Composers Datebook

In 1723, the Leipzig Town Council appointed Johann Sebastian Bach as the new Kantor of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig. Despite what he might have felt about everything they expected him to do, Bach apparently did like that Church: it was there that his family worshiped and 12 of his 20 children were baptized.

But Bach was responsible for music at TWO Leipzig churches: St. Thomas and St. Nikolaus Church.

In Bach’s day, St. Thomas was regarded as the lesser of the two, with St. Nikolaus Church the official venue for most important occasions, including the premiere performances of many of Bach’s sacred works. For example, it was at St. Nikolaus Church on today’s date in 1724 that Bach’s “Passion According to Saint John” was premiered.

Bach apparently intended his new Passion to be performed at St. Thomas Church, ignoring the Council’s specific request for the other venue, and changed his plans ONLY after the Council authorized more space for performers in the choir loft at St. Nikolaus—and after they repaired that church’s harpsichord.

Chalk up one victory for the cagey cantor!

Alas, Bach’s tussles with the Council didn’t end there. While posterity regards Bach’s years in Leipzig as one of the most glorious epochs in music history, it’s quite likely that both Bach AND his employers might have recalled it as one long battle of wills over matters large and small.

On today’s date in 2013, the Jamaican-American pianist and composer Donald Shirley died at age 86 in New York City.

His death set into motion a plan that had been long in the works: a movie based on Shirley’s concert tour to the deep South in 1962, accompanied by Tony “the Lip” Vallelonga, a bouncer at the famous Copacabana night club who Shirley hired for protection.

In the 1960s Shirley was at the height of his popularity as the leader of a jazz trio he founded after being told by the great concert impresario Sol Hurok a career as a classical pianist was impossible due to his skin color.

In the 1980s, Vallelonga’s son Nick told Shirley and his father he wanted to make a movie about the indignities they suffered during that 1962 tour and the life-long friendship that developed between them. Shirley agreed, but said only after his death. "'You should put in everything your father told you, and everything I told you,” said Shirley. "'You tell exactly the truth, but wait until I pass.'"

In 2018, five years after Shirley’s death, the film was released, titled GREEN BOOK, after a guide for Negro motorists listing hotels and restaurants open to them in segregated states. Fact-checkers confirm the film is largely accurate, and, yes, for over 50 years Shirley did live in an elegant apartment over Carnegie Hall, where his jazz trio often performed.

In a 1964 essay, the American composer Samuel Barber wrote: “I want my music to be of use to people, to please them, to enhance their lives... I do not write for posterity.” And in a 1979 interview, he said: “I write for the present, and I write for myself... I think that most music that is really good will be appreciated by the audience—ultimately.”

Barber was 35 years old when he composed his Cello Concerto in 1945, finishing the work around the same time he was discharged from the U.S. Army Air Corps. The Concerto was written for the cellist Raya Garbousova, who gave the premiere performance of the work with the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky on today’s date in 1946.

The new Concerto was warmly received in Boston, and even won an award from New York music critics. Oddly enough, soon after its premiere, Barber’s Cello Concerto was pretty much ignored for several decades, and to date has yet to catch on with performers or audiences to the same degree as his earlier Violin Concerto—another work that took quite a while to become popular.

Still, in recent years both performers and audiences seem more than willing to revisit ALL of Barber’s scores, including his Cello Concerto, and a major reappraisal of Barber seems well underway, and, to paraphrase the composer, we think most of Barber’s music that is really good will be appreciated by audiences—ultimately.

On today’s date in 1964, a new musical called “Anyone Can Whistle” opened at Broadway’s Majestic Theater. The book was by Arthur Laurents, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

The show told the story of a town that's gone bankrupt because its only industry manufactured something that never wears out. To spark tourism, the town’s Mayor fakes a miracle—water flowing from a rock—and when patients from a local mental hospital called the “Cookie Jar” escape and mix in with townspeople and tourists, chaos ensues. The only conventional thing about the new Sondheim-Laurent musical was the inclusion of a love story.

The New York Daily News called the first act "joyously daffy," and the Journal-American reported that the opening night audience cheered several numbers. The New York Times, unfortunately, panned the new show, opening its review with this statement: "There is no law against saying something in a musical, but it's unconstitutional to omit imagination and wit."

Ouch!

It didn't help that the new Laurent-Sondheim musical’s competition on Broadway that year included crowd pleasers like Hello, Dolly, Funny Girl, and Fiddler on the Roof. The show ran for just one week.

But one person who liked the show happened to be a Columbia Record executive named Goddard Lieberson, who assembled the original cast the day after it closed to make an original cast recording that became something of a cult classic.

On today’s date in 2003, a new orchestral work by the American composer Elliott Carter had its premiere in Boston. Carter was then 94 years old—he would live to be a month shy of 104, and, even more remarkable, he was composing new works almost to the end of his days.

Now, when you live that long, you experience a lot of changes. Carter had studied English and Greek at Harvard, and recalled a time when at Boston Symphony concerts conservative members of the audience would joke that the emergency exits signs should read “Exit – in case of Brahms.” Apparently, even in the 1920s, for some Boston Brahmins, Brahms was still “difficult music.”

For his part, Carter felt the complexity of his own music reflected the complex world into which he was born—the world of Proust, Picasso, and Stravinsky. His music was technically very, very difficult, but Carter always insisted it was all in service of the greater freedom and fantasy of his imagination, not difficult for difficulty’s sake.

Carter’s “Boston Concerto” was dedicated to the memory of his wife, Helen, who died shortly before its premiere. Carter prefaced his score with the opening lines from a poem entitled “Rain” by William Carlos Williams:

“As the rain falls

So does

your love

bathe every

open

Object of the world—“

On today’s date in 1800, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 had its first performance in Vienna, at a benefit concert for the 29-year-old composer.

It would be several years before any of Beethoven’s orchestral music reached American shores, but it did occur during Beethoven’s lifetime. In 1819, for example, a “Grand Piano Concerto” by Beethoven was performed in New Orleans—only we have no idea which one. On today’s date in 1825, when Beethoven was 54, his “Egmont” Overture was performed at the City Hotel in New York, and was performed again in Philadelphia on March 28, 1827—just two days after its composer had died back in Vienna.

By the 1840s, Beethoven’s overtures and symphonies appeared with some regularity on the East Coast, and slowly worked their way Westward.

In 1853, Beethoven’s “Leonore” Overture No. 3 was performed in San Francisco by musicians gathered from that city’s gambling houses. A letter describing the event recalled, “there were many Chinese present,” and that it “lasted four hours owing to an overwhelming demand for encores, which the performers dared not refuse in the face of rugged California individualism.”

In 1856, when San Francisco’s German Society gave the West Coast premiere of Beethoven’s Fifth, The San Francisco Chronicle review the following day noted: “The pieces were very beautiful, but it must be said that some of them appeared to be considered very tedious by the greater number of the audience. The Adagio, Scherzo and Finale of Beethoven’s Symphony, for instance, caused many to yawn.”

For many years, the BBC celebrated April Fools’ Day by trying to pull radio listeners’ legs with outrageously fabricated news stories. One year, for example, BBC TV aired footage of an Italian spaghetti farm where happy peasants harvested that year’s crop from bushes that the BBC production crew had draped with limp noodles for the filming.

On another April 1st, the BBC’s classical service featured a profile of an eccentrically reclusive 19th century French composer who concocted unplayable works in his apartment on a bizarre instrument that combined an organ pedal board with a grand piano. He was, the story claimed, as fantastic a performer as Liszt or Chopin, and supposedly was crushed to death by his own bookcase when he attempted to remove a heavy volume from its top shelf. Only in this case, the story was more or less true, and the composer, Charles-Valetin Alkan, was a very real person.

Alkan was born in Paris in 1813 and was buried there on today’s date in 1888. Only the bit about Alkan’s “death by bookcase” in the BBC profile is disputed by some historians. That story originated with Isidore Philipp, one of only four mourners who attended Alkan’s April 1st interment, and who claimed to have been present when the composer’s body was found in his apartment. Philipp was a highly respected and long-lived French composer and piano teacher who came to America in 1940 and died here in 1958. He seems a credible witness—so who to believe?

We tend to think of the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak as a 19th century composer—but he lived a few years into the 20th and one of his major works, his opera “Rusalka,” had its premiere in Prague on today’s date in 1901.

We mostly think of Dvorak as primarily a composer of symphonies and chamber works, but in his final years, Dvorak devoted himself chiefly to opera. In a 1904 interview, given just two months before his death, Dvorak said: “Over the past five years I have written nothing but operas. I wanted to devote all my powers, as long as the dear Lord gives me health, to the creation of opera. Not out of any vain desire for theatrical glory, but because I consider opera to be the most suitable medium for the Czech nation, and listened to by the widest audience, whereas if I compose a symphony I might have to wait years before it is performed.”

Dvorak was undoubtedly gratified that his opera “Rusalka” was a big success at its 1901 premiere, and would subsequently become one of his most popular works with Czech audiences. More recently, thanks to soprano Renee Fleming, “Rusalka” has won over a new generation of American audiences as well.

By the time of his death in 1949, the German composer Richard Strauss was famous worldwide as the composer of operas like “Der Rosenkavalier” and tone-poems like Don Juan and “Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks.” These operas and tone-poems are so famous, we tend to forget that Strauss also composed symphonies—two of them, both written when the young composer was just starting out.

Strauss’s Symphony No. 1 in d-minor, for example, was premiered in his home town of Munich on today’s date in 1881, when the composer was just 16. That performance was given by an amateur orchestra, but was conducted by one of the leading German conductors of that day, Hermann Levi, who would lead the premiere of Wagner’s “Parsifal” the following year. Another eminent Wagnerian conductor, Hans von Bulow, subsequently took up the teenager’s symphony, and also commissioned him to write a Suite for Winds. In short order, the young composer also dashed off a violin concerto, a cello sonata, and a horn concerto for his father, Franz Strauss, a famous virtuoso on that instrument.

The American conductor Theodore Thomas was an old friend of Franz Strauss, and while in Europe during the summer of 1884, Thomas looked over the score for the younger Strauss’s Second Symphony, and immediately arranged for its premiere in New York City the following winter.

On today’s date in the year 2000, the Shanghai Quartet premiered a new chamber work at the University of Richmond in Virginia. This was the String Quartet No.4 by the Chinese composer Bright Sheng.

Sheng was born in Shanghai in 1955, but since the 80s he’s made the United States his home, and now has an enviable reputation as both a composer and teacher. But back in the late 1960s, during the tumultuous years of Madame Mao’s “Cultural Revolution,” Sheng worked as a pianist and percussionist in a Chinese folk music and dance troupe near the Tibetan border, where he also studied and collected folk music. Sheng’s String Quartet No. 4 is subtitled “Silent Temple.” He explains that title as follows:

“In the early 1970s I visited an abandoned Buddhist temple in north-west China. As all religious activities were completely forbidden at the time, the temple, still renowned among the Buddhist community all over the world, was unattended and on the brink of turning into a ruin. The most striking and powerful memory I had of that visit was that, in spite of the appalling condition of the temple, it was still a grandiose and magnificent structure. Standing in the middle of the courtyard, I could almost hear the praying and chanting of the monks, as well as the violence committed to the temple and the monks by the Red Guards. To this day, the memories of the visit remain vivid, and I use them almost randomly as the basic images of my String Quartet.”