Composers Datebook

In 1971, American film composer Bernard Herrmann confessed, "the only thing I ever did that was foolhardy was to write an opera." The opera was based on the 19th century novel "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte. Herrmann began work on it in April of 1943, and didn't finish until today's date in 1951—at 3:45 p.m., as he noted in its score.

In those years, Herrmann was juggling three careers. He was conducting the CBS Orchestra, producing music for New York radio plays and occasional Hollywood films, and trying to write "serious" concert hall works. It's no wonder it took him eight years to finish a big opera score that clocked in at over three hours in length.

Now, writing an opera is hard enough, but getting it staged is even harder. Herrmann liked to quote Franz Liszt, that "to write an opera you have to have the soul of a hero—and the mentality of a lackey—to have it produced." Even if an opera company expressed interest, Herrmann refused to cut or alter his score. He felt "Wuthering Heights" was his masterpiece, and refused to compromise.

The opera was never staged during his lifetime, so Herrmann had to content himself with making his own studio recording of "Wuthering Heights" at his own expense. After Herrmann's death in 1975, the Portland Opera staged an edited-down version, and more recently, in 2011, the Minnesota Opera staged and filmed a critically acclaimed revival.

Today's date marks anniversary of the birth of the famous Czech conductor Rafael Kubelík. He was born on June 29, 1914, in the Bohemian village of Býchory, as the son of a very musical father, namely the violin virtuoso Jan Kubelík, known as the "Czech Paganini."

Rafael Kubelík studied violin, composition, and conducting at the Prague Conservatory, and was an excellent pianist to boot—good enough to accompany his father on several concert tours. At the age of 19, Kubelík made his conducting debut with the Czech Philharmonic, and later became that orchestra's artistic director.

In 1950, Kubelík became director of the Chicago Symphony, in 1955, the director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and in 1961, conductor of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra. It was with the Bavarian orchestra that Kubelík made the bulk of his recordings, including a critically-acclaimed set of the Mahler symphonies. Like Mahler, Kubelík was both a conductor and a composer.

"In public, I am practicing more as a conductor," said Kubelík, "but I could not live without composing, just as I would not be able to conduct without composing." Kubelík wrote five operas, three symphonies, chamber music, choral works, and songs.

It was on today's date in 1745 that a 73-year-old French Baroque composer named Antoine Forqueray died in Mantes-la-Jolie outside Paris, where he had lived after his retirement as a court musician to King Louis XIV of France.

Forqueray was a virtuoso on the viola da gamba, a bowed string instrument popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, but which is nowadays played mainly by specialists in old music. At the tender age of 10, Forqueray played before Louis XIV. Seven years later he landed a job at the Court of Versailles.

In Forqueray's day the other great French gamba virtuoso and composer was Marin Marais, noted for his introspective, sweet, and gentle style of playing. Forqueray's style was the polar opposite: extroverted and bold, even brash. People said Marais played like an angel, and Forqueray like the devil.

Forqueray's style was so distinctive that three other French composers of the day, Jean-Philippe Rameau, François Couperin, and Jacques Duphly, each composed a piece named "La Forqueray" in tribute to him.

An obituary notice suggested that by the time of Forqueray's death he had composed some three hundred works, but a selection of thirty-two pieces published by Forqueray's son two years after his father's death are the only music by Antoine Forqueray that survives.

The name "George Templeton Strong" crops up frequently in both the Ken Burns PBS documentary on the Civil War and Ric Burn's history of New York. THAT George Templeton Strong was a lawyer and music lover who lived in New York City from 1820-1875, who documented in some four millions words of diary entries a detailed picture of daily life in that city.

But there's another member of the family we'd like to tell you about—the son of the famous diarist, George Templeton Strong, Junior, who was born in New York in 1856, and died in Geneva, Switzerland on today's date in 1948.

The younger Strong became a fine oboist who played off and on in various New York orchestras of his day. His father was not very happy with that: he wanted his son to study law. Moreover, Junior rebelled against his father's ultra-conservative tastes in music. Strong Senior detested the music of Liszt and Wagner, whereas Strong Jr., who eventually became a composer, modeled his works on those very composers.

It's perhaps an all-too familiar story of youthful rebellion, and it's documented painfully in the final entries of the elder Strong's diaries. Shortly before his father's death, the son had left home after a bitter argument, and in 1879, he moved to Europe, eventually settling in Switzerland, where he pursued a dual artistic career as composer and watercolorist.

It was Mozart who wrote the first great piano concertos, with Beethoven, Brahms and others following suit in the 19th century. Closer to our own time, the tradition continues, with new contributions appearing each year.

On today's date in 1986, it was the turn of American composer, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, when her new piano concerto received its premiere by the Detroit Symphony under Guenter Herbig, with Marc-Andre Hamelin the soloist.

"My piano concerto does not cast the pianist as the prototypical 19th-century hero battling the orchestral forces and triumphing through overwhelming virtuosity," said Zwilich at the time. "My concerto calls for a blending of forces—a joint exploration of the piano soloist and orchestra. The pianist is even asked to merge with various sections of the rather large orchestra at times."

"To me," continued Zwilich, "a part of the nobility of the piano is that it can change its color, chameleon-like without losing its special identity. Of all the instruments, the piano is perhaps the most able to be whatever it is asked to be… One composer treats the piano as a percussion instrument, another as a singer… Certainly the vast and wonderful piano repertoire explores this remarkable range. And the world of composer-pianists is large enough to embrace Serge Rachmaninoff and Art Tatum."

In the Guiness Book of Music Facts and Feats, the record for "Most Prolific Composer" goes to Georg Philip Telemann, who died on today's date in 1767 at the age of 86. And longevity gave an edge to productivity: Telemann outlived his prolific contemporary, J.S. Bach, by 21 years, and outlived Handel by 12. But even considering the extra years he lived, Telemann's output is staggering. Of Bach's cantatas, some 200 or so survive, but Telemann's number 1400. He also wrote 125 orchestral suites, 125 concertos, 130 trios, 145 pieces for solo keyboard, and about 50 operas. Most composers (if they are lucky), publish one autobiography; Telemann published three, and commented in one of them, "How is it possible for me to remember everything I wrote for violin and winds?" Sometimes, in addition to composing original music, Telemann was also asked to perform it: "A few days before I play a violin concerto," he wrote, "I always locked myself away, fiddle in hand, shirt-sleeves rolled up, with something strong to calm the nerves, and practice." Fortunately, Telemann seemed to find musical inspiration everywhere, including from the pop and folk music of his day. As he put it, "One would scarcely believe what wonderful ideas pipers and fiddlers have when they improvise while dancers pause for breath. An observer could easily gather enough ideas from them in eight days to last a lifetime!"

In wartime London, on today's date in 1943, a Promenade Concert featured the first performance of the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams. The composer himself conducted the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Queen's Hall, the traditional home of the annual summertime Proms concerts, had been destroyed by German bombers two years earlier. The Proms concerts had moved into a new and larger venue, the Royal Albert Hall, where the series continues to this day. For the 1943 season, Proms programs started earlier than usual, so that concert goers could get home before the nightly air raids on the city. To London audiences troubled by war fears and many sleepless nights of German bombing, the serene musical world of the Vaughan Williams Fifth must have seemed a real blessing. It's not a "wartime" symphony in the conventional sense, full of defiance and bluster, but rather an evocation and affirmation of England's musical past, blending hints of 16th century hymn tunes and modal folk melodies into symphonic form. For some time, Vaughan Williams had been at work on an opera based on "The Pilgrim's Progress," a 17th century allegorical tale by the Puritan writer John Bunyan. Some of the tunes and motives from his projected opera ended up in the symphony, along with a sense of faith and optimism in the face of adversity that must have deeply affected the first audience to hear the work.

In 2008, the National Convention of the American Guild of Organists was held in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and for the occasion a "Minnesota Organ Book" was commissioned. The idea was that six Minnesota composers* would each write a short piece for organ plus one solo instrument, and that the pieces would be suitable for use at a Sunday service.

One of the Minnesota composers selected was Carol Barnett, who recalled thinking to herself, "Well, probably everybody else will do something slow and lovely, so I'm going to do something fast, which means a Recessional. The whole idea of a Recessional is, 'We are done. Let's get out of here!' and one assumes that means getting out into a bright and beautiful day…"

Barnett selected a bright, beautiful, but decidedly unusual extra instrument for her piece—namely the steel pan.

The steel pan is a chromatically-pitched concert instrument related to the steel drums heard in the calypso folk music of Trinidad. Its bright, metallic sound blends surprisingly well with the pipe organ, holding its own against the organ's mighty voice. Moreover, its calypso associations evoke a sense of joyful release—perfect for a recessional, in Barnett's opinion.

She titled her piece, "Praise," and it received its premiere performance on today's date in 2008 at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Minneapolis, with organist Jonathan Gregoire and percussionist Jay Johnson.

*For the record, the six composers and pieces included in "The Minnesota Organ Book" are:

• Cary John Franklin: "Morning Light" (for cello and organ)

• Monte Mason: "The Dances of Our Lady" (for soprano saxophone and organ)

• Janika Vandervelde: "Hachazarah: The Arousal of the Return" (for violin and organ)

• Linda Tutas Haugen: "Invocation and Remembrance" (for trumpet and organ)

• Carol Barnett: "Praise" (for steel pan and organ)

• David Evan Thomas: "Psalm and Dance" (for flute and organ)

The sheet music comes with a CD recording of all six pieces and is available from Augsburg Fortress Music (ISBN: 9780800679118)

There is an ancient curse, popularly attributed to the Chinese, "May you live in INTERESTING times!" The French composer Etienne-Nicolas Mehul, who was born on this date in 1763, certainly lived and worked in an "interesting" time, politically and musically speaking.

His creative life spanned both the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Empire, and since Mehul live and worked in Paris, he found himself at the epicenter of some extremely "interesting" events. As one of the leading French composers of his day, he was commissioned to write patriotic works for state occasions, and had friends and supporters in high places, including Napoleon himself.

His operas, both dramatic and comic, were greatly admired by his contemporaries, although sometimes these proved too "politically incorrect" for the Parisian censors.

Beethoven (not always "P-C" himself) was a Mehul fan, and borrowed some striking theatrical effects from one of Mehul's operas to use in his own opera, "Fidelio."

Apparently this admiration—and the borrowing—was reciprocated. The last movement of Mehul's First Symphony (in g minor) shows the impact of Beethoven's dramatic Fifth Symphony (in c minor) of a few years earlier.

Even after Mehul's death in 1817, his works continued to be admired, studied, and imitated by later composers like Weber, Berlioz, and Wagner. These days, sad to say, Mehul's works are only occasionally heard in performance or on recordings.

Today's the birthday of the versatile Argentinean-born American composer, arranger and jazz pianist, Boris Claudio "Lalo" Schifrin, who was born in Buenos Aires on today's date in 1932. From his background, you'd guess Schifrin was destined for a concert career. His father was a violinist in the orchestra of Argentina's premiere opera house, the Teatro Colon. As a boy he studied with Enrique Barenboim, father of pianist/conductor Daniel Barenboim, and in Paris he studied composition with Olivier Messiaen and Charles Koechlin.

But Lalo Schifrin also loved jazz, and after studies by day with Messiaen, his nights were spent performing in Parisian jazz clubs. Eventually Dizzy Gillespie commissioned him to write for his band.

Around the same time, Schrifin began writing film and TV scores. When he started working on the TV series "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," he came into contact with legendary film composer Bernard Herrmann, who became a friend and mentor. Schifrin has written more than 100 scores for film and television, garnering Grammy awards and Oscar nominations along the way. Undoubtedly his most famous composition is this catchy theme of the 1960s TV series, "Mission Impossible"—and still used in the subsequent movie remakes.

For the concert hall, Schifrin has composed concertos and arrangements for cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, and guitarist Angel Romero, and was the arranger of choice for those "Three Tenor" song medleys sung by Pavarotti, Carreras and Domingo.