Composers Datebook

Composers and publishers don’t always see eye to eye. Simrock, the German publisher of Dvorak’s music, irritated the patriotic Czech composer by issuing his scores with his first name printed in its Germanic form “Anton” rather than its Czech form “Antonin.” They finally came up with a compromise: Simrock ABBREVIATED Dvorak’s first name, printing it as “A-N-T-period” on the music’s title page: Germans could read that as “Anton” and Czechs as “Antonin.” Everyone was happy.

Simrock would also have liked Dvorak to stick to writing small-scale chamber works — which sold well— rather than large-scale symphonic works — which didn’t.

“You counsel me that I should write small works,” writes Dvorak in 1891, “but this is very difficult . . . At the moment my head is full of LARGE ideas and I will have to do as dear Lord wishes.” A few years later, Dvorak would make Simrock very happy by sending them some large- AND small-scale works that would sell tremendously well, including his “New World” Symphony and “American” Quartet . . . plus this music — an “American” QUINTET published by Simrock as Dvorak’s Op. 97.

Dvorak’s Quintet was composed in Spillville, Iowa, in the summer of 1893 and was first heard at Carnegie Hall in New York on today’s date in 1894.

The German composer Johannes Brahms would probably have nodded in approval if he could have heard Orson Welles intone “We will sell no wine before its time” in those old TV ads for Paul Masson. Brahms was a notorious perfectionist, an obsessive polisher, and a cautious taste-tester of any of his own musical fermentations.

So, if one notes that Brahms appeared at the piano on today’s date in 1895, accompanying clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld at a high-profile Viennese performance of his Clarinet Sonata No. 1, one can safely assume there had been a number of trial performances beforehand.

In the summer of 1894, during his annual holiday in the Austrian countryside, Brahms composed this sonata. The very first performances of the new Clarinet Sonata followed in the fall of 1894 for the Duke of Meiningen and his sister, with an additional test run in Frankfurt for Clara Schumann. After Clara gave the new work a thumbs up, Brahms apparently felt it was fit for public consumption: first on January 7, 1895 for members of Vienna’s Tonkünstler Society, and four days later for an even more “toney” audience attending the Rosé String Quartet Quartet’s chamber music series.

After all, as Brahms and Mühlfeld might have put it: “We play NO sonata before its time!”

On today’s date in 1998, the Lark Quartet gave the first performance of the String Quartet No. 2 by the American composer Aaron Jay Kernis. Like much of Kernis’s music, the new Quartet drew upon an eclectic variety of influences.

As Kernis himself put it: “My Second String Quartet uses elements of Renaissance and Baroque dance music and dance forms as its basis and inspiration. For years I’ve played various Bach suites and pieces from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book at the piano for my own pleasure, and I suspected for some time that their influence would eventually show up in my own work.”

The Lark Quartet had commissioned Kernis’ FIRST String Quartet, and, like the composer, were over the moon when they learned the Second had won the Pulitzer Prize for music. Just three months after its premiere, Kernis got the news by phone as he was headed to the airport to catch a flight to Spain. “I haven’t had a martini in years,” recalled Kernis, “but that’s sort of what it felt like.”

Kernis’ Second Quartet was a triple commission from Merkin Concert Hall in New York, Ohio University, and The Schubert Club of St. Paul, Minnesota, and was dedicated to Linda Hoeschler, the former Executive Director of the American Composers Forum.

In January of 1939, the famous jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman was playing each night at New York’s Paramount Theater. On today’s date that year he also appeared on the stage of Carnegie Hall.

The occasion was the American premiere of a new chamber trio by the Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, commissioned by Goodman at the suggestion of Bartok’s compatriot, violinist Joseph Sizgeti. The work was billed as a two-movement “Rhapsody” for clarinet, violin and piano.

Now, in 1939 Goodman was at the peak of his popularity with the swing-crazed youth of America, and the New York Times music critic felt the need to write: “There is no indication that Bartok wrote the clarinet part for Benny’s clarinet, so jitterbugs reading this review have been simply wasting their time. The work is as Hungarian as goulash, and Mr. Goodman was artist enough to restrain himself from any insinuation of swing. Indeed, considering that he had probably left the stage of the Paramount Theatre some minutes before he appeared on that of Carnegie Hall, the purity of his style and the bright neatness of his technique were particularly admirable.”

The following year, Goodman and Szigeti recorded the trio with Bartok himself at the piano. For that occasion, Bartok added a third movement, and the resulting work was re-titled “Contrasts.”

If the late 18th century is the “Classical Age,” and the 19th “The Romantic,” then perhaps we should dub our time “The Eclectic Age” of music. These days, composers can—and do—pick and choose from a wide variety of styles.

The American composer William Bolcom was loath to rule anything out when he approached the task of setting William Blake’s "Songs of Innocence and of Experience” to music. Bolcom calls for a large orchestra, multiple choruses, and more than a dozen vocal soloists versed in classical, pop, folk, country, and operatic styles. There are echoes of jazz, reggae, gospel, ragtime, country and rock idioms as well.

As Bolcom put it: "At every point Blake used his whole culture, past and present, high-flown and vernacular, as sources for his many poetic styles. All I did was use the same stylistic point of departure Blake did in my musical settings.”

The massive work received its premiere performance in Stuttgart, Germany, on today’s date in 1984.

Most of the work was completed between 1973 and 1982, after Bolcom joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and it was there that the work received its American premiere a few months following its world premiere in Germany.

In 1935 Aaron Copland finished a new orchestral work that was to be premiered by the Minneapolis Symphony and its young conductor Eugene Ormandy.

The work was entitled “Statements for Orchestra,” and consisted of six short movements, each with a descriptive title, namely: “Militant,” “Cryptic,” “Dogmatic,” “Subjective,” “Jingo,” and “Prophetic.” The “Jingo” movement alludes to the popular tune “Sidewalks of New York” – where Copland completed the orchestration of his new score.

The last two movements were premiered by the Minneapolis Symphony early in 1936, first on an NBC radio broadcast, then on one of the orchestra’s subscription concerts. The conductor, however, was not Ormandy but rather Dimitri Mitropoulos, who would become the Music Director of the Minneapolis Symphony the following year. And it was Mitropoulos who would lead the first COMPLETE performance of all six of Copland’s “Statements” on today’s date in 1942 during a concert by the New York Philharmonic.

The new piece got good reviews, and Copland quoted with pride one given by his friend and colleague Virgil Thomson, which called the music “succinct and stylish, cleverly written and very, very personal …“

Much to Copland’s surprise this music never really caught on with orchestras or audiences. “To my disappointment,” wrote Copland, “Statements remains one of my lesser-known scores.”

The American composer Ned Rorem liked to classify music as being either French or German – by “French” Rorem meant music that is sensuous, economical, and unabashedly superficial; by “German” Rorem meant music that strives to be brainy, complex, and impenetrably deep.

On today’s date the Boston Symphony gave the premiere performances of two important 20th century piano concertos.

The first, by Francis Poulenc, had its premiere under the baton of Charles Munch in 1950, with the composer at the piano. Poulenc’s Concerto is a light, entertaining with no pretension to profundity. It is quintessentially “French” according to Rorem’s classification.

The second Piano Concerto, by the American composer Elliott Carter, had its Boston premiere in 1967, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf, with soloist Jacob Lateiner. Carter’s Concerto was written in Berlin in the mid-1960s when the Wall dividing that city was still new. Carter said he composed it in a studio near an American target range, and one commentator hears the sounds of machine guns in the work’s second movement. Carter himself compared woodwind solos in the same movement to the advice given by three friends of the long-suffering Job in the Bible.

Needless to say, Rorem would emphatically classify Carter’s Concerto as “German” to the max!

On today’s date in 1932, Maurice Ravel’s Concerto for Piano Left Hand received its public premiere in Vienna. It was one of several concertos for piano left hand commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, a wealthy Austrian pianist who lost his right arm during the First World War. Wittgenstein also commissioned concertos from Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, Korngold, and Britten.

In the fall of 1931, Ravel presented Wittgenstein with the score of his new concerto, and together they gave it a private read-through with Ravel playing the orchestra part on one piano, and Wittgenstein the solo part on another. At first Wittgenstein was not impressed and offended Ravel by suggesting a few changes, which Ravel flatly refused to make. “Only after I had studied the concerto carefully,” said Wittgenstein , ”did I realize what a great work it was.” Wittgenstein performed the premiere with the Vienna Symphony led by Robert Heger.

A few days later, on January 14th that same year, Ravel himself conducted the premiere of his OTHER Piano Concerto, this one written for the TWO hands of French pianist Marguerite Long. In stark contrast to the brooding Concerto for Wittgenstein, the Concerto for Long is light-hearted, with a blues-y slow movement inspired by the Harlem jazz sampled by Ravel during a visit to New York in 1928.

On today’s date in 1961, the New York City Ballet presented a new work scored by a 35-year old composer named Gunther Schuller, who was conducting the pit orchestra. On stage, in the middle of the green- and purple-garbed dancers, were four additional musicians: namely, the Modern Jazz Quartet, decked out in their usual white ties and tails. Schuller’s score, entitled “Variants,” was an attempt to fuse modern music and jazz into a style he labeled “Third Stream.”

”I had this idea of the First and Second streams [classical and jazz] getting married and giving birth to a child, which is the Third stream," recalled Schuller years later, ruefully noting that today one would have to call it the “10,000th stream” as composers have since introduced a multitude of ethnic, folk and vernacular music into the mix as well.

But back in 1961, the idea attracted a lot of press – not all favorable. The New Yorker, for example, thought it odd that the MJQ “sat like a quartet of hunters in a duck blind, anxiously shooting out carefully calculated notes.” Time magazine wrote: “Schuller’s score was the essence of the cool – spare, fragmentary, but resembling jazz only in its rhythmic drive.” If this was the “Third Stream,” the reviewer concluded, “it never seemed to be flowing anywhere.”

In Austrian culture there is a theatrical tradition that pokes fun at anything somber and serious. Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute” taps into this in the person of Papageno, and in the 19th century the Austrian actor Johann Nestroy deflated pomposity in his satirical plays, including one wicked sendup of Wagner’s opera “Tannhauser.”

In our own time, this tradition is alive and well – and even Mozart is not immune. How else do you explain a 1991 Austrian film titled: “Bring Me the Head of Amadeus!” – a work ostensibly released in honor of the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death?

That film’s soundtrack was written by a musical jack-of-all-trades named H.K. Gruber, who was born in Vienna on today’s date in 1943. Gruber has composed what might be called “normal” concertos and such but is best known for “abnormal” works, including a piece he describes as a “pandemonium” for voice and chamber ensemble titled “Frankenstein!”

“Frankenstein!” is a musical setting of some very macabre poems by a fellow Austrian named H.C. Artmann. Oddly enough, its bizarre Viennese humor translates well with audiences worldwide. As Gruber puts it: “The poems evokes in each culture a unique set of metaphors and associations. The gloomy Russian temperament, for example, seems to find our ‘Frankenstein’ particularly amusing!”