Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1840, a comic opera by Gaetano Donizetti had its premiere performance at the Opéra Comique in Paris. This was “La fille du régiment,” or “The Daughter of the Regiment.”

Some of the Italian composer’s other operas were already playing in Paris that year, and still more were scheduled. Despite being tailor-made to Parisian tastes and traditions, the opening night of “The Daughter of the Regiment” was not well received.

Apparently French opera composers, Berlioz among them, felt threatened by the Donizetti blitz. Berlioz’s review of the newest Donizetti opera included these lines: “Monsieur Donizetti seems to treat us like a conquered country. It is a veritable invasion. One can no longer speak of the opera houses of Paris, but only of the opera houses of Donizetti!”

Well, eventually Donizetti did win over French hearts and minds, and, it’s rather ironic to note that one hundred years after its 1840 premiere, Paris was indeed an occupied country. In 1940, German tanks rolled into Paris, and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the patriotic French soprano Lily Pons used her starring role in a revival performance of Donizetti’s “Daughter of the Regiment” as an opportunity to stage a musical protest. In solidarity with the French Resistance, she added a rousing version of the “Marseilles” to the finale of Donizetti’s score, which brought sympathetic American audiences to their feet.

What do you SEE when you HEAR music? An odd question perhaps, since music is such an abstract art form, but sometimes composers themselves confess that particular places, persons, and scenes play a role in how music is created.

On today’s date in 1994, in San Antonio, Texas, for example, a new symphony for wind ensemble by the American composer David Maslanka received its premiere performance during a convention of the Texas Music Educators Association. Maslanka wrote several symphonies for winds, and this one was his Fourth.

In his program notes Maslanka confessed two major inspirations: The first was (quote), “the powerful voice of the Earth that comes to me from my adopted western Montana, and the high plains and mountains of central Idaho.” The second, he said, is his fascination with President Abraham Lincoln. Maslanka explains that reading about a Civil War brass band playing the “Old Hundreth” hymn tune at sunset as Lincoln’s coffin was transferred to a waiting funeral train was an image that haunted him.

“For me,” wrote Maslanka, “Lincoln’s life and death are as critical today as they were more than a century ago… My impulse through this music is to speak to the fundamental human issues of transformation and re-birth in this chaotic time.”

Of all the comic creations of William Shakespeare, the fat knight Sir John Falstaff ranks highest in popularity. In Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” history plays, Sir John appears as the Lord of Misrule, a bad but endearing companion to the young prince Hal. In Shakespeare’s comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” supposedly written at the personal request of Queen Elizabeth the First, Sir John’s amatory exploits are held up to ridicule.

Now, in addition to comic plays, there are such thing as comic operas, and, in the 18th century, two of Mozart’s contemporaries, Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf and Antonio Salieri, had a go at adapting “The Merry Wives of Windsor” into operas. In the 19th century, the German composer and conductor Otto Nicolai scored a big hit with his “Die Lustigen Weiber von Windsor,” which proved the most successful of all Falstaff operas to date, and remains a favorite to this day.

But pride of place must be reserved for the Falstaff opera that premiered on today’s date in 1893, at the La Scala opera in Milan. This “Falstaff” was the last opera written by Giuseppe Verdi, famous for his blood and thunder melodramas and tragic operas. Approaching eighty, Verdi proved surprisingly adept at comedy, setting the nimble libretto crafted by Arrigo Boito to music as sly and quick-witted as the character Shakespeare created some three hundred years earlier.

For a magic ring of gold, the dwarf Alberich was willing to renounce love and become master of the world. At least, that’s the story in Richard Wagner’s four operas entitled “The Ring of the Nibelungen,” which premiered in 1876 at Wagner’s specially constructed theater in Bayreuth, Germany.

And apparently, for one million U.S. dollars, Wagner himself was prepared to renounce not only Bayreuth, but Germany as well, and settle in America, offering in exchange the premiere and exclusive performance rights to his latest opera, “Parsifal.”

That was the offer Wagner outlined in a letter to his American dentist on today’s date in 1880. Dr. Newell Jenkins practiced in Dresden, and dutifully passed the proposal on to prominent music patrons back home in the states. Even the most ardent Wagnerians among them found the idea ludicrous: If Wagner couldn’t sell his operas in Germany, the idea that he would fare better on the banks of the Mississippi was downright crazy. Even so, Wagner’s wife, Cosima, recorded in her diary that Wagner seemed obsessed with idea of settling in Minnesota, of all places.

Well, as it happened, Wagner died in Venice, not Minneapolis, and “Parsifal” premiered in Bayreuth, not in St. Paul. Dr. Jenkins broke the news that a) the million dollars was not going to materialize, and b) there were such things as mosquitoes and blizzards in Minnesota. Wagner prudently decided to give Germany one more chance.

You might say that Eubie Blake flunked retirement.

In 1946, with a five-decade career as a successful performer and composer behind him, Eubie Blake retired. He was 63 at the time. The son of former slaves, Blake’s religious mother objected to ragtime music on principle, but in 1899, while still a teenager, Blake penned a classic: “The Charleston Rag.”

In 1915, he formed a songwriting partnership with a talented young singer named Noble Sissle, and, in 1921, the two men produced “Shuffle Along,” a smash-hit Broadway show that fused ragtime and operetta and proved to be a major influence on the classic Broadway musicals of the 1920s and 30s.

During World War II, Eubie Blake toured as a musical director of USO shows, and, as mentioned, officially retired in 1946, using his leisure time to study composition formally at New York University and to collect and edit his own work for posterity

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In the 1950s, a revival of interest in ragtime music coaxed Blake out of retirement, and the successful use of ragtime music in the 1973 film “The Sting” transformed the ragtime revival into a major pop culture phenomenon.

On today’s date in 1973, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Blake was honored by ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and in 1981, at the age of 98, Blake was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Long before the “76 Trombones” made famous by “The Music Man,” there were the “76 flutes” of Henry Brant. At least that’s what the score of his flute ensemble piece “Angels and Devils” called for, although when it received its premiere performance on today’s date in 1933, a much smaller group assembled on the stage of Carnegie Chapter Hall in New York City.

In February of 1933, American composer Henry Brant was 29 years old, and must have been a pretty good pianist as well: On the same program he accompanied soprano Judith Litante in the premiere performances of three songs by the then 58-year old composer Charles Ives.

Brant says that as a young composer he was much influenced by the music and ideas of Ives, adding to these an expanded awareness of the possibilities of spatial music, inspired in part by the colossal ensembles called for by Hector Berlioz in some of his grander sacred works, which Brant heard performed in the great cathedrals of Europe. Many of Brant’s most famous works involve multiple ensembles of players performing with and against each other in large indoor and outdoor venues.

“I had come to feel that single-style music could no longer evoke the new stresses, layered insanities, and multi-directional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit,” explains Brant.

On today’s date in 1915, the prolific German composer Max Reger conducted in Berlin the premiere performance of what would become his most popular orchestral work—in Germany, at least. These days, for some reason, Reger’s music is seldom played by American orchestras.

Like Bach, Reger was a master of counterpoint and the fugue, and, like Beethoven, loved writing variations. Reger’s “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart” starts off simple enough, quoting a familiar theme from Mozart’s Piano Sonata No. 11 in A Major. Some thirty minutes later, the simple theme develops into massive fugue—it’s all very grand and clever if you like it, or bombastic and tiresome if you don’t.

For his part, the witty Nicolas Slonimsky, in his “Music Since 1900,” described Max Reger’s piece as follows: “Mozart’s ingenuous theme… is subjected to torturous melodic anamorphoses, contrapuntal contortion, canonic dislocation, rhythmic incrustation, and harmonic inspissation.”

To save you the trouble of googling the definition of “inspissation,” let’s just say it’s not a condition you would wish on anybody!

Whether you’re a Max Reger fan or not, his “Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart” is quintessential Reger, and one is tempted to say, “What did you expect? It’s Reger to the Max!”

By 1837, the symphonies of Beethoven had become quite popular in Paris. Beethoven had been dead for ten years, but surprisingly, much of his chamber music had yet to be performed publicly in Paris.

In the winter of 1837, Franz Liszt organized a series of chamber concerts at the Salle Erard to showcase Beethoven’s Trios for Piano, Violin, and Cello. Liszt would play the piano part, of course, joined by violinist Chrétien Urhan, and cellist Alexandre Batta, two of the finest performers of that day.

One of the programs fell on today’s date, and was to feature TWO big piano trios: on the first half, one of Beethoven’s Trios, then, on the second half, a brand new Piano Trio composed by another German composer named Johann Peter Pixis, a contemporary composer whose works Liszt admired.

At the last minute, the performers decided to reverse the printed order of the program, performing the new Pixis Trio first, followed by the Beethoven. The audience (and critics), following the printed program, warmly applaud the Pixis, mistakenly thinking it was the Beethoven work, and reacted coolly to the Beethoven, assuming it was by Pixis.

Among the many newspaper critics who attended the concert, only one noticed the switch and wrote his review accordingly—and that music critic’s name happened to be Hector Berlioz.

If he hadn’t turned composer, Johannes Brahms might have made an excellent travel agent. He was in the habit of spending his summer vacations working on his music, and liked to be someplace where the creative juices could flow. Consequently, Brahms was always on the lookout for scenic spots and comfortable rooms at a decent price.

In the summer of 1865, Brahms rented rooms from a certain Widow Becker in Lichtental near Baden-Baden. The rooms offered a wonderful view of a mountain hillside covered with fir trees—and the rent was irresistibly low. “I came, I saw, I rented,” wrote Brahms to a friend, and returned several summers in a row.

Brahms composed his String Sextet No. 2 there, between jolts of bracing coffee in the morning and afternoon hikes up the aforementioned hillside. Not surprisingly, this Sextet turned out to be one of his happiest and most genial chamber works.

Unfortunately, on today’s date in 1867 at the Sextet’s premiere public performance in Vienna, the critic of the Wiener Zeitung heard desert sands rather than shady forests, and wrote: “We are always seized with a kind of oppression when this new John in the Wilderness, Herr Johannes Brahms, announces himself. This prophet makes us quite disconsolate with his impalpable, vertiginous tone-vexations, pleasing neither body nor soul, products of the most desperate effort.”

On today’s date in 1890, the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak conducted the first performance of his Symphony No. 8 in G Major in Prague, on the occasion of his election to the Bohemian Academy of Science, Literature and Arts.

By 1890, Dvorak was a world-famous composer, honored in his own country and abroad. Within a year of its premiere, Dvorak conduced his Symphony No. 8 again in London, Frankfurt, and at Cambridge University, when he received an honorary doctor of music degree in 1891. And it was this 8th Symphony that Dvořák conducted in America in August of 1893, at a special Bohemian Day concert during Columbian Exposition, also known as “The Chicago World's Fair.”

Despite some mysterious and melancholy passages, Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony is usually described as “sunny,” “idyllic,” and “pastoral.” Its final movement opens with a brass fanfare, perhaps a reference to a century-old tradition of signal trumpeters playing from the towers and parapets in Prague, a sight and sound that visitors to the famous Astronomical Clock tower in that city’s Old Town Square can still experience today.

It’s amusing—and perhaps revealing of something deep in the national spirit—that at a rehearsal of this finale, the legendary Czech conductor Rafael Kubelik quipped to his players, "Gentlemen, in Bohemia the trumpets never call to battle—they always call to the dance!"