Composers Datebook

On today's date in 1895, Gustav Mahler conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in the first complete performance of his own Symphony No. 2.

Mahler's Second is often called the "Resurrection" symphony, as the work includes a choral setting of the "Resurrection Ode" of the 18th-century German poet Klopstock, but Mahler himself gave his symphony no such title. In a letter to his wife, Mahler confided that his Second Symphony "was so much all of a piece that it can no more be explained than the world itself."

And like the world, music is often full of surprising transitions!

The American composer Paul Schoenfield quotes a dramatic passage of Mahler's Second in his concerto for piccolo trumpet and orchestra titled "Vaudeville."

In live performances, the sudden juxtaposition of Mahler and the Brazilian tune "Tico-Tico" always gets a laugh—which is just what Schoenfield intended.

"I often suffer from depression," says Schoenfield, "and once, when I was feeling pretty low, a friend of mind suggested I try writing something happy and upbeat to see if that would help. Vaudeville was the result. I don't know if it helped me, but people say when they hear it, it makes them feel better. The music of other composers I respect has that effect on me, and I'm glad if "Vaudeville has that effect on others."

"La Valse" -- one of the most popular orchestral works of Maurice Ravel -- was performed for the first time this day in 1920 by the Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris, conducted by Camille Chevillard. Ravel's score was subtitled a "choreographic poem for orchestra in the tempo of the Viennese waltz."

"La Valse" is a far more Impressionistic work than any of the waltzes by the Strauss Family. It is certainly darker. Ravel himself said, "I had intended this work to be a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, with which was associated in my imagination an impression of a fantastic and fatal kind of Dervish's dance."

"La Valse" was written for the great ballet impresario Serge Diagalev, who apparently found it undanceable, and his failure to stage "La Valse" caused a serious rift in his friendship with Ravel.

The contemporary composer Judith Lang Zaimont is an unabashed Ravel enthusiast—"Ravel's music defines 'gorgeous,'" says Zaimoint, "it's beguiling to the ear, and sensuous. His textures are built in thin layers, like a Napoleon pastry, and his intricate surfaces—beautifully worked-out—shine and fascinate."

Judith Lang Zaimont should know. For many years she taught composition at the University of Minnesota, and her own solo piano, chamber and orchestra works are increasingly finding their way into concert halls and onto compact disc.

On this day in 1952, thirty-one theaters nationwide offered the first pay-per view Met opera telecast. This was a regularly-scheduled performance of Bizet's "Carmen" broadcast live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, featuring Risë Stevens in the title role and Fritz Reiner conducting. The performance was relayed to the theaters by means of a closed TV circuit.*

Beginning in 1948, the Metropolitan Opera had experimented with live telecasts of their opening night performances, but relatively few people in the U.S. owned TV sets at the time. By 1952, most American households had TVs, but the Met's manager, Rudolf Bing, was dead-set against any further FREE telecasts. The 1952 pay-per-view experiment was not successful, and it wasn't until 1976—after Bing had resigned—that live telecasts of Metropolitan Opera performances resumed on public television.

The most successful of all commercial telecasts of a live opera performance occurred in 1951, when, on Christmas Eve that year, NBC-TV broadcast "Amahl and the Night Visitors" by Gian-Carlo Menotti on Christmas. NBC's black and white kinescope recording of that premiere performance was broadcast annually for a number of years—until it was accidentally erased by a network employee.** Although "Amahl" is no longer an annual visitor to television, it is still staged this time of year by amateur and professional opera companies around the world.

Today's date marks the birthday anniversary of Morton Gould, a quintessentially American composer, conductor, and advocate for music, who was born in Richmond Hill, New York, on today's date in 1913.

A child prodigy, he published his first work of music at the tender age of six. His teenage years coincided with the Great Depression, and Gould played piano for New York movie theaters and vaudeville acts. When Radio City Music Hall opened, Gould was hired as its staff pianist.

By the late 1930s, he was conducting and arranging orchestral programs for radio networks, and by the 1940s was writing scores for Hollywood films and Broadway shows. A decade or so later, he was writing music for TV. Gould became a favorite conductor for RCA recording sessions of both popular and classical music on LP.

All his life, Gould composed original, well-crafted works that gracefully incorporated American sounds ranging from spirituals to tap-dancing. One of these, for a singing fire department, he titled—with a sly wink at his colleague Aaron Copland—"Hosedown."

Gould was a serious composer with a healthy sense of humor AND a keen sense of the business of music. He served for many decades as the president of ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers,) lobbying hard for the intellectual property rights of composers in the age of the Internet.

Gould died in 1996 at the newly-opened Disney Institute in Orlando, Florida, where he was invited to serve as its first resident guest composer.

These days, no one is surprised if a popular film generates a series of sequels or even prequels, but back in the 1830s the idea of a composer coming up with a sequel to a symphony must have seemed a little odd. But that odd idea did pop into the head of French composer Hector Berlioz.

In 1830, Berlioz had a huge hit with his “Symphonie fantastique.” That “Fantastic Symphony” told a story through music, based on the composer’s own real-life, unrequited love for a British Shakespearian actress. The story ends badly, with our hero trying to end it all with a dose of opium, which, while not killing him, does produce, well, “fantastic” nightmares in which he is condemned to death for killing his beloved who reappears at a grotesque witches’ sabbath.

That seems a hard act to follow, but two years later, Berlioz produced a musical sequel, entitled “Lelio, or the Return to Life,” which premiered in Paris on today’s date in 1832. In this, our hero awakes from his drug-induced nightmare, and, with a little help from Shakespeare and a kind of 10-step arts-based recovery program, rededicates his life to music.

Berlioz intended the original and the sequel to be performed together as a kind of double-feature. Alas, while audiences thrill to the lurid “Symphonie fantastique,” they tend to drift during the admirable, but rather boring rehab sequel, which is rarely performed.

On this date in 1813, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was played for the first time in Vienna. The occasion was a benefit concert in honor of the Austrian and Bavarian soldiers who had died fighting Napoleon, with the concert's proceeds donated to their widows and orphans. At its first rehearsal, some of the musicians found the part writing of the new work intimidating. A friend of Beethoven's who sat in on rehearsals later recalled: "the violin players refused to play a passage and rebuked [Beethoven] for writing difficulties that were incapable of performance. But Beethoven begged the gentlemen to take the parts home with them. If they were to practice it at home it would surely go. The next day the passage went excellently, and the gentlemen themselves seemed to rejoice that they had given Beethoven such pleasure." The slow movement of Beethoven's Symphony so pleased the Viennese audience at its premiere that it had to be encored. On today's date in 1980, a private tragedy also prompted music. On December 8th that year, ex-Beatle John Lennon was shot and killed outside his apartment in New York City. American composer Aaron Jay Kernis was then a student at the Manhattan School of Music, living not far from where Lennon was slain. The death moved Kernis to reshape elements of Lennon's song "Imagine" into an altogether new work for cello and piano titled "Meditation (in memory of John Lennon)."

On today's date in 1842, an orchestra of 63 players performed Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 at the first concert of the Philharmonic Society of New York. This 1842 performance of Beethoven's Fifth occurred 34 years after the work's premiere in Vienna in 1808.

One early and avid Philharmonic Society fan was George Templeton Strong, a young New York lawyer who recorded this appraisal of the symphony after another Philharmonic Society performance of Beethoven's Fifth in 1844:

"The first movement, with its abrupt opening, the complicated entanglement of harmonies that makes up the rest of it, is not very satisfactory or intelligible to me as a whole, though it abounds in exquisite little scraps of melody that come sparkling out like stars through a cloudy sky... but the second and fourth movements—the third ain't much—are enough to put Beethoven at the head of all instrumental composers if he'd never written another note."

In 1865, Strong became the President of the Philharmonic Society, and founded the Church Music Association, which presented sacred choral compositions by leading European composers. George Tempelton Strong's diaries are a fascinating record of life in New York City during the 19th century. Entries from Strong's diaries were quoted frequently as part of the Ken and Ric Burns' PBS television documentaries on the American Civil War and the history of New York City.

Today marks the anniversary of the birth of the American composer and pianist Dave Brubeck. Born in Concord, California on December 6th, 1920, Dave Brubeck would become one of the most famous jazz performers of our time—and one of the most successful at fusing elements of jazz and classical music.

Brubeck studied with Schoenberg and Milhaud, and in the late 1940's and '50's formed a jazz quartet incorporating Baroque-style counterpoint and unusual time signatures into a style that came to be known as "West Coast" or "cool" jazz, culminating in the 1960 release of a landmark jazz album for Columbia Records titled "Time Out." This album produced two Hit Parade singles: "Blue Rondo à la Turk" and "Take Five." Ironically, Brubeck had to fight to convince Columbia to release an album composed totally of original material with no familiar "standards" to help sales!

In addition to works for chamber-sized jazz combos, Brubeck has written a number of large-scale sacred works, among them a 1975 Christmas Choral Pageant titled "La Fiesta de la Posada," or, "The Festival of the Inn."

Originally written to celebrate the restoration of a Spanish mission in California, it wound up being premiered in Hawaii by the Honolulu Symphony. Since its premiere, "La Fiesta de la Posada" has been performed by both professional and amateur ensembles, ranging from symphony orchestras to mariachi bands. Its premiere recording was made by the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Dale Warland Singers, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting.

So what do you call a setting of the Latin mass that is not in Latin? Well, if you’re the Moravian-born composer Leoš Janáček, you call it “Glagolitic,” since your Mass sets an Old Church Slavonic text written down in a script called that.

The idea came from a clerical friend who complained about the lack of original religious music in Czechoslovakia and suggested Janáček’s do something about it. His “Glagolitic Mass” premiered in Brno on today’s date in 1927. One reviewer wrote it was “a marvelous religious work of an old composer” – to which Janacek snapped back: “I am NOT old. And I am certainly NOT religious!”

Now, people do say “you’re only as old as you feel,” and the 73-year old Janáček had for many years been in love with a much younger woman who inspired his best works, and rather than any religious convictions, Janacek told another reporter that the piece was in fact jump-started by an electrical storm he witnessed and described as follows: ‘It grows darker and darker. Already I am looking into the black night; flashes of lightning cut through it . . . I sketch nothing more than the quiet motive of a desperate frame of mind to the words ‘Gospodi pomiluj’ [Love have mercy] and nothing more than the joyous shout ‘Slava, Slava!’ [Glory].”

Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto was first performed on today's date in 1881. The premiere took place in Vienna with Adolf Brodsky the violin soloist and the Vienna Philharmonic led by Hans Richter. It was not a big hit. The next day, the conservative Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick wrote: "The violin is no longer played: it is tugged about, torn, beaten black and blue." According to Hanslick, the concerto's finale (quote): "transports us to the brutal and wretched jollity of a Russian festival. We see gross and savage faces, hear crude curses, and smell the booze... Tchaikovsky's Concerto confronts us for the first time with the hideous idea that there may be musical compositions whose stink one can hear." Ouch! Tchaikovsky's score survived the bad review, but a more recent American work suffered a far unkinder cut. The original film score for the 1968 blockbuster movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey" was written by Alex North, who was born in Chester, Pennsylvania on today's date in 1910. North was hired by director Stanley Kubrick to write the music for "2001," but Kubrick ultimately decided to use pre-recorded classical and contemporary music instead. When North attended the New York premiere of "2001," he was devastated that not one minute of the music he had written was included in the final edit. Believe it or not, no one had informed him in advance!