Composers Datebook

The Boston Symphony premiered a new symphony on today's date in 1984—a commission for its Centenary Celebrations. It was the Symphony No. 1 by the then 45 year-old American composer, John Harbison.

Like many composers who teach, Harbison does most of his composing in the summer months, usually spent on a farm in Token Creek, Wisconsin. The academic year is usually spent in Boston, teaching at MIT. In the case of his first symphony, Harbison worked on the piece both in Wisconsin (where he was also finishing up an Italian language song-cycle), and during a residency year at the American Academy in Rome.

"Just as it felt very right to be working on Italian songs in the Midwest," commented Harbison, "it was natural to work on this American-accented symphony in Italy. I have always found the view from the distance to be clearest."

Harbison's father, a Princeton history professor and amateur composer, also was a big influence on him. The younger Harbison, like his father, has an abiding passion for and fluency in American jazz as well as the modern classical idiom. Harbison dramatically fused both styles in one of his most ambitious ventures to date, the opera, "The Great Gatsby," which premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1999.

In 1838, Robert Schumann visited the grave of Franz Schubert in Vienna and paid a courtesy call on Schubert's brother, Ferdinand, who was still alive. Schumann had heard about Ferdinand's closet full of his brother's manuscripts, and among the dusty music scores that Schumann was shown was one for a big symphony in C Major, unperformed, he was told, because people thought it was too difficult, too bombastic, and far too long.

Looking at the music, Schumann was stunned, and asked if he could arrange to have the symphony played. "Sure," said Ferdinand, and Schumann sent the score off to his friend and fellow composer, Felix Mendelssohn, who was the director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Mendelssohn liked what he saw, and gave the first public performance of Schubert's big symphony on today's date in 1839.

After attending the rehearsal, Schumann wrote to his girlfriend, Clara Wieck, "Today I have been in seventh heaven. If only you had been there! For I cannot describe it to you; all the instruments were like human voices, and immensely full of life and wit… and the length, the divine length, like a four-volume novel… I was utterly happy, with nothing left to wish for except that you were my wife and I could write such symphonies myself!"

Well, sometimes wishes do come true, and good deeds are rewarded. Schumann did marry Clara, did write symphonies of his own, and did help launch Schubert's work on its path towards worldwide recognition as a great symphonic masterpiece.

Not ALL composers were nice people, and even some of the more famous ones turn out to have been rather nasty, greedy, vindictive and altogether unpleasant specimens of humanity, despite the enduring beauty of their music. But we like to showcase the BETTER side of the species. On today's date in 1739, for example, George Frederick Handel premiered this music, his Organ Concerto in A Major, as a special, added attraction at a benefit concert in London. It was organized "for the benefit and increase of a fund established for the support of decay'd musicians and their families." The previous year Handel had been shocked to learn that the widow and children of one of his favorite performers, the oboist John Christian Kitch, were found wandering impoverished on the streets of London. Handel called a meeting of some of his colleagues at the Crown and Anchor Tavern and started a charitable fund, even enlisting the support of rival composers and musicians who heretofore had not been on very good terms with Herr Handel. Within a year, a series of benefit concerts were organized to raise money for a continuing fund to assist musicians fallen on hard times, and even Handel's enemies had to admit the gruff and frequently abrasive German must have had a good heart after all.

It's time once again for our "Composer Quiz": Name a famous American composer who was also a successful businessman. If you answered insurance executive "Charles Ives," Jay will show you what's under the box. But if your answer was "John Alden Carpenter," vice president of George B. Carpenter and Co., supplies and equipment dealer, we'll just pull back the curtain and show you all your prizes!

John Alden Carpenter was born in 1876 near Chicago, and, after studies out East, entered his father's business back home, eventually becoming its Vice President. Fortunately for the budding composer, the firm was largely run by his brothers, and Carpenter had enough free time to devote to his music. On today's date in 1915, the Chicago Symphony premiered Carpenter's first big orchestral work, a suite entitled "Adventures in a Perambulator." (You get extra points if you knew a perambulator is a baby buggy.)

Anyway…

Carpenter's "pram" piece was a big success, and he wrote a string of other popular works, including a ballet based on the "Krazy Kat" comic strip of his day, and one entitled "Skyscrapers," a jazzy and topical tribute to the transformation of urban America in the 1920s.

Unlike the unconventional Charles Ives, who toiled away in obscurity, the more conventional Carpenter was very famous in his day. Ironically, while Ives' fame only increased after his death in 1954, when Carpenter died in 1951, his music rapidly fell from fashion.

The Russian émigré composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff was himself the soloist on today's date in 1927 in the first performance of his Piano Concerto No. 4 with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Leopold Stokowski.

Rachmaninoff had premiered his Third Concerto in New York in 1909, and he'd been thinking about writing another one for over a decade. In the meantime, his life had been disrupted by both the Russian Revolution and the exhausting business of earning a living as a touring virtuoso pianist. In 1926, Rachmaninoff finally felt he could afford to take some time off and put a Fourth Piano Concerto down on paper.

In its original form, it turned out to be a much longer work than even Rachmaninoff thought practical. He joked to a friend that its movements would have to be "performed on successive nights, like Wagner's Ring operas."

Rachmaninoff made a number of cuts before the Philadelphia premiere, but even so, the new work was not well received, and so Rachmaninoff kept cutting. Audiences and critics still remained cool, and Rachmaninoff eventually shelved the work for a time—quite a time. In 1941 he prepared a "final cut" version, which ended up considerably shorter than his other three Piano Concertos, and recorded it with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

On today's date in 1972, a most unusual chamber work by the American composer George Crumb had its premiere at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Ideally, and "impractically" according to Crumb, it SHOULD have been heard, not in a concert hall in March… but in the open air… heard at a distance across a body of water, on a moonlit evening in August.

The work was entitled "Vox Balaenae," which is Latin for "The Voice of the Whale," and it's scored for three masked musicians, performing on electric flute, electric cello, and amplified piano.

Crumb writes, "The work was inspired by the singing of the humpback whale, a tape recording of which I had heard two or three years previously. Each of the three performers is required to wear a black half-mask or visor-mask. The masks, by effacing the sense of human projection, are intended to represent, symbolically, the powerful impersonal forces of nature. I have also suggested that the work be performed under deep-blue stage lighting."

In the opening of his piece, marked "Vocalise... from the beginning of time," Crumb quotes, with tongue firmly planted in masked cheek, the famous sunrise theme from Richard Strauss' "Also sprach Zarathustra," used to great effect in the opening of the Kubrick film "2001."

A new opera by Jules Massenet had its premiere at the Paris Opera on today's date in 1894. It was titled "Thais" and was based on a rather spicy novel of the same name by the popular French author of the day, Anatole France.

The novel and the opera are based on an old seventh-century manuscript, which mentions a fabulously beautiful Egyptian courtesan named Thais who converted to Christianity and spent the rest of her life meditating in seclusion on matters spiritual. In Massenet's opera, the conversion from strip-tease artiste to nun is depicted by an instrumental interlude, the famous "Meditation" from "Thais," which has become a favorite showpiece for solo violinists.

To add a dash of the piquant to the tale, in both the novel by Anatole France and in the opera by Massenet, the young monk who diligently convinces Thais to change her wicked ways suddenly falls madly in love with her himself, and just as diligently tries to persuade her to add just one more name—his—to her list of satisfied customers.

As they used to say in ancient Egypt: "Ooh-la-la!"

The thick historical novels of the 19th century French writer Alexandre Dumas, Sr. are packed with some fact and a lot of fiction. Chapter 22 of "The Three Musketeers," for example, set during the 17th century reign of King Louis XIII, begins as follows:

"Nothing was talked of in Paris but the ball which the aldermen were to give to the king and queen in which their Majesties were to dance the famous 'La Merlaison' — the favorite ballet of the king. Eight days had been spent preparing for the important evening. The city carpenters erected risers for the guests; the hall would be lit by two hundred huge candles of white wax, a luxury unheard of; and twenty violins were ordered, the price for them double the usual rate, since they would be playing all night."

In this case, Dumas was referencing a real event.

On today's date in 1635, at Chantilly castle, a gala ballet premiered. It depicted in stylized dance the Louis's favorite activity: hunting the blackbird ("la merlaison" in French). The choreography, the costumes, and music were all created by the King himself—who also danced several of the lead roles.

It got a rave review in the press of the day. If there were any critics, we suspect Cardinal Richelieu, the dreaded power behind the throne in Dumas's novel—and in real life—had them hauled off and "dealt with."

Ah yes, it's good to be King.

On today's date in 1996 at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, pianist Marvin Tartak gave the first performance of a new piano sonata, the sixth, of the American composer, Leo Ornstein.

That in itself might not seem so remarkable—unless you consider that the Sonata was written when the composer was about 90. In fact, very little about the life and music of Leo Ornstein was "unremarkable."

Ornstein was born in the 19th century and lived into the 21st. He was born in the Ukraine around 1893 (the exact date has never been determined), and, after the failed Russian revolution of 1905, came with his family to New York's Lower East Side. He made his New York debut as a pianist in 1911, and rapidly established himself as a composer as well, performing daring and dissonant avant-garde piano works with titles like "Wild Men's Dance" and "Suicide in an Airplane." He also composed more lyrical, atmospheric pieces and at least 8 piano sonatas, the last written as he neared 100 years of age.

This music is from a Naxos CD of Ornstein's Sonata No. 7, written in 1988, when the composer was in his spry mid-90s.

After a decade of world tours as a fiery piano virtuoso and four decades of dedicated teaching, Ornstein retired to Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he continued to compose and where he died on February 24, 2002.

It might seem farfetched that Katherine Hepburn, Winona Ryder and Charles Ives might have anything in common, but there IS a connection of sorts: Hepburn appeared in a 1933 film based on Louisa May Alcott's classic 19th century novel, "Little Women," Wynona Ryder starred in a 1994 Hollywood remake, and, in 1913, American composer Charles Ives composed the music we're hearing now—the second movement of his "Concord" sonata for piano, a movement titled "The Alcotts," which evokes Louisa May, her novel and her real-life family and friends, who included the New England "Transcendentalists," Emerson and Thoreau.

Set during the American Civil War, Alcott's "Little Women" chronicles the coming of age of four young women in Concord, Massachusetts. The story of Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy has charmed readers and film-goers around the world. Ives's music, like Alcott's novel, is nostalgic, affectionate, and quietly powerful.

A young contemporary American composer, Mark Adamo, has written an opera based on Alcott's "Little Women", which premiered on today's date in 1998 at the Opera Studio of Houston Grand Opera. After its premiere, that company's general director, David Gockley, pronounced Adamo's opera "destined to become an American classic," and rescheduled "Little Women" for mainstage performances at Houston Grand Opera in March of 2000.

And Mr. Gockley's predication seems to have been accurate. Since the successful Houston Opera revival in 2000, Mark Adamo's version of "Little Women" has been staged again and again, to equal acclaim from audiences and critics.