Composers Datebook

For many years now MidAmerica Productions has been organizing concerts in New York City and enlisting choral ensembles from the U.S. and abroad to come to the "big apple" to perform at prestigious Manhattan venues.

On today's date in 1990, choirs from Arkansas, Connecticut, Minnesota, and Texas* were on stage at Carnegie Hall for the world premiere of John Rutter's "Magnificat," specially commissioned by MidAmerica, and with the British composer himself on hand to conduct.

"The chorus numbered over 200 voices," Rutter recalled, "every one of them happy and excited at the prospect of joining forces in the magnificent setting of Carnegie Hall… [so] I wanted to write something joyous because that would reflect the mood of the performers…"

"The 'Magnifcat'" continues Rutter, "is known as the Canticle of the Blessed Virgin, and it is mainly in the sunny southern countries—Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico—that Mary is most celebrated and enjoyed. This led me to conceive the music as a bright, Latin-flavored fiesta. On feast days of the Virgin Mary in Latin countries, the population sings, dances, dresses in its most colorful clothes, processes in the open air, and celebrates. I wrote my setting in that spirit."

Despite composing and conducting religious music, Rutter confessed during a 2003 interview on "60 Minutes" that he was not a particularly religious man himself—just a composer deeply moved and inspired by the spirituality of sacred verses and prayers.

*These were the Southern Arkansas University Heritage Singers, the Branford High School Concert Choir from Connecticut, the Moorhead High School A Cappella Choir from Minnesota, and the Sanctuary Choir of the First United Methodist Church of Houston, Texas.

This lush, late-Romantic score, composed in 1904, had to wait until 1962 for its premiere performance, when, on today's date that year, the Philadelphia Orchestra led by Eugene Ormandy performed it in Seattle during an international festival devoted to its composer, Anton Webern. For most music lovers, the Austrian composer Anton Webern is a shadowy, vaguely mysterious figure. If they know anything at all about him, it is that he was a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, that he wrote a small body of very short and very condensed atonal scores, and that in 1945 he was shot by accident by an American soldier in the tense days following the end of World War II. The early orchestral score that received its belated premiere on today's date in 1962 was titled "In the Summer Wind," completed when Webern was just 19 years old. It's very much in the style of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and even Arnold Schoenberg in the early years of the 20th century. To earn a living, Webern worked as a conductor of everything from Viennese operettas to worker's choral unions. He was one of the earliest European conductors to present music by the American composer Charles Ives, and even appeared as a guest conductor in London with the BBC Symphony. His conducting career came to a halt when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, and until his untimely death in 1945, Webern lived by doing routine work for a Viennese music publisher.

On today's date in 1803, violinist George Polgreen Bridgetower, age 33, and pianist and composer Ludwig van Beethoven, age 32, gave the first performance in Vienna of a new Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano, a chamber work now regarded as one of Beethoven's greatest.

The performance was to have taken place two days earlier, but Beethoven wasn't finished with the music. At the first rehearsal, Bridgetower had to read from Beethoven's manuscript score—no easy task considering Beethoven's poor penmanship—and at one point felt compelled to improvise a passage, which so enchanted Beethoven that he added Bridgetower's improvisation to his score. In fact, the two young men became fast friends, and were inseparable for a time.

Bridgetower was an English violin virtuoso born in Poland of a European mother and an African father. He ended up in England, and joined the famous Salomon orchestra which premiered many of Haydn's "London" Symphonies. They caught the eye and ear of the Prince of Wales, who became his patron and sponsored a European tour which brought him to Vienna. His Viennese friendship with Beethoven came to a sudden end, Bridgetower later claimed, when the two men became interested in the same young lady.

And so, even though it should be known as the "Bridgetower Sonata," when this music was published as Beethoven's Op. 47, Beethoven dedicated the music to another contemporary virtuoso, a French violinist named Kreutzer, who apparently never performed it.

Some famous composers were notorious perfectionists—and then there was Johannes Brahms, the Perfectionist of Perfectionists. He spent 14 years tinkering with the score of his First Symphony, remember.

Brahms once claimed he had written and discarded twenty string quartets before publishing his first two in the year 1873. To say Brahms was his own severest critic would be putting it mildly, but there was one other person whose opinion Brahms valued above all others, and that was Clara Schumann, one of the finest pianists of her day, the widow of his mentor Robert Schumann, and a fine composer in her own right.

So it comes as no surprise that the Third String Quartet of Brahms, the Quartet in B-flat Major, published as his Opus 67, was first performed as a kind of "test run" at the Berlin home of Clara Schumann on today's date in the year 1876. The performers were the famous Joachim Quartet, led by violinist Joseph Joachim, a long-time friend of Brahms.

Apparently Clara and Joseph liked the new quartet, but Brahms arranged for one more trial run the following month, and probably tinkered with the score right up to its first public performance by the Joachim Quartet in Berlin on October 30, 1876.

Brahms had composed his Third Quartet the previous summer, while on vacation, and unlike his preceding two string quartets, both austere and introspective works, this one was light-hearted and cheerful—"a useless trifle," as Brahms himself put it, adding it was just his way to (quote) "avoid facing the serious countenance of a symphony."

The German composer Richard Strauss wrote his first song at age 6, and his last at age 84, a year before his death in 1949. Four of his last songs were for soprano and orchestra, settings of one poem by the Romantic poet Josef von Eichendorff, and three by the modern poet and novelist Hermann Hesse. These “Four Last Songs,” as they came to be known, were premiered in London, at the Royal Albert Hall, on today’s date in 1950.

Strauss had written to the great Norwegian soprano Kirsten Flagstad, suggesting "I would like to make it possible that [the songs] should be at your disposal for a world premiere … with a first-class conductor and orchestra.” Flagstad did sing the premiere performances, with the first-rate Philharmonia Orchestra of London conducted by the legendary German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler.

In addition to those famous performers, credit for the realization of Strauss’s request is also due to an unlikely and exotic patron of the arts, namely the Maharaja of Mysore, Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar Bahudar, who put up a cash guarantee for the Strauss premiere. And since he could not be present himself, the Maharaja asked that the premiere be recorded and the discs shipped to him in Mysore.

The Maharaja had wanted to be concert pianist, but the deaths of both his father and his uncle forced him to succeed to the throne in 1940 at the age of 21. Mysore was one of the most prosperous states of India, and, in addition to underwriting the premiere of Strauss’s “Four Last Songs”, the young Maharaja championed the music of the Russian composer Nikolas Medtner, and, in 1945, the creation of the Philharmonia Orchestra of London as a recording ensemble for the enterprising EMI producer Walter Legge.

In addition to Western classical music, the Maharaja was passionate about the court music of his native land, and, under the pen name of Shri Vidya, himself composed almost 100 works in the South Indian tradition.

On today's date in 1892, at Italy's premiere opera house, La Scala in Milan, Arturo Toscanini conducted the first performance of a new one-act opera by Ruggero Leoncavallo. The opera was titled "Pagliacci," and would rapidly become an international hit, and Leoncavallo's one, undisputed masterpiece.

Leoncavallo's father was an Italian magistrate, and from him the composer heard of a true story: a sordid tale of infidelity and murder that occurred among a troupe of traveling show-biz people—literally a bunch of clowns. The contrast between the painted smiles of the professional entertainers and the murderous private passions they masked appealed to the opera composer's sense of drama. "Pagliacci" was the result—and one of those rare occasions when everything clicked, and the timing was just right.

Two years earlier, Leoncavallo's slightly younger contemporary, Pietro Mascagni, had scored a hit with another one-act opera titled "Cavalleria Rusticana," also dealing with a lower-class murder. The two operas made up a perfect double-bill, and as "Cav and Pag," "Cavallieria Rusticana" and "Pagliacci" became well-nigh inseparable partners for the next 100 years. Their tabloid-like dramatic style was dubbed "verismo," and has proven effective for hundreds of other operas written ever since.

In all, Leoncavallo wrote over a dozen other operas, ranging from Wagnerian epics to comic operettas, but they are rarely if ever revived—and, ironically, the same can be said for Pietro Mascagni.

These days composer John J. Becker is almost totally forgotten, but back in the 1930s his name was linked with Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Henry Cowell, and Wallingford Riegger as one of the so-called "American Five" composers of what was dubbed "ultra-modern" music.

From 1928 to 1935, Becker taught at the College of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and briefly assembled a "Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra" to give Midwest premieres of works by Ives and other ultra-modernists. From 1935 to 1941, Becker was the Minnesota State director of the Federal Music Project, one of President Roosevelt's initiatives to provide work for American musicians during the Depression years.

On today's date in 1937, at the old St. Paul Auditorium, Becker conducted the Federal Music Project's Twin Cities Orchestra in a program that included the premiere performance of his own Symphony No. 3, subtitled "Symphonia Brevis."

This "ultra-modern" symphony was met with an "ultra-conservative" review in The Saint Paul Pioneer Press, whose critic wrote: "It consists of spasmodic little excursions… percussive barrages… ideas that seem to run out before the score comes to a close, with the consequent suggestion of that spurious vitality exhibited by decapitated fowls."

Decades later, three years before his death in 1961, Becker, along with a few other surviving members of the "American Five," was invited to take a bow from the stage of Carnegie Hall at one of Leonard Bernstein's New York Philharmonic concerts which featured his "Sinfonia Brevis."

On today’s date in 2013, a new work by a 90-year old German-born American composer and teacher named Ursula Mamlok received its premiere performance in Switzerland. “Five Fantasy Pieces” for oboe, violin, viola, and cello, was given its first performance by the great Swiss oboist Heinz Holliger and colleagues.

Ursula Mamlok was born in Berlin in 1923, and began composing as a child, studying piano and composition. Her family was Jewish, and once the Nazis placed school music programs off limits to Jews, her family began holding musicales in their home, with Ursula writing the music.

After the “Crystal Night” pogrom in 1938, her family left Germany, and, via Ecuador, young Ursula came to America after being offered a full scholarship to study at the Mannes School of Music in New York. She became an American citizen and taught for many years at various schools, most notably the Manhattan School of Music, where she taught for four decades.

All the while she continued to compose, and described her own music as follows:

“My main concern is that [it] should convey the various emotions in it with clarity and conviction. It interests me to accomplish this with a minimum of material, transforming it in such multiple way so as to give the impression of ever-new ideas that are like the flowers of a plant, all related yet each one different.”

The bulk of Mamlok’s music is for small chamber ensembles, and only once she tried to create a purely electronic piece. In a 1996 interview, she confessed, “Unfortunately I have no connection to it … I put it together in the studio at Columbia in New York, but it took too long. I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ I’d rather use the pencil.”

Late in her life, in her 80s, Mamlok returned to Berlin, where she wrote her last works, including her “Five Fantasy Pieces.” She died there in May of 2016 at age 93.

On today's date in 1917, at the height of World War One, Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes presented in Paris the premiere performance of a new ballet titled "Parade." The sets and costumes were designed by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, the ballet scenario was devised by the French poet Jean Cocteau, and the music was provided by the eccentric Parisian composer, Erik Satie, whose score included parts for various noisemakers, including a typewriter and a revolver. In reaction to the sensuous contemporary orchestrations of Debussy and Ravel, Satie's score was austere and cleverly direct. "Parade" proved to be a very influential work, especially on younger composers like Francis Poulenc. "I was conquered," wrote Poulenc, "With all the injustice of youth, and although I idolized Debussy, I agreed to disown him a little because I was so eager for the new inspirations Satie and Picasso were bringing us." Others in the audience, including most of the critics, trashed the whole affair as a bad joke, and some resorted to the ultimate war-time insult, dubbing Picasso, Cocteau and Satie as no better than a bunch of Germans! Cocteau later recalled: "After a performance of 'Parade,' with a fight going on in the audience, I heard a man say to a friend: 'If I knew it was so silly, I would have taken the children along.' This was the best tribute we could have received!"

Today, a tip of the hat to the persistence of one Ms. Elisa Hall, who lived in Boston from 1853-1924.

Ms. Hall was at the heart of that city's musical life for many years. She was a Francophile, and championed the best and the latest in French music. Sadly, Elisa Hall suffered from a hearing ailment, which would eventually result in complete deafness. At the advice of her doctor, who thought it might stimulate her ears, Hall took up the saxophone — and with typical enthusiasm soon began commissioning the leading French composers of the day for new pieces for her instrument. In all, she commissioned no less than 22 works, the most famous being by Claude Debussy. Debussy was at first reluctant to respond to Ms. Hall's persistence, pleading that the saxophone was (quote) “a reed animal with whose habits he was poorly acquainted.”

Debussy was paid in advance, but it was years before he finally set to work on a short saxophone rhapsody in a vaguely Moorish style. In fact, it wasn't until May of 1919, one year after Debussy's death, that the orchestration of the piece was completed by Debussy's friend, Jean Roger-Ducasse, and premiered in Paris.

Ms. Hall apparently never performed it herself. Maybe she was exasperated by the long delay or perhaps, by 1919, her own hearing had deteriorated to the point where she could simply no longer could.