Composers Datebook

In 1881, the posthumous premiere of Jacques Offenbach’s final work, an opera entitled “The Tales of Hoffmann,” had been announced for February 1st at the Opera Comique in Paris—and was, in fact, performed there on that date, but as a closed dress rehearsal attended only by theater staff and Offenbach’s family.

Offenbach knew he was dying when he wrote this opera, and hoped its success would provide royalty payments for his family after he was gone. Before he died in 1880, Offenbach completed the opera’s full piano score and extensive sketches for its orchestration. For its 1881 premiere, Ernest Guiraud faithfully orchestrated “Hoffmann,” but, at the request of the Opera Comique’s director, replaced the original, quick-paced spoken dialogue between its musical numbers with slower, SUNG recitatives in the style of a French grand opera.

At the February 1st dress rehearsal, the opera ran much too long. In something of a panic, drastic cuts and a wholesale rearrangement of Offenbach’s score were made before the public premiere nine days later. But even in drastically altered form, “Hoffmann” proved a great success, and remained so for decades. For the opera’s centenary in 1981, however, musicologists painstakingly prepared new performing versions of “Hoffmann,” restoring Offenbach’s original plan for the work.

Consequently, opera companies today are faced with a dilemma: do they stage the familiar—or the faithful—version of Offenbach’s masterpiece?

Since the 18th century, Paris and Prague have been famous for producing some of the greatest wind players of Europe. And in the 19th century, Anton Reicha, who was born in Prague but died in Paris, wrote for those wind players a sizeable body of quintets to showcase the agreeable blend of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and French horn performing as a consort of winds.

In our own time, the number of professional wind quintets has increased dramatically, with professional ensembles springing up in Europe and America. Not surprisingly, contemporary composers are to contribute new works for these contemporary ensembles.

On today’s date in 1987, at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in New York, the Manhattan Wind Quintet premiered this new ensemble piece by the American composer David Maslanka—his Wind Quintet No. 2.

A clarinetist himself, Maslanka was particularly known for his works for wind ensembles, large and small. He described his three-movement Wind Quintet No. 2 as follows:

“The first movement is fierce and somewhat daunting in its technical demands; the second is moody and elusive; the third is sweet and resigned.”

This recording features the Bergen Woodwind Quintet of Norway, an ensemble that has taken Maslanka’s music very much to heart. They’ve recorded three of Maslanka’s Quintets for the BIS label from Sweden.

In 1985, the musical world was celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of Georg Frideric Handel. On today’s date that year, a much younger composer named Libby Larsen, then in her mid-thirties, was celebrating the premiere performance of her Symphony No. 1.

Larsen titled her symphony “Water Music,” and says its first movement was a deliberate homage to Handel, whose own “Water Music” is one of the most popular orchestral works of the Baroque Age. As a resident composer of a state with over 10,000 lakes, Larsen admits her own love of sailing also had something to do with the symphony’s descriptive title.

Since 1985, Larsen has gone on to write four more symphonies, each with its own particular title. And Larsen frequently gives individual movements of each symphony their own descriptive tag, as well.

One movement from her “Solo” Symphony No. 5, from 1999, is entitled “The Cocktail Party Effect.” Rather than the wallop of a stiff drink, Larsen says she means the ability of human hearing to pick out a single voice among the extraneous noise one encounters at a crowded cocktail party.

“It’s a kind of musical ‘Where’s Waldo?’” says Larsen. “In this case, Waldo is a melody, introduced at the beginning of the movement, from then on hidden amidst the other music.”

If Mozart’s widow, Constanza, is to be believed, the happiest days of Mozart’s life occurred in 1780, when he was 24 years old and writing the music for “Idomeneo,” an opera that had its premiere performance in Munich on today’s date in 1781.

Mozart had good reason to be happy. For starters, the best orchestra in Europe, the Mannheim Court Orchestra, had relocated to Munich, and that orchestra would be the pit band for his new opera. The lead role was being written for Anton Raff, a famous tenor of his day, and, even better than that, there were some exceptionally talented—and exceptionally good-looking—young sopranos in the cast as well. Mozart promptly fell in love with one of them, a strikingly beautiful diva named Aloysia Weber, but ended up marrying her sister Constanza instead. By contemporary accounts, Aloysia, with her high cheekbones and magnificent carriage, was close to the ideal beauty of the day. But Mozart came to appreciate Constanza’s more sympathetic personality, not to mention, in his own words, her “two little black eyes and pretty figure.”

Mozart had written several operas already, but music historians are right when they say the canon of truly great Mozart operas begins with “Idomeneo,” an opera that must have been, literally and figuratively, a labor of love.

It would be nice if talent in one field would automatically recognize and appreciate it in another. But, sad to say, this is not always the case.

Take the case of Jonathan Swift, one of the greatest English writers of the 18th century, and Georg Frideric Handel, one of that century’s greatest composers.

In 1742, Handel was in Ireland, preparing for the premiere of his sacred oratorio "Messiah" at the Music Hall in Dublin’s Fishamble Street. Handel wanted to use the choirboys from Dublin’s two cathedrals, Christ Church and St. Patrick’s. Swift was the Dean of St. Patrick’s, and, on today’s date the author of “Gulliver’s Travels” penned this flaming letter to his sub dean:

“I do hereby require and request not to permit any of the choristers to attend or assist at any public musical performances... and whereas it hath been reported that I gave a license to assist a club of fiddlers in Fishamble Street, I do hereby declare that I do annul said license, entreating my said Sub-Dean to punish such as shall ever appeal there as songsters, fiddlers, pipers, trumpeters, drummers, drum-majors, or in any sonic quality, according to the flagrant aggravations of their respective disobedience, rebellion, perfidy and ingratitude.”

History does not record Handel’s response, but he did, in point of fact, eventually get to use the St. Patrick’s choir boys and other “songsters” he requested.

In Iowa City, Iowa, on today’s date in the year 2000, the Ahn Trio gave the premiere performance of a new work for violin, cello, and piano they had commissioned from the American composer Paul Schoenfield*.

Schoenfield is known for combining popular, folk, and classical music forms, and is himself an excellent pianist. An earlier piano trio by Schoenfield entitled “Café Music” was commissioned by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and was inspired by the composer’s experience filling in for a night or two as house pianist at Murray's steakhouse in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “Café Music” received its premiere during an SPCO chamber concert in January, 1987, with Schoenfield at the piano.

His new piano trio for the Ahn Trio was entitled “Four Music Videos,” and was the result a short meeting, described as follows by Schoenfield:

“[Me]: What kind of piece would you like?

“[Them]: Possibly a rock piece—(tentatively) we were thinking of something for MTV.

“[Me]: (Having no knowledge of pop culture, and not having a television) MTV, what is that?”

Well, Schoenfield did a little investigating, and after a subsequent email from the Ahn Trio asking if he had seen the film “The Buena Vista Social Club” and would be willing to include some Latin American music in the new trio, he came up with a four movement work, with the following descriptive titles: “Rock Song,” “Bossa Nova,” “Film Score,” and “Samba.”

*pronounced “SHONE-felled” by the composer.

On today’s date in 1966, the first purely symphonic work of the American composer Dominick Argento received its premiere performance by the Minneapolis Civic Orchestra at the St. Paul Campus Student Center of the University of Minnesota. A second performance took place the following day at Coffmann Memorial Union on the Minneapolis campus of the University. The work was entitled “Variations for Orchestra (The Mask of Night)” for orchestra and soprano soloist. For the premiere performances, the vocal soloist was Argento’s wife, the soprano Carolyn Bailey.

The music was composed in Florence, Italy.

“I vividly remember the circumstances that inspired it,” wrote Argento. “Our seventh-floor apartment in the Piazza Pitti overlooked the Boboli Gardens and behind it, out of sight, was a military barracks. Every night at 10 o’clock a bugle solemnly intoned the Italian equivalent of taps. The sound seemed to be the voice of the garden itself—moonlit, deserted, cypress-scented, and mysterious. References to night in Shakespeare’s plays served as points of departure for the variations... The trumpet theme is a 12-tone row whose first six notes, I later realized, form the opening phrase sung by the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute, a role my wife had often performed. Consequently,” Argento concludes, “these Variations are much indebted to my favorite city, my favorite writer, my favorite composer, and my favorite soprano.”

On today’s date in 1946, the octogenarian German composer Richard Strauss conducted the final rehearsal of his latest work, a study for 23 strings entitled “Metamorphosen.” Paul Sacher, the Swiss conductor and music patron, had commissioned “Metamorphosen,” and conducted the public premiere later that day in Zurich.

Strauss had begun work on this piece during the final days of WW II, on March 13, 1945, to be exact, one day after the Vienna State Opera house had been hit by Allied bombs. When the Nazis had come to power in 1933, Strauss was at first fêted as the greatest living German composer, but he soon fell out of favor. While his music was not banned, official Nazi support for Strauss eventually fell away, and the fact that Strauss’ beloved daughter-in-law was Jewish meant increasingly anxiety about her fate and that of the Strauss grandchildren as the Nazi’s race laws tightened their noose.

In a post-war memorandum Strauss wrote, “The most terrible period of human history has come to an end, the 12-year reign of bestiality, ignorance, and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany’s 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom and irreplaceable monuments of architecture and works of art were destroyed.”

“Metamorphosen” is Strauss’ intensely personal threnody for a national culture swallowed up in a catastrophe of collective guilt and mass destruction.

On today’s date in 1968, London witnessed a double debut: the first concert of the London Sinfonietta, a chamber group which would go on to become one of the Britain’s most famous new music ensembles and, on their debut program, the premiere performance of a dramatic cantata by John Tavener, who would go on to become one of Britain’s most famous contemporary composers.

Tavener’s cantata was titled, “The Whale.” The London Sinfonietta’s premiere attracted the attention of both the BBC, which broadcast the work that same year, and The Beatles, who released a recording of the work on their own newly formed Apple label.

After Tavener’s religious conversion to the Greek Orthodox faith in 1977, and a near-death experience during surgery in 1990 to remove a tumor from his jaw, Tavener’s music became ever more liturgical, and, as the composer puts it, more “spontaneous.”

“The religious tradition says that only the spontaneous is true,” says Tavener. “If I find myself trying to write and it's not spontaneous, it doesn't come. And that's completely the opposite of the western concept of composition—the idea of someone slaving over something to get it right.”

In 1997, when the funeral service for Princess Diana was broadcast worldwide, it was Tavener’s serenely lyrical anthem “Song for Athene” that was chosen to accompany the Princess’s coffin as it left Westminster Abbey.

On today’s date in 1935, at the Church of Saint François-Xavier in Paris, organist Geneviève de la Salle gave the first complete performance of the three-movement Suite, Op. 5, by the French composer, teacher, and virtuoso organist Maurice Duruflé.

If you sing in a choir or are a fan of choral classics, you might be familiar with Duruflé’s serene and tranquil “Requiem,” Op. 9, which premiered some 12 years later.

Now, if Duruflé’s Op. 5 premiered in 1935, and his Op. 9 in 1947, you might reasonably conclude the composer was a slow worker, which he was. He was also a very meticulous and self-critical artist -- a perfectionist whose catalog of works is rather small, but exquisitely crafted. In all, Duruflé’s output comprises less than 15 published works, of which seven are for organ. The three movements of his Suite, Op. 5 consist of a brooding Prélude, a Sicilienne that evokes the harmonies and inflections of Ravel, and a brilliant, concluding Toccata.

Duruflé’s music is firmly embedded in the French tradition of organ composers like César Franck and Louis Vierne, and orchestral composers like Debussy, Ravel, and Duruflé’s own composition teacher, Paul Dukas. The great French organist Marie-Claire Alain, when asked to describe Duruflé’s music, replied "it is a perfectly honest art. . . . He was not an innovator but a traditionalist … Duruflé evolved and amplified the old traditions, making them his own."