Composers Datebook

Do you enjoy a good ghost story? The American novelist Henry James did, but liked to give the ones he wrote an extra twist – another “turn of the screw” you might say. In fact, one of his classic ghost stories from 1898 is titled just that: “The Turn of the Screw.”

In it, a young British governess is entrusted with the care of two orphaned children, who may – or may not – have been abused by their previous governess and her lover, both now dead, who may – or may not -- have returned as ghosts to continue their torment of the children. The manner in which Henry James tells the story leaves open the question whether the ghosts are real or just figments of the young governess’s lurid imagination.

“The Turn of the Screw” has been adapted for both stage and screen, and, on today’s date in 1954, an operatic version by the British composer Benjamin Britten received its premiere performance at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Each of the 16 scenes in Britten’s chamber opera is preceded by a variation on a ghostly 12-note theme, a “tone row” in the style of the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, and since we see and hear the ghosts on stage, it’s pretty clear Britten is suggesting the ghosts and the evil in the tale are disturbingly real.

On today's date in 1993, the first gala preview screening of a new film, "The Age of Innocence," based on the novel by Edith Wharton, took place at the Ziegfield Theater in Manhattan, as a benefit for the New York Historical Society. That was only appropriate, since Wharton's historical novel describes upper-class New York society of the 1870s — an age, if the film is to be believed, so emotionally repressed that the unbuttoning of a woman's glove can be a breathtakingly sensual moment.

The new film was directed by Martin Scorsese, famous for decidedly UN-repressed thrillers likes "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," and "Cape Fear" – and initially some thought Scorsese a poor choice to film Wharton's novel. The skeptics were proven wrong.

Much of the success of the film can be attributed to its ravishing orchestral score by American composer Elmer Bernstein. "It was my personal tribute to the music of Johannes Brahms," said Bernstein, who also credited Scorsese for appreciating the importance of music in bringing a movie to life: Unlike most directors today, Scorsese brought in Bernstein before "Age of Innocence" was filmed – not after.

"We started talking about the character of the music long before Scorsese ever shot a frame of film," recalls Bernstein, with admiration. Bernstein's "Age of Innocence" score was nominated for an Academy Award — the 12th time Bernstein had been so honored in his long and productive cinematic career.

During her lifetime, pianist Nadia Reisenberg was regarded as one of this country’s finest concert artists. She performed at Carnegie Hall 22 times, often with the New York Philharmonic.

But she made history on today’s date in 1939 as she embarked on a series of concert performances encompassing of all 27 of the Mozart Piano Concertos. These were live radio broadcasts conducted by Alfred Wallenstein, originating at WOR in New York, relayed coast-to-coast via the Mutual Network and the CBC in Canada, and overseas via short wave. There were 29 broadcasts in all, one a week, starting on September 12, 1939 and ending on March 26, 1940.

Mozart’s 27 piano concerts were first published in 1850, almost 60 years after the composer’s death, but before Reisenberg’s broadcasts, no one had performed ALL of them in such a series. The French composer and pianist Camille Saint-Saens played 9 Mozart concertos in Paris in 1864/1865, and 11 during a series in London in 1910, but Reisenberg was the first to perform all 27 in one concert sequence, since even Mozart himself never played them all in just one season.

Amazingly, live aircheck recordings of most of these historic radio broadcasts have survived and are now part of the Nadia Reisenberg Collection in the International Piano Archives at Maryland.

Today we take the unusual step of honoring that frequent bane of composers, the music critic. Specifically, Eduard Hanslick, born on this date in Prague, in 1825. He’s remembered today as the arch-conservative 19th century critic who once said an uncut performance of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” would be, quote, “a kind of murder committed upon singers and listeners alike.”

Wagner had his revenge in “Die Meistersinger,” where the Philistine critic Beckmesser is a thinly-disguised parody of Hanslick. Reviewing “Die Meistersinger,” Hanslick wrote that in that opera’s Overture “all the opera’s themes are dumped consecutively into a chromatic flood and finally tossed about in a kind of tonal typhoon.”

A famous and equally quotable 20th century music critic was the late Virgil Thomson, who once defined a music critic as a person “who seldom kisses, but always tells.” In his years as chief music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, his barbs were often as sharp as Hanslick’s. He called Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess” “fake folklore,” with “fidgety accompaniments.”

Like all music critics, Virgil Thomson called some right — and others wrong. Unlike most critics, though, Thomson was a composer himself — so, in addition to his witty reviews, there’s his genial music to enjoy as well, such as this brass suite titled “Family Portrait.”

We tend to think of Paris as the most sophisticated and worldly of European capitals – a city whose residents are unlikely to be shocked by anything they see or hear.

Ah, but that’s not always the case, as poor Hector Berlioz discovered on today’s date in 1838, when his new opera “Benvenuto Cellini” premiered at the Paris Opéra. One line in the libretto about the cocks crowing at dawn was considered, as Berlioz put it, “belonging to a vocabulary inconsistent with our present prudishness” and provoked shocked disapproval. And that was just the start of a controversy that raged over both the morality and the music of this new opera.

Following the dismal opening night, Berlioz wrote to his father: “It’s impossible to describe all the underhanded maneuvers, intrigues, conspiracies, disputes, battles, and insults my work has given rise to… The French have a positive mania for arguing about music without having the first idea – or even any feeling – about it!”

From the fiasco of the opera’s premiere, however, Berlioz did retrieve some measure of success. His famous contemporaries Paganini and Liszt both admired the work — and said so — and one flashy orchestral interlude from “Benvenuto Cellini” did prove a lasting success when Berlioz recast it as a concert work: his “Roman Carnival Overture.”

Today is the birthday anniversary of the American composer and teacher Edward Burlingame Hill, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1872.

Hill studied at Harvard, which was not surprising, since his grandfather had been President of the college, and his father taught chemistry there. “My father sang the songs of Schubert,” recalled Hill, “and was a great admirer of Bach. Thus at an early age I was imbued with a deep love for serious music.” Hill studied with the 19th century American composer John Kowles Paine, who had established at Harvard the first music department in any American university. After Hill took all of Paine’s courses, he went on to study in Paris with Charles Widor.

Hill’s early works were in the French style, and you might say that he “wrote the book on the subject” — literally. In 1924, Hill published a study titled “French Music” and was awarded the French Legion of Honor for his efforts. During his lifetime, major American orchestras performed Hill’s music, but today, if he’s remembered at all, it’s as a teacher at Harvard. Toward the end of tenure, one his students was Leonard Bernstein, who, in 1953, made a recording of his teacher’s “Prelude for Orchestra.” Hill died in New Hampshire in 1960, at the age of 88.

On today’s date in 1971, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., was inaugurated with a gala performance of a new work by Leonard Bernstein. Entitled “Mass,” this was a musical and visual extravaganza which reinterpreted the text of the Latin liturgy and involved more than 200 singers, dancers, and instrumentalists.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had asked Bernstein to write a piece to open the new Center but was conspicuous by her absence. President Richard Nixon also chose to stay away, rightly fearing that Bernstein’s “Mass” would be interpreted as an embarrassing protest against the war in Vietnam.

The Washington Post’s front-page review, titled “A Reaffirmation of Faith,” was glowing in its praise, but Time magazine’s assessment was condescending, quoting some New York wits who dubbed it the “Mitzvah Solemnis.” The New York Times review was brutal, calling Bernstein’s Mass “a combination of superficiality and pretentiousness . . . [and] the greatest mélange of styles since the ladies’ magazine recipe for steak fried in peanut butter and marshmallow sauce.”

But Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, when she finally did hear Bernstein’s work, sent the composer an inscribed photograph which read: “Lenny – I loved it, yes, I did, and I love you, too. Thank you for making ‘Mass’ so beautiful.”

“The Three Choirs Festival” is one of England’s oldest musical traditions. Established around 1715, it showcases the cathedral choirs of Gloucester, Worcester, and Herford, and presents both choral and orchestral works by British composers

Vaughan Williams' “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis” was premiered there in 1910, and in the audience was an 18-year-old aspiring composer named Herbert Howells, who later would relate how Vaughan Williams had sat next to him for the remainder of the concert and shared his score of Elgar's “The Dream of Gerontius” with him.

Howells studied music at Gloucester Cathedral before heading off to London and the Royal College of Music. He also got married and had two children. In 1935, his 9-year-old son Michael contracted polio and died three days later. The grief-stricken Howells began composing a memorial work as private therapy, choral sketches he considered too painful to complete and too personal to have performed.

But in 1950 Howells was asked for a new work to be premiered at Three Choirs Festival, and, at the urging of Vaughan Williams and others who had seen Howell’s private sketches, Howells completed a work he titled “Hymnus Paradisi,” and led the premiere himself on September 7, 1950, one day after the 15th anniversary of his son's death.

Works by Henry Kimball Hadley rarely shows up on concert programs anymore, but in the early years of the 20th century, he ranked as a major and very popular American composer. In 1910, Gustav Mahler, during his tenure at the New York Philharmonic, conducted Hadley’s tone poem “The Culprit Fay,” and in 1920, Hadley’s opera “Cleopatra’s Night” was staged at the Metropolitan Opera.

But by the time of his death on today’s date in 1937, Hadley’s full-blown, late-Romantic style was falling out of fashion in the modernist age of Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

In other aspects of his musical career, however Hadley was quite avant-garde and forward-looking: In 1921 he became associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic -- the first American-born conductor to hold a full-time post with any major American orchestra. In 1926, he was invited by Warner Brothers to conduct the Philharmonic at the New York premiere of their silent film “Don Juan,” starting the legendary actor John Barrymore, and the following year wrote an original score for a second Barrymore silent feature entitled “When A Man Loves.”

Hadley is also credited with making the first symphonic “video,” a 10-minute Vitaphone film of Hadley conducting Wagner’s “Tannhauser” Overture that was shown in movie theaters back then and you can still see today via YouTube!

Amy Marcy Cheney Beach was born in Henniker, New Hampshire, on today’s date in 1867. Amy Beach — or, Mrs. H.H.A. Beach, as she was also called — was one of America’s first major women composers and a gifted concert pianist to boot

We probably have Mr. Beach to thank for Amy’s decision to devote herself more to composition than performance. In the spring of 1885, at the age of 18, Amy debuted as a soloist with the Boston Symphony, and it seemed a major concert career was in the offing. But later that same year, she married Dr. Henry Harris Aubrey Beach, a prominent New England physician. In respect to his wishes and the custom of the day for women in high society, Mrs. H.H.A. Beach curtailed her concert career and concentrated instead on writing music. Her first published work was a setting of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a long-time family friend.

Only after her husband’s death in 1911, did Amy revive her career as a concert pianist with a concert tour throughout Germany, returning to America at the outbreak of World War I. In her later years, she acted as mentor to a whole new generation of American women pursuing careers in music. She died in New York in 1944.