Composers Datebook

The gourmet composer Gioachino Rossini had a beef dish, Tournedos Rossini, named after him, and over the centuries countless towns have honored their native composers by naming streets after them — but few can top the honor bestowed on the late Olivier Messiaen by the citizens of Parowan, Utah. They named a mountain after him.

On today's date in 1978, the citizens of Parowan resolved to name a local mountain Mt. Messiaen in honor of the French composer, who had spent a month in Utah five years earlier while working on his symphonic suite titled "From the Canyons to the Stars."

Messiaen had been commissioned to write a work for the American Bicentennial in 1976. Apparently back in France he owned of a series of books titled "Wonders of the World," which included striking color pictures of the canyons of Utah, which so fired Messiaen's imagination that he made a special pilgrimage to Bryce Canyon in Utah see them with his own eyes. The result was an orchestra score titled "From the Canyons to the Stars," which includes a movement titled "Bryce Canyon and the Red-orange rocks."

"Colors are very important to me," Messiaen once said. "I have a gift — it's not my fault, it's just how I am — whenever I hear music or even if I read music, I see colors. The colors do just what the sounds do: they are always changing, but they are marvelous."

Today marks the birthday of American composer David Raksin, born in 1912 in Philadelphia. He studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg, was friends with Igor Stravinsky, and has written a wide range of concert music. Yet Raksin is best known for one haunting tune — the theme he wrote for a classic 1944 film noir entitled "Laura."

David Raksin said the true story behind this music sounds like something out of a Grade-B movie. The very weekend he faced a deadline and simply had to come up with a theme for "Laura," Raksin says he received a "Dear John" letter from his wife stating she was leaving him. Unwilling to believe she was serious (she was); he stuck the letter in his pocket and tried to lose himself in his work.

"By Sunday night," recalled Raksin, "I realized I had a very painful case of writer's block. From the time I was a boy, when the music wouldn't flow, I would prop a book or a poem on the piano and improvise. The idea was to divert my mind from conscious awareness of music-making… I took the letter out of my pocket, put it up on the piano and began to play… and then, without willing it — I was playing the first phrases of what you now know as the 'Laura' theme."

A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust, and a hearty “Hi-yo, Silver!”

Generations of American baby boomers first heard Rossini’s “William Tell” Overture as the opening credits of the old Lone Ranger TV western, but we suspect only a few of them ever realized the overture by an Italian composer was written for a French opera about a Swiss archer, which was adapted from a German play by Friedrich Schiller. Like a Facebook relationship, “It’s complicated.”

Anyway, Rossini’s “William Tell” was first heard in Paris on today’s date in 1829. Rossini hoped “William Tell” would be considered his masterpiece. Ironically, the complete opera is only rarely staged these days, but the “William Tell” overture became a familiar concert hall showpiece – SO familiar, in fact, as to become something of a musical cliché.

The Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich gave a dark 20th-century spin to Rossini’s overly familiar theme, when he quoted the “William Tell” overture in the opening movement of his Symphony No. 15. In the context of Shostakovich’s enigmatic final symphony, Rossini’s jaunty little theme comes off like a forced smile, and audiences are free to read whatever political subtext they wish into its rather sinister context.

In Greek mythology, Orpheus was a priest of Apollo and a fabulous musician, who attempted to bring his dead wife Eurydice back from the underworld.

On this day in 1774, in Paris, the first performance of the French version of the opera “Orpheus and Eurydice” by Christoph Willibald Gluck took place. Gluck originally wrote the opera in Italian, but for the French version in 1774, he added some new instrumental music, including a serene interlude depicting the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” —an excerpt that has become one of Gluck’s most famous and best-loved works.

Over the centuries, more than 60 operas have been written on the theme of Orpheus and Eurydice. In fact, two of the very FIRST operas ever written are based on this legend, both by Italian composers of the late Renaissance: one by Jacopo Peri performed in 1600 and another by Claudio Monteverdi from 1607.

One of the more recent operas based on the Orpheus legend is by the American composer Philip Glass, based on a libretto he adapted from the 1950 movie, “Orpheus,” by the surrealistic French poet and film director Jean Cocteau. The American Repertory Theatre and the Brooklyn Academy of Music commissioned Glass’s version in 1993.

Most classical music lovers know and love Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, Opus 95, and his “American” String Quartet, Opus 96, but fewer know the work he wrote next: his String QUINTET, Opus 97. We think that’s a shame, since all three rank among the finest things the Czech composer ever wrote.

Dvorak’s Quintet is also nicknamed the “American” – and for good reason: It was completed in 1893 on today’s date in Spillville, Iowa, during the composer’s summer vacation in that small, rural community of Czech immigrants, where he and family could escape the noise and bustle of New York City and his duties there at the National Conservatory.

Dvorak had been brought to America to teach Americans how to write American music, but, like any good teacher, Dvorak was as eager to LEARN as to teach. In New York, Henry T. Burleigh, a talented African-American Conservatory student taught Dvorak spirituals, and in Spillville Dvorak eagerly attended performances of Native American music and dance by a group of touring Iroquois Indians.

Traces of those influences can be heard in Dvorak’s “American” works. In his Quintet, for example, unison melodic lines and striking rhythms seem to echo the Iroquois chants and drums Dvorak heard during his summer vacation in Spillville.

Two or three days after his death on July 28, 1750, the final rites were held in Leipzig, in St. John’s Church, for Johann Sebastian Bach, considered by many the greatest composer who ever lived. Bach was buried in the churchyard of St. John’s. In 1894, his remains were discovered during excavations and were reburied inside.

Although not unappreciated in his lifetime, and not completely forgotten for nearly a century as myth would have it (Mozart and Beethoven both revered him), it’s true that Bach’s real stature was not fully recognized by the wider public until Felix Mendelssohn’s famous revival performance of Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” in Berlin in 1829.

And since Mendelssohn’s 19th century revival, Bach’s Passion settings and cantatas have been staged as operas or ballets in the 20th and 21st. His music has survived arrangements for solo piano, full symphony orchestra, Moog synthesizer, authentic “period” instruments, Japanese koto orchestra, shakuhachi flute, and the various jazz stylings of the Swingle Singers and the late pianist of the Modern Jazz Quartet, John Lewis.

However it was adapted or altered by the passing fashion or fads of the day, Bach’s music continues to touch whoever plays it or listens to it.

On today’s date in 1965, the New York Philharmonic gave the premiere performance of an orchestral work by Duke Ellington, titled “The Golden Broom and the Golden Apples,” with the composer conducting. On the same program, Lukas Foss conducted the very belated, posthumous premiere of “From the Steeples and the Mountains,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Charles Ives.

In 1965, Duke Ellington, too, had been nominated for the Pulitzer, but didn’t get it. The Pulitzer jury did, however, recommend that Ellington receive a Special Citation in honor of “the vitality and originality of his total productivity.” That recommendation was rejected, and when word leaked out, a scandal ensued. The 66-year old Ellington remained unflappable, and said, with just a tiny hint of irony, “Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.”

“I work and I write,” said Ellington. “My reward is hearing what I’ve done. I’m hardly surprised that my kind of music is still without official honor at home. Most Americans will take it for granted that European music—classical music, if you will—is the only really respectable kind. Jazz is like the kind of man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.”

In 1999, the Pulitzer Committee made amends, and Ellington was awarded a Special Citation—belatedly and posthumously—to commemorate the centennial year of his birth.

In 1917, on the day the United States declared war in Germany, the American song-writer and former vaudeville showman George M. Cohan composed a song titled “Over There,” based on the first three notes of a military bugle-call.

On today’s date the following year, the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso performed Cohan’s song for an audience of 10,000 at an open-air concert in Ocean Grove, N.J. Musical America reported (quote): “It was a great opportunity for the rocking-chair brigade, which had never in its whole life witnessed such an outpouring of humans. And the automobiles! The Ocean Grove police department had BOTH its hands busy directing the traffic, extricating Fords from Rolls-Royces and preventing them from parking on the pathways.”

Caruso’s 1918 rendition of “Over There,” despite his heavily Italian-accented English, was the smash hit. “The audience got up on its 20,000 feet and yelled with delight,” reported Musical America, which also noted that Cohan had completed a brand new patriotic song addressed to the troops overseas, ending with the lines, “When you come back, and you will come back, There’s a whole world waiting for you.”

In 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented Cohan with the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to World War I morale, in particular for his songs "You're a Grand Old Flag” and "Over There."

Playing in a marching band isn’t always as easy as it looks. Imagine the predicament in which Berlioz found himself on today’s date in 1840, conducting 210 musicians under a broiling noonday sun as they slowly progressed to the Place de Bastille.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the French “July” Revolution of 1830, a memorial column had been erected on the spot where the Bastille once stood, and the remains of fallen revolutionary heroes were being transferred to a cenotaph at the foot of the column, accompanied by Berlioz’s specially commissioned “Funeral and Triumphal Symphony,” composed for massed military bands. Berlioz himself, in full military uniform and conducting with a saber, led the solemn procession that hot July day.

In a letter to his father, Berlioz wrote: “The old know-it-alls were claiming that I’d never manage to have my symphony performed on the march and that my 210 musicians wouldn’t stay together for even 20 bars. So I placed the trumpets and drums in front so that I could give them the beat while walking backwards. I planned it so that in the opening bars these instruments play by themselves, so they could be heard by the rest of the band. The symphony’s march and finale were played six times, on the march, with an ensemble and effect that were truly extraordinary.”

It was on this day in 1929 that the first performance was given of a radio cantata—not on the radio, oddly enough, but in a concert hall in Baden-Baden, Germany. It was entitled “Lindbergh’s Flight,” with a text by Bertolt Brecht, and music by both Kurt Weill AND Paul Hindemith. This cantata was intended for a later radio broadcast and meant to illustrate both the literal and philosophical aspects of Charles A. Lindbergh’s first-ever solo flight across the Atlantic two years earlier in 1927.

Today, when planes whiz back and forth across the Atlantic every day, carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers, we have to remember that in 1927, the number of people flying to Europe nonstop was just ONE, namely Lindbergh, and the feat made headline news around the world.

Three decades after Lindbergh’s flight, composer Franz Waxman would write the film score for “The Spirit of St. Louis,” a 1957 Hollywood version of the Atlantic crossing starring Jimmy Stewart.

And speaking of Atlantic crossings, Waxman, Weill and Hindemith—all German-born composers—would emigrate to the U.S. in the 1930s, their flight a result of the racial laws and artistic repression that followed the rise of Nazi ideology in Europe.