Composers Datebook

There's an old joke that Schubert wrote two symphonies: one unfinished, and the other endless—the reference being to Schubert's "Unfinished Symphony" which lasts about 20 minutes, and his "Great" Symphony in C Major, which can run about an hour in performance.

It was Antonio Salieri, one of Schubert's composition teachers in Vienna, who encouraged the young composer to date his manuscripts, so we know that Schubert's "Unfinished" Symphony was written in 1822. It wasn't performed in public, however, until December 17th, 1865—some 43 years later. The manuscript was known to exist, but no one bothered much about it until Josef von Herbeck tracked it down and conducted its first performance in Vienna.

At its premiere, Herbeck added the last movement of Schubert's Third Symphony in D as a kind of makeshift finale. Many others have tried to "finish" the "Unfinished" Symphony, but more often than not, it is performed as an incomplete, yet oddly satisfying, work.

The Icelandic composer Jon Leifs, who died in 1968, apparently worried that he might leave some unfinished orchestral score behind. Therefore, he composed not one but TWO works he titled "Finale." These were intended as a kind of "musical insurance policy." To each score, Leifs attached a note suggesting that if he died and left behind any unfinished orchestral projects, either of these two "Finales" could be used.

He was dubbed the "French Beethoven," and like Ludwig van, was famous as both a composer and a pianist. Camille Saint-Saëns was born in Paris in 1835, and died on today's date, at the age of 86, in 1921.

The death date seems rather fitting, in a macabre sort of way, since December 16th is also the date we celebrate as Beethoven's birthday. And imagine, if you will, the 10-year old Saint-Saens making his formal debut as a pianist at the Salle Pleyel in Paris, first performing a concerto by Beethoven, then, as an encore, offering to play any one of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas—from memory!

Saint-Saens's keyboard skills were legendary. An early admirer of Wagner, Saint-Saens once amazed that composer by playing entire scores of his operas at sight. Berlioz, another admirer, once quipped that Saint-Saens: "knows everything but lacks inexperience."

In addition to music, Saint-Saens was fascinated by mathematics, astronomy, and the natural sciences. As a young boy he collected fossils that he dug out himself from the stone quarries at Meudon. Maybe that experience inspired him years later to add a movement titled "fossils" to his "Carnival of the Animals," a chamber work he wrote as a private joke in 1886. Saint-Saens forbade its publication during his lifetime, and probably would have been appalled that this flippant work—and not his more serious symphonies or sonatas—has become his best-known and best-loved work.

On today's date in 1893, Anton Seidl conducted the New York Philharmonic in the first performance of Antonin Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, a work subtitled "From the New World." This was an afternoon concert, meant as a public dress rehearsal for the work's "official" premiere the following evening.

Among the Dec. 15th audience was Dvořák's eight-year old son, Otakar, who had a special interest in the success of his father's new symphony. In the preceding weeks, Otakar had accompanied his father to a New York café, where Dvořák met Anton Seidl to go over the new score. Young Otakar amused himself at a nearby toyshop, where a seven-foot long model of the ocean liner Majestic was on display, complete with its own miniature steam-chamber and working propellers. It cost a whopping $45—a HUGE amount of money in those days, and the answer from papa was always: NO!

Seeing that the boy's heart was set on having the toy, Anton Seidl suggested to Otakar that he wait until after the premiere and then ask his father again. Seidl told Otakar that if all went well at the premiere, Dvořák would be in a generous mood. The premiere was a great success, and, as Otakar recalled: "When Seidl offered to pay half the cost of the Majestic, Father could not say no. So that is how the three of us celebrated the success of the first performance of the New World Symphony."

The song of birds has fascinated composers for centuries, and imitations of especially melodious birds like the lark or the nightingale are fairly common in musical works from the 18th and 19th centuries.

In the 20th century, musical ornithology became more scientific—and bolder. The modern French composer Olivier Messiaen recorded and notated the birds of rural France and elsewhere, and used birdsong as the core thematic material in many of his scores. We're listening to the solo piano opening of Messiaen's chamber work "Exotic Birds" from 1956.

But on today's date in 1924, an orchestral work premiered in Rome that included—for the first time in musical history—the actual song of an actual bird. On that occasion, over faint, muted strings and clarinet, conductor Bernardino Molinari cued a member of his orchestra to start up a 78-rpm phonograph record of a real nightingale's song, as indicated in the score of Ottorino Respighi's orchestral suite titled "The Pines of Rome."

This was the second of three suites composed by Respighi depicting Roman landscapes: the others being "The Fountains of Rome" from 1917 and "Roman Festivals" from 1929. The British music critic Norman Lebrecht calls these three pieces, "God's gift to hi-fi salesmen," and, truth be told, ever since the early days of stereo, Respighi's colorful scores HAVE served to show off many a newly acquired audio system.

On today's date in 1895, Gustav Mahler conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in the first complete performance of his own Symphony No. 2.

Mahler's Second is often called the "Resurrection" symphony, as the work includes a choral setting of the "Resurrection Ode" of the 18th-century German poet Klopstock, but Mahler himself gave his symphony no such title. In a letter to his wife, Mahler confided that his Second Symphony "was so much all of a piece that it can no more be explained than the world itself."

And like the world, music is often full of surprising transitions!

The American composer Paul Schoenfield quotes a dramatic passage of Mahler's Second in his concerto for piccolo trumpet and orchestra titled "Vaudeville."

In live performances, the sudden juxtaposition of Mahler and the Brazilian tune "Tico-Tico" always gets a laugh—which is just what Schoenfield intended.

"I often suffer from depression," says Schoenfield, "and once, when I was feeling pretty low, a friend of mind suggested I try writing something happy and upbeat to see if that would help. Vaudeville was the result. I don't know if it helped me, but people say when they hear it, it makes them feel better. The music of other composers I respect has that effect on me, and I'm glad if "Vaudeville has that effect on others."

"La Valse" -- one of the most popular orchestral works of Maurice Ravel -- was performed for the first time this day in 1920 by the Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris, conducted by Camille Chevillard. Ravel's score was subtitled a "choreographic poem for orchestra in the tempo of the Viennese waltz."

"La Valse" is a far more Impressionistic work than any of the waltzes by the Strauss Family. It is certainly darker. Ravel himself said, "I had intended this work to be a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, with which was associated in my imagination an impression of a fantastic and fatal kind of Dervish's dance."

"La Valse" was written for the great ballet impresario Serge Diagalev, who apparently found it undanceable, and his failure to stage "La Valse" caused a serious rift in his friendship with Ravel.

The contemporary composer Judith Lang Zaimont is an unabashed Ravel enthusiast—"Ravel's music defines 'gorgeous,'" says Zaimoint, "it's beguiling to the ear, and sensuous. His textures are built in thin layers, like a Napoleon pastry, and his intricate surfaces—beautifully worked-out—shine and fascinate."

Judith Lang Zaimont should know—for many years she taught composition at the University of Minnesota, and her own solo piano, chamber and orchestra works are increasingly finding their way into concert halls and onto compact disc.

On this day in 1952, thirty-one theaters nationwide offered the first pay-per view Met opera telecast. This was a regularly-scheduled performance of Bizet's "Carmen" broadcast live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, featuring Risë Stevens in the title role and Fritz Reiner conducting. The performance was relayed to the theaters by means of a closed TV circuit.*

Beginning in 1948, the Metropolitan Opera had experimented with live telecasts of their opening night performances, but relatively few people in the U.S. owned TV sets at the time. By 1952, most American households had TVs, but the Met's manager, Rudolf Bing, was dead-set against any further FREE telecasts. The 1952 pay-per-view experiment was not successful, and it wasn't until 1976—after Bing had resigned—that live telecasts of Metropolitan Opera performances resumed on public television.

The most successful of all commercial telecasts of a live opera performance occurred in 1951, when, on Christmas Eve that year, NBC-TV broadcast "Amahl and the Night Visitors" by Gian-Carlo Menotti on Christmas. NBC's black and white kinescope recording of that premiere performance was broadcast annually for a number of years—until it was accidentally erased by a network employee.** Although "Amahl" is no longer an annual visitor to television, it is still staged this time of year by amateur and professional opera companies around the world.

*Currently the Metropolitan Opera offers a series of live opera performances transmitted in high-definition video via satellite from Lincoln Center in New York City to select venues, primarily movie theaters, in the United States and other parts of the world. The first transmission was of a condensed English-language version of Mozart's "The Magic Flute" on December 30, 2006.

**One surviving copy of the original kinescope did surface in a California archive, and was shown at broadcast museums on both coasts in 2001 to celebrate the work's 50th anniversary.

Today's date marks the birthday anniversary of Morton Gould, a quintessentially American composer, conductor, and advocate for music, who was born in Richmond Hill, New York, on today's date in 1913.

A child prodigy, he published his first work of music at the tender age of six. His teenage years coincided with the Great Depression, and Gould played piano for New York movie theaters and vaudeville acts. When Radio City Music Hall opened, Gould was hired as its staff pianist.

By the late 1930s, he was conducting and arranging orchestral programs for radio networks, and by the 1940s was writing scores for Hollywood films and Broadway shows. A decade or so later, he was writing music for TV. Gould became a favorite conductor for RCA recording sessions of both popular and classical music on LP.

All his life, Gould composed original, well-crafted works that gracefully incorporated American sounds ranging from spirituals to tap-dancing. One of these, for a singing fire department, he titled—with a sly wink at his colleague Aaron Copland—"Hosedown."

Gould was a serious composer with a healthy sense of humor AND a keen sense of the business of music. He served for many decades as the president of ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers,) lobbying hard for the intellectual property rights of composers in the age of the Internet.

Gould died in 1996 at the newly-opened Disney Institute in Orlando, Florida, where he was invited to serve as its first resident guest composer.

On today's date in 1974, the San Francisco Chamber Music Society presented its annual holiday concert at Lone Mountain College. In addition to seasonal works by Corrette and Rheinberger, their program featured the premiere performance of a new piece by the American composer Lou Harrison titled "Suite for Violin and American Gamelan."

For years Harrison had been fascinated by the Javanese gamelan—an orchestra comprised of tuned bronze gongs. In 1967, Harrison met William Colvig, an electrician and amateur musician with an interest in acoustics. Together, they constructed their own gamelan from bits and pieces of aluminum and steel retrieved from discarded gas tanks and furniture tubing found in scrap metal heaps.

Now, traditionally, Javanese gamelans are given poetic names, like "Venerable Golden Rain," or "River of Flowing Honey," but the title Harrison and Colvig came up with for their "American gamelan" was more homey than poetic. They dubbed their junkyard creation "Old Granddad." The 1974 premiere of "Suite for Violin and American Gamelan" was one of "Old Granddad's" early public outings.

Mixing of Eastern and Western traditions and instruments has been a hallmark of Harrison's music. "It seemed perfectly natural to me," said Harrison. "I don't think of it either as a problem or as a distinction. It's all part of making music as far as I'm concerned. There's no THEY and ME."

On this date in 1813, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was played for the first time in Vienna. The occasion was a benefit concert in honor of the Austrian and Bavarian soldiers who had died fighting Napoleon, with the concert's proceeds donated to their widows and orphans. At its first rehearsal, some of the musicians found the part writing of the new work intimidating. A friend of Beethoven's who sat in on rehearsals later recalled: "the violin players refused to play a passage and rebuked [Beethoven] for writing difficulties that were incapable of performance. But Beethoven begged the gentlemen to take the parts home with them. If they were to practice it at home it would surely go. The next day the passage went excellently, and the gentlemen themselves seemed to rejoice that they had given Beethoven such pleasure." The slow movement of Beethoven's Symphony so pleased the Viennese audience at its premiere that it had to be encored. On today's date in 1980, a private tragedy also prompted music. On December 8th that year, ex-Beatle John Lennon was shot and killed outside his apartment in New York City. American composer Aaron Jay Kernis was then a student at the Manhattan School of Music, living not far from where Lennon was slain. The death moved Kernis to reshape elements of Lennon's song "Imagine" into an altogether new work for cello and piano titled "Meditation (in memory of John Lennon)."