Composers Datebook

If the name Henry Holden Huss [pronounced “Hoos”] doesn’t ring a bell, we’re not surprised—but in his heyday, around 1900, he was famous as a leading American concert pianist and composer. On today’s date in 1894, Huss was the soloist with the Boston Symphony for the premiere of his own Piano Concerto in B Major.

Now, piano concertos written in the key of B Major are not exactly thick on the ground, and Huss’s unusual choice was probably influenced by the “Liebestod” or “Love-Death” music from Wagner’s ultra-Romantic opera “Tristan and Isolde.” Certainly, Huss’s Piano Concerto is in a similarly ultra-Romantic vein. After many decades of neglect, it was revived and recorded by the British compact disc label Hyperion for inclusion in their “Romantic Piano Concerto Series,” devoted to both famous and downright obscure examples of the genre.

In addition to his musical fame, Huss was justly proud of his ancestors: He was related on his father’s side to the early 15th century Protestant martyr John Huss and on his mother’s side to a member of George Washington’s staff.

Like his contemporary, pianist-composer Edward MacDowell, Huss studied in Germany. Unlike the more famous but tragic short career of MacDowell, Huss enjoyed a long, healthy and productive creative life. In addition to his Piano Concerto, Huss wrote symphonic poems, chamber works, music for chorus, and, not surprisingly, a number of solo piano works.

He died at the age of 91 in 1953.

Three of the symphonies of the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner were introduced to American audiences in the 1880s, when Bruckner was still alive and still composing new works. Walter Damrosch introduced Bruckner’s Third to New York audiences in 1885, Theodore Thomas conducted the American premiere of the Seventh in Chicago in 1886, and Anton Seidl led the first New York performance of the Fourth in 1888.

Bruckner, then in his 60s, was thrilled that Americans were performing his music. He would have been less thrilled had he seen the devastating reviews they received. “Formless, weird, fragmentary, flimsy, uncongenial, and empty,” were just a few of the adjectives that greeted this new music at the time.

After Bruckner’s death in 1896, it was the Boston Symphony’s turn to take up his cause: On today’s date in 1901, Wilhelm Gericke led the American premiere of Bruckner’s Fifth. The Boston critics’ estimation was mixed: “Interesting, scholarly and very skillfully orchestrated,” were among the more positive comments—“not very coherent or systematic,” among the negative.

Bruckner’s mammoth Eighth Symphony had its American debut at a matinee concert of the Boston Symphony conducted by Max Fiedler in March of 1909. One reviewer wrote: “The work is, of course, massive, but it is massive like a business building, not like a mountain; it impresses one, but it does not move the emotions. The Bruckner work is by no means easy to listen to... Altogether it made a trying afternoon.”

There’s something in the way the human mind works that likes to see things in contrasting pairs: right and left, up and down, ying and yang, major and minor, happy and sad. That’s certainly the way the mind of the German composer Johannes Brahms worked, and there’s a number of examples in his music of works that emerged from his pen in contrasting pairs. The most famous example is his two contrasting concert overtures: the comic and upbeat “Academic Festival Overture,” and the dark, stoic pessimism of his “Tragic Overture.”

While composing the jaunty Academic Festival Overture in 1880, to acknowledge an Honorary Doctorate he had received the previous year from the University of Breslau, Brahms felt compelled to write a more serious companion piece. To his friend the publisher Simrock, he wrote: "I could not refuse my melancholy nature the satisfaction of composing an overture for a tragedy," To another friend, Carl Reinecke, he wrote, "One weeps, the other laughs."

Hans Richter conducted the premiere of the “Tragic” Overture in Vienna on today’s date in 1880, and the following month Brahms himself led the premiere of his “Academic Festival” Overture in Breslau. And the new works soon came to the New World: On November 12, 1881, the enterprising Theodore Thomas conducted the New York Philharmonic in the American premiere of the “Tragic” Overture, and one week later, with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, he conducted the “Academic Festival” Overture as well.

It’s Christmas Day, and for many families that means special holiday traditions – and if you’ve ever been out “caroling, caroling” you might have sung this well-known staple by American composer Alfred Burt.

Well, Alfred Burt, a jazz trumpeter from Michigan who composed 15 beloved carols, is part of a larger family tradition – begun back in the 1920s by his father, the Reverend Bates G. Burt, who – every year – composed a new Christmas carol to send in a seasonal greeting card to friends and family.

Fast forward to the 21st century, when young composer Abbie Betinis would celebrate Christmas with her grandparents in Michigan. She says, “I knew there were certain carols we’d sing – even joyful ones – that could make everyone cry... and I realized later that these were our family carols. They helped us remember the generations before and feel connected to them and to their traditions. So I thought maybe I should write one myself.”

And write she did. With composition degrees from St Olaf College and the University of Minnesota, Abbie Burt Betinis, the great-granddaughter of Reverend Burt, has now written an annual carol since 2001 – carols which have been performed the world over, each one premiering on Minnesota Public Radio – before being sent to mailboxes across America as the new Burt Family Christmas card.

Abbie’s carol we’ve been sampling here, with lyrics by Holly Windle, is from 2007, called “Run, Toboggan, Run.”

On Christmas Eve in 1951, NBC television broadcast the premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera, “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” This was back in the days of live television, and for decades the kinescope recording of that original live transmission was thought to be lost.

Menotti himself thought so, and said as much on a number of occasions. But, miraculously, a copy of the original 1951 broadcast resurfaced—just in time for Amahl’s 50th anniversary—and was shown at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills in December of 2001 and later that month in New York City.

On that tape, the dapper Mr. Menotti says by way of introduction that NBC had commissioned the opera in 1950, but its wasn’t until the Thanksgiving of 1951 that he actually began working on it, inspired by the painting “The Adoration of the Magi,” which he saw at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Apparently Menotti was delivering the music bit by bit to the original cast members right up until air time.

That original cast included a 12-year-old boy soprano named Chet Allen as Amahl. Allen sang the title part twice for NBC: first on the Christmas Eve premiere, and then a repeat live telecast the following Easter. By the summer of 1952, Chet Allen’s voice had changed, and a 10-year-old named Bill McIver took over for the Christmas telecasts from 1952 through 1955.

NBC continued to broadcast “Amahl” occasionally through the 1970s, but by that time it had become an established seasonal tradition for both professional and amateur performers coast to coast.

The greatest clarinetist of the early 19th century was Heinrich Baermann, whose son Carl was also a fantastic performer on the basset horn, the lower-voiced member of the clarinet family. Felix Mendelssohn met these two when he was just 20, and, in addition to developing a taste for their playing, developed a fondness for another Baermann Family specialty: the “Dampfnudeln” or sweet dumplings they served him in their home in Munich.

In December of 1832, when the Baermanns were visiting Mendelssohn in Berlin, he asked if they’d whip up a batch. The Baermanns said “Sure—if you’ll whip something up for us, namely a duet for clarinet and basset horn.”

Carl Baermann described what happened next:

“Mendelssohn put a chef's hat on my head, drew an apron around my waist and stuck a cooking spoon into the waistband. He did the same himself, except that instead of a spoon, he stuck a pen behind his ear. Then he led me into the kitchen... He returned to his room where, as he said, he was going to stir and knead tones...

“As the clock struck five, my heart skipped a beat, as I hoped that my dumplings had risen properly. To my great relief, they had. When I brought them in a covered dish to the table at the time agreed upon, Mendelssohn also had his duet in a covered dish. Father and I were delighted with the charming piece—although Mendelssohn kept saying that my creation was more brilliant than his.”

In the 1930s and 40s, radio’s so-called “Golden Age,” Deems Taylor was the dominant “voice” of classical radio. Taylor was both the broadcast announcer of the New York Philharmonic on the CBS Network, and the opera commentator for NBC. He was also the voice-over narrator in the famous Disney animated film “Fantasia”.

In his day, Deems Taylor was also a very successful composer, producing a wide variety of works ranging from this 1922 orchestral suite entitled “Through the Looking Glass,” to grand operas, including two that were commissioned by and staged at the prestigious Metropolitan Opera in New York: “The King’s Henchman,” composed to a libretto by Edna St. Vincent Millay premiered there in 1927, and “Peter Ibbetson,” based on a novel by George du Maurier, in 1931.

Deems Taylor was also a very fine writer and critic on musical topics, and the author of several books.

He was born in New York City on today’s date in 1885, and died there in 1966. The year after his death, ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, established the annual Deems Taylor Awards to acknowledge outstanding print, broadcast, and new media coverage of music topics.

And, we’re proud to say, in December of 2000, this program, Composers Datebook was one of the recipients of that award.

Today in 1864, the attention of most newspaper readers in New York was probably focused on the trauma of the American Civil War. So even though the once controversial American composer and music critic William Henry Fry had died in Santa Cruz on December 21st, the news didn’t reach New Yorkers until late in January the following year.

Fry was only 50 when he died of consumption, an illness he had tried to fight by moving to the warmer climate of the Virgin Islands. He was born into a wealthy Philadelphia family and was a teenager when he started composing. Fry was the first American composer to tackle grand opera, modeling his works on Bellini and Meyerbeer. He also wrote orchestral pieces, like this one called “The Breaking Heart,” which was performed to great acclaim in New York in December of 1853 by the a virtuoso symphonic orchestra assembled by a flashy conductor/showman Jullien, who, like Prince or Sting or Madonna, felt one name was better than two.

As a newspaper critic, Fry railed against the neglect of American composers by American orchestras—a common complaint in this country still today. And long before Dvorak’s similar suggestion, Fry called for the development of a uniquely American school of symphonic music. Like many early prophets of new causes, he was largely ignored for his efforts, and died decades before others fulfilled many of his predictions and dreams.

For a lad who grew up in Orange, New Jersey, listening to the Saturday afternoon broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, American composer John Harbison celebrated his 61st birthday in a big way: On today’s date in 1999, Harbison’s opera “The Great Gatsby” premiered at the Met, with its composer on hand to take a curtain call with its cast.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, a devastating evocation of America’s “Roaring 20s,” is a regular contender for the title of the “Great American Novel,” but Harbison says when he told his mother he was thinking of writing an opera based on “Gatsby,” she wasn’t very enthusiastic, arguing, in effect, that the characters in the opera were a totally unsympathetic bunch. Gatsby, the novel’s anti-hero is a both a fraud and a crook. Daisy, Gatsby’s lost love and the object of his obsessive desire, is selfish, spoiled and shallow.

But Harbison saw it differently: “Yearning and despair are very big operatic themes,” he said. “As for the character of Jay Gatsby, I like that he takes a lot of risks and is steadfast and loyal to some vision that is not realistically possible. The opera provides many opportunities to look at both sides of that, to understand to what degree he's an impostor, and to what degree his story is real, which is a big American theme in general.”

Time will tell if Harbison’s “The Great Gatsby” will prove a strong contender for the title of “The Great American Opera.”

On today’s date in 1930, Igor Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms” received its American premiere by the Boston Symphony. The Russian-born conductor and new music impresario Serge Koussevitzky had commissioned the work to celebrate the Boston Symphony’s 50th anniversary.

Stravinsky later said that for some time he had been carrying around in his head the idea for a choral symphony based on psalm texts. Since Koussevitzky’s commission was for “anything Stravinsky had on his mind” that is exactly what emerged. The dedication on the finished score read: “This symphony, composed to the glory of God, is dedicated to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.” The phrasing might seem a little odd, but apparently it was quite sincere.

Even though Stravinsky is on record stating that “music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all,” in his “Symphony of Psalms,” Stravinsky gave powerful expression to his own very deep religious convictions. Koussevitzky’s performance was supposed to be the world premiere of the new work, but the conductor took ill, forcing the originally scheduled December 12th world premiere in Boston to be postponed until the 19th, by which time a European performance of Stravinsky’s new score conducted by Ernest Ansermet had already occurred.

No matter. Koussevitzky had the satisfaction of knowing that he had commissioned a masterpiece. Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms” has come to be regarded as one of the great sacred works of the entire 20th century.