Composers Datebook

In the Catholic Liturgical calendar, today is celebrated as the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven. In the Middle Ages, when the veneration of Mary as Notre Dame – French for "Our Lady" – was at its peak, a "Lady Mass" would be sung on a day like this.

And it's quite likely that one of the earliest-known settings of the Latin mass, the "Notre Dame Mass" by Guillaume de Machaut, was performed as a Lady Mass at one particular chapel in the Cathedral of Reims for many years in the 14th century. Guillaume and his brother Jean were both canons at that Cathedral and had arranged an endowment for a mass in honor of Mary to be sung there every Saturday.

In our day, Guillaume de Machaut's Notre Dame Mass is his most famous work, but in his own time, the age of Chaucer, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, he was far better known as a secular poet of Courtly Love. Machaut had been a widely-travelled and extremely well-connected artist before returning to his native Reims at the end of his life. Before that, employment by various members of the royalty took him from Paris to Prague and on trips to Italy, Poland, and Lithuania.

It's ironic that Machaut is nowadays famous for his sacred music – this one Mass in particular – when the vast majority of his music was decidedly secular in tone.

The fact that a new opera might debut at the Salzburg Festival in Austria is not in itself an unusual occurrence. But in August of the year 2000, the new opera in question was "L'Amour de Loin" or "Distant Love" by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho — making it the first opera by a female composer ever to be staged at the prestigious international Festival, and one that opened to rave reviews.

Born in Helsinki in 1952, Saariaho now lives with her husband and children in Paris. She has said that though she loves Helsinki, she's more comfortable in a city where she is not a celebrity. "I'm too well recognized in Finland," says Saariaho. "When I say this to colleagues in America, they think it's fantastic that there is a country where contemporary music composers can be esteemed public personalities."

Speaking of summer-time opera premieres, Richard Wagner's "Die Walküre" had its first performance as part of his "Ring cycle" on today's date in 1876, at Wagner's own theater in Bayreuth, a small town in Southern Germany.

Some early critics thought building a big theater in such an out-of-the-way place was a monumental act of folly, but Wagnerites have been making the midsummer pilgrimage there for over 125 years — despite the lack of air-conditioning in Wagner's theater. Appropriately, it's some of the warmest music from "Die Walküre" — the "Magic Fire" scene that brings the opera to its close.

On today's date in 1950, the orchestra of the Musical Arts Society of La Jolla, California gave the premiere performance of this music by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu. The "Sinfonietta La Jolla" was Martinu's response to the Society's call for a tuneful and approachable piece of new music for their chamber orchestra.

Martinu modeled his 20th century work on the 18th century symphonies of Haydn, a composer he very much admired. In fact, in 1890, when Martinu was born, his native Bohemia was still a part of the Austria-Hungarian empire in which Haydn had lived and worked a hundred years earlier.

Martinu's music blends the modernism of 20th century composers like Stravinsky with the rich 19th century tradition of Czech national composers like Dvořák — but Martinu's relations with his native land were anything but smooth. He was twice kicked out of the Prague Conservatory for his supposed lack of academic discipline, and instead established himself as a freelance composer in France and Switzerland. Then, just as his music began to receive some recognition and performances back in Prague, the Nazi invasion of World War II led to his works being banned.

In 1941, Martinu settled in the United States, where his music was very well received. In 1948, Martinu returned briefly to Prague, but found the new Communist government there as distasteful to him as the Nazis. Martinu's "Sinfonietta La Jolla" was written shortly after he returned to the United States.

Each summer, music lovers congregate about 25 miles north of downtown Chicago for the annual Ravinia Festival, the oldest outdoor music festival in America, and since 1936 the summer home of the Chicago Symphony.

But on today’s date in 2013, Ravinia was the venue for world-premiere performances of several new art songs, including “Twilight Butterfly,” by the American composer Augusta Read Thomas, a setting of a poetic text written by the composer herself.

“The poetic is always in my music”, explained Thomas. “In writing ‘Twilight Butterfly’ … I began with a mental picture … [of] someone, viewing a butterfly fluttering on a deep summer evening beneath the twilight moon. This imagery became so specific that writing my own lyrics was almost inescapable.”

Now even at their most poetic, composers must keep practical considerations in mind, as Thomas explained:

"Beyond the evocative, impressionist nature of the piece … I sought to provide a comfortable performance environment for the singer. My lyrics integrate words whose open vowel sounds suit the voice ... The piano gives the singer pitches at every entrance … [and] rubato indications allow the singer delicate rhythmic and interpretive flexibility.”

Elia Kazan's film, "On the Waterfront," a 1954 black and white classic starring Marlon Brando, won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It was also nominated for — but didn't win — that year's Oscar for best original score. It was Leonard Bernstein's first film score, and his last. He didn't enjoy the experience:

"I had become so involved in each detail of the score," Bernstein recalled, "that it seemed to me the most important part of the picture. I had to keep reminding myself that it really is the LEAST important part… Sometimes the music would be turned off completely to allow a line to stand forth stark and bare, and then be turned on again. Sometimes the music, planned as a composition with a beginning, middle, and end, would be silenced seven bars before the end… And so the composer sits by, protesting as he can, but ultimately accepting with a heavy heart the inevitable loss of a good part of the score. Everyone tries to comfort you. 'You can always use it in a suite.' Cold comfort. It's good for the picture, you repeat numbly to yourself… it's good for the picture."

But Bernstein did fashion a concert suite from "On the Waterfront" and, not one to waste time, conducted the first performance with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood on today's date in 1954, exactly two weeks after the film opened.

On today's date, Wolfgang Mozart completed two of his most famous works: on August 10th, 1787, the Serenade known as "Eine kleine Nachtmusik," and, on the same day exactly one year later, the "Jupiter Symphony" — Mozart's Symphony No. 41 in C Major.

Despite the fame of "Eine kleine Nachtmusik"—which translates as "A Little Night Music" — nothing is known for certain about the circumstances of its composition. Since a Serenade is a suite of orchestral movements normally written as background music for some rich patron's patio party, we can assume "Eine kleine" filled such a function some pleasant evening in Vienna. We can only hope the patrons appreciated what they got for their money.

Hardly any more is known about the composition of Mozart's final symphony, the "Jupiter," as no relevant letters or documents survive from this period of his life. The "Jupiter" nickname appears to have originated years later in London. In Germany it was just called "the symphony with the fugal finale."

There's a classic recording of Mozart's symphony favorites featuring the Marlboro Festival Orchestra with Pablo Casals conducting. The Marlboro Festival is held each summer for seven weeks in a cluster of old farm buildings on a hilltop in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Talented young professional musicians from all over the country gather here, principally to study, secondly to perform, for audiences eager to hear both the emerging and established Marlboro musicians.

In the 19th century, the German spa town of Baden-Baden was the place to be in the summer. Wealthy international tourists could bathe in artesian wells by day and by night gamble at the casino or attend performances at a splendid theater modeled on the Paris Opera.

That theater opened on today’s date in 1862 with the premiere of a new comic opera by the French composer Hector Berlioz, based closely on Shakespeare's comedy ‘Much Ado About Nothing', and titled “Beatrice and Benedict” after the witty pair of lovers in the play. The composer himself conducted.

“A great success,” Berlioz wrote the next day. “… applauded from beginning to end. I was recalled to the stage I don’t know how many times.” Despite the success, Berlioz confessed, “My infernal neuralgia was so bad that I mounted the podium … without feeling the slightest emotion. This bizarre indifference meant I conducted better than usual!”

Despite making light of his increasing illness, possibly Crohn’s Disease, this opera proved to be his last work, and Berlioz had only a few more years to live. His biographer David Cairns writes: "Listening to the score's exuberant gaiety, only momentarily touched by sadness, one would never guess that its composer was in pain when he wrote it and impatient for death.”

The French composer and concert pianist Cecile Chaminade was born in Paris on this date in 1857. She wrote symphonic works and even operas, but it was her piano pieces and songs that became enormously popular with amateur musicians around the turn of the century, especially in America.

In the decade before World War I, over a hundred "Chaminade Clubs" sprouted up in America, where Chaminade's music was performed by and for her fans. So imagine the excitement when it was announced that Madame Chaminade herself would be giving a concert tour of Eastern and Midwest states in 1908. Chaminade's American tour opened and closed at New York's Carnegie Hall, and over a two-month period she performed in Philadelphia, Louisville, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Boston, and Washington DC.

In 1908, the majority of amateur musicians in America were women, but the majority of music critics were men – the latter gave Chaminade's concerts mixed reviews at best, and downright sexist put-downs at worst. For her part, Chaminade was used to that sort of reception in Europe – and the limited role society allowed women artists in her day.

But in a Washington Post interview published during her American tour, Chaminade remained optimistic: "There is no sex in art," she said. "Genius is an independent quality. The woman of the future, with her broader outlook, her greater opportunities, will go far, I believe, in creative work of every description."

On today’s date in 1829, the German composer Felix Mendelssohn and his friend, Karl Klingemann, were on the North Sea bound for Glasgow.

Klingemann was not impressed with Scotland and wrote home that the rough North Sea passage had made most of the passengers sick — with one remarkable exception. “An 82-year old woman,” he wrote, “sat calmly by the smoke stack, warming herself in the cold wind. She was determined to see Staffa before she died. Staffa, with its silly basalt columns and caves, is in all the picture books. So, we were put into boats and clambered past the hissing sea on stumps of columns up to the odiously celebrated Fingal’s Cave. I must say, never did such green and roaring waves pound in a stranger cave. The many pillars make the inside resemble a monstrous organ. Black, resounding, and utterly without any purpose at all…”

Well, perhaps not utterly without purpose, since Felix Mendelssohn sent a letter home to HIS family on August 7 which included a scrap of musical notation. “To give you an idea of how strange I felt,” wrote Mendelssohn, “this music occurred to me.” It was the opening theme of what would become his concert overture titled “The Hebrides, or Fingal’s Cave.”

On today's date in 1946, Leonard Bernstein conducted the American premiere of Benjamin Britten's opera, "Peter Grimes," at the Tanglewood Festival in Lenox, Massachusetts. "Peter Grimes" had received its very first performance in London the previous year, and had already been staged elsewhere in Europe before reaching America. In fact, this quintessentially British opera was originally an American commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation run by the famous conductor and music patron Serge Koussevitzky, who was the founder and guiding spirit of the Tanglewood Festival.

Opera News covered the American premiere with a feature titled "Peter Grimes On Trial — A Symposium of Verdicts," beginning by quoting with the grudging praise of the New York Times' very conservative critic that the opera was "a very interesting modern work in a provocative form."

Also included were quotes from the lead singers, who noted its "strange intervals, harmonies, and difficult counter-play of the various voices." But Boris Goldowsky, the music director of the Tanglewood Center, provided the most accurate assessment, given the hindsight of history: "The opera has lasting merit," said Goldovsky, "and it will join the standard repertory. Like all new works, it was difficult at first, but future productions will be easier."

Here's an additional historical footnote: the Tanglewood premiere of "Peter Grimes" was the first opera Leonard Bernstein conducted professionally, and the opera's instrumental "Sea Interludes" were on the program of the last orchestral concert he ever conducted, 44 years later, in August of 1990, and again at Tanglewood.