Composers Datebook

The German composer Richard Wagner tried to limit performances of his final opera, “Parsifal,” to his own theater in Bayreuth, hoping it would provide a source of income for his family after his death. “Parsifal” premiered at Bayreuth in 1882, and after Wagner died the following year, his widow forbade rental of the music for performances elsewhere.

Naturally, Wagner enthusiasts all over the world were eager to hear the new work. One of them was a German-born American named Walter Damrosch, who, at the tender age of 23, was the head of both the New York Symphony and Oratorio Society, and a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera, to boot. While visiting London in 1885, Damrosch had bought a miniature score of “Parsifal.” The purchase gave him no right to perform the work, but he discovered the fine for doing so was only 50 pounds, and so he hired copyists to prepare orchestral parts for a performance in America.

On today’s date in 1886, Damrosch gave a concert performance of “Parsifal” at the old Metropolitan Opera House. Among his vocal soloists, Damrosch even managed to book soprano Marianne Brandt, one of the original Bayreuth cast members.

Unfortunately for Damrosch, Anton Seidl, a close friend of the Wagner family had just been hired as the new music director of the Met. Seidl apparently took offense at Damrosch’s audacity, and as long as Seidl was in charge at the Met, he limited Damrosch to the NON-Wagnerian repertory!

On today’s date in 1965, the now-classic and mega-iconic musical film “The Sound of Music” officially debuted at the Rivoli Theater at Broadway and 49th Street in New York City.

Since we at COMPOSERS DATEBOOK are notorious for mentioning “little known facts,” let us state in our best Cliff Clavin manner, that the first test audiences to see the film did so in fly-over country—first in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and subsequently in Tulsa, Oklahoma, about a month before the film’s New York debut.

The Midwestern audiences were ecstatic, and director Robert Wise knew he would have a hit on his hands when his film starring Julie Andrews opened on Broadway, not far from where the stage version, starring Mary Martin, had originally debuted back in 1959.

The 1965 New York Times film review was a little snarky—well, what else is new? It began by referring to (quote) “the perceptible weakness of its quaintly old-fashioned book” and the show’s “cheerful abundance of kirche-küche-kinder sentiment,” grudgingly admiring, “the generally melodic felicity of the Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein score,” and ended by opining, “Businesswise, Mr. Wise is no fool.”

Indeed, Mr. Wise’s film won five Oscars and displaced “Gone with the Wind” as the highest-grossing film of all-time. Its songs are known by heart by most of us—thanks chiefly to Mary Martin and Julie Andrews, of course, but also to others ranging from John Coltrane to Stephen Hough to Lady Gaga.

In Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare’s characters brags: “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” None of those happened to Claude Debussy, however, when his symphonic suite “La Mer”–“The Sea”–had its American premiere on today’s date in Boston in 1907.

It was, as they say, a tough crowd… composed of “easily discomfited dowagers, quiet, academically-minded New England music lovers, and irascible music critics.”

That’s the description of musicologist Nicholas Slonimsky, who collected notably bad reviews in his notably excellent “Lexicon of Musical Invective.” Other reviews of “The Sea” included lines like: “Frenchmen are notoriously bad sailors, and we clung like a drowning man to a few fragments of the tonal wreck.”

Another said: “Debussy’s music is the dreariest kind of rubbish. Does anybody for a moment doubt that Debussy would not write such chaotic, meaningless, cacophonous, ungrammatical stuff if he could invent a melody?”

An even more graphic critic said: “It is possible that Debussy did not intend to call it 'La Mer,' but 'Le Mal de Mer,' which would at once make the tone-picture as clear as day. It is a series of symphonic pictures of seasickness. The first movement is Headache. The second is Doubt, picturing moments of dread suspense... The third movement, with its explosions and rumblings, has now a self-evident purpose: The hero is endeavoring to throw up his boot heels!”

For most music lovers, the phrase “Italian composers of the 19th and 20th centuries” means first and foremost OPERA composers.

But during the 1920s and 1930s, when the great Italian opera conductor Arturo Toscanini was music director of the New York Philharmonic, American audiences heard many non-operatic, symphonic works by modern Italian composers.

On today’s date in 1929, for example, Toscanini led the New York Philharmonic in the world premiere performance of the “Concerto dell ‘estate” or “Summer Concerto of the contemporary Italian composer, Ildebrando Pizzetti. And one year later, almost to the day, Toscanini and the Philharmonic premiered another Pizzetti orchestral work, his “Venetian Rondo.”

In addition to premieres by Pizzetti, New York audiences heard recent Italian symphonic works by Respighi, Tommasini, Martucci, Busoni, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Wolf-Ferrari, and others.

Absent from Toscanini’s New York programs were new works by the rising American composers of the day. There were no Toscanini premieres—or even performances—of works by Copland, Hanson, Harris, or Piston. Those composers had to look to the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky if they wanted a hearing.

The American composer Daniel Gregory Mason complained in 1931 that the New York Philharmonic was run by “fashion-enslaved, prestige-hypnotized minds... totally devoid of any American loyalty to match the Italian loyalty” that was, as Mason put it, “rather likeable” in the charismatic Italian maestro.

Today’s date marks the birthday of a 20th century Czech composer you perhaps have never heard of. Viktor Kalabis was born in 1923 and by age 6, was giving public piano performances. All the signs pointed to a brilliant career in music. But Kalabis would face – and surmount -- two major political hurdles.

First, his formal musical studies were delayed by the Nazi occupation of his country in 1938, when he was forced into factory work. Even so, he found time to conduct a choir, perform in a local trio, and take lessons in composition.

After the war, Kalabis completed his studies in Prague, where he met and married a young harpsichordist named Zuzana Ruzickova, who was a concentration camp survivor. Victor was a Gentile, but in Stalinist Czechoslovakia, anti-Semitism was rampant and marrying a Jew was frowned upon. To make matters worse, both Victor and Zuzana refused to join the Communist Party, hardly what one would call “a smart career move” in those years. Despite that, Kalabis began to attract commissions and performances of his music at home and abroad.

Following the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and before his death in 2006, Kalabis assumed a more prominent position in his country’s musical life. His symphonies, concertos, and chamber works reflect his admiration for both Igor Stravinsky and his Czech compatriot Bohuslav Martinu, and are now regarded as some of the most important contributions to Czech music in the late 20th century.

On today’s date in 1832, the Polish pianist and composer Frederic Chopin made his concert debut in Paris at the Salle Pleyel. Among the enthusiastic audience members was another composer-pianist by the name of Franz Liszt, who would rapidly become Chopin’s close friend and advocate.

Chopin dedicated his recently completed Piano Etudes, Op. 10, to Liszt, and once wrote to a friend these lines: “I am writing without knowing what my pen is scribbling, because at this moment Liszt is playing my etudes and putting honest thoughts out of my head. I should like to rob him of the way he plays them!”

The failure of the Polish Insurrection of 1831 had driven a large number of Polish refugees to Paris, where they joined émigré groups of Italians and Austrians who had also fled political repression at home for the more liberal, welcoming atmosphere of the French capitol.

Chopin was in the midst of a concert tour in Austria and Germany when he heard of troubles back home, and, more by accident than design, found himself cut off from his native land. Increasing ill-health and crippling stage fright made Chopin’s public concert appearances in Paris rare events. When Chopin did perform in public, he liked to share the stage with a sympathetic singer like Pauline Viardot-Garcia, or a fellow pianist like Liszt. Despite his fame, Chopin’s concert appearances in Paris numbered less than a dozen.

“Pssst… Hey buddy—wanna buy a bridge?… No? Well, how about a Clarinet Concerto, then?”

As most of us know, the Brooklyn Bridge is not for sale, but this New York icon has reputedly been sold to many unsuspecting visitors. After its opening in 1883, Harper's Monthly wrote, "The wise man will not cross the bridge in five minutes, nor in twenty, [but] will linger to get the good of the splendid view about him." The American composer Michael Daugherty did just that, and came up with a concerto for clarinet and wind ensemble.

Daugherty’s “Brooklyn Bridge” concerto was commissioned by the International Clarinet Association, and was premiered in 2005 by clarinetist Michael Wayne and the University of Michigan Symphony Band, first in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and then, on today’s date, at Carnegie Hall during the national convention of the College Band Directors National Association.

“Like the four cables of webs of wire and steel that hold the Brooklyn Bridge together,” says Daugherty, “my ode to this cultural icon is divided into four movements: East (Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights); South (Statue of Liberty); West (Wall Street and the lower Manhattan skyline); and North (Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Rockefeller Center). In the final movement, I imagine Artie Shaw, the great jazz swing clarinetist of the 1940s, performing with his orchestra in the once glorious Rainbow Room on the sixty-fifth floor of the Rockefeller Center.”

Early in the year 1874, Norway’s greatest playwright penned a letter to Norway’s greatest composer, a letter that read in part: “Dear Mr. Grieg! I am intending to adapt Peer Gynt for stage performance. Would you be willing to compose the necessary music?”

The letter was signed Henryk Ibsen.

Two years later, on today’s date in 1876, Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt” premiered at Norway’s Christiania Theater with the requested music by Grieg. Excerpts from Grieg’s incidental music, arranged into concert suites, rapidly became some of his best-known and best-loved works. Oddly enough, Grieg himself complained that Ibsen’s play was quote “the most unmusical of subjects,” and that working on the project had become a nightmare for him.

While Grieg’s music is famous around the world, the story-line of Ibsen’s play remains largely unfamiliar to music lovers. It’s ironic that Grieg’s music for “Peer Gynt” is perceived as being quintessentially Norwegian, when the story line of Ibsen’s play takes its hero on travels all across the globe.

For most music lovers, the famous excerpt titled “Morning Mood” might evoke the sun rising over the snowcapped peaks surrounding a Norwegian fjord—but in the context of Ibsen’s play, in fact, it’s the prelude to a scene set in the North African desert!

The American composer Daniel Robert (Danny) Elfman is best known for writing the opening theme of the wildly popular "The Simpsons" animated TV series and for scoring movies directed by his friend Tim Burton and others.

But on today’s date in 2005, Elfman had, for him, a rather unusual experience—namely, hearing some of his music played live at Carnegie Hall when the American Composers Orchestra gave the premiere performance of “Serenada Schizophrana,” his first-ever foray into composing a symphonic concert work.

In notes for a subsequent recording of the piece, Elfman said:

“I’ve always had visuals to drive my orchestral music… As I’d never done anything like this before, figuring out how to begin was daunting. I began several dozen short improvisational compositions… Slowly, some of them began to develop themselves until finally I had six separate movements that, in some abstract, absurd way, felt connected… I more or less let the movements take themselves wherever they wanted to go in a kind of musical stream of consciousness (which, with the way my brain works, was not a very smooth stream).”

Hearing the work at Carnegie Hall, Elfman concluded, was “a thrilling and surreal experience.”

But, being a practical sort of fellow—or simply because stream of consciousness is such a “fluid” process of creation—Elfman retroactively re-purposed some of his “Serenada Schizophrana” as the soundtrack for 2006 IMAX film entitled “Deep Sea 3D.”

In recounting the life story of many composers, it’s a familiar and perhaps Romantic cliché that their work will be—as a matter of course—NOT appreciated by their contemporaries, and that the composer in question will have to toil years in obscurity before his or her music is appreciated by performers and audiences.

In reality, we’re happy to report, this isn’t always the case.

Consider, for example, the American composer Lowell Liebermann, who was born in New York on today’s date in 1961. At the age of sixteen, the premiere performance of his Piano Sonata No. 1 at Carnegie Hall resulted in a number of prizes and awards. By the time he reached his thirties, Liebermann’s work was being commissioned and championed by some of the leading performers of our time, and the young composer was producing on average about six major works a year.

For James Galway, Liebermann composed a Flute Concerto in 1992, and the success of that work prompted another concerto for Flute and Harp in 1995. Liebermann’s two-act opera “The Picture of Dorian Gray” was the first work that the Monte Carlo Opera commissioned from an American composer.

In 1998, Liebermann was appointed composer-in-residence with the Dallas Symphony, and that orchestra premiered his Symphony No. 2 in February of the year 2000, and, in a symbolic Millennium gesture, simulcast their performance on the World Wide Web.