Composers Datebook

On today's date in 1883, the premiere of Antonín Dvořák's Violin Concerto was given in Prague by the Czech violinist František Ondrícek with the National Theatre Orchestra. Some program notes still state that Dvořák himself conducted the premiere, but in fact it was a Czech conductor named Moric Anger, an old friend of the Dvořák's and his one-time roommate, who had that honor.

The concerto was commissioned by one of the most distinguished violinists of Dvořák's day, Joseph Joachim, an old friend and collaborator of the German composer Johannes Brahms. It was Brahms who introduced Joachim to Dvořák's music. Brahms had sent Joachim two of Dvořák's chamber works for strings. Joachim expressed enthusiasm for these pieces and urged Dvořák to write a concerto for him.

So far so good.

Dvořák began his concerto in July 1879 and had a finished score by December of that year. But Joachim had what we now would call "some issues" with the score, and, by the time Dvořák was finishing the last revisions, almost four years had elapsed with no talk of a premiere. Dvořák realized Joachim was unlikely to ever premiere the new Concerto, so he offered it to Ondrícek, a young Czech violin virtuoso who eagerly championed it in Prague and abroad.

We should note that Joachim finally did perform Dvořák's Concerto in Berlin in 1894, some 15 years after he had commissioned it.

On today's date in 1991, Dennis Russell Davies conducted a Carnegie Hall concert by the American Composers' Orchestra that included the premiere performance of a new orchestral work entitled "Black Light."

Its composer was Daniel Asia, a Seattle native who has emerged as one of the most productive contemporary composers of orchestral works. Asia has written four symphonies to date, and a number of concertos and shorter orchestral works.

The final page of the score for Asia's "Black Light" is inscribed, "October 15, 1990—In Memoriam Leonard Bernstein." Bernstein had died the previous day, as Asia was just finishing his new score, and a year later, almost to the day, Asia's "Black Light" was premiered in New York.

Bernstein was a composer that Asia openly acknowledges as a big influence in his own work. But it would be wrong to suggest that "Black Light" was conceived as an elegy for Bernstein. Asia has been associated with the University of Arizona in Tucson, and says the closing section of "Black Light" is "suggestive of the fierceness of the appearance of the sun, particularly in the Southwest, in all its glory at that first instant of daybreak."

As far as housewarming gifts go, a nice bottle of champagne is common, or maybe a bouquet of flowers. Even an electric can-opener might be appropriate, depending on the circumstances. But if you're a composer, and the occasion is the ceremonial opening performance at a new concert hall, you write a celebratory piece of music. On today's date in 1984, for the inaugural concert of the Indianapolis Symphony's new home, the Circle Theater, composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich wrote an orchestral work entitled, appropriately enough, "Celebration." "In writing this work," said Zwilich, "I was motivated by three complementary goals. First, I wanted to celebrate a joyous and historic occasion with all its inspiring symbolism of beginning and renewal. My second goal was to write a kind of "toccata" or test piece for the new Circle Theater. Finally, I wanted to celebrate the orchestra itself, which is, after all, the centerpiece of the occasion. Thus 'Celebration' is like a mini-concerto for orchestra." Zwilich's housewarming gift was dedicated to the Indianapolis Symphony's music director in 1984, conductor John Nelson, who recorded the piece with the Indianapolis Symphony for New World Records. Despite its origins as an occasional piece for a particular event, "Celebration" has gone to become one of Zwilich's most popular and frequently performed orchestral works.

By a coincidence of fate, the last two symphonies of the Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev both premiered on today's date: Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony premiered in Leningrad in 1947, and Prokofiev's Seventh, his last Symphony, in Moscow, in 1952. The Sixth Symphony is tragic in tone, and Prokofiev confided that it was about the physical and emotional wounds suffered by his countrymen during the Second World War. The Sixth was premiered at the opening concert of the Leningrad Philharmonic's 1947 season, conducted by the great Soviet conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky and was applauded warmly by both audiences and the official Soviet critics. But early in 1948, Prokofiev and other composers were attacked directly and indirectly by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and Prokofiev's Sixth was quickly withdrawn from further performances. Prokofiev's Seventh was intended to be a symphony for children, a kind of symphonic "Peter and the Wolf," written in a deliberately populist style and with a wary eye on the dictates of the Central Committee. It's an airy, almost transparently melodic score. Originally it had a wistful, somewhat melancholic ending, with the music trailing off into silence. During the final dress rehearsals, however, Prokofiev wrote an alternative, perhaps more "politically correct" finale, decidedly chipper and up-beat in tone. Prokofiev made his last public appearance at the October 11th premiere of his Seventh Symphony in 1952. His health rapidly declined, and he died the following spring.

In literature, the "stream of consciousness" style of prose writing was made famous by the 20th century Irish novelist James Joyce. In Joyce's "Ulysses," the thoughts of the novel's characters shift from the distracting sights and sounds from Dublin's streets to interior monologues, often including snatches of real or recollected snatches of music.

In music, something similar occurred on today's date in 1968, when the Italian composer Luciano Berio conducted the Swingle Singers and the New York Philharmonic in the premiere performance of a new work entitled "Sinfonia."

"Sinfonia" included direct orchestral quotes from Bach to Mahler intermingled with sung and spoken texts ranging from Claude Levi-Strauss to Samuel Beckett. There's even a bit of James Joyce's "Ulysses" tossed in as well, alongside quotations of French and American student protesters circa 1968. The text of "Sinfonia's" second movement was a tribute to the recently assassinated civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr.—and consisted of nothing other than the intoned syllables of his name.

Berio's "Sinfonia" was a dizzying mix of 1968 politics, avant-garde montage, familiar concert hall melodies, and theatrical flair. "The juxtaposition of contrasting elements, in fact," wrote Berio at the time, "is part of the whole point." Somewhat to everyone's surprise, Berio's "Sinfonia" turned out to be a hit with both the critics and the audiences at its premiere performances.

After two and a half years in America as Director of National Conservatory of Music in New York City, the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák and his family returned to Prague for good in April of 1895, and moved into his summer house in the Czech countryside.

In a letter to a friend, Dvořák wrote, “I am basking in God’s nature and am contentedly idle. I am not doing anything, which will probably surprise you, but it’s true, it really is. I’m just lazing around and I haven’t touched my pen!”

Well, Dvořák may have been telling the truth about not writing anything down, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking about music -- and quite probably was mulling over not one, but two string quartets in his head.

In any case, in late autumn 1895, it took him just a month or so to complete his String Quartet No. 13 in G Major, published as his Op. 106. This was the first new work Dvořák wrote entirely in his native land after his years in America.

The new quartet premiered in Prague on today’s date in 1896, performed by the Bohemian Quartet, an ensemble which at that time included a violinist named Josek Suk, who was also a composer and who a few years later would become Dvořák’s son-in-law.

On today's date in 1992, one of the strangest—and some would say most strikingly original—violin concertos of the late 20th century had its premiere performance in Cologne, Germany. It was written by the Transylvanian-born Hungarian composer, György Ligeti. This Violin Concerto combined several aspects of Ligeti's style, a style that tends to divide audiences pro or con in performance. It's hard for performers or audiences to remain indifferent where Ligeti's music is concerned.

Ligeti became famous in the West when some of his music appeared in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film "2001." Kubrick used Ligeti's music to evoke the eerie and empty vastness of outer space. And, in fact, Ligeti was fascinated by the sounds traditional orchestral instruments make when pressed to the extreme limits of their range—their own sonic "outer limits." There's some of that in Ligeti's 1992 Violin Concerto, plus a dash of the traditionally melancholic Hungarian strain familiar from the music of Ligeti's famous compatriot, Béla Bartók. Finally, tossed in for good measure, is Ligeti's puckish fondness for thumbing his nose at life, the universe, and traditional concert hall decorum.

As if to counterbalance his melancholic strain, or perhaps just express it in a more surprising way, there's a good deal of the clown in Ligeti, who includes a chorus of ocarinas in the score of his Violin Concerto.

*In correct Hungarian pronunciation, Ligeti's first name rhymes with "urge" and is one syllable, not two: his name sounds more like "George" than "Ge-orgy," in other words.

As the 20th century drew to its close, some who followed the demographics of American audiences for classical music noticed a strange phenomenon: opera was suddenly a "hot" ticket, and the audience for opera performances was getting younger. Simultaneous with this demographic shift was the appearance on the scene of a number of new American operas on American themes.

On today's date in 2000, one of these new operas received its premiere performance in San Francisco. "Dead Men Walking," an opera in two acts, was based on a 1993 book by Sister Helen Prejean, a book also made into a successful movie. The libretto for the operatic version of Sister Prejean's book was crafted by Terrance McNally and set to music by the American composer, Jake Heggie.

Now, an opera based on eye-witness accounts of American prisoners on death row might seem an unlikely topic for an opera, but Sister Prejean didn't think so:

"I love the way the opera captures essential human conflicts: love or hate, compassion or vengeance, redemption or condemnation… From the beginning, I told McNally and Heggie that I'd trust them to compose the opera if they wove into its center the quest for redemption. They got it. And I could tell by the stillness in the auditorium and the tumultuous applause at the end that the audience also really gets it."

On today's date in 1927, a landmark film entitled "The Jazz Singer" received its premiere showing at the Warner Theater in New York. "The Jazz Singer" starred Al Jolson and is usually credited with being the first "talkie"—the first motion picture to successfully incorporate prerecorded music and spoken dialogue.

The musical score for "The Jazz Singer" was a potpourri of melodies including Hebrew liturgical chant, pop tunes of the day, and bits of Tchaikovsky tossed in for good measure. Both the music and dialogue were recorded using the Vitaphone process, essentially a set of disc recordings synchronized for playback with the film's projector.

The previous year, the New York Philharmonic had participated in the first Vitaphone projects, recording Wagner's "Tannhauser" overture as the first-ever "music video," and performing the soundtrack for an otherwise silent drama entitled "Don Juan," starring John Barrymore. When those Vitaphone features premiered at the Warner Theater in August of 1926, for the first time loudspeakers replaced live musicians in the theater's orchestra pit.

Within a decade, Hollywood orchestras would be recording the classic film scores of European émigré composers like Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner, and within two decades American composers like Aaron Copland and Bernard Herrmann would be writing their memorable film scores as well.

But back in 1927, all that was well in the future, and, as one of Al Jolson's lines in "The Jazz Singer" so prophetically put it, "You ain't heard nothin' yet."

On today's date in 1867, two eminent British Victorians arrived in Vienna in search of Schubert. Now, Schubert had been dead for 39 years, but the two Brits were quite aware of that fact. George Grove, age 47, was England's finest musicologist, and Arthur Sullivan, age 25, one the country's most promising young composers. These two were in search of lost works by Schubert. Grove believed there must be forgotten manuscripts in the possession of the late composer's relatives. Grove and Sullivan met with Schubert's nephew, a certain Herr Doktor Schneider, who said, oh yes, come to mention it, he did have an overture and two symphonies by Uncle Franz that no one had played for more than 40 years. If the two British gentlemen had no objection to being covered in dust, they were welcome to dig through the family's storage closets themselves. Maybe something else might turn up. The two visitors braved the dust and found the complete orchestral parts for Schubert's "Rosamunde" incidental music, tied up in a big bundle after the work's premiere back in 1823 and untouched since then. Grove and Sullivan spent the rest of the day carefully making a hand-written copy of their discoveries. At 2 a.m., after finishing the task, their adrenaline must have still been pretty high, since these two proper Victorian gentlemen began an impromptu game of leap-frog to celebrate.