Composers Datebook

Following the death of a loved one, the American poet Barbara Crooker wrote, “How can we go on/knowing the end of the story?”

The American composer Dale Trumbore attempted to answer that question with her haunting choral work entitled “How to Go on,” given its premiere performance on today’s date in 2016 in Anaheim, California by the Choral Arts Initiative.

Rather than setting the traditional Latin text of the Requiem Mass like Verdi, or passages from the Bible like Brahms, Trumbore crafted a kind of “secular requiem,” choosing texts by Crooker and two other contemporary American poets addressing fundamental questions of life, love, and loss.

“I have moments of utter panic about my own mortality,” confessed Trumbore, “and I know many other people do as well, although we may not openly discuss or address our fears about death. Taken together, the seven poems of ‘How to Go On’ recognize these fears while also cultivating a feeling of everything ultimately being at peace. Hopefully the music adds to that visceral feeling of reassurance. “

New Jersey native Dale Trumbore studied with the great choral composer Morten Lauridsen at the University of Southern California and her own vocal works are noted for what The New York Times described as her “soaring melodies and beguiling harmonies.”

In 1965, Leonard Bernstein took a sabbatical year from his duties as music director of the New York Philharmonic. In 1964, the busy Mr. Bernstein had just finished conducting Verdi’s opera “Falstaff” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and in 1966, would make his debut at the Vienna State Opera, conducting the same work. But he reserved 1965 to concentrate on composing.

“In the course of that year,” recalled Bernstein, “I had the luxury to do nothing but experiment. And part of my experimentation was to try to write some pieces that, shall we say, were less old-fashioned. I wrote a lot of music, 12-tone music and avant-garde music of various kinds, and a lot of it was very good, but I threw it all away. What I came out with at the end of the year was a piece called ‘Chichester Psalms,’ which is simple and tonal and as pure B-flat as any piece you can think of… because that was what I honestly wished to write.”

Bernstein conducted the premiere performance at Lincoln Center with the Camerata Singers and the New York Philharmonic on July 15th, 1965, and later in the month, traveled to Chichester Cathedral in England, which had commissioned the work in the first place, for the British premiere of his “Chichester Psalms.”

Today is Bastille Day, and on today’s date in 1900, the Opera-Comique in Paris premiered a patriotic opera entitled “La Marseillaise,” which melodramatically depicted how, on a spring night during the French Revolution, Rouget de l’Isle supposedly wrote the words AND music for the song which later became the French National Anthem.

The opera has been long forgotten, but its composer, the French-born Lucien-Leon-Guillaume Lambert, JUNIOR.—alongside his father, the American-born composer Charles-Lucien Lambert, SENIOR —is getting some renewed attention. Both are included in a landmark new reference work: The International Dictionary of Black Composers, published by the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College in Chicago.

The elder Lambert was born in New Orleans around 1828, and was a contemporary and friendly rival of the famous piano virtuoso and composer, Louis Moreau Gottschalk. The elder Lambert settled in Brazil, and njoyed an internation career in both Brazil and France, performing and publishing his piano dances and salon pieces, and often appearing in concert with his son.

Lucien Lambert, Jr. was born in France in 1858, and studied with Jules Massenet, among others. He won the prestigious Concours Rossini competition, and enjoyed a productive career in France and Portugal, composing ballets, concertos, and several operas—including the one that premiered in Paris on today’s date in 1900. He died in Portugal in 1945.

Decades after their deaths, Richard Strauss and Dmitri Shostakovich still remain politically controversial. Strauss worked in Nazi Germany under Hitler, and Shostakovich in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Was their art compromised by politics —and should that influence how we hear their music today?

In July of 1935, Strauss pleaded with Hitler for a personal meeting to explain his resignation as President of Germany’s office of musical affairs. He needn’t have bothered: the Gestapo had intercepted a letter Strauss had sent to the Jewish writer, Stefan Zweig, the Austrian librettist of Strauss’ latest opera. In that letter, Strauss mocked the Nazi’s obsession with race and urged Zweig to continue to work with him, even if they would have to meet in secret. Strauss was asked to resign, and, anxious to avoid further trouble for himself and his family, appealed directly to Hitler, who never responded.

Dmitri Shostakovich also ran afoul of his dictator when, in 1936, Stalin attended Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk” and hated it. The next day Shostakovich was harshly condemned in the official press, and lived in terror for the rest of Stalin’s reign, redirecting his music according to Party line and making obsequious political utterances whenever asked. Even so, many today claim to hear both terror AND heroic—if coded—resistance in Shostakovich’s best scores.

On this day in 1900, the world first heard the Requiem of Gabriel Fauré in its full orchestral version at a concert at the Paris World Exhibition. Faure’s Requiem ranks today among his best-known and best-loved compositions, and omits all reference to the terrors of the Last Judgment which appear in the traditional liturgical text, concentrating instead on comforting the bereaved. The Requiem was originally written for chorus and a more intimate chamber ensemble, and was occasioned by Fauré’s sorrow at the death of his own father.

The American composer Christopher Rouse has written a number of works dealing with the passing of friends and colleagues—works half-seriously, half-jokingly referred to as Rouse’s “Death Cycle.” Rouse’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Trombone Concerto from 1991 is dedicated to the memory of Leonard Bernstein; his Symphony No. 2, from 1994, contains a tribute to the young composer Stephen Albert, who died in a car crash; and a section of his Flute Concerto from 1993 reflects the composer’s shock upon reading an account of the senseless tragedy of a two-year-old child, abducted from an English shopping mall and killed by two ten-year-olds.

Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed has noted that much of Rouse’s work is “music of leave-taking… but it is also a music of catharsis, survival and a celebration of being alive.”

Today’s date marks two events in American musical history—one sad, one happy.

It was on today’s date in 1937 that George Gershwin died at 10:35 in the morning in a Hollywood hospital after an operation for a brain tumor. He was only 38 years old. Gershwin was the idol of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, and also admired by the “serious” composers of his day, such as Maurice Ravel and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Even Arnold Schoenberg, the fearsome leader of the 12-tone school—and Gershwin’s regular tennis partner in Los Angeles—said, in tribute, “there is no doubt that he was a great composer.”

A Gershwin memorial concert was held in the Hollywood Bowl later that year, featuring notables from both classical and popular music, including Otto Klemperer, Fred Astaire, and Lily Pons.

The happier anniversary we note is the founding of the Hollywood Bowl itself, on today’s date in 1922. This open-air auditorium was constructed in a natural canyon in the Los Angeles area, and hosted its first public concert with the fearsomely-bearded German conductor Alfred Hertz on the podium. An audience of 5,000 cheered music by Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Rossini. Works by those composers still show up on Hollywood Bowl programs today, often alongside selections from now-classic Hollywood film scores, often conducted by their composers—bearded or otherwise.

On today’s date in 1733, Georg Friderich Handel paid a visit to Oxford to conduct the premiere performance of his new oratorio, “Athalia,” at the Sheldonian Theater.

Handel had been invited by the University to add some musical pizzazz to an elaborate ceremony know as “The Publick Act,” during which honorary degrees were bestowed on worthy individuals. It was apparently a terrific performance, with one visitor from London reporting: “Never has there been such applause and marks of admiration.” But not everyone in Oxford was happy. One crusty don, apparently not a fan of new music, complained of the presence of “Handel and his lousy crew—a great number of foreign fiddlers.“

Handel was offered an honorary degree by Oxford, but he did not accept, claiming he was “too busy,” but maybe he just balked at paying the University’s required fee of 100 pounds to receive the honor.

In the 19th century, Oxford and its rival Cambridge would bestow honorary degrees on other major composers like Tchaikovsky and Dvorak, and, in our own time, between 1949 and 1990, one American composer, William Schuman received no fewer than 28 honorary degrees. In fact, Schuman had so many that he had a quilt sewn together from pieces of his ceremonial gowns, so that, as he liked to quip, “He could take his naps by degrees.”

Today we note the birthday anniversaries of two composers, one Italian, and one American.

On today’s date in 1879, Ottorino Respighi was born in Bologna, Italy. Respighi is one of the few Italian composers more famous for orchestral works than operas. In 1902, Respighi studied with the Russian master of orchestration, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and the result was a series of brilliantly scored instrumental works for large orchestra.

In 1913, Respighi settled permanently in Rome, and he immortalized that city in a famous trilogy of Roman tone poems: “The Pines of Rome,” “The Fountains of Rome,” and “Roman Festivals.” Respighi died in Rome in 1936.

July 9th is also the birthday of American composer Paul Chihara, who was born in Seattle in 1938. Chihara is of Japanese-American descent, and after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the outbreak of WWII, his family, like that of many Japanese-Americans, was relocated to an internment camp. Chihara studied literature at the University of Washington, and composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger.

Chihara has written a number of film scores, and his television credits include “China Beach” and “100 Centre Street.” For ten years Chihara was composer in residence with the San Francisco Ballet, and this music is from his ballet score titled “The Tempest,” after the play by Shakespeare.

It’s a book – it’s a YouTube video – it’s a concert hall work! It’s by Stookey and Snicket!

Now, “Stookey and Snicket” is not the name of a law firm in some obscure novel by Charles Dickens, but is in fact the collaborative team of American composer Nathaniel Stookey and American novelist Daniel Handler, who writes popular children’s books under the pen name of Lemony Snicket.

Stookey was the youngest composer ever commissioned for the San Francisco Symphony's New and Unusual Music Series when he collaborated with Handler on a piece for narrator and orchestra. Their collaboration, entitled “The Composer Is Dead,” premiered on this date in 2006.

This “new and usual” work with a macabre title is similar to Prokofiev's “Peter and the Wolf” and Britten's “The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra” in that it intends to introduce young audiences to the instruments of the orchestra. But anyone familiar with Lemony Snicket books can expect something a little quirky, and, in fact, “The Composer Is Dead” is a murder mystery, complete with a police inspector rounding up the usual suspects, and eventually pointing the finger…

And if you want to find out “whodunit”—well, you’ll have to buy the book!

On today’s date in 1956, one of the most successful of all American operas had its first performance at the Center Opera House in Colorado. “The Ballad of Baby Doe” was created by composer Douglas Moore and librettist John Latouche, and was based on a real-life tale of love and loss that had played out in that state.

Elizabeth McCourt Tabor, better known as “Baby Doe,” became the second wife of the Colorado prospector, businessman, and politician Horace Tabor in 1883. Tabor's messy divorce and remarriage to the young and beautiful Baby Doe was a major scandal at the time. Tabor was immensely wealthy, and had built an Opera House that bears his name and still stands in Leadville, Colorado, where he met Baby Doe. In 1899, Tabor had lost his entire fortune, and after his death, Baby Doe lived on in a poor miner’s shack near Leadville, where she was found frozen to death in 1935.

And it was on a cold winter’s day—a year before the premiere of their new opera—that Moore and Latouche paid a visit to Tabor’s Opera House in Leadville, and stood on its stage for inspiration. A witness of their visit recalled: “I was intensely aware of a great and eerie silence that suddenly came over the building. If ever there were ghosts of the past in the Tabor Opera House I could believe that they were there at that moment!”