Composers Datebook

Henry Cowell was one of the most prolific of all 20th century American composers. Some of his works are aggressively experimental in nature, while others tap into folk traditions and world music. The range and variety is quite remarkable. Cowell wrote so many works, in fact, that even the composer himself often had trouble keeping track of all he had written.

Take his genial Suite for Woodwind Quintet, for example. It was written in the early 1930s for the great French flute virtuoso Georges Barrère, who commissioned and premiered many new works involving his instrument. In 1934, Barrère even made a recording of the Suite for New Music Quarterly, a publishing venture bankrolled by none other than the retired insurance executive and part-time composer Charles Ives.

After that recording, Cowell went on producing new works, and the manuscript of his Woodwind Quintet remained with Barrère, who apparently just filed it away. The music didn’t surface again until 1947, when it was discovered among the late musician’s collection of scores.

On today’s date in 1948, Cowell’s Woodwind Suite received its first concert performance at Columbia University in New York City, and quickly established itself as one of Cowell’s most popular works.

Today’s date in the year 1724, a cantata of Johann Sebastian Bach was performed in Leipzig. February 20th fell on a Sunday that year, and, as part of his first annual cycle of sacred cantatas as the Cantor of St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, Bach’s cantata No. 22 was heard as part of the Sunday service.

Meanwhile, on February 20 th that same year, London audiences at the King’s Theater in the Haymarket heard the premiere performance of a new Italian opera seria by George Frideric Handel, “Giulio Cesare in Egitto” or, in English, “Julius Caesar in Egypt.”

How revealing, and typical, to find Bach in church and Handel in the theater, on the very same date—but NOT, is it turns out, on the same DAY.

In 1724, Bach’s Germany kept track of dates under the Gregorian calendar we use today, but in Handel’s England, the older Julian calendar was still use, and in that reckoning of time, February 20 fell on a Thursday. In fact, Handel’s February 20th premiere would have occurred on a day Bach would have known as March 2nd. It wasn’t until 1752 and close to the end of Handel’s creative life that England adopted the same calendar that Bach used then and we use now.

In the 18th century, it seems, you didn’t need an Albert Einstein to remind you that time is a very RELATIVE concept!

On today’s date in 1923, the great Finnish composer Jean Sibelius conducted the premiere performance of his Symphony No. 6 in Helsinki.

He had begun work on it some five years earlier, and at that time described his vision for the symphony as follows: “The Sixth Symphony is wild and passionate in character. Gloomy with pastoral contrasts. Probably in four movements with a finale, which will build to a gloomy, wild romp of the orchestra in which the main theme disappears.”

Well, that may have been the composer’s original idea, but the final product turned out quite different, and the late musicologist Michael Steinberg offers a more spot-on description: “The Sibelius Sixth is transparent, pastoral, lyrical, and notably even-tempered—a sanctuary fashioned out of music.”

In the pecking order of popularity, the Second and Fifth of Sibelius’s seven symphonies rank at the top, with his First becoming more and more performed these days. The Fourth and Seventh, both very strange, enigmatic works, probably come next in order of popularity, with the genial Third symphony following those two.

That leaves the Sibelius Sixth in last place with the public. But let’s close with another comment from the always perceptive Mr. Steinberg, who wrote: “To this day the Sixth remains the least known (or understood) of the seven symphonies, and yet for those who make its full acquaintance, the Sixth may become the most cherished of them all.”

Some things are best left to the imagination—at least that’s what the French Romantic composer Hector Berlioz came to think regarding opera. Berlioz didn’t have the best of luck getting his operas staged during his lifetime, and, on the few occasions he did, the resulting performance fell far short of his ideal. Increasingly Berlioz turned to what might be called the “Theater of the Imagination,” composing concert works that were for all intents and purposes really operas minus the staging and costumes.

One of these “operas in disguise,” which Berlioz called “a dramatic legend,” premiered in 1846, was entitled “The Damnation of Faust,” and was based on the famous Faust plays of the German poet and playwright Goethe. Like many of Berlioz’s works, “The Damnation of Faust” proved an artistic success—but a box office failure—at its premiere as an unstaged concert piece at the Opera Comique in Paris.

Some five decades later, on today’s date in 1893, an impresario named Raoul Gunsbourg decided to revive “Damnation of Faust” as a fully staged opera. As Faust, he enlisted the aid of the greatest opera tenor of that day, Jean de Reszke. This staged version at the Monte Carlo Opera proved such a success that in short order it was mounted on stages in Milan, Moscow, and Liverpool, and even reached the shores of America, courtesy of the French Opera in New Orleans.

Today’s date marks the birthday of the American composer and pianist Lee Hoiby, who was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1926.

Hoiby was just six when he made his debut as a composer in the parlor of his Madison home for his grandmother’s Daughters of Norway Club. He played a piano piece he wrote himself entitled “The Storm,” and insisted, before playing it, that all the lights in the parlor be turned off to set a proper mood for the music.

With that early sense of dramatic staging in mind, it’s not surprising that Hoiby eventually would write successful operas, ranging from “Bon Appetit!,” a monolog based on cook books of Julia Child, to a full-blown, three-act setting of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” His best-known known opera is a 1971 setting of the Tennessee Williams play “Summer and Smoke,” which premiered at the St. Paul Opera in Minnesota.

Hoiby studied with two virtuoso pianists, Gunnar Johansen and Egon Petri, both famous interpreters of the modern Romantic composer Feruccio Busoni, and Hoiby’s own music seems rooted in the later Romantic/early Modern tradition.

“For me, composing music bears some likeness to archeology,” said Hoiby. “It requires patient digging, searching for the treasure; the ability to distinguish between a treasure and the rock next to it—and recognizing when you're digging in the wrong place.”

Hoiby died on March 28, 2011, aged 85, in New York City.

He was warned. He was given an explanation. Nevertheless, he persisted.

That’s pretty much the story of how John Corigliano, Junior became a famous American composer.

Corigliano’s father, John Corigliano, Senior, was the concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic from 1943 to 1966, and when Junior said he wanted to become a composer, his dad tried to warn him off. Corigliano Junior recalls: “He did everything he could to discourage me. He knew firsthand that the composer was the lowest man in the musical hierarchy. ‘Performers don’t want to bother with your work, and audiences don’t want to hear it. So what are doing it for?’ he would say.”

After graduating from college, John Junior got a teaching job and made ends meet by working at classical music radio stations, producing recordings for Columbia Masterworks, and assisting Leonard Bernstein with his Young People’s Concerts. He also persisted in composing.

In 1964, one of his early chamber works, a Sonata for Violin and Piano, was premiered in Italy at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto. It won a chamber music prize, and its success helped launch young Mr. Corigliano as a composer to watch.

Since then, Corigliano. has been awarded the Grawmeyer Award, five Grammys for recordings of his music, an Oscar for “Best Film Score,” and the Pulitzer Prize.

On today’s date, composer John Corigliano, Jr. is celebrating his 80th birthday.

Congratulations, and here’s a toast to persistence!

Today we celebrate the birthday anniversaries of two notable baby boomers.

The first is the American composer John Adams, born on this date in 1947 in Worcester, Massachusetts. After studies at Harvard, Adams moved to California in 1971, and taught at the San Francisco Conservatory.

In 1978 he became new music advisor to the San Francisco Symphony, and with music director Edo de Waart, created the Symphony's “New and Unusual Music” series. Around that same time, Adams began producing some “new and unusual music” of his own, like this orchestral piece, entitled “The Chairman Dances,” arranged from his landmark 1987 opera “Nixon in China.”

Our second birthday anniversary today is that of the American composer Christopher Rouse, born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1949. After studies at Oberlin and Cornell, Rouse taught at Eastman, where, alongside courses on theory and composition, he also offered students his scholarly spin on the history of rock ‘n’ roll. Rouse’s interest in rock was quite genuine, and, in 1988, he even wrote a piece for eight percussionists entitled “Bonham”—a tribute to the Led Zeppelin drummer of that name.

On a more introspective note, the following year the St. Paul Chamber orchestra premiered this music by Rouse, entitled “Iscariot,” which quotes a Bach chorale. John Adams conducted that SPCO premiere, and it was to Adams that Rouse dedicated the score “in friendship and admiration.”

Today is St. Valentine’s day, one of the most popular of all saints’ days—not for any religious reasons, but because it has been associated for centuries with love and romance.

It was a nice touch for Italian composer Riccardo Zandonai to get his new opera, “Giulietta e Romeo,” based on Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet”, premiered in Rome on Valentine’s Day 1922. Today, Zandonai’s music is seldom heard outside of Italy, but the classic story of Romeo and Juliet has attracted a remarkable number of different musical settings.

Many other operas on “Romeo and Juliet” have been written; the most famous being that by the French composer Charles Gounod, first staged in 1867. First runner-up, some distance away, is probably Bellini’s “I Capuleti e i Montecchi” of 1830.

It’s intriguing to speculate what might have been if Tchaikovsky had ever followed through on his idea to write his own “Romeo and Juliet” opera. He made a few sketches, but instead of an opera he turned to the idea of a “fantasy-overture,” tinkering with it over a period of a dozen years. The finished product is still one of his most beloved concert pieces, and is often quoted in movies and TV commercials as an instantly recognizable musical cue for love and romance.

Today we observe an important anniversary for what we now call “intellectual property.”

On today’s date in 1914, ASCAP—the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers—was founded in New York City. Its first director was the composer Victor Herbert, who, the story goes, once heard a hotel orchestra playing some of his music. Now, you might think Herbert would be pleased, but actually he was furious—as his music was supposedly protected by copyright — and Herbert realized he wasn’t receiving royalty payments from the hotel or the performers.

The U.S. copyright law of 1897 SHOULD have prevented this. Long before Muzak systems, live musical performances in commercial settings like hotels and restaurants were very common, but enforcement of copyright and the collection of royalty payments woefully rare. Helping to found ASCAP was Herbert's way of improving the chances that his fellow composers, songwriters, lyricists, and music publishers could earn a decent living from their creative works.

Herbert was 55 in 1914, and a string of musical hits such as “Babes in Toyland” and “Naughty Marietta” had made him the toast of Broadway. Herbert was the early 20th century equivalent of Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber — and he would probably be gratified to know that both Sondheim and Lloyd Webber are current ASCAP members.

Just to show that political spin and media manipulation is nothing new, consider this little tune by Franz Joseph Haydn…

It was first heard on today’s date in 1797. Now, February 12th happened to be the birthday of Franz II, the Hapsburg Emperor, and the Austrian poet Lorenz Leopold Haschka was commissioned to write some verses that would inspire a feeling of patriotic support for Franz II, who just happened to be at war with France and Napoleon Bonaparte at the time. Haydn was asked to set the verses into music.

The premiere took place in the Emperor’s presence at Vienna’s Burgtheater, between a comic opera and a tragic ballet. But contemporary spin-meisters saw to it that copies of Haydn's song had been sent to all playhouses, opera houses and concerts halls in the Hapsburg Monarchy, so that it could be heard there, too, during any performances occurring on February 12. After the defeat of Napoleon, Haydn’s little tune became the Austrian national anthem.

Long before that happened, Haydn recycled his hit tune into one of his String Quartets—a work that to this day is called the “Emperor” Quartet. And long AFTER that happened, 40 years after Haydn's death, in fact, the German nationalist poet August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben wrote verses to the tune, which began “Deutschland, Deutschland, ueber alles.”

But THAT’s another story entirely…