Composers Datebook

When most people hit 65 they’re spending their first social security check, but today in 1750, when George Frederick Handel turned 65, he was making out his will.

To John Christopher Smith Senior, Handel left, “my large harpsichord, my little house organ, my musick books, and 500 pounds sterling.” John Christopher Smith, born Johann Christoph Schmidt, was an old friend of Handel’s from his university days in Germany. Handel persuaded Schmidt to give up the wool trade and come to England. As Mr. Smith, he and his son established a famous copyists’ shop in London, became Handel’s business partners and remained among the composer’s closest friends. Handel left the rest of his estate to a favorite niece back in Germany.

Seven years later, Handel modified his will, leaving his larger theater organ to John Rich, whose Covent Garden Theater had staged Handel’s most recent operas and oratorios. To Charles Jennens, who had arranged the Biblical verses for Handel’s “Messiah,” the composer bequeathed some paintings. To the Foundling Hospital, a charitable institute that had performed “Messiah” as a successful fundraiser, Handel left “a fair copy of the score and all parts” for that famous oratorio.

Shortly before his death, Handel bequeathed 1000 pounds to the Society for the Support of Decayed Musicians, a charity in aid of musicians’ widows and orphans, and directed that 600 pounds be used to erect his own monument in Westminster Abbey.

Handel died on April 14, 1759, and was buried in the south transept of the Abbey. About 3000 people crowded in and around the Abbey to attend his interment.

A talented performer sacrifices everything, including his integrity, his happiness, his friends and even his lover to climb to the top, only to realize (too late!) what he has sacrificed along the way...

Yes, thanks to countless Hollywood “show-biz” films, the basic outline is familiar, and, whether based on fact or fiction, has resulted in countless movies: some memorable, some not.

In 1991 a French film was released that combined some fact and a lot of fiction to tell the story of a 17th century performer and composer named Marin Marais, who was baptized in Paris on today’s date in 1656.

Marais was a virtuoso on the viola da gamba, a kind of early variant of the modern cello. Sparked by the period-instrument movement of the late 20th century, interest in Marais’ music had been growing for some time before the release of the film, which was titled “Tous les matins du monde,” which translates as "all the mornings of the world [leave] without [ever] returning."

Well, it DOES sounds a lot better in French...

Anyway, in the film, Gérard Depardieu plays the world-weary, elderly Marin Marais, with the role of the fiercely ambitious, young Marais taken by Depardieu’s actor son, Guillaume.

Whether or not it tells the truth about Marais, in a darkened theater, for the space of an hour or two, the film does conjure up some haunting images and ideas as a backdrop for some equally haunting music from the 17th century.

Frederick Delius died in 1934, two years before the publication of Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” devoted to the psychology of marketing. Too bad, since that British composer was not always the savviest marketer of his own music.

On today’s date in 1899, for example, Delius mounted at his own expense an all-Delius concert in London, performed by a hand-picked orchestra and well-rehearsed chorus.

Although born and raised in England, Delius had been living as an expat in Europe, so this concert would be the first opportunity for British audiences to hear his music. The opening work on the program, entitled “Over the Hills and Far Away,” could just as well have described the 37-year old composer’s prior career to the Brits.

The good news was the concert was a great success, with one critic stating "a composer wholly unknown to this country burst upon us with something like the astonishing effect of an unexpected thunderstorm."

The bad news was almost immediately after the concert Delius returned to France. The concert’s organizer wrote to him, “I was extremely sorry that you had to go… It was a business mistake, as you would have been the lion of the season... and would have made many useful musical and moneyed friends.”

In fact, it wasn’t until 1907 that the musical and moneyed British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham would discover and champion Delius’s music in his own homeland.

In all, the American composer Henry Cowell composed 20 symphonies, and left sketches for a 21st.

On today’s date in 1954, the Louisville Orchestra gave this premiere performance of Cowell’s 11th Symphony, subtitled “The Seven Rituals of Music.”

“There are seven rituals of music in the life of man from birth to death,” Cowell explained in program notes for the Louisville Orchestra’s recording of the new work, made shortly after their premiere performance. According to Cowell, these musical rituals included work, play, dance, love, and war, bracketed by the mysteries of birth and death.

The mood and mysticism of Cowell’s programmatic Symphony are similar to those found in Gustav Holst’s much more familiar orchestral suite, “The Planets.”

Although interest in Cowell’s music has risen steadily since his death in 1965, performances of Cowell symphonies are still rare events. Part of the problem lies in the eclectic range of styles to be found in Cowell’s music, and his fascination in what we now call “world music.” There is, for example, a Cowell “Gaelic” Symphony, another entitled the “Icelandic” Symphony, and yet another, influenced by Indian ragas and talas, entitled the “Madras” Symphony.

This didn’t bother Cowell at all. As he once explained it: “I have never deliberately concerned myself with developing a distinctive personal style, but only with the excitement and pleasure of writing music as beautiful, as warmly, and as interestingly as I can.”

If you set out to make up a name for a patriotic conductor, bandmaster, impresario, and music publisher from the era of the American Revolution, you probably couldn’t top the name “Josiah Flagg.”

Believe it or not, a real-life Colonial-Era musician named Josiah Flagg was born on today’s date in 1737, in Woburn, Massachusetts.

He was even a business associate of the legendary Paul Revere, who engraved the plates for Flagg’s first big collections of hymn-tunes. That collection from 1764 was the largest published in America up to that time, and, although the music was all by a British composer, it was – symbolically – the first to be printed on AMERICAN-made paper.

Flagg was active in both sacred and secular music, and organized at least six public concerts in Boston. He was an important figure in the musical life of that city for about a decade, and as an impresario, arranged for some of the first Boston performances of music by the great Georg Frideric Handel.

In the fall of 1773, Flagg presented a gala concert at Boston’s Faneuil (pronounced like “spaniel”) Hall, which proved to be his last. He included excerpts from Handel’s “Messiah,” but closed with his band’s rendition of the “Song of Liberty,” the marching hymn of Boston’s patriots.

Soon after, Flagg moved to Providence, where he served as a colonel in the Rhode Island regiment during the American Revolution, and disappeared from our early music history.

The poetry of the 20th century writer T.S. Eliot has inspired some memorable 20th century music, ranging from the silly (like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats”) to the solemn (like Igor Stravinsky’s anthem “The Dove Descending Breaks the Air,” a setting of some lines from Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding.”)

Some lines from that same Eliot poem haunted the American composer Libby Larsen for years, and eventually resulted in an orchestral tone poem entitled “Ring of Fire.”

The lines from Eliot’s poem read as follows: “We only live, only suspire, consumed by either fire or fire.”

“What does it mean, to be consumed by either fire or fire?” wrote Larsen in the preface to her score. “What does it mean to live consumed by passion or passion?” asked Larsen, and came up with a musical answer. As she explained, “The image is ignited musically by a melodic fragment in the tremolo strings echoed here and there by solo horn. To suggest flame, I added woodwind arpeggios and a two-chord motive which are heard in bursts of activity, extended string lines, and brief articulations from the woodwinds, brass and cymbals.”

Larsen’s tone-poem “Ring of Fire” received its premiere performance on today’s date in 1995, at a concert by the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble that had commissioned the work. In addition to her tone-poem, Larsen has written a number of other works for the modern symphony orchestra, including several symphonies.

In one of his poems entitled The Ballad of East and West, the British poet Rudyard Kipling penned a line of verse which was destined to enter the English language as an often-quote cliché: ‘Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.’

On today’s date in 1963, East DID meet West at the premiere performance of a musical work by the American composer Lou Harrison, entitled “Pacifika Rondo,” written for an orchestra of Western and Oriental instruments at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii.

For Lou Harrison, it was just one more stop on a journey he had begun decades earlier.

In the spring of 1935, when he was still a teenager, Lou Harrison had enrolled in a course entitled “Music of the Peoples of the World” at the University of California extension in San Francisco. The course was taught by the American composer Henry Cowell, who became Harrison’s composition teacher. Cowell urged his pupils to explore non-Western musical traditions and forms. Javanese gamelan music became a big influence in Harrison’s music, and, in 1961-62, a Rockerfeller Foundation grant made it possible for him to study Asian music in Korea.

The movements of Harrison’s “Pacifika Rondo” refer to various sections of the Pacific Basin. This music is from the section titled “In Sequoia’s Shade,” and Harrison’s home state of California.

“In composing Pacifika Rondo,” wrote Harrison, “I have thought, with love, around the circle of the Pacific.”

In 1967, the Beatles released a song about “a girl with kaleidoscope eyes,” but on today’s date in 1870, it was “a girl with ENAMEL eyes” that was the subject of a ballet that debuted in today’s date at the Paris Opéra.

The ballet’s full title was “Coppelia, or the Girl with Enamel Eyes,” and its story-line was based on a fantastic tale by the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, and dealt with the mad toymaker Dr. Coppelius, his uncannily lifelike doll Coppélia, and the complications the beautiful doll causes in the love-life of a small Polish village.

The music was provided by a 30-something French composer named Leo Delibes. “Coppelia” was a great success, much to Delibes’ relief. He had been juggling several jobs in Paris, but the new ballet’s financial success allowed him to concentrate on composing as his main career from then on.

Delibes followed up on the success of “Coppelia” with another ballet, “Sylvia,” in 1876, and, in 1883, his opera “Lakmé” premiered at the Opéra-Comique.

Along with the famous ballet of Tchaikovsky, Delibes’ “Coppelia” is now regarded as the culmination of the 19th century Romantic ballet. Tchaikovsky, for his part, was a great admirer of Delibes’ work, so much so that the Russian would argue that “Coppelia” was musically superior to his own “Swan Lake” ballet.