Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1885, the Paris Opera gave the first performance of Le Cid, the 11th opera written by the French composer Jules Massenet.

Le Cid is set in medieval Spain and tells the story of Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, a legendary hero who defended his country against the Moors. The same story inspired a 1961 movie, El Cid, starring — who else? — Charlton Heston.

But back in 1890, the New Orleans Opera introduced Massenet’s opera to American audiences and reached New York City in 1897, serving as a vocal showcase for turn-of-the-century superstars of the early Metropolitan Opera. Enrico Caruso made a famous recording of the opera’s most famous excerpt — Rodrigo’s Act III aria, “O souverain, O Juge, O Pere,” which translates as “Oh Lord, Oh Judge, Oh Father.”

Unlikely as it may seem, this aria inspired a pop hit in 1981, when composer and performance artist Laurie Anderson translated its opening line as “O Superman, O Judge, O Mom and Dad.” As a credit to the French composer, O Superman is even subtitled For Massenet.

Trained as a classical violinist with the Chicago Youth Symphony, Anderson soon shifted to a variety of electronically-altered fiddles, and one of her albums is titled, appropriately, Life on a String.

Jules Massenet (1842-1912): O Souverain, O Juge, O Pere; from Le Cid; Ben Heppner, tenor; Munich Radio Orchestra; Roberto Abbado, conductor; RCA/BMG 62504

It was on this date in 1825 that the United States had its first date with authentic Italian opera. This was a performance of Gioacchino Rossini's The Barber of Seville, staged at New York City’s Park Theater.

The singers were mostly from one extraordinary Spanish family — the Garcias — led by its patriarch Manuel Garcia, a tenor who performed role of Count Almaviva — the same role Garcia had created at the opera’s premiere in Rome nine years earlier.

The 1825 New York audience included luminaries from society and the arts — including the American novelist James Fenimore Cooper and Mozart’s one-time librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, who was teaching Italian at Columbia University in those days.

November 29th is also important to 20th century American musical theater. Cole Porter’s Gay Divorce opened on Broadway on November 29, 1932, at the Ethel Barrymore Theater.

The musical’s title rankled censors who feared it treated divorce too lightly, and they insisted on converting it to the less controversial Gay Divorcee. Cole Porter’s score included one of his classic songs, Night and Day, and, like Rossini before him, Porter claimed to have tailor-made this song for the unusual tenor star of his new show, one Fred Astaire.

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868): Selections from The Barber of Seville; Academy of St. Martin in the Fields; Neville Marriner, conductor; Philips 412 266

Cole Porter (1891-1964): Gay Divorce Overture; London Sinfonietta; John McGlinn, conductor; EMI 68589

According to historians, the 19th Century was the great age of Romanticism — but tell that to Sergei Rachmaninoff and Howard Hanson! On today’s date, two of their quintessentially Romantic works were both premiered in the 20th century.

In 1909, Rachmaninoff came to the U.S. for his first American tour, and on today’s date appeared as the piano soloist in the premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 3 with the New York Symphony. Now, if you believe the movie Shine, this is the most difficult of all Romantic piano concertos. Even its composer confessed he need to practice it on the boat to America!

By 1930, when American composer Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2 premiered on today’s date in Boston, Romantic music was increasingly considered old fashioned. But he defiantly subtitled his new Symphony The Romantic.

“My symphony represents a definite embracing of the Romantic. I recognize, of course, that Romanticism is, at the present time, music’s poor stepchild … Nevertheless, I embrace her all the more fervently, believing as I do that Romanticism will find in this country rich soil for new growth,” he wrote.

And how about outer space? Decades after its premiere, Hanson’s popular Romantic Symphony even showed up as part of the film score to the sci-fi classic Alien.

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): Piano Concerto No. 3; Martha Argerich, piano; Berlin Radio Symphony; Riccardo Chailly, conductor; Philips 446 673

Howard Hanson (1896-1981): Symphony No. 2 (Romantic); RCA Symphony; Charles Gerhardt, conductor; Chesky 112

Also Sprach Zarathustra, a tone poem by Richard Strauss, was first performed in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, on this day in 1896, with the composer conducting.

For decades thereafter, it was considered one of his lesser works and only occasionally performed. Then, in 1968, Stanley Kubrick chose its opening fanfare as the main theme of his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Suddenly Also Sprach Zarathustra jumped to the top of the classical charts and became a concert hall favorite as well — even though many of its new audiences are surprised when the piece goes on for another half hour after its spectacular opening.

Another composer who also benefited from Kubrick’s movie was Hungarian György Ligeti. Initially, Ligeti’s fame was limited to avant-garde circles, but his 1961 composition Atmosphères also became part of the soundtrack and catapulted him to much wider fame. Ligeti’s eerily floating sound-clusters seemed to Kubrick perfect outer space music.

Ligeti himself was not happy how his music was used in the film, but, grudgingly, did express admiration for the film’s surreal final sequence. Richard Strauss died in 1949 — some 20 years before Kubrick’s film debuted — but we suspect that hard-headed businessman would have been pleased that his music was used — and would have promptly demanded a hefty cut of Kubrick’s royalties.

Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Also Sprach Zarathustra; Chicago Symphony; Fritz Reiner, conductor; RCA/BMG 60833

György Ligeti (1923-2006): Atmospheres; Hollywood Bowl Orchestra; John Mauceri, conductor; Philips 446 403

On today’s date in 1997, violinist Joshua Bell and the San Francisco Symphony gave the premiere performance of an 18-minute Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra by American composer John Corigliano.

This music was a concert offshoot of Corigliano’s film score for Francois Gerard’s movie The Red Violin, but debuted months before the film itself was completed.

Corigliano said, “I was delighted when asked to compose the score for Francois Girard’s new film. How could I turn down so interesting and fatalistic a journey through almost three centuries, beginning as it did in Cremona, home of history’s greatest violin builders? I also welcomed the producer’s offer to separately create a violin and orchestra concert piece, to be freely based on motives from the film.

“I’d assumed that, as usual in film, I wouldn't be required to score it until it was completed, except for a number of on-camera “cues” … Then plans changed. Filming was pushed back. So the present Chaconne was built just on the materials I had; a good thing, as it turns out, because I now had the freedom, as well as the need, to explore these materials to a greater extent than I might have had I been expected to condense an hour’s worth of music into a coherent single movement.”

John Corigliano (b. 1938): Selections from The Red Violin; Joshua Bell, violin; Philharmonia Orchestra; Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor; Sony 63010

On today’s date in 1955, the Boston Symphony was celebrating its 75th anniversary season with the premiere performance of a brand-new symphony — the sixth — by American composer Walter Piston. At the time, he was teaching at Harvard, and his association with the Boston Symphony went back decades. Even so, he paid the orchestra an extraordinary compliment, crediting its musicians as virtual partners in its composition:

“While writing my Symphony No. 6, I came to realize that this was a rather special situation. I was writing for one designated orchestra, one that I had grown up with, and that I knew intimately. Each note set down sounded in the mind with extraordinary clarity, as though played immediately by those who were to perform the work. On several occasions it seemed as though the melodies were being written by the instruments themselves as I followed along. I refrained from playing even a single note of this symphony on the piano,” he wrote.

This symphony may have been tailor-made for the Boston players, but Piston was practical enough to know other orchestras would be interested, and so added this important footnote: “The composer’s mental image of the sound of his written notes has to admit a certain flexibility.”

Walter Piston (1894-1976): Symphony No. 6; Seattle Symphony; Gerard Schwarz, conductor; Delos 3074

On today’s date in 1888, Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky premiered his Hamlet-Fantasy Overture. He had been asked to write an overture for a gala charity benefit staging of Act III of Shakespeare’s famous play at the Mariinsky Theatre. Alas, the charity was, as Hamlet might say, “not to be.” But Tchaikovsky so liked the idea of a piece inspired by the mood and characters of Hamlet that wrote the overture anyway.

As Hamlet said, “the time is out of joint,” and we fast forward our story almost 100 years to 1982 and another Tchaikovsky — André Tchaikovsky (no relation to Peter Ilyich). André Tchaikovsky was a Polish composer who was also a virtuoso pianist of some note and a wanna-be actor to boot. When André Tchaikovsky died in 1982, he’d asked that his skull be donated to the Royal Shakespeare Company, hoping it would be used for the skull of Yorick in their productions of Hamlet. André Tchaikovsky got his wish in 2008, when his skull was finally held aloft by David Tennant in a series of performances of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon, a production that proved so famous that an image of Tennant as Hamlet holding Tchaikovsky’s skull ended up on a British postage stamp.

Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893): Hamlet-Fantasy Overture; Israel Philharmonic Orchestra; Leonard Bernstein, conductor (DG 477670)

A question: do you see colors when you hear music? No, we’re not going psychedelic on you, and absolutely no controlled substances are involved in preparing today’s edition of Composers Datebook.

It’s just that many composers do — see colors, that is.

Romantic Russian composer Alexander Scriabin would describe the key of F-sharp Major as very definitely being “bright blue.” His colleague Nicolai Rimsky Korsakov, however, thought F-sharp Major more a greyish-green hue. While many composers confess to seeing certain musical keys as certain colors, the fact is they don’t always agree on which color matches which key.

Which brings us to American composer Michael Torke, who gave the title Bright Blue Music to an orchestral piece that premiered on today’s date at Carnegie Hall at a concert of the New York Youth Symphony.

In 1985, when this music premiered, Torke was just 24 years old, but had already been composing music for most of his young life. In addition to a string of other “colorful” scores, with titles like The Yellow Pages and Ecstatic Orange, Torke has also gone on to write a number of ballet scores and vocal works, including a TV opera and, in 1999, a big choral symphony for the Disney Corporation to celebrate the Millennium.

Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915): Etude No. 4; Piers Lane, piano; Hyperion 66607

Michael Torke (b. 1961): Bright Blue Music; Baltimore Symphony; David Zinman, conductor

American composer Roger Sessions is an acquired taste for most classical music fans, and, truth be told, his works don’t show up on concert recital programs all that often.

He was born in the 19th century, 1896, when Grover Cleveland was president, and died in 1985, when Ronald Reagan was in the White House.

Session’s early music, written when he was in his twenties and thirties, was neo-classical in style, but as the 20th century progressed, Sessions’ style did also, moving from harmonically complex tonality to frankly atonal works. His music became increasingly “gnarly,” you might say, but there was always a lot of emotion in his music, whatever technique he employed.

Take, for example, his Piano Sonata No. 3, nicknamed The Kennedy Sonata. It was written in reaction to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred on today’s date in 1963. The last movement of Sessions’ Piano Sonata was written as an elegy for the slain president, and includes a climax of three sharply accented chords. For American pianist William Grant Naboré, one of just a handful of artists who have recorded this work, those three chords suggest the three sharp rifle shots that shattered the air in Dallas the day Kennedy died.

Roger Sessions (1896-1985): Sonata No. 3 (Kennedy Sonata); William Grant Naboré, piano; DRC 3002

Today, a letter: written on this date in 1615 by Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi to a friend at the court of the Duke of Mantua.

The letter accompanied a vocal score that Monteverdi hoped would convince the Duke to commission a much larger work. After detailed instructions regarding the positioning of the singers and the instruments Monteverdi adds — almost as an afterthought — this line: “If you could let the singers and players see the music for an hour before His Highness hears it, it would be a very good thing indeed.”

Talk about “authentic performance practice!”

It probably took more than an hour’s rehearsal for the U.S. premiere of American composer Steve Reich’s intricate setting of four Hebrew psalm fragments — Tehillim — which took place in Houston, Texas, on today’s date in 1981. Back then, Reich was already famous as one of America’s leading “minimalist” composers, but a search for fresh directions coincided with Reich’s rediscovery of his Jewish heritage, and Tehillim was the result.

“For me, the most important aspect of a piece of music, mine or someone else’s, is its emotional and intellectual effect on performers and audiences—I find it basically impossible to separate the emotional and intellectual aspects of a piece of music,” Reich said.

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643): Orfeo; Monteverdi Choir; English Baroque Soloists; John Eliot Gardiner, conductor; Erato 88032

Steve Reich (b. 1936): Tehillim; Schoenberg Ensemble; Percussion group The Hague; Reinbert De Leeuw, conductor; Nonesuch 79295