Composers Datebook

Oh, to have been in Vienna on today’s date in 1785! Wolfgang Mozart had just finished this new piano concerto a week earlier, and quite likely performed it as an intermission feature at a performance of the oratorio “Ester” by Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. That performance was conducted by Antonio Salieri, and, although it is possible that Mozart conducted his Piano Concerto No. 22 in Eb from the keyboard, it’s also possible Salieri conducted both the Dittersdorf and the Mozart.

Now wouldn’t that have made for a good scene in the movie “Amadeus?”

Fast forward 21 years for another memorable concert at the Theater an der Wien, a Viennese performing venue that Mozart’s librettist for “The Magic Flute,” Emanuel Schikaneder, had opened a few years after Mozart’s death.

On today’s date in 1806, it was Beethoven’s turn to premiere one of his new concertos in Schikaneder’s Viennese theater. Alongside works of Mozart, Méhul, Cherubini, and Handel, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D was introduced to the world, with Franz Clement as the soloist.

Beethoven’s friend Czerny recalled that Clement’s performance was greeted with “noisy bravos,” but a contemporary Viennese music critic wrote, “while there are beautiful things in the concerto, the sequence of events often seems incoherent; the endless repetition of some commonplace passages could prove fatiguing.” The reviewer’s final assessment? “If Beethoven pursues his present path, it will go ill with him and the public alike.”

The arrival of the solstice means “It’s official: winter is here!”

Now, it may not seem like winter to some of you listening, say, in Southern California or Puerto Rico, but here in Minnesota, where I happen to be at the moment, the season is, how shall we put it, usually “noticeable.”

Winter must have been noticeable as well for the transplanted Italian composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, who was born in Florence but settled in Paris and ended up as the court composer for King Louis XIV.

One of Lully’s operas, “Isis,” had its premiere in the winter of 1676-77, and contains this music—a chorus of ‘Trembleurs,” or “Trembling People from the Frozen Climes,” whose teeth chatter in slurred tremolos. This chorus became particular famous for the wintry pantomime ballet that accompanied it, as well as for its evocative music.

Of course, the most famous of all Baroque “Winter” music was also served up by another Italian, Antonio Vivaldi, who was born in Venice but traveled widely in Northern Europe as well, and died in Vienna.

Vivaldi’s “Winter” Violin concerto from “The Four Seasons” includes its own musical shivers, not to mention a musical depiction of slipping and sliding on icy streets.

Let me tell you, Antonio, as bad as it might have been in Vienna, if you want to talk real winter, real slipping and sliding, we can book you a gig here in Lake Wobegon.

On today’s date in 1934, on a radio broadcast from Moscow, the orchestral suite Prokofiev culled from his film score to “Lt. Kije” received its first performance. The original film recounted the efforts of 18th century Russian bureaucrats to invent a suitably impressive life and death for a nonexistent Russian solider, whose unusual name, actually a typographical error on a list of real soldiers’ names, caught the attention of the Czar.

Few in the West have ever seen the original film, but Prokofiev’s orchestra suite soon became one of that composer’s “greatest hits.”

If the fictional Russian bureaucrats in “Lt. Kije” were terrified less they displease the Czar, real-life composers living in the Soviet Union of the 1930s were desperately anxious to keep on the good side of their ruler, the dictator Joseph Stalin. It was, to put it mildly, a matter of life and death.

For Stalin’s 60th birthday, which fell on December 21st, 1939, Prokofiev composed a choral tribute entitled “Zdravitza,” which translates as “A Congratulatory Toast.” With apologies to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” Prokofiev’s cantata might just as well have been called “An Ode to Joe,” considering its obsequious praise of Stalin. It, too, was broadcast on today’s date, this time booming over loudspeakers throughout Moscow’s squares and side streets. Prokofiev’s son Oleg recalls running home through the swirling snow eager to tell the big news: “Daddy! They’re playing you outside!”

On today’s date in 1738, a once-successful French composer died destitute and demented at the asylum of Charenton. It was a lamentable end for the 56-year-old Jean-Joseph Mouret, who had once served the French King at the Palais Royal and whose operas had once graced the stage of the Paris Opéra.

How ironic, then, that Mouret would achieve belated fame in 20th century America when the "Rondeau" from his “Symphonies and Fanfares for the King's Supper” was chosen as the theme for the “Masterpiece Theater” TV series on PBS. Christopher Sarson, the original executive producer of “Masterpiece Theatre,” recalls how this came about.

“In 1962 my future wife and I went to one of the Club Med villages in Italy. We were in these little straw huts and every morning we were summoned to breakfast by that theme. It was just magic... I wanted to use it for Masterpiece Theatre but there was no way I could bear to put a FRENCH piece of music on something that was supposed to be English. I went through all kinds of English composers and nothing worked. So, Mouret became the theme. The nice little twist on that is that about five years ago someone from the New York Times went to a Club Med in Mexico and commented on what a classy joint it was because they used the music of Masterpiece Theatre to summon people to meals!”

The short career of the very talented composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes is one of the more tragic “might-have-beens” of American music history. Griffes died young, just 35 years old, in 1920, and just at the time his music was being taken up by the major American orchestras of his day.

As most young American composers of his time, Griffes had studied in Germany, and his early works were, not surprisingly, rather Germanic in tone. But beginning around 1911, Griffes turned away from the Germanic style and began composing works inspired by French impressionism and the art of the Far East.

The Boston Symphony under Pierre Monteux premiered his tone-poem “The Pleasure Dome of Kubla-Khan,” and the New York Symphony under Walter Damrosch his “Poeme” for flute and orchestra. On today’s date in 1919, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski premiered four orchestral pieces: “Nocturne,” “Bacchanale,” “Clouds,” and this music, entitled “The White Peacock.” The Philadelphia newspaper reviews of the premieres called Griffes’ work, “one of the hopeful intimations for the future of American music.”

A severe bout of influenza left Griffes too weak to attend these Philadelphia premieres under Stokowski, and he died of a lung infection the following spring.

In the section of his autobiography on the 1960s, Aaron Copland wrote: “I have often called myself a ‘work-a-year’ man… and 1964 belonged to the band piece ‘Emblems.’ Among the invitations I received to compose new pieces was one from clarinetist Keith Wilson, who was president of the College Band Directors National Association, for a work to be played at the organization’s national convention.

Wilson wrote, ‘The purpose of this commission is to enrich the band repertory with music that is representative of the composer’s best work, and not one written with all sorts of technical or practical limitations.’”

“I hesitated for a moment,” continued Copland, “but accepted when I was told that the piece would be bought sight unseen by at least two hundred bands!”

“Emblems” premiered in Tempe, Arizona, on today’s date in 1964, performed by the USC Band, conducted by William Schaefer. Here’s how Copland explained the work’s title: “An emblem stands for something… I called this work ‘Emblems’ because it seemed to me to suggest musical states of being: noble or aspirational feelings, playful or spirited feelings.”

Close listeners may hear harmonic echoes of the spiritual “Amazing Grace” in the slow opening and close of “Emblems.” Copland said, "Curiously, the harmonies had been conceived without reference to that tune. It was only by chance that I realized a connection between my harmonies and "Amazing Grace!"

When Franz Schubert died in Vienna in 1828, he left behind several manuscripts of symphonies: works unpublished, and in some cases unperformed during his short lifetime. Nobody seemed much interested in these, even ten years later, when Schubert’s posthumous fame was on the rise. Both Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann did what they could to help promote Schubert’s symphonies, but it wasn’t until today’s date in 1865—37 years after Schubert’s death—that his most famous Symphony received its premiere performance in his home town of Vienna.

This Symphony in B minor came to be called the “Unfinished,” since its manuscript score contained only two completely finished movements. A normal Viennese Symphony of Schubert’s time should contain four movements, and, in fact, a fairly complete piano sketch of the third movement exists, as does a full score of just the first nine measures of that same movement.

When Johann van Herbeck conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in the first performance in 1865, he played the two surviving movements and tacked on the last movement of Schubert’s Third Symphony as a finale. More recently, some scholars have argued that this music, a portion of Schubert’s “Rosamunde” incidental music, was in fact the missing final movement of his symphony.

Despite these attempts to finish the “Unfinished,” most performers and audiences seem content to hear the score as Schubert left it—romantically cut short, just like the composer’s tragically short life.

Nostalgic fans of old-time radio and TV shows will have no trouble recognizing the overture to Emil Nikolaus von Reznicek’s comic opera “Donna Diana” as the signature theme for Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, an adventure series set in the far North which chronicled the exploits of a Royal Canadian Mountie and his loyal husky, Yukon King.

Those who grew up listening to the original radio series, or its subsequent TV version, might even be seen cracking an imaginary sled dog whip while intoning the show’s familiar tagline, “On, King! On, you huskies!”

This music, however, had its real birth on today’s date in the year 1894 at the New German Theater of Prague, when Reznicek’s opera had its first performance. Reznicek wrote a number of other operas, but “Donna Diana” was his one international hit. Gustav Mahler thought highly of it, and conducted its premiere in Vienna in 1904.

In 1932, Reznicek and another famous composer, Richard Strauss, formed an international society for composers. When Reznicek resisted a Nazi takeover of that organization in 1942, the 82 year-old was punished by having his music confiscated by the Propaganda Ministry. His death three years later amid the bombed-out rubble of Berlin was a sad one. Reznicek died in 1945 of typhoid fever aggravated by starvation.

A tragic end for a composer best known for such light-hearted music!

In the world of pop music, it’s not uncommon for a new song to be recorded in the studio before it’s actually performed in public. In the world of concert music, this sometimes happens as well.

The Swedish trombone virtuoso Christian Lindberg was planning a compact disc of American trombone concertos, but he needed a piece to fill out his disc. While in Las Vegas, Lindberg heard the premiere of a new orchestral work by the American composer Augusta Read Thomas, and was very impressed. “I asked if by chance she’d written a trombone concerto,” recalled Lindberg, “or if she had any suggestions for a suitable piece for the CD.” Thomas, for her part, was equally impressed by Lindberg’s playing. “I’ll write you a piece!” was the reply, and the result, a trombone concerto entitled “Meditation” was finished in the fall of 1995.

The first performance of “Meditation” took place during Lindberg’s recording sessions in Wales with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Grant Llewellyn. Those sessions were wrapped up on today’s date in 1995, and the compact disc released the following year.

Writing about her music, Thomas states, “I am not concerned with commercial success; rather I am concerned with speaking honestly, which will hopefully (not necessarily) lead me towards truth. Meditation is dedicated to Christian Lindberg, with admiration for his beautiful playing.”

On today’s date in 1918, the Metropolitan Opera in New York offered the world premiere performance of not one, not two, but three brand-new operas by Giacomo Puccini.

The three one-act operas are collectively billed as “Il Trittico” or “The Tryptych.” In order of their presentation at the Met, the tryptych consisted of “Il Tabarro” (or “The Cloak”), a rather sordid tale of passion and murder, followed by a sentimental tear-jerker titled “Suor Angelica” (or “Sister Angelica,” after its Romantic heroine), and, for a comic finale, “Gianni Schicchi,” titled after the resourceful hero of its comic plot.

Musical America reported a warm welcome for the three new Puccini operas, but did find “Il Tabarro’s” on-stage sex and violence “in the main, black and brutal.” In that journal’s opinion, the hit of the evening was the comic opera, “Gianni Schicci.” In particular, one brief soprano aria from that opera so pleased the first night audience that it had to be encored.

Over time, this little aria, “O mio babbino caro,” has become one of Puccini’s “Greatest Hits,” and has even reached audiences outside of the opera house, when the melody cropped up in the soundtracks of a number of movies, ranging from “Room with a View” to “G.I. Jane.”