Composers Datebook

On today's date in 2002, Mariss Jansons led the Pittsburg Symphony in the premiere performance of the Second Symphony written by a then 32-year-old American composer named Michael Hersch. Hardly a child prodigy, Michael Hersch was introduced to classical music at age 18 by his brother Jamie, who showed him a videotape of Georg Solti conducting Beethoven's Fifth. That experience shook him. "It scrambled everything." Hersch recalled. "That's when I knew that I was to be a composer... My whole life started over at that moment." Hersch certainly made up for lost time, exhibiting an uncanny ability to master both the piano and the intricacies of contemporary compositional techniques in less than a decade. His first success as a composer came when his "Elegy for Strings" won a major prize and was conducted by Marin Alsop at Lincoln Center in New York in 1997. Since then his works have been commissioned and performed by many other leading orchestras and performers. Tim Smith of The Baltimore Sun described Hersch's work as, "music of astounding, even thrilling, complexity; music that can be hard to grasp, yet impossible to let go of; and music of stark, unsettling, seemingly implausible beauty." Hersch's Symphony No. 2 has no stated program, but it was composed shortly after the events of September 11, 2001, and knowing that, it's hard to disassociate the score's violent opening and subsequent elegiac mood from that tragic moment in American history.

If you were like Dr. Who with his Tardis, and a piano fan to boot, you might set your time machine for Paris, April 25th, 1841. That's when an all-Beethoven concert was given at the Salle Erard to raise funds for the proposed Beethoven monument in Bonn, the late composer's birthplace. Franz Liszt was the soloist in Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto, conducted by Hector Berlioz.

About a month earlier, Liszt had dazzled Paris with the premiere of his new piano fantasia on themes from the popular opera "Robert the Devil," by Giacomo Meyerbeer. So, as Liszt walked on stage—with the entire orchestra in place, all ready for Beethoven's Concerto—the audience clamored loudly for a repeat performance. They made such a racket that Berlioz and the orchestra had no choice but to sit idly by until Liszt first encored his Fantasia.

In the audience was a 27-year old German named Richard Wagner, reviewing the concert for a Dresden newspaper. Wagner was outraged that the Beethoven was put on hold for Liszt's flashy solo. "Some day," fumed Wagner, "Liszt in heaven will be summoned to play his Fantasy on 'The Devil' before the assembled company of angels!"

We're not sure if Wagner attended a concert the following day at the Salle Pleyel, but any modern-day time traveler would probably want to stick around to hear Frederic Chopin give one of HIS rare Parisian recitals, performing, among other works, his own F-Major Ballade.

During the last 20 years of his life, the avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen concentrated on completing an ambitious cycle of seven operas, collectively titled “Licht” or, in English “Light.” Each opera was named for a day of the week, and inspired by familiar and obscure world mythologies associated with each day.

The opera titled “Montag” (or “Monday”), for example, is devoted to the Moon and the feminine architype of Eve as the mother of all creation. Two additional main characters that appear in the operas are Michael the Archangel, representing the creative force, and Lucifer, representing the destructive force.

Each opera begins with a “Greeting,” or overture, often an electronic piece designed to be heard in the theater lobby while the audience gathers, and ends with a “Farewell,” sometimes intended for performance outside the theater proper, to be heard as the audience disperses.

Story lines in Stockhausen’s operas draw on many sources, including the composer’s own childhood, and have more in common with symbolic Renaissance courtly masques and pageants than works by Verdi or Puccini, but might be considered a 21th century response to Wagner’s 19th-century cycle of four mythological “Ring” operas.

Portions of Stockhausen’s operas were premiered piecemeal starting in 1977, and only on rare occasions staged in their entirety. The last to be completed, “Sontag” (or “Sunday”) was performed complete for the first time in Cologne, Germany, on today’s date in 2011, more than three years after Stockhausen’s death.

During his stay in America, the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák became convinced that distinctive American music could be based on two, uniquely American sources: the plantation songs and spirituals of African-Americans and the chants and dances of the indigenous Native American tribes. By the early years of the 20th century, a number of American composers had taken his suggestions to heart.

One of them, an American composer, publisher, music editor and critic named Arthur Farwell, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on today's date in 1872. Farwell went to MIT intending to become an electrical engineer, and did, in fact, get his engineering degree in 1893, the same year Dvořák's views began appearing in the press, and Farwell eventually came to the conclusion that a musical career might be more interesting than engineering. Frustrated at his inability to find a publisher for his set of solo piano transcriptions entitled "American Indian Melodies," he formed his own publishing house.

In addition to pioneering work in arranging Native American themes, Farwell set Emily Dickinson poems to music, experimented with polytonality, and, in 1916, arranged for the first "light show" in New York's Central Park, decades before the psychedelic 1960s. His teaching career included stints at Cornell, UC Berkley and Michigan State, but Farwell never felt completely at home in academia, preferring to organize community-based musical pageants with audience participation. He died at the age of 79 in New York in 1953.

On today's date in 1876, the New York Philharmonic Society closed its season with what The New York Times called a "precise and effective rendering" of the Beethoven Symphony No. 4.

Back then, same as today, a Beethoven Symphony on the program made for good box office. And a virtuoso soloist on the program doesn't hurt either. If the name of S.B. Mills doesn't ring a bell these days, back in 1876 the pianist was a draw… and Mr. Mills' performance in Chopin's E- Minor Piano Concerto was also well received by press and audiences. Reviewing the concert for The New York Times a few days later, the paper's anonymous critic enthused about the Chopin, writing "This elaborate composition is so seldom heard in its entirety as to be almost a novelty."

With a Beethoven Symphony and a Chopin Concerto on the program, perhaps the Philharmonic felt safe enough to risk a REAL novelty for good measure, and so, on the same program, they gave the American premiere of Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" Fantasy-Overture, a work then about 6 years old.

The Times critic was less enthusiastic about this "new" music, however.

"Admirable as a specimen of full and powerful instrumentation," he wrote, "we cannot say that the strange themes and violent passages of this vigorous and rather shapeless achievement impressed us profoundly."

In 1863, the price of The New York Times was three cents, and many plunked down their pennies to read front-page news about "the rebellion"—what we now call the Civil War.

But if you were a new music aficionado back in 1863, you probably turned to the concert listings on the "Amusements" page. One of Verdi's newest operas, "Un Ballo in Maschera," had just closed at the Academy of Music, and the contemporary composer-pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk had given a concert of his latest works the day before, too.

After all that "modern" music, maybe you were in the mood for some really OLD music. The enterprising duo of William Mason and Theodore Thomas was offering a "Soiree of Chamber Music" at Dodworth's Hall on April 21, 1863, and the program included the first public performance in America of the Concerto in C Major for Two Keyboards and Strings by J.S. Bach. Now this was REALLY old stuff—a work that predated the birth of America in 1776 by a good 50 years!

The Times did not review this Bach premiere, but the next documented American performance in Boston in 1877 was described in Dwight's Journal as a "cheerful, lightsome, everyday sort of composition," with the reviewer adding that (quote) "Bach's everyday is something finer than the common mortal's… the work [was] full of vigor and life, the best of tonics…"

Today in 1928, a French musician and inventor named Maurice Martenot gave the first public demonstration of a strange, new electronic instrument he had created. It was a gadget that had pull-wires, pointers and a keyboard diagram which produced eerie-sounding tones reminiscent of the human voice, but without the human limitations of voice range or lung power.

In addition to being a clever inventor, Martenot was also a savvy promoter of his new electronic instrument, which he took on a world tour, with his sister serving as its first virtuoso performer. The instrument came to be called the "Ondes Martenot"—which translates into English as "Martenot Waves."

A number of 20th century composers were quite enthusiastic. Arthur Honegger even thought the Ondes Martenot might replace the contra-bassoon in symphony orchestras, writing: "The Ondes Martenot has power and a speed of utterance which is not to be compared with those gloomy stove-pipes looming up in orchestras."

Well, contra-bassoonists needn't worry: their analog, breath-powered stove-pipes still provide the low blows in most modern orchestras, but the Ondes Martenot does figure prominently in several major 20th century scores, including the monumental "Turangalila Symphony" of the French composer, Oliver Messiaen.

In 1947, Martenot established classes in the Ondes Martenot at the Paris Conservatory, and, following Martenot's death in 1981, the French even formed an official society with the grand title of "L'Association pour la Diffusion et le Développement des Ondes Martenot."

Alban Berg's Violin Concerto had its first performance in Barcelona, Spain, on today's date in 1936, at the opening concert of that year's International Society for Contemporary Music Festival. Berg had died the previous winter, and the premiere was supposed to be conducted by his close friend and fellow composer, Anton Webern, but Webern withdrew at the last minute, reportedly upset with the quality of the Spanish orchestra. And so Hermann Scherchen conducted the first performance, with the violinist who had commissioned the work, Louis Krasner, as the soloist. Krasner was born in the Ukraine, but raised in America, and, in addition to commissioning Violin Concertos and premiering them, served for a time as the concertmaster of the Minneapolis Symphony under Dimitri Mitropoulos. He later taught at Syracuse University and the New England Conservatory of Music. In the spring of 1976, Louis Krasner was cleaning out his attic, and discovered he still had some private acetate discs he had made of the SECOND performance of the Berg Violin Concerto. The old discs documented a May 1st, 1936 radio broadcast of the new work by the BBC Symphony, with Krasner once again the soloist. This time the conductor WAS Anton Webern. The 40-year old discs were transcribed to tape, and eventually were released on CD in 1991, allowing posterity a chance to listen in as music history was being made.

The month of April in the year 1800 was an especially busy one for Ludwig van Beethoven. On the second of April at his first big orchestral concert in Vienna, Beethoven had premiered his First Symphony, a new Piano Concerto, and his Septet for winds. He had been planning for this concert all winter, and there was a lot of music to be worked up and written down for that occasion.

On today's date that same month, Beethoven appeared in Vienna once again, this time as piano accompanist for the popular Bohemian horn virtuoso, Johann Wenzel Stich, who went by the more marketable Italian "stage name" of Giovanni Punto.

The pre-concert announcements for the Punto recital promised that Beethoven would contribute a new work for the occasion—but, apparently preoccupied by his OWN concert, Beethoven didn't get around to writing the promised piece until the day before the recital!

Beethoven and Punto took the new Horn Sonata with them for a concert in Budapest the following month. The press in Hungary had heard of Punto, but not Beethoven, whose name they didn't even get right: "Who is this Bethover (sic)." One press notice read: "The history of German music is not acquainted with such a name. Punto, of course, is VERY well known…"

Early in April in the year 1845, a 15-year old American pianist named Louis Moreau Gottschalk performed at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. On the program was Chopin's Piano Concerto in E minor, and Chopin happened to be in the audience that day. Although already quite weak from the consumption that would eventually kill him, Chopin went backstage to congratulate the young American on his performance. What exactly Chopin said depends on whom you asked. Gottschalk's first biographer claims it was, "Very good, my child, let me shake your hand," while Gottschalk's sister insists it was, "I predict you will become the king of pianists!" In 1845, Parisian society was curious about anything American after experiencing other exotic specimens from the New World, including P.T. Barnum's circus and George Catlin's paintings of Native American life. The New World was definitely "in." Four years later, on today's date in 1849, Gottschalk returned to the Salle Pleyel, this time performing some of his own original compositions, including a work, entitled "Bamboula," after the name of a deep-voiced Afro-Caribbean drum. Gottschalk had been born in New Orleans, and was exposed from childhood to Cuban and Haitian rhythms and music. The Parisian audiences had never heard anything like it, and gave Gottschalk a standing ovation. Responding to demands for more of the same, Gottschalk wrote and performed a "Louisiana Quartet" of four original Creole-inspired piano pieces, works which anticipate by many decades both the rhythms and colors of American jazz.