Composers Datebook

If the bassoon is rather unkindly known as the “clown” of the orchestra, what does that make the poor tuba?

Just say “tuba” to someone, and they turn into a mime – at least that was the experience of American composer Alex Shapiro when she mentioned that she was writing a new work for tuba and piano.

“The response was usually one of surprised and barely muffled laughter,” said Shapiro. “The exclamation ‘Tuba, eh? What a funny instrument!’ was often accompanied by exaggerated hand and mouth gestures that somewhat resembled a trout attempting to inflate a balloon.”

Shapiro wanted to show how nimble and lyrical a tuba could be. She gave her finished piece – for tuba and piano -- a punning title: “Music for Two Big Instruments.” And that’s spelled “T-W-O” -- not “T-O-O,” folks!

The new work was commissioned by Norman Pearson, Principal tubist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who premiered the work with wife, pianist Cynthia Bauhof-Williams, on today’s date in 2001 at Alfred Newman Hall on the campus of University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Grateful tubists have taken up Shapiro’s piece since then, and this West Coast commission’s first recording was made by New York Philharmonic Principal tubist Alan Baer, so one could say – with a bit of a stretch – “Music for Two Big Instruments” has been a coast to coast success!

On today's date in 1934, the audience at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City demanded—and got—50 curtain calls for the cast and conductor of the new opera that had just received its premiere staged performance.

The opera was "Merry Mount," based on a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story set in a Puritan colony in 17th century New England. The music was by the American composer Howard Hanson. The performers for Met Opera's premiere included the great American baritone Lawrence Tibbett as the Puritan preacher Wrestling Bradford, sorely tempted by the Swedish soprano Gösta Ljungberg in the role of Lady Marigold Sandys, his VERY unwilling leading lady.

Despite its setting in Puritan New England, Hanson's opera included plenty of the lurid sex and violence that fuels the all the best Romantic opera plots, and the score was in Hanson's most winning Neo-Romantic style, with rich choral and orchestral writing, capped by a fiery conflagration as a grand finale. What more could an opera audience want?

Strangely enough, despite its tremendous first-night success, "Merry Mount" has seldom—if ever—been staged since 1934. To celebrate the centenary of Hanson's birth in 1996, the Seattle Symphony presented "Merry Mount" in a concert performance conducted by Gerard Schwarz.

On today's date in 1784, in the city of Vienna, Wolfgang Mozart finished one bit of work and started another—which he would continue until the end of his life.

After Mozart put the finishing touches to his Piano Concerto No. 14 in E flat, he entered this work as the first item in a ledger, which he titled, "A List of all my works from the month of February, 1784 to the month of..." Mozart then left a blank space on his title page for the concluding month and wrote just the number "1" in the space left for the concluding year of his catalog—with the reasonable expectation that he would live long enough to see the turn of the new century. He then signed his title page: "Wolfgang Amadé Mozart by my own hand."

On the catalog's unruled left-hand pages Mozart wrote the date and description of his subsequent works, and occasionally, in the case of his operas and vocal pieces, the names of the singers who premiered them. The right-hand side of the page was lined with music staves, and here Mozart would write the opening measure of each piece.

The very last entry in Mozart's ledger book is dated November 15, 1791, just one month before his death. This final entry notes the completion of a cantata written for Vienna's "New-Crowned Hope" Masonic Lodge.

On this day in 1934, an excited crowd of locals and visitors had gathered in Hartford, Connecticut, for the premiere performance of a new opera entitled "Four Saints in Three Acts."

The fact that the opera featured 16 saints, not 4, and was divided into 4 acts, not 3, was taken by the audience in stride, as the libretto was by the expatriate American writer, Gertrude Stein, notorious for her surreal poetry and prose. The music, performed by players from the Philadelphia Orchestra and sung by an all-black cast, was by the 37-year old American composer, Virgil Thomson, who matched Stein's surreal sentences with witty musical allusions to hymn tunes and parodies of solemn, resolutely tonal music.

Among the locals in attendance was the full-time insurance executive and part-time poet, Wallace Stevens, who called the new opera (quote): "An elaborate bit of perversity in every respect: text, settings, choreography, [but] Most agreeable musically… If one excludes aesthetic self-consciousness, the opera immediately becomes a delicate and joyous work all around."

The opera was a smashing success, and soon opened on Broadway, where everyone from Toscanini and Gershwin to Dorothy Parker and the Rockefellers paid a whopping $3.30 for the best seats—a lot of money during one of the worst winters of the Great Depression.

On today's date in 1975, "Laude," a new work for symphonic winds by American composer Howard Hanson received its premiere performance in Berkeley, California, by the California State University Long Beach Band conducted by Larry Curtis. The new work was a commission from the College Band Directors National Association.

The notes supplied for the occasion by the 78-year-old composer were unusually eloquent and reflective:

"As one comes toward the end of a long life," wrote Hanson, "one realizes how many influences go back to early childhood. In my musical and religious life the greatest was, undoubtedly, the chorales which I heard as a young boy growing up in Wahoo, Nebraska… 'Laude' [is] based on a chorale of praise… I took my cue from the 150th Psalm: 'Praise Him with the sound of the Trumpet, With Psaltery and harp, With timbrel and dance, With string instruments and organs, Praise Him upon the loud cymbals, the high-sounding cymbals, Let everything that has breath praise the Lord'… when the chorale melody appears, working up a crescendo which becomes, I hope, a veritable avalanche of sound, with, literally, 'everything that has breath' praising the Lord."

An ardent champion of American classical music, Howard Hanson taught for some 40 years at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and once estimated that over 2000 works by more than 500 American composers were premiered during his tenure.

For most of the 18th and 19th centuries, commissioning new musical works was the exclusive prerogative of the Church, royalty, and the wealthy nobility. More recently, Foundations and big corporations have gotten into the act. But even today, individuals can make a difference.

In 1991, six couples in Minneapolis and St. Paul decided to form a Commissioning Club, modeled along the lines of an Investment Club, to spark the creation of new works in a variety of genres and promote the work of composers they admired.

On today's date in 1996, one of their commissions, the "Dramatic Suite" by American composer Stephen Paulus was premiered by flutist Ransom Wilson and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. It was played first in Minnesota, and subsequently at Lincoln Center in New York City.

Later that same year, the Club arranged for another Paulus commission: a new Christmas Carol, titled "Pilgrim Jesus," that was premiered on the BBC radio broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge. That 1996 broadcast, heard by millions of radio listeners worldwide, marked the first time that an American composer had been chosen to contribute a new carol for that famous Christmas Eve service—not a bad return for the Commissioning Club's investment!

One of the greatest of all Italian operas had its first performance on this day in 1887. "Otello," by Giuseppe Verdi, was a musical version of Shakespeare's tragedy, "Othello." The opera was written when Verdi was in his 70s, years after he had supposedly retired from a long and successful career as Italy's most famous opera composer. It was one of the greatest triumphs of Verdi's career.

The premiere took place at La Scala, Milan, with famous singers in the lead roles, and the cream of international society and the music world in the audience. Even the orchestra was distinguished: among the cellists was a young fellow named Arturo Toscanini, who would later become one of the world's most famous conductors. Two of the violinists had the last name of Barbirolli—they were the father and grandfather of another famous conductor-to-be, Sir John Barbirolli. Both Toscanini and Barbirolli would eventually make classic recordings of Verdi's "Otello."

And speaking of recordings, in the early years of the 20th century, the Italian tenor Francesco Tamago, who created the role of Otello, and the French baritone Victor Maurel, who created the role of Iago, both recorded acoustical phonograph excerpts from Verdi's "Otello"—the technological marvel of the 20th century—preserving, belatedly, a sonic souvenir of a 19th century Verdi premiere.

Many 20th century composers were scarred by the violence and turmoil of their times—but none quite so literally as the Greek composer, engineer, and architect Iannis Xenakis, who died at the age of 78 on today's date in the year 2001.

In the early 1940s, Xenakis was a member of the Communist resistance in Greece, fighting first the German occupation, then, as the war ended, the British. In 1945, when Xenakis was 23, his face was horribly disfigured by a shell fragment fired by a British tank, resulting in the loss of one of his eyes. Two years later he was forced to flee to Paris. As he himself laconically put it: "In Greece, the Resistance lost, so I left. In France, the Resistance won."

Xenakis wanted to write music, but earned his living as an architect and engineer in Paris at Le Courbusier's studio. Xenakis designed and was involved in major architectural projects for Le Courbusier, including the famous Philips pavilion at the 1958 World's Fair in Brussels.

As a composer, Xenakis wrote highly original music that was meticulously ordered according to mathematical and scientific principles, but sounded intensely emotional, almost primeval. His music might even be described as "Pre-Socratic," as Xenakis seemed to echo the theories of the early Greek thinker Pythagoras, who saw a relationship between music, mathematics, and religion.

The contemporary Hungarian composer György Kurtág is famous for writing very short, very sparse and VERY concentrated musical works. He has, however on occasional written more expansive pieces, including one big orchestral piece for the Berlin Philharmonic and some works for large chorus.

Obsessively self-critical, Kurtág disavowed most of the music he wrote before his mid-thirties, which included some for chorus, but a suggestion from the Italian avant-garde composer Luigi Nono that he write for chorus again resulted in a work that the BBC Singers premiered in London on today’s date in 1981.

It has an Italian title, “Omaggio a Luigi Nono,” or “Tribute to Luigi Nono,” ¬– a tip of the hat to his Italian colleague, but the work itself is a setting of bits of Russian poems. Now at the time of its premiere, 25 years after the Russian-led invasion of Hungary in 1956 and 10 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hungarian eyebrows were raised when Kurtág chose to set Russian texts. Disparaging or just plain “diss-ing” ANYTHING Russian was the normal M.O. for Hungarian intellectuals in those days.

Kurtág, for his part, stood his ground: as an ardent Dostoevsky’s fan, he simply said Russian was a sacred language to him.

On today's date in 1795, Haydn was in England and about to conduct one of his new symphonies at The King's Theater in London. An early biographer recounts what happened next: "When Haydn entered to conduct the symphony, the curious audience left their seats and crowded towards the orchestra the better to see the famous Haydn. The seats in the middle of the floor were thus empty, and hardly anyone was there when the theater's great chandelier crashed down and broke into bits, throwing the numerous gathering into great consternation. As soon as the first moment of fright was over and those who had pressed forward could think of the danger they had luckily escaped and find words to express it, several persons uttered the state of their feelings with loud cries of 'Miracle!' 'Miracle.'" And thus, one of Haydn's symphonies, his symphony No. 96 in D Major, came to be called "The Miracle" Symphony. It's a nice story, but it actually occurred just before the first performance of Haydn's Symphony No. 102 in B-flat. Somehow or another the nickname got stuck to one of Haydn's earlier London Symphonies, and simply refused to become "unstuck." In his book, "The Symphony: A Listener's Guide," musicologist Michael Steinberg suggests an elegant solution: He still lists Haydn's Symphony No. 96 as "The Miracle" but give the Symphony No. 102 a new nick-name: "The REAL Miracle."