Composers Datebook

On today's date in 1893, the opera "Hansel and Gretel" written by a 39-year old German composer named Engelbert Humperdinck received its premiere performance at the Court Theater of Weimar. It was conducted by a promising 29-year old composer by the name of Richard Strauss.

It quickly became an international hit, playing to packed houses in Berlin, Vienna and London. Gustav Mahler, head of the Hamburg Opera at the time, declared it a masterpiece, and parents on several continents breathed a sigh of relief: here was an opera without the sex and violence so fashionable in the media—even back in 1893! "Hansel and Gretel" quickly became a Christmastime tradition—even though there's nothing in it particular "Christmas-y" apart from children, sugary things to eat, and the appearance of an angel or two.

Initially, Humperdinck didn't even want to write anything as silly as an opera on "Hansel and Gretel." He was a serious young protégé of Richard Wagner who had helped copy the orchestral parts for Wagner's final opera, "Parsifal."

It was his sister who talked him in to writing some music for a children's play she had prepared on the familiar fairytale by the Brothers Grimm. At some point, Humperdinck must have realized he not only could—but should—work his sister's play into a full-blown opera, which would blend Wagner's complex orchestral technique with a simple but universally appealing story that would charm old and young alike.

On this day in 1808 at Vienna's Theater-an-der-Wien one of the most famous concerts in the history of classical music took place.

It was an all-Beethoven concert, with the composer himself featured as both conductor and piano soloist. The program included the premieres of both Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Beethoven's Fourth Piano was also on the program—along with additional piano and vocal selections, including portions of Beethoven's Mass in C.

At the last moment, Beethoven felt this still might not be quite enough music, so, considering the forces he had booked, he hastily composed his Choral Fantasy, a work that begins with a solo piano, then adds full orchestra and chorus to the mix.

The concert began at 6:30 p.m. and lasted over four hours. Contemporary reviews were mixed—but apparently Beethoven's Fifth proved popular with its first night audience, and rapidly established itself worldwide as one of classical music's greatest hits.

A less successful symphonic work had its premiere on this day in 1960, when Charles Munch conducted the Boston Symphony in the first performance of "Die Natali" by American composer Samuel Barber. This orchestral piece used familiar Christmas carols as themes, which are treated to a series of variations. Barber later expressed his own dissatisfaction with this score and withdrew it, but recycled his variations on "Silent Night" as a separate piece for solo organ.

In all, the American composer David Diamond wrote 11 Symphonies, spanning some 50 years of his professional career. The last dates from 1991, and the first from 1940, completed after his return from studies in Paris shortly before the outbreak of World War II.

Diamond’s first Symphony was premiered on today’s date in 1941 by the New York Philharmonic led by the famous Greek conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos. Despite winning awards and positive comments from fellow composers ranging from Virgil Thomson to Arnold Schoenberg, for years Diamond struggled to make ends meet by playing violin in various New York City theater pit bands. More than one fellowship grant, however, enabled him to live abroad for extended stays, where, he said:

“I can make my income last and live extremely well with my own villa and garden at a cost that would provide a hole-in-the-wall, coldwater flat in America . . . There is a spiritual nourishment, too, in that cradle of serious music [and] quiet for concentration that could never be found in an American city.”

Defending his more traditional approach, Diamond wrote: “It is my strong feeling that a romantically inspired contemporary music, tempered by reinvigorated classical technical formulas, is the way out of the present period of creativity chaos in music... To me, the romantic spirit in music is important because it is timeless.”

In the spring of 1775, shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, and the sparks of the American Revolution burst into flames at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Far away in Salzburg, Austria, a 19-year-old composer named Wolfgang Mozart was spending most of that year composing five violin concertos. The fifth, in A major, was completed on this day in 1775. At the time, Mozart was concertmaster of the orchestra in the court of the Archbishop of Salzburg. Archbishops don't have their own orchestras now, but they did then—at least in Europe, if not in the American colonies.

A century and a half later, America was celebrating its sesquicentennial, and the magazine Musical America offered a prize of $3,000 for the best symphonic work on an American theme. The prize was awarded unanimously to Ernest Bloch, a Swiss-born composer who had arrived in this country only a decade before. But already, sailing into the harbor of New York, he had conceived of a large patriotic composition. Several years later, it took shape in three movements as "America—An Epic Rhapsody for Orchestra."

It premiered in New York on today's date in 1928, with simultaneous performances the next day in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Fifteen other orchestras programmed it within a year. Curiously, although Bloch remains a highly respected composer, his "America Rhapsody" from 1928 is seldom performed today.

The Stanley Kubrick film "A Clockwork Orange" opened in New York City on this date in 1971. The music was composed, and in some cases re-composed, by Wendy Carlos. As in his earlier hit, "2001: A Space Odyssey," Kubrick used classical music. This time, however, in keeping with the film's futuristic storyline, the classics were adapted and arranged for Moog synthesizer by Wendy Carlos. The Main Title music, which we're sampling, was Purcell's "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary."

Carlos had just read the Anthony Burgess novel, "A Clockwork Orange," when she saw a notice in the New York Times that Kubrick was at work filming it. She immediately airmailed Kubrick two Moog synthesizer pieces, one original and one a classical arrangement. Kubrick wrote back, inviting her to London to talk, and the rest is history.

Wendy Carlos had become an international celebrity with her earlier album "Switched-On Bach," consisting of her Bach arrangements for synthesizer. It became the first classical recording ever to be certified "Platinum." Musical genius pianist Glenn Gould, whose own recording of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" was one of the biggest sellers of all time, said: "Carlos's realization of the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto is, to put it bluntly, the finest performance of any of the Brandenburgs—live, canned, or intuited—I've ever heard."

It's strange to read the doubts Tchaikovsky expressed in letters about many of his greatest musical works, which he first would dismiss as failures, only to change his mind completely a few weeks later. Take, for example, his ballet "The Nutcracker," which had its premiere performance on this day in 1892 at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.

Tchaikovsky described working on the ballet as a "dread-inspiring, feverish nightmare, so abominable that I don't think I have the strength to put it into words." At the time, Tchaikovsky was MUCH more optimistic about an opera he was writing titled "Yolanta"—only to abruptly changed his mind, writing "Now I think that the ballet is good and the opera nothing special." This time, Tchaikovsky got it right—although initially the opera DID prove more popular than the ballet.

Another—and deliberately nightmarish—Russian composition had its first performance on this same day 70 years later. This was the Symphony No. 13 by Dmitri Shostakovich, subtitled "Babi Yar," based on poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko. This choral symphony was first heard on today's date in 1962 at the Moscow Conservatory, but was quickly banned by the Soviet authorities. Its title poem, "Babi Yar," called attention to Soviet indifference to the Holocaust and persistent anti-Semitism in Soviet society. Yevtushenko later softened these lines so the symphony could be performed in the U.S.S.R.

There's an old joke that Schubert wrote two symphonies: one unfinished, and the other endless—the reference being to Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" which lasts about 20 minutes, and his "Great" Symphony in C Major, which can run about an hour in performance.

It was Antonio Salieri, one of Schubert's composition teachers in Vienna, who encouraged the young composer to date his manuscripts, so we know that Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony was written in 1822. It wasn't performed in public, however, until December 17th, 1865—some 43 years later. The manuscript was known to exist, but no one bothered much about it until Josef von Herbeck tracked it down and conducted its first performance in Vienna.

At its premiere, Herbeck added the last movement of Schubert's Third Symphony in D as a kind of makeshift finale. Many others have tried to "finish" the "Unfinished" Symphony, but more often than not, it is performed as an incomplete, yet oddly satisfying, work.

The Icelandic composer Jon Leifs, who died in 1968, apparently worried that he might leave some unfinished orchestral score behind. Therefore, he composed not one but TWO works he titled "Finale." These were intended as a kind of "musical insurance policy." To each score, Leifs attached a note suggesting that if he died and left behind any unfinished orchestral projects, either of these two "Finales" could be used.

He was dubbed the "French Beethoven," and like Ludwig van, was famous as both a composer and a pianist. Camille Saint-Saëns was born in Paris in 1835, and died on today's date, at the age of 86, in 1921.

The death date seems rather fitting, in a macabre sort of way, since December 16th is also the date we celebrate as Beethoven's birthday. And imagine, if you will, the 10-year old Saint-Saens making his formal debut as a pianist at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, first performing a concerto by Beethoven, then, as an encore, offering to play any one of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas—from memory!

Saint-Saens's keyboard skills were legendary. An early admirer of Wagner, Saint-Saens once amazed that composer by playing entire scores of his operas at sight. Berlioz, another admirer, once quipped that Saint-Saens: "knows everything but lacks inexperience."

In addition to music, Saint-Saens was fascinated by mathematics, astronomy, and the natural sciences. As a young boy he collected fossils that he dug out himself from the stone quarries at Meudon. Maybe that experience inspired him years later to add a movement titled "fossils" to his "Carnival of the Animals," a chamber work he wrote as a private joke in 1886. Saint-Saens forbade its publication during his lifetime, and probably would have been appalled that this flippant work—and not his more serious symphonies or sonatas—has become his best-known and best-loved work.

On today's date in 1893, Anton Seidl conducted the New York Philharmonic in the first performance of Antonin Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, a work subtitled "From the New World." This was an afternoon concert, meant as a public dress rehearsal for the work's "official" premiere the following evening.

Among the Dec. 15th audience was Dvořák's eight-year old son, Otakar, who had a special interest in the success of his father's new symphony. In the preceding weeks, Otakar had accompanied his father to a New York café, where Dvořák met Anton Seidl to go over the new score. Young Otakar amused himself at a nearby toyshop, where a seven-foot long model of the ocean liner Majestic was on display, complete with its own miniature steam-chamber and working propellers. It cost a whopping $45—a HUGE amount of money in those days, and the answer from papa was always: NO!

Seeing that the boy's heart was set on having the toy, Anton Seidl suggested to Otakar that he wait until after the premiere and then ask his father again. Seidl told Otakar that if all went well at the premiere, Dvořák would be in a generous mood. The premiere was a great success, and, as Otakar recalled: "When Seidl offered to pay half the cost of the Majestic, Father could not say no. So that is how the three of us celebrated the success of the first performance of the New World Symphony."

Over the centuries, hundreds of composers have set the Latin prayer, “Ave Maria” – the “Hail Mary” in English – to music. The best-known music versions are by Franz Schubert and Charles Gounod, but there have been settings ranging from William Byrd to Igor Stravinsky.

On today’s date in 1997, the Los Angeles Master Chorale gave the premiere performance of a new unaccompanied choral setting by the American composer Morten Lauridsen.

Lauridsen was born in the Pacific Northwest in 1943, and worked for a time as a Forest Service lookout on an isolated tower near Mt. St. Helens before studying composition at the University of Southern California. By 1997, he proved be one of the most oft-performed choral composers of our time. His music is deeply rooted in the great choral tradition. One critic, writing of Lauridsen’s “Ave Maria,” said it “recalls the sumptuous polychoral music of Gabrieli as well as the rich textures of Brahms’s music for unaccompanied chorus.”

In a 1989 interview, Lauridsen said, “I think all of my music is deeply spiritual. I tend to be one who feels a part of a great whole on some level ... when I go off in my summers ... to [a] remote island off the coast of Washington [state], I’m able to commune with a greater sense and greater being, or whatever one might call it.”