Composers Datebook

On today's date in 1862, while President Lincoln was fretting over General McClellan's unwillingness to confront Secessionist rebels, New York concert-goers could find some relief from Civil War headlines by attending a New York Philharmonic concert at Irving Hall.

Conductor Carl Bergman had programmed some brand-new music by a Hamburg composer named Brahms, whose Serenade No. 2 in A Major received its American premiere at their February 1st concert—a concert that took place almost 2 years to the day after the Serenade's world premiere in Hamburg in 1860.

Give the New York Philharmonic some credit for daring programming. After all, it would be another year before the same Serenade would be performed in Vienna. Moreover, in 1863, during the Vienna Philharmonic's final rehearsal of this "difficult" new music by a composer nobody there had ever heard of, open mutiny broke out.

The first clarinetist stood up and declared that the music was too darn hard and the orchestra simply refused to play it. Conductor Otto Dessoff, who had programmed the Brahms, turned white with anger, laid down his baton, and resigned on the spot, joined by the Vienna Philharmonic's concertmaster and principal flutist.

Alarmed at the threatened disintegration of their orchestra, the Viennese rebels capitulated; and the performance of Brahms' Serenade No. 2 took place as scheduled and was, to the mutineers' chagrined astonishment, a tremendous success.

The American composer Philip Glass was born in Baltimore on this date in 1937.

Glass says he discovered music via his father's radio repair shop, where, in addition to servicing radios, Papa Glass sold records. When certain titles sold poorly, Papa would take them home and play them for his three children, trying to discover why they didn't appeal to customers. And so the future composer rapidly became familiar with commercially unsuccessful records of Beethoven string quartets, Schubert piano sonatas, and Shostakovich symphonies.

After some decades studying music, both commercially successful and not, Glass struck out on an original path. In the 1970s, he made a name for himself as both a composer and a performer of hypnotically and repetitiously patterned music for dance and theatrical events in association with Mabou Mines and avant-garde theatrical director Robert Wilson. In 1976 the Philip Glass-Robert Wilson opera “Einstein on the Beach” premiered in France and was subsequently staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

In the decades that followed, Glass has composed many more operas, symphonies, and film scores, and has the dubious distinction of generating of “Philip Glass jokes,” the most famous being:

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Philip Glass.

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Philip Glass

Knock-knock.

Who's there?

Philip Glass

On today’s date in 1948, Leonard Bernstein, age 29, conducted the Boston Symphony in the premiere of a new orchestral work by Harold Shapero, age 27.

This was Shapero’s “Symphony for Classical Orchestra,” a work modeled on Beethoven but sounding very much like one of the Neo-Classical scores of Igor Stravinsky. This was exactly what Shapero intended, but some found the music perplexing.

Aaron Copland, for one, wrote: “Harold Shapero, it is safe to say, is at the same time the most gifted and baffling composer of his generation.” That comment by Copland, one should remember, came at a time when Shapero’s generation included the likes of Barber, Bernstein, Menotti and Rorem. But Copland continued, “Stylistically, Shapero seems to feel a compulsion to fashion his music after some great model. He seems to be suffering from a hero-worship complex – or perhaps it is a freakish attack of false modesty.”

“Copland was so original,” Shapero responded, “that he just couldn’t understand anyone who wasn’t.”

Even so, Shapero’s superbly crafted orchestral imitations suffered many decades of neglect. In the 1980s, however, conductor and composer Andre Previn fell in love with Shapero’s Symphony, performing and recording it with the LA Philharmonic, and declared its “Adagietto” movement the most beautiful slow movement of any American symphony.

Today marks the birthday of the American pianist and composer Donald Shirley, who was born in Pensacola, Florida, in 1927, to Jamaican immigrant parents: a mother who was a teacher and a father an Episcopalian priest. Young Donald was a musical prodigy who made his debut with the Boston Pops at age 18, performing Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto.

If Shirley had been born 20 years later, he might have had the career enjoyed by Andre Watts, who born in 1946. But in the late 1940s, when Shirley was in his 20s, impresario Sol Hurok advised him that America was not ready for a black classical pianist, so instead Shirley toured performing his own arrangements of pop tunes accompanied by cello and double-bass.

His Trio recorded successful albums marketed as “jazz” during the 1950s and 60s, but Shirley also released a solo LP of his piano improvisations that sounds more like Debussy or Scriabin, and he composed organ symphonies, string quartets, concertos, chamber works, and a symphonic tone poem based on the novel Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

The 2018 Oscar-winning film “Green Book” sparked renewed interest in Shirley’s career as a performer, but those of us curious to hear his organ symphonies and concert works hope they get a second look as well.

Late in 2013, the musical world was gearing up to celebrate the 70th birthday of British composer John Tavener, but sadly he died, so his 70th birthday, which fell on today’s date in 2014, became a memorial tribute instead.

Tavener had suffered from ill health throughout his life: a stroke in his thirties, heart surgery and the removal of a tumor in his forties, and two subsequent heart attacks.

In his early twenties, Tavener became famous in 1968 with his avant-garde cantata entitled “The Whale,” based loosely on the Old Testament story of Jonah. That work caught the attention of one of The Beatles, and a recording of it was released on The Beatles’ own Apple label.

Tavener converted to the Russian Orthodox Church in 1977, and his music became increasingly spiritual. Millions who watched TV coverage of the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, were deeply moved by his “Song for Athene,” which was performed to telling effect as Diana’s casket left Westminster Abbey. Taverner was knighted in 2000, becoming Sir John Tavener

In 2003, Tavener’s “Ikon of Eros,” commissioned for the Centennial of the Minnesota Orchestra, and premiered at St. Paul’s Cathedral—the one in St. Paul, Minnesota, that is, not the one in London—and Tavener came to Minnesota for the event.

In 1848, when revolutions convulsed Europe, the Italian opera composer Giuseppe Verdi wrote these lines to a friend:

"Imagine whether I wanted to stay in Paris when I heard that there was a revolution in Milan! I left immediately when I heard the news, but I've been unable to see anything except those marvelous barricades! All honor to our brave champions! . . . You may be sure that the hour of [Italy’s] freedom has struck. The people will have it so, and there is no power on earth than can resist them!"

In that frame of mind, Verdi crafted an opera on a patriotic theme, "La Battaglia di Legnano" or "The Battle of Legnano," which premiered on today's date in 1849 in Rome. It was a great success, but over time, as revolutionary fervor turned into repression, Verdi's opera ran afoul with Italian censors, and the opera's overt political message had to be softened considerably for its occasional revival performances during the rest of the 19th century.

Verdi died in Milan on January 27, 1901, over a half-century after the premiere of "The Battle of Legnano. By that time, Verdi was revered not only as a great composer, but also as an artistic symbol of Italy's eventual unification and statehood.

This is the Composers Datebook for January 26th. I’m John Birge.

In 1933, Aaron Copland introduced Roy Harris to Serge Koussevitzky, the famous conductor of the Boston Symphony in those days. Now, Koussevitzky was one of the great patrons of American music and was always looking for new American music and new American composers. Roy Harris had been described to him as an "American Mussorgsky," which probably intrigued the Russian-born conductor.

When Koussevitzky learned that Harris had been born in a log cabin in Lincoln County, Oklahoma, on Abraham Lincoln's birthday, no less – well, perhaps he hoped the 41-year old Harris might produce music equally all-American in origin. "Write me a big symphony from the West," asked Koussevitzky, and Harris responded with a three-movement orchestral work titled: "Symphony, 1933," which had its premiere performance on today's date in 1934 with the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzky's direction.

Koussevitzky loved it. "I think that nobody has captured in music the essence of American life -- its vitality, its greatness, its strength -- so well as Roy Harris," enthused the famous conductor, who recorded the piece at Carnegie Hall in New York just one week after its premiere.

And it was Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony that would subsequently premiere Harris's Second, Third, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies as well.

On today’s date in 1909, Richard Strauss’s opera “Elektra” had its premiere in Dresden. The libretto, a free adaptation of the grim, ancient Greek tragedy by Sophocles, was by the Austrian poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

In ancient Greek tragedies, violence occurred off-stage, and for his libretto, Hofmannsthal honored that tradition. But the music of Strauss evoking the tragedy’s violence unleashed a huge orchestra with a ferocity that stunned early listeners.

After its American premiere, one New York critic wrote of “a total delineation of shrieks and groans, of tortures physical in the clear definition and audible in their gross realism . . .Snarling of stopped trumpets, barking of trombones, moaning of bassoons and squealing of violins.”

Even Strauss himself later admitted “Elektra” (quote) “penetrated to the uttermost limits of … the receptivity of human ears,” and what he called his “green horror” opera might cause him to be type-cast as a purveyor of creepy-crawly music. And so, Strauss prudently suggested to Hofmansthal “Next time, we’ll write a MOZART opera.”

Almost two years later to the day, on January 26, 1911, their “Mozart” opera, ”Der Rosenkavalier,” or the “The Rose Bearer” premiered. It’s set in 18th century Vienna, and for this opera Strauss included anachronistic, but eminently hummable waltz tunes.

On this day in 1946, Igor Stravinsky conducted the New York Philharmonic in the first performance of his “Symphony in Three Movements,” a work inspired in part by World War II newsreels.

“Each episode in the Symphony,” Stravinsky wrote, “is linked in my imagination with a specific cinematographic impression of the war. But the Symphony is not programmatic. Composers combine notes—that is all. How and in what form the things of this world are impressed upon their music is not for them to say.”

What Stravinsky did say was that images of goose-stepping soldiers influenced its first movement, and its third movement was inspired in part by newsreels of the victorious march of the Allies into Germany. The themes of middle movement, however, had nothing to do with the war, but consisted of bits and pieces Stravinsky salvaged from his unused and unfinished score for the 1943 movie “The Song of Bernadette.” The producers decided instead to go with a score by Alfred Newman, a more experienced film composer.

To Stravinsky’s embarrassment, Newman’s score for “The Song of Bernadette” won an Oscar for the Best Film Score of 1943.

But Igor needn’t have felt TOO chagrined—his music may have failed in Hollywood, but it triumphed at Carnegie Hall.

On today’s date in 1837, the Dublin-born pianist and composer John Field breathed his last in Moscow at the age of 54.

Born in 1782 into musical family, Field soon moved to London to study with the Italian composer Muzio Clementi and became a sought-after concert artist at a very tender age.

Haydn heard the 13-year perform in London and was impressed. At age 16, Field premiered his own first Piano Concerto. Over the course of his life, John Field would meet, play for, and perform with many other famous composers of his day, including Beethoven, Czerny, Hummel, Moscheles, and Mendelsohn.

Field ended up in Saint Petersburg, where he published his own compositions and apparently lived rather extravagantly. It’s said he was so well-off that he could afford to turn down a lucrative appointment to the Russian court.

In Tolstoy’s famous novel WAR AND PEACE, the Countess Rostova even asks a pianist to play her favorite Field nocturne. And it’s quite likely that while in Russia, like most of the Russian nobility of the day, Field got by speaking French, not Russian.

It’s said that on his deathbed when asked what his religion was, Field replied with a French pun: "I am not a Calvinist, but a Claveciniste (French for a harpsichord player).