Composers Datebook

In one of his letters, the German poet Goethe dropped this memorable and frequently quoted line: “I call architecture frozen music.”

If that’s the case, then this music might be accurately described as “unfrozen architecture,” since it was music inspired by work of famous Spanish architect Antonio Gaudi, whose unfinished Temple of the Holy Family in Barcelona is an internationally famous landmark of that city.

This “Concert de Gaudi” for guitar and orchestra premiered in Hamburg, Germany, on today’s date in the year 2000, and was commissioned by guitarist Sharon Isbin from the American composer Christopher Rouse.

Rouse explained its title as follows:

“I was not thinking of specific Gaudi structures (with the exception of the Cathedral of the Sagrada Familia, which was in my visual memory), but rather of the spirit that inhabits his work. It would be difficult for me to put into words what I think that spirit is. I would say only that Gaudi’s taking of a basic and accepted structural design and applying a host of unexpected twists, curves, drips of a highly fantastic, phantasmagorical type, make him one of the few dreamers to have ever been allowed to actually build his dreams.”

On today’s date in 1585, Giovanni Gabrieli got the job.

He had been acting as the temporary organist at St. Mark’s in Venice, but his appointment was made permanent when he proved successful in a competition against the other candidates for the post. It was a unanimous vote, in fact.

Gabrieli would hold the post until his death in 1612, and would supply for the Doges of Venice a body of ceremonial music still admired for its exceptional power and beauty.

Even before Gabrieli’s tenure, musicians at St. Mark’s had made use of the church’s multiple choir lofts for special effects involving antiphonal groups of performers. Gabrieli wrote music involving two, three, and even four groups of musicians, a kind of early surround-sound experience when one musical theme was answered, or echoed, by another in space and time.

Gabrieli’s intricate music required a high degree of co-ordination among the performers scattered around the big church, and occasionally things didn’t come off as planned, which could prove embarrassing. In a resolution drawn up by the governing body of St. Mark’s in April of 1607, some five years before Gabrieli’s death, the church officials, anxious to avoid embarrasing musical train wrecks, passed a resolution stressing the necessity of placing one of the best musicians in each loft to “beat the time as it is regulated by maestro Gabrieli.”

These days, “musical piracy” can mean anything from illegal MP3 files downloaded from the internet to bootleg Bruce Springsteen compact discs pressed in China.

But back in 1878, the smash success of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “HMS Pinafore” resulted in a flurry of unauthorized “pirate” productions in the United States. The two resourceful Englishmen decided the best way to put a stop to it was to premiere their next collaboration in New York, thereby establishing its copyright under American law.

And so, on today’s date in 1879, it was Arthur Sullivan himself who conducted the pit orchestra of the Fifth Avenue Theater in Manhattan for the first full performance of their latest creation, entitled, perhaps not coincidentally, “The Pirates of Penzance.”

The New York Times review was glowing in its praise, but did point out that the new work was strikingly similar to “Pinafore,” and opined, “Whether the new piece will be received with the same favor that has been accorded to ‘Pinafore’ is very doubtful.”

On a more optimistic note, the reviewer wrote, “There is genuine musical merit in several of the numbers,” and, “A chorus of policemen was the most musically humorous number of the evening, and provoked more amusement than anything else... In response to repeated calls, the author and composer appeared before the curtain and bowed their acknowledgments.”

Now, 18th century opera is supposed to be a rather staid and stuffy affair. The serious operas of that day—“opera seria”—invariably had happy endings, with all the messy human passion and conflicts amicably resolved by the opera’s finale.

But even in the 18th century, opera could arouse some serious emotion off-stage. In 1704, an 18-year-old composer named Georg Friedric Handel was employed as a violinist and harpsichordist in the orchestra of the Hamburg opera house. He made the acquaintance of another young composer, the 23-year-old Johann Mattheson. The two became fast friends until, that is, a December 5th performance of Mattheson’s opera “Cleopatra,” during which Handel refused to turn over the harpsichord to Mattheson.

“Hey, it’s my opera, after all—move over!” Mattheson must have said, but to no avail. Handel wouldn’t budge. One thing lead to another between the two hot-headed young blades, and the result was a duel; it is told that during the swordplay, Handel’s life was saved by a button on his coat that deflected one of Mattheson’s more lethal sword-thrusts.

Thankfully, in the best tradition of 18th century opera, the two reconciled on today’s date that same year, dining together and attending a Hamburg rehearsal of Handel’s first opera, “Almira,” becoming, as Mattheson put it, “better friends than ever.”

It might seem odd to think of Max Bruch as a twentieth century composer. After all, his three “Greatest Hits” were all written in the 19th century—his Violin Concerto in G Minor, his “Scottish Fantasy” for violin and orchestra, and his setting of the Hebraic liturgical chant “Kol nidrei” for cello and orchestra.

But this archetypal German Romantic composer, who was born in 1838, lived to the ripe old age of 82, and kept producing new works up to the time of his death in 1920.

One of these, a Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, was commissioned by an American duo piano team, Ottilie and Rose Suttro, who gave the work’s premiere performance with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra on today’s date in 1916. The American reviews were glowing in their praise: “It should bring a lively satisfaction to one of the great men of musical history to be made aware of the unequivocal recognition of the merit of his work at its first public hearing by Philadelphia audiences.”

There is a somewhat ironic historical footnote to this premiere, however. It appears the Suttro Duo didn’t necessarily subscribe to the “great men of musical history” theory themselves. They drastically revised and even rewrote parts of Bruch’s score for their 1916 performance, unbeknownst to the composer. It wouldn’t be until 1971 that the Concerto was performed as he had actually written it.

Decades before the Cuban revolution, some decidedly revolutionary sounds had their birth in that country’s capital city on today’s date in 1930 during a concert of ultra-modern music presented by the Havana Philharmonic.

The concert offered the premiere performance of a new Piano Concerto by the American composer Henry Cowell, who was also the soloist. Cowell’s concerto was structured in the classical mode of three movements: fast-slow-fast, but it broke new ground—and perhaps a few piano strings—by employing what Cowell dubbed “tone clusters.” These dense dissonant chords were produced by pounding the keys of the piano with the fist, palms, or extended forearms.

The presenters of the concerto prudently arranged for a squad of Cuban policemen to be on hand to forestall threatened disturbances by those in the audience who might not be so willing to sit quietly through even a musical revolution.

Cowell also took his new techniques to the Old World, giving five European tours in the 1920s and 30s, which attracted the attention of Bela Bartok, who asked Cowell’s permission to employ tone clusters in his own works, and Arnold Schoenberg, who invited Cowell to perform for his Berlin composition classes.

Cowell’s oft-stated goal was to embrace what he described as “the whole world of music,” whether dissonant or consonant, radical or traditional, Western or non-Western. Perhaps that ideal was even more revolutionary that his Piano Concerto must have seemed back in 1930.

On today’s date in 1841, Franz Liszt performed a solo piano recital at the Academy of Song in Berlin. Liszt was already considered one of the greatest composer-performers of his time, and so, when he arrived in Berlin, was greeted by three of his distinguished composer-colleagues: Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Spontini.

For his Berlin recital, Liszt played, among other works, his own solo piano arrangements of the overture to Rossini’s opera “William Tell,” a medley of tunes he’d arranged from Meyerbeer’s opera “Robert, the Devil,” and this virtuoso arrangement of the Schubert song “The Erl King.”

Now, Liszt had played these same pieces in England the previous year, but they hadn’t really gone over very well with the reserved British audiences. But in Berlin, for some inexplicable reason, the audience just went nuts. No one had ever seen anything like it, in fact.

The German poet Heinrich Heine even coined a special term for it: “Lisztomania.” Women began wearing Liszt’s portrait on brooches and cameos. The composer was attacked by fans desperate for clippings of his hair; his cast-off cigar butts and coffee-dregs were collected as precious souvenirs; piano strings that Liszt broke at concerts were retrieved and made into bracelets for his fans.

The madness swept Europe, and so, long before the Beatles and Michael Jackson, Franz Liszt, composer and pianist had become “Franz Liszt—Superstar!”

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flocks by night.” So reads the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 2, verse 8, in the King James translation of the Bible.

On today’s date in 1734, the second cantata from the “Christmas Oratorio” of Johann Sebastian Bach had its first performance in Leipzig, Germany. This cantata takes its inspiration from Luke’s Gospel describing the shepherds, and opens with a purely instrumental Sinfonia that sets the scene. Four oboes take the role of the shepherds.

In Bach’s day, a famous builder of wind instruments lived in Leipzig. His name was J. H. Eichentopf, and he is credited with inventing an “oboe da caccia”—that’s Italian for "hunting oboe." This instrument was curved with a big brass horn bell at its end. Bach calls for this instrument in his Christmas Oratorio, but after Bach’s time, it fell out of use, and knowledge of its exact sound and construction was lost.

In the 20th century, two well-preserved (but unplayable) “hunting oboes” built by Eichentopf survived in museums in Denmark and Sweden, and from their measurements, modern-day copies were made. These were used for the first time in over 200 years for the period-instrument recording of the Christmas Oratorio conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt that appeared in 1973.

In the 1930s, many Americans had a hard time making ends meet. During the Great Depression, opera and concert tickets didn’t always figure into most family’s budgets, but thanks to live radio broadcasts, American families enjoyed a veritable “Golden Age” of operatic and symphonic music in the comfort of their own homes.

On Christmas Day in 1931, the NBC network made radio history when they broadcast a matinee performance of Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera “Hansel und Gretel” live from the stage of the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York City to radio listeners coast to coast. The front-page headline in the New York Times the following day read, “Metropolitan Broadcasts First Full Opera; Hailed as a Success as Millions Listen In.” The on-air host was the American composer Deems Taylor, whose own opera, “Peter Ibbetson,” would be included in a live Met broadcast the following spring.

And on Christmas Day in 1937, some music of Antonio Vivaldi was the first piece on the program of the first live NBC Symphony broadcast conducted by the legendary Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. Live NBC Symphony broadcasts under Toscanini would continue until the famous conductor’s retirement in 1954. Along with Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, Toscanini included a handful of American works in his programs, and in 1938, conducted the broadcast premiere of Samuel Barber’s famous “Adagio for Strings.”

On today’s date in 1871, the Opera House of Cairo, Egypt, presented the world premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida.” The Khedive of Egypt, Ismail Pasha, commissioned the opera for his new theater, which had opened in 1869 with a production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” Back then, the Khedive had asked Verdi to write something brand new for the theater’s grand opening. Verdi declined, but the Khedive persisted, and eventually got his wish.

Here’s how Verdi himself described it, in his customary laconic fashion, to his publisher: “I was invited to write an opera for a very distant country. I replied no. I was approached again and offered a very large sum. I still said no. A month later I was sent a printed synopsis, and told it was the work of a person in high authority (which I don’t believe). Even so, I found it excellent and replied that I would set it to music on such and such terms. Three days later I received a telegram that read: accepted.”

For his efforts, the 58-year-old Verdi received four times the fee he was paid for his last opera—and the honorary title of “Commendatore of the Ottoman Order.” The Cairo premiere was a great success, even though Verdi chose to spend his Christmas Eve at home, arranging for the Italian premiere of his Egyptian opera at Milan’s La Scala opera house early the following year.