Composers Datebook

“Which is better — the movie, or the book it’s based on?”

On today’s date in 2003, at its premiere in Graz, Austria, a new multi-media opera asked a different question: “Which is better — the opera, or the movie it’s based on?”

The new opera, Lost Highway, is by Olga Neuwirth, an Austrian composer, and was inspired by a 1997 movie by American film director David Lynch.

Like David Lynch’s film noir, Olga Neuwirth’s opera, which combines live action and music with videos and electronic tape, is dark, often baffling, and more than a little creepy – perfect for a Halloween premiere, in fact. Neuwirth herself had this to say:

“I wanted the stage to be aseptic and empty … I had to conceive music and video (the two forms of art which deal with time) simultaneously so that I would be able to match the famous film with a new arrangement of sound and image ... The singers and actors have to move through this terrible sense of space, namely, the sense of being nowhere, in a non-space, the non-real, the non-palpable … a terrifying and, at the same time, fascinating vortex between dream and reality.”

Olga Neuwirth (b. 1968): Intro from Lost Highway; Klanform Wien; Johannes Kalitzke, conductor; Kairos CD-0012542KAI

It was on today’s date in 1944 that Martha Graham and her dance company first performed the ballet Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copland. The premiere took place at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C, as part of the 80th birthday celebrations for music patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who had commissioned Copland’s score for $500 — not a bad commission back then!

Copland used an old Shaker hymn, “Simple Gifts,” as a principal theme for his ballet. The austere but simple elegance of Shaker art reminded him, he said, of Graham’s style of dancing, and tied in with her vague suggestions that the ballet would be about early American pioneers. Copland left the title up to Graham.

Arriving in Washington for the rehearsals, Copland wrote: “The first thing I said to Martha when I saw her was, ‘What have you called the ballet?’ She replied, ‘Appalachian Spring.’ ‘What a pretty title. Where did you get it?’ I asked, and Martha said, ‘Well, actually it’s from a poem by Hart Crane.’ I asked, ‘Does the poem have anything to do with your ballet?’ ‘No,’ said Martha. ‘I just liked the title.’”

Understandably, Copland said he was always amused when people said, “Oh Mr. Copland, I can just see the Appalachian Mountains when I hear your music!”

Aaron Copland (1900-1990): Appalachian Spring; Saint Louis Symphony; Leonard Slatkin, conductor; EMI 73653

On today’s date in 1787, Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni had its premiere performance in Prague, with Mozart himself conducting. Mozart had arrived in Prague early in October that year, but as singers and instrumentalists alike needed more time than originally planned to prepare his difficult new score, the premiere occurred later than planned.

The October 29th premiere was a triumph, and a Prague newspaper reported that Mozart was received with threefold cheers when he entered and left the theater. At the request of Joseph II, the Austrian emperor, Don Giovanni was staged in Vienna the following year. The emperor was pleased: “That opera is divine,” he told Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte, but, surprisingly, the Viennese audiences didn’t seem to like it.

Da Ponte quoted the Emperor as suggesting Don Giovanni was just too complicated for their taste: “Such music is not meat for the teeth of my Viennese,” he said. In his memoirs, da Ponte wrote, “I reported this remark to Mozart, who replied quietly: ‘Well, give them time to chew on it, then.’”

”He was not mistaken,” continued da Ponte. “At each performance of Don Giovanni the applause increased, and little by little, even Vienna of the dull teeth came to savor it.”

Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791): Don Giovanni; Michele Pertusi (as Leporello); London Philharmonic; Georg Solti, conductor; London 455 500

In 2016, Minneapolis-based jazz composer and pianist Jeremy Walker collaborated with Consortium Carissimi, a Twin Cities early music vocal ensemble in the creation of some brand-new music in the style of the ensemble’s namesake, 17th-century Italian composer Giacomo Carissimi.

One of the pieces Walker composed was a duet for tenor and mezzo-soprano. The mezzo for the premiere performance was Clara Osowski, a singer with a special passion for art songs, past and present.

Since Osowski was as impressed with Walker’s music as he with her voice, after that concert they decided to embark on a project to infuse the modern jazz harmonies of Bill Evans into the Romantic art song genre of Schubert and Brahms.

They chose texts by Whitman, Longfellow, and Minnesota lyricist Greg Foley, for a song cycle, Haunted Blue.

“The ‘blue’ in the title refers to the overall mood of the music,” Walker explained. “But it also refers to the type of harmonies I’m using. The ‘haunted’ part is like when you’re half asleep and half awake at night, and dreams combine with reality.”

A studio recording and even some music videos were made, and on today’s date in 2018, Haunted Blue received its premiere public performance at a CD release concert in Minneapolis.

Jeremy Walker: ‘Alma Gentil’ and ‘The Rainy Day,’ from Haunted Blue Clara Osowski, mezzo-soprano; Tefsa Wondemagegnehu, tenor; Jeremy Walker, piano; Haunted Blue CD 93428 00177

On this day in 1919, Edward Elgar conducted the London Symphony in the premiere performance of his new Cello Concerto, with Felix Salmond as soloist.

What should have been a joyous occasion turned out to be a frustrating one — there simply wasn’t enough time to rehearse properly, and the premiere was a near-fiasco. Puzzled, the less-than-full house in Queen’s Hall gave Elgar a polite ovation but left shaking their heads.

Mrs. Elgar blamed the conductor, Albert Coates, who hogged all the orchestra’s rehearsal time working over the two pieces he was to conduct on the same program as Elgar’s new concerto, for which Coates would hand off the baton to Elgar. In her diary for October 26, she wrote, “Poor Felix Salmond in a state of suspense and nerves — wretched hurried rehearsal — an insult to Elgar from that brutal, selfish, ill-mannered bounder, Coates.”

After the botched premiere of the new concerto, critic Ernest Newman reported, “Never, in all probability, has so great an orchestra made so lamentable a public exhibition of itself.”

Despite this rough beginning, Elgar’s Cello Concerto has gone on to become one of the composer’s best-loved works worldwide, and has proven to be a favorite with the great cellists of our time, including British cellist Jacqueline du Pré.

Edward Elgar (1857-1934): Cello Concerto; Jacqueline du Pré, cello; Philadephia Orchestra; Daniel Barenboim, conductor; Sony 60789

Imagine that you are playing for high stakes on a TV quiz show and here’s your question:

Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 had its world premiere performance in what city?

a) Moscow

b) St. Petersburg

c) Budapest

d) Boston

Is that your final answer? If you chose d) Boston, you would have been a winner!

Tchaikovsky finished his Piano Concerto No. 1 in the early months of 1875, and the work received its very first performance on October 25 that year at the Music Hall in Boston. The orchestra was a freelance group, mostly members of the Harvard Musical Association — the Boston Symphony wouldn’t be founded until six years later. The conductor of the Tchaikovsky premiere was one B.J. Lang — hardly a name most classical music lovers would recognize today — but the soloist was world-class: the famous German pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow.

In his day, Bülow was one of the great champions of new music, and Tchaikovsky dedicated his new Piano Concerto to Bulow after his one-time teacher, Nicolai Rubinstein, a famous Russian concert pianist and conductor in his own right, had said the piece was unplayable. Von Bülow proved him wrong, and was able to telegraph Tchaikovsky from Boston that his new concerto had been a big success.

Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky (1840-1893): Piano Concerto No. 1; Van Cliburn, piano; RCA Symphony; Kirill Kondrashin, conductor; Philips 456 748

In the year 1929, October 24 fell on a Thursday, and that particular day has the dubious honor of being dubbed “Black Thursday” — for it was on that fateful day that the New York Stock Exchange crashed. A full-blown financial panic ensued, leading to the Great Depression of the 1930s. For many who saw their fortunes wiped out overnight, it must have seemed like the end of the world.

Meanwhile, in Charleston, West Virginia, a baby boy was born on Black Thursday who would grow up to become one of America’s most original composers. By the 1970s, George Crumb was acknowledged as a masterful creator of impressionistic and mysterious soundscapes, with evocative titles like Dream Sequence, Night of the Four Moons, and Eleven Echoes of Autumn.

Most of Crumbs’ pieces are for small ensemble, but in 1977 he composed a large-scale work, Star-Child, scored for antiphonal choirs, bell ringers, and a large symphony orchestra positioned for surround-sound effect in the concert hall. Crumb said it traces a “progression from darkness and despair to light or joy and spiritual realization.”

A recording of Star-Child was issued to celebrate Crumb’s 70th birthday in 1999 — a year, curiously enough, in which the stock market enjoyed an all-time high, just before taking yet another downward plunge!

George Crumb (1929-2022): Musica Apocalyptica, from Star-Child; Warsaw Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra; Thomas Conlin, conductor; Bridge 9095

On today’s date in 1913, composer Frederick Delius was in Leipzig for the first performances of two orchestral pieces destined to become among his most popular works. These were On hearing the first Cuckoo in Spring and Summer Night on the River, premiered by the world-famous Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, led by one of the most charismatic conductors of that time, the legendary Artur Nikisch.

In a letter to his wife, Delius reported that the orchestra was “splendid” — as for Nikisch, Delius had this to say: “He played the first piece much too slow, but very expressively. The second piece he played most beautifully — perfect!”

Eighty-four years later, on October 23, 1997, another atmospheric orchestra work received its first performance when conductor Zdenek Macal led the New Jersey Symphony in Celestial Night, a work by the American composer Richard Danielpour, who wrote:

“Part of the inspiration for Celestial Night came to me while star-gazing in New Hampshire and reflecting on the contrast inherent in my life: between summers in rural places where all the driven, frenetic life that I lead in New York City is temporarily suspended and I have a period of peace… [and] the possibility of personal transformation … of discovering something beyond one’s own immediate environment or experience in order to grow.”

Frederick Delius (1862-1934) Summer Night on the River BBC Symphony; Andrew Davis, cond. Teldec 90845

Richard Danielpour (b. 1956) Celestial Night Philharmonia Orchestra; Zdenek Macal, cond. Sony 60779

On today’s date in 1942, Bruno Walter conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere of the Symphony No. 2 of American composer John Alden Carpenter.

Like Charles Ives, Carpenter led a double life as a composer and successful businessman. He was born into a wealthy family, and from 1906 until his retirement in 1936, served as Vice President of George B. Carpenter & Co., his father’s railroad and shipping supply company.

Carpenter studied music at home and abroad, and even took composition lessons from Edward Elgar. In 1914, Carpenter scored a national success with his first big orchestral work, a whimsical symphonic suite, Adventures in a Perambulator, and in 1921 wrote a very popular jazz-inspired ballet, Krazy Kat, based on a wildly popular newspaper comic strip of the day.

By the 1940s, Carpenter’s works were being performed by America’s leading orchestras and famous maestros like Bruno Walter and Fritz Reiner. To celebrate his 75th birthday, the newly-formed National Arts Foundation promoted performances of his music in the U.S, Europe, and Australia.

But in the decades following his death in 1951, much of Carpenter’s work has been forgotten. Naxos of America released this first-ever recording of his Symphony No. in 2001 — 59 years after the work’s 1942 premiere.

John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951): Symphony No. 2; National Symphony of Ukraine; John McLaughlin Williams, conductor; Naxos 8.559065

In the year 1858, Parisian composer Jacques Offenbach was, as usual, busy writing his next operetta and avoiding his creditors. He found it expedient to work in hotel rooms rather than at home, where he ran the risk of being cornered by bill collectors. Offenbach hoped that maybe, just maybe, one big box office success might clear his debts — and enable him to reupholster the tattered seats in his theater, Les Bouffes-Parisiens.

On today’s date in 1858, the audience in those tattered seats saw the premiere of Offenbach’s latest operetta: a farcical send-up of an old Greek myth. Orpheus in the Underworld was a modest success and ran well for several weeks.

But just as the production would normally be closing, an important Parisian music critic attended a performance, and was shocked, shocked that Offenbach dared make fun of something so noble and edifying as Greek mythology. His outraged review generated a lively debate, especially when Offenbach slyly inserted direct quotes from the review into the operetta!

Suddenly, Orpheus in the Underworld was the hottest ticket in Paris.

Box office revenue not only paid for new upholstery, but one tune from the show, an infectious “Infernal Galop” would, as M. Offenbach’s celebrated Can-Can, become a world-famous melody practically synonymous with Paris itself.

Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880): Orpheus in the Underworld; English National Opera Orchestra and Chorus; Mark Elder, conductor; MCA 6325