Composers Datebook

For over 120 years the late summer music festival known as the BBC Proms has been presenting memorable concerts in London, but one of the most memorable occurred on today’s date in 1968.

The scheduled performers at the Royal Albert Hall were the USSR State Symphony, its conductor Yevgeny Svetlanov, and the virtuoso cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. As the musicians took to the stage, boos and cat-calls were mixed with the applause, and some shouts of “Go home!” and “Russians out!”

The reason? Earlier that same day, the Soviet Union and its East Block allies had invaded Czechoslovakia, sending troops and tanks into the country to crush the so-called “Prague Spring,” a period of liberalization and reform that threatened Communist control of that nation.

By a cruel stroke of irony, one of the works on the scheduled program of the Soviet orchestra was the Cello Concerto by Czech composer Antonín Dvořák. There were some shouts of protests as Rostropovich began to play, but by the end of his intense performance, all was quiet. Rostropovich had played with tears streaming down his face, and after finishing held up the conductor’s score of the concerto as both a sign of solidarity with the Czech nation and act of mute protest of the invasion.

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): Cello Concerto; Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; USSR State Symphony; Yevgeny Svetlanov, conductor; BBC Legends CD 4110 (recorded live August 21, 1968 at the BBC Proms)

Two concert overtures — one very famous and one not so famous — had their premiere performances on today's date.

In 1956, this music by British composer Arthur Bliss provided a festive opening to that year’s Edinburgh Festival of Music and Drama. The Edinburgh Festival Overture is a salute to Scotland's premiere arts festival, presented annually in late summer and early fall since 1947.

Also premiered on today’s date was Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, commissioned for an international Exhibition of Industry and the Arts in Moscow, and first played at an all-Tchaikovsky concert on today’s date in 1882. As pleased as Tchaikovsky was that his music was to be presented at the Exhibition, he was definitely not enthusiastic about the commission.

“There is nothing less to my liking than composing for the sake of some festival. What, for instance, can you write on the occasion of the opening of an exhibition except banalities and generally noisy passages?” he wrote. On top of all that, the commission called for something “with a hint of church music, which must certainly be Orthodox.”

Glumly, Tchaikovsky to work, writing to another friend: “I don't think it has any serious merits, and I shouldn’t be at all surprised and offended if you find that it is in a style unsuitable for symphony concerts.”

Ah, Peter Ilyich — you certainly got that one wrong!

Arthur Bliss (1891-1975): Edinburgh Overture; City of Birmingham Symphony; Vernon Handley, conductor; EMI Classics 69388

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893): 1812 Overture; Kirov Orchestra; Valery Gergiev, conductor; Phillips 442 011

If you were in Washington, D.C. on today’s date in 1957, and wanted to escape the summer heat, tickets for a new musical at the air-conditioned National Theater would run you between $1.10 and $5.50 — and you could boast for years afterwards that you attended the world premiere performance of Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story.

Actually, the three-week trial run of West Side Story at D.C.’s National Theater was a hot ticket. The premiere attracted a fashionable crowd of Washington elite as well as those who trained or planed their way to the national’s capitol to catch the latest work of America’s musical “boy wonder” — the 38-year old Leonard Bernstein.

Even so, The Washington Post reported Bernstein was able to wander the lobby at intermission largely unrecognized — to eavesdrop on audience reaction. One woman who did recognize him identified herself as a former social worker in a rough neighborhood like the one depicted in his musical. “It's all so real, so true,” she told Bernstein. “It chills my blood to remember.”

Bernstein was a little taken aback. “It isn’t meant to be realistic,” he said. “Poetry — poetry set to music — that’s what we were trying to do.”

But gang violence as the subject for a musical was shocking to 1957 audiences. When the show opened on Broadway, the New York Times expressed its impact as follows: “Although the material is horrifying, the workmanship is admirable … West Side Story is a profoundly moving show.”

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990): Prologue from West Side Story; orchestra and chorus; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; DG 415 255

Today is the birthday of Antonio Salieri, one of the most unjustly maligned composers in history.

The successful stage play and movie Amadeus have helped to repeat the notorious charge that jealous 18th-century Italian composer Antonio Salieri was directly or indirectly responsible for Mozart’s early death. Historians have acquitted Salieri of this crime, but more people are familiar with the fiction than the facts.

The truth is that Salieri was often quite friendly to Mozart during his lifetime, and after Mozart’s death served as a music teacher to his talented son, Franz Xaver Mozart. The long-lived Salieri also gave lessons in the Italian style to Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt — surely signs of a nature more generous than jealous.

Salieri was born in Legnano, Italy in 1750. He came in Vienna in 1766, when he was 16 years old, and Vienna remained his home until the end of his life. A protégé of the Austrian Emperor, Joseph II, Salieri even accompanied that very musical monarch, who played the cello, at royal chamber music sessions. As a composer, Salieri enjoyed imperial patronage from his arrival in Vienna until 1800, a period of some 35 years.

Some of the operas Salieri wrote for Vienna have been revived and recorded in our time. He wrote over 40 of them, including The Talisman — a comic opera composed to a text by Mozart’s favorite librettist, Lorenzo da Ponti.

Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791): Symphony No. 25; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields; Neville Marriner, conductor; Fantasy 900 1791

Antonio Salieri (1750-1825): La Locandiera Overture; London Mozart Players; Matthias Bamert, conductor; Chandos 9877

On today’s date in 1928, the Columbia Phonograph Company of New York announced that the Symphony No. 6 by Swedish composer Kurt Atterberg was the winner of its $10,000 Schubert Memorial Prize.

The competition was intended to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Schubert’s death, and originally, Columbia wanted the prize to go to the composer who most successfully finished Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. After protests that this was an insult to his memory, Columbia expanded the competition to include the best original score conceived in the spirit of Schubert’s music. Attenberg’s symphony was chosen as the winner by an international jury, which included several composers.

Now, in 1928, $10,000 was a small fortune — and about 10 times the normal commission fee for a big symphonic work. Not surprisingly, Atterberg’s score was soon nicknamed The Dollar Symphony. Some even accused him of cynically tailoring his music to appeal to the conservative taste of the competition’s jury, and even quoting from works by the composers on the panel to curry their favor.

Atterberg defended himself by pointing out the symphony’s opening movements were very much in his normal style, but admitted the final movement was, in fact, intended as a parody of the competition’s requirement to write in Schubert’s style. “It brought me special pleasure, to observe that all the critics who found reminiscences of other composer’s works were not able to identify a very obvious quotation of a Schubert theme in my Rondo-Finale,” Atterberg said.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828): Symphony No. 8 (Unfinished); Chamber Orchestra of Europe; Claudio Abbado, conductor; DG 423 655

Kurt Atterberg (1887-1974): Symphony No. 6 (Dollar Symphony); Norrköping Symphony; Jun’ichi Hirokami, conductor; Bis 553

On today’s date, Elvis left the building — permanently.

On August 16, 1977, Elvis Presley died in Memphis, Tennessee. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1935, Elvis first earned his living as a mechanic and furniture repairman who occasionally played cowboy ballads on the guitar at parties. But somehow Elvis reinvented himself and became the archetypal rock ‘n’ roll superstar, revered more as the modern day reincarnation of the Greek god Dionysius than a mere mortal.

His funeral caused such an outpouring of hysteria and that two people died in the chaos and many more were injured. There was even a bizarre plot at the time to kidnap Elvis’ corpse and hold it for ransom. And, of course, some people claim he never died at all.

American composer Michael Daughtery has taken pop icons like Elvis as the inspiration for a number of his concert works. He has even written a bassoon concerto, Dead Elvis: a set of variations on the Dies Irae theme from the Latin Mass for the Dead. In performance, the composer asks that the soloist enter in the familiar costume of Las Vegas Elvis — sunglasses and a rhinestone-encrusted white jumpsuit with a plunging, open, neckline. Hip gyrations are optional.

Daugherty wrote: “Elvis is a part of American culture, history, and mythology, for better or for worse. If you want to understand American and all its riddles, sooner or later you have to deal with Elvis.”

Michael Daugherty (b. 1954): Dead Elvis; Charles Ullery, bassoon; London Sinfonietta; David Zinman, conductor; Argo 458 145

In the Catholic Liturgical calendar, today is celebrated as the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven. In the Middle Ages, when the veneration of Mary as Notre Dame — French for “Our Lady” — was at its peak, a Lady Mass would be sung on a day like this.

And it's quite likely that one of the earliest-known settings of the Latin mass, the Notre Dame Mass by Guillaume de Machaut, was performed as a Lady Mass at one particular chapel in the Cathedral of Reims for many years in the 14th century. de Machaut and his brother Jean were both canons at that Cathedral and had arranged an endowment for a mass in honor of Mary to be sung there every Saturday.

In our day, de Machaut’s Notre Dame Mass is his most famous work, but in his own time, the age of Chaucer, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, he was far better known as a secular poet of Courtly Love. de Machaut had been a widely-travelled and extremely well-connected artist before returning to his native Reims at the end of his life. Before that, employment by various members of the royalty took him from Paris to Prague and on trips to Italy, Poland and Lithuania.

It's ironic that Machaut is nowadays famous for his sacred music — this one Mass in particular — when the vast majority of his music was decidedly secular in tone.

Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300-1377): Messe de Nostre Dame

Young composers who came of age in the 1960s found themselves faced with a question: should they adopt the intellectually fashionable post-serial, atonal style of composition developed by Arnold Schoenberg’s followers, or return to a more accessible and tonal musical language, neo-Romantic, neo-Classical, or Minimalist in nature?

For American composer William Bolcom, who turned 20 in 1958, the first option was not appealing. “I had the credentials and the chops to write like that if I wanted to,” he said, “but I said ‘to hell with it.’”

According to Bolcom’s teacher and mentor, French composer Darius Milhaud, Bolcom was “as gifted as a monkey.” Bolcom was a fabulous pianist with a passion for American ragtime and popular song, and distinctly American elements and accents crop up in his compositions. Bolcom says he prefers to live, as he puts it, “in the cracks” between opera and musical theater, tonality and atonality, highbrow and lowbrow.

Bolcom’s chamber work, Five Fold Five, for example, premiered on today’s date in 1987 at Saratoga Springs, New York, by pianist Dennis Russell Davies and the Philadelphia Woodwind Quintet. The piece starts off flirting with atonal elements, but ends with something that sounds a lot like boogie-woogie.

William Bolcom (b. 1938): Five Fold Five; Detroit Chamber Winds; William Bolcom, piano
Koch 7395

On today's date in 1950, the orchestra of the Musical Arts Society of La Jolla, California gave the premiere performance of this music by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu. The Sinfonietta La Jolla was Martinu's response to the Society’s call for a tuneful and approachable piece of new music for their chamber orchestra.

Martinu modeled his 20th century work on the 18th century symphonies of Haydn, a composer he very much admired. In fact, in 1890, when Martinu was born, his native Bohemia was still a part of the Austria-Hungarian empire in which Haydn had lived and worked a hundred years earlier.

Martinu’s music blends the modernism of 20th century composers like Stravinsky with the rich 19th century tradition of Czech national composers like Dvořák — but Martinu’s relations with his native land were anything but smooth. He was twice kicked out of the Prague Conservatory for his supposed lack of academic discipline, and instead established himself as a freelance composer in France and Switzerland. Then, just as his music began to receive some recognition and performances back in Prague, the Nazi invasion of World War II led to his works being banned.

In 1941, Martinu settled in the United States, where his music was very well received. In 1948, Martinu returned briefly to Prague, but found the new Communist government there as distasteful to him as the Nazis. Martinu’s Sinfonietta La Jolla was written shortly after he returned to the United States.

Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959): Sinfonietta “La Jolla”; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Christopher Hogwood, conductor; London 433 660

Each summer, music lovers congregate about 25 miles north of downtown Chicago for the annual Ravinia Festival, the oldest outdoor music festival in America, and since 1936 the summer home of the Chicago Symphony.

But on today’s date in 2013, Ravinia was the venue for world-premiere performances of several new art songs, including Twilight Butterfly, by American composer Augusta Read Thomas, a setting of a poetic text written by the composer herself.

“The poetic is always in my music”, she explained. “In writing Twilight Butterfly … I began with a mental picture … [of] someone, viewing a butterfly fluttering on a deep summer evening beneath the twilight moon. This imagery became so specific that writing my own lyrics was almost inescapable.”

Now even at their most poetic, composers must keep practical considerations in mind, as Thomas explained:

“Beyond the evocative, impressionist nature of the piece … I sought to provide a comfortable performance environment for the singer. My lyrics integrate words whose open vowel sounds suit the voice ... The piano gives the singer pitches at every entrance … [and] rubato indications allow the singer delicate rhythmic and interpretive flexibility.”

Augusta Read Thomas (b. 1964): Twilight Butterfly; Yvonne Redman, soprano; Julie Gunn, piano; Nimbus 6306