano teacher?

In the case of Duke Ellington, it was not a name one could easily forget. She was a certain Mrs. Clinkscales, and Ellington always gave her credit for her persistence.

"Because of my enthusiasm for playing ball and running and racing through the street, I missed more lessons than I took," wrote Ellington. "When she had her piano recital with all her pupils, I was the only one who could not play his part. So Mrs. Clinkscales had to play the treble, and I just played the umpy-dump bottom! The umpy-dump bottom, was, of course, the foundation and understanding of that part of piano-playing I later learned to like."

The avant-garde American composer Morton Feldman immortalized the name of HIS piano teacher in an elegiac chamber piece titled "Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety."

This music was premiered in France on today's date in 1970. Steeped in the great Russian tradition, Madame Maurina Press said she had taught the children of the Czar and knew the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin. She started teaching Morton Feldman when he was twelve, and his tribute to her is scored for 12 instruments—with the piano conspicuous by its absence!

During WWII, Germans encircled the city of Leningrad, creating a siege that would last 900 days and cause immense suffering for that city's residents. One resident, composer Dimtri Shostakovich, appeared on the cover of a July 1942 issue of TIME magazine, grim-faced and wearing the helmet of a Leningrad fireman.

The publicity was related to the American premiere of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7, subtitled "Leningrad," as a live NBC Symphony radio broadcast on today's date in 1942. The performance was dedicated to the Russian War Relief, and the NBC announcer explained how 3000 pages of the score and parts for the recently-completed symphony had been microfilmed and flown from the Soviet Union to the West via Teheran.

What the NBC announcer didn't say was that two famous conductors, Leopold Stokowski and Arturo Toscanini, had been hotly contesting who would conduct the American premiere. Toscanini had resigned from the NBC Symphony for the 1941/42 season, and Stokowski was his replacement. It was Stokowski who had lobbied for the "Leningrad" Symphony premiere, but the older conductor pulled rank, and returned to conduct the broadcast. "Don't you think, my dear Stokowski," wrote Toscanini, "it would be interesting for everybody, and yourself, too, to hear the old Italian conductor—one of the first artists who strenuously fought against Fascism—to play this work of a young Russian anti-Nazi composer?"

Friends of the composer suggest Shostakovich had more than just the Nazis on his mind, and quote him as saying: "Fascism is not simply National Socialism, and this is music about terror, slavery, and oppression of the spirit."

In Leipzig on today’s date in 1723 the funeral of Johanna Maria Kees, the wife of that city’s postmaster, took place at the St. Nicolas Church, where Johann Sebastian Bach served as music director.

For many years, some musicologists have speculated that for this occasion Bach composed a motet for solo voices entitled “Jesu, Meine Freude,” or “Jesus, My Joy” in English. Other musicologists have pointed out that there is no reference to this work in the surviving order of service for that funeral, so if the motet were performed, it might have been by a small group of singers at the gravesite for the consolation of the deceased’s family.

Bach’s music is both intricately constructed and heartfelt, which leads us to speculate Bach may have been thinking of another funeral that took place three years earlier, namely that of his own wife, Maria Barbara, who died at age 35, when he was away from home, and was buried on July 7, 1720.

In an age long before cell phones and text messaging, Bach’s son Carl Philip Emmanuel reported that his father was at Carlsbad when Maria Barbara died, writing, “The news that she had been ill and died reached him only when he entered his own house.”

On today's date in 1877, the Vienna Philharmonic performed for the first time in Salzburg, the birthplace of Mozart, during a three-day music festival that included works by Mozart and others, including two living composers of that day, a 44-year old fellow named Brahms and a 64-year old named Wagner. The Philharmonic would return to Salzburg six more times for mini-festivals through 1910, some led by composer-conductors like Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler. A summertime visit was scheduled in 1914, too, but the outbreak of World War I cancelled that. In 1925, an annual "Salzburg Festival" was established, with the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna State Opera as the main musical participants. The Second World War disrupted the Festival in the 1940s, but soon after it reestablished itself among the most prestigious of international musical happenings. The biggest names all performed at the Salzburg Festival: Herbert von Karajan, Luciano Pavarotti, and James Levine, to cite just a few. Traditionally, a familiar brass fanfare opens each Festival broadcast, but probably few music lovers know the name of its composer. It was written by Joseph Messner, who wrote over 700 works in nearly all genres. He was born in 1893 in the Austrian Tyrol and died in 1969 in a village near Salzburg, where he had served as church organist, conductor and composer for decades, leading many Festival concerts featuring sacred music by Mozart and others.

Today we note the birthday of a remarkable composer, conductor and virtuoso violinist: Eugéne Ysaÿe, who was born in Liége, Belgium, on today's date in 1858. After studies with two of the most famous violin composers of his day, Henyrk Wieniawski of Poland and his Belgian compatriot, Henri Vieuxtemps, Ysaÿe soon was touring Europe and Russia as a star performer himself.

In 1886, when the 28-year old Ysaÿe married, the great Belgian composer Cesar Franck presented the young couple with his Violin Sonata in A Major as a wedding present. That same year, Ysaÿe founded a famous string quartet, and in 1893 it was the Ysaÿe Quartet that gave the premiere performance of Claude Debussy's String Quartet, a work its composer dedicated to the ensemble in admiration.

In 1918, Ysaye made his American debut as a conductor with the Cincinnati Symphony, and made such a great impression there that he remained as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony from 1918 to 1922.

As a composer, Ysaye wrote eight concertos and a set of six solo sonatas for the violin. In 1928, at the age of 70, the patriotic Belgian began work on an opera titled "Peter the Miner" to a libretto in his native Walloon language, and was at work on a second opera when he died at the age of 72, in 1931. In 1937, Queen Elizabeth of Belgium inaugurated the annual Eugene Ysaÿe International Prize for promising young violinists.

For over five decades, Nicolas Slonimsky, the Russian-born American composer, conductor, and witty musical lexicographer, compiled a thick reference work titled "Music Since 1900." It's a year-by-year, month-by-month, day-by-day chronicle of musical events that Slonimsky deemed significant, interesting, or simply amusing. Here, for example, is Slonimsky's entry for July 15, 1942: "Heitor Villa-Lobos conducts in Rio de Janeiro the first performances of three of his orchestral Choros: No. 6, No. 9 and No. 11, exhaling the rhythms, the perfumes and the colors of the Brazilian scene, with tropical birds exotically chanting in the woodwinds against the measured beats of jungle drums." Slonimsky did have a way with words, and certainly had fun compiling his mammoth (and highly readable) reference work. For his part, the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos was equally diligent, so much so that he himself admitted he couldn't always remember everything that he had written or when he wrote it. His Choros No. 11 for piano and orchestra, however, was one work he must have remembered: it's one of his most ambitious compositions and lasts some 65 minutes. Originally the word "choro" meant improvised music by Brazilian street musicians, but Villa-Lobos always used the word in its plural form, and used it to describe a flexible form for over a dozen of his instrumental works. Villa-Lobos also wrote a unique series of works he dubbed 'Bachianas Brasileiras", which might be translated as "Tributes to Bach in the Style of Brazil."

A famous commercial for magnetic recording tape once asked the question: "Is it live—or Memorex"—suggesting it was impossible to tell the difference. These days, at concerts of some contemporary composers' works, the correct answer would be "It's live AND Memorex"—as there is a growing body of works that involve BOTH live performers and prerecorded tape.

A 1995 work by the American composer Ingram Marshall, titled 'Dark Waters,' was written for an English horn soloist accompanied by a prerecorded tape of fragments from old 78-rpm recordings of Jean Sibelius' chilly tone-poem "The Swan of Tuonela."

Both the live English horn part and the prerecorded tape are digitally processed and mixed at each live performance. "Those who know the Sibelius will recognize familiar strains," says Marshall. "Of course the live and taped materials are highly processed, so eventually the listener forgets about the original materials and sinks into the re-created music itself."

On today's date in 1998, Ingram Marshall and Libby Van Cleve, the English horn player for whom "Dark Waters" was written, recorded the work at St. Casimir's Church in New Haven, Connecticut.

"You can actually hear the sound of that church in the recording," recalls Van Cleve. "We finished at about 3 AM, and it was stiflingly hot—How ironic that Ingram's music—and Sibelius'—is always associated with cold climates!"

On today's date in 1829, the German composer Felix Mendelssohn was in London, participating in a gala concert to raise funds for the victims of a flood in Silesia. "Everyone who has attracted the slightest attention during the season will take part," wrote Mendelssohn. "Many offers of good performers have had to be declined, as the concert, even so, will last till the next day!"

Mendelssohn performed his Double Concerto in E Major for two pianos and orchestra, joined at the second piano by his friend and fellow-composer Ignaz Moscheles. While rehearsing for the concert, Mendessohn and Moscheles jointly prepared a special cadenza, and jokingly bet each other how long the audience would applaud it—Mendessohn predicting 10 minutes, and Mosceheles, more modestly, suggesting 5.

In the Baroque age, Double Concertos were very popular, but by Mendelssohn's day they had become less common. In our time, Concertos for Two Pianos are even rarer. One of the most successful American Double Concertos was written between 1952 and 1953 by the American composer Quincy Porter. Also known as the "Concerto Concertante," this music was commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra, and premiered by piano soloists Dorothea Adkins and Ann Monks. It proved to be one of the most popular of Porter's works, and even won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1954.

On today’s date in 1992, a new violin concerto by the American composer Christopher Rouse had its premiere performance in Colorado with the Aspen Music Festival Orchestra led by Leonard Slatkin and violin soloist Cho-Liang Lin, to whom the new work was dedicated.

A sense of past masters of the Violin Concerto was never far from Rouse’s mind when writing this work, as he explained in his own program notes:

“I have long been drawn to the two-movement concerto form as exemplified by Bartok's Violin Concerto, and I resolved to structure my own concerto [similarly] ... The opening movement is an elegiac barcarolle ... The second movement, a toccata, follows without pause and requires enormous virtuosity of the soloist.

“The language of the concerto is, of course, more dissonant than that found in nineteenth century counterparts ... I ... find this to be one of my more ‘objective’ compositions, lacking as it does any stated or unstated program, though I hope that ... will not lead the listener to conclude that my aim was an inexpressive one.”

These days, when "Modern Music" is on the program, a sizeable chunk of the concert hall audience might start nervously looking for the nearest exit—but that wasn't always the case.

On today's date in 1882, a 21-year old American composer and pianist named Edward MacDowell took the stage in Zurich, Switzerland, to perform his "Modern Suite" for piano at the 19th annual conference of the General Society of German Musicians, a showcase for new music whose programs were arranged by none other than Franz Liszt.

Liszt had met MacDowell earlier that year, and when MacDowell sent him the music for his "Modern Suite" for solo piano, Liszt asked the young composer to play it himself at the Society's conference in Zurich.

Now, in an era when piano virtuosos like Liszt always played from memory, MacDowell premiered his "Modern Suite" with his own manuscript score propped up in front of him at the piano. This struck contemporaries as rather odd, but MacDowell's explanation was (quote): "I had never realized that my compositions could be worth actual study or memorizing!"

The success of his First "Modern Suite" lead to the creation of a Second, and both were published a year later by the Leipzig firm of Breitkopf and Hærtel. These two suites were the first works of MacDowell to appear in print, and launched his career as one of the major American composers of the late 19th century.