On today’s date in 1957, the New York City Ballet staged a new collaboration between great Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky and great Russian-born choreographer Georges Balanchine. 

The ballet company had been asking Stravinsky for nearly a decade to write a third ballet on a classical subject to make up a trilogy that would include his two earlier dance works on Greek mythology, Apollo from 1928 and Orpheus from 1948. Just as they were about to despair that Stravinsky would ever do it, he unexpectedly obliged — if not with a Greek myth, at least with a Greek word: his new ballet was titled Agon, the Greek word for contest or struggle.

On a more modern note, by the 1950s, as Stravinsky’s assistant Robert Craft recalled, “Something called twelve-tone music was in the air, and Agon is about 12 dancers and 12 tones.”

Agon is also set in 12 scenes, and some of its movements were consciously laid out in multiples of 12 bars. Balanchine himself said in working on the ballet, “Stravinsky and I constructed every possibility of dividing 12” — which in dance terms, meant abstract solos, duets, trios and quartets to match the abstract, if eminently danceable, nature of Stravinsky’s score.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): Agon Ballet; Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra; Michael Stern, conductor; Denon 78972

Ever wonder how composers choose the stories for their operas? Here’s one answer, courtesy of the American composer Tobias Picker: “My sister was dusting her bookshelf in 1998, and a copy of Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin fell off. She picked it up, read it and then recommended it to me for my next opera.”

And so three years later, on today’s date in 2001, the Dallas Opera premiered Thérèse Raquin, a new opera by Tobias Picker. Zola’s novel is a clinical examination of adultery, murder and a double suicide. “The novel exudes ‘opera’ from every page,” Picker said.

In his setting, traditional harmonies spiral off into atonality, just as the ordered world of the opera’s characters gradually falls apart. Picker has written successfully in both styles, so combining the two seemed only natural. “That tension has always been there in my music,” he said.

“I think the opera made some people uncomfortable,” Picker said. “It affected people strongly and in different ways. One woman came up to me at the third and final Dallas performance and said: ‘I just love this. It’s the third time I’ve seen it.’ Perhaps she had experienced the same catharsis that I had when I composed it!”

Tobias Picker (b. 1954): Thérèse Raquin; Dallas Opera Orchestra; Graeme Jenkins, conductor; Chandos 9659

On today’s date in 1719, the Papal ambassador in Lisbon noted the arrival of a fellow Italian, composer Domenico Scarlatti. Scarlatti was in his early 30s, and the son of Alessandro Scarlatti, a famous and influential composer of Baroque operas in Naples.

At the time, Scarlatti was nowhere near as famous as his father, and had come to Lisbon to serve as the music teacher for eight-year-old Portuguese princess Maria Magdalena Barbara. This teaching gig turned out to be the most important event in his life — and for two reasons.

First, the little princess was mad about music, and became a talented performer on the harpsichord. Second, in 1733, when the princess was 22, she married into the Spanish royal house, becoming the Queen of Spain. Scarlatti remained in her service for the next 25 years, composing for her amusement over 500 harpsichord sonatas, infused with the rhythms and colors of Spanish and Portuguese folk music and with the plucked sound of the harpsichord often mimicking a Spanish guitar.

Only a small number of Scarlatti’s sonatas were published during his lifetime, but long after his death all surviving manuscripts were tracked down and published.

Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757): Harpsichord Sonata; Gustav Leonhardt, harpsichord; Sony 61820

On today’s date in 1919, eminent French conductor Pierre Monteux led the Boston Symphony in the premiere performance of The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, a new orchestral score written by American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes.

This music was inspired by the famous Romantic poem of that name by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but owes its exotic orchestral coloring to Griffes’ interest in the music of Asia and the Pacific Rim. Although Griffes himself never traveled there, he knew someone who had: influential Canadian soprano Eva Gauthier, famous for her avant-garde song recitals that included music by Stravinsky and Schoenberg, and her later association with Gershwin and Ravel. It was the well-traveled Gauthier who introduced Griffes to the musical traditions of Japan and Java.

The 1919 Boston premiere of Kubla Khan was the highpoint of Griffes’ career, and all the critics agreed a major new talent had arrived on the American music scene.

Unfortunately, one month later, Griffes took ill and in a few months died from a severe lung infection. He was just 35. How his music would have developed had Griffes lived remains one of the most intriguing “what might have beens” of American music.

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920): The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan; Boston Symphony; Seiji Ozawa, conductor; New World 273

On today’s date in 1972, almost two decades after its premiere, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony received its first successful concert performance by the Munich Philharmonic led by Rudolf Kempe. A recording was made with the same performers, supervised and produced by the composer’s son, George Korngold.

Korngold had died in 1957, so he was not able to enjoy the eventual success of this major work. He completed his Symphony in 1952, and its Austrian Radio premiere in 1954 had been a disaster. As the composer put it: “The performance, which was an execution in every sense of the term, took place under the most unfavorable conditions imaginable, with inadequate rehearsals and an exhausted and overworked orchestra.”

Korngold had become an American citizen during the 1940s, and dedicated his symphony to the memory of America’s wartime President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The postwar European premiere of his Symphony came at a time when shifting tastes in music made his late-Romantic style seem hopelessly old-fashioned to many of critics of that day. “More corn than gold” was one dismissive appraisal of his style.

These days, Korngold’s music — including his Symphony — make more frequent, better-played, and eagerly welcomed appearances on concert programs.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957): Symphony; Philadelphia Orchestra; Franz Welser-Most, conductor; EMI 56169

On today’s date in 1937, a gala concert in Berlin presented the premiere performance of Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto, a work composed in the fall of 1853, shortly before Schumann’s tragic mental collapse.

The concerto was never given a public performance during Schumann’s lifetime, although great 19th century violinist Joseph Joachim read through the score during an orchestral rehearsal early in 1854 and played the work privately in 1855 with piano accompaniment provided by Schumann’s wife, Clara. Clara, Joachim and their mutual friend Johannes Brahms all judged the concerto subpar and perhaps embarrassing evidence of Schumann’s declining mental state.

Oddly enough, the 1937 premiere in Berlin, attended by none other than Adolf Hitler, was presented as part of the Nazi’s Strength Through Joy cultural program. German commentators touted Schumann’s ties to the German “folk,” while American critics bemoaned that most of the great German violinists of the day were unavailable for this important premiere, having all left Germany for racial or political reasons.

On this side of the Atlantic, it was violinist Yehudi Menuhin who gave the American premiere of Schumann’s long-neglected concerto a month later, first with piano accompaniment at Carnegie Hall, then later with the St. Louis Symphony.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856): Violin Concerto; Gidon Kremer, violin; Philharmonia Orchestra; Riccardo Muti, conductor; EMI 69334

As a busy church musician, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote around 300 sacred cantatas. That seems a high number to us — but consider that his contemporaries Telemann and Graupner composed well over a thousand cantatas each!

In what surviving documents we have, Bach himself rarely uses the Italian term “cantata” to describe these pieces, preferring “concertos” or simply “the music” to describe these works intended for Lutheran church services. It was only in the 19th century, as Bach’s music was being collected and catalogued, that the term “cantata” would become the official label for this sizeable chunk of Bach’s output.

On today’s date in 1731, the 27th Sunday after Trinity that year, Bach presented what would become one of his most popular cantatas: Wachet auf, Ruft uns die Stimme, or Awake, the Voice Calls to Us. In that 19th century catalog of Bach’s works, this is his Cantata No. 140.

The text is based on a Gospel parable recounting the story of the wise and foolish virgins, who are called, ready or not, to participate in a wedding feast. The opening choral melody may have been already familiar to Bach’s performers and congregation, but his dramatic setting of it is downright ingenious.

J.S. Bach (1685-1750): Cantata No. 140 (Wachet auf, Ruft uns die Stimme); Bach Ensemble; Helmuth Rilling, conductor; Laudate 98.857

In 1944, while World War II ground on in Europe and Asia, David Diamond’s Rounds for String Orchestra received its premiere performance by the Minneapolis Symphony and its then conductor, Dimitri Mitropoulos. 

“Write me a happy work,” Mitropoulos had asked Diamond. “These are distressing times, most of the difficult music I play is distressing. Make me happy.”

To some in 1944, Rounds sounded as if Diamond had turned to traditional American folk music, but, as the composer put it, “the tunes are original. They sound like folk tunes, but they are really the essence of a style that must have been absorbed by osmosis.”

Even the stodgy conservative music critic of the St. Paul Pioneer Press expressed her grudging admiration. “It reveals a good deal of talent and resourcefulness” was her verdict.

Reviewing a subsequent Boston Symphony performance under Koussevitzky, New York Times critic Olin Downes was much more enthusiastic. He wrote, “It is admirably fashioned, joyous and vernal. There is laughter in the music.”

Rounds has gone on to become one of Diamond’s most frequently performed works. Perhaps joy and laughter in music remains as rare and precious a commodity now as it was back in those distressed days of 1944.

David Diamond (1915-2005): Rounds; Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; Gerard Schwarz, conductor; Nonesuch 79002

On today’s date in 1934, after 10 intense rehearsals, the Orquestra Sinfonica de Mexico, conducted by the Carlos Chávez, gave the premiere performance of the Symphony No. 2 of American composer Aaron Copland.

Copland’s Symphony No. 2 was titled The Short Symphony, but there was a lot packed into its 15-minute duration. He said, “The Short Symphony’s preoccupation is with complex rhythms, combined with clear textures. Sonority-wise, the most rhythmically complex moments have a certain lightness and clarity.”

“Shortly after its Mexican introduction, the piece was announced for an American premiere by Leopold Stokowski with the Philadelphia Orchestra but was never given,” Copland recalled. “A similarly announced performance by the Boston Symphony under Koussevitzsky was also cancelled. Both told me subsequently that they had announced performances because they had admired the work, but that the composition was so intricate from a rhythmic standpoint that they dared not attempt a performance within the allotted period.”

In 1937, Copland recast his Short Symphony as a chamber sextet, leaving the music fundamentally unchanged, but re-barring the score to make it less challenging for performers. It wasn’t until the 1980s, decades after its Mexican premiere, that his symphony was performed by American orchestras in its original form.

Aaron Copland (1900-1990): Symphony No. 2 (Short Symphony); San Francisco Symphony; Michael Tilson Thomas, conductor; BMG 68541

Today is the Feast Day of St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music and musicians. Over time, her Feast Day came to be celebrated with special works composed in her honor, all extolling the power of music. Of these, the most famous were written by three great British composers: Henry Purcell, George Frederick Handel and Benjamin Britten.

In the 17th century, Henry Purcell wrote four cantatas, or odes for St. Cecilia’s Day. The most famous of these, Hail! Bright Cecilia! was written in 1692.

British poet John Dryden, a contemporary of Purcell’s, wrote two poems in praise of St. Cecilia. These attracted the attention of great British composer of the following century, George Frederick Handel. The first, Alexander’s Feast premiered in 1736 — oddly enough not on St. Cecilia’s Day — but proved so popular that Handel set Dryden’s other ode to St. Cecilia, From Harmony, Heavenly Harmony, and performed both pieces on today’s date in 1739.

Great 20th-century British composer Benjamin Britten was actually born on St. Cecilia’s Day in 1913. In the early 1940s, British poet W.H. Auden wrote Anthem for St. Cecilia’s Day for Britten, who set it to music in 1942.

Henry Purcell (1659-1695): Hail Bright Cecilia!; Gabrieli Consort; Paul McCreesh; Archiv 445 882

George Frederic Handel (1685-1759): Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day; English Concert; Trevor Pinnock, conductor; Archiv 419 220

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): Hymn to St. Cecilia; London Sinfonietta Voices; Virgin 90728