Composers Datebook

The fairy-tale opera “Sadko” by the Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov had its first performance in Moscow on today’s date in 1898. This opera is still staged in Russia, but rarely anywhere else—even though some of its wonderful melodies have proven extremely popular.

One of the opera’s arias had a tune so catchy that it was set to English words as “Play That Song of India Again” and became a best-selling Paul Whiteman recording in the 1920s. In the big-band era, Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Song of India” even made the American “Hit Parade.”

The line between popular culture and classical music has often been blurred—and seldom so wickedly as in the works of the American composer Michael Daugherty.

This music is from his “Le Tombeau de Liberace.” Now, in classical music terminology, a “tombeau” is a memorial tribute to an eminent musician or composer—in this case, it’s Wladziu Valentino Liberace, the flamboyant, rhinestone-encrusted pop pianist and showman who died in 1993.

“Starting from the vernacular idiom,” writes Daughtery, “I have composed ‘Le Tombeau de Liberace’ as a meditation on the American sublime: a lexicon of forbidden music. It is a piano concertino in four movements, each creating a distinct Liberace atmosphere.”

Many of Michael Daugherty’s other concert pieces have also been inspired by pop icons, real and imaginary, ranging from Desi Arnez to Superman.

On today’s date in 1733, music-loving readers of a Leipzig newspaper called the “Nachtricht auch Frag und Anzeiger” would have seen this welcome announcement: “Tonight at 8 o’clock there will be a Bach concert at Zimmermann’s Coffeehouse on Catharine Street.”

So, in addition to a Grandé Latté or Double-shot Depth-Charge, Zimmermann’s patrons could treat themselves to a Grand Sonata or Double-Concerto by Johann Sebastian Bach. As if Bach wasn’t busy enough providing all those sacred cantatas and organ chorales for two Leipzig’s churches every Sunday, he was also in charge of that city’s Collegium Musicum, an organization that presented more secular musical fare.

It’s likely that on occasional weekday nights at Catharine Street, most of Bach’s concertos and chamber works were performed by Bach himself, alongside many of the same musicians he employed each Sunday for his church music. And, much like symphony orchestras do today, visiting composers or virtuoso performers who passed through town could be showcased as soloists at Collegium Musicum performances.

Given his staggering workload, it’s not too far-fetched to assume that caffeine helped Bach stay focused and alert: One of his secular cantatas might even be considered as an early form of an advertising jingle: the humorous text of Bach’s ‘Coffee Cantata’ recounts how a young woman’s addiction to coffee triumphs over her stuffy father’s moral objections to the tasty brew.

In the opinion of General George Washington, a commanding plateau on the west bank of the Hudson River, about 40 miles north of New York City, was a key strategic position during America’s War for Independence. Washington selected Thaddeus Kosciuszko,* one of the heroes of the Battle of Saratoga, to design fortifications there in 1778, and transferred his headquarters to this “West Point” in 1779. In 1802, after America’s independence had been won, President Thomas Jefferson signed legislation establishing a United States Military Academy at West Point.

150 years later, in 1952, the West Point Military Band decided to observe the Academy’s Sesquicentennial by asking prominent composers to write celebratory works to mark the occasion. A number of composers responded, including the French composer Darius Milhaud. Milhaud’s “West Point Suite” was premiered by the West Point Band at Carnegie Hall on today’s date in 1952, with Captain Francis Resta conducting, and proved to be one of the most successful and oft-performed of these Sesquicentennial pieces.

The previous year, Milhaud had paid a visit to West Point to hear the band, as he wanted to assess both their size and ability. He was impressed by what he heard—and surprised as well when the band struck up “Happy Birthday” in his honor. It seems that both Milhaud and his wife had completely forgotten that their September 4th visit coincided with the composer’s 60th birthday!

Now, it may be a hotly contested statement that New York is the cultural capital of the United States, but few would contest that city’s important role in so much of our country’s musical history.

In 1992, to celebrate its 150th anniversary, the New York Philharmonic commissioned many new works by leading composers and spread out their celebratory premieres over several years. On today’s date in 1996, Leonard Slatkin conducted one of these: an orchestral tribute to New York written by a native son—a work by Richard Danielpour titled “Toward the Splendid City.”

While intended as sonic portrait of his hometown, Danielpour’s piece was written entirely outside of the city. As Danielpour explains it:

“‘Toward the Splendid City’ is one of the very few works I’ve written completely away from New York. Work on the piece began in Seattle and was completed in Taos, New Mexico—and, to an extent, expresses the nostalgia I felt for the city. It became my sonic postcard of the town. One passage, a sound-painting with string harmonics, celesta, harp, vibes and bells, was inspired by my memory of floating about New York at night on a plane and seeing the lights of the city in the mist…”

The comic opera “Don Pasquale” by the Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti had its first performance in Paris on this date in the year 1843. To this day it remains one of his best-loved and most often-performed works. In all, Donizetti wrote about 70 operas, sometimes turning out four per year.

Amazing as this seems today, it wasn’t at all uncommon in the 19th century, especially in Italy, where audience demand for new works was insatiable. Back then, when composers vied with each other for speed, Donizetti was asked if he believed that Rossini had written “The Barber of Seville” in only 13 days. “Why not?” quipped Donizetti, “He’s so lazy!”

In our time, the corollary of a busy opera composer like Donizetti might be a hard-pressed Hollywood composer like John Williams. To date, Williams has written approximately the same number of film scores as Donizetti wrote operas!

John Williams started out in the 1960s writing scores for TV shows like “Wagon Train” and “Gilligan’s Island,” then wrote for movies like “How to Steal a Million” and “Valley of the Dolls.” Eventually he wrote some of the most memorable film scores of our time, including those for “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” and “Schindler’s List.”

On today’s date in 1843, Richard Wagner’s opera “The Flying Dutchman” had its premiere performance in Dresden. The story is often told how the opera’s sea-swept overture was inspired by a stormy voyage Wagner and his wife Minna took from Riga to Paris, their journey interrupted by an emergency stop in a Norwegian fjord due to rough weather and a longer layover in London.

As usual, Wagner was fleeing creditors, and, as usual, this was due to his own outrageous extravagance. Imagine making a cramped sea voyage in the company of a huge Newfoundland dog named Robber. Wagner may have been fleeing creditors, but he wasn’t about to leave his dog behind, even though a three-week voyage in the company of a wet, sea-sick Newfoundlander must have made the trip seem as interminable as the Flying Dutchman’s eternal wanderings!

Negotiating London also proved a challenge, as Wagner recounted in his memoirs: “The dog whisked round every corner and dragged us every which way. So the three of us sought refuge in a cab which took us to the Horseshoe Tavern, a sailor’s pub recommended to us by our captain… The narrow London cabs were meant to carry two people facing each other, so we had to lay Robber across our laps, his head through one window and his tail through the other…”

We’d like to start the new year with some upbeat music to honor the American composer and bandleader Edwin Franko Goldman, who was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on today’s date in 1878.

At the tender age of 14, Goldman attended the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, where he studied composition with Antonin Dvorak. At 15, Goldman became a professional trumpet player, performing with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra.

In 1911, he founded the New York Military Band, later known simply as the Goldman Band. They performed hundreds of public concerts around the city, including on the Mall in Central Park. In the 1930s, radio broadcasts made the Goldman Band famous nationwide. Their catchy signature tune, entitled “On the Mall,” was composed by Goldman himself, and invited the audiences to sing—or whistle—along.

Goldman composed about 150 band works of his own, and prompted the commission of many more, including wind band classics by American composers such as Virgil Thomson, Walter Piston, and Howard Hanson. The Goldman Band, led by Goldman, or his son Richard, also premiered new works by leading European composers as well.

Goldman founded the American Bandmasters Association in 1929 and served as its Second Honorary Life President after John Philip Sousa.

Edwin Franko Goldman died in New York in 1956. For his contribution to the radio industry, he has a star on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame, and The Goldman Bandshell in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is named in his honor.

In the 1940s, the Boston Symphony gave the premiere of more than 60 new orchestral works—most conducted by the very charismatic and very wealthy Serge Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony.

And why not? It was the Koussevitzky Foundation that commissioned most of those pieces in the first place, and certainly Maestro Koussevitzky had the knack for picking winners and advancing the careers of composers he admired. In the 1940s, for example, Koussevitzky premiered no less than four major works by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu. On today’s date in 1943, one of these pieces, Martinu’s Second Violin Concerto, received its first performance under Koussevitzky with Mischa Elman as the soloist.

But not all the Boston premieres were conducted by Koussevitzky. Earlier that same December of 1943, the American composer and conductor Howard Hanson led the orchestra in the first performance of his Symphony No. 4, and on today’s date in 1948, the premiere of his own Piano Concerto, with the Boston Symphony and the Czech pianist Rudolf Firkusny as soloist. Like the Martinu Concerto, this, too, was a Koussevitzky Foundation commission.

And while we’re on the subject of music patrons, we should note that George Eastman, the great Kodak film magnate, was so impressed with Hanson back in the 1920s that he put him in charge of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. This recording of the jazzy finale from Hanson’s concerto is from a 1965 recording, featuring the Eastman-Rochester orchestra conducted by Hanson.

For fans of old-time radio shows, a certain piece of music will always be known as the theme for “The FBI in Peace and War.” But among classical music buffs the more common title is the “March” from Prokofiev’s opera “The Love of Three Oranges.”

This satirical, fairy-tale opera had its premiere performance in Chicago on today’s date in 1921, and Prokofiev himself was on hand to supervise the rehearsals. His opera received a lavish production which cost Chicago $250,000—a staggering amount back in 1921. The premiere was a modest success, even though the Chicago Tribune pronounced Prokofiev’s music (quote) “too much for this generation.” The production then traveled to New York for one performance, and there it was savaged by the press as “Russian jazz with Bolshevist flourishes.” “There are a few, but only a few, passages that bear recognizable kinship with what has hitherto been recognized as music,” was the ultimate verdict of the New York Times.

Summing up his American experience, Prokofiev himself wrote: “In my pocket was a thousand dollars; in my head, noise from all the running around and a desire to go away somewhere quiet to work.”

In the 1930s, Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union, where his music had to toe the Stalinist Party Line. It’s one of life’s little ironies that a theme by a Soviet composer would be chosen for a radio show about the FBI that aired during the height of America’s post-War “Red Scare.”

On today’s date in 1903, violinist and conductor Harry West led the very first performance by the Seattle Symphony. At that time, the orchestra comprised just 24 players. For their first program in Seattle, the aptly named Maestro “West” conducted the musicians in works by Schubert and Rossini, two long-dead classical masters, and also programmed works by three living composers: Max Bruch, Jules Massenet, and Pablo Sarasate.

Today, the Seattle Symphony has grown into a 90-member professional orchestra, and under director Gerard Schwarz has earned worldwide attention with its CD’s of both classical and contemporary works.

The orchestra has released critically acclaimed recordings of symphonic works by modern American masters like Howard Hanson, David Diamond, and Alan Hovhaness, as well as newer pieces by a younger generation of American composers including Richard Danielpour and Stephen Albert. With conductor Gerard Schwarz, the Seattle Symphony has made over 80 recordings, many of them nominated for Grammy Awards.

For its 2003-2004 centennial season, the Seattle Symphony commissioned six new orchestral pieces from composers Daniel Brewbaker, Chen Yi, John Harbison, Samuel Jones, Bright Sheng, and David Stock.