Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1931, the Russian-born American conductor, and composer Nicolas Slonimsky was in Paris conducting the first of two concerts of ultra-modern music from the New World. These were presented under the auspices of the Pan American Association of Composers, and funded by an anonymous philanthropist Slonimsky later identified as retired insurance executive and fellow composer Charles Ives.

Slonimsky had approached Ives early in 1931 with the idea of presenting a series of new music concerts in New York. When that proved too costly, they suggested mounting the same concerts in Paris.

“In 1931, the dollar was still almighty among world currencies,” recalled Slonimsky. “Ives gave me a letter of credit to the Paris branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank in the amount of $1500, an enormous sum of money in French francs at the time. The prestigious Orchestra Straram was engaged for my first Paris concert. I had a brilliant audience: composers, journalists, painters, Italian futurists. There was applause, but also puzzled responses.”

One French music critic even entitled his review “The Discovery of America,” writing, “We have, (without joking), just discovered America, thanks to a Christopher Columbus called Slonimsky.” As for Ives, he was very pleased with the success of the concerts, and for a time jokingly addressed Slonimsky as either “Columbus et Vespuccius,”

Merriam-Webster’s defines a “gazebo” as “a freestanding roofed structure usually open on the sides.

To most Americans, however, “gazebo” conjures up warm, summer days spent out-of-doors: If you imagine yourself inside a gazebo, you’re probably enjoying a cool beverage while gazing out at the greenery—or, if you fancy yourself outside one, you’re probably seated in a lawn chair, gazing at a group of gazebo-sheltered band musicians playing a pops concert for your entertainment.

In the early 1970’s, the American composer John Corigliano wrote a series of whimsical four-hand piano dances he dedicated to certain of his pianist friends, and then later arranged these pieces for concert band, entitling the resulting suite “Gazebo Dances. “

“The title,” explained Corigliano, “was suggested by the pavilions often seen on village greens in towns throughout the countryside, where public band concerts are given in the summer. The delights of that sort of entertainment are portrayed in this set of dances, which begins with a Rossini-like Overture, followed by a rather peg-legged Waltz, a long-lined Adagio, and a bouncy Tarantella.”

The concert band version of Corigliano’s “Gazebo Dances” was first performed in Indiana on today’s date in 1973, by the University of Evansville Wind Ensemble, with Robert Bailey conducting.

In the summer of 1853 Johannes Brahms had just turned twenty and was touring as the piano accompanist of the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi. On today’s date, they arrived in Gottingen, where they were hosted by Arnold Wehner, the Music Director of that city’s University.

Wehner kept a guest book for visitors, and over time accumulated signatures from the most famous composers of his day, including Mendelssohn, Rossini, and Liszt. Now, in 1853, Brahms was not yet as famous as he would later become, but as a thank-you to his host, he filled a page of Wehner’s album with a short, original composition for piano.

Fast forward over 150 years to 2011, when Herr Wehner’s guest book fetched over $158,000 at an auction house in New York City, and this previously unknown piano score by Brahms attracted attention for many reasons.

First, few early Brahms manuscripts have survived. Brahms was notorious for burning his drafts and sketches, and second, the melody Brahms jotted down in 1853 showed up again in the second movement of his Horn Trio, Op. 40, published 12 years later.

Finally, there's a still-unresolved controversary about who had rediscovered the long-lost score: the auction house had the manuscript authenticated in 2011, but in 2012 the British conductor Christopher Hogwood claimed he had stumbled across it while doing other research.

In the late 19th Century, there were two rival musical camps: one favored “absolute music” like the symphonies, concertos, and chamber music of Brahms; the other the “music of the future,” namely the operas of Wagner and the tone poems of Liszt, works that told dramatic stories in music.

Now, Dvorak’s mentor was Brahms, and Dvorak was famous for his symphonies, concertos, and chamber music. But on today’s date in 1896, at a concert of the Prague Conservatory Orchestra, three TONE POEMS by Dvorak premiered: “The Water Goblin,” “The Noonday Witch,” and “The Golden Spinning Wheel,” all three based on Czech folk legends -- and rather lurid, even gruesome ones at that.

Not surprisingly, the “absolute music” camp was shocked. The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick lamented: “It is strange that Dvorak now indulges in ugly, unnatural, and ghastly stories which correspond so little to his amiable character and to the true musician that he is. In ‘The Water Goblin’ we are treated to a fiend who cuts off his own child’s head!”

But another Czech composer, Leos Janacek, heard something quite different: “In all the orchestral tone poems that I have known, the ‘direct speech’ of the instruments, if I might describe it thus, has never sounded with such certainty, clarity and truthfulness within the wave of melodies, as it does in ‘The Water Goblin.’”

On today’s date in 1953, thousands crowded the route to and from London’s Westminster Abbey for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and, at the Queen's own request, the event was televised live by the BBC.

British composer William Walton was asked to write two new pieces. The first Walton’s “Coronation Te Deum”, a work that he had begun almost a decade earlier for a quite different occasion, namely the opening night of the 1944 London Proms. The piece got shifted to a back-burner when Walton was asked to work on Lawrence Olivier’s wartime film of Shakespeare’s “Henry V.”

For the new Queen’s Coronation, Walton returned to his abandoned score, writing to friends, “I’ve got cracking on the Te Deum. Lots of counter-tenors and little boys Holy-holy-ing, not to mention all the Queen’s Trumpeters and a side drum. You will like it, I think, and I hope He will too.” “He” was capitalized, so presumably Walton was referring to either the Deity -- or Winston Churchill, perhaps.

Walton was also asked to compose a “Coronation March,” which he entitled “Orb and Scepter” after a line, coincidentally, from Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” Walton’s March may have seemed a bit jazzy to the more conservative audiences of the day, but one critic, slipping into Cockney slang, gushed, “It sounds like a right royal knees-up!”

When most people hit 65, they’re anticipating their first social security check, but on today’s date in 1750, when George Frederick Handel turned 65, he was making out his will.

To John Christopher Smith, Handel left, “my large harpsichord, my little house organ, my musick books, and 500 pounds sterling.” John Christopher Smith, born Johann Christoph Schmidt, was an old friend of Handel’s from his university days in Germany. Handel persuaded Herr Schmidt to give up the wool trade and come to England. As MISTER Smith, he established a famous copyists’ shop in London, became Handel’s business partner.

Seven years later, Handel modified his will, leaving his larger theater organ to John Rich, whose Covent Garden Theater had staged Handel’s most recent operas and oratorios. To Charles Jennens, who had arranged the Biblical verses for Handel’s “Messiah,” the composer bequeathed some paintings.

To the Foundling Hospital, a charitable institute that had performed “Messiah” as a successful fundraiser, Handel left “a fair copy of the score and all parts” for that famous oratorio. Shortly before his death, Handel bequeathed 1000 pounds to the Society for the Support of Decayed Musicians, a charity in aid of musicians’ widows and orphans, and directed that 600 pounds be used to erect his own monument in Westminster Abbey.

For fans of British comedy, the name Peter Sellars conjures up an actor famous for his iconic role as the bumbling Chief Inspector Clouseau in “Pink Panther” movies. But for opera fans, the name refers to a completely different fellow: an American theater director born in 1957.

The American Peter Sellars is notorious for staging classic operas as if they were set in present-day America. For example: Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” in a dangerous, drug-dealing neighborhood in New York City's Spanish Harlem, or “The Marriage of Figaro” in a luxury penthouse in Trump Tower.

Sellars is also the frequent partner of American composer John Adams in brand-new operas and concert projects. On today’s date 2012, a new oratorio by Adams and Sellars titled “The Gospel According to the Other Mary” received its world premiere at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

The new work’s libretto, crafted by Sellars, tells the Biblical story of the passion and death of Jesus from the point of view of "the other Mary," Mary Magdalene, alongside texts and scenes from contemporary American life, including a women’s shelter, labor and social justice protests, and the opioid crisis. If Jesus were alive today, Sellars and Adams seem to be saying, He would be ministering to the suffering margins of American society, not to the rich and powerful.

On today’s date in 1962, Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” for soprano, tenor, baritone, chorus, and orchestra, had its premiere performance at Coventry Cathedral in England. The Cathedral had been virtually destroyed in World War II bombing, and Britten’s big choral work was commissioned to celebrate its restoration and reconsecration.

Britten was a committed pacifist, and his “War Requiem” text combines poems by Wilfred Owen, who had been killed in the First World War, with the traditional Latin text of the Mass for the Dead. For the premiere, Britten requested soloists representing nations who had fought during the Second World War.

With Britten’s life-time partner, tenor Peter Pears, representing England, the plan was to have a German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and a Russian soprano, Galina Vishnevskaya, for the 1962 premiere. As a young man, Fischer-Dieskau had been drafted into the German army, and had been a prisoner of war, but was eager to participate. Unfortunately, the Soviet authorities wouldn’t issue a visa for soprano Vishnevskaya to sing in the new Britten piece. “How can you, a Soviet woman, stand next to a German and an Englishman and perform such a political work,” they told her. The British soprano Heather Harper substituted for her.

For many, Britten’s “War Requiem” is his masterpiece, and shortly after its premiere, Britten wrote to his sister, “The idea did come off, I think... I hope it will make people think a bit.”

It was on today’s date in 1913 that Igor Stravinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring” premiered at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, provoking catcalls and fisticuffs from some in the audience. Most scholars suggest it was the ungainly, deliberately primitive choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky, more than Stravinsky’s score, that provoked the most negative response.

Pierre Monteux’s concert performance—without the dancing—at the Casino de Paris the following Spring marked the start of the score’s success as pure music. On that occasion, Stravinsky was carried in triumph from the hall on the shoulders of his admirers.

Shortly before his death in 1929, Sergei Diaghilev, who had commissioned Stravinsky’s score, was enthusiastically quoting a review in the London Times that suggested (perhaps ironically) that the “Rite of Spring” would be for the 20th century what Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was for the 19th.

Well, that has rather turned out to be the case, in fact, and by 2013, a piece of orchestral music that in 1913 was considered almost unplayable is routinely programmed as a classic orchestral showpiece.

One New York Times critic even wrote “… now everybody knows “The Rite.” [It’s] an audition piece that every music student practices, so that now any conservatory orchestra can give a fleet and spiffy performance of what used to stump their elders, and professional orchestras can play it in their sleep, and often do…”

Unless you’re Tony Soprano, if your boss turns to you and says, “Murder can be fun,” the prudent reaction would be to: a) start looking for a new job, and b) wait for a discrete opportunity to call the police.

But in 1975, when Alfred Hitchcock made that statement to composer John Williams, Williams probably just nodded in agreement. After all, it was a great honor to be asked by Hitchcock to write music for what would turn out to be the last film completed by the famous Master of Suspense.

That film was “Family Plot,” and Williams completed its music for recording sessions at Universal Studios early in 1976. Williams recalled that the already-ailing Hitchcock stayed just an hour, pronounced the music “fine,” and said, “I’ll leave this to you,” before departing.

Now, film buffs will recall that Hitch, a notorious micro-manager, had abruptly fired composer Bernard Herrmann, his legendary former collaborator, during a recording session for his 1966 film “Torn Curtain,” when Hitchcock realized Herrmann had NOT followed his instructions for a trendy pop music score.

“Family Plot,” was shown at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival but was not officially entered in the competition. Still, it’s ironic that on today’s date that year, the Festival’s top prize, the coveted Palme d’Or, was awarded to “Taxi Driver,” a film by Martin Scorsese, with—you guessed it—music by Bernard Herrmann.