Composers Datebook

The stage directions read: "The garden of the Grimaldi Palace outside Genoa. On the left side, the palace, directly in front, the sea. Dawn is breaking." The evocative music is by the Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi, the prelude to his opera "Simon Boccanegra," which premiered on today's date in 1857 in Venice. Despite its shimmering prelude, Verdi's new opera was not well received. The critics felt it was one of those works which "does not make its effect immediately... It is written with the utmost exquisite craftsmanship but needs to be studied in all its details." Verdi, a practical man of the theater, knew what that sort of review really meant. He wrote: "I thought I'd done something passable, but it seems I was mistaken. The score is not possible as it stands. It is too sad, too depressing. I shall need to redo it to give it more contrast and variety, more life." The revised version of "Simon Boccanegra" premiered 24 years later, in 1881, with additions and alterations to the story by Arrigo Boito, the brilliant librettist for Verdi's final operas, "Otello" and "Falstaff." Despite the revisions, "Boccanegra" remained one of the least popular of Verdi's works for many decades. In the 1930s, it was revised successfully at the Metropolitan Opera in New York with an all-star cast, and since then, audiences have had more opportunities to "study" Verdi's score sufficiently to appreciate its "exquisite craftsmanship, contrast, variety, and life."

Today's date marks the birth anniversaries of two major 20th century American composers: Carl Ruggles was born in East Marion, Massachusetts on today's date in 1876, and Henry Cowell, in Menlo Park, California in 1897. Ruggles was a tough old bird, who wrote a small handful of tough, uncompromising musical works. He was the conductor of a symphony orchestra in Winona, Minnesota from 1908-1912, a teacher at the University of Miami from 1937-1943, and a talented painter to boot. His first music to be performed in public was entitled "A Voice Crying in the Wilderness," an apt description of Ruggles himself, a crusty loner who once claimed the only man he ever met who could out-swear him was his friend and colleague Charles Ives. He eventually retired to an old schoolhouse in Arlington, Vermont. Ruggles's striking orchestral works, with titles like "Sun-Treader" and "Men and Mountains", are occasionally revived, but he remains just a name for most 21st century concert-goers. Henry Cowell was a much more genial, out-going sort: a composer, performer and teacher who wrote a great deal of music, ranging from the dissonant and experimental to the beguilingly lyrical. Cowell was an early apostle of what we now call "world music," and in 1956 undertook a world tour, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and the US State Department, which included lengthy stays in Iran, India and Japan, and resulted in Cowell writing a number of musical works incorporating ideas and musical instruments from those countries.

On today's date in 1915, the Moscow Synodal Choir gave the premiere performance of a new choral work by Sergei Rachmaninoff. In Russian, the work was titled Vsenoshchnoe bdeniye, which translates as "All-Night Vigil Service" or more commonly as "Vespers." This was Rachmaninoff's take on traditional liturgical melodies of the Easter Orthodox church. Rachmaninoff himself was not particularly religious, but by 1915, all Russians, religious or not, perhaps found solace in such music as the staggering casualties of the Russian Imperial troops during World War I became apparent. Rachmaninoff's "Vespers" was warmly received in Moscow and repeated five times within a month of its premiere. But in 1917, the Bolshevik revolution transformed Imperial Russia into a non-religious Soviet state. Rachmaninoff's "Vespers" remained pretty much forgotten until 1965, when Alexander Sveshnikov made the first recording of the work with the USSR State Academic Russian Choir for the Soviet record label Melodiya. Ironically, that Melodiya LP was never available for sale within the USSR, and was only issued as an export item to the West. It quickly became a best-seller, and Western audiences were astonished by both the emotional power of the work and the low bass voices required to perform it. Even by Russian standards, the bass parts are VERY low. When shown the manuscript score back in 1915, the work's original conductor shook his head, and said, "Now where on earth are we to find such basses? They are as rare as asparagus at Christmas!"

If "Entertainment Tonight!" were around in Paris in 1831, they would probably have offered a breathless special edition report on a concert that occurred on today's date that year. EVERYBODY who was ANYBODY was there: from the literary world, the French novelist Victor Hugo, author of "Les Miz," don't you know, and the writer Alfred de Mussett, who they SAY was living in sin with that cross-dressing Baroness, who, despite her sex, went by the name of George Sand. Oh, and the German poet Heinrich Heine was there, and from the music world, three of the leading opera composers of the day: the foreign born Giacomo Meyerbeer and Luigi Cherubini, and popular native son, Jacques Halevy. And who could miss the dashing, lion-maned Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt also seated in the theater? They were all there to witness the Parisian debut of the most charismatic performer of his time, the Italian violinist Nicolo Paganini. It was whispered that the fourth string on his violin was made from the intestine of his mistress, murdered at his own hand, and that he had spent 20 years in prison for the crime, with his violin his sole companion. Others hinted he had actually made a pact with Satan, trading his immortal soul for superhuman virtuosity! He looked like death warmed over, thin and gaunt, but played like a man possessed. Beat THAT, Ozzy Osbourne!

In Toronto on today’s date in 2017 violinist James Ehnes gave the world premiere performance of a new violin concerto by the American composer Aaron Jay Kernis. The work was written specially for Ehnes and was a joint commission from orchestras in Toronto, Seattle, Dallas, and Melbourne.

Shortly after the Toronto premiere, Ehnes performed the new concerto in Seattle with the Seattle Symphony and conductor Ludovic Morlot. A live recording of that Seattle performance was released on compact disc and was awarded not one, but TWO Grammy Awards in 2019: it was chosen as “Best Contemporary Classical Composition” and snagged the highly-competitive “Best Classical Instrumental Solo” prize.

The three movements of Kernis Violin Concerto demand incredible virtuosity from the soloist, and Ehnes was up to the challenge. “James Ehnes is a truly spectacular musician and collaborator,” said Kernis. “James took everything I threw at him with good humor and generosity, and made the knuckle-busting passages and everything else I gave him sound absolutely dazzling.”

As part of the commissioning agreement, Ehnes was granted exclusive performing rights of the new concerto for five years – so audiences will have to wait until March 2021 to hear if other violinist choose to tackle the demanding new Kernis Concerto!

Some special music had its premiere at Harvard University (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) on today's date in 1980. It was commissioned to honor the memory of Walter Piston, who had taught composition at Harvard for a number of years, and it was one of his students, the American harpsichordist and organist Daniel Pinkham, who composed it. Pinkham had exceptional teachers. He studied harpsichord with Wanda Landowska, organ with E. Power Biggs and, in addition to Piston, Pinkham studied composition with Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and Arthur Honegger. But Pinkham credits another familiar name for his most important musical epiphany. In 1939, while still a teenager, Pinkham heard one of the first American concerts given by the Trapp Family, whose sentimentalized story is familiar from "The Sound of Music." The Trapp Family's usual ensemble, which combined Renaissance and Baroque instruments like recorders and gambas with the bright and clear voices of young children, spoke to the young Pinkham as no music had before, becoming "a part of my way of looking at things," as he put it later. Since then, Pinkham has composed everything from symphonies to electronic music. His choral and organ works are especially admired, and in 1990, he was named "Composer of the Year" by the American Guild of Organists.

Today in 1825, one of Beethoven's late chamber works, his String Quartet in E-flat, Op. 127, received its premiere in Vienna by the Schuppanzigh Quartet. The Quartet had only received the music two weeks earlier, which, in those days, would be plenty of time for experienced musicians to work up a normal string quartet of that day. But Beethoven's new quartet was harmonically and structurally far from the norm for 1825.

Even Beethoven knew as much, and drafted a humorous "contract" for himself and the four musicians to sign. It read: "Each one is herewith given his part and is bound by oath and pledged on his honor to do his best, to distinguish himself and to vie with the other in excellence. Signed: Schuppanzigh, Weiss, Linke, the grand master's accursed cellist Holtz, and the last, but only in signing, Beethoven."

Even so, the premiere was under-rehearsed, and the players seemed visibly unhappy with their difficult assignment. Fortunately, Beethoven was not present, but when he learned of the poor performance, he was furious. He immediately contacted another violinist, Joseph Böhm, whose quartet meticulously rehearsed the new piece under the composer's watchful eye.

Their performance was better received, and in April of 1825, Böhm took the unusual step of programming the difficult new work TWICE on the same program. As a contemporary review put it, this time, "the misty veil disappeared and Beethoven's splendid work of art radiated its dazzling glory."

Among the talented music students at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute in the late 1920s, a teenager named Samuel Barber must have stood out. After all, he was an incredibly gifted triple talent: a pianist, composition student, and a singer. Maybe it just ran in the family: his mother was a talented amateur pianist, his uncle Sidney Homer a respected composer of art songs, and his aunt Louise Homer was a leading soprano at the Metropolitan Opera. On today's date in 1933, it was another Metropolitan Opera artist, mezzo-soprano Rose Bampton, who gave the premiere of one of Barber's early masterworks: a setting of a text by the British poet Matthew Arnold entitled "Dover Beach" for voice and string quartet. This first recording of "Dover Beach," made in 1935, however, featured Barber himself as the vocalist, making him perhaps the only classical composer to sing one of his own works on a professional, major-label recording. When the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams heard Barber sing his setting of "Dover Beach," he urged Barber to continue to compose. The young man took his advice, and rather than make a name for himself as a concert pianist or opera baritone, rapidly established himself as one of the major American composers of the 20th century.

Perhaps the fanfare is the most optimistic and hopeful of all musical forms, since it signals the start of something new and worth noting.

The American composer Adam Schoenberg* was feeling optimistic and hopeful when he wrote the fanfare that opens his “American Symphony,” a work premiered on this date in 2011 by the Kansas City Symphony led by Michael Stern.

“’American Symphony’ was inspired by the 2008 presidential election,” says Schoenberg, “when both parties asked the people to embrace change and make a difference. I was both excited and honored about ushering in this new era in our nation’s history.”

Schoenberg celebrated his 28th birthday a few weeks after Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, and says that just a few days after the election got the idea for his new Symphony after hearing what he calls “the quintessential American symphony,” namely Aaron Copland’s Symphony No. 3, composed in 1946, just after the end of World War II. Not coincidentally, Copland’s Symphony includes his famous “Fanfare for the Common Man” as a key thematic statement

“I believe Copland wanted to bring beauty and peace into the world during a time of great turmoil,” says Schoenberg “and seeing that our country and world had needs similar to those of Copland’s time, I set out to write a modern American symphony that paid homage to our past and looked forward to a brighter future.”

I believe Oscar Wilde gets credit for the line, "But enough about me — what do YOU think about me?" Roughly a century ago, this portrait of the self-absorbed ego not only got laughs on the London stage, it also hit home with German concertgoers after a series of frankly autobiographical tone poems and operas by Richard Strauss had their premieres.

Take today's date in 1899, for example. Strauss's tone poem "Ein Heldenleben" (A Hero's Life), received its premiere in Frankfurt, with the composer himself conducting. Strauss quoted themes from his own works in the section of the new score marked, "The hero's works of peace," leaving no doubt in anyone's mind that the hero in question was Strauss himself. Depicted in carping and crabbed musical terms were "the hero's critics," meant to be taken as Strauss's real-life music critics. Understandably, THEY were not amused, and attacked Strauss for his inflated ego AND music.

Strauss, as usual, was totally unflappable and offered his own somewhat self-deprecating description of the origins of his heroic piece as follows:

"Beethoven's Eroica Symphony is so little beloved of our conductors these days that to fulfill this need I am composing a largish tone-poem entitled A Hero's Life, admittedly without a funeral march, yet in E-flat, and with lots of horns, which are the yardstick of heroism."