Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1836, the Polish composer Frederic Chopin held a musical soiree in his apartment in Paris. The famous Paris Opéra tenor Adolphe Nourit, the Pavarotti of his day, sang some Schubert songs, accompanied at the piano by Chopin’s friend, Franz Liszt. Liszt and Chopin also played a new Sonata in E-flat for piano four-hands by Ignaz Moscheles.

Curiously enough, one of the people Chopin invited was a petite, olive-skinned Baroness turned writer, who, despite her sex, went by the name George Sand. Sand was notorious for her novels, which included passages considered quite racy in that day, and for her highly unorthodox lifestyle. She liked cigars, for example, and often showed up at parties dressed as a man.

Chopin had met her earlier, and at first was frankly repulsed. The 26 year-old composer was engaged to a much younger girl back home in Poland, a pale, childlike beauty who couldn’t be more unlike the 32-year-old Sand. But, as they say, opposites attract. Anxious to make a good impression, Sand showed up for Chopin’s soiree wearing white pantaloons and a scarlet sash (the colors of the Polish flag)—and left her stogies at home!

All it took was a “Dear Frederic” letter from the girl back home, and before long the Chopin-Sand romance was the talk of Paris. “My heart was conquered,” wrote Chopin in his journal, “She understood me.”

On today’s date in 1891, two new works by Brahms premiered in Berlin—much to the relief of the composer’s friends. The previous year the 58-year-old composer was in an especially grumpy mood, poo-poohing suggestions that he would ever compose anything again. Brahms felt he was, in effect, all “composed-out.” “I have tormented myself to no purpose lately,” he told one friend. “Till now I never had to do so at all, things always came easily to me.”

Then early in 1891, he heard the Duke of Meiningen’s excellent orchestra. So taken was Brahms by the sound of that orchestra’s clarinetist, one Richard Mühlfeld, that he spent his summer vacation writing two works for him: a Trio for clarinet, piano and cello, and a Quintet for Clarinet and String Quartet. The creative juices were flowing once again.

As a thank-you to the Duke, Brahms had his two new pieces played privately at Meiningen Castle on November 24th, and then Mülhfeld and Brahms headed to Berlin for public performances of the new pieces at the chamber concerts of the Joachim Quartet. Violinist Joseph Joachim was an old friend of Brahms, and, for nearly four decades his chamber concerts in Berlin had featured only works written for strings. But for Brahms—and Mülhfeld—Joachim made an exception. For their part, the Berlin audiences loved the new clarinet works, and even demanded that the Quintet’s “Adagio” movement be encored.

On today’s date in 1918, this celebratory music opened the first program of the newly-formed Cleveland Symphony Orchestra. It’s the “American Fantasy” of the Dublin-born American composer Victor Herbert.

Cleveland had reason to celebrate. World War I had ended exactly one month earlier, and, for some time, organizers in that city had been working to build a home-town orchestra. In December of 1918, Father John Powers of St. Ann’s Church in Cleveland wanted to give a concert to raise some money for his parish, and, as Father Powers also happened to be a fine Irish tenor, offered to perform on the same bill as the new orchestra, just in case the untried ensemble of 54 didn’t prove to be a sufficient box-office attraction.

So, along with Father Power’s songs and Victor Herbert’s “American Fantasy,” conductor Nikolai Solokoff lead the Cleveland Orchestra in their first performances of Bizet’s “Carmen” Suite, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, Liadov’s tone poem “The Enchanted Lake,” and, for a rousing closer, Liszt’s tone poem “Les Preludes.”

In the course of its subsequent history, the Cleveland Orchestra would establish itself as one of America’s “top five” orchestras under the leadership of famous conductors such as Arthur Rodzinski, Erich Leinsdorf, George Szell, Pierre Boulez, Lorin Maazel, and Christoph von Dohnanyi.

And, since this is the COMPOSER’s Datebook, we should mention that the Cleveland Orchestra has premiered an impressive number of new works by both American and European composers.

Wolfgang Mozart died on December 5, 1791, leaving behind an unfinished Requiem Mass, commissioned anonymously by Count Franz von Walsegg, a 28-year-old Austrian nobleman who had the ignoble habit of passing off works he commissioned as his own. The Requiem was intended to be a memorial to the Count’s 20-year-old wife, Anna, who had died earlier that year.

Mozart’s wife Constanza arranged for some of Mozart’s pupils to complete the unfinished score, and eventually delivered it to Count Walsegg in order to receive the full commission fee promised her husband.

But just five days after Mozart’s death in 1791, the portions of the Requiem that Mozart himself had completed were sung at a memorial service organized by his friend and collaborator Emanuel Schikaneder.

Schikaneder was the librettist for Mozart’s opera “The Magic Flute,” and ran his own opera house at the Theater auf der Wieden in a Viennese suburb. It was there that Mozart’s “Magic Flute” had premiered, and it was Schikaneder’s musicians who performed parts of Mozart’s Requiem for the first time on today’s date in 1791, at St. Michael’s Church in the center of Vienna.

Lili Kraus, a 20th century Hungarian concert pianist closely associated with Mozart’s music, said of his Requiem Mass, “There is no feeling—human or cosmic, no depth, no height the human spirit can reach—that is not contained in his music.”

So what’s your favorite season? And how would you describe it in words? And if you’re a composer, how would you describe it in music?

The most famous musical depiction of “The Four Seasons” is a set four violin concertos by the Italian Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi, but other composers have evoked the mood and sounds of the seasons. There’s an oratorio by Haydn and a ballet by Glazunov, for example. On today’s date in 2009, the American composer Philip Glass tossed his hat into the ring with the Toronto Symphony premiere of a new work entitled “The American Four Seasons.”

Like Vivaldi, his seasonal tone painting is a set of four concertos, written for violinist Robert McDuffle, who also performed the premiere. For some years, Glass and McDuffie had been talking about creating a four-movement work as a companion to Vivaldi “Four Seasons,” but when McDuffie finally saw the finished score, he felt Glass’s interpretation of some of the seasons did not quite match his own, so they came up with an unusual solution: in the published score, Glass did not provide titles for any of the four concertos, letting each listener (or performer) decide for him- or herself which concerto matched which season.

And so, in this case of THIS “Four Seasons,” it’s all up to you.

At Carnegie Hall on today’s date in 1908, Gustav Mahler conducted the New York Symphony, the 200-voice Oratorio Society chorus, and two vocal soloists in the American premiere of his Symphony No. 2, a work often called his “Resurrection Symphony.”

These days, Mahler’s Second ranks among his most popular works. But how was this new music received by New Yorkers back in 1908? An unsigned review that appeared in the New York Daily Tribune includes these observations:

“It was by demonstrations of far more than mere politeness that the large audience found vent for its feelings of interest and pleasure in this new music and its author... After the Schubertian second movement there was long continued applause, and at the close of the composition… there was cheering and waving of handkerchiefs until Mr. Mahler was compelled to appear several times to bow his thanks and appreciation.”

Of the music itself, the review opined: “… of the beauty and insight of certain episodes there can be no doubt… there seems, however, a lack of significant and commanding originality. It is more cerebral than passionate, more intellectual than compellingly emotional.”

Even so, the 1908 review concludes, “In view of the effectiveness of last night’s performance… it may be hoped that this symphony will be heard again within a reasonable time. Mr. Mahler’s work is too large to be passed upon at a first performance.”

On today’s date in 1975, the Oakland, California, Youth Orchestra gave the first performance of a symphony by a Bay area resident, American composer Lou Harrison. Harrison began sketches for this symphonic score back in 1942 and tinkered with it off and off until the day of its premiere performance, even stapling in 15 additional measures to the young players’ parts at their final dress rehearsal.

The commission for Harrison’s Fourth Symphony, subtitled “The Elegiac,” came from the Koussevitzky Foundation, and in part was written as a tribute to the memory of Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky, two of the 20th century’s greatest new music patrons. But the intensely personal tone of this elegiac symphony was prompted by the death of Harrison’s mother, which was followed by the death of his close friend, the iconoclastic American composer and instrument inventor Harry Partch.

The symphony’s first movement is titled “Tears of the Angel Israfel”—the angel of music in Islamic lore—and the score also bears two inscriptions: The first reads “Epicurus said of death: where death is, we are not; where we are, death is not; therefore, death is nothing to us.” The second inscription is a quote from Horace: “Bitter sorrows will grow milder with music.”

On today’s date in 1998, two brand-new Christmas carols debuted in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during the “Welcome Christmas” choral concert of the Plymouth Music Series organized and conducted by Philip Brunelle.

The two carols, “Sweet Noel” by Joan Griffith and “The Virgin’s Cradle Hymn” by Richard Voorhaar, were the prize-winning submissions entered in a contest arranged by the Plymouth Music Series and the American Composers Forum. The idea was to inspire contemporary composers to create new carols that—who knows?—might turn out to be classics over time.

As Brunelle put it, “The Christmas carols that we love to sing and hear have a timelessness about them wrapped in their music and words. Out of submissions from all across the USA, [we] selected two that we felt captured this feeling.”

Since 1998, the “Welcome Christmas” Carol Contest has continued as an annual tradition, and hundreds of worthy carols have been submitted. Each year, two are selected and premiered in December by Brunelle’s choral ensemble, which in 2002 changed its name to Vocalessence. And each year, the Vocalessence “Welcome Christmas” concerts are recorded by Minnesota Public Radio for both regional broadcast and national distribution.

Who knows? Maybe these annual radio broadcasts have even become a part of YOUR holiday tradition.

On today’s date in 1998, at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis, the Minnesota Orchestra, led by Eiji Oue, premiered a new symphony by the American composer Libby Larsen. This was her Symphony No. 4, a work scored for strings alone.

Larsen explained her decision to do without winds, brass, and percussion as follows: “This Symphony is both homage to strings and an essay about them. Strings, the core of the symphony orchestra, are supremely lyrical and supremely emotional. Yet, throughout the 20th century, perhaps marked by the performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, orchestral compositions have tended to become more and more rhythmic and percussive and less lyrical.”

Larsen goes on to make this interesting observation: “In each century since the 1600s, the orchestra has added a new choir of sound to its ensemble: the Baroque orchestra consisted chiefly of strings; woodwinds were added during the 1700s; brass during the 1800s. The 20th century has added the percussion section.”

By removing those instrumental choirs from the score of her Fourth Symphony, however, Larsen was not trying to return to the sound world of the 17th century. Larsen said her new symphony was an attempt to capture something of the melody and inflections of 20th century American English, as it is spoken and sung, through orchestral strings alone.

On today’s date in 1693, a new opera based on an old legend had its premiere performance at the Académie de la Musique in Paris. The new opera was by the French Baroque composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier, and the old legend was that of Medea, the sorceress who murdered her own children to revenge her abandonment by their father, the Greek hero, Jason.

Charpentier’s “Médée” (to give his opera its French title) was well received by its first audiences. The most celebrated French soprano of her day sang the title role, but one contemporary critic, impressed by Charpentier’s achievement, wrote, “The emotions are so vivid, that even if the role were only spoken, the opera would not fail to make a great impression.”

In the three centuries following Charpentier’s opera, many other musicians have taken up the Medea legend as well. In 1980, the American composer Jacob Druckman took themes from three famous Medea operas and worked these into a three-movement orchestral suite entitled “Prisms.”

Druckman had Medea on his mind, and was considering writing an opera based on the legend himself. Druckman died before that could happen, but his suite salutes three of his successful predecessors. Charpentier’s version of “Medea” has pride of place, and is quoted in the first movement of Druckman’s score.