Composers Datebook

The great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius was born on this date in 1865.

In 1990, when the world was observing Sibelius’s 125th birthday, conductor Osmo Vänskä led the Lahti Symphony in the belated world-premiere performance of a previously unknown work by the composer. This was a Suite for Violin and Orchestra that Sibelius had probably completed in 1929, but never published or had performed.

Now, Sibelius was a very prolific composer up through his fifties, but during the last 30 years of his life before his death in 1957 wrote very little. He had completed his Seventh Symphony, his last, in 1924, and the world waited in vain for an Eighth. Perhaps it was due to depression, perhaps it was due to drink—or maybe, creatively speaking, Sibelius had just dried up. In any case, what works he did complete as a senior citizen were either revisions of much earlier pieces, or minor incidental works.

Which makes this genial little Suite, if composed fresh in 1929, rather interesting. It’s landscape music, evoking the Finnish countryside, but in a less bleak and abstract manner compared to his final large-scale works. It may not be top-drawer Sibelius, but even so, we’re grateful that Sibelius decided to stick his Suite for Violin in a bottom drawer—and not in the fireplace!

It’s perhaps not surprising that a solitary, iconoclastic 20th century composer should identify with a solitary, iconoclastic 18th century poet. The ultra-modernist American composer Carl Ruggles took as the title for one of his most famous orchestral pieces a phrase from a motto by the early Romantic British poet William Blake which ran, “Great things are done when men and mountains meet.”

On today’s date in 1924, Ruggles’ “Men and Mountains” received its premiere performance at a New York concert of the International Composers’ Guild.

The music critic of the New York Times was in attendance and wrote: “Mr. Ruggles, in his ‘Men and Mountains,’ leaps upon the listener with a yell. There is a wild shriek of the brass choir, and thereafter no rest for the wicked. It is as if the irate composer had seized a plump, disparaging critic by some soft and flabby part of his anatomy, and pinched him blue, crying the while, ‘You will hear me and you’ll not go to sleep, either!’ No one slept, either during or after the concert, for there is a Ruggles contingent, and a determined one. They applauded in phalanxes, while others kept silent or groaned. This was,” concluded the Times, “one of the most entertaining moments of the evening.”

By the time of his death in 1971, at age of 95, Ruggles would come to be revered—if not always performed—as the craggy, last-standing survivor of the craggy ultra-modernist movement of the early 20th century.

Two famous pieces of chamber music had their premieres on today’s date, both at private readings prior to their first public performances.

On today’s date in 1842, the German Romantic composer Robert Schumann arranged for a trial reading of his new Piano Quintet in E-flat at the Leipzig home of some of his friends. Schumann’s wife, Clara, was supposed to be the pianist on that occasion, but she took ill, and Schumann’s friend and fellow-composer Felix Mendelssohn stepped in at the last moment for the informal performance, reading the work at sight.

After this preliminary reading, Mendelssohn praised the work, but offered some friendly suggestions concerning part of the trio section in the new work’s Scherzo movement, which prompted Schumann to write a livelier replacement movement for the work’s first public performance.

About 100 years later, on today’s date in 1949, a cello sonata by the Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev received a similar private performance in Moscow, for an invited audience at the House of the Union of Composers. Two of the leading Soviet performers of the day, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and pianist Sviatoslav Richter, gave the work its first performance. The following spring, it was again Rostropovich and Richter who gave the Sonata its public debut at the Moscow Conservatory.

“Snuff” is a finely pulverized tobacco that can be, well, “snuffed” through the nose (and Kids—don’t try this at home!)

In the 19th century, taking snuff was a common practice, and on today’s date in 1837, the most notorious example of snuff-taking in musical history occurred—or didn’t occur, depending on who you believe—during the premiere in Paris of the massive “Requiem Mass” of the French composer Hector Berlioz.

As Berlioz tells it in his Memoirs, the conductor of the performance, Francois-Antoine Habeneck, decided to take a pinch of snuff during an especially tricky passage of the score, just when a cue from the conductor was of particular importance. To avert disaster, Berlioz stepped in front of Habeneck, gave the cue, and afterwards all but accused the conductor of deliberately trying to sabotage his music. Some eye-witnesses are on record saying, “Yes, that’s just how it happened,” while others, equally emphatic, state, “Preposterous! Nothing of the sort occurred.”

Who to believe?

Well, it IS known that once the basic tempo was set, M. Habeneck was in the habit of putting down his baton to let the orchestra play on by themselves. He would then calmly take a pinch of snuff. Sometimes, it’s said, he even offered snuff to his neighbors, so perhaps those performances, at least, if not the premiere of Berlioz’s Requiem, were indeed sabotaged—by an especially loud sneeze!

On today’s date in 1885, at an open public rehearsal at the Old Metropolitan Opera House, the New York Symphony gave the first performance in America of any symphony by the Austrian composer Anton Bruckner. It was a fresh-faced 23-year-old conductor named Walter Damrosch who programmed the 61-year-old Bruckner’s Symphony No. 3 in d minor, a score dedicated to Richard Wagner and quoting themes from Wagner’s operas.

The New York Times critic, in fairness to this “new” music by a totally unfamiliar composer, attended both the December 4th rehearsal and the December 5th concert before venturing an official opinion:

“As to form and workmanship,” he wrote, “it is a highly commendable achievement. The composer’s motives are distinct and fluent, the instrumentation is rich, though not cloying, and vivid without being clangorous. Unfortunately, there is not in the whole composition a measure in which a spark of inspiration, or a grain of inventiveness is discernible.”

Some of the other New York papers were more blunt: “A dreary waste of sound… formless, weird, flimsy, uncongenial and empty” wrote the Sun, and, according to the Post: “The first movement is marked ‘misterioso,’ but the only mystery about it is how it ever came to be written, printed and performed.”

In fairness to the music critics of 1885, it would take another hundred years or so before American audiences started to acquire a taste for Bruckner’s particular blend of music and mystery.

In many denominations, the Christian calendar or liturgical year begins with the season of Advent, the four Sundays preceding Christmas. The word “Advent” comes from the Latin “adventus,” which means “arrival” or “coming,” because Advent celebrates both the joyful anticipation of the arrival of the baby Jesus and the need for believers to prepare for the second coming of their Savior at the Last Judgement.

In 1724, a very devout German Lutheran church musician named Johann Sebastian Bach crafted a cantata, a work for a small instrumental ensemble with solo voices and chorus, to be performed on the First Sunday of Advent, which fell on today’s date that year.

At Bach’s church, the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, there would have been readings from Luther’s translation of the Bible appropriate for the day, so Bach asked a poet friend for a text meditating on them, and took for his musical inspiration Luther’s Advent hymn, "Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland,", which in English means “Now come, Savior of the heathens."

That hymn appeared as the first in the Thomaskirche’s hymnal, which meant the church year was off and running once again. Now, it was Bach’s responsibility to provide a cantata for performance each Sunday, and during his time in Leipzig he would write over 200 of them -- which no doubt made him a favorite customer with anyone in Leipzig selling music manuscript paper!

On today’s date in 1949, Leonard Bernstein conducted the Boston Symphony in the first complete performance of Olivier Messiaen’s ten-movement, 75-minute long “Turangalila” Symphony.

“Turangalila” is the Sanskrit word for love, and Messiaen’s score is meant to be a voluptuous evocation of the emotion at its most exalted state. In addition to a huge percussion battery, Messiaen’s score calls for an electronic keyboard instrument known as the “Ondes Martenot,” whose tones fans describe as “haunting,” but foes liken to the sound of a musical saw.

Messiaen had spent the summer of 1949 as composer-in-residence at Tanglewood at the invitation of the great Russian conductor and new music impresario, Serge Koussevitzky, who was also Bernstein’s mentor. Before arriving in Tanglewood, Messiaen had written to Bernstein as follows: “I am 41 years old and I have put into my symphony all of my strengths of love, of hope and of musical research. But I know you are a man of genius and that you will conduct it the way I feel it.”

The exotic French score was a modest success in Massachusetts. At least it provoked no riot, but then, as the Christian Science Monitor noted: “If Bostonians suffer, they suffer in silence.” When Bernstein and the Boston Symphony took the new score to New York’s Carnegie Hall, however, critical reaction ranged from “a really rousing experience” to “the trashiest Hollywood composers have met their match.”

On today’s date in 1957, the New York City Ballet staged a new collaboration between the great Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky and the great Russian-born choreographer Georges Balanchine.

The New York City company had been asking Stravinsky for nearly a decade to write a third ballet on a classical subject to make up a trilogy of works that would include his two earlier dance works on Greek mythology, “Apollo” from 1928 and “Orpheus” from 1948.

Just as they were about to despair that Stravinsky would ever write another big ballet, he unexpectedly obliged—if not with a Greek myth, at least with a Greek WORD: He titled his new ballet for Balanchine “Agon,” the Greek word for contest or struggle.

A 17th century French dance manual provided Stravinsky with a visual image of two trumpeters accompanying a dance, and that prompted one of the Ballet’s movements, entitled “bransle simple,” which prominently features those instruments. On a more modern note, by the 1950s, as Stravinsky’s assistant Robert Craft recalled, “Something called twelve-tone music was in the air, and ‘Agon’ is about 12 dancers and 12 tones.”

“Agon” is also set in 12 scenes, and some of its movements were consciously laid out in multiples of 12 bars. Balanchine himself said in working on the ballet, “Stravinsky and I constructed every possibility of dividing 12”—which in dance terms, meant abstract solos, duets, trios and quartets to match the abstract, if eminently danceable, nature of Stravinsky’s score.

Ever wonder how composers choose a story for an opera? Here’s one answer, courtesy of the American composer Tobias Picker:

“My sister was dusting her bookshelf in 1998, and a copy of Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin fell off. She picked it up, read it and then recommended it to me for my next opera.”

And so it came about, some three years later, that on today’s date in 2001, that the Dallas Opera premiered a new opera entitled Thérèse Raquin, with music by Tobias Picker.

Zola’s novel is a rather clinical examination of adultery, murder, and a double suicide. “The novel,” said Picker, “exudes ‘opera’ from every page. Everything about it is operatic.” In Picker’s musical setting, traditional harmonies spiral off into atonality, just as the ordered world of the opera’s characters gradually falls apart.

Picker has written successfully in both styles, so combining the two in his new opera was a natural process. “That tension has always been there in my music,” says Picker.

“I think the opera made some people uncomfortable,” said Picker following the Dallas premiere. “There’s so much negative wish fulfillment and guilt. It affected people strongly and in different ways. One woman came up to me at the third and final Dallas performance and said: ‘I just love this. It’s the third time I’ve seen it.’ Perhaps she had experienced the same catharsis that I had when I composed it!”

On today’s date in 1719, the Papal ambassador in Lisbon noted the arrival of a fellow Italian, a composer named Domenico Scarlatti. Domenico was in his early 30s, and the son of Alessandro Scarlatti, a very famous and influential composer of Baroque operas in Naples.

At the time, Domenico was nowhere near as famous as his father, and had come to Lisbon to serve as the music teacher for an 8-year old Portuguese princess named Maria Magdalena Barbara. Well, this teaching gig turned out to be the most important event in the life of Domenico Scarlatti for two reasons.

First, the little princess was mad about music, and became a very talented performer on the harpsichord. Second, in 1733, when the princess was 22, she married into the Spanish royal house, becoming the Queen of Spain. Scarlatti remained in her service for the next 25 years, composing for her amusement over 500 harpsichord sonatas.

These sonatas include the rhythms and colors of Spanish and Portuguese folk music, with the plucked sound of the harpsichord often mimicking a Spanish guitar. Only a small number of Scarlatti’s sonatas were published during his lifetime, but long after his death they attracted the attention and admiration of composers ranging from Chopin to Brahms to Bartok, and eventually all the sonatas that survived in manuscript were published, attracting the attention and admiration of modern performers on both the harpsichord and piano.