Composers Datebook

In the summer of 1912, the Vienna Philharmonic presented a week-long Music Festival that offered three “Ninths”—Beethoven’s Ninth conducted by Felix Weingartner, Bruckner’s Ninth conducted by Artur Nikisch, and, on today’s date, the world premiere of Gustav Mahler’s Ninth, conducted by Bruno Walter.

Mahler had died the previous year, and the Viennese public greeted the posthumous premiere of his last complete work with a roar of applause—and decidedly mixed reviews. The work’s elegiac opening won over most of the professional critics, but many were frankly puzzled by some of the symphony’s raucous middle movements.

Bruno Walter, the Mahler protégé who conducted the premiere, was singled out for praise, however. Walter made two famous recordings of Mahler’s Ninth: The first made live during a January 16, 1938, concert of the Vienna Philharmonic. On January 16, 1961—exactly 23 years to the day after that 1938 recording—Walter began making a stereo recording of Mahler’s Ninth at the American Legion Hall in Hollywood, with the Columbia Symphony.

Walter was 84 in 1961, and despite repeated pleas from the control room, couldn’t stop himself from vigorously stamping his foot 17 seconds into the second-movement, Laendler—a thump not written in Mahler’s score, but now part of Walter’s classic second recording.

In the middle of the 15th century, a German printer by the name of Johann Gutenberg invented a method of printing from moveable type cast in metal. His invention revolutionized the way books were printed, and the widespread dissemination of Gutenberg Bibles made him famous in Europe.

In the summer of 1840, the city of Leipzig planned to unveil a new statue of Gutenberg, and commissioned composer Felix Mendelssohn for two new works. The first, for two choirs, would accompany the unveiling of the statue of Gutenberg, and would take place in the city’s open marketplace after the morning church service on June 24th. The following day, June 25th, there would be a gala concert in Leipzig’s St. Thomas Church featuring the church choir and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra performing a new symphony by Mendelssohn.

Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2, entitled “Lobgesang,” or “Hymn of Praise,” is modeled on Beethoven’s Ninth, opening with purely instrumental movements, and concluding with a finale for vocal soloists and chorus. Mendelssohn’s text was taken from Martin Luther’s German-language translation of the Bible. Since the premiere was intended for St. Thomas Church, where the master of counterpoint Johann Sebastian Bach had once been Kantor, Mendelssohn chose to end his Symphony with a big fugue.

Today’s date marks the shared birthday of two of America’s most famous “maverick” composers, both hailing from California.

June 24, 1901, is the birth date of Harry Partch, an Oakland native. Partch devoted his life to developing an alternate system of tuning. Instead of the conventional Western system of equal temperament, in Partch’s harmonic world, microtones were welcomed.

To play his expanded scales, Partch designed and built new instruments with colorful names like “marimba eroica” and “cloud chamber bowls.” For Partch, music was a synthesis of theory and theater, ritual and dance -- intensely physical in nature and best experienced live. Harry Partch died in San Diego in 1974.

Another Californian, born on this date in 1935, is Colfax native Terry Riley.

It was in San Francisco in 1964 that Riley’s most famous piece, entitled “In C”, received its premiere. The score consists of 53 phrases, or modules, with each player freely repeating each phrase as many times as desired before proceeding to the next. The result is an unpredictable, unique music work of canonic textures and polyrhythms, capable of being performed by any group of instruments ranging from a marimba ensemble to a full symphony orchestra, and now regarded as one of the seminal works of the so-called “minimalist” movement in music.

Today we remember the Russian composer Reinhold Glière, who died in Moscow on today’s date in 1956. These days Glière is probably best known for the popular “Russian Sailor’s Dance” from his ballet “The Red Poppy.”

Glière was born in Kiev in 1875, and studied at the Moscow Conservatory, where he later became professor of composition. That was after the Russian Revolution, and Glière could count among his students Sergei Prokofiev and Nikolai Miaskovsky. With the success of works like “The Red Poppy,” Glière is often cited as the founder of Soviet ballet.

Glière also wrote several symphonies, all intensely Russian in color and character. The most famous of these is his Third, subtitled “Ilya Murometz” after a legendary Russian folk hero.

Glière was also intrigued by the folk music of the far eastern republics of the then USSR, incorporating folk themes from the Soviet Union’s Trans-Caucus and Central Asian peoples into some of his orchestral scores.

He was a very prolific composer, but apart from a handful of very popular works, most of Glière's operas, ballets and orchestral works remain largely unfamiliar to most music lovers in the West.

For eight summers starting in 1868, the German-born American conductor Theodore Thomas lead concerts at New York City’s Central Park. As usual with Thomas’s programs, there was a calculated mix of old and new music, and more than a few premieres.

On today’s date in 1871, for example, Thomas conducted the first American performance of “Kaiser March,” a brand-new work by the German opera composer Richard Wagner completed earlier that year to honor Wilhelm of Prussia who had just become Emperor of a united German Reich. It went over very well back in Germany, and, considering that: a) everybody likes a good march, especially at summertime pops concerts and, b) a sizeable percentage of New York’s musicians in Thomas’s day were either German-born or German-trained, we can assume Wagner’s “Kaiser March” was well-received at its American debut.

Five years later, in 1876, Thomas would conduct the premiere of another celebratory march by Wagner, this one commissioned for the 100th anniversary of the American Revolution. Wagner was paid $5000, an enormous sum of money in those days, to compose an “American Centennial March” for national festivities in Philadelphia.

Both of these marches are seldom performed today, and are regarded as pretty thin stuff, musically speaking. Wagner himself quipped that the best thing about his “American Centennial March” was the fee he received for writing it.

There are dozens of famous cello concertos that get performed in concert halls these days, ranging from 18th century works by the Italian Baroque master Antonio Vivaldi to dramatic 20th century works of the Russian modernist Dmitri Shostakovich.

In 2007, the American composer Sean Hickey was commissioned by Russian cellist Dmitry Kouzov to write a new concerto, which received its premiere performance on today’s date two years later, in 2009.

“In this work,” Hickey recalled, “I wanted to fuse my interest in neo-classical clarity and design with the songful, heroic nature of the greatest cello concerto literature … My Cello Concerto had its Russian premiere at the Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace, a neo-Baroque edifice on the banks of the Fontanka River in Saint Petersburg … [It] was then recorded in the legendary Melodiya Studios on Vasilevsky Island in St. Petersburg, known from Soviet times as producing recordings from the likes of Shostakovich, Rostropovich, Mravinsky, and many others.

“One moment of personal satisfaction came when the Russian orchestra, after rehearsing the piece for days, picked up on a buried quotation from Shostakovich’s Seventh, his ‘Leningrad Symphony’ in the final pages of my piece. It’s easy to forget in the glittering and watery metropolis, which rivals any European city for beauty and culture, that St. Petersburg is a city full of ghosts.”

It’s a mark success when a new musical work is recorded shortly after its premiere, and even more when the recording session itself IS the premiere. But that was the case with many works written by the American composer Leroy Anderson, whose short and tuneful compositions from the 1940s, 50s and 60s proved enormously popular during his lifetime.

On June 20, 1962, Anderson was at New York’s Manhattan Center, conducting for Decca Records the premiere of his “Clarinet Candy.” By recording in the summer months, when many of New York’s best symphonic players were available for studio work, Anderson was able to round up top-notch musicians for his recording sessions.

The contemporary Argentinean-born composer Osvaldo Golijov has also proved popular enough to have many of his brand-new works recorded either at their premieres or shortly thereafter. This Klezmer-style clarinet piece is entitled “Rocketekya,” and was written for the 20th anniversary of New York’s Merkin Hall. Golijov explained: “I thought it would be interesting to write a different sort of celebratory piece, and I had an idea of a shofar blasting inside a rocket—an ancient sound propelled toward the future.”

On today’s date in 1869, a visitor to Boston’s Back Bay could have marveled at a huge, specially-erected wooden structure sporting American flags and surrounded by a mini-village of peanut vendors and lemonade stands.

Inside, an orchestra of 1000 sat surrounded by a chorus of 10,000. Over the stage hung giant portraits of Handel and Beethoven, and higher yet depictions of two angels gazing heavenwards by a banner reading “Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men.”

This June 19th concert marked the end of a 5-day Jubilee Festival of Music and Reconciliation, as America tried to mend the wounds caused by its recent Civil War. Former Union General and current President Ulysses S. Grant was on hand, and the New York Times opined that the Festival offered proof that, “our people can think of something beyond … the almighty dollar.”

During the Festival, the massive orchestra and chorus performed selections ranging from “classical” works by Bach and Mozart to more recent works by Meyerbeer and Verdi.

A review by John S. Dwight, Boston’s leading music critic of that day, found the immense chorus “glorious and inspiring” and the huge orchestra “splendid.” However, he dismissed a performance of Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus,” accompanied by 100 real anvils, as a “childish, trivial thing for such a grand occasion.”

Drop the name “Pleyel” among classical music aficionados and one might say, “Oh, yeah, Pleyel. He was a French piano maker. I think Chopin liked Pleyel pianos.” Another might add, “He was a composer, too, but... I don’t think he was really French…” Another might add, “Didn’t he have something to do with Haydn?”

Well, they’re ALL right. Ignace Joseph Pleyel was born near Vienna on today’s date in 1757. As a teenager, he became a pupil of Haydn, and in 1791, ended up in London, where, for a time, Pleyel’s orchestral concerts competed with Haydn’s. The two remained friends, however, dined together and attended each other’s concerts.

In 1795, Pleyel set up shop in Paris, where he founded a publishing house and piano factory. His own compositions remained enormously popular. In 1805, Pleyel travelled to Vienna, visited the aging Haydn and heard that young upstart Beethoven improvising at the piano.

In 1822, the whaling port of Nantucket, Massachusetts, formed a Pleyel Society ‘to chasten the taste of listeners,’ in the words of a local newspaper. According to the New Grove Dictionary of Music, “The most telling evidence of the appeal of Pleyel’s music lies in the thousands of manuscript copies that filled the shelves of archives, libraries, … and private homes, and in the thousands of editions of his music produced in Europe and North America.”

Back in 1714, today’s date fell on a Sunday, and, if you had happened to be attending a church service at the German Court of the Duke of Weimar, you might have heard some new music by the Duke’s court composer and organist, Johann Sebastian Bach.

It’s possible that Bach’s Cantata No. 21 received its first performance that day: its first part before the sermon, its second part right afterwards. The opening text, which Bach sets as a fugue, begins “Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis” or, in English, I had much affliction.”

Now even in Bach’s day, composers were afflicted with critics. In 1725, a then-famous composer—and critic—Johann Mattheson took Bach to task for the way in which he had set his text by quoting exactly what is being sung:

"I, I, I, I had much affliction, I had much affliction, in my heart, in my heart. I had much affliction, in my heart…” etc… Mattheson’s point, apparently, was that vocal music should not stutter, but flow gracefully in the “gallant” style that was becoming more fashionable and trendy back then.

Even so, Mattheson knew that Bach was the real deal, and earlier had praised Bach in print for church and keyboard music so well written that (quote), “we must certainly rate this man highly.”