Composers Datebook

When your instrument is nicknamed “the burping bedpost,” it’s hard to get respect in refined circles. So it’s understandable then, that the bassoon section of, say, a major London orchestra might indulge in a bit of day-dreaming in which a gang of hot-rodding motorcycling bassoonists blow into town and take over a concert hall. And guess what? That is EXACTLY the scenario of a piece written for Britain’s Philharmonia Orchestra by the American composer Michael Daughtery. “Hell’s Angels” is the title of his concerto for bassoon quartet and orchestra that received its premiere in London on today’s date in 1999.

Daughtery says: “I find the bassoon to be an instrument with great expressive and timbral possibilities, ranging from low and raucous rumbling to plaintive high intensity. Hell’s Angels juxtaposes hellish and angelic music.”

Daugherty takes a lot of his inspiration from icons of American pop culture, so it’s not surprising that he should choose “Hell’s Angels” as a theme for a bassoon concerto.

After all, he writes, “the bassoon is similar in size and shape to the drag pipes found on Harley Davidson motorcycles, the preferred mode of transportation of Hell’s Angels in America. When the noise-curbing mufflers are illegally removed from the drag pipes, they create a deafening roar. I have removed the traditional mufflers on the bassoon repertoire in order to compose the first concerto for bassoon quartet and orchestra in the 20th century.

Today’s date marks the 70th birthday of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the British composer of blockbuster musicals such as “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Cats,” and “The Phantom of the Opera.”

In addition to winning Grammy and Tony Awards in our country, he’s racked up Olivier Awards in his own. He was knighted in 1992, and in 1997 was created a life peer as Baron Lloyd-Webber, of Sydmonton in the County of Hampshire. Estimates of his net worth suggest a figure well over $900 million.

Despite all that, Lloyd Webber has always had detractors, including those who accuse him of plagiarizing everyone from Mendelssohn to Puccini to Pink Floyd. His musicals are often criticized for their supposed glitz and superficiality, and adversely compared to those of his American contemporary, Stephen Sondheim.

Sarah Crompton, writing for The Telegraph, offered a more nuanced comparison between the two, referencing The Beatles, no less: “Lloyd Webber is McCartney to Stephen Sondheim's Lennon. He suffers from just the same under-valuing as an innovator because his essential impulse to go for the big, thumping number with the catchy tune will always obscure the subtlety and bravery he is capable of.” She concludes, “At a time when the Broadway musical was running out of steam, [Lloyd Webber] has taken the form on, shown what it is capable of -- and the pantheon of history might just judge him as a great 20th-century innovator.”

One of the most serious—and daunting—of musical forms is the passacaglia, in which an unchanging melodic pattern repeats itself while other lines of melody offer elaboration and counterpoint to the unwavering tread of the repeated motive. The result tends to be deliberate, somber, and imposing.

The most famous passacaglia in all of Western classical music is the Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor for organ by Johann Sebastian Bach, whose birthday we observe on today’s date.

After Bach’s high water mark, it takes more than a little courage for modern composers to tackle this form! One of those brave souls who tried—and succeeded—is the American composer Ron Nelson.

Nelson’s “Passacaglia, “subtitled “Homage on B-A-C-H,” utilizes the melodic motive represented in German musical nomenclature by B-flat, A, C, and B natural—in German B natural is represented by the letter H. Nelson’s wind band Passacaglia was commissioned to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music in 1992. It didn’t prove an easy task, recalls Nelson: “It evolved very slowly… The trick was… to make it seamless and inexorable. Of all my compositions, this is the tightest. I cannot imagine changing one note.”

Apparently others agree, since the resulting work won a number of awards and has become a wind band classic.

On today’s date in 1980, a new production of a seldom-heard work by the German composer Kurt Weill was staged by the New York City Opera. Their production of Silverlake, starring Joel Grey, opened on the eve of the 47th anniversary of Weill’s hasty departure from Nazi Germany after being tipped off that the Gestapo was hunting for him.

“Silverlake,” or “Der Silbersee” in its original German title, was Weill’s last work to premiere in Germany, shortly before the Nazi’s total ban of his music. As early as 1930, at a rally in Augsburg, Hitler had railed against anti-Nazi intellectuals and singled out by name the novelist Thomas Mann, the scientist Albert Einstein, and the composer Kurt Weill. Astonishing, Weill happened to be in Augsburg observing the crowds that very day.

Imagine what it must have been like to hear YOUR name denounced by Hitler—and to hear the crowd’s enthusiastic response!

Despite that, Weill courageously stayed in his native land until 1933, despite violent Nazi protests at performances of his music, before fleeing to Paris. Even there at a performance of some of his music, cries of “Vive Hitler!” mingled with the applause.

In 1935, after two unhappy years in Paris and London, Weill arrived in New York, applied for U.S. citizenship, and reinvented himself as a successful Broadway composer, insisting on Anglicizing the pronunciation of his last name from “Vile” to “While,” and refusing to even speak German.

The opening of Edith Wharton’s novel “The Age of Innocence” takes place at New York’s old Academy of Music in the early 1870s, during a performance of Charles Gounod’s “Faust,” a French grand opera based on the classic German play by Goethe. At the time specified in Wharton’s novel, Gounod’s opera was still “new” music, having premiered about a dozen years earlier in Paris on today’s date in 1859.

Gounod’s “Faust” became a worldwide success, and was quickly translated into many languages. In Wharton’s fictional New York performance, for example, the real-life Swedish diva Christine Nilsson sang the role of Marguerite, the pure German maiden seduced and abandoned by Faust. As Wharton puts it: “She sang, of course, ‘m’ama!” and not “he loves me,’ since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”

Nilsson, again singing in Italian, sang Marguerite at the 1883 gala opening night performance of “Faust” at New York’s newly built Metropolitan Opera House. “Faust” was performed so often there that the building was soon dubbed the “Faust-spielhaus,” a pun on Wagner’s German “Festpielhaus” or “Festival Theater” in Bayreuth.

Despite its good tunes, Gounod’s sentimental opera fell out of favor around the time of the First World War, but soon bounced back into the core repertory of opera houses worldwide—only these days, more often than not, it’s sung in French.

All artists, including composers, are frequently urged to “write what they know.”

Well, if that’s the case, then any new and sleep-deprived parent can probably relate to music which supposedly depicts a late-night session with a new-born baby. It’s the middle movement of a Piano Concerto that was given its premiere on today’s date in 1994 by the Kansas City Symphony, with Bill McGlaughlin conducting and Richard Cass the piano soloist.

This new Concerto was by the Kansas City composer James Mobberley, who writes: “The piece is in three movements, each of which reflects a different emotional side of parenthood. The first movement represents the excitement and hysteria of forthcoming childbirth. The middle movement begins with amazingly soft moments following childbirth but leads into the period of sleeplessness and total chaos that inevitably follows. The final movement represents the wonderful fun and unpredictable interactions that start to happen, beginning with the child’s first smile.”

Composer James Mobberley was born in Iowa in 1954, raised in Pennsylvania, and earned music degrees from the University of North Carolina and the Cleveland Institute of Music. Since 1983 he’s taught at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, balancing his teaching duties there with his composition work, which includes a wide range of concert and theatrical pieces, some combining electronic and live performing elements.

Today we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Boston (where else?), noting two musical premieres in that Celtic city.

The first was in March of 1922, when Pierre Monteux conducted the Boston Symphony in the premiere of three of the “Five Irish Fantasies” by the German-born American composer Charles Martin Loeffler. These were settings for solo voice and orchestra of poetry by William Butler Yeats, and, for their Boston premiere, the vocalist was none other than THE great Irish tenor, John McCormack.

In 1947, the Eire Society of Boston commissioned another American composer, Leroy Anderson, to write an “Irish Suite” for its annual Irish night at the Boston Pops. Anderson used six popular Irish tunes, ranging from the sentimental to the exuberant, for his suite… skillfully arranging them into an immediate hit and lasting success. Arthur Fiedler conducted the premiere during the Pops’ summer season that year.

On today’s date in 1968, a 72-year old Italian-born American composer named Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco died in Beverley Hills, California. As a young man, Castelnuovo-Tedesco was already known as a rising composer, concert pianist, music critic and essayist.

In 1939 he left Mussolini’s Italy and came to America, and like a lot of European musicians of the time, he found work writing film scores for major Hollywood studios. Castelnuovo-Tedesco became an American citizen, and eventually taught at the Los Angeles Conservatory, where his pupils included many famous names from the next generation of film composers, including Jerry Goldsmith, Henry Mancini, Andre Previn, Nelson Riddle and John Williams.

In addition to film scores, Castelnuovo-Tedesco composed a signifigant body of concert music, including concertos for the likes of Heifetz and Sergovia. One high point in the composer’s post-war career occurred in the 1960s, when his Shakespearean opera “The Merchant of Venice” was staged in both Italy and Los Angeles.

A number of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s works are directly related to his Jewish faith, including a choral work from 1947, entitled “Naomi and Ruth.” The composer’s mother was named Naomi, and he claimed the faithful Ruth in the Biblical story reminded him of his own wife, Clara. “In a certain sense,” he wrote, “it was really my symbolic autobiography, existing before I decided to write—to open my heart—in these pages.”

Ernest von Dohnanyi’s Second Symphony was written during the closing years of World War II, begun during the German occupation of his native Hungary in early 1944, and finished after his flight to Vienna later that same year as Soviet troops advanced from the east. According to his wife, Dohannyi was so focused on the composition of this work, that on one occasion she had to tear him away from his desk to seek shelter during an Allied air raid.

Dohnanyi was wrongly accused of being a Nazi sympathizer, even though he had resigned from the Liszt Music Academy and disbanded the Budapest Philharmonic rather than dismiss any Jewish musicians. His strong anti-Soviet views also made him persona non grata with the post-war Communist government in Hungary. Dohnanyi eventually found a new home in America, where he taught at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He and his wife became American citizens in 1955.

Dohnanyi’s Second Symphony received its first performance by a semi-professional orchestra in London in 1948, but he revised it substantially for its American premiere on today’s date in 1957 by the Minneapolis Symphony under Antal Dorati. In its final movement, Dohnanyi quotes the Bach chorale, “Komm, Susser Tod” (Come, Sweet Death), and in program notes for the Minneapolis performance, quotes the Hungarian playwright Imre Madach: “The goal is death. Life is a struggle.”

On today’s date in 2002, a new Violin Concerto received its premiere by the Boston Symphony. The soloist was the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, with the new work’s composer, Andre Previn, conducting. Despite his French-sounding first name and his British honorary knighthood, Previn was born in Berlin, he came to the United States in 1939, and became an American citizen in 1943.

Previn’s Violin Concerto has a kind of homecoming in its third movement, subtitled “From a Train in Germany.” Late in 1999, Previn had telephoned a birthday greeting to his manager back in New York while riding on a German train. That call prompted a suggestion that a musical work planned for Boston might reflect that train ride through the country of his birth. The 3rd movement also incorporates a German children’s song suggested by Anne-Sophie Mutter, one that Previn had known as a child in Germany.

Autobiographical inferences throughout the Violin Concerto are also suggested by an inscription from T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” which reads: “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/will be to arrive where we started/and know the place for the first time.” And, as if to underscore the autobiographical interplay of life and art, Mutter and Previn were married on August 1, 2002, five months after the premiere of “their” Concerto.

That marriage (Previn’s fifth) ended four years later when the pair divorced in 2006, citing the 34 year difference in their ages as the cause.