Composers Datebook

Some special music had its premiere at Harvard University (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) on today's date in 1980. It was commissioned to honor the memory of Walter Piston, who had taught composition at Harvard for a number of years, and it was one of his students, the American harpsichordist and organist Daniel Pinkham, who composed it. Pinkham had exceptional teachers. He studied harpsichord with Wanda Landowska, organ with E. Power Biggs and, in addition to Piston, Pinkham studied composition with Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and Arthur Honegger. But Pinkham credits another familiar name for his most important musical epiphany. In 1939, while still a teenager, Pinkham heard one of the first American concerts given by the Trapp Family, whose sentimentalized story is familiar from "The Sound of Music." The Trapp Family's usual ensemble, which combined Renaissance and Baroque instruments like recorders and gambas with the bright and clear voices of young children, spoke to the young Pinkham as no music had before, becoming "a part of my way of looking at things," as he put it later. Since then, Pinkham has composed everything from symphonies to electronic music. His choral and organ works are especially admired, and in 1990, he was named "Composer of the Year" by the American Guild of Organists.

Today in 1825, one of Beethoven's late chamber works, his String Quartet in E-flat, Op. 127, received its premiere in Vienna by the Schuppanzigh Quartet. The Quartet had only received the music two weeks earlier, which, in those days, would be plenty of time for experienced musicians to work up a normal string quartet of that day. But Beethoven's new quartet was harmonically and structurally far from the norm for 1825.

Even Beethoven knew as much, and drafted a humorous "contract" for himself and the four musicians to sign. It read: "Each one is herewith given his part and is bound by oath and pledged on his honor to do his best, to distinguish himself and to vie with the other in excellence. Signed: Schuppanzigh, Weiss, Linke, the grand master's accursed cellist Holtz, and the last, but only in signing, Beethoven."

Even so, the premiere was under-rehearsed, and the players seemed visibly unhappy with their difficult assignment. Fortunately, Beethoven was not present, but when he learned of the poor performance, he was furious. He immediately contacted another violinist, Joseph Böhm, whose quartet meticulously rehearsed the new piece under the composer's watchful eye.

Their performance was better received, and in April of 1825, Böhm took the unusual step of programming the difficult new work TWICE on the same program. As a contemporary review put it, this time, "the misty veil disappeared and Beethoven's splendid work of art radiated its dazzling glory."

Among the talented music students at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute in the late 1920s, a teenager named Samuel Barber must have stood out. After all, he was an incredibly gifted triple talent: a pianist, composition student, and a singer. Maybe it just ran in the family: his mother was a talented amateur pianist, his uncle Sidney Homer a respected composer of art songs, and his aunt Louise Homer was a leading soprano at the Metropolitan Opera. On today's date in 1933, it was another Metropolitan Opera artist, mezzo-soprano Rose Bampton, who gave the premiere of one of Barber's early masterworks: a setting of a text by the British poet Matthew Arnold entitled "Dover Beach" for voice and string quartet. This first recording of "Dover Beach," made in 1935, however, featured Barber himself as the vocalist, making him perhaps the only classical composer to sing one of his own works on a professional, major-label recording. When the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams heard Barber sing his setting of "Dover Beach," he urged Barber to continue to compose. The young man took his advice, and rather than make a name for himself as a concert pianist or opera baritone, rapidly established himself as one of the major American composers of the 20th century.

Perhaps the fanfare is the most optimistic and hopeful of all musical forms, since it signals the start of something new and worth noting.

The American composer Adam Schoenberg* was feeling optimistic and hopeful when he wrote the fanfare that opens his “American Symphony,” a work premiered on this date in 2011 by the Kansas City Symphony led by Michael Stern.

“’American Symphony’ was inspired by the 2008 presidential election,” says Schoenberg, “when both parties asked the people to embrace change and make a difference. I was both excited and honored about ushering in this new era in our nation’s history.”

Schoenberg celebrated his 28th birthday a few weeks after Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, and says that just a few days after the election got the idea for his new Symphony after hearing what he calls “the quintessential American symphony,” namely Aaron Copland’s Symphony No. 3, composed in 1946, just after the end of World War II. Not coincidentally, Copland’s Symphony includes his famous “Fanfare for the Common Man” as a key thematic statement

“I believe Copland wanted to bring beauty and peace into the world during a time of great turmoil,” says Schoenberg “and seeing that our country and world had needs similar to those of Copland’s time, I set out to write a modern American symphony that paid homage to our past and looked forward to a brighter future.”

I believe Oscar Wilde gets credit for the line, "But enough about me — what do YOU think about me?" Roughly a century ago, this portrait of the self-absorbed ego not only got laughs on the London stage, it also hit home with German concertgoers after a series of frankly autobiographical tone poems and operas by Richard Strauss had their premieres.

Take today's date in 1899, for example. Strauss's tone poem "Ein Heldenleben" (A Hero's Life), received its premiere in Frankfurt, with the composer himself conducting. Strauss quoted themes from his own works in the section of the new score marked, "The hero's works of peace," leaving no doubt in anyone's mind that the hero in question was Strauss himself. Depicted in carping and crabbed musical terms were "the hero's critics," meant to be taken as Strauss's real-life music critics. Understandably, THEY were not amused, and attacked Strauss for his inflated ego AND music.

Strauss, as usual, was totally unflappable and offered his own somewhat self-deprecating description of the origins of his heroic piece as follows:

"Beethoven's Eroica Symphony is so little beloved of our conductors these days that to fulfill this need I am composing a largish tone-poem entitled A Hero's Life, admittedly without a funeral march, yet in E-flat, and with lots of horns, which are the yardstick of heroism."

26 miles 385 yards is the length you’ll need to run to complete a Marathon.

Well, the Russian cellist Mstsilav Rostropovich did something even more daunting in 1967, when in the space of two weeks he performed 26 works for cello and orchestra at 8 concerts with the London Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York City -- including some world premieres!

Oh, and just to make it easier, he performed everything from memory.

We should also mention, I suppose, that, during those weeks in New York, Rostropovich was asked to leave his hotel because other guests there complained about his practicing all night!

On today’s date in 1967, New England composer Walter Piston’s “Variations for Cello and Orchestra” was one of the new works premiered during Rostropovich’s concerto marathon.

After appearing with the Boston Symphony the previous year, Rostropovich had asked Piston to write something for him, suggesting only, "Please don't write for the player--write for the instrument." Piston took that to mean Rostropovich didn’t want flash, but substance.

After receiving the score, Rostropovich was astonished to learn that Piston himself did not play the cello, so idiomatically had the composer written for the instrument.

For his part, Piston considered the new work for Rostropovich among the best he ever wrote. "I put everything I had into that piece,” he said. “It takes a lifetime of knowledge to write for a man like that."

Composer Serge Prokofiev and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich first met in 1947 when Prokofiev was 56 and already ailing, and Rostropovich, a fresh, skinny 20-year-old, was just at the start of his career. Rostropovich had played Prokofiev's long-neglected First Cello Concerto and, after the performance, the grateful composer said he would write something new for the talented young cellist.

Prokofiev completed a Cello Sonata, and in the summer of 1949 invited Rostropovich to his country dacha to play through the new piece. When Rostropovich arrived, he found Prokofiev dressed in a bathrobe with a towel on his head like a turban, surrounded by chickens and roosters. "Forgive my rustic appearance," said Prokofiev to the obviously embarrassed young cellist, and they promptly set to work.

The first public performance of the new Sonata took place on today's date in 1950, at the Moscow Conservatory, with Rostropovich joined by pianist Sviatoslav Richter. Ill health prevented Prokofiev from attending—but, fortunately, we can listen in via a recording that was made at that very performance.

Prokofiev rarely added epigraphs to his scores, but at the top of the score for his Cello Sonata he added some words of Maxim Gorky, "Man — that has a proud sound." Commentators have suggested the broad, sweeping warmth of Prokofiev's Sonata expresses a similar sentiment. In any case, the new work was an instant hit and rapidly became a staple in the cello repertory.

Maurice Ravel’s orchestral suite "Le Tombeau de Couperin" was premiered in Paris this day in 1920. It had started out as a suite of solo piano pieces, intended as a tribute to the great French Baroque composer François Couperin—or, as Ravel wrote, “not so much to Couperin himself, as to 18th-century French music in general.” Although the French word “tombeau” translates literally as “tomb,” it also signifies a musical piece paying tribute to a past master, in the English sense of “in memoriam.”

As it turned out, Ravel’s piece would become a memorial not only to Couperin, but to seven of his friends killed during World War I. His original work on the piece began in 1914, but was interrupted by his service as an ambulance driver during the war. He returned to it after being discharged in 1917. Each movement was dedicated to a friend or two killed in battle.

Although the “tombeau” as a musical form has been associated almost exclusively with French composers, a contemporary American composer has used the idea as well, albeit with a more lighthearted spirit. His “Tombeau de Liberace” makes reference to the late pianist and showman, a kitschy icon of 20th century American pop culture.

Michael Daugherty says, “Starting from the vernacular idiom, I have composed ‘Le Tombeau de Liberace’ as a meditation on the American sublime: a lexicon of forbidden music. It is a piano concertino in four movements, each creating a distinct Liberace atmosphere.”

On this date in 1814, Ludwig van Beethoven conducted the premiere performance of his Symphony No. 8 in F Major. As the scherzo movement of his new symphony, Beethoven recycled a tune he originally used as a musical salute to Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, the inventor of the metronome. For a time, Maelzel was Beethoven's friend and sometimes collaborator on concerts and various mechanical projects.

Beethoven used Maelzel's metronomes to add precise, if sometimes debatable, tempo markings to some of his earlier works. Some conductors choose to ignore these metronome markings, since they came after the fact of composition and at a time when Beethoven was increasingly deaf. In fact, in addition to metronomes, the versatile Maelzel also supplied the Beethoven with ear trumpets—the 19th-century version of hearing aids.

Perhaps Beethoven was using one of those ear trumpets when someone asked him why his Seventh Symphony was more popular in Vienna than his Eighth. "Because the Eighth is so much better," he growled in reply.

Closer to our own time, the American composer Leroy Anderson, who lived from 1908 to 1975, immortalized the tick-tock of a mechanical timekeeper in his piece entitled "The Syncopated Clock." Leroy Anderson was a master of the musical miniature, creating dozens of witty pieces with titled like "Plink, Plank, Plunk," "Bugler's Holiday," and "Fiddle Faddle."

Two interesting symphonies had their premieres on today's date just eight years apart. Oddly enough, they were composed nearly ninety years apart.

The first was the Symphony in C by George Bizet, written in 1855 when the composer was only 17. It was mislaid in his papers, ignored by Bizet himself as a naive youthful exercise, and not revived until 1935. It was performed for the first time on the 26th of February that year in Basel, Switzerland under the baton of Felix Weingartner, who found a copy of the score that had been kept in the Paris Conservatory.

The other work that premiered today was the Fifth Symphony of the American composer Roy Harris. It was written in 1942, during the Second World War, and was reportedly inspired by reports of heroic resistance by the Soviet Union to the Nazi invasion. Harris dedicated this symphony to the Red Army in honor of its 25th anniversary.

The first performance—given by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony on February 26th, 1943—was broadcast via short wave to the Soviet Union. Ironically, despite Harris's unquestionable credentials as a loyal American and enthusiastic patriot, his pro-Soviet Symphony No. 5 was to become something of an embarrassment when our one-time Soviet allies became Public Enemy No. 1 during the long Cold War period that followed the end of the Second World War.