Composers Datebook

Primitive man probably imitated animal sounds for both practical and religious reasons. More recently, the Baroque-era composer Heinrich Franz von Biber imitated one particular animal for comic effect.

The music is Biber’s “Sonata Representing Animals,” and, in early 20th century slang, it’s simply “the cat’s meow.”

Now, most cats are supposed to have nine lives, but would you believe 8,949?

On today’s date in 1981, “Cats,” a new musical by the British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber opened at the New London Theatre in that city’s fashionable West End.

Despite a bomb threat and brief evacuation of the theatre, the premiere of “Cats” was a great success. 8,949 performances later, on the same date in 2002, when the show finally closed, it had long since entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-running musical to date.

In London, the show took in 136 million British pounds in ticket sales and was seen by over eight million people. Worldwide, “Cats” has taken in excess of 2 billion dollars and has been seen by over 50 million people.

“Cats” has been performed in 11 different languages in over 300 cities in 26 countries. “Memory,” the hit song from the musical, has had nearly 53,000 plays on radio and television in the UK alone, and airplays in the US passed the 1 million total in 1988 and the 2 million in 1998.

Is the customer always right? Apparently Giuseppe Verdi thought so – to a degree, at least.

On today’s date in 1872, Verdi sent a note to his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, with an attached letter he had received from a disgruntled customer, a certain Prospero Bertani, who had attended not one, but two performances of Verdi’s then brand new opera, “Aida.”

“I admired the scenery,” wrote Bertani, “I listened with pleasure to the excellent singers, and took pains to let nothing escape me. After it was over, I asked myself whether I was satisfied. The answer was ‘no’.”

Since everyone else seemed to think “Aida” was terrific, Bertani attended a second performance to make sure he wasn’t mistaken, and concluded: “The opera contains absolutely nothing thrilling or electrifying. If it were not for the magnificent scenery, the audience would not sit through it. It will fill the theatre a few more times and then gather dust in the archives.”

Bertini itemized his expenses for tickets, train fare, and meals, and asked Verdi for reimbursement.

Verdi was so amused that he instructed Ricordi to pay Bertani – but not the full amount, since, as Verdi put it: “…to pay for his dinner too? No! He could very well have eaten at home!” Verdi asked for a signed statement that (quote) “Bertani promises never again to go to hear my new operas, to avoid for himself the danger of other specters and for me the farce of paying him for another trip.”

Some classical music snobs look down their nose at film scores, considering them less “serious” and more “commercial” than “art” music written for the concert hall.

Aaron Copland, for one, deplored this attitude. He admired the work of composers like Bernard Herrmann, Alex North, David Raksin, and Elmer Bernstein, whose successful Hollywood careers earned them financial rewards on the West Coast, if not the respect of the snootier East Coast music critics. Copland himself had spent some time in Hollywood, and knew what was involved in completing a film score on time and on budget.

On today’s date in 1940, at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood, the press was invited to a special preview showing of a new film version of Thorton Wilder’s popular stage play “Our Town.” Europe was already at war, and Copland wrote his friend Benjamin Britten: “I find it hard as hell to go on putting notes down on paper as if nothing were happening.”

To match Thorton Wilder’s nostalgic play about American life in Grover’s Corner, New Hampshire, Copland’s score employed harmonies suggestive of old New England church hymns.

For once, audiences and the critics were impressed, and Copland saw to it that his film score would also have an extended life in the concert hall. Copland quickly arranged an “Our Town” concert suite, which premiered on a CBS Radio broadcast in June of 1940, and reworked this suite for its first public performance by the Boston Pops and Leonard Bernstein in May of 1944.

Stephen Sondheim was 32 years old when his musical “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” opened on Broadway on today’s date in 1962.

The best seats in the house at New York’s Alvin Theater on West 52nd Street would have cost you $8.60, but decent seats were to be had for three bucks in those pre-inflationary days. And, much to Sondheim’s relief, New Yorkers snapped up those tickets in short order.

The trial run of “Forum” in Washington DC had been a near disaster, and, as this was the first major musical for which Sondheim wrote both the lyrics and the music, he had a lot riding on the show’s success.

Audiences and critics alike loved the over-the-top fusion of an ancient Roman comedy by Plautus with the kick-in-the-pants conventions of American Vaudeville, spiced up with a liberal dash of Burlesque beauties in skimpy Roman costumes. As the NY Times review put it, the cast included six courtesans who “are not obliged to DO much, but have a great deal to SHOW.”

“Forum” won several Tony Awards in 1962, including “Best Musical.” Even so, while Sondheim’s lyrics were praised as being very clever, his music was barely mentioned, and his skill as a composer not yet fully appreciated. That would occur several years – and several shows – later.

On today’s date in 1825, the Italian composer Antonio Salieri breathed his last in Vienna.

Gossip circulated that in his final dementia, Salieri babbled something about poisoning Mozart. Whether he meant it figuratively or literally, or even said anything of the sort, didn’t seem to matter. This Viennese gossip became a Romantic legend that culminated in a 19th century poem and opera, and a very popular 20th century play and movie.

More recently, some food detectives have suggested that if Mozart was poisoned, it was more likely an undercooked pork chop that was to blame. In one of his last letters to his wife, Mozart mentions his anticipation of feasting on a fat chop his cook had secured for his dinner.

Twenty-five years after Salieri’s death, on today’s date in 1850, the Austro-Hungarian conductor Anton Seidl was born in Budapest. Seidl became a famous conductor of both the Metropolitan Opera and New York Philharmonic. It was Seidl, for example, who conducted the premiere of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony at Carnegie Hall in 1893.

In 1898, at the age of just 47, Seidl died suddenly, apparently from ptomaine poisoning. Perhaps it was the shad roe he ate at home, or that sausage he ate at Fleischmann’s restaurant? An autopsy revealed serious gallstone and liver ailments, so maybe Seidl’s last meal, whatever it might have been, was as innocent of blame as poor old Salieri.

Today’s date marks the birthday of the American composer and musicologist George Perle, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1986.

In a 1985 interview, Perle vividly recalled his first musical experience, an encounter with Chopin’s Étude in F minor, played by an aunt: “It literally paralyzed me,” he said, “I was extraordinarily moved and acutely embarrassed at the same time, because there were other people in the room, and I could tell that nobody else was having the same sort of reaction I was.”

Not surprisingly, Perle became a composer himself, writing for orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo instruments and voice. He was also fascinated by the 20th century Austrian composers Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, and published many articles and books on their 12-tone method of composition.

In his own lyrical and well-crafted music, Perle employed what he called “12-tone tonality,” a middle path between rigorous atonality and traditional, tonal-based music.

Whether tonal or not, music is both a logical and an emotional language. Perle once made this telling distinction between speech and music: “Reading a novel is altogether different from reading a newspaper, but it's all language. If you go to a concert, you have some kind of reaction to it. If the newspaper is Chinese, you can't understand it. But if you hear something by a Chinese composer, if it's playful, for instance, you understand.”

George Perle died at his home in Manhattan, aged 93, early in 2009.

If I ask, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” you say, “Practice!” (Of course!) But back in 1891, Peter Tchaikovsky would have probably answered, “by ship” – since he had, in fact, sailed from Europe to conduct several of his pieces at the hall’s gala opening concerts.

The first concert in Carnegie Hall, or as they called it then, “The Music Hall,” occurred on today’s date in 1891, and included a performance of Tchaikovsky’s “Marche solennelle” or “Coronation March,” conducted by the composer.

The review in the New York Herald offered these comments: “Tchaikovsky’s Marche solennelle is simple, strong and sober, but not surprisingly original. The leading theme recalls the Hallelujah chorus, and the treatment of the first part is Handelian… Of the deep passion, the complexity and poetry which mark some other works of the composer’s, there is no sign in this march.”

Oh well, in the days that followed, Tchaikovsky would conduct other works of “complexity and poetry,” including his Third Orchestral Suite and First Piano Concerto.

During his American visit, Tchaikovsky kept a travel diary, and recorded these impressions of New York: "It is a huge city, not beautiful, but very original. In Chicago, I’m told, they have gone even further – one of the houses there has 21 floors!"

At Queen’s Hall in London, on today’s date in 1920, the British conductor Albert Coates led the premiere of the revised version of the Second Symphony, the “London” Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

A longer version of this Symphony had premiered, also at Queen’s Hall, six years earlier, and Vaughan Williams would continue to tinker with this work, on and off, for decades.

“The London Symphony is past mending,” wrote Vaughan Williams in 1951, “though with all its faults I love it still; indeed, it is my favorite.”

Mention the name Vaughan Williams to most music lovers, and you’ll bring to mind English folk tunes or hymns woven into lush works for strings, or musical pictures of English countryside… But it was a city view that inspired his “London Symphony,” described by Vaughan Williams himself as “a good view of the river and a bridge and three great electric-light chimneys and a sunset.”

In fact, you could call the Vaughan Williams Second a “sunset” symphony. Its final pages were inspired by part of an H. G. Wells novel describing a night passage on the Thames to the open sea: “To run down the Thames so is to run one’s hand over the pages in the book of England from end to end... The river passes... London passes… England passes…“

Pleyel and Company was a French piano firm founded in 1807 by the composer Ignace Pleyel. The firm provided pianos for Chopin, and also ran an intimate Parisian 300-seat concert hall called the Salle Pleyel – the “Pleyel room” in English, where Chopin performed.

In the 20th century, a roomier Salle Pleyel comprising some 3,000-seats was built, and it was there on today’s date in 1929 that a new concerto for an old instrument had its premiere performance. This was the “Concert champetre” or “Pastoral Concerto” for harpsichord and orchestra by the French composer Francis Poulenc, with the Paris Symphony conducted by Pierre Monteux, and with Wanda Landowska as the soloist.

“A harpsichord concerto in a hall that seats thousands?” you may ask. “How could anyone hear the harpsichord?” Well, the answer is that Madame Landowska performed on a beefier, metal-framed harpsichord built in the 20th century rather than the quieter wood-framed instruments used in the 18th. Landowska’s modern harpsichord was specially-constructed for her by – who else? – Pleyel and Company.

Landowska needed those extra decibels, not only to fill a big hall, but also because Poulenc’s concerto was scored for harpsichord and – or perhaps against – a large modern orchestra, with full strings, winds, percussion, and a large brass section that even included a tuba!

These days, of course, discrete electronic amplification can be employed, so the harpsichord soloist needn’t constantly ask, “Can you hear me now?”

You can listen to a complete performance of Poulenc’s “Concert champêtre” played on a 1930 Pleyel harpsichord via the links on this webpage -- and compare the sound of a 20th century Pleyel harpsichord to a historic 18th century instrument.