Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1928, Kurt Weill’s Three Penny Opera, whose cast members portrayed thieves, murderers,and sex workers, debuted at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in Berlin.

The Three-Penny Opera was a 20th century updating of The Beggar’s Opera, a satirical 18th century British ballad-opera by John Gay. A new German text was provided by playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill provided a jazzy score.

The opera was a smash success in Berlin, and within a year was taken up by theaters all over Europe. But in 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany, all performances of The Three Penny Opera were banned, since Weill was Jewish and Brecht was a communist sympathizer.

Just as it was being banned in Germany, its 1933 American premiere in New York was a flop, and the show closed after only a dozen performances. It wasn’t until 1952 that it was successfully revived in America. With a new English translation by the American composer Marc Bliztstein, The Three Penny Opera was reintroduced by Leonard Bernstein at a Music Festival at Brandeis University, and in 1954 reopened off-broadway in Greenwich Village to sold-out houses and rave reviews.

Kurt Weill (1900-1950): Three Penny Opera; Suite Canadian Chamber Ensemble; Raffi Armenian, conductor; CBC 5010

It was on this day in 1929 that a new march by John Philip Sousa was played for the first time — once — and then promptly forgotten until almost 60 years later. The Foshay Tower Washington Memorial March was commissioned by Wilbur Foshay, a high-flying Minneapolis businessman of the Roaring 20s who fell victim to the stock market crash and criminal charges of mail fraud.

One of his extravagant projects was the Foshay Tower he built in downtown Minneapolis, a building shaped like the Washington Monument. The building still stands, with Foshay’s name carved in huge letters on all sides of the obelisk, now renovated as a historic site. In the lobby hangs Wilbur Foshay’s portrait, along with the score of Sousa’s march, which the March King himself conducted in Minneapolis on today’s date in 1929.

Soon after Foshay’s empire of public utilities, factories and banks crumbled to dust, and he was convicted of fraud, spending two years and eleven months in Leavenworth prison. Not surprisingly, John Philip Sousa never got paid for his commission. He considered giving it a new name: The Washington Memorial March, but then decided to withdraw the piece completely, and the music was not published or performed again until 1988.

John Philip Sousa (1854-1932): Foshay Tower (Washington Memorial) March; Great American Main Street Band; Timothy Foley, conductor; EMI/Angel 54130

On today’s date in 1952, at the aptly named Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York, pianist David Tudor premiered two new works by the American composer John Cage.

The first, Water Music, was scored for a “prepared piano” — a piano into whose metal strings various items had been inserted to alter its sound — plus a duck call and transistor radio. For the second work, Tudor simply closed the lid of the piano, set a stopwatch for the length of the work’s four sections — 4 minutes and 33 seconds to be exact – and then sat quietly on the piano bench. The composition consisted of whatever sounds occurred in that amount of time at that particular moment in time, including any breathing, coughing or snickering from the audience.

Some likened the piece to the all-white canvases of the avant-garde painter Robert Rauschenberg, on which accidental aspects of dust or bumps in the canvas created an arbitrary texture. Others thought it an outrageous affront at worst, or a bad joke at best. Whatever else one might think of it, as pianist David Tudor put it, “Cage’s 4:33 is one of the most intense listening experiences one can have.”

Cage once said, “I’m interested in making sounds that I don't understand,” and insisted that random, unplanned sounds were as welcome to his ears as those he organized himself, as in this Cage piece for prepared piano, Mysterious Adventure.

John Cage (1912-1992): Nos. 5 and 12, from Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano; Robert Miller, piano; New World 80203

Franz Liszt, the inventor of the “symphonic poem,” wrote 13 of them. The second, Tasso, had its first performance on today's date in 1849. The occasion was a festival celebrating the 100th birthday of great German national poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the author of Faust. The festival was in Weimar, Germany, the city where Goethe died and was buried in 1832.

Liszt’s Tasso was written to serve as the overture to Goethe’s drama about Italian poet Torquato Tasso, and its premiere performance was conducted by its composer. The main theme of the work is said to be a tune Liszt claimed he heard sung by an Italian gondolier in Venice.

One of the more surprising tributes to Goethe occurred not in Germany, but in scenic Aspen, Colorado, when the Aspen Music Festival was founded in Goethe's honor in 1949 — on the 200th anniversary of his birth. The Aspen Music Festival has grown over the years and today draws some 30,000 visitors annually. One of the original founders of the Festival was French composer Darius Milhaud, who taught at the Aspen Music School for many years. This music is from Milhaud’s Aspen Serenade, written in 1957.

More recently, during conductor David Zinman years as the Festival’s Music Director, many contemporary American composers, including John Corigliano, Richard Danielpour, Christopher Rouse and Augusta Read Thomas, have had their works performed — and occasionally premiered — in Aspen.

Franz Liszt (1811-1886): Tasso; Orchestre de Paris; Georg Solti, conductor; London 417 513

Darius Milhaud (1892-1974): Aspen Serenade, Stuttgart Radio Symphony; Gilbert Varga, conductor; CPO 999114

On today’s date in 1937, in Mexico City, Mexican composer and conductor Carlos Chavez conducted the first performance of this music by Aaron Copland.

The music owes its existence to Copland’s friendship with Chavez, which led to Copland visiting Mexico in 1932. Copland and Chavez paid a visit to a wild Mexico City Dance Hall called El Salón México. Quoting a guide-book description of the place in his memoirs, Copland noted its “Three halls: one for people dressed up, one for people dressed in overalls but shod, and one for the barefoot.” A sign on a wall over the dance floor read: “Please don't throw lighted cigarette butts on the floor so the ladies don’t burn their feet!”

“In some inexplicable way, while milling about in those crowded halls, I felt a live contact with the Mexican people — their humanity, their shyness, their dignity and unique charm. I remember quite well that it was at such a moment I conceived the idea of composing a piece about Mexico and naming it El Salón México,” Copland recalled.

Five years later Chavez conducted Copland's music in Mexico City. Copland admits he was nervous about how Mexican audiences would react. He had little to fear — Chavez and the musicians loved it, and so did the local critics, who called it “as Mexican as the music of Revueltas,” which at the time, says Copland, was like saying, “as American as the music of Gershwin.”

Aaron Copland (1900-1990): El Salón México; New Philharmonia; Aaron Copland, conductor; CBS/Sony 46559

On today’s date in 2001, during the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland, the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter premiered Tango, Song and Dance, a new chamber work for violin and piano. She had commissioned the work from Andre Previn several years earlier, but its premiere was delayed as Mutter embarked on a project to perform and record all Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas.

“After doing all those stern [Beethoven] recitals, I wanted to play pieces which reflected the basis of musical history, the folksongs and dances which has inspired composers through so many centuries. Tango, Song and Dance is both modern and old-fashioned, and it touches the heart, especially the slow movement, which is really a Song Without Words,” said Mutter.

And that wasn’t the only thing to touch her heart. It was around this time that Previn and Mutter became husband and wife. For his part, Andre said, “I have one piece of advice to composers for the violin — make sure Anne-Sophie premieres your piece. Then you’re home and dry, and everything works!”

Other composers seem to agree, and Krzysztof Penderecki, Witold Lutoslawski, Henri Dutilleux, Wolfgang Rihm and John Williams have all written violin works for Anne-Sophie Mutter.

Andre Previn (1929-2019): Tango Song and Dance III. Dance; Lambert Okis, piano; Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin; DG 8143

You almost feel sorry for the guy — after all, how would you like to go down in history as the fellow who tried to stiff J.S. Bach? That’s what happened to Herr Johannes Friedrich Eitelwein, a rich merchant of Leipzig who thought he could avoid paying the customary wedding fee apportioned to that city’s church musicians by getting married outside city limits.

Back then such fees provided a significant portion of their income, and so on today’s date in 1733, Bach and two other church musicians sent a letter to the Leipzig City Council complaining that, whether married inside or outside of the city, as a Leipzig resident, and a wealthy one to boot, Eitelwein should pay up.

Now in the 18th Century, such petitions required a delicate balance of formal flattery and firm persistence, so the letter begins: “Magnificent, most honorable gentlemen, our wise and learned councilors, distinguished Lords and Patrons: may it please you to condescend to hear how Herr Johannes Friedrich Eitelwein was married on the twelfth of August of the present year out of town, and therefore thinks himself entitled to withhold the fees due us in all such cases, and has made bold to disregard our many kind reminders.”

Bach’s letter survives, but not any records letting us know if Eitelwein ever paid up!

J.S. Bach (1685-1750): Weichet Nur, from Wedding Cantata No. 202; Elly Ameling, soprano; Academy of St. Martin in the Fields; Neville Marriner, conductor; EMI Classics

On today's date in 1907, the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 4 by Edward Elgar had its premiere performance in London. Say Pomp and Circumstance to most people and they will start humming the tune of No. 1, later set to words as Land of Hope and Glory. That march accompanied many of us down the aisle at our high school or college graduations.

In all, Elgar composed five Pomp and Circumstance marches, and meant to write a sixth, but just never got around to it. No. 1 is the most familiar, but No. 4 runs a close second, with another very noble, very British main tune. During World War II, Alan Herbert fitted his “Song of Freedom” to this music and with its opening line of “All men must be free,” it became an unofficial alternate British national anthem.

Meanwhile on these shores, we note that one of America’s classic chamber jazz ensembles was founded on today’s date in 1951 in New York City, when the Modern Jazz Quartet was formed by pianist John Lewis, vibraphonist Milt Jackson, bassist Percy Heath, and drummer Kenny Clarke. Under the direction of Lewis, the Quartet fused jazz improvisation with classical forms and Baroque counterpoint. Instead of playing in smoky bars, MJQ made a point of playing in concert halls and even wore tuxes, asking audiences to afford their chamber jazz the same attention and respect usually reserved for classical music.

Edward Elgar (1857-1934): Pomp and Circumstance No. 4; London Philharmonic; Daniel Barenboim, conductor; Sony Classical 60789

Milt Jackson (1923-1999): Blues in C; Modern Jazz Quartet; Atlantic 1652

On today’s date in 1944, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky completed an orchestral score, Scenes de Ballet, or Ballet Scenes. Now, considering Stravinsky had achieved international fame for his earlier ballet scores for The Firebird, Petroushka and The Rite of Spring, perhaps the generic title Ballet Scenes was not all that surprising.

What was surprising was that the commission for this 1944 score came from an unusual source — Broadway. New York impresario and nightclub owner Billy Rose had achieved fame the previous year for his Broadway production of Carmen Jones — an updated American version of Bizet’s opera Carmen with an all-Black cast and a jazzed-up score. Rose decided to capitalize on this popular success with something more “upscale and highbrow.” Rose conceived of a stage review, The Seven Lively Arts, and for the dance component decided to commission the most famous living composer of ballet scores, Igor Stravinsky, who was then living in Los Angeles.

Rose liked the score when he heard it played on the piano, but he thought Stravinsky’s orchestration a bit too far-out, and this led to a famous coast-to-coast telegraph exchange. After a preview performance in Philadelphia, Rose sent this telegram message to Stravinsky: “Great success, but could be sensational success if you would authorize Robert Russell Bennett to retouch orchestration.”

Stravinsky telegraphed this reply to Billy Rose: “Satisfied with great success.”

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): Scènes de Ballet; London Symphony; Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor; RCA/BMG 68865

We have a silly anniversary to note today — seriously!

On today's date in 1929, Walt Disney released his first Silly Symphonies cartoon: “The Skeleton Dance.” It depicted four skeletons dancing and making music in a graveyard, employing bizarre instruments, including an unfortunate cat played like a fiddle and the skeletons’ own bones, played like a xylophone.

While its release on Halloween might have been more appropriate, perhaps “The Skeleton Dance” provided some pleasurable spinal chills for moviegoers on a hot August evening back in 1929. In any case, this Silly Symphony was a huge success for Disney, became an instant classic, and was voted #18 in a 1994 poll of the 50 greatest cartoons of all time by professional animators.

And speaking of classics, a bit of Edvard Grieg’s spooky March of the Trolls was used to great effect in “The Skeleton Dance.” But credit for its success should go first to Carl W. Stalling, a legendary composer and arranger of cartoon music and absolute master of unexpected segues, witty allusions, and surreal orchestration, and second, to pioneering Disney animator Ub Iwerks, likewise a master in his field.

Chuck Jones, an animator famous for his much later Warner Brothers cartoons like Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner, had worked for Iwerks’ studio in his youth, and put it this way: “Iwerks is Screwy spelled backwards.”

Edward Grieg (1843-1907): March of the Trolls