Composers Datebook

If you had been in Vienna on today’s date in 1897, you could have witnessed a civic outpouring of affection and respect as the coffin bearing the remains of Johannes Brahms processed to that city’s Central Cemetery. One eye-witness was the German-born British musician Sir George Henschel, who was a friend of the late composer.

He tells us the funeral procession was led by black-garbed riders on horseback, followed by the bier bearing Brahms’s coffin surrounded by many other carts overflowing with floral bouquets, including two immense floral wreaths, one from the city of Hamburg, where Brahms was born, another from the city of Vienna, where he died.

Let’s let Henschel himself describe what happened next:

“The sun, which had come out gloriously by that time, shone, as it were on a gigantic, moving garden… Before the building of the Society of the Friends of Music, the procession halted. The doors and pillars were draped in black cloth. On either side of the portal, from metal bowls, candelabras were flickering with a subdued, mystical light. From underneath a canopy the SingVerein [Chorale], which had often sung under the inspiring direction of the master, now sang his own beautiful part-song, ‘Farewell,’ Op. 93a, no. 4.

“As the lovely strains rang out into the vernal air, there could be heard from the neighboring trees the merry twittering of birds, whose song seemed to have been kindled by the approach of spring.”

Johann Strauss, Jr. dominated the dance hall scene in Vienna in the first quarter century of his musical career, but the "waltz king" was 45 years old before he tried his hand at writing an operetta. He was urged on by the management of Vienna's premiere light opera venue, the Theater an der Wien, which was anxious to replace the extremely popular French operettas by Jacques Offenbach with some new works by Vienna's own and equally famous purveyor of light music.

Even so, for Strauss's third operetta, the cagey theater managers hedged their bets by acquiring the rights to a French farce entitled "Le Réveillon," which just happened to be written by the librettists for several of Offenbach's biggest hits.

"Le Réveillon" was considered a little too French and a little too racy as it stood, so some substantial changes were made before Strauss set to work. The end result, re-titled "Die Fledermaus" (or "The Bat",) opened in Vienna on today's date in 1874.

Now, there is an oft-repeated myth that "Fledermaus" was initially a flop and that it closed after only sixteen performances. But blame that on the famous American soprano, Adelina Patti, who had booked the Theater an der Wien for a run of Italian opera performances shortly after "Fledermaus" was scheduled to open. When Patti and her troupe left Vienna, "Fledermaus" returned for more performances, and has rarely been absent from Viennese stages from that day to this.

Today we offer a special "Gong Show" edition of The Composer's Datebook.

On today's date in 1791, at the height of the French Revolution, the Panthéon in Paris was converted into a mausoleum for national heroes, and the first to be interned there, with great pomp and ceremony, was Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, a tremendously popular personage of the day. For dramatic effect during the Count's funeral procession through the streets of Paris, French composer François Joseph Gossec added an unusual percussion instrument to his funereal wind band: an exotic instrument someone had brought to Paris from the Far East, and known as—you guessed it—the gong.

It was reported that whenever the gong was struck during Mirabeau's funeral procession, cries of terror and fright were heard from the crowd that lined the Parisian streets as the cortège passed.

And so, in addition to being known as "father of the French symphony," Gossec can also be called "the father of the gong"—at least in Western classical music.

Now terror and fright are bread and butter in the world of grand opera, and so the gong soon was adopted by 19th century composers like Spontini, Meyerbeer, and Wagner, and in the 20th century, composers like Stravinsky, Stockhausen, and George Crumb have also used gongs to—forgive us—striking effect!

But today's Gong Prize goes to Giacomo Puccini for putting the instrument right on stage for all to see at a climactic moment at the end of Act One of the opera "Turandot," in which the tenor lead, mallet in hand, gets to deliver several gong strokes to accompany his own ringing high notes.

In the 19th century, same as today, New Yorkers looking for fun had a lot to choose from. Can you blame them for being a little jaded, when, for example, on today's date in 1871, the options included these three musical offerings: First: at Lina Edwin's Theater, a musical burlesque entitled "Pluto," an entertainment The New York Times billed as an "Anglicized and condensed" version of Jacques Offenbach's racy operetta, "Orpheus in the Underworld," with, as an added attraction, interpolated comic sketches and monologues by the show's star, the David Letterman of the day, the ever-popular comedian Mr. Lingard . Second: for the more serious sort, the American staged premiere of Richard Wagner's opera, "Lohengrin," at the Stadt Theater. The Times noted that Wagner's opera was "brought out in Germany some 20 years earlier, but was unknown here in its entirety until now." A large audience showed up for the "entirety" of "Lohengrin," which lasted over four hours and ended around midnight. Finally: at Broadway's Minstrel Hall, directly from Japan, twenty star performers from Satsuma's Japanese Circus Troupe offered "varied and interesting" entertainment in New York that night, including the amazing Mr. Yadunochi, who first smoked a pipe, then ate it, then smoked WITHOUT his pipe while playing on a flute and expelling smoke from that instrument, and, for his grand finale, concluded by reproducing, as the Times put it "the original pipe whole and unsullied." Now, THAT'S entertainment!

Today in 1961, the American composer Wallingford Riegger died in New York City, about a month shy of what would have been his 76th birthday.

Riegger was born in Albany, Georgia, in 1885. Like many American musicians of that era, Riegger studied in Germany. In the years before America entered World War I, Riegger worked in both the US and Europe: for three years he was the principal cellist with the St. Paul Symphony in Minnesota; he then served as an assistant voice coach and conductor at German opera houses in Würzburg and Königsberg.

Returning home in 1918, Riegger spent the next ten years teaching, eventually settling in New York in 1928. There he got to know Henry Cowell, Charles Ives, and other "ultra-modern" composers. Riegger's early music had been in the traditional mode, but he quickly established himself as one of the leading figures in the more experimental American music scene.

In the '30s, Riegger, like Copland, worked with the pioneers of modern American dance, including Martha Graham, and he composed a number of ballet scores. From 1938 on, however, he concentrated on non-theatrical scores, including symphonies and chamber works.

Riegger's mature works blend atonality with traditional musical forms and dance rhythms. This music from 1953, the opening of his Concerto for Piano and Woodwind Quintet, even includes some jazzy American syncopation.

On this date in 1747, a crowd of London concert-goers gathered in response to a newspaper announcement, which read, "At the Theatre-Royal in Covent-Garden tomorrow will be perform'd a new oratorio, call'd 'Judas Maccabaeus'… no person to be admitted without tickets… at half a guinea each."

The composer of this new Biblical oratorio was George Frideric Handel, and 'Judas Maccabaeus' would become one of his most popular works. One choral number, entitled "See, the Conqu'ring Hero Comes," celebrating a military victory of its title character, proved a smash hit that generations of audience members would whistle or hum on their way home.

Oddly enough, the audience at the 1747 premiere wouldn't have heard that tune, since Handel only added it to his score some years later, after the chorus was first used in another Handel oratorio altogether.

Fifty years after the oratorio's premiere, Ludwig van Beethoven would composed twelve variations on "See, the Conqu'ring Hero Comes" for piano and cello, and 90 years after Beethoven, a Swiss writer made the tune into an Easter hymn that some of us know as "Thine Be the Glory."

The tune also appears in a much rowdier context during the annual Last Night of the Proms concert in London, since it crops up in Sir Henry Wood's "Fantasia on British Sea Songs," an almost obligatory party piece played on that occasion.

On today's date in 1837, the Princess Cristina Belgiojoso-Trivulzio scored the social coup of the season at her Parisian salon. Ostensibly, it was the culmination of a three-day charity fundraiser in aid of Italian political refugees, but it REALLY was the artistic equivalent of a prize fight—the fists in question pummeling the piano keyboard. If you'll forgive the pun, it was a "Battle of the HANDS," a digital confrontation of the two leading virtuoso pianists of the day, Sigismund Thalberg and Franz Liszt.

Thalberg was up first, playing his own Fantasy on Themes from Rossini's opera, "Moses." Liszt followed with one of HIS fantasias based on operatic themes. The music critic for the prestigious Journal des Debats was present, and he wrote, "Never was Liszt more controlled, more thoughtful, more energetic, more passionate. Never has Thalberg played with greater verve and tenderness. Each used every one of his resources. It was an admirable joust. The most profound silence fell over the noble crowd assembled, and, finally, Liszt and Thalberg were both proclaimed victors by this glittering and intelligent assembly. Thus: two victors and no vanquished."

When asked for her verdict who had "won" the contest, the hostess, Princess Cristina replied with consummate diplomacy: "Thalberg," she said, "is the first pianist in the world—Liszt is unique."

In 2002, film director Godfrey Reggio released his latest movie. Entitled "Naqoyqatsi"—the Hopi word for "Life as War"—this was Reggio's third and final installment in a trilogy of unusual, non-narrative films, all with Hopi titles, each comprised of visually striking, collage-like visuals set against hypnotic film scores by American composer Philip Glass.

The preceding two films were: "Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of balance" (released in 1982) and "Powaqqatsi: Life in transformation" (released in 1988).

"Naqoyqatsi" may have been a non-narrative film, but Reggio's message was that humankind was transforming its natural environment into a technology-based one. Reggio described his 2002 film as a symphony in three movements, and even provided descriptive titles: Movement 1 - Language and place gives way to numerical code and virtual reality; movement 2 - Life becomes a game; Movement 3 - A world that language can no longer describe.

Fast forward ten years to 2012. That year Philip Glass was serving as the Creative Director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and had been commissioned to turn his "Naqoyqatsi" film score into a concert work for cello and orchestra. In the film score, solos played by the famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma featured prominently, so this "repurposing" of film score seemed a logical step.

And so, on today's date in 2012, Philip Glass's Cello Concerto No. 2, subtitled "Naqoyqatsi," received its premiere performance with the Cincinnati Symphony conducted by Dennis Russell Davies and Matt Haimowitz as the cello soloist.

OK, if you say "band music," most people think "marching bands—sporting events." So if someone tells you there is a band work entitled "Ra"—you might automatically respond: "sis-boom-ba." But that's not at all what composer David Dzubay had in mind. He was thinking of RA, the ancient Egyptian sun god.

A major figure in Egyptian mythology, the sun god Ra was born anew each day and journeyed across the sky doing battle with his chief enemy, a serpent named Apep, usually emerging victorious, though on stormy days or during an eclipse, the Egyptians believed that Apep had won and swallowed up the sun god.

David Dzubay's band composition named "Ra" is, as he describes it, "a rather aggressive depiction of an imagined ritual of sun worship, perhaps celebrating the daily battles of Ra and Apep," with the sections of the work alternating as if following the precise dictates of some grand and ancient ceremony.

Originally written for orchestra, Dzubay arranged his piece for concert band, and in this incarnation, it won an annual competition for new bands works. Ra was first performed by the Indiana University Symphonic Band, led by Ray Cramer at the College Band Directors' National Convention in Minneapolis on today's date in 2003. Both the venue and the performers selected for that premiere must have seemed particularly gratifying to Dzubay, since he was born in Minneapolis and received his Doctorate in Music at the University of Indiana.

In Beethoven's day, there were no independent symphonic orchestras in Vienna, so when Ludwig van wanted to put on an orchestral concert, the way he did it was to hire a theater orchestra for a night or two. Now, Viennese theaters were usually pretty busy and well booked up, but in Catholic Austria, they would shut down for a few weeks each year during Lent, which explains why a number of Beethoven's symphonies premiered in April when the orchestras were available for hire.

It wasn't until today's date in 1842 that Vienna's most famous independent orchestra played its first concert, and even then, as it still does today, the Vienna Philharmonic also doubles as the orchestra of the Vienna Opera.

The German composer and conductor Otto Nicolai led that first concert of the Vienna Philharmonic. The program included Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and two of his concert overtures, alongside vocal selections by Mozart and Cherubini.

Not surprisingly, Beethoven remains core repertory for the Vienna Philharmonic, along with those other two Viennese "B's"—Brahms and Bruckner. But in the 20th century, the Austrian orchestra presented important European premieres of works by Samuel Barber and Leonard Bernstein, two notable American "B's." And more recently, the Vienna Philharmonic premiered this work, entitled "Diversions," by the German-born, American composer and conductor, Andre Previn.