Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1938, at the New York Philharmonic’s summertime concert home at Lewissohn Stadium, a 24-year-old American composer named Morton Gould conducted the first performance of his new piece entitled “American Symphonette No. 2.”

As Gould put it, his “American Symphonette” was “entertainment music attempting to utilize the elements of American swing in the classical form of the sinfonietta.”

The new piece was in three movements, and the second, which proved especially popular, was entitled “Pavanne” and fused elements of jazz in swing time with the form of the old-fashioned courtly dance made famous by Maurice Ravel’s “Pavane for Dead Princess.”

In the published score, Gould spelled “Pavanne” with two “n’s.” He explained much later—“I know the spelling is incorrect, but at the time I wrote the piece, Pavane was not a well-known word. Those who knew their Ravel could spell and say it right, but the people who knew only mine had difficulty in pronouncing the title. Among the misspellings were Pavayne, Puvunie, and even Parvenue! So I decided to use two n’s to give at least some idea of what the phonetic sounds were.”

For many decades, Morton Gould was much in demand as a conductor and arranger, but writing original music was what he loved best. “Composing is my life blood,” he claimed. “That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life—conducting, arranging, playing piano, and so on—what is fundamental is my being a composer.”

In the summer of 1829, the German composer Felix Mendelssohn was touring Scotland. In the company of a friend from Berlin who held a post in London, Mendelssohn saw all the sights: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth, Inverness, Loch Lomond, and some of the Hebrides Islands. The two German tourists were not impressed by the food or friendliness of the somewhat surly natives, but they loved the Scottish scenery.

It’s very telling that they made a point of paying a courtesy call on the famous novelist Sir Walter Scott, whose Romantic historical tales of love and tragedy were wildly popular throughout Europe in Mendelssohn’s day. And very likely, it was through the Romantic filter of Scott’s novels that Mendelssohn and his friend viewed the Scottish landscape. On today’s date they visited the ruined castle of Mary Queen of Scots, and Mendelssohn wrote this letter to his family back in Germany:

“In darkening twilight today, we went to the Palace of Holyrood where Queen Mary lived and loved. The chapel has lost is roof and is overgrown with grass and ivy, and at that broken altar Mary was crowned Queen of Scotland. Everything there is ruined, decayed and open to the clear sky. I believe that I have found there today the beginning of my Scotch Symphony.”

Mendelssohn may have begun his “Scotch” Symphony on today’s date in 1829, but he didn’t finish it until about a dozen years later. And although the work is dedicated to “Her Majesty Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland,” the new symphony was premiered in Leipzig, under Mendelssohn’s baton, in March of 1842.

As a young man in his 20s, just starting out on his musical career, the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak had a rough time making ends meet. He played viola in a theater orchestra, worked as a church organist, and took on music students.

But by the time he hit his 30s, things started to click. His own music, composed in his rare, free moments, was starting to attact attention. The German composer Johannes Brahms took him under his wing and helped Dvorak find a publisher.

The year 1878 was a particularly auspicious one for Dvorak. He was in his late 30s, and the publication of his first set of Slavonic Dances for piano four-hands had proven to be something of a smash hit with amateur musicians across Europe. Some of Dvorak’s orchestral and chamber works published that year were also doing very well.

Dvorak was approached by the leader of the Florentine String Quartet and asked to write a chamber piece in his popular “Slavonic” style. The result was Dvorak’s “String Quartet No. 10, Op. 51.”

Dvorak showed it to Brahms, who liked the new work and in turn showed it to some of HIS friends, including Josef Hellmesberger, whose String Quartet was the best in Vienna. But as it turned out, Dvorak’s new Quartet was premiered in Berlin, on today’s date in 1879, by the Quartet headed by another of Brahms’ old friends, the virtuoso violinist Joseph Joachim.

In the decades since its founding in 1920, the annual Salzburg Music Festival in Austria has earned a well-deserved reputation as one of the best—and priciest—summertime music venues in the world. The core repertory of the Festival has always been the music of Salzburg’s most famous native son, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and other classical and romantic masters from the Austro-Germanic tradition. Standards—and expenses—are high, and that often means risk-taking is discouraged.

Fearing that the Salzburg Festival was becoming a bit too conservative and predictable, in the 1990s the Festival’s directors began including some challenging contemporary classics into the mix.

On today’s date in 1997, a revised version of Gyorgy Ligeti’s opera “La Grand Macabre” premiered at the Salzburg Festival. It opens with a car-horn overture, and is a surreal, darkly whimsical vision of a post-modern world—set in a timeless never-never land inspired by the fantastic landscapes of the painters Franz Brueghel and Heronimous Bosch.

In Liegti’s opera, the world is fast approaching apocalypse, and the ultimate catastrophe is overseen by a rather ineffectual, and occasionally tipsy Grim Reaper. The libretto is silly and serious at the same time, and was devised by the composer and Michael Meschke, a master puppeteer. For the 1997 Salzburg production, the American director Peter Sellars set the work in a devastated Chernobyl-like landscape contaminated by a nuclear disaster.

On today’s date in 1941, this notice appeared in the “Radio Concerts” section of The New York Times, as the 3pm listing for New York’s WABC: “Bernard Herrmann directs the Columbia Symphony in the world premiere of his Symphony No. 1.” As a program note, the newspaper also offered these words from the 30 year-old composer: “My symphony was written in my spare time during radio and motion-picture commitments.”

Herrmann was a very busy young man in those days. In the late ‘30s he composed and conducted music for Orson Welles’s radio plays, and in 1940 he wrote his first big film score for “Citizen Cane,” again directed by Orson Welles. In the ‘50s and ‘60s, for Alfred Hitchcock, Herrmann would provide the music for thrillers like “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho.”

But all that was still off in the future back in 1941. Herrmann’s First Symphony was a joint commission by the CBS Network and the New York Philharmonic. After Herrmann conducted the premiere over the radio with the CBS Symphony, the New York Philharmonic gave the piece its concert premiere in November of that same year.

It’s possible that Herrmann was a little distracted while conducting the premiere, however: His wife, Lucille, had gone into labor and gave birth to their daughter Lucille, just two hours after the live broadcast.

On today’s date in 1791 Mozart’s sixth child, a son christened Franz Xaver, was born in Vienna. Mozart nicknamed the new arrival “Wowi” and everyone said the baby was the spitting image of papa, even down to the distinctive Mozart ears. The baby’s mother, Constanze, later claimed her husband predicted the child would become a musician when he noticed that it cried in tune with the music he was playing on the piano.

Of Mozart’s six children, only two survived: Franz Xaver and his older brother Carl Thomas, who had no interest in music. Franz Xaver, however, did become a composer and performing musician, just as his father predicted. Wolfgang Mozart died just four months after Franz Xaver was born, so Constanze enlisted the aid of family friends as the child’s first music teachers, and then, as little Franz Xaver showed real talent, enlisted the aid of the leading Viennese composers of her day, including Haydn, Salieri and Hummel.

Franz Xaver made his concert debut in 1805, and early on, Constanze decided to bill her son professionally as “Wolfgang Mozart II.” As a young man Franz Xaver—or Wolfgang II—toured widely, but eventually settled in Lemberg, where he remained for almost 30 years before returning to his native Vienna.

Although his own compositions were well received, and his piano playing praised as very elegant, contemporaries realized Franz Xaver’s talent would never match that of his famous father. When he died in Karlsbad in 1844, his father’s “Requiem Mass” was sung at his funeral.

Today’s date is the birthday of the Italian composer Alfredo Casella—or “Alfred Casella” as he was known during his tenure as conductor of the Boston Pops in the later 1920s.

Casella was born in Turin in 1883, and died in Rome in 1947. He studied at the Paris Conservatory, attended Fauré’s composition classes, and counted Ravel as a friend. His enthusiasms included much of the “new” music of his day, including the works of Debussy, Richard Strauss, and Mahler in the early years of the 20th century… and Bartók, Schoenberg and Stravinsky as those composers came on the scene. As a composer, conductor, and festival organizer, Casella became one of the most important figures on the Italian music scene between the wars, composing symphonies, concertos, chamber music songs and operas.

This little march from Casella’s “Serenata” for chamber orchestra was composed in 1927, the same year he came to America as the newly-appointed director of the Boston Pops. According to the Boston Symphony historian Richard Dyer, Casella “made the only great mistake in the Pops' history: He sought to elevate the audiences.” Although he programmed popular pieces such as Gershwin's brand-new "An American in Paris," Casella also included entire Beethoven symphonies on his Pops programs and even works by contemporary avant-garde composers such as Arthur Honegger.

Casella's contract was not renewed, and the Bostonians turned to one of their own, a 35-year-old viola player in the Boston Symphony named Arthur Fiedler, as Casella’s successor.

On today’s date in 1938, a new opera by the 74-year-old German composer Richard Strauss had its premiere at the Munich National Theater. It was entitled “Friedenstag” or “Peace Day” —a rather ironic title, considering a Second World War was imminent.

The idea for the opera came from the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who was a pacifist, and, as an Austrian Jew, persona non grata in Nazi Germany. Strauss had landed himself in hot water for wanting to work with Zweig despite the Nazi Race Laws, and so “Peace Day’s” libretto was written by another Austrian, Josef Gregor, a writer Zweig had himself suggested as an “acceptably Ayran” replacement.

The opera’s story takes place during the Thirty Years War in 17th century Germany. The military commander of a besieged town decides to blow the whole place up rather than surrender, and is about to do so when he misinterprets a signal and opens the gates, allowing a peaceful takeover. The surprised commander is reconciled to his enemy, and everyone celebrates their deliverance from the horrors of war.

Hitler did not attend the Munich premiere, and supposedly thought the historical peace following the Thirty Years War a disaster for Germany. But the opera could be interpreted many ways, and, after the “peaceful” takeover of Austria by Nazi Germany, Hitler did in fact attend the Viennese premiere of “Peace Day” in 1939. The new opera played in other German opera houses briefly, but after the outbreak of war was quickly dropped.

And to this day, depending on whom you ask, Strauss’ ambiguous opera is either a work celebrating peace—or appeasement.

During the summer of 1973, a chamber music festival was inaugurated in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The great Spanish cellist Pablo Casals was the festival’s honorary president. Fourteen artists performed six Sunday concerts in Santa Fe and toured to several area communities. The promotional poster for the first Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival sported a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe.

The summertime festival—and the Georgia O'Keeffe posters—became a recurring annual tradition. Today, the Festival presents over 80 events, including concerts, adult and youth education/outreach presentations, free open rehearsals, concert previews and roundtable discussions with composers and musicians.

In 1976, a “Composer-in-Residence” program was added to the Festival mix, and featured composers have included Aaron Copland, Ned Rorem, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. Since 1980, the Festival has commissioned and premiered many new chamber works.

On today’s date in 1982, for example, this music by the American composer John Harbison debuted at Santa Fe. It’s entitled simply “Variations” for clarinet, violin, and piano. Harbison recalls the first inspiration for the piece was a statue of the Caananite fertility goddess dancing, and so the piece began as a dance set with the titles “Spirit Dance, Body Dance, Soul Dance and Dervish-Finale.” But as the composition process continued, the dance set turned into a set of variations with the same four basic sections.

The Latin word “juvenilia” is commonly used for works produced in an artist’s, writer’s, or composer’s youth. Sometimes, as in the case of Mozart or Mendelssohn, these early works are still worth hearing. Other composer’s juvenilia, such as the early, bombastic concert overtures of Richard Wagner, are seldom granted more than one hearing—if that. Take his “Columbus” Overture… PLEASE!

Most musicologists—and modern audiences—have decided the title is probably the best thing about that work of the 20-something Wagner.

But persistence pays, and some seven years later, on today’s date in 1844, a 31-year-old Wagner conducted the premiere in Dresden of an overture he wrote that still shows up occasionally on concert programs today. This piece is entitled “A Faust Overture,” and was originally conceived as the first movement of a “Faust” Symphony that Wagner never got around to completing.

In his autobiography, Wagner claimed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a principal influence, but to modern ears it’s apparent that Wagner had been studying the scores of his slightly older French contemporary, Hector Berlioz, when at work on this piece. Berlioz’s “Romeo and Juliet” Symphony, in particular, seems to have impressed Wagner at the time, and so Wagner’s orchestra recounts the Faust legend with just the slightest hint of a French accent.