Composers Datebook

The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu had written around 300 works before he started on his first symphony in 1942. In fact, he had written pieces in just about every orchestral genre EXCEPT a full-blown symphony.

At heart, Martinu was a cosmopolitan European composer, but with a deep link to the specifically Czech musical legacy of Smetana, Dvorak, and Janacek. In 1942, Martinu was experiencing a cultural mid-life crisis: both his native land of Czechslovakia and his adopted home of Paris had been overrun by the Nazis. Martinu was living as an exile in America. Musical AND ethical considerations were both on his mind.

In a program note for the Boston Symphony’s premiere on November 13, 1942, the 52-year old Martinu wrote: “You will understand that when someone is face to face with the problem of his first symphony, he takes up a very nervous and serious attitude… his reflexes link with Beethoven’s and Brahms’s First… The large proportions, the expansive form of the symphony force the composer to put himself on a high plane… My deepest conviction is the essential nobility of thoughts and things which are quite simple and which, not explained in high-sounding words and abstruse phrases, still hold an ethical and human significance.”

Martinu’s First Symphony somehow captures both the nervous tension of the times and the yearning for a nobility of spirit in the face of a world in crisis.

These days, at symphony concerts when a new piece of music is about to be played, it’s not uncommon to overhear someone mutter, “Why do they have to program all this new stuff, when there’s so much Brahms and Tchaikovsky we’d rather hear?”

On today’s date back in 1881, conductor Theodore Thomas chose to open the 40th season of the New York Philharmonic Society’s concerts with a pair of brand-new works: an Overture and a Piano Concerto hot off the press—both published early that same year, in fact.

That 1881 concert opened with the New York premiere of the “Tragic” Overture by Johannes Brahms, and after that, the world premiere performance of the Second Piano Concerto by Peter Tchaikovsky. The soloist in the Tchaikovsky was a certain Madame Madeleine Schiller.

Here’s what the New York Times had to say the following morning: “The return of Madame Schiller to the stage is a welcome event... the only regret being that her efforts had not been devoted to a more interesting work, for, apart from the novelty, it cannot be said that the Tchaikovsky concerto possessed any great merit. There are older works,” the review continued, “of which one never tires, and which, interpreted by Madame Schiller and the superb orchestra of the Philharmonic Society would always be welcomed.”

Ah, some things never change!

In his autobiographical sketch, “A Mingled Chime,” the late British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham offered this assessment of the British composer Dame Ethel Smyth: “Ethel Smyth is without question the most remarkable of her sex that I have been privileged to know. I have been told that here and there in the world there have been observed a few examples of that same fiery energy and unrelenting fixity of purpose... It may be, but they have never come my way.”

Born in 1858, Smyth became a composer against her family’s wishes, and it took both courage and dogged determination for her to succeed in getting her large-scale choral and operatic works performed in an era when most in the music business did not take female composers very seriously. That was before they met Dame Ethel, who convinced legendary conductors like Arthur Nikisch, Bruno Walter, and Sir Thomas that her music had merit.

Smyth’s opera “The Wreckers” had its premiere performance in Leipzig on today’s date in 1906, and was soon championed in England by Sir Thomas Beecham, who thought it her masterpiece. “It remains,” wrote Beecham in 1944, the year of Smyth’s death, “one of the three or four English operas of real musical merit and vitality written in the past forty years.”

On today’s date in 1595, in Nuremburg, the English composer and lutenist John Dowland wrote a long, agitated letter back home to London. The letter was addressed to Robert Cecil, one of the closest confidents of Queen Elizabeth.

In 1595, Europe was split into rival Catholic and Protestant camps. Spies and double agents mixed with foreign travelers and foreign students. Both sides were guilty of assassination attempts and acts of terror.

While in Italy, Dowland had fallen in with a group of English expatriates, and, to his horror, discovered that some of them were plotting to assassinate the Queen. Perhaps fearing that word of such contact would filter back to England and ruin any chance of securing a position at court, Dowland fled to Germany and penned his long letter to Cecil, “God he knoweth,” wrote Dowland, “I never loved treason or treachery nor never knew any, nor never heard any Mass in England.”

Dowland never did land that plum job at Elizabeth’s court, and ended up in the service of the Danish King. As luck would have it, the Danish King’s sister Anne married the King of Scotland, who, after Elizabeth’s death, became King James the First of England. Finally, in 1612, Dowland got what he most wanted: a position as one of the King’s Lutes, at a salary of 20 pence a day.

On today’s date in 1967, the New York Philharmonic gave the premiere performance of a new piece entitled “November Steps” by the Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu, a work commissioned by the Philharmonic as part of its 125th anniversary celebrations. In addition to the usual instruments of the Western symphony orchestra, Takemitsu included in his score two traditional Japanese instruments: the shakuhachi flute and the biwa, a kind of Japanese lute.

The New York Times reviewer wrote, “The grafting of the Japanese instruments onto a Western orchestra worked smoothly, for Mr. Takemitsu is extraordinarily sensitive to timbre. He was able to create a homogenous blend of sounds, using delicate, transparent blocks of orchestral color in which the biwa and shakuhachi were at home.”

Eight years after the Takemitsu premiere, an organization called Music from Japan was founded to help make other Japanese contemporary music feel “at home” in America. Music from Japan has presented some 400 works across the U.S. and premiered over 40 new works, many of them specially commissioned.

On today’s date in the year 2000, to celebrate its 25th anniversary, Music from Japan presented a gala concert at Carnegie Hall, which included the premiere of a new orchestral work by the talented young Japanese composer Karen Tanaka, one of the rising stars of her generation. Among Tanaka’s recorded works is a piece entitled “Night Bird” for two decidedly Western instruments: saxophone and piano.

On today’s date in 1830, an 11-year old piano virtuoso named Clara Wieck took the stage of the Leipzig Gewandhaus for her first solo recital. Her father was a piano teacher, who had groomed Clara for a solo career since infancy.

This was the age of the great composer-pianists Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin, and little Clara also wrote original works for her own use. Clara’s Op. 1, a set of four Polonaises, was published the following year. In 1840, over her father’s strenuous objections, Clara eventually married composer Robert Schumann, a handsome young man who had moved into the Wieck household as a boarder just a month before Clara’s 1830 Leipzig debut. Clara’s own career as a composer and performer would eventually span five decades, and, like her father, she became one of the most famous piano teachers of her time.

Nowadays composer-performers are more common in the world of jazz than classical music, although there are exceptions. One of them is Judith Lang Zaimont, who, like Clara Schumann, developed a triple career as composer, performer, and teacher. “Composing is the central fact of my life,” says Zaimont. “My music seeks to appeal both to the heart (the Ahh! response) and to the head (the Aha! response). When this mix is just right, I can sense it—and reactions from audiences can be positive, too.”

Page 111 of the November 7th, 1950, issue of Look magazine contains a short record review column. One of the albums reviewed featured music by the avant-garde composer Edgar Varèse, including this piece entitled “Ionisation,” which premiered in 1933. “Varèse is unlike anything else in music,” suggested the Look magazine review, “and well worth knowing.”

When that magazine first appeared, a young California resident named Frank Zappa was just short of his 10th birthday. So fascinated was Zappa by the Look magazine photo of Varèse accompanying the review, which made the composer look a little like the mad scientist in vintage horror films, that the young lad felt compelled to hunt down the record, which rapidly became his favorite. Around the same time, Zappa started composing music himself, and, for his 15th birthday, Zappa chose to spend a $5 gift from his parents on a long-distance phone call to Varèse, who Zappa correctly guessed must live in New York’s Greenwich Village.

These days, Frank Zappa is best remembered as the head of the iconoclastic rock band of the 60s and 70s, The Mothers of Invention, but in 1983, Zappa also conducted works of Varèse at a San Francisco concert honoring the composer’s centenary, and always acknowledged Varèse as a major influence. One of Zappa’s final projects, recorded in 1993, the last year of his life, was an orchestral tribute to Varèse.

The American composer Florence Price wrote three symphonies in all. Her first symphony was premiered by The Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933, and marked the first time a composition by an African-American woman was played by a major American orchestra. Her third symphony, commissioned by the Works Progress Administration's Federal Music Project shortly thereafter, was premiered on today’s date in 1940 by the Detroit Civic Orchestra. The score for her second symphony is lost.

Florence Price was born in 1887, in Little Rock, Arkansas, one of three children in a mixed-race family. Her mother was a music teacher who guided Florence's early musical training. At age 14, she had graduated from high school at the top of her class and enrolled in the New England Conservatory of Music, where she pretended to be Mexican to avoid the Ivy League racial prejudice of that time.

After teaching in the South, Price moved to Chicago in 1927, where she won some composition prizes and became acquainted with the writer Langston Hughes and contralto Marian Anderson, both prominent figures in the African-American arts scene, and who both helped promote her music. Price died in 1953, and for a while her music was all but forgotten. Some 50 years later, early 21st century performances and recordings of her works have helped revive interest in her life and career.

“Into the Woods,” a new musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, opened on Broadway at the Martin Beck Theater on today’s date in 1987. The show brought to the stage several familiar themes from the world of fairy-tales: Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and not one, but two Prince Charmings.

But in Lapine and Sondheim’s fairy tale, decidedly bad things do happen to mostly good people, and they make some morally questionable decisions in their quest to “live happily ever after.”

In a New York Times preview, Sondheim said, “All fairy tales are parables about steps to maturity. The final step is when you become responsible for the people around you, when you feel connected to the rest of the world.”

The Times review after the show’s debut was mixed, noting that this fairy tale quest was “the same painful, existential one taken by so many adults in Sondheim musicals past.” Granting that the story was “potent stuff,” according to the reviews, there was simply too much of it, with a complicated story hampering Sondheim’s lyrical gifts from really taking off on their own.

The same complaints resurfaced when the musical was revived on Broadway in 2002, but even so, in the intervening 15 years, “Into the Woods” has gone on to become one of the most performed of all Sondheim’s musicals.

Today we honor one of America’s greatest patrons of chamber music, Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who died on this date in 1953.

Born in 1864, Elizabeth was a daughter of Albert Arnold Sprague, the founder of a prosperous wholesale grocery. She put her inheritance to good use. In 1924, she proposed to the Library of Congress that an auditorium be constructed in Washington DC, which, as she put it, would be “planned for and dedicated to the performance of chamber music.” A year later it was built, and Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress still stands today.

Not content with just a superb venue for chamber music, Mrs. Coolidge was every bit as diligent to fill it with specially commissioned new works. The list of important chamber pieces her Foundation commissioned is impressive, and includes Bartok’s Fifth and Schoenberg’s Third and Fourth String Quartets, the original chamber versions of Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and Stravinsky’s “Apollo” ballets, and modern works by American composers as diverse as Samuel Barber, Milton Babbitt, George Crumb, and John Corigliano.

Mrs. Coolidge was herself an amateur composer and accomplished pianist. Her passion for music and enthusiasm for the creation of new works was all the more remarkable considering that tragically she herself battled deafness from her mid-thirties.