Composers Datebook

On today's date in 1992, lovers of the tango had good reason to be sad. The great Argentinean composer and bandoneón virtuoso Astor Piazolla had died in Buenos Aires at the age of 71.

Now, the bandoneón is a close relation of the accordion, and for his instrument Piazolla composed original music inspired by the tango, a dance form that originated in the working-class dancehalls and bordellos of Buenos Aires. While still a teen-ager, Piazolla had played bandoneón in the orchestra of Carlos Gardél, the most famous tango singer of the 1930s. Eventually, Piazolla formed his own band, which became famous throughout South America.

But Piazzola had a burning desire to write concert music, and won a scholarship to study composition in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. She encouraged him to explore the possibilities inherent in the music he knew best, and so Piazzola set about "reinventing" the tango. The result was dubbed "nuevo tango." These "new" tangos were as vital as the old ones, but often dark and brooding.

Shortly before his death, someone asked Piazolla why his music was so melancholy. "Not because I'm sad," Piazolla replied. "Not at all. I'm a happy guy. I like to taste a good wine. I like to eat well. I like to live. No, my music is sad because the tango is sad—sad and dramatic, but not pessimistic."

On today's date in 1876, America was celebrating its Centennial, and the place to be was in Philadelphia, where a Centennial Exhibition was in progress. Officially known as "The International Exhibition of Arts, Manufacturers and Products of the Soil and Mine," this was the first World's Fair to be held in the United States. It drew 9 million visitors—this at a time when the entire population of the U.S. was only 46 million.

The Exhibition had opened in May with a concert attended by President and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant. After "Hail to the Chief," the orchestra premiered a specially commissioned "Centennial March" by the famous German opera composer Richard Wagner. Wagner was paid $5000 for the commission, an astronomically high fee in those days. Wagner did not bother to attend the Philadelphia premiere, and privately told friends back in Germany: "Between you and me, the best thing about the march was the $5000 they paid me."

The following month, the French composer Jacques Offenbach arrived in Philadelphia to conduct his music at a specially constructed open-air pavilion. "They asked my permission to call it 'Offenbach Gardens,'" the composer later wrote. "How could I refuse?" The concertmaster of Offenbach's orchestra, by the way, was a 21-year old violinist from Washington, D.C. by the name of John Philip Sousa, who would go on to write some festive music of his own.

"Country Gardens" is the best-known work of the Australian-born American composer, arranger, and pianist Percy Grainger. Its score bears this note: "Birthday-gift, Mother, July 3, 1918." Grainger's mother Rose was responsible for his excellent musical training that made him a successful concert pianist in Britain, Europe, and America. In 1918, Grainger arranged a folk tune given to him in 1908 by Cecil Sharp, a major figure in the folklore revival in England. Grainger titled his arrangement "Country Gardens," and it went over so well at his recitals that Grainger decided to have it published. It was a big hit and broke sales records. In fact, until his death in 1961, its sales generated a significant portion of Grainger's annual income. Like other composers with a mega-hit, Grainger came to resent being known for just one tune, and would say to audiences: "The typical English country garden is not often used to grow flowers. It's more likely to be a vegetable plot. So you can think of turnips as I play it". In 1931, "Country Gardens" was arranged for wind band by someone other than Grainger, but around 1950, at the special request of a Detroit band director named Graham Overgard, Grainger prepared his own arrangement, and wrote to Overgard: "I now have my own version, quite delicate and unlike the coarse-sounding score you rightly object to. The new setting is not based on the piano version, but on a chamber music sketch of 1908 and is a new piece in every way."

In the German, "Gluck" means luck, and today's date marks the birth anniversary of a German composer named Christoph Willibald Gluck, whose good fortune it was to be credited with "reforming" the vocally ornate but dramatically static form of Baroque opera.

In the 18th century, opera was the biggest and most high-profile of all musical forms, and Gluck wrote 49 of them during his 67 years of life. Like many 18th century opera composers, the stories Gluck chose were often based on ancient Greek myths such as "Orpheus and Eurydice."

It wasn't the matter of Gluck's operas that was revolutionary, but the manner in which he set these stories to music. When the British music historian Charles Burney visited Gluck in 1771, he recorded the composer's own words on the subject.

"It was my design," said Gluck," to divest music of those abuses which the vanity of singers, or the complacency of composers, had so long disfigured Italian opera and made the most beautiful and magnificent of all public exhibitions into the most tiresome and ridiculous. It was my intention to confine music to its true dramatic province, of assisting poetical expression… without interrupting the action, or chilling it with useless and superfluous ornamentation."

To sum it all up, Gluck told Burney, "My first and chief care as a dramatic composer was to aim at a noble simplicity."

On today's date in 1937, some jaunty music by the French composer Darius Milhaud premiered in Paris. It was a suite for two pianos entitled "Scaramouche," after a stock character in the Italian commedia dell arte, an art form famous for thumbing its nose at authority. Its upbeat, carefree mood made "Scaramouche" an instant hit, much to the composer's surprise.

For his part, Milhaud was in an apprehensive mood that year. When he and his wife Madeleine had visited the 1937 Paris International Exposition, they saw premonitions of war reflected all-too clearly in many of its exhibits.

"Picasso's Guernica adorned the walls of the Spanish pavilion," recalled Milhaud, "but the Spanish Republic had been murdered. Placed face to face, the German and the Soviet pavilions seemed to challenge each other to mortal combat. One evening, as we watched the sun set behind the immense mass of flags of all nations, Madeleine clutched my arm in anguish and whispered 'This is the end of Europe!'"

In 1940, Milhaud was forced to leave France when the Germans occupied Paris. As a Jew, his music was promptly banned. But like Scaramouche himself, French musicians soon found ways of thumbing their noses at the unwelcome German authorities.

In 1943, two French pianists performed "Scaramouche" in concert, tricking the censors by listing its composer's name as "Hamid-al-Usurid"—a fictitious Arabic composer whose name just happens to be an anagram of "Darius Milhaud."

In 1971, American film composer Bernard Herrmann confessed, "the only thing I ever did that was foolhardy was to write an opera." The opera was based on the 19th century novel "Wuthering Heights" by Emily Bronte. Herrmann began work on it in April of 1943, and didn't finish until today's date in 1951—at 3:45 p.m., as he noted in its score.

In those years, Herrmann was juggling three careers. He was conducting the CBS Orchestra, producing music for New York radio plays and occasional Hollywood films, and trying to write "serious" concert hall works. It's no wonder it took him eight years to finish a big opera score that clocked in at over three hours in length.

Now, writing an opera is hard enough, but getting it staged is even harder. Herrmann liked to quote Franz Liszt, that "to write an opera you have to have the soul of a hero—and the mentality of a lackey—to have it produced." Even if an opera company expressed interest, Herrmann refused to cut or alter his score. He felt "Wuthering Heights" was his masterpiece, and refused to compromise.

The opera was never staged during his lifetime, so Herrmann had to content himself with making his own studio recording of "Wuthering Heights" at his own expense. After Herrmann's death in 1975, the Portland Opera staged an edited-down version, and more recently, in 2011, the Minnesota Opera staged and filmed a critically acclaimed revival.

Today's date marks anniversary of the birth of the famous Czech conductor Rafael Kubelík. He was born on June 29, 1914, in the Bohemian village of Býchory, as the son of a very musical father, namely the violin virtuoso Jan Kubelík, known as the "Czech Paganini."

Rafael Kubelík studied violin, composition, and conducting at the Prague Conservatory, and was an excellent pianist to boot—good enough to accompany his father on several concert tours. At the age of 19, Kubelík made his conducting debut with the Czech Philharmonic, and later became that orchestra's artistic director.

In 1950, Kubelík became director of the Chicago Symphony, in 1955, the director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and in 1961, conductor of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra. It was with the Bavarian orchestra that Kubelík made the bulk of his recordings, including a critically-acclaimed set of the Mahler symphonies. Like Mahler, Kubelík was both a conductor and a composer.

"In public, I am practicing more as a conductor," said Kubelík, "but I could not live without composing, just as I would not be able to conduct without composing." Kubelík wrote five operas, three symphonies, chamber music, choral works, and songs.

It was on today's date in 1745 that a 73-year-old French Baroque composer named Antoine Forqueray died in Mantes-la-Jolie outside Paris, where he had lived after his retirement as a court musician to King Louis XIV of France.

Forqueray was a virtuoso on the viola da gamba, a bowed string instrument popular in the 17th and 18th centuries, but which is nowadays played mainly by specialists in old music. At the tender age of 10, Forqueray played before Louis XIV. Seven years later he landed a job at the Court of Versailles.

In Forqueray's day the other great French gamba virtuoso and composer was Marin Marais, noted for his introspective, sweet, and gentle style of playing. Forqueray's style was the polar opposite: extroverted and bold, even brash. People said Marais played like an angel, and Forqueray like the devil.

Forqueray's style was so distinctive that three other French composers of the day, Jean-Philippe Rameau, François Couperin, and Jacques Duphly, each composed a piece named "La Forqueray" in tribute to him.

An obituary notice suggested that by the time of Forqueray's death he had composed some three hundred works, but a selection of thirty-two pieces published by Forqueray's son two years after his father's death are the only music by Antoine Forqueray that survives.

The name "George Templeton Strong" crops up frequently in both the Ken Burns PBS documentary on the Civil War and Ric Burn's history of New York. THAT George Templeton Strong was a lawyer and music lover who lived in New York City from 1820-1875, who documented in some four millions words of diary entries a detailed picture of daily life in that city.

But there's another member of the family we'd like to tell you about—the son of the famous diarist, George Templeton Strong, Junior, who was born in New York in 1856, and died in Geneva, Switzerland on today's date in 1948.

The younger Strong became a fine oboist who played off and on in various New York orchestras of his day. His father was not very happy with that: he wanted his son to study law. Moreover, Junior rebelled against his father's ultra-conservative tastes in music. Strong Senior detested the music of Liszt and Wagner, whereas Strong Jr., who eventually became a composer, modeled his works on those very composers.

It's perhaps an all-too familiar story of youthful rebellion, and it's documented painfully in the final entries of the elder Strong's diaries. Shortly before his father's death, the son had left home after a bitter argument, and in 1879, he moved to Europe, eventually settling in Switzerland, where he pursued a dual artistic career as composer and watercolorist.

It was Mozart who wrote the first great piano concertos, with Beethoven, Brahms and others following suit in the 19th century. Closer to our own time, the tradition continues, with new contributions appearing each year.

On today's date in 1986, it was the turn of American composer, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, when her new piano concerto received its premiere by the Detroit Symphony under Guenter Herbig, with Marc-Andre Hamelin the soloist.

"My piano concerto does not cast the pianist as the prototypical 19th-century hero battling the orchestral forces and triumphing through overwhelming virtuosity," said Zwilich at the time. "My concerto calls for a blending of forces—a joint exploration of the piano soloist and orchestra. The pianist is even asked to merge with various sections of the rather large orchestra at times."

"To me," continued Zwilich, "a part of the nobility of the piano is that it can change its color, chameleon-like without losing its special identity. Of all the instruments, the piano is perhaps the most able to be whatever it is asked to be… One composer treats the piano as a percussion instrument, another as a singer… Certainly the vast and wonderful piano repertoire explores this remarkable range. And the world of composer-pianists is large enough to embrace Serge Rachmaninoff and Art Tatum."