Composers Datebook

On today's date in 1998, in Purchase, New York, the Westchester Philharmonic gave the premiere performance of a new flute concerto by a 41-year old composer named Melinda Wagner. The soloist was Paul Lustig Dunkel, who had asked Wagner to write the concerto.

Wagner's concerto won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1999—a gratifying mark of recognition for Wagner, who claims she had developed 20 years of calluses from all the rejections and minor defeats that are the common experience of most young composers in America. Along with the bumps and scrapes, Wagner also had picked up a number of other honors along the way, including awards, grants, and fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, Meet the Composer and ASCAP, to name just a few.

Wagner says her flute concerto took as its models the sound worlds of two famous 20th century compositions she admired: Bela Bartok's "Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celeste," and Leonard Bernstein's "Serenade, after Plato's Symposium." "Composition," says Wagner, "is like writing a kind of love letter to performers. They will be interpreting something that is incredibly personal, so it feels like a love affair. As for the audience, to try to try to second-guess them to figure out what they're going to like, and write that, would be an insult to them. I just hope they can plug into the communication that's happening between the performers and me."

On today's date in 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach began his formal duties as the new Cantor of the St. Thomas School in Leipzig, a city that would remain his home for the next 27 years.

A newspaper item datelined "Leipzig" had appeared the previous day, noting: "This past Saturday at noon, four wagons loaded with household goods arrived here from Cöthen; they belonged to the former Princely Cappelmeister Johann Sebastian Bach, now called to Leipzig as Cantor. He himself arrived with his family on two carriages at 2 o'clock and moved into the newly renovated apartment in the St. Thomas School."

Bach was not the first choice for the appointment, and it's clear from the proceedings of the Leipzig Town Council that they were more concerned with Bach as a teacher rather than Bach as a composer. Providing quality music for services at St. Thomas Church might have been foremost in Bach's mind, but the council seemed to think that was definitely not as important as teaching Latin to the young students of the St. Thomas School.

One council member, a certain Dr. Steger, after reluctantly voting for Bach, even wanted it on record that in his opinion, (quote) "Bach should make compositions that were NOT theatrical." It's not on record what poor Dr. Steger thought of Bach's intensely dramatic "St. Matthew Passion," or the hundreds of brilliant crafted cantatas that Bach would provide, week in and week out, for the next 20 years.

Today's date marks the anniversary of one of the most famous—and notorious—premieres in the history of classical music, that of Stravinsky's "Le sacre du printemps" (The Rite of Spring), in Paris on May 29, 1913.

From its first note—sounded by the bassoon at the extreme end of its highest register—Stravinsky's score signaled the start of something radically different. It's also remembered as the occasion of one of the most emotional reactions by any audience: As the music got under way, catcalls and insults were hurled between the composer's supporters and detractors, fistfights broke out, and finally the police were called.

There were those, including Pierre Monteux, the conductor of the premiere, who felt the reactions were occasioned more by the dancing and the stage picture than by the music itself, and indeed "The Rite of Spring" has since fared far better in the concert hall than as a ballet.

Years later, when Monteux was asked what he thought of the original production, he confessed to everyone's amusement that he actually never saw it, because his eyes were glued to the score. "On hearing this near riot behind me," he wrote, "I decided to keep the orchestra together at any cost, in case of a lull in the hubbub. I did, and we played it to the end absolutely as we had rehearsed it in the peace of an empty theatre."

On today's date in 1938, "Mathis the Painter," an opera by the German composer Paul Hindemith, had its premiere performance in Zurich, Switzerland. This work had been scheduled to be premiered in Berlin four years earlier.

In 1934, the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler had scheduled it at the Berlin Opera, but the newly-installed Nazi regime canceled the premiere. In protest, Furtwangler then performed a concert suite from Hindemith's opera at a Berlin Philharmonic concert, which resulted in a wild pro-Hindemith demonstration on the part of the audience. The Nazi press responded with attacks on both Hindemith and Furtwangler. In reply, Furtwangler published a long article, titled "The Hindemith Case," which unleashed only more repercussions from none other than Hitler's propaganda minister, Joseph Goebels. By the end of 1934 it was clear to all in Germany that the Nazis would brook no opposition when it came to cultural matters.

So how had the quintessentially German Hindemith offended the new regime? In 1929 Hitler had attended the premiere of another Hindemith opera, titled "News of the Day," and hated it—labeling it "degenerate." Furthermore, Hindemith's wife and many of his closest musician friends were Jewish. By the end of the 1930s, Hindemith became persona non grata in Nazi Germany, and, shortly after the Zurich premiere of his new opera, he and his wife emigrated to the U.S., where he taught at Tangelwood and Yale, becoming an American citizen in 1946.

On today's date in 1992, during the bloody civil wars that shattered the former Yugoslavia, a hand grenade was thrown into the midst of a bread line in Sarajevo. Twenty-two people died. To most around the world it appeared to be just one more cruel and senseless act of violence amidst the thousands of such acts that had and would take place in that unhappy part of the world.

One Sarajevo resident thought otherwise. At four o'clock every day after the incident, Vedran Smailovic, a cellist with the orchestra of the Sarajevo Opera, went to the spot of the bombing in full evening dress and played his cello in memory of the dead, risking his own life amidst the continuing machine gun and mortar fire that surrounded him. A New York Times reporter wrote of the cellist's moving act of courage and faith in art and humanity—and the world took notice.

The English-born composer David Wilde read about the cellist while riding a train in Germany, where he lived and worked. "As I sat in the train, deeply moved," Wilde later recalled, "I listened; and somewhere deep within me a cello began to play a circular melody like a lament without end." That theme developed into a piece titled "The Cellist of Sarajevo," dedicated to Vedran Smailovic, and which cellist Yo-Yo Ma was soon performing around the world.

For many years now MidAmerica Productions has been organizing concerts in New York City and enlisting choral ensembles from the U.S. and abroad to come to the "big apple" to perform at prestigious Manhattan venues.

On today's date in 1990, choirs from Arkansas, Connecticut, Minnesota, and Texas* were on stage at Carnegie Hall for the world premiere of John Rutter's "Magnificat," specially commissioned by MidAmerica, and with the British composer himself on hand to conduct.

"The chorus numbered over 200 voices," Rutter recalled, "every one of them happy and excited at the prospect of joining forces in the magnificent setting of Carnegie Hall… [so] I wanted to write something joyous because that would reflect the mood of the performers…"

"The 'Magnifcat'" continues Rutter, "is known as the Canticle of the Blessed Virgin, and it is mainly in the sunny southern countries—Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico—that Mary is most celebrated and enjoyed. This led me to conceive the music as a bright, Latin-flavored fiesta. On feast days of the Virgin Mary in Latin countries, the population sings, dances, dresses in its most colorful clothes, processes in the open air, and celebrates. I wrote my setting in that spirit."

Despite composing and conducting religious music, Rutter confessed during a 2003 interview on "60 Minutes" that he was not a particularly religious man himself—just a composer deeply moved and inspired by the spirituality of sacred verses and prayers.

*These were the Southern Arkansas University Heritage Singers, the Branford High School Concert Choir from Connecticut, the Moorhead High School A Cappella Choir from Minnesota, and the Sanctuary Choir of the First United Methodist Church of Houston, Texas.

This lush, late-Romantic score, composed in 1904, had to wait until 1962 for its premiere performance, when, on today's date that year, the Philadelphia Orchestra led by Eugene Ormandy performed it in Seattle during an international festival devoted to its composer, Anton Webern. For most music lovers, the Austrian composer Anton Webern is a shadowy, vaguely mysterious figure. If they know anything at all about him, it is that he was a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, that he wrote a small body of very short and very condensed atonal scores, and that in 1945 he was shot by accident by an American soldier in the tense days following the end of World War II. The early orchestral score that received its belated premiere on today's date in 1962 was titled "In the Summer Wind," completed when Webern was just 19 years old. It's very much in the style of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and even Arnold Schoenberg in the early years of the 20th century. To earn a living, Webern worked as a conductor of everything from Viennese operettas to worker's choral unions. He was one of the earliest European conductors to present music by the American composer Charles Ives, and even appeared as a guest conductor in London with the BBC Symphony. His conducting career came to a halt when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, and until his untimely death in 1945, Webern lived by doing routine work for a Viennese music publisher.

On today's date in 1803, violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower, age 33, and pianist and composer Ludwig van Beethoven, age 32, gave the first performance in Vienna of a new Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano, a chamber work now regarded as one of Beethoven's greatest.

The performance was to have taken place two days earlier, but Beethoven wasn't finished with the music. At the first rehearsal, Bridgetower had to read from Beethoven's manuscript score—no easy task considering Beethoven's poor penmanship—and at one point felt compelled to improvise a passage, which so enchanted Beethoven that he added Bridgetower's improvisation to his score. In fact, the two young men became fast friends, and were inseparable for a time.

Bridgetower was an English violin virtuoso born in Poland of a European mother and an African father. He ended up in England, and joined the famous Salomon orchestra which premiered many of Haydn's "London" Symphonies. They caught the eye and ear of the Prince of Wales, who became his patron and sponsored a European tour which brought him to Vienna. His Viennese friendship with Beethoven came to a sudden end, Bridgetower later claimed, when the two men became interested in the same young lady.

And so, even though it should be known as the "Bridgetower Sonata," when this music was published as Beethoven's Op. 47, Beethoven dedicated the music to another contemporary virtuoso, a French violinist named Kreutzer, who apparently never performed it.

Some famous composers were notorious perfectionists—and then there was Johannes Brahms, the Perfectionist of Perfectionists. He spent 14 years tinkering with the score of his First Symphony, remember.

Brahms once claimed he had written and discarded twenty string quartets before publishing his first two in the year 1873. To say Brahms was his own severest critic would be putting it mildly, but there was one other person whose opinion Brahms valued above all others, and that was Clara Schumann, one of the finest pianists of her day, the widow of his mentor Robert Schumann, and a fine composer in her own right.

So it comes as no surprise that the Third String Quartet of Brahms, the Quartet in B-flat Major, published as his Opus 67, was first performed as a kind of "test run" at the Berlin home of Clara Schumann on today's date in the year 1876. The performers were the famous Joachim Quartet, led by violinist Joseph Joachim, a long-time friend of Brahms.

Apparently Clara and Joseph liked the new quartet, but Brahms arranged for one more trial run the following month, and probably tinkered with the score right up to its first public performance by the Joachim Quartet in Berlin on October 30, 1876.

Brahms had composed his Third Quartet the previous summer, while on vacation, and unlike his preceding two string quartets, both austere and introspective works, this one was light-hearted and cheerful—"a useless trifle," as Brahms himself put it, adding it was just his way to (quote) "avoid facing the serious countenance of a symphony."

The German composer Richard Strauss wrote his first song at age 6, and his last at age 84, a year before his death in 1949. Four of his last songs were for soprano and orchestra, settings of one poem by the Romantic poet Josef von Eichendorff, and three by the modern poet and novelist Hermann Hesse. These “Four Last Songs,” as they came to be known, were premiered in London, at the Royal Albert Hall, on today’s date in 1950.

Strauss had written to the great Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad, suggesting "I would like to make it possible that [the songs] should be at your disposal for a world premiere … with a first-class conductor and orchestra.” Flagstad did sing the premiere performances, with the first-rate Philharmonia Orchestra of London conducted by the legendary German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler.

In addition to those famous performers, credit for the realization of Strauss’s request is also due to an unlikely and exotic patron of the arts, namely the Maharaja of Mysore, Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar Bahudar, who put up a cash guarantee for the Strauss premiere. And since he could not be present himself, the Maharaja asked that the premiere be recorded and the discs shipped to him in Mysore.

The Maharaja had wanted to be concert pianist, but the deaths of both his father and his uncle forced him to succeed to the throne in 1940 at the age of 21. Mysore was one of the most prosperous states of India, and, in addition to underwriting the premiere of Strauss’s “Four Last Songs”, the young Maharaja championed the music of the Russian composer Nikolas Medtner, and, in 1945, the creation of the Philharmonia Orchestra of London as a recording ensemble for the enterprising EMI producer Walter Legge.

In addition to Western classical music, the Maharaja was passionate about the court music of his native land, and, under the pen name of Shri Vidya, himself composed almost 100 works in the South Indian tradition.