Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1784, in the city of Vienna, Wolfgang Mozart finished one bit of work and started another — which he would continue until the end of his life.

After Mozart put the finishing touches to his Piano Concerto No. 14, he entered this work as the first item in a ledger, which he titled, “A List of all my works from the month of February, 1784 to the month of...” Mozart then left a blank space on his title page for the concluding month and wrote just the number “1” in the space left for the concluding year of his catalog — with the reasonable expectation that he would live long enough to see the turn of the new century. He then signed his title page: “Wolfgang Amadé Mozart by my own hand.”

On the catalog’s unruled left-hand pages Mozart wrote the date and description of his subsequent works, and occasionally, in the case of his operas and vocal pieces, the names of the singers who premiered them. The right-hand side of the page was lined with music staves, and here Mozart would write the opening measure of each piece.

The very last entry in Mozart’s ledger book is dated November 15, 1791, just one month before his death. This final entry notes the completion of a cantata written for Vienna’s New-Crowned Hope Masonic Lodge.

Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791): Piano Concerto No. 14; Murray Perahia, piano and conductor; English Chamber Orchestra CBS/Sony 415

Freemason Cantata; Boston Early Music Festival; Andrew Parrott, conductor; Denon 9152

On this day in 1934, an excited crowd of locals and visitors had gathered in Hartford, Connecticut, for the premiere performance of a new opera, Four Saints in Three Acts.

The fact that the opera featured 16 saints, not four, and was divided into four acts, not three, was taken by the audience in stride, as the libretto was by expatriate American writer Gertrude Stein, notorious for her surreal poetry and prose. The music, performed by players from the Philadelphia Orchestra and sung by an all-black cast, was by 37-year old American composer, Virgil Thomson, who matched Stein’s surreal sentences with witty musical allusions to hymn tunes and parodies of solemn, resolutely tonal music.

Among the locals in attendance was the full-time insurance executive and part-time poet, Wallace Stevens, who called the new opera “An elaborate bit of perversity in every respect: text, settings, choreography, [but] Most agreeable musically … If one excludes aesthetic self-consciousness, the opera immediately becomes a delicate and joyous work all around.”

The opera was a smashing success, and soon opened on Broadway, where everyone from Toscanini and Gershwin to Dorothy Parker and the Rockefellers paid a whopping $3.30 for the best seats — a lot of money during one of the worst winters of the Great Depression.

Virgil Thomson (1896-1989): Four Saints in Three Acts; Orchestra of Our Time; Joel Thome, conductor; Nonesuch 79035

One of the most popular Romantic string quartets had its premiere performance on today’s date in 1882 at a Russian Musical Society concert in Saint Petersburg.

Alexander Borodin’s String Quartet No. 2 was dedicated to his wife, Ekaterina Protopova. They had met in Heidelberg, Germany 20 years earlier, and since Borodin had just returned from another trip to Heidelberg, his new quartet may have been an anniversary present.  Some commentators even suggest the cello represents Borodin and the first violin, Ekaterina. So what about the second violin and viola? Well, maybe they’re meant to be the two witnesses at the wedding!

Fast forward to 1953, when some of the tunes in Borodin’s Quartet were repurposed in a Broadway musical entitled Kismet. This one, for example, was set to the lyrics, “Baubles, bangles and beads,” which are, after all, more conventional anniversary presents.

Alexander Borodin (1833-1877): String Quartet No. 2; Cleveland Quartet; Telarc 80178

For most of the 18th and 19th centuries, commissioning new musical works was the exclusive prerogative of the Church, royalty, and the wealthy nobility. More recently, Foundations and big corporations have gotten into the act. But even today, individuals can make a difference.

In 1991, six couples in Minneapolis and St. Paul decided to form a Commissioning Club, modeled along the lines of an Investment Club, to spark the creation of new works in a variety of genres and promote the work of composers they admired.

On today’s date in 1996, one of their commissions, the Dramatic Suite by American composer Stephen Paulus was premiered by flutist Ransom Wilson and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. It was played first in Minnesota, and subsequently at Lincoln Center in New York City.

Later that same year, the Club arranged for another Paulus commission: a new Christmas Carol, Pilgrim Jesus, that was premiered on the BBC radio broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge. That 1996 broadcast, heard by millions of radio listeners worldwide, marked the first time that an American composer had been chosen to contribute a new carol for that famous Christmas Eve service — not a bad return for the Commissioning Club’s investment!

Stephen Paulus (1949-2014): Dramatic Suite; Judith Ranheim, flute; Chouhei Min, violin; Korey Konkol, viola; Mina Fisher, cello; Thelma Hunter, piano; innova 539

One of the greatest of all Italian operas had its first performance on this day in 1887. Otello, by Giuseppe Verdi, was a musical version of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Othello. The opera was written when he was in his 70s, years after he had supposedly retired from a long and successful career as Italy’s most famous opera composer. It was one of the greatest triumphs of his career.

The premiere took place at La Scala, Milan, with famous singers in the lead roles, and the cream of international society and the music world in the audience. Even the orchestra was distinguished: among the cellists was a young fellow named Arturo Toscanini, who would later become one of the world’s most famous conductors. Two of the violinists had the last name of Barbirolli — they were the father and grandfather of another famous conductor-to-be, John Barbirolli. Both Toscanini and Barbirolli would eventually make classic recordings of Verdi’s Otello.

And speaking of recordings, in the early years of the 20th century, Italian tenor Francesco Tamago, who created the role of Otello, and the French baritone Victor Maurel, who created the role of Iago, both recorded acoustical phonograph excerpts from Verdi’s Otello — the technological marvel of the 20th century — preserving, belatedly, a sonic souvenir of a 19th-century Verdi premiere.

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901): Act I Excerpt from Otello; Ambrosian Chorus; New Philharmonia Orchestra; John Barbirolli, conductor; EMI Classics 65296

Many 20th century composers were scarred by the violence and turmoil of their times — but none quite so literally as Greek composer, engineer, and architect Iannis Xenakis, who died at 78 on today’s date in 2001.

In the early 1940s, Xenakis was a member of the Communist resistance in Greece, fighting first the German occupation, then, as the war ended, the British. In 1945, when Xenakis was 23, his face was horribly disfigured by a shell fragment fired by a British tank, resulting in the loss of one of his eyes. Two years later he was forced to flee to Paris. As he laconically put it: “In Greece, the Resistance lost, so I left. In France, the Resistance won.”

Xenakis wanted to write music, but earned his living as an architect and engineer in Paris at Le Courbusier’s studio. Xenakis designed and was involved in major architectural projects for Le Courbusier, including the famous Philips pavilion at the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels.

As a composer, Xenakis wrote highly original music that was meticulously ordered according to mathematical and scientific principles, but sounded intensely emotional, almost primeval. His music might even be described as “Pre-Socratic,” as Xenakis seemed to echo the theories of the early Greek thinker Pythagoras, who saw a relationship between music, mathematics, and religion.

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001): Opening of A Colone; New London Chamber Choir; Critical Band; James Wood, conductor; Hyperion 66980

Huuem-Duhey; Edna Michell, violin; Michael Kanka, cello; Angel 57179

Contemporary Hungarian composer György Kurtág is famous for writing short, sparse and concentrated musical works. He has, however on occasional written more expansive pieces, including one big orchestral piece for the Berlin Philharmonic and some works for large chorus.

Obsessively self-critical, Kurtág disavowed most of the music he wrote before his mid-thirties, which included some for chorus, but a suggestion from Italian avant-garde composer Luigi Nono that he write for chorus again resulted in a work that the BBC Singers premiered in London on today’s date in 1981.

It has an Italian title, Omaggio a Luigi Nono, or Tribute to Luigi Nono, — a tip of the hat to his Italian colleague, but the work itself is a setting of bits of Russian poems. Now at the time of its premiere, 25 years after the Russian-led invasion of Hungary in 1956 and 10 years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hungarian eyebrows were raised when Kurtág chose to set Russian texts. Disparaging or just plain dissing anything Russian was the normal M.O. for Hungarian intellectuals in those days.

Kurtág, for his part, stood his ground: as an ardent Dostoevsky’s fan, he simply said Russian was a sacred language to him.

György Kurtág (b. 1926): Omaggio a Luigi Nono; SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart; Marcus Creed, director; SWR Music; 93.174

On today’s date in 1795, Haydn was in England and about to conduct one of his new symphonies at The King’s Theater in London. An early biographer recounts what happened next:

“When Haydn entered to conduct the symphony, the curious audience left their seats and crowded towards the orchestra the better to see the famous Haydn. The seats in the middle of the floor were thus empty, and hardly anyone was there when the theater’s great chandelier crashed down and broke into bits, throwing the numerous gathering into great consternation.

As soon as the first moment of fright was over and those who had pressed forward could think of the danger they had luckily escaped and find words to express it, several persons uttered the state of their feelings with loud cries of ‘Miracle! Miracle!’”

And thus, one of Haydn’s symphonies, his symphony No. 96, came to be called The Miracle Symphony. It’s a nice story, but it actually occurred just before the first performance of Haydn’s Symphony No. 102. Somehow or another the nickname got stuck to one of Haydn’s earlier London Symphonies, and simply refused to become “unstuck.”

In his book, The Symphony: A Listener’s Guide, musicologist Michael Steinberg suggests an elegant solution: He still lists Haydn’s Symphony No. 96 as The Miracle but give the Symphony No. 102 a new nickname: The REAL Miracle.

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809): Symphony No. 96; Concertgebouw Orchestra; Sir Colin Davis, conductor; Philips 442 611

On today's date in 1862, while President Lincoln was fretting over General McClellan’s unwillingness to confront Secessionist rebels, New York concert-goers could find some relief from Civil War headlines by attending a New York Philharmonic concert at Irving Hall.

Conductor Carl Bergman had programmed some brand-new music by a Hamburg composer named Brahms, whose Serenade No. 2 received its American premiere at their February 1 concert — a concert that took place almost two years to the day after the serenade’s world premiere in Hamburg in 1860.

Give the New York Philharmonic some credit for daring programming. After all, it would be another year before the same Serenade would be performed in Vienna. Moreover, in 1863, during the Vienna Philharmonic’s final rehearsal of this “difficult” new music by a composer nobody there had ever heard of, open mutiny broke out.

The first clarinetist stood up and declared that the music was too darn hard and the orchestra simply refused to play it. Conductor Otto Dessoff, who had programmed the Brahms, turned white with anger, laid down his baton, and resigned on the spot, joined by the Vienna Philharmonic's concertmaster and principal flutist.

Alarmed at the threatened disintegration of their orchestra, the Viennese rebels capitulated; and the performance of Brahms’ Serenade No. 2 took place as scheduled and was, to the mutineers’ chagrined astonishment, a tremendous success.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Serenade No. 2; Scottish Chamber Orchestra; Sir Charles Mackerras, conductor; Telarc 80522

American composer Philip Glass was born in Baltimore on this date in 1937.

Glass says he discovered music via his father’s radio repair shop, where, in addition to servicing radios, Papa Glass sold records. When certain titles sold poorly, Papa would take them home and play them for his three children, trying to discover why they didn't appeal to customers. And so the future composer rapidly became familiar with commercially unsuccessful records of Beethoven string quartets, Schubert piano sonatas, and Shostakovich symphonies.

After some decades studying music, both commercially successful and not, Glass struck out on an original path. In the 1970s, he made a name for himself as both a composer and a performer of hypnotically and repetitiously patterned music for dance and theatrical events in association with Mabou Mines and avant-garde theatrical director Robert Wilson. In 1976 the Philip Glass-Robert Wilson opera Einstein on the Beach premiered in France and was subsequently staged at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

In the decades that followed, Glass has composed many more operas, symphonies, and film scores, and has the dubious distinction of generating of “Philip Glass jokes,” the most famous being:

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Philip Glass.

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Philip Glass

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Philip Glass

Philip Glass (b. 1937): Symphony No. 3; Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra; Dennis Russell Davies, conductor; Nonesuch 79581