Composers Datebook

During his later years, the German composer Johannes Brahms was a frequent visitor to the town of Meiningen, where the Grand Duke had a fine orchestra that gave stellar performances of Brahms’ music.

Early in 1891, Brahms heard one member of that orchestra, the clarinetist Richard Mülhfeld, perform chamber works by Mozart and Weber. Brahms was so impressed that they became fast friends. Listening to Mülhfeld play, Brahms became so enthusiastic about the clarinet’s possibilities that began writing chamber works for his new friend. Brahms was always particularly fond of the female alto voice, whose timbre is similar to the clarinet’s, and so Brahms promptly nicknamed Mülhfeld “Fraeulein Clarinet” or the “new primadonna.”

For Mülhfeld, Brahms first wrote a clarinet trio, which was followed by a clarinet quintet, and finally, a pair of clarinet sonatas, both composed in the summer of 1894.

These two sonatas were first played by Mülhfeld with Brahms at a private performance in the home of the sister of the Duke of Meiningen on today’s date that year. In November, the pair also gave private performances in Frankfurt for Clara Schumann and at Castle Altenstein for the Duke of Meiningen. The first public performances occurred in Vienna in January of 1895.

The American composer Virgil Thomson was fond of writing what he called “portraits”—musical sketches of people he knew. When asked how he did this, Thomson replied: “I just look at you and I write down what I hear.”

This music by Thomson was a portrait in disguise. It premiered on today’s date in 1954 at the Venice Festival in Italy, identified simply as his Concerto for Flute, Strings, Harp, and Percussion. Thomson later confessed it was in fact a musical portrait of Roger Baker, a handsome young painter he had recently befriended.

Born in Kansas City in 1896, Thomson studied music at Harvard, and lived in Paris through much of the 1920s and 30s. In 1940, he became the music critic of The New York Herald-Tribune, and held that post until 1954. Thomson once defined the role of music critic as one who “seldom kisses, but always tells.”

But in 1954, Thomson decided fourteen years as a music critic was enough, and it was time to concentrate on his own music for a change. Perhaps not by coincidence, one of the friends who encouraged him to do so was Roger Baker, the artist “portrayed” by Thomson in his 1954 concerto.

Ironically, Thomson’s successor at the Herald-Tribune, music critic Paul Henry Lang, dismissed the New York premiere of Thomson’s new concerto as (quote): “mortally fatigued music” and “not one of Mr. Thomson’s good pieces.”

In 1871, one year after the premiere in Munich of Richard Wagner’s opera “Die Walküre,” a German-born American conductor named Theodore Thomas wrote to Wagner asking if he might perform some excerpts of this new work in the United States. Wagner turned him down, probably worried that loose American copyright laws might not be able to protect his new music.

Undeterred, Thomas turned for advice to the famous German conductor Hans von Bulow, who suggested Thomas try to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Wagner to plead his case. After all, Bulow told Thomas, Wagner was actually quite interested in America. That meeting never took place, but somehow Thomas secured a manuscript of what would become the most popular orchestral excerpt from “Die Walküre,” its famous “Ride of the Valkyries.”

To this day, no one knows for sure how Thomas managed this. Some speculate von Bulow himself provided the music, others suggest the American conductor got his copy from Franz Liszt.

In any case, on today’s date in 1872, this music was performed for the first time in America at one of Theodore Thomas’s concerts in Central Park, an all-Wagner evening, in fact.

The “Ride of the Valkyries” proved to be a smash hit with Manhattanites. As Thomas recounted in his memoirs, “the people jumped on the chairs and shouted.”

There’s a fun little book entitled “Great Operatic Disasters,” which chronicles some of the humorous—and some of the harrowing—mishaps that have befallen opera singers and productions over the last few centuries… and September 16th seems to have been a particularly unlucky day in the history of opera:

Consider that on today’s date in 1782, one of the most celebrated opera stars of the 18th century, the Italian castrato Farinelli, died in Bologna after his dismissal from the Spanish court; on September 16th in 1920, the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso made his last records in Camden, New Jersey; and in 1977, opera diva Maria Callas dropped dead of a heart attack in Paris.

And it was on today’s date in 1966 that the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center opened with a gala production of a brand-new opera specially commissioned from the American composer Samuel Barber. Despite an all-star cast headed by Leontyne Price and a lavish stage production designed by Franco Zefferelli—you guessed it—the opera was a flop.

Maybe everyone expected too much, or perhaps the lavish sets were too distracting. Whatever the reason, despite its gorgeous music, even today Barber’s “Anthony and Cleopatra” has never found a lasting place in the repertory of popular American works.

Maybe it was just the operatic jinx of September 16th?

On today’s date in 1946, at the Yaddo Music Festival in Saratoga Springs, New York, the Walden Quartet gave the first professional performance of the String Quartet No. 2 by the American composer Charles Ives.

Ives’ String Quartet No. 1 was his first major work—its manuscript is dated 1896, back when Ives was a 21-year-old student at Yale. While Ives’ First Quartet was written under the watchful eye and conservatively tonal ear of the Yale music professor Horatio Parker, Ives Second, composed between 1907 and 1913, is more often than not a wildly atonal work that would have given poor Professor Parker a heart attack.

On the first page of its score, Ives provided a kind of program. It reads: “String Quartet for four men who converse, discuss, argue politics, fight, shake hands, shut up, and then walk up the mountainside to view the firmament.”

From some musical quotations in the first movement of Ives Quartet, it seems the American Civil War was one of the political topics fought over by the four men mentioned by Ives, and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” is quoted, along with Ives’ perennial favorite, “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean.”

By 1946, a serious revival of interest in Ives music was underway, and, just one year later, Ives would win the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 3. Ives gave the prize money away to other composers, and grumbled: “Prizes are for boys—I’m all grown up.”

The year 2002 marked the 10th anniversary of BBC Music Magazine, and to commemorate the occasion, the magazine’s editor asked the British composer Colin Matthews to coordinate a bold commissioning idea: a set of seven orchestral variations on a theme by Henry Purcell, a tune entitled “Hail, Bright Cecilia.”

The resulting suite, called “Bright Cecilia Variations,” had its premiere on today’s date in 2002 at a “Last Night of the Proms” concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with the BBC Symphony led by its American conductor, Leonard Slatkin.

This is Colin Matthew’s orchestration of the Purcell theme, which was followed by Matthew’s original variation, and in turn by six other variations. These were written by three additional British composers, namely Judith Weir, David Sawer and Anthony Payne, plus one each by the Danish composer Poul Ruders, the Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg, and the American Michael Torke.

Of his variation, Torke had this to say: “I wanted to create almost a jungle frenzy, by having four drummers from the percussion section playing tom-toms, and shadowing those rhythmic beatings with melodic woodwind and brass fragments all drawn from the original theme… The result is vigorous, which I hope will help express one of the notions I believe is vitally important in classical music.”

The Grove Dictionary of Music defines the word “aleatory” as follows: “A term applied to music whose composition and/or performance is, to a greater or lesser extent, undetermined by the composer.”

But isn’t music supposed to be organized, planned, determined sound? Isn’t “aleatoric music” a contradiction in terms? Well, not necessarily. Musicians throughout the ages have delighted in spontaneous, improvised sound, or musical games in which the results will be different with each performance.

In the 20th century, American composers like Charles Ives and Henry Cowell often gave performers a great deal of freedom in the realization of their scores, and John Cage developed what he called “chance operations” into an art form all its own.

On September 13, 1986, at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City, Leonard Bernstein conducted the Israel Philharmonic in the premiere of his new Concerto for Orchestra subtitled “Jubilee Games” which incorporates some aleatoric or chance elements. Bernstein’s Concerto is dedicated to the Israel Philharmonic on the occasion of its 50th anniversary jubilee.

Bernstein explained, “Its first movement is musical athletics, with cheers and all. It is also charades, anagrams, and children’s counting games. But mainly it is celebratory, therefore spontaneous, therefore aleatoric, ranging from structured improvisation to totally free orchestral invention. It is thus inevitable that the movement will vary considerably from one performance to another, and even one rehearsal to another.”

Today, a love story.

In the year 1840, the immensely talented German pianist Clara Wieck was eagerly awaiting the eve of her 21st birthday, when she would be free to legally marry the 30-year-old composer and music critic Robert Schumann. The couple had hoped to wed years earlier, but the match was bitterly opposed by Clara’s father. The situation turned ugly, and the whole matter ended up in the German courts.

Clara and Robert kept in touch by letters, which were sometimes intercepted by Papa Wieck. Schumann, for his part, buried himself in his music, composing furiously until Clara would come of age.

Early in 1840 Clara wrote, “Dear Robert, I love you so much it hurts my heart. Tell me what you’re writing. I would so love to know. Oh please, please… a quartet, an overture—even perhaps a symphony? Might it by any chance be—a wedding present?”

The marriage finally took place on today’s date in 1840. As she had guessed, Robert presented Clara with a musical wedding present: not a quartet, overture, or symphony, but a song cycle, a “Myrten”, consisting of 26 songs, which were published as his Opus 25.

The opening song, entitled “Dedication,” is a setting of a Rückert poem which contains this refrain: “You are my heart and soul, my bliss and pain, you are the world I live in and the heaven I aspire to, my good angel, my better self.”

On today’s date in 1733, the French composer François Couperin, known as “François Couperin the Great,” died in Paris. The building where Couperin lived for the last decade of his life still stands in Paris at the corner of the rue Radziwill and the rue des Petits Champs, and like the building, the high esteem afforded this Baroque composer has stood the test of time.

François Couperin is known as “The Great” for two reasons: first, to distinguish him from other talented Couperins, who like the Bach Family, were also well-known musicians, and second, because, well, he WAS great—a strikingly original composer, admired for his harmonic invention and programmatic wit.

Although Couperin wrote organ and chamber works, he is most famous for his 226 pieces for solo harpsichord, many with descriptive titles indicating they were portraits or caricatures of real people or recognizable types of people. Others have poetically ambiguous or rather baffling titles like “The Mysterious Barricades.”

Was Couperin writing miniature tone poems as private “insider” jokes for himself and his friends? Who knows—and maybe not knowing the secret “program” is even part of the music’s appeal.

Couperin was admired by fellow composers ranging from Bach to Brahms and Ravel, and some of his harmonically-adventurous keyboard pieces have been orchestrated by Richard Strauss in the 20th century and Thomas Ades in the 21st.

The average music lover, if asked to name some notable Baroque composers, will probably answer Bach, Handel, Telemann or Vivaldi. But decades before most of those composers flourished, a number of bold pioneers of the early Baroque period were busily developing new musical forms and techniques.

Like most composers born before 1700, details about their lives and careers tend to be skimpy at best. Take the case of the Italian composer Marco Uccellini, who was born somewhere in Italy around 1603, and died on today’s date in 1680.

We know (from a little bird) that Uccellini studied in Assisi, and was active in the service of Italian noble families in Modena and Parma. We know he composed operas and ballets for them, but none of that music survives. Uccellini’s lasting claim to fame rests of a series of instrumental works, mainly sonatas for violin, which were published during his lifetime.

The British violinist Andrew Manze, one of the great virtuosos of our day, has recorded some of Uccelini’s Sonatas, and offers this assessment: “Uccellini’s pioneering spirit led him to seek new colors, explore strange keys, and to boldly go higher than any violinist had gone before. His (high) G’’’ was a world record that stood until the Austrian composer Heinrich von Biber squeaked a tone higher in a Violin Sonata published the year after Uccellini’s death in 1680.”