Composers Datebook

The plight of honey bees and their possible extinction is much in the news these days, sad to say.

Some attribute to Albert Einstein a quote that, “if the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, man would have only four years to live,” although most likely that’s a paraphrase of something Maurice Maeterlinck wrote in his 1901 book entitled “The Life of the Bee.”

Bees show up in the concert hall on occasion, too. Think of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” from the 19th century and Arvo Pärt’s “If Bach Had Kept Bees” from the 20th. In the 21st century, this bee-inspired chamber work for 14 players by the American composer Arlene Sierra debuted on today’s date in 2009 at the Miller Theater in New York City.

It’s titled “Colmena,” which means “beehive” in Spanish, and Ms. Sierra says, “Coloring this idea is a subtle nod to the stylized Franco-Iberian sound of early 20th century scores, with simmering energy and sweeping gestures,” and, “…the idea of a mass of insects hibernating, as beehives do each year, brought about the… exploration of a kind of buzzing repose.”

An American composer based in London, Arlene Sierra’s music has been described over there as having (quote) “its own character, in which historical and contemporary influences are fused into a highly flexible and distinctive style,” while back home, a New York magazine called her music “spry, savage, sly and seductive.”

At the end of one of his parables, Jesus says, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!” That’s also the spirit of a group called Ears Open, formed by Esa Pekka Salonen and Magnus Lindberg back when they were students at the Helsinki Academy, to raise the profile of new music in Finland.

Years later, after Salonen became the music director of the LA Philharmonic, he gave Lindberg his first major American commission, a work called “Fresco,” which had its world premiere in Los Angeles on today’s date in 1998.

In contrast to the chilly Northern landscapes of Finland, the title Fresco invokes much warmer places, and Lindberg has described it as reflecting both the ‘loud’ and ‘soft’ style of Indonesian gamelan ensembles, exotic percussion music designed for outdoor ceremonial purposes or for intimate indoor use.

Both East and West Coast critics were impressed. The LA Times wrote: "Lindberg uses the orchestra as if it were one massive instrument full of ever-changing textures... the interplay of light and dark, of colors and textures, commands attention.” And, according to the New York Times: "Lindberg raises orchestral color to the level of line, rhythm, and counterpoint. ... Layers of timbre fall away and new ones are added, easing one episode smoothly into the next."

These days if someone goes to all the trouble to write a symphony, they’re lucky to hear it performed at all—and it might be years before a second hearing. But back in 1791, when Haydn paid his first visit to England, Londoners were so enthusiastic about his new symphonies they asked for repeat performances as soon as possible. On today’s date in 1791, the work we know as Haydn’s Symphony No. 92 had its London premiere, and, “by particular desire,” as they phrased it back then, was repeated a week later and again the following month.

And when Haydn paid a visit to Oxford University that summer to receive an honorary doctorate, he led a performance of this same symphony at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre. Ever since, this particular English favorite has been nick-named Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony.

Haydn, being a politically astute sort of chap, didn’t publicize to his British fans that one of their favorite symphonies was actually commissioned by a French Count who had sponsored a series of Haydn concerts in Paris some five years earlier.

One wonders how the music-loving Count fared during the French Revolution, which was well underway in 1791. In any case, by 1794, when Haydn next paid a visit to London, England and France were at war, and Napoleon Buonaparte, the purported inspiration for one of Beethoven’s famous symphonies, was on the rise.

Following the successful premiere of his First Symphony in 1876, the New England composer John Knowles Paine finished a Second, to which he gave a German subtitle: “Im Fruehling” or “In Springtime.” In 19th century America, “serious” music meant German music, and “serious” musicians like Paine all studied in Germany. Returning home, Paine became the first native-born American to win broad acceptance as a symphonic composer, and, accepting a teaching post at Harvard, that school’s first professor of music.

On today’s date in 1880, Paine’s “Spring” Symphony was premiered at Sanders Theater by the Boston Philharmonic, and warmly received by its first audience. You might even go so far as to say that the normally staid Bostonians went nuts. One critic who was present recalled that “ladies waved their handkerchiefs, men shouted in approbation, and the highly respected John S. Dwight, arbiter in Boston of music criticism, stood in his seat frantically opening and shutting his umbrella as an expression of uncontrollable enthusiasm.”

Paine’s music remained tremendously popular in his own day. In 1883, George Henschel, then the conductor of the Boston Symphony, was sent the following poetic suggestion about his programming:

Let no more Wagner themes thy bill enhance

And give the native workers just one chance.

Don’t give that Dvorák symphony a-gain;

If you would give us joy, oh give us Paine!

On today’s date in 1706, the German composer and organist Johann Pachelbel was buried in Nuremberg, the town where he was born some 53 years earlier.

In his day, Pachelbel was regarded as something of a progressive—an innovative composer of Protestant church music and works for harpsichord and organ. Pachelbel was acquainted with the Bach family, and was, in fact, the teacher of the teacher of J.S. Bach, and served as godfather to one of J.S. Bach’s older relations.

As famous as he was in his day, Pachelbel would be pretty much forgotten by most music lovers until late in the 20th century, when an orchestral arrangement of a little chamber piece that he had written would suddenly become one of the best-known, best-loved, and one of the most unavoidable classical themes of our time. In 1979, the American composer George Rochberg even included variations on Pachelbel’s famous Canon as the 3rd movement of his own String Quartet No. 6.

Like Bach, some of Johann Pachelbel’s children also became composers, and one of them, Karl Teodorus Pachelbel, emigrated from Germany to the British colonies of North America. As “Charles Theodore Pachelbel,” he became an important figure in the musical life of early 18th century Boston and Charleston, and died there in 1750, the same year as J.S. Bach.

At Carnegie Hall on today’s date in 2015, James Levine led the MET Chamber Ensemble in the first performance of a new work by the American composer Elliott Carter, who died in November of 2012, a month or so shy of what would have been his 104th birthday.

The 2015 Carnegie Hall debut of “The American Sublime” marked the last world premiere performance of Carter’s 75-year-long composer career.

Hearing Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” at Carnegie Hall in the 1920s inspired Carter to become a composer. A high school teacher introduced him to Charles Ives, who became a mentor. By the mid-1930s, Carter was writing music in the “populist modern” style, ala Copland, but during a year spent in the Arizona desert in 1950, Carter finished his First String Quartet—music uncompromising in both its technical difficulty and structural intricacy.

"That crazy long First String Quartet was played in Belgium," Carter recalled. "It was played over the radio, and I got a letter from a coal miner, in French, and he said, 'I liked your piece. It's just like digging for coal.' He meant that it was hard and took effort."

Carter’s music remains hard work for performers AND audiences, but increasingly both are taking up the challenge. This music is from a BBC Symphony recording of Carter’s Horn Concerto from 2006, a work completed when he was 98 years old.

Of all music lovers in the world, the Viennese are notorious for the passion with which they can despise celebrities one moment, and lionize them the next. Here, for example, is one music critic’s reaction to the 1886 Viennese premiere of the Symphony No. 4 by Johannes Brahms:

“Conspicuous is the crab-like progress in the output of Brahms. It has, to be sure, never reached beyond the level of mediocrity, but such nothingness, emptiness, and hypocrisy as prevails throughout this E-minor symphony has not appeared in any previous work of Brahms in so alarming a manner. The art of composing without ideas has decidedly found in Brahms its worthiest representative. Just like the good Lord, Herr Brahms is a master at making something from nothing.”

And yet, 11 years later, on today’s date in 1897, when this same symphony was performed again in Vienna—by the very same orchestra and conductor—each movement was greeted by prolonged cheers from the audience. Not only had the Viennese come to admire the music, but also the man—and they knew their beloved Herr Brahms was dying. And so, on March 7, 1897, when the gaunt and sickly composer attended a matinee performance of his 4th symphony at the Vienna Philharmonic’s Golden Hall, the audience took the opportunity to acknowledge him and his music for the very last time.

On today’s date in 2000, the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen gave the premiere of a new opera, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” based on a novel of the same name by Canadian writer Margaret Attwood.

The book and opera tell of a nightmarish future: following a nuclear disaster in the United States, infertility rates have soared, and a religious sect has staged a military coup, enslaving the few fertile women who remain as breeders, or “handmaids,” for the military and religious commanders of their sect. Says Attwood, "There is nothing new about the society I depicted in The Handmaid's Tale except the time and place. All of the things I have written about have been done before—more than once, in fact."

Despite its grim subject matter, Danish composer Poul Ruders says he saw "huge operatic potential" when he first read the book back in 1992. The heroine of his opera, a handmaid named “Offred,” can still remember life before the disaster, and, through a series of flashbacks and monologues, recounts a tale of hope and suffering—emotions not foreign to many other classic operas of the past.

The original production in Copenhagen was sung in Danish, but Ruders says he conceived the work in English. The opera was staged in that language first in London at the English National Opera, and subsequently, at the opera’s American premiere, in St. Paul by the Minnesota Opera, to great critical acclaim.

The Russian city of Kuibyshev on the Volga river east of Moscow might seem an unlikely site for an important symphonic premiere. But from 1941 to 1943, Kuibyshev was the temporary capital of the Soviet Union. As German and Finnish troops advanced from the west, the Russian government and its cultural institutions moved east. Among the refugees relocated to Kuibyshev were the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra from Moscow and the composer Dimitri Shostakovich from Leningrad.

And so, on today’s date in 1942, that unlikely city was the venue for the world premiere of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, subtitled “Leningrad.”

In 1942, the Soviet Union was America’s ally in the war against Hitler, and Shostakovich’s new symphony was enlisted as a major propaganda tool. A microfilm copy of the new score was flown from Kuibyshev to Tehran, then transported by car through Iran, Iraq, Jordan and Palestine to Cairo, then flown to Brazil for transfer by the U.S. Navy to New York. The American premiere was given on July 19, 1942, by the NBC Symphony under Arturo Toscanini.

Less than a month later, on August 9, 1942, the “Leningrad” symphony was even performed in the besieged and starving city of Leningrad. The few musicians still capable of performing were given extra rations to keep up their strength, and, to ensure a measure of quiet during their performance, a Russian artillery commander ordered an intensive artillery bombardment on the enemy troops surrounding the city.

On today’s date in 1893, a New York Philharmonic concert at Carnegie Hall featured the premiere of a big new symphony by a 37-year old American composer and New York native named George Templeton Strong, Jr. This was a pretty big deal at a time when the Philharmonic regularly played new works from Europe, but paid little attention to what Americans were composing.

As the Philharmonic’s program book put it, somewhat defensively: “The acceptance of a work for performance is to a certain extent a declaration that it belongs to the very best class of contemporaneous literature according to the unbiased judgment of those who are entrusted with these concerts.”

Strong’s Symphony No. 2, subtitled “Sintram,” was inspired by a literary work of that name depicting the victory of good over evil. The New York Times review gave it high marks, praising the composer’s imagination and mastery of instrumentation, but ventured to suggest that a few cuts might be welcomed by future audiences, as the new symphony WAS a tad long and unremittingly serious in tone. Still, the Times gave the opinion that Strong belonged to “the front rank of living composers.”

Strong himself was not present. He was in Switzerland, a country he was soon to adopt as his permanent home. His absence on the American scene caused his music to be largely forgotten, but recently there has been a revival of interest in this late Romantic expatriate composer.