Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1892, Darius Milhaud was born in Aix-en-Provence. He was one of the most amiable — and prolific — of 20th century French composers, producing over 400 works, including a dozen symphonies. Milhaud spent many years in America teaching at Mills College in California, whose climate reminded him of his beloved Provence.

Despite the rheumatoid arthritis that eventually confined him to a wheelchair, and the fact that he was forced to flee his native country when the Nazis arrived, Milhaud titled his 1973 autobiography: “My Happy Life.”

In his autobiography, Milhaud says that after composing his Twelfth Symphony, his publisher, half in jest, asked him to please stop and that surely twelve symphonies were enough. “I did not stop writing symphonies,” Milhaud slyly noted, “but a minor incident prompted me to give them other titles.” That incident occurred after a concert with the Boston Symphony when Milhaud conducted some of his own music. He heard the grandmother of one of his students remark, “All that is very nice, but it is NOT music for Boston!” Amused, Milhaud composed a work he titled: “Music for Boston,” and soon embarked on a whole NEW series of symphonic works, referred to generically as the “Music For” series, which include “Music for” Indiana, New Orleans, Lisbon, and Prague.

On today’s date in 1931, a short notice appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, which began: “Music never before heard in San Francisco will make up the program of the New Music Society to be conducted by Nicolas Slonimsky of Boston tonight in the Community Playhouse.” In addition to new works by Stravinsky and Prokofiev, Slonimsky conducted pieces by three American composers, including the world premiere of “Washington’s Birthday,” by Charles Ives.

Ives had written “Washington’s Birthday” in 1909, and the following year had talked some theater musicians into giving the work a run-through. “They made an awful fuss about playing it,” Ives recalled, “and only after some of the parts that seemed to me to be the best and strongest were cut.” About 10 years later, he asked some players of the New York Symphony to give the score a private reading at his home. Again, the musicians complained it was just too difficult.

Slonimsky’s 1931 performance in San Francisco presented the score complete and as originally written. Ives, who lived on the East Coast, was not present for the San Francisco premiere, but was delighted to learn — as he put it: “Neither the audience nor the critics were disturbed to the point of cussing.

On today’s date in 1773, the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa was visiting the country estate of Prince Nikolaus of Esterhazy. Among the attractions there were an opera house, a marionette theater, and the Prince’s impressive chamber orchestra led by Franz Joseph Haydn.

It’s possible that Haydn’s Symphony No. 48 was performed for the Empress — in any case, this symphony came to be nicknamed the “Maria Theresa.” We do know that Haydn and his orchestra did perform for the Empress — and that they were all dressed up in Chinese costumes for one performance during her visit! Among other “duties as assigned,” Haydn shot three wild game hens that were cooked up for the Empress’s dinner. Ah, the life of a court musician in the 18th century!

It’s also reported that Haydn told the Empress an amusing story from his childhood in Vienna. Apparently repair work was being done on St. Stephens Cathedral when Haydn was a boy soprano in the Cathedral Choir. The Empress was annoyed at the racket made by choirboys playing on the scaffolding and ordered that the next one caught playing up there would get a spanking. The following day Haydn climbed the scaffold, was caught, and received the promised punishment.

Apparently they both got a good laugh out of recalling the story.

On today’s date in 17th century Germany, a baby boy was christened who would grow up to be one of the leading composers and organists of his time. No, it wasn’t Johann Sebastian Bach — although the child we’re discussing here would become the teacher of the teacher of J.S. Bach and did serve as godfather to one J.S. Bach’s older relations.

It was Johann Pachelbel who was baptized on today’s date in Nuremberg in the year 1653. A famous musician in his day, after his death in 1706, Pachelbel would be pretty much forgotten by most music lovers until late in the 20th century, when an orchestral arrangement of a little chamber piece that he had written would, as Pachelbel’s “Canon,” suddenly become an unexpected hit. In 1979, the American composer George Rochberg even included a set of variations on Pachelbel’s Canon as the 3rd movement of his own String Quartet No. 6.

Like Bach, some of Pachelbel’s children also became composers, and one of them, Karl Teodorus Pachelbel, emigrated from Germany to the British colonies of North America. As “Charles Theodore Pachelbel,” he became an important figure in the musical life of early 18th century Boston and Charleston, where he died in 1750, the same year as J.S. Bach

On today’s date in 1928, Kurt Weill’s “Three Penny Opera,” whose cast members portrayed thieves, murderers, and sex workers, debuted at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin.

“The Three-Penny Opera” was a 20th century updating of a satirical 18th century British ballad-opera by John Gay, titled “The Beggar’s Opera.” A new German text was provided by playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill provided a jazzy score.

“The Three Penny Opera” was a smash success in Berlin, and within a year was taken up by theaters all over Europe. But in 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, all performances of “The Three Penny Opera” were banned, since Kurt Weill was Jewish, and Bertolt Brecht a communist sympathizer.

Just as “The Three Penny Opera” was being banned in Germany, its 1933 American premiere in New York was a flop, and the show closed after only a dozen performances. It wasn’t until 1952 that it was successfully revived in America. With a new English translation by the American composer Marc Bliztstein, the “Three Penny Opera” was reintroduced by Leonard Bernstein at a Music Festival at Brandeis University, and in 1954 reopened off -roadway in Greenwich Village to sold-out houses and rave reviews.

It was on this day in 1929 that a new march by John Philip Sousa was played for the first time —ONCE— and then promptly forgotten until almost 60 years later. The “Foshay Tower Washington Memorial March” was commissioned by Wilbur Foshay, a high-flying Minneapolis businessman of the Roaring 20s who fell victim to the stock market crash and criminal charges of mail fraud.

One of his extravagant projects was the Foshay Tower he built in downtown Minneapolis, a building shaped like the Washington Monument. The building still stands, with Foshay’s name carved in huge letters on all sides of the obelisk, now renovated as a historic site. In the lobby hangs Wilbur Foshay’s portrait, along with the score of Sousa’s march, which the March King himself conducted in Minneapolis on today’s date in 1929.

Soon after Wilbur Foshay’s empire of public utilities, factories and banks crumbled to dust, and he was convicted of fraud, spending two years and eleven months in Leavenworth prison. Not surprisingly, John Philip Sousa never got paid for his commission. He considered giving it a new name: “The Washington Memorial March,” but then decided to withdraw the piece completely, and the music was not published or performed again until 1988.

On today's date in 1952, at the aptly named Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York, pianist David Tudor premiered two new works by the American composer John Cage.

The first, titled "Water Music," was scored for a "prepared piano" — a piano into whose metal strings various items had been inserted to alter its sound — plus a duck call and transistor radio. For the second work, Tudor simply closed the lid of the piano, set a stopwatch for the length of the work's four sections — 4 minutes and 33 seconds to be exact — and then sat quietly on the piano bench. The composition consisted of whatever sounds occurred in that amount of time at that particular moment in time, including any breathing, coughing or snickering from the audience.

Some likened the piece to the all-white canvases of the avant-garde painter Robert Rauschenberg, on which accidental aspects of dust or bumps in the canvas created an arbitrary texture. Others thought it an outrageous affront at worst, or a bad joke at best. Whatever else one might think of it, as pianist David Tudor put it, "Cage's 4:33 is one of the most intense listening experiences one can have."

Cage once said: "I'm interested in making sounds that I don't understand," and insisted that random, unplanned sounds were as welcome to his ears as those he organized himself, as in this Cage piece for prepared piano titled "Mysterious Adventure."

Franz Liszt, the inventor of the "symphonic poem," wrote 13 of them. The second, "Tasso," had its first performance on today's date in 1849. The occasion was a festival celebrating the 100th birthday of the great German national poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the author of "Faust." The festival was in Weimar, Germany, the city where Goethe died and was buried in 1832.

Liszt's "Tasso" was written to serve as the overture to Goethe's drama about the Italian poet "Torquato Tasso," and its premiere performance was conducted by its composer. The main theme of the work is said to be a tune Liszt claimed he heard sung by an Italian gondolier in Venice.

One of the more surprising tributes to Goethe occurred not in Germany, but in scenic Aspen, Colorado, when the Aspen Music Festival was founded in Goethe's honor in 1949 — on the 200th anniversary of his birth. The Aspen Music Festival has grown over the years and today draws some 30,000 visitors annually. One of the original founders of the Festival was French composer Darius Milhaud, who taught at the Aspen Music School for many years. This music is from Milhaud's "Aspen Serenade," written in 1957.

More recently, during conductor David Zinman years as the Festival's Music Director, many contemporary American composers, including John Corigliano, Richard Danielpour, Christopher Rouse, and Augusta Read Thomas, have had their works performed — and occasionally premiered — in Aspen.

On today's date in 1937, in Mexico City, the Mexican composer and conductor Carlos Chavez conducted the first performance of this music by Aaron Copland.

The music owes its existence to Copland's friendship with Chavez, which led to Copland visiting Mexico in 1932. Copland and Chavez paid a visit to a wild Mexico City Dance Hall called "El Salon Mexico." Quoting a guide-book description of the place in his memoirs, Copland noted its "Three halls: one for people dressed up, one for people dressed in overalls but shod, and one for the barefoot." A sign on a wall over the dance floor read: "Please don't throw lighted cigarette butts on the floor so the ladies don't burn their feet!"

"In some inexplicable way," Copland recalled, "while milling about in those crowded halls, I felt a live contact with the Mexican people — their humanity, their shyness, their dignity and unique charm. I remember quite well that it was at such a moment I conceived the idea of composing a piece about Mexico and naming it 'El Salon Mexico.'"

Five years later Chavez conducted Copland's music in Mexico City. Copland admits he was nervous about how Mexican audiences would react. He had little to fear — Chavez and the musicians loved it, and so did the local critics, who called it "as Mexican as the music of Revueltas," which at the time, says Copland, was like saying, "as American as the music of Gershwin."

On today's date in 1846, Felix Mendelssohn's oratorio "Elijah" was performed for the first time at a choral festival in Birmingham, England.

Mendelssohn had visited England a number of times, and contemporary English audiences took both Mendelssohn and his music very much to heart. Mendelssohn himself conducted the Birmingham premiere of "Elijah," which was so well received that no fewer than eight numbers from the new work had to be encored. In fact, Mendelssohn's "Elijah" went on to become one of the best-loved and most-often performed choral works written in the 19th century.

Like many of Handel's 18th century oratorios, the story of "Elijah" came from the first books of the Bible — texts sacred to both the Jewish and Christian traditions.

In August of the year 1999, a new choral symphony was premiered at the Salzburg Music Festival in Austria, whose text was drawn from a number of the world's great sacred books, including the Book of Genesis from the Hebrew Bible alongside texts from the Sanskrit "Rig Veda," the Arabic "Koran," and texts from the Persian, Asian, and African sacred traditions. This work was the Fifth Symphony of the American composer Philip Glass, commissioned and conceived as a millennium celebration for the Salzburg Festival.

"Besides being a compendium of reflection on the process of global transformation and evolution," said Glass, "I hope that the work served as a strong and positive celebration of the millennium year."