Composers Datebook

Most classical music lovers know and love Dvořák’s New World Symphony, Opus 95, and his American String Quartet, Opus 96, but fewer know the work he wrote next: his String Quintet, Opus 97. We think that’s a shame, since all three rank among the finest things the Czech composer ever wrote.

Dvořák’s Quintet is also nicknamed the American — and for good reason: It was completed in 1893 on today’s date in Spillville, Iowa, during the composer’s summer vacation in that small, rural community of Czech immigrants, where he and family could escape the noise and bustle of New York City and his duties there at the National Conservatory.

Dvořák had been brought to America to teach Americans how to write American music, but, like any good teacher, he was as eager to learn as to teach. In New York, Henry T. Burleigh, a talented African-American Conservatory student, taught him spirituals, and in Spillville, he eagerly attended performances of Native American music and dance by a group of touring Iroquois.

Traces of those influences can be heard in Dvořák’s American works. In his Quintet, for example, unison melodic lines and striking rhythms seem to echo the Iroquois chants and drums Dvorak heard during his summer vacation in Spillville.

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): II. Allegro Vivo from String Quintet No. 3; Vlach Quartet Prague with Ladislav Kyselak, viola; Naxos 8.553376

Two or three days after his death on July 28, 1750, the final rites were held in Leipzig, in St. John’s Church, for Johann Sebastian Bach, considered by many the greatest composer who ever lived. Bach was buried in the churchyard of St. John’s. In 1894, his remains were discovered during excavations and were reburied inside.

Although not unappreciated in his lifetime, and not completely forgotten for nearly a century as myth would have it (Mozart and Beethoven both revered him), it’s true that Bach’s real stature was not fully recognized by the wider public until Felix Mendelssohn’s famous revival performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829.

And since Mendelssohn’s 19th century revival, Bach’s Passion settings and cantatas have been staged as operas or ballets in the 20th and 21st. His music has survived arrangements for solo piano, full symphony orchestra, Moog synthesizer, authentic “period” instruments, Japanese koto orchestra, shakuhachi flute, and the various jazz stylings of the Swingle Singers and the late pianist of the modern jazz quartet, John Lewis.

However it was adapted or altered by the passing fashion or fads of the day, Bach’s music continues to touch whoever plays it or listens to it.

J.S. Bach (1685-1750): St. Matthew Passion; SW German Madrigal Chorus; Wolfgang Gönnenwein, conductor; EMI Classics 79544

J.S. Bach (1685-1750) (arr. Chris Brubeck): Variations on Themes by Bach; Joel Brown, guitar; London Symphony; Joel Revzen, conductor; Koch International 7485

On today’s date in 1965, the New York Philharmonic gave the premiere performance of an orchestral work by Duke Ellington, The Golden Broom and the Green Apple, with the composer conducting. On the same program, Lukas Foss conducted the very belated, posthumous premiere of From the Steeples and the Mountains, by Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Charles Ives.

In 1965, Duke Ellington, too, had been nominated for the Pulitzer, but didn’t get it. The Pulitzer jury did, however, recommend that he receive a Special Citation in honor of “the vitality and originality of his total productivity.” That recommendation was rejected, and when word leaked out, a scandal ensued. The 66-year old Ellington remained unflappable, and said, with just a tiny hint of irony, “Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young.”

“I work and I write,” he said. “My reward is hearing what I’ve done. I’m hardly surprised that my kind of music is still without official honor at home. Most Americans will take it for granted that European music — classical music, if you will — is the only really respectable kind. Jazz is like the kind of man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.”

In 1999, the Pulitzer Committee made amends, and Ellington was awarded a Special Citation — belatedly and posthumously — to commemorate the centennial year of his birth.

Edward Kennedy (“Duke”) Ellington (1899-1974): The Golden Broom and the Green Apple; Duke Ellington, piano; Cincinnati Symphony; Erich Kunzel, conductor; MCA 42318

In 1917, on the day the United States declared war in Germany, American song-writer and former vaudeville showman George M. Cohan composed “Over There,” a song based on the first three notes of a military bugle-call.

On today’s date the following year, the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso performed Cohan’s song for an audience of 10,000 at an open-air concert in Ocean Grove, New Jersey Musical America reported: “It was a great opportunity for the rocking-chair brigade, which had never in its whole life witnessed such an outpouring of humans. And the automobiles! The Ocean Grove police department had both its hands busy directing the traffic, extricating Fords from Rolls-Royces and preventing them from parking on the pathways.”

Caruso’s 1918 rendition of “Over There,” despite his heavily Italian-accented English, was the smash hit. “The audience got up on its 20,000 feet and yelled with delight,” reported Musical America, which also noted that Cohan had completed a brand new patriotic song addressed to the troops overseas, ending with the lines, “When you come back, and you will come back, There’s a whole world waiting for you.”

In 1936, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented Cohan with the Congressional Gold Medal for his contributions to World War I morale, in particular for his songs “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and “Over There.”

George M. Cohan (1878-1942) (arr. Bennett): “Over There”; Cincinnati Pops; Erich Kunzel, conductor; Telarc 80175

George M. Cohan (1878-1942): “Over There”; Enrico Caruso, tenor; recorded July 11, 1918 RCA/BMG 60495

Playing in a marching band isn’t always as easy as it looks. Imagine the predicament in which composer Hector Berlioz found himself on today’s date in 1840, conducting 210 musicians under a broiling noonday sun as they slowly progressed to the Place de Bastille.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the French “July” Revolution of 1830, a memorial column had been erected on the spot where the Bastille once stood, and the remains of fallen revolutionary heroes were being transferred to a cenotaph at the foot of the column, accompanied by Berlioz’s specially commissioned Funeral and Triumphal Symphony, composed for massed military bands. Berlioz, in full military uniform and conducting with a saber, led the solemn procession that hot July day.

In a letter to his father, he wrote: “The old know-it-alls were claiming that I’d never manage to have my symphony performed on the march and that my 210 musicians wouldn’t stay together for even 20 bars. So I placed the trumpets and drums in front so that I could give them the beat while walking backwards. I planned it so that in the opening bars these instruments play by themselves, so they could be heard by the rest of the band. The symphony’s march and finale were played six times, on the march, with an ensemble and effect that were truly extraordinary.”

Hector Berlioz (1803-1869): Symphonie Funebre et Triomphale; London Symphony; Colin Davis, conductor; Philips 416 283

It was on this day in 1929 that the first performance was given of a radio cantata — not on the radio, oddly enough, but in a concert hall in Baden-Baden, Germany. Lindbergh’s Flight featured a text by Bertolt Brecht and music by both Kurt Weill amd Paul Hindemith. This cantata was intended for a later radio broadcast and meant to illustrate both the literal and philosophical aspects of Charles A. Lindbergh’s first-ever solo flight across the Atlantic two years earlier in 1927.

Today, when planes whiz back and forth across the Atlantic every day, carrying hundreds of thousands of passengers, we have to remember that in 1927, the number of people flying to Europe nonstop was just one, namely Lindbergh, and the feat made headline news around the world.

Three decades after Lindbergh’s flight, composer Franz Waxman would write the film score for The Spirit of St. Louis, a 1957 Hollywood version of the Atlantic crossing starring Jimmy Stewart.

And speaking of Atlantic crossings, Waxman, Weill and Hindemith — all German-born composers — would emigrate to the U.S. in the 1930s, their flight a result of the racial laws and artistic repression that followed the rise of Nazi ideology in Europe.

Kurt Weill (1900-1950): Lindbergh’s Flight; Cologne Radio Orchestra; Hermann Scherchen, conductor; Capriccio 60012

Franz Waxman (1906-1962): The Spirit of St. Louis; studio orchestra; Franz Waxman, conductor; BMG/RCA 2283

On today’s date in 1882, eminent German conductor Hermann Levi led the first performance of Richard Wagner’s new opera, Parsifal — a work that would also turn out to be his last, as Wagner would die the following year in Venice.

No other Wagner opera would arouse the same level of controversy as Parsifal. Some thought it a blasphemous parody of the Catholic Mass, others, like the anti-religious Friedrich Nietzsche, saw it as a sanctimonious sell-out. Wagner helped fuel the controversy by calling the work a “sacred stage festival play.” Despite the notorious anti-Semitism of Wagner and his circle, the bulk of those Bayreuth performances, like the very first, would be conducted by Hermann Levi, who was Jewish.

Levi wrote to his father about an unusual occurrence that took place during the final performance of the first run of Parsifal at Bayreuth:

“Just before the final scene, Wagner appeared in the pit, twisted and turned his way up to my desk, took the baton from my hand and conducted the performance to the end. I remained at his side, because I was afraid he might slip up, by my fears were quite groundless — his conducting was so assured that he might have been nothing but a Kapellmeister all his life. At the end, the audience burst into applause which defies all description.”

Richard Wagner (1813-1883): Transformation Music, from Parsifal; London Symphony; Sir Adrian Boult, conductor; EMI Classics 62539

On today’s date in 1937, one of Copland’s less familiar works had its premiere performance — on the radio. The radio premiere was the result of a commission from the Columbia Broadcasting System, and was premiered by the CBS Symphony Orchestra.

This work has at least three different titles. Originally titled simply Music for Radio, as requested by the network, it was given the more colorful name Saga of the Prairies as the result of an on-air listener contest sponsored by CBS. Later, when Copland himself published the music, it bore the title Prairie Journal. So — take your pick.

Copland received a $500 commission — quite generous in those days — and was thrilled that his music would reach millions of listeners with a single broadcast. Today, new music by contemporary composers is still occasionally commissioned by radio stations and radio networks.

In 1993, Still Movement with Hymn was commissioned from Aaron Jay Kernis by American Public Radio (now American Public Media) and broadcast nationally on one of their program offerings. Still Movement with Hymn, is one of a series of elegiac works by Kernis, written in memory of American composer Stephen Albert, who was killed in a car accident the year before.

Aaron Copland (1900-1990): Music for Radio (Saga of the Prairies); Pacific Symphony; Keith Clark, conductor; Albany TROY-064

Aaron Jay Kernis (b. 1960): Still Movement with Hymn; Pamela Frank, violin; Paul Neubauer, viola; Carter Brey, cello; Christopher O’Riley, piano; Argo 448 174

In 1926, the German composer Paul Hindemith was the director of that year’s Donaueschingen Music Festival, which, since its inception in 1921, had quickly established itself as an important showcase for new and progressive music. For the 1926 Festival, Hindemith decided to spotlight a genre of music overlooked by many composers, namely music for wind bands, and contributed a work of his own, Concert Piece for Wind Orchestra, which premiered on today’s date in 1926 and was published as his Opus 41.

The critics of the day opined that the music was interesting, but lamented that such talented composers would waste their time writing for bands.

In his book Winds of Change, a history of band music and its reception, Dr. Frank Battisti explained: “In 1926, serious works for band were of no interest to German and Austrian band directors, who preferred to continue performing the standard repertory of transcriptions, arrangements, and marches. Critics, after hearing these works, remained convinced that the wind band would never become a medium of artistic musical expression.”

With the passage of time, and a dramatic change in the attitudes of band director and critics alike towards concert music for bands, Hindemith’s 1926 concert programming seems downright prophetic.

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963): Concert Music for Winds; Eastman Wind Ensemble; Donald Hunsberger, conductor; CBS MK-44916

On today’s date in 1940, the “Standing Room Only” signs went up early as a crowd of 23,000 stormed the Hollywood Bowl to hear the great Paul Robeson perform.

On the program was Earl Robinson’s Ballad for Americans, a work for solo voice and orchestra that was for a time one of the most popular musical works in America. Earl Robinson had studied with Copland, and in 1934 had joined the Federal Theater Project. His Ballad for Americans quickly became a popular concert hall vehicle for Robeson, and, in election year 1940, it was even performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Republican Party’s National Convention. Robeson made a famous recording of the work, but nowadays Ballad for Americans is seldom, if ever, heard or performed.

Also on the Hollywood Bowl’s program for July 23, 1940, was the first complete West Coast performance of William Grant Still’s Symphony No. 1, the Afro-American Symphony. Still had settled in Los Angeles to work for the film industry, but by 1940 had also achieved fame as the country’s foremost African-American composer of concert music. Unlike Ballad for Americans, the Afro American Symphony still shows up on concert programs these days.

William Grant Still (1895-1978): Symphony No. 1 (Afro-American); Detroit Symphony; Neeme Järvi, conductor; Chandos 9154