Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1960, the second season of The Twilight Zone — the legendary TV series created by Rod Serling — began airing on CBS. For this, the producers added a new signature theme written by Marius Constant, a Romanian-born French composer. Constant had studied composition with Olivier Messiaen, Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger and had a respectable career as a composer and teacher, but he’s best known for his brief, but iconic, Twilight Zone theme.

During its five-season run, that show also employed the talents of other famous composers, including Jerry Goldsmith, Leonard Rosenman, Fred Steiner and Franz Waxman.

And in case you’re wondering who wrote the theme for the first season of The Twilight Zone, well, that was another famous Hollywood composer: Bernard Herrmann.

Marius Constant (1925-2004): The Twilight Zone Main Theme (second version); Orchestra; Joel McNeely, conductor; Varese-Sarabande VSD2-6087

Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975): The Twilight Zone Main Theme (first version); Orchestra; Joel McNeely, conductor; Varese-Sarabande VSD2-6087

One of the most popular works of 20th-century orchestral music, The Planets by Gustav Holst, had its first performance on today’s date in 1918. This was at a private concert at Queen’s Hall, London, under the baton of Adrian Boult, who later became one of the most famous interpreters of this work. The first public performance of excerpts from The Planets took place in February 1919, after which it quickly became Holst’s best-known composition.

The great success of The Planets actually dismayed Holst, who feared it would create a demand for more orchestral works in the same vein, and Holst always liked to do something new and different. He never considered The Planets anywhere near his best work, but posterity disagrees.

Holst’s seven-movement orchestral suite is based on the symbolic astrological associations of the planets. Only seven planets are represented because Pluto had yet to be discovered when the music was written. This omission has recently been rectified by a contemporary English composer, Colin Matthews.

At the request of conductor Kent Nagano, Matthews composed a Pluto movement, which had its premiere performance in England in May 2000. Matthew’s new piece has also been recorded, as you might expect, as an occasional eighth planetary appendix to new recordings of Holst’s original seven.

Gustav Holst (1874-1934): The Planets; Montréal Symphony; Charles Dutoit, conductor; London 460 606

Colin Matthews (b. 1946): Pluto; Hallé Orchestra; Mark Elder, condictor; Hyperion 67270

It happens to all of us: you’re in some public space and overhear someone say something that strikes you as memorable, oddly poetical, or perhaps even moving. American composer Lisa Bielawa and soprano Susan Narucki started collecting such overheard phrases, and created a musical work incorporating them.

Commenting on the phrases, Bielawa said, “I noticed … people often say things … that help locate themselves in space and time: ‘Last time I ate here by myself’ or ‘Remember — it was snowing horribly? And she was holding the dog?’” Or nostalgic phrases like “We used to have a house here, but then my father lost his job. I never go there now.”

The resulting composition for soprano and 12 instrumentalists, Chance Encounter, was designed to be performed in a public spaces as well, with the performers arriving and leaving at different times and from different directions, taking up positions scattered around the site, with the soprano singing the overheard phrases as she strolls among them.

This unusual work received its premiere performance at Seward Park in New York City on today’s date in 2008. Since then, Chance Encounter has been performed in Rome on a walkway along the banks of the Tiber River, and in other public spaces in places ranging from Venice to Vancouver.

Lisa Bielawa (b. 1968): Chance Encounter; Susan Narucki, soprano; The Knights (Orange Mountain Music 7004)

On this date in 1828, Franz Schubert attended a party at the Vienna home of one of his admirers and played some of his new piano sonata in B-flat, which he had completed only the previous day. That same month, Schubert composed one of his greatest works, the String Quintet in C Major.

Tragically, in less than two months, Schubert would be dead, an apparent victim of tertiary syphilis, the most dreaded sexually-transmitted disease of Schubert’s day. In our time, antibiotics can treat this once fatal disease, but in the early 1980s, its place was taken by the AIDS epidemic, which, before effective treatments were discovered, shortened the lives of many contemporary artists.

One of these was the American composer Kevin Oldham, born in 1960 in Kansas City. His piano concerto was premiered to critical acclaim and a standing ovation by the Kansas City Symphony conducted by Bill McLaughlin in 1993.

At that time, Oldham was seriously ill in a New York hospital and weighed only 135 pounds. Nevertheless he checked himself out, flew to his home town to solo in his concerto, then returned to the hospital the following day. He died six weeks later at 32.

When Schubert died, he was only 31.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828): Piano Sonata No. 21; Alfred Brendel, piano (Philips 456 573)

Kevin Oldham (1960-1993): Concerto for Piano; Ian Hobson, piano; Kansas City Symphony; Bill McGlaughlin, conductor (BMG/Catalyst 61979)

The haunting melody September Song by Kurt Weill was first heard by the public on today’s date in the year 1938, during a trial run of a new musical, Knickerbocker Holiday in Hartford, Connecticut.

Weill was 38 at the time and had been in America just three years. In Europe, he had been a successful composer of both concert and stage works, most notably the enormously popular Three-Penny Opera from 1928, a collaboration with the Marxist poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. He had left his native Germany after being warned that he was under danger of imminent arrest by the Gestapo.

In America, Weill set out to establish himself on Broadway, but to remain faithful to the philosophical thrust of his European work. The text for his Knickerbocker Holiday, for example, was by Maxwell Anderson, inspired by Washington Irving’s fanciful Father Knickerbocker’s History of New York. But in the Anderson-Weill treatment, the historical Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant comes off as a proto-Fascist dictator, a comic but pointed reference in the year 1938, when both Hitler and Mussolini were at the height of their power.

Until his untimely death in 1950, Weill’s Broadway musicals continued to set serious subjects — ranging from psychoanalysis to South African apartheid — in a distinctive yet accessible style.

Kurt Weill (1900-1950): September Song (arr. Morton Gould); Hollywood Bowl Orchestra; John Mauceri, conductor; (Philips 446 404)

On today’s date in 1966, the 60th birthday of composer Dimitri Shostakovich was celebrated at the Moscow Conservatory with a gala orchestral concert of his music. Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich gave the premiere performance of Shostakovich’s new Cello Concerto No. 2, and the composer’s son, Maxim, conducted his father’s youthful Symphony No. 1 from 1926.

On the morning of the concert, it was announced that, for his outstanding services in the development of Soviet musical culture, the Central Committee had awarded Shostakovich the title “Hero of Socialist Labor,” along with the Order of Lenin and the gold medal “Hammer and Sickle.”

Ironically, earlier that year, Shostakovich had composed a self-deprecating parody piece for voice and piano, Preface to the Complete Edition of My Works and a Brief Reflection apropos of This Preface, whose text included a deadpan recitation of just a small portion of the many honorific titles he had received and the imposing but meaningless official posts with which he had been honored — and now, he found, he had been awarded several more to boot!

All that must have seemed grimly comic to Shostakovich, who, about 30 years earlier, had written an opera which had so offended Joseph Stalin that the composer had come perilously close to disappearing without a trace into the Soviet prison system.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Symphony No. 1; St. Petersburg Philharmonic; Yuri Temikanov, conductor (BMG 68844)

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975): Cello Concerto No. 2; Msistislav Rostropovich, cello; Boston Symphony; Seiji Ozawa, conductor (DG 437 952)

In all, Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki completed eight symphonies, and in 2013, to celebrate his 80th birthday, there appeared a box set of recordings billed as his “complete symphonies,” all conducted by their composer. But while that “complete” set included Symphonies Nos. 1-5 and 7&8, it was missing No. 6. The reason? Although Penderecki had begun work on his sixth symphony years earlier, it remained unfinished when the set was issued.

Fast forward to today’s date in 2017 for the out-of-sequence premiere of Penderecki’s Symphony No. 6, given in China by the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra. The venue was apt, since the symphony was subtitled Chinese Poems, and included settings for baritone and orchestra of eight ancient Chinese poems — with a Chinese instrument, the erhu, providing solo interludes.

Curiously, Penderecki chose to set German translations of the Chinese poems, translations published back in 1907 in the same collection Gustav Mahler had sourced for his unnumbered song-symphony Das Lied von der Erde, the Song of the Earth. And it’s probably no coincidence that Penderecki’s Symphony No. 6 sounds very much like he was trying to channel both the spirit and sound world of Mahler’s early 20th century song-symphony into own his 21st-century one.

Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020): Symphony No. 6 (Chinese Poems); Stephan Genz, baritone; Polish Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Sopot; Wojciech Rajski, conductor; Accord ACD-270

If you were a member of the European nobility, the summer of 1798 was a scary time. That revolutionary wild man Napoleon Bonaparte had crushed your armies on land and now word had it his fleet had escaped a British blockade. The possibility that Napoleon would control both land and sea struck terror in many a nobleman’s breast.

During this anxious time Prince Nicholas Esterhazy the Second’s favorite composer Joseph Haydn composed a Latin mass Missa in Angustiis or Mass in Time of Fear. It opens in the key of D minor, the key employed by Mozart for the spookiest scenes in Don Giovanni, an opera that had made a big impression on Haydn at its premiere in Vienna ten years earlier. As Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon put it, in Don Giovanni, 18th century listeners were presented with ”the presence of real fear — nay terror.”

So, when word reached the rattled princes of Europe that British Admiral Nelson had destroyed the French fleet, everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief, and, coincidentally, Haydn ends his Mass in the more optimistic key of D Major.

First performed on today’s date in 1798, Haydn’s work soon came to be known as the Lord Nelson Mass, and in Robbins Landon’s view stands as “arguably Haydn’s greatest single composition.”

Franz Joseph Haydn: Missa in Angustiis (Lord Nelson Mass)

As the season begins, we offer you this Autumn Music — a woodwind quintet by American composer Jennifer Higdon. She said she wanted to write a companion piece to another famous woodwind quintet, Summer Music by Samuel Barber. Higdon’s Autumn Music was commissioned by Pi Kappa Lambda, the national music honorary society, and premiered at their 1994 national convention in Pittsburgh.

“Autumn Music is a sonic picture of the season of brilliant colors. The music of the first part represents the explosion of leaves and the crispness of the air of fall. As the music progresses, it becomes more spare and introspective, moving into a more melancholy and resigned feeling,” she said.

Jennifer Higdon was born in Brooklyn in 1962, and teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her chamber and orchestral pieces have been performed by ensembles coast to coast. She’s also active as a performer and, as she explained, as an enthusiastic member of the audience:

“I love exploring new works — my own pieces and the music of others — in a general audience setting, just to feel a communal reaction to new sounds. Music speaks to all age levels and all kinds of experiences in our lives. I think it can express anything and everything.”

Jennifer Higdon (b. 1962): Autumn Music; Moran Woodwind Quintet; Crystal 754

Today’s date marks the 1925 premiere in New York City of a classic operetta The Vagabond King by Rudolf Friml, the source of many once-popular sentimental tunes, including “Love Me Tonight,” and “Only a Rose.”

Friml was born in Prague in 1879, and he studied composition there with no less a master than Antonín Dvořák. He started his career as a piano accompanist to the famous Czech violinist Jan Kubelik, then emigrated to the U.S. in 1906. In 1907, he appeared as a soloist in his own Piano Concerto No. 1 with the New York Symphony, and decided to make America his home.

Friml wrote two piano concertos, a symphony, solo piano pieces — and three film scores for Hollywood. But he’s remembered today chiefly for 24 stage works, beginning in 1912 with The Firefire, his first big musical success, and continuing with many others, including the 1924 operetta Rose Marie — which in 1936 was made into a successful film starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. Their rendition of Friml’s “Indian Love Call” has become a campy cult classic.

Even Friml was occasionally embarrassed by the success of some of his flufflier pop works, and would publish some of these under the pseudonym of Roderick Freeman. He died in Los Angeles in 1972 at 92.

Rudolf Friml (1879-1972): Song of the Vagabonds from The Vagabond King; Eastman-Dryden Orchestra: Donald Hunsberger, conductor; Arabesque 6562

Rudolf Friml (1879-1972): Chanson ‘In Love’; New London Orchestra; Ronald Corp, conductor; Hyperion 67067