Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1947, a new opera entitled “The Mother of Us All” debuted at Columbia University in New York City.

The libretto was by the American poet Gertrude Stein, and dealt with the life and times of Susan B. Anthony, a 19th century champion of women’s rights. In Stein’s dream-like account, iconic figures from America’s past like President John Adams, orator Daniel Webster, and entertainer Lillian Russell interact even though they lived at different times in history. Two of the opera’s 27 characters, playwright Constance Fletcher and Yale librarian Donald Gallup, in fact, were contemporary friends of Stein’s.

The music was by the American composer Virgil Thomson, whose score evoked seemingly familiar 19th century hymns, sentimental ballads, circus band music, drum rolls, and fanfares. The tunes were, in fact, all original creations. The mix of Thomson’s music and Stein’s text results in a rambunctious opera about American life and politics, at turns both amusing and strangely touching. It became an unlikely success.

Thomson wrote two other operas: “Four Saints in Three Acts,” from 1933, was an earlier collaboration with Gertrude Stein, and “Lord Byron,” from 1972, sets a witty libretto by Jack Larson, an actor famous for his portrayal of Daily Planet cub reporter Jimmy Olson on the old “Superman” TV series. “Lord Byron” was intended for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, but never made it there, and performances these days are rare.

On today’s date in 1992, Joel Revzen conducted the Albany Symphony in the premiere of the Third Symphony of American composer Libby Larsen.

Larsen subtitled her new work a “Lyric Symphony.” Now, the early 20th century Viennese composer Alexander Zemlinsky had written a “Lyric Symphony,” one that involved vocal soloists. As a composer, Libby Larsen is noted for her songs and choral works, but for her own “Lyric Symphony” she opted for a purely instrumental work that would be somehow quintessentially “American.” In program notes for her new symphony, Larsen wrote:

“As I struggle with the definition of ‘American’ music, it occurs to me that in all of our contemporary American genres, the dominating parameter of the music is rhythm. Rhythm is more important than pitch. This is a fundamental change in the composition of music in the 20th century. Here we speak American English, an inflected, complex, rhythmic language.

“What is lyric in our times?” continued Larsen. “Where is the great American melody? Found, I would say, in the music of Chuck Berry, Robert Lockwood, Buddy Guy, George Gershwin, Dolly Parton, Hank Williams, James Brown, Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, and those composers who create melodies that are defined more by the rhythm than their pitch. My Symphony No. 3—the Lyric, is an exploration of American melody.”

The French composer Claude Debussy was too sick to be called up for service when World War I broke out in 1914. His private battle with cancer on top of his nation’s battle with Germany plunged him into depression. But by the spring of 1915, Debussy decided to keep on composing. “I want to work,” he wrote, “not so much for myself, but to give proof, however small it may be, that not even 30 million Boches can destroy French thought.”

He knew his remaining time was precious, so decided to write small chamber works rather than big orchestral pieces. Debussy planned to write SIX chamber sonatas but completed only three. Working, as he put it, “like a madman,” he finished a Cello Sonata and a Trio Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp by the fall of 1915.

In December of that year, the side-effects of radium treatments and morphine injections for his cancer brought Debussy’s Sonata project to a grinding halt. Rallying somewhat by the by the summer of 1916, Debussy vowed to keep on working. He wrote: “If I am doomed to vanish soon, I desire at least to have done my duty.”

On May 5, 1917, Debussy made his last public appearance in Paris at the Salle Gaveay, accompanying violinist Gaston Poulet in the premiere of his final work -- a Sonata for Violin and Piano. Debussy would die the following spring.

On today’s date in 1895, the New York Choral Society gave the premiere of a choral work by Antonin Dvorak entitled “The American Flag.” Mrs. Jeannette Thurber, who brought Dvorak to New York City to teach at her National Conservatory, had asked him to set a patriotic poem of that name. The idea was the new work would be performed to coincide with Dvorak’s arrival in the fall of 1892, and the big celebrations planned that year for the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World.

Unfortunately, Dvorak didn’t get the text in time, and so another choral work, his recently completed “Te Deum” was performed during the big Columbus Quadricentennial. “The American Flag” was put on a back burner, as it were, and wasn’t performed until AFTER Dvorak returned to Prague. Dvorak never heard the work performed at all, in fact.

The blustery, outright chauvinistic tone of its pro-New World, anti-Old World text would hardly endear it to European audiences of his day. In fact, this work hasn’t proven to be a big hit with AMERICAN audiences, either.

“The American Flag” remains one of Dvorak’s least-performed pieces. Michael Tilson Thomas conducted a recording of it timed for release in 1976 during the American Bicentennial. Ironically for so “American” a work, that recording was made in Berlin with a German orchestra and chorus!

By the 1960s, the prevailing trends dictated that modern music should be austere, brainy, complex, and preferably written in the 12-tone “serial” technique developed by Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils. Igor Stravinsky had started writing serial pieces in the 1950s, and even Aaron Copland had a go at writing a 12-tone piece in his “Connotations” for Orchestra, composed for the opening of the New York Philharmonic’s new hall at Lincoln Center in 1962.

Well, the American composer Henry Cowell was not one to be so easily pigeon-holed. In 1962 he composed an airy little quartet for flute, oboe, cello and harpsichord—a piece very much in the neo-classical style. Cowell then re-scored the harpsichord part for harp at the request of Mary Spalding Sevitzky, the harp-playing wife of the Russian émigré conductor Fabien Sevitzky, to whom the quartet was dedicated.

Sevitzky’s real last name was Koussevitzky, and, yes, he was the nephew of the famous Russian conductor and music patron Serge Kousseviztky. At his uncle’s request, to avoid confusion, Fabien shorted his last name to Sevitzky when he became a conductor in his own right. He led the People’s Symphony of Boston in the 1930s before becoming the director of the Indianapolis Symphony from 1937 to 1955. Like his more famous uncle, Fabien Sevitzky was a great champion of American composers. In his later years, he moved to Florida, where he taught and led the University of Miami Symphony. It was in Miami that a distinguished quartet—including Mrs. Sevitzky—premiered Henry Cowell’s quartet on today’s date in 1963.

When Patrick Stewart began his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in "Star Trek: The Next Generation," the Los Angeles Times called him an "unknown British Shakespearean actor." Ouch! That must have caused a wry smile to cross the face of this star actor of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Royal National Theater.

In any case, in 1995, when Stewart played Prospero in Shakespeare’s “Tempest” at New York’s Public Theater, one reviewer said he acted “with white hot fury.” (Who knows, maybe he was thinking of that L.A. Times critic?)

Composer Paul Moravec was in the audience for one of those New York performances, found Stewart “extraordinary,” and began writing a chamber work he titled “Tempest Fantasy.” Moravec describes it as follows:

"'Tempest Fantasy' is a musical meditation on various characters, moods, situations, and lines of text from my favorite Shakespeare play. ... Rather than trying to depict these elements in programmatic terms, the music simply uses them as points of departure for flights of purely musical fancy. The first three movements spring from the nature and selected speeches. ... The fourth movement begins from Caliban's uncharacteristically elegant speech from Act III, scene 2: ‘Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight, and hurt not.’”

Paul Moravec’s “Tempest Fantasy” debuted in New York City on this date in 2003 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2004.

Today in 1825, a benefit concert was arranged in Boston for one of that city’s favorite musicians: Johann Christian Graupner—not a household name for music lovers today, but in the early 19th century, Graupner was an important musical link between the Old World and the New.

Graupner was born near Hanover in 1767. The son of an oboist, young master Graupner mastered that instrument, too—and many others. After service in a German military band, he made his way to London, where in 1791 he was picked as the principal oboist for the first of Haydn’s symphonic concerts there.

In 1797, Graupner’s itchy feet took him to Charleston, South Carolina, where he met and married a pretty English actress and opera singer. The couple moved to Boston and became active in the musical life there. Graupner opened a music store, importing from Europe both those newfangled fortepianos and the latest in sheet music. In 1810, he became the first president of Boston’s Philharmonic Society, and in 1815 helped organize that city’s Handel and Haydn Society—a performing organization that still exists today.

For Graupner’s benefit concert on May 1, 1825, Haydn’s Symphony No. 100 was included on the program, marking that symphony’s first documented performance in America. It was presumably an “authentic” performance, too, since Graupner had most likely played it under the composer’s own direction back in London some three decades earlier.

On today’s date in 2003, the Wind Ensemble of the University of Texas at Austin, led by Jerry Junkin, premiered a new work for wind band by the American composer David Del Tredici.

Its title was “In Wartime,” as its composition and premiere coincided with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, led by the United States alongside the United Kingdom and smaller contingents from Australia, Denmark, and Poland.

“’In Wartime,’ my first piece for wind symphony, was begun on November 16, 2002, and completed on March 16 (my birthday), in 2003—as momentous a four-month period in U.S. history as I have experienced,” recalled Del Tredici.

“With my TV blaring, I composed throughout this period, feeling both irresistibly drawn to the developing news and more than a little guilty to be unable to turn the tube off. Composing music at such a time may have seemed an irrelevant pursuit, but it nevertheless served to keep me sane, stable and sanguine, despite the world's spiraling maelstrom.”

Del Tredici’s “In Wartime” has two sections: “Hymn” and “Battlemarch.” The first has the character of a choral prelude, with fragments of “Abide with Me” sounding through a welter of contrasting material. An ominous drum roll introduces the “Battlemarch” section, with the confrontation of East vs. West symbolized by musical quotes from “Salamti, Shah!” (the national song of Persia) and the opening of Wagner’s opera, “Tristan und Isolde.”

April 29th fell on Sunday in the year 1906, and readers of The New York Times photogravure supplement were able to view scenes of the terrible destruction in San Francisco that followed the great earthquake that struck that city just 11 days before. The paper was filled with accounts of the suffering caused by the quake, and undoubtedly, many New Yorkers asked themselves what they could do to help. The New York musical community provided one answer by quickly arranging a number of benefit concerts.

The largest of these occurred on today’s date that year at New York’s Hippodrome, and was organized by the popular composer Victor Herbert, who conducted his orchestra with Metropolitan Opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink as a featured soloist. The vast Hippodrome was completely sold out, with standing-room-only tickets filling the aisles. Seven thousand dollars were raised, which by today’s standards seems a rather modest sum, but by 1906 standards was impressive enough to make newspaper headlines.

Perhaps New York musicians and their audiences felt a personal affinity with the quake victims, as their own Metropolitan Opera Company, including its star tenor Enrico Caruso, was on tour in San Francisco when the quake struck on April 18th, and, as the Times reported, the Met’s touring orchestral musicians, almost without exception, lost their instruments.

That bit of news must have struck a special chord with Victor Herbert. In 1886, both he and his wife had come to America from Europe to join the Metropolitan Opera—he as an orchestral cellist, and she as a soprano soloist.

Despite its relation to both the physics of sound and pure mathematics, music, for most people—including composers—is essentially an emotional language.

Despite its abstract sound, that’s the case of this orchestral piece, which premiered in Rochester, New York, on today’s date in 1938. The music was by a then 22-year-old American composer named David Diamond, and bears the title: “Elegy in Memory of Ravel.”

Nine years earlier, as a precocious adolescent, Diamond had met Ravel during the French composer’s American tour of 1928. Ravel was impressed with the lad’s talent, and encouraged Diamond to pursue a career in music, as did George Gershwin who served on a jury that awarded one of Diamond’s works first prize. Diamond lost both these important mentors in 1937, with the sudden deaths of first Gershwin, then Ravel. The day after learning of Ravel’s death, Diamond began work on his “Elegy.”

“It is an expression of terrible loss,” recalled Diamond in an interview many decades later. “As the piece began to take shape, almost unconsciously, I heard it as a ritual—an elegy, but a ritualistic one. I asked that there be no applause at the end.”

The work’s 1938 premiere performance was conducted by Howard Hanson, then the head of the Eastman School of Music and the conductor of its famous orchestra. Diamond’s modern, frankly dissonant idiom didn’t sit well with Hanson’s more conservative tastes. Diamond recalled Hanson asking “David, why do you have to write such modern music?” Even so, Hanson respected both Diamond and his music enough to conduct the new piece.