Composers Datebook

Today we celebrate the birthday of the American composer David Schiff, who was born in New York City on August 30, 1945, but who now lives and works on the opposite coast in Portland, Oregon.

Schiff’s best-known work, a 1979 opera entitled “Gimpel the Fool,” is based on a story by the beloved Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer that tells the tale of Gimpel, a Jewish baker in Eastern Europe who takes everything at face value and so is lied to and cheated by everyone he meets. Rather than take revenge on everyone who has treated him so badly, Gimpel becomes a wandering holy man, convinced that when he dies, God will not lie or cheat him.

Schiff’s opera premiered in New York City at the 92nd Street Y in 1979, and shortly thereafter he arranged themes from it into an instrumental Divertimento, the first of many works written for clarinetist David Shifrin and Chamber Music Northwest in Portland. Writing for those musicians, says Schiff, his given him what he calls, “a wonderful sense of how Haydn must have felt as court composer at Ezsterhazy.”

The Divertimento from “Gimpel the Fool” draws on Jewish liturgical modes and Klezmer music, and its fourth movement references “Who Knows One?”—a traditional cumulative song sung on Passover. Like the story of Gimpel, the song is meant to be humorous, while still imparting an important lesson.

On today’s date in 1981, at a house concert in St. Paul, Minnesota, a chamber work by the American composer Stephen Paulus received its premiere. The piece was entitled “Courtship Songs,” and was commissioned to celebrate the 15th wedding anniversary of a St. Paul couple, Jack and Linda Hoeschler. The piece was scored for the four instruments the Hoeschler family played: flute, oboe, cello and piano. The commissioning bug apparently caught on, and anniversary commissions became a family tradition.

Eventually the Hoeschlers and some of their friends in the Twin Cities started up a Commissioning Club, modeled along the lines of an investment club. The idea was to pool their resources, and commission new works by American composers whose works they admired, including Paulus, Paul Schoenfield, Steve Heitzeg, and Augusta Read Thomas. Performing groups who have premiered Commissioning Club projects have included New York’s Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Washington D.C.’s 20th Century Consort, as well as the Minnesota and St. Paul Chamber Orchestras.

In 1996, 15 years after “Courtship Songs” premiered, one Commissioning Club project reached a worldwide audience of millions… Stephen Paulus’s setting of “Pilgrim Jesus,” by the English poet Kevin Crossley-Holland, was one of the carols performed at King’s College, Cambridge, as part of the “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols,” broadcast live on both the BBC’s World Service and public radio stations across America.

All in all, not a bad return on the Commissioning Club’s investment.

On today’s date in 1850, the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt conducted in Weimar the first performance of “Lohengrin,” a new opera by the German composer Richard Wagner.

Liszt was determined to make Weimar famous, musically-speaking, despite the rather provincial nature of the forces he had at his disposal. For the “Lohengrin” premiere Liszt had to go out and buy a bass-clarinet, since the Court orchestra didn’t own one, and he beefed up the number of violins from the usual 11 players to a grand total of 18.

As for the singers, they were hardly world-famous superstars. The title role of Lohengrin was sung by a local tenor named Karl Beck, who had also been a pastry cook in Weimar, and would later return to that profession as a master baker in Vienna. Even so, Liszt’s unprecedented 46 rehearsals apparently paid off: the premiere of “Lohengrin” was a big success, and helped put both Weimar and Wagner on the map.

Ironically, Wagner himself was unable to attend the premiere of his new opera. He was a wanted man on German soil, having participated in the unsuccessful Dresden uprising of 1849, and there was a warrant out for his arrest on the charge of high treason. Liszt had helped him escape to Switzerland, and while his opera was being staged in Weimar, Wagner himself was at hotel in Lucerne, listening in his imagination, he later told Liszt, as each scene unfolded.

Today we note the birthday anniversary of a remarkable British composer who spent a good deal of her life in the United States. Her name was Rebecca Clarke and she was born in Harrow, England, on today’s date in 1886 to an American father and German mother.

Rebecca studied at the Royal Conservatory in London, where she became the first female composition student of the Victorian composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. As a professional violist, she was one of the first women to be admitted as a member of the Queen’s Hall Orchestra, an ensemble led by Sir Henry Wood.

Many of the chamber works Clarke composed were written for and premiered by professional colleagues. The American music patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, herself an amateur composer, admired Clarke’s music, and two of Clarke’s finest chamber works, a Viola Sonata from 1919 and a Piano Trio from 1921, were both written for competitions sponsored by Coolidge.

Based in London from 1924 to 1939, Clarke toured extensively, performed with a number of ensembles, and broadcast over the BBC. She found herself stranded in the U.S. by the outbreak of World War II. In 1944 she married pianist James Friskin, who had been a fellow student at the Royal College, and settled in New York.

She lived long enough to experience what she called “a little renaissance” of interest in her music around the time of her 90th birthday. She died at the age of 93 in 1979.

On today’s date in the year 2001, during the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter premiered a new chamber work for violin and piano entitled “Tango, Song and Dance.” She had commissioned the work from Andre Previn several years earlier, but its premiere was delayed as Mutter embarked on a project to perform and record all Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas.

“After doing all those stern recitals,” said Mutter, “I wanted to play pieces which reflected the basis of musical history, the folksongs and dances which has inspired composers through so many centuries. Tango, Song and Dance is both modern and old-fashioned, and it touches the heart, especially the slow movement, which is really a ‘Song Without Words.’”

And that wasn’t the only thing to touch her heart… it was around this time that Previn and Mutter became husband and wife. For his part, Andre offered these comments on composing a piece for Anne-Sophie: “I had written a violin sonata before I did Tango, Song and Dance, and I gave it to Anne-Sophie, who came back with the request that I make it much more difficult—otherwise she didn’t want to touch it. I have one piece of advice to composers for the violin—make sure Anne-Sophie premieres your piece. Then you’re home and dry, and everything works!”

Other composers seem to agree, and Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutoslawski, Henri Dutilleux, and Wolfgang Rihm have all dedicated violin works to her.

Many operatic works have been described as “revolutionary,” but on today’s date in 1830, a performance of an opera helped to spark a real, take-to-the-streets kind of revolution.

The opera in question was by the French composer Daniel Auber, and entitled La Muette di Portici, or “The Mute Girl of Portici.” The opera’s story concerns a 17th century uprising by some patriots in Naples against their Spanish rulers, and is regarded today as one of the first examples of a genre known as “GRAND opera,” which means it included some stage spectacles worthy of Cecil B. DeMille. For example Auber’s opera ends with the title heroine casting herself into an erupting volcano.

The opera had premiered in Paris in 1828, but on today’s date in 1830 it was being staged at the Theatre La Monnaie in Brussels, a country then under the control of the Dutch. The opera’s story of evil occupiers and patriotic rebels must have touched a raw nerve in many in the Belgian audience.

Upon hearing the line in the opera: "a slave knows no danger, as death is better than living in chains," some in the audiences began a demonstration against the hated Dutch authorities.

The demonstration grew more and more heated, and then, just like the volcano in Auber’s opera, erupted out of the theater and into the streets. Symbols of Dutch authority were attacked, a new provisional government was formed, and by November that same year Belgium had declared its independence.

Looking back on a famous person’s life and career, one often notes quirky patterns of coincidences. Take the American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, for instance.

On today’s date in 1943, Leonard Bernstein was exactly one day short of his 25th birthday, and, at the Public Library in Lenox, Massachusetts, accompanied the singer Jennie Tourel in the premiere of a new song cycle for which he had just composed both the words and the music.

The song cycle was entitled “I Hate Music!” and offered, from a child’s perspective, some devastatingly direct observations on art and life.

The following day, on his 25th birthday, the New York Philharmonic’s music director, Artur Rodzinski, invited Bernstein to be Assistant Conductor of the New York Philharmonic… Now, fast forward to November that same year.

On November 13, 1943, Jennie Tourel and Bernstein were at Town Hall, giving the New York premiere of “I Hate Music!” The very next day, Leonard Bernstein stepped in at short notice for the indisposed Bruno Walter, and made his debut conducting the orchestra during the Philharmonic’s live Sunday afternoon national radio broadcast from Carnegie Hall.

The 25-year old Bernstein’s surprise—and successful—conducting debut made the front page of the New York Times, and his career was launched with a splash. Just a coincidence, of course, but we suspect Bernstein had a special soft spot for his little song cycle with the “tongue-in-cheeky” title.

The first railway line in Russia opened in 1837 and ran from St. Petersburg to Pavlovsk. In the summers, tourists from St. Petersburg would travel to Pavlovsk to visit the site of an 18th century royal palace, to dine at the elegant Vauxhall restaurant, or take in an orchestral concert.

The Russian railroad had enticed Johann Strauss’s orchestra to perform there in the 1850s, and Pavlovsk remained a popular summertime concert venue for several decades.

In 1913, the young Sergei Prokofiev traveled to Pavlovsk to appear as the soloist in the first performance of his Piano Concerto No. 2. The premiere occurred on today’s date that year, and the music of young firebrand composer-performer proved to be far from the standard light classical fare normally offered in Pavlovsk.

One reviewer wrote: “Prokofiev’s music left listeners frozen with fright, their hair standing on end.” Another critic wrote: “One couple stood up and ran for the exit, commenting, ‘Such music is enough to drive you crazy! What is he doing, making fun of us? We came here to enjoy ourselves. The cats at home can make music like this!’”

Even so, one calmer review concluded: “This means nothing. Ten years from now the public will atone for the catcalls by applauding unanimously a new composer with a European reputation.”

On today’s date in 1980, at a Proms concert at Royal Albert Hall in London, the British conductor Colin Davis led the London Symphony in the premiere of a new work by the British composer Michael Tippett. This was a Triple Concerto for violin, viola and cello with orchestra, showcasing the talents of three virtuoso string players: violinist Gyorgy Pauk, violist Nobuko Imai, and cellist Ralph Kirshbaum.

The central slow movement of the new Triple Concerto, marked “very slow—calmer still,” proved to be one of Tippett's most lyrical and colorful moments, and with it, Tippett joined a long line of Western composers, including Claude Debussy, Benjamin Britten, and Lou Harrison, who have been inspired by Asian music: specifically the traditional bronze gong orchestras of the islands of Indonesia, known as “gamelan.”

Shortly before he composed his Triple Concerto, Tippet had visited Java and Bali, and had experienced first-hand performances of gamelan music in the palaces, temples and gardens of Indonesia.

In describing the role of the artist as he saw it, Tippett suggested that it was, “the creation of images of vigour for a decadent period, images of calm for one too violent, images of reconciliation for a world torn by divisions, and in an age of mediocrity and shattered dreams, images of abounding, generous, exuberant beauty.”

Today’s date marks the birthday anniversary of the French composer Lili Boulanger. She was born in Paris on August 21, 1893.

In 1913, Lili Boulanger became the first woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome for her cantata “Faust and Helen,” an achievement which was headline news in those days. Lili’s father, Ernst, had he lived to see it, would have been especially proud, since he, too, was a composer and had won the Prix de Rome himself back in 1835.

The Boulangers were a remarkably talented family, it seems, and it’s one of music history’s saddest “what-might-have-beens” to consider what Lili might have accomplished if she had lived as long as her gifted older sister, Nadia Boulanger, who died at 92 after a long career as the world’s most famous composition teacher. Nadia could count among her pupils several generations of famous American composers, ranging from Aaron Copland to Philip Glass.

Lili Boulanger suffered from Crohn’s disease, and died at just 24 years of age, in 1918. Despite her frail health and tragically short life, Lili Boulanger left behind a small body of vocal and instrumental works that are still performed. Her Psalm settings in particular are admired for their solemnity and deep spirit.