Composers Datebook

On today's date in 1806, Ludwig van Beethoven sent a letter to his German publisher Breitkopf and Härtel announcing that he could send them, if they liked, three new strings quartets—works we know today as the three "Razumovsky" Quartets that were eventually issued as Beethoven's Opus 59.

In Beethoven's day, Vienna was swarming with Russian, Polish, and Hungarian aristocrats with a taste for music. Among them was Count Andreas Kyrilovich Razumovsky, the Russian ambassador to Vienna. The count was himself a good amateur violinist who occasionally played second violin in a string quartet he maintained at his own expense.

The count commissioned Beethoven to write three string quartets, stipulating that they should incorporate Russian melodies, real or imitated. The most recognizable of the Russian tunes Beethoven employed occurs in the scherzo of the second quartet: It's the same theme that was later quoted by Mussorgsky in the big coronation scene of his opera "Boris Godunov."

When these "Razumovsky" Quartets were premiered in Vienna in 1807, one contemporary review noted that (quote): 'Three very long and difficult Beethoven quartets… are attracting the attention of all connoisseurs. They are profoundly thought-through and composed with enormous skill, but will not be intelligible to everyone."

In fact, when one Italian violinist confessed to Beethoven that he found them incomprehensible, Beethoven allegedly retorted: 'Oh, they are not for you, but for a later age.'

On today's date in 1948, at a BBC Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall, the London Symphony gave the premiere performance of the "Serenade in G Major" by the British composer Ernest John Moeran. E.J. Moeran was born in 1894 in a London borough, but most music-lovers associate him with Ireland, since that country became his adopted home and his musical inspiration during the last decades of his life. Moeran was fascinated by folksongs, and his preferred method of collecting them was to sit in a country pub and wait until an old man started singing. He would note down the song and ask for more. In the 1920s, Moeran became the friend and drinking companion of another British composer, music critic, and fellow folk song aficionado Peter Warlock, a talented but rather notorious character who was the model for the outrageously Bohemian and somewhat shady composer depicted in Anthony Powell's string of novels collectively titled "A Dance to the Music of Time." Warlock's most famous piece of music was his "Capriol Suite," an affectionate reworking of Renaissance tunes, and Moeran's "Serenade in G," similar in tone, was perhaps intended as a tribute to his old boon companion. In any case, Moeran's 1948 "Serenade" proved to be last major work, as the composed died suddenly two years later, at age 55, in his beloved Ireland.

On today's date in 1785, Wolfgang Mozart dedicated his six latest string quartets to his friend and older colleague, Joseph Haydn. Earlier that year, Haydn heard some of these quartets performed at a private concert in Vienna. Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang's father, was also present, and must have been over the moon when, after the performance, Haydn told him, "Before God and as an honest man I tell you that your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name." The six quartets Mozart dedicated to Haydn were published by the Viennese firm Artaria, and generated some much-needed income for Wolfgang. Whether they sold well enough to make money for their publisher as well is another matter. Three years later, one of Mozart's lesser contemporaries, Karl Maria von Dittersdorf, offered Artaria six of HIS string quartets at the same price they paid Mozart, with a note that read, "I am certain you will do better with MY quartets than you did with Mozart's, which deserve the highest praise, but which, because of their overwhelming and unrelenting artfulness, are not to everyone's taste." Apparently Mozart's quartets were regarded as a little too "brainy" to suit the public taste. Well, Dittersdorf's quartets may have sold better in the 1780's, but these days, performers and audiences have pretty much decided that Mozart's "unrelenting artfulness" appeals more to contemporary taste than Dittersdorf's sugary confections.

The "Radetzky March" is undoubtedly Johann Strauss Senior's most famous work. Its performance has become obligatory at the annual New Year's concert of the Vienna Philharmonic—it's the piece that involves audience participation in the form of a "clap along."

The premiere performance of this familiar music took place on today's date in the year 1848. Few people outside of Vienna know that this music had a distinct political subtext in Strauss's day, and not everyone back then was clapping along.

Field Marshall Radetzky was the commander of the Austrian forces that put down "insurgent democrats" in Italy during the revolutions of 1848, and, as such, became a counter-revolutionary hero in Europe. The premiere of the "Radetzky March" occurred at a concert attended chiefly by monarchists and the Austrian military, and the tune quickly became the unofficial anthem of the Austrian military and ultra-conservatives—the "far right" of that time.

Curiously enough, Johann Strauss Junior held diametrically opposite political sympathies from his father. The younger Strauss even wrote a "Revolution" March and in 1848 his Viennese orchestra once dared play the "far left" French anthem, the "Marseillaise," which got him into trouble with the authorities.

By the end of the 19th century, however, the bloody political troubles of 1848 were diplomatically swept under the collective Austrian carpet, and Johann Strauss Junior's "Blue Danube" Waltz became the unofficial anthem for ALL Austrians, right, left and center.

On today's date in 1933, the Philadelphia Orchestra was performing at its summer home at Robin Hood Dell. Conductor Alexander Smallens led the world premiere performance of a new work by a 23-year-old composer named Samuel Barber. It was his first orchestral composition to have a major public hearing, but oddly enough, young Mr. Barber himself was not in attendance. Barber was in Europe that summer, and so missed the premiere of his Overture to "The School for Scandal," a musical romp inspired by the 18th century English Restoration comedy of the same name by Richard Sheridan. Even before he had left the Curtis Institute of Music, where he pursued a triple major in piano, composition, and voice, Barber had begun winning prizes that enabled him to study abroad. Until the outbreak of the Second World War, Barber's musical career was quite Euro-centric. His "School for Scandal" Overture, in fact, was written in Italy in 1931. Barber's First Symphony premiered in Rome in 1936, and the following year was played by the Vienna Philharmonic at the 1937 Salzburg Music Festival. That led to stateside performances and commissions from conductors like Bruno Walter and Arturo Toscanini. Barber's international career, like that of many other American composers, was temporarily put on hold by the War and by a three-year stint in the U.S. Army.

Say the phrase "BBC Proms Concert" to most music lovers, and they'll probably conjure up a mental image of the rowdy "Last Night of the Proms"—an event at which normally staid and reserved Britons don funny hats and make rude noises during Sir Henry Wood's arrangement of British sailor songs.

But the raucous "Last Night of the Proms" is only the festive finale of several weeks of fairly serious music making: dozens of concerts covering a wide range of old and new music

From the very beginning of the Proms in 1895, Sir Henry, who started the whole thing, had this specific agenda: "I am going to run nightly concerts to train the public in easy stages," he explained. "Popular at first, gradually raising the standard until I have created a public for classical AND modern music."

On today's date in 1996, for example, violinist Gidon Kremer premiered this

brand-new violin concerto by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho at a BBC Proms concert. The new concerto had an unusual title—"Grail Theater."

"I like the unusual combination of these two words," explained Saariaho, "because it represents two such different things. One is the search for the Grail, and the other side is the theatrical aspect. I feel that the concerto situation is very much comparable to a theater, and the main person in this theater piece is the violin."

The life story of George Gershwin usually runs something like this: an incredible string of successes is cut short by Gershwin's tragically early death.

On today's date in 1922, George Gershwin suffered one of his rare flops when his one-act opera "Blue Monday" opened and closed on the same day. For five years, beginning in 1920, Gershwin had provided the music for an annual Broadway review entitled "The George White Scandals." The impresario Mr. White provided the money and the leggy showgirls, Mr. Gershwin the catchy tunes and light-hearted dances.

But in 1922, Gershwin was eager to try something different: a modern, jazz-age version of an Italian verismo opera. The plot was simple: he does her wrong, and then she shoots him. Since it was a jazz opera, the characters were supposedly all blacks, but for the 1922 premiere, the cast was all white, made up in blackface. The reviews were devastatingly bad—one critic suggesting the soprano with the pistol should have shot all the rest of the cast before ANYONE had a chance to sing.

Mr. White read the reviews the next day, and pulled "Blue Monday" from his revue before it could have a second performance. A concert revival by the Paul Whiteman band at Carnegie Hall in 1925, and a 1953 CBS-TV production with an all-black cast didn't fare all that much better, and "Blue Monday" is rarely mounted today.

Around this time in 1956, the hot ticket on Broadway was for a musical based on the old Greek legend of Pygmalion, a sculptor so good that he fell in love with one of his beautiful female statues. The playwright, George Bernard Shaw, had updated the legend to modern-day London, with Pygmalion transformed into Professor Henry Higgins, and the beautiful female statue, a Cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle. In 1956, the Broadway team of Lerner and Loewe had in turn transformed Shaw's play into the smash Broadway musical, "My Fair Lady." But 208 years before all that, on today's date in the year 1748, another very successful musical adaptation of the Pygmalion legend opened in Paris. This "Pygmalion" was an opera-ballet by the great French Baroque composer, Jean-Philippe Rameau. Rameau was born in 1683, two years earlier than Bach and Handel, but unlike them, was something of a late bloomer. Rameau was 50 before he became famous, and his opera-ballet "Pygmalion" opened shortly before his 65th birthday. In this work and many others, Rameau prefigured Wagner's desire to integrate myth, music and dance into a theatrical whole. Rameau was also famous for imitating natural sounds and noises in his music. One of Rameau's contemporaries, in praising the overture to "Pygmalion," even suggested the repeated notes of Rameau's theme represented the chipping of Pygmalion's chisel as he worked on his lovely creation.

Piero della Francesca was a 15th century Renaissance painter, whose series of frescoes entitled "Legend of the True Cross" inspired one of the best orchestral works of a 20th-century Czech composer named Bohuslav Martinu.

In 1952, Martinu made a trip to the Tuscan hill town of Arezzo, where he saw the frescoes and got the idea for a new symphonic work that would attempt to capture in music what Piero had captured in painting.

"If a composer tries to represent a picture in music," said Martinu, "his work is often considered merely descriptive, and somehow outside the range of pure music." What Martinu sought to capture was, as he put it, "a kind of solemn, frozen silence and opaque, colored atmosphere… a strange, peaceful, and moving poetry."

Even so, Martinu did link the first movement of his 3-part score to one Tuscan fresco showing the Queen of Sheba and some women kneeling by a river; and the second to another depicting the dream of the Emperor Constantine. The third and final movement was intended, in Martinu's words, as "a kind of general view of the frescoes, calling attention to some battle scenes and many other fascinating details."

Martinu's orchestral triptych, entitled "The Frescoes of Piero della Francesca," received its premiere performance on today's date at the 1956 Salzburg Festival in Austria, with the Vienna Philharmonic led by the eminent Czech conductor, Rafael Kubelik.

On today's date in 1959, Leonard Bernstein celebrated his 41st birthday in Moscow. The New York Philharmonic was embarked on an extensive world tour, which included three weeks in the Soviet Union. Their August 25th concert proved controversial, offering two works of Igor Stravinsky, a composer still condemned in the Soviet Union as "bourgeois" and "decadent." Even more daring, Bernstein opened his concert with "The Unanswered Question," a short piece by the American composer, Charles Ives. Even worse, Bernstein broke traditional Soviet protocol by talking directly to the audience through an interpreter, explaining Ives' philosophy of allowing several components of his score their own separate tempos and rhythms, which, in performance, came together in a kind of planned unpredictability. The enthusiastic audience response after the Ives led to it being encored. This really upset the Soviet authorities, and the music critic of the Ministry of Culture wrote, "Before this four-minute piece Bernstein spoke for six minutes. Only the good manners of the hospitable public resulted in a ripple of cool applause. Nevertheless, the conductor, setting modesty aside, himself suggested that the piece be repeated." Now, even the Tass news agency had reported that the enthusiastic audience had insisted on the encore. Even though furious at what he called "an unforgivable lie," Bernstein was persuaded to respect the local customs and to forgo any further controversial lectures from the podium for the remainder of the Soviet tour.