Composers Datebook

In the hands of a great performer, the violin can sing with the personality and intensity of a great opera singer. Pyrotechnics may dazzle, but nothing moves an audience as much as when a great violinist "sings" through his instrument.

On today's date in 1896, a French audience in Nancy must has been so moved when the great violinist Eugène Ysaÿe gave the first performance of this music: the "Poème" for Violin and Orchestra by Ernest Chausson. In addition to famous artists like Manet and Degas, Chausson counted among his friends many of the great musicians of his day, including the great violinist Ysäye.

Although they admired his work, Chausson was not always appreciated by the public. But when Ysaÿe premiered Chausson's "Poème" in Paris in 1897, the applause went on and on. Used to just the opposite reaction, Chausson was stunned by his success, and, while thanking Ysaye profusely, kept repeating to himself: "I just can't believe it!"

Two modern-day violinists, Joshua Bell and Pamela Frank, were the inspiration for this songful contemporary work by Aaron Jay Kernis. Titled "Air for Violin," it was originally composed for violin and piano, and premiered in 1995 by Joshua Bell. The following year, Pamela Frank and the Minnesota Orchestra premiered a new version of "Air" for violin and orchestra.

On this day in 1926, Walter Damrosch conducted the New York Symphony in the first performance of the last major orchestral work of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius—his symphonic tone poem "Tapiola." The title refers to an ancient Finnish forest god, Tapio, and the music suggests an ancient mystery culminating in a burst of terrifying savagery.

After receiving the score, Damrosch wrote this note of appreciation to the composer: "No one but a Norseman could have written this work. We were all enthralled by the dark pine forests and the shadowy gods and wood nymphs who dwell therein. The coda with its icy winds sweeping through the forest made us shiver." Today the commission fee Damrosch paid Sibelius for this orchestral masterpiece makes US shiver: Sibelius was paid only $400.

At this point in his career, Sibelius was afflicted by intense self-doubt. He wrote in his diary: "I have suffered because of 'Tapiola,'... was I really cut out for this sort of thing? Going downhill. Can't be alone. Drinking whiskey. Physically not strong enough for all this…"

For the next 30 years and more, Sibelius lived in retirement, drinking heavily, and though rumors persisted that he was still writing music, no scores were discovered after his death.

Today is a holiday for most people, but certainly NOT for church musicians. On this day in 1734 in Leipzig, Johann Sebastian Bach supervised not one but TWO performances of the first part of his new "Christmas Oratorio." Bach was music director of two Leipzig churches, responsible for morning and afternoon performances scheduled on the same day.

The "Christmas Oratorio" was conceived as six separate cantatas on the Christmas theme, spread out over Christmas, New Year's Day, and Epiphany—so Bach and his Leipzig musicians kept busy well into the following year. "Jauchzet, frohlocket" sings the chorus in German at the opening of the first of the six cantatas—"Rejoice and be happy!"

Closer to our own day, musicians from several countries gathered in Berlin at Christmastime in 1989 to participate in especially joyous performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony led by Leonard Bernstein, which celebrated the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the eventual reunification of the two halves of Germany separated since the end of World War II.

A multi-national orchestra included members of the Bavarian Radio Symphony with additional players drawn from the major orchestras of New York, London, Paris, Dresden and Leningrad. They performed first on the west side of the wall on December 23rd, and then on the east side on the 24th. On Christmas Day, a video performance was telecast from Berlin to the world.

Today marks birthday of the American composer Libby Larsen. In 1973, while a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, she and fellow composer Stephen Paulus founded The Minnesota Composers Forum– originally as a means to get their own music performed on and off campus.

In a 1988 interview, Larsen said: "When I got my Ph.D. in 1978, I looked around and saw that there were certain paths that I could take, as a composer, to be happy. One was to teach at a university, another was to write music for performance. I chose to write music, to try not teaching for a while, and see where that led me."

Larsen's path led to the creation of well over 400 vocal and instrumental works, from songs to large-scale symphonic and operatic scores, residencies with several symphony orchestras, and even a prestigious post at the Library of Congress. Ironically, while never taking a teaching post, Larsen has become very much in demand as a popular visiting lecturer at colleges and universities!

"The path that led me to become a composer was a series of lucky self-discoveries," says Larsen, "No one ever encouraged me to be a composer, but I've always had the desire to tell everybody what I see and what I feel. To do that through music seemed to me the most elegant and most deeply communicative way."

Oh, and that organization Larsen and Paulus founded back in 1973 is still around, renamed The AMERICAN Composers Forum.

On today's date in 1893, the opera "Hansel and Gretel" written by a 39-year old German composer named Engelbert Humperdinck received its premiere performance at the Court Theater of Weimar. It was conducted by a promising 29-year old composer by the name of Richard Strauss.

It quickly became an international hit, playing to packed houses in Berlin, Vienna and London. Gustav Mahler, head of the Hamburg Opera at the time, declared it a masterpiece, and parents on several continents breathed a sigh of relief: here was an opera without the sex and violence so fashionable in the media—even back in 1893! "Hansel and Gretel" quickly became a Christmastime tradition—even though there's nothing in it particular "Christmas-y" apart from children, sugary things to eat, and the appearance of an angel or two.

Initially, Humperdinck didn't even want to write anything as silly as an opera on "Hansel and Gretel." He was a serious young protégé of Richard Wagner who had helped copy the orchestral parts for Wagner's final opera, "Parsifal."

It was his sister who talked him in to writing some music for a children's play she had prepared on the familiar fairytale by the Brothers Grimm. At some point, Humperdinck must have realized he not only could—but should—work his sister's play into a full-blown opera, which would blend Wagner's complex orchestral technique with a simple but universally appealing story that would charm old and young alike.

On this day in 1808 at Vienna's Theater-an-der-Wien one of the most famous concerts in the history of classical music took place.

It was an all-Beethoven concert, with the composer himself featured as both conductor and piano soloist. The program included the premieres of both Beethoven's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies. Beethoven's Fourth Piano was also on the program—along with additional piano and vocal selections, including portions of Beethoven's Mass in C.

At the last moment, Beethoven felt this still might not be quite enough music, so, considering the forces he had booked, he hastily composed his Choral Fantasy, a work that begins with a solo piano, then adds full orchestra and chorus to the mix.

The concert began at 6:30 p.m. and lasted over four hours. Contemporary reviews were mixed—but apparently Beethoven's Fifth proved popular with its first night audience, and rapidly established itself worldwide as one of classical music's greatest hits.

A less successful symphonic work had its premiere on this day in 1960, when Charles Munch conducted the Boston Symphony in the first performance of "Die Natali" by American composer Samuel Barber. This orchestral piece used familiar Christmas carols as themes, which are treated to a series of variations. Barber later expressed his own dissatisfaction with this score and withdrew it, but recycled his variations on "Silent Night" as a separate piece for solo organ.

On today's date in 1908, a chamber concert in Vienna provoked a near riot as the Rosé Quartet premiered the Second String Quartet of Austrian composer, Arnold Schoenberg.

A reporter from the Viennese Daily wrote: "It was like a bunch of singing cats"—and a reporter from Prague newspaper wrote: "Some discords made elegantly dressed ladies cringe under the painful impact on their delicate ears, and elderly gentlemen were at the point of tears from fury. In the middle of all this tumult stood the figure of the composer, who gestured towards the performers in an expression of gratitude and encouragement."

Even today, no major figure of 20th century music remains quite so controversial and seemingly contradictory as Arnold Schoenberg, who developed a new, atonal system of composition which gave equal importance to all 12 tones of the Western musical scale—yet was also heard to say that "there was still so much good music to be written in C Major."

And Schoenberg, the implacable musical revolutionary, insisted his students first study the German classics, Bach, Beethoven and Brahms—and he himself prepared opulent modern orchestral versions of three organ pieces by Bach. Two of these Schoenberg arrangements of organ preludes by Bach, "Adorn thyself, O my Soul" and "Come God, Creator, Holy Ghost" were premiered in New York in December of 1922, by Joseph Stransky and the New York Philharmonic.

In the spring of 1775, shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, and the sparks of the American Revolution burst into flames at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Far away in Salzburg, Austria, a 19-year-old composer named Wolfgang Mozart was spending most of that year composing five violin concertos. The fifth, in A major, was completed on this day in 1775. At the time, Mozart was concertmaster of the orchestra in the court of the Archbishop of Salzburg. Archbishops don't have their own orchestras now, but they did then—at least in Europe, if not in the American colonies.

A century and a half later, America was celebrating its sesquicentennial, and the magazine Musical America offered a prize of $3,000 for the best symphonic work on an American theme. The prize was awarded unanimously to Ernest Bloch, a Swiss-born composer who had arrived in this country only a decade before. But already, sailing into the harbor of New York, he had conceived of a large patriotic composition. Several years later, it took shape in three movements as "America—An Epic Rhapsody for Orchestra."

It premiered in New York on today's date in 1928, with simultaneous performances the next day in Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Fifteen other orchestras programmed it within a year. Curiously, although Bloch remains a highly respected composer, his "America Rhapsody" from 1928 is seldom performed today.

The Stanley Kubrick film "A Clockwork Orange" opened in New York City on this date in 1971. The music was composed, and in some cases re-composed, by Wendy Carlos. As in his earlier hit, "2001: A Space Odyssey," Kubrick used classical music. This time, however, in keeping with the film's futuristic storyline, the classics were adapted and arranged for Moog synthesizer by Wendy Carlos. The Main Title music, which we're sampling, was Purcell's "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary."

Carlos had just read the Anthony Burgess novel, "A Clockwork Orange," when she saw a notice in the New York Times that Kubrick was at work filming it. She immediately airmailed Kubrick two Moog synthesizer pieces, one original and one a classical arrangement. Kubrick wrote back, inviting her to London to talk, and the rest is history.

Wendy Carlos had become an international celebrity with her earlier album "Switched-On Bach," consisting of her Bach arrangements for synthesizer. It became the first classical recording ever to be certified "Platinum." Musical genius pianist Glenn Gould, whose own recording of Bach's "Goldberg Variations" was one of the biggest sellers of all time, said: "Carlos's realization of the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto is, to put it bluntly, the finest performance of any of the Brandenburgs—live, canned, or intuited—I've ever heard."

It's strange to read the doubts Tchaikovsky expressed in letters about many of his greatest musical works, which he first would dismiss as failures, only to change his mind completely a few weeks later. Take, for example, his ballet "The Nutcracker," which had its premiere performance on this day in 1892 at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg.

Tchaikovsky described working on the ballet as a "dread-inspiring, feverish nightmare, so abominable that I don't think I have the strength to put it into words." At the time, Tchaikovsky was MUCH more optimistic about an opera he was writing titled "Yolanta"—only to abruptly changed his mind, writing "Now I think that the ballet is good and the opera nothing special." This time, Tchaikovsky got it right—although initially the opera DID prove more popular than the ballet.

Another—and deliberately nightmarish—Russian composition had its first performance on this same day 70 years later. This was the Symphony No. 13 by Dmitri Shostakovich, subtitled "Babi Yar," based on poems of Yevgeny Yevtushenko. This choral symphony was first heard on today's date in 1962 at the Moscow Conservatory, but was quickly banned by the Soviet authorities. Its title poem, "Babi Yar," called attention to Soviet indifference to the Holocaust and persistent anti-Semitism in Soviet society. Yevtushenko later softened these lines so the symphony could be performed in the U.S.S.R.