Composers Datebook

Details on the lives and careers of composers born before 1700 tend to be a bit skimpy, at best. For example, we know that the Italian Baroque composer Jacopo Peri was born on today’s date in 1561, but we’re not sure if that was in Rome or Florence.

As a point of reference, remember that William Shakespeare was born in 1564, just three years after Peri. And by the 1580s, around the same time Shakespeare was learning to be a playwright, Peri and some of his Italian colleagues were experimenting with a new art form that we call “opera.”

There was much discussion at the time about what the music of the ancient Greeks must have been like, and how a complete dramatic story might be told from beginning to end in music, utilizing some of the same techniques that composers employed to accompany the much shorter songs and madrigals popular at the time.

Peri was active as a musician and singer at the Medici court in Florence, where early attempts to come up with some answers took place. He was instrumental in the production of two of the earliest operas for which the complete music survives: Dafne, which premiered around 1597 and Euridice from 1600.

Peri outlived his English contemporary Shakespeare by some 17 years. Shakespeare died in 1616 at the age of 52, while Peri died sometime in August of 1633, at 72, a ripe old age for the 17th century.

Most of us—if we’re lucky—chug along more or less contentedly in an uneventful day-by-day routine... a little like the opening of this chamber work by the American composer John Howell Morrison.

But sometimes, in some lives, something happens that suddenly disrupts the uneventful, comfortable routine, something that knocks all routine and normality straight out of the ballpark: perhaps it’s the loss of a job, or the loss of a loved one, and suddenly routine physical or mental health is so shaken that the soundtrack of life shifts to something uncomfortably similar to that of a bad horror film... But most of us—if we’re lucky—somehow survive, and are perhaps even grow a bit stronger from the experience.

As the old saying goes: “Hard Weather Makes Good Wood”—and that’s the title Morrison gave this piece, scored for string quartet and electronic tape, recorded on today’s date in 2002 as the title track on a CD collection of his chamber works.

And, yes, Morrison confesses that “Hard Weather Makes Good Wood,” was, in fact, composed during a period of intense personal struggle in his own life.

We’re not sure if he feels stronger for surviving that experience, but at least it resulted in striking new piece of chamber music.

The 1985 Salzburg Festival boasted a quite unusual premiere: a 17th century Venetian opera by the Italian Baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi entitled “Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria,” or “The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland,” as arranged and orchestrated by the contemporary German composer Hans Werner Henze.

The surviving music for Monteverdi’s opera does not exist in what we now call “full score.” Monteverdi wrote down a bare 5-part accompaniment to the vocal lines of his opera, without indicating what specific instruments he meant to play those notes—and when. This means for any modern performance, someone needs to make those decisions.

For their 1985 summer season, the Salzburg Festival commissioned Henze to prepare a new orchestration of Monteverdi’s “Return of Ulysses” 245 years after its first performance in Venice back in 1640. As luck would have it, Henze’s version appeared around the same time as another modern attempt to reconstruct Monteverdi’s score by the noted Baroque specialist Nicholas Harnoncourt.

Even so, the music critics, in the main, were complimentary after the Henze’s version premiered in Sazlburg, noting that his scoring somehow managed to sound both ancient and modern at the same time.

Even though we’ll never know EXACTLY how the opera sounded when Monteverdi heard it back in 1640, thanks to modern technology, the audio and video of that 1985 Salzburg performance can be sampled in both CD and DVD versions.

When asked to name some important musical works associated with World War II, music lovers are apt to think of the sonatas and symphonies Prokofiev and Shostakovich wrote during those years. But three symphonies by the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger form another very compelling war triptych.

Honegger spent the war years in occupied France, and his Symphony No. 2, which premiered in 1942, might be considered a symphony of the grim wartime resistance. It is scored for strings alone, but at the very end includes an optional trumpet solo, a dramatic gesture that seems an emotional call to action.

Honegger’s Symphony No. 3, which premiered on August 17, 1946, is entitled “A Liturgical Symphony,” with the titles of each of its movements taken from the Latin Mass for the Dead. Considering the great loss of life on all sides of the conflict just ended, this work, too, packs an emotional wallop.

And to round out the triptych, Honegger’s Symphony No. 4, from 1947, is subtitled “The Delights of Basel.” This music captures the elusive and bittersweet mood of a Europe tentatively groping its way back to normal life, closing with a decidedly wistful evocation of carnival time in the Swiss city of Basel.

It might seem odd that during his long career, Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodály wrote only nine works for orchestra. When someone asked him about this, he replied: “I was busy with more important work: I had to educate a public.”

Kodály and his countryman Béla Bartók were pioneers in the collection and study of Hungarian folk music, and, on top of that, Kodály’s lifelong concern was to instill this rich heritage into the Hungarian people through an extensive and innovative program of musical education.

So successful was Kodály that even outside Hungary the so-called “Kodály method” has been adapted for music education worldwide.

Given Kodály’s tireless educational efforts, it’s surprising he had any time or energy left for composing at all. For example, Kodaly started writing a symphony in the 1930s at the request of the great Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini.

The Symphony finally received its premiere decades later at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland on today’s date in 1961, and by that time Toscanini had been dead for several years. Even so, Kodály did not forget the original request for the work, and dedicated his only Symphony to the memory of the great conductor.

In fact, Toscanini was also responsible for the creation of one of Kodály’s most popular orchestral works: it was at Toscanini’s prompting that Kodály orchestrated his Marosszék Dances, a set of folk tunes he had originally arranged for solo piano.

In the 1930s, the American composer Ferde Grofe was on a roll. During the previous decade, as staff arranger for the Paul Whiteman orchestra, Grofe had orchestrated all the music that popular ensemble had premiered, including George Gershwin’s 1924 jazz classic “Rhapsody in Blue”. By the late 1920s, Grofe was composing his own original scores, and in 1931 finished his famous “Grand Canyon” Suite.

Around that time, Ferde Grofe left the Whiteman band, and signed on as staff conductor of the NBC Radio Network, and soon became a familiar figure on the American music scene from coast to coast.

On today’s date in 1935, for example, a new ballet score by Grofe premiered at the Hollywood Bowl. It took as its story line a familiar Hollywood theme: the exploited “double” who stands in for a starlet during the making of a film. The double is the anonymous actor who does all the hard work, but gets none of the recognition—or close-ups—when the film is released.

Grofe later arranged his ballet score into a “Hollywood Suite,” adding another musical picture postcard to works with titles like: “Kentucky Derby Suite” or “Niagara Falls Suite.” In the 1960s, looking back on his long career in music, Grofe said: "Many of my compositions, I believe, were born of sight, sound, and sensations common to all of us. I think I have spoken of America in this music simply because America spoke to me.”

Most young American composers who came of age in the 1960s found themselves faced with a question: should they adopt the intellectually fashionable post-serial, atonal style of composition developed by Arnold Schoenberg and his followers, or return to a more accessible and tonal musical language, whether Romantic, neo-Classical, or Minimalist in nature?

For the young American composer William Bolcom, who turned 20 in 1958, the school of Schoenberg was not all that appealing… He said: “I had the credentials and the chops to write like that if I wanted to, but I said to hell with it.” According to his teacher and mentor, the French composer Darius Milhaud, Bolcom was as “gifted as a monkey.” Bolcom was a fabulous pianist with a passion for American ragtime and popular song, and distinctly American elements and accents crop up in many of his own compositions, including his magnum opus, a three-hour oratorio based on William Blake’s poems entitled “Songs of Innocence and Experience.”

Bolcom says he prefers to live, as he puts it, “in the cracks” between opera and musical theater, tonality and atonality, highbrow and lowbrow. Take this Bolcom piece for woodwind quintet and piano, for example. It’s entitled “Five Fold Five,” and was premiered on today’s date in 1987 at Saratoga Springs, New York, by pianist Dennis Russell Davies and the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet. “Five Fold Five” starts off flirting with atonal elements, but ends with something that sounds a lot like boogie-woogie.

In 1960, the musical world was observing the centenary of the birth of composer Gustav Mahler. A British musicologist named Deryck Cooke hit upon the idea of preparing a performing edition of Mahler’s Symphony No. 10, a work left unfinished at the time of Mahler’s death in 1911. This was a daunting task for two reasons.

First, Mahler’s widow, Alma, had resisted efforts for too close an examination of Mahler’s sketches for his 10th Symphony, as these were peppered with emotionally charged comments to her in Mahler’s hand, painful reminders that her husband was working on this symphony at a time when he had just discovered she was having an affair with another man.

The second hurdle was purely musical in nature: even though Mahler had sketched out the symphony in full, he had left most of it unorchestrated. Now, Mahler was a master orchestration, and it was argued that only a similarly gifted composer could flesh out Mahler’s sketches. Schoenberg and Shostakovich were both asked to do so, and both declined.

Deryck Cooke, however, persisted, and completed his version of Mahler’s Tenth in time for some excerpts to be broadcast over BBC radio. Understandably, that broadcast spurred interest in hearing all of Cooke’s realization.

Eventually even Alma relented, dropping her opposition to the project shortly before her death. And so, on today’s date in 1964, Bertold Goldschmidt conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the first complete concert performance of Deryck Cooke’s arrangement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 10.

On today's date in 1845, the sleepy little German town of Bonn played host to some 5000 visitors. These ranged from curious natives and opportunistic pickpockets to famous composers, performers, and music lovers from many countries, including their royal highnesses, the British monarch Queen Victoria and her royal consort, Prince Albert.

The occasion was the gala unveiling of a bronze stature of the great German composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, who had been born in Bonn 75 years earlier. A Beethoven Festival was in progress, and before the unveiling of the Beethoven statue, the German composer Ludwig Spohr had conducted a performance of Beethoven’s “Missa solemnis” at the Bonn Cathedral.

For almost a decade, the Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt had been tireless in fundraising for this event and almost single-handedly saw to it that it even occurred at all. Liszt was the largest contributor the Beethoven statue fund, and for years had been performing benefit recitals to enlist others in supporting the project.

On August 12th the big day had finally arrived. Alas, the Festival planning committee was totally unprepared for the huge crowd that descended on Bonn, and woefully incompetent in managing just about every aspect of the Festival.

How incompetent? Well, consider this: as their majesties Queen Victoria and King Wilhelm the IV of Prussia looked on, with great fanfare the shroud fell from Beethoven’s statue—only to reveal the statue’s BACK facing the vast assembled crowd…

Oops.

The Belgian poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck was tremendously popular in the early years of the 20th century. The French composer Claude Debussy wrote a successful opera based on Maeterlinck’s play “Pelleas and Melisande,” and the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff had his heart set on turning Maeterlinck’s “Monna Vanna” into an opera as well.

Unfortunately, Rachmaninoff began work on “Monna Vanna” in 1906 before he had secured the rights to do so. In fact, Rachmaninoff had already finished one act of his opera by 1907 when he learned that Maeterlinck had already granted the rights to another composer. Rachmaninoff was crushed.

Although he stopped work on his opera, years later when he sat down at the piano to play for friends, he would sometimes include melodies from his abandoned opera.

One of those who heard Rachmaninoff play in this fashion was the much younger Russian conductor Igor Buketoff, who said he was too embarrassed at the time to ask the great Rachmaninoff to identify this unfamiliar music.

Decades later Buketoff was startled to recognize those same tunes as he looked over Rachmaninoff’s unfinished piano score for “Monna Vanna,” which had ended up at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.

Buketoff orchestrated the surviving portions of Rachmaninoff’s opera for its premiere, which occurred on today’s date in 1984, at annual summertime music festival in Saratoga Springs, New York—some 75 years after the music was composed.