Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 2003, a new orchestral work by American composer Elliott Carter had its premiere in Boston. Carter was then 94 — he would live to be a month shy of 104, and, even more remarkable, he was composing new works almost to the end of his days.

When you live that long, you experience a lot of changes. Carter had studied English and Greek at Harvard, and recalled a time when at Boston Symphony concerts conservative members of the audience would joke that the emergency exits signs should read “Exit — in case of Brahms.” Apparently, even in the 1920s, for some Boston Brahmins, Brahms was still “difficult music.”

For his part, Carter felt the complexity of his own music reflected the complex world into which he was born — the world of Proust, Picasso and Stravinsky. His music was technically very, very difficult, but Carter always insisted it was all in service of the greater freedom and fantasy of his imagination, not difficult for difficulty’s sake.

Carter’s Boston Concerto was dedicated to the memory of his wife, Helen, who died shortly before its premiere. He prefaced his score with the opening lines from the poem “Rain” by William Carlos Williams:

“As the rain falls

So does

your love

bathe every

open

Object of the world—“

Elliott Carter (1908-2012): Boston Concerto; BBC Symphony; Oliver Knussen, conductor; Bridge 9184

On today’s date in 1800, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 had its first performance in Vienna, at a benefit concert for the 29-year-old composer.

It would be several years before any of Beethoven’s orchestral music reached American shores, but it did occur during Beethoven’s lifetime. In 1819, for example, a “Grand Piano Concerto” as it was billed, was performed in New Orleans — only we have no idea which concerto. On today’s date in 1825, when Beethoven was 54, his Egmont Overture was performed at the City Hotel in New York, and was performed again in Philadelphia on March 28, 1827 — just two days after its composer had died in Vienna.

By the 1840s, Beethoven’s overtures and symphonies appeared with some regularity on the East Coast, and slowly worked their way Westward.

In 1853, Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 was performed in San Francisco by musicians gathered from that city’s gambling houses. A letter describing the event recalled, “there were many Chinese present,” and that it “lasted four hours owing to an overwhelming demand for encores, which the performers dared not refuse in the face of rugged California individualism.”

In 1856, when San Francisco’s German Society gave the West Coast premiere of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, The San Francisco Chronicle review the following day noted: “The pieces were very beautiful, but it must be said that some of them appeared to be considered very tedious by the greater number of the audience. The Adagio, Scherzo and Finale of Beethoven’s Symphony, for instance, caused many to yawn.”

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 1; Concertgebouw Orchestra; Bernard Haitink, conductor; Philips 442 073

For many years, the BBC celebrated April Fools’ Day by trying to pull radio listeners’ legs with outrageously fabricated news stories. One year, for example, BBC TV aired footage of an Italian spaghetti farm where happy peasants harvested that year’s crop from bushes that the BBC production crew had draped with limp noodles for the filming.

On another April 1, the BBC’s classical service featured a profile of an eccentrically reclusive 19th century French composer who concocted unplayable works in his apartment on a bizarre instrument that combined an organ pedal board with a grand piano. He was, the story claimed, as fantastic a performer as Liszt or Chopin, and supposedly was crushed to death by his own bookcase when he attempted to remove a heavy volume from its top shelf. Only in this case, the story was more or less true, and the composer, Charles-Valetin Alkan, was a very real person.

Alkan was born in Paris in 1813 and was buried there on today’s date in 1888. Only the bit about Alkan’s “death by bookcase” in the BBC profile is disputed by some historians. That story originated with Isidore Philipp, one of only four mourners who attended Alkan’s April 1 interment, and who claimed to have been present when the composer’s body was found in his apartment. Philipp was a highly respected and long-lived French composer and piano teacher who came to America in 1940 and died here in 1958. He seems a credible witness — so who to believe?

Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888): Bombardo-Carillon; Caroline Clemmow and Anthony Goldstone, pedal-piano; Symposium 1062

We tend to think of the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák as a 19th century composer — but he lived a few years into the 20th and one of his major works, his opera Rusalka, had its premiere in Prague on today’s date in 1901. We also think of Dvořák as primarily a composer of symphonies and chamber works, but forget that in his final years, he devoted himself chiefly to opera — and for reasons that might surprise us today.

In a 1904 interview, given just two months before his death, Dvořák said: “Over the past five years I have written nothing but operas. I wanted to devote all my powers, as long as the dear Lord gives me health, to the creation of opera … because I consider opera to be the most suitable medium for the Czech nation and the widest audience, whereas if I compose a symphony I might have to wait years before it is performed.”

Dvořák was gratified that Rusalka was a big success at its 1901 premiere and would subsequently become one of his most popular works with Czech audiences, but ironically, outside Czech-speaking lands, most of his other operas, unlike his symphonies, are rarely performed.

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): O Silver Moon, from Rusalka; Renée Fleming, soprano; London Symphony; Sir Georg Solti, conductor; London 455 760

By the time of his death in 1949, German composer Richard Strauss was famous worldwide as the composer of operas like Der Rosenkavalier and tone-poems like Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. These operas and tone-poems are so famous, we tend to forget that Strauss also composed symphonies — two of them, both written when the young composer was just starting out.

Strauss’ Symphony No. 1 was premiered in his hometown of Munich on today’s date in 1881, when the composer was just 16. That performance was given by an amateur orchestra but was conducted by one of the leading German conductors of that day, Hermann Levi, who would lead the premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal the following year. Another eminent Wagnerian conductor, Hans von Bulow, subsequently took up the teenager’s symphony, and also commissioned him to write a Suite for Winds. 

American conductor Theodore Thomas was an old friend of Richard Strauss’ father, Franz Strauss, and while in Europe during the summer of 1884, Thomas looked over the score for the younger Strauss’ Symphony No. 2, and immediately arranged for its premiere in New York City the following winter.

Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Symphony No. 1; Bavarian Radio Symphony; Karl Anton Rickenbacker, conductor; Koch/Schwann 365 322

On today’s date 2000, at the University of Richmond in Virginia, the Shanghai Quartet premiered the String Quartet No. 4 by composer Bright Sheng.

Sheng was born in Shanghai in 1955, but since the 80s he’s made the United States his home and has earned an enviable reputation as both a composer and teacher. But in the late 1960s, during the tumultuous years of Madame Mao’s Cultural Revolution, he worked as a pianist and percussionist in a Chinese folk music and dance troupe near the Tibetan border. His String Quartet No. 4 is subtitled Silent Temple, which he explained that title as follows:

“In the early 1970s I visited an abandoned Buddhist temple in northwest China. As all religious activities were completely forbidden at the time, the temple, still renowned among the Buddhist community all over the world, was unattended and on the brink of turning into a ruin … In spite of the appalling condition of the temple, it was still a grandiose and magnificent structure … I could almost hear the praying and chanting of the monks, as well as the violence committed to the temple and the monks by the Red Guards.”

Bright Sheng (b. 1955): String Quartet No. 4 (Silent Temple); Shanghai Quartet; BIS 1138

On today’s date in 1801, the world — or at least that portion of it seated in the Imperial Court Theater in Vienna — heard a new ballet for the first time. The real draw that evening was the prima ballerina of the company, a certain Fraulein Cassentini.

The music was by young, emerging composer Ludwig van Beethoven, and his ballet was called The Creatures of Prometheus. The creatures referred to in the title are two stone statues that are brought to life by Prometheus, the legendary Greek figure who stole fire from the gods and gave it to mankind. 

Beethoven’s commission came from Italian dancer Salvatore Vigano, who had been working in Vienna since 1793, and was — like Beethoven — seeking the attention and possible patronage of the culture-loving Austrian Empress Maria Theresa.

Although Beethoven’s ballet was performed 14 times the first season, and nine more the next, it was never published in his lifetime. Beethoven was evidentially pleased with at least one of its themes, a tune he recycled twice: first in the finale of his mammoth Eroica and again in 15 Variations for Solo Piano.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): The Creatures of Prometheus; Orpheus Chamber Orchestra; DG 453 713

In the winter of 1807, a group of music-loving Viennese, frustrated that their chances to hear orchestral and symphonic music seemed rather sporadic, decided to sponsor a series of symphonic concerts themselves. Their organization was called, simply The Concert of Music Lovers, with performing forces made up — as a Viennese newspaper put it — of “the best local amateurs, with a few wind instruments only: French horns, trumpets, etc., drafted from Viennese theaters.” And the audience, according to the same source, comprising “exclusively the nobility of the town, foreigners of note, and selected cognoscenti.” Twenty concerts were staged in all, most of them in a large hall of the Vienna University.

The final concert in the series occurred on today’s date in 1808: a performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. The work was sung in Italian, and the conductor on that occasion was the famous Italian composer Antonio Salieri.

Haydn was living in a suburb of Vienna at the time and arrived in Prince Ezterhazy’s coach. Haydn was carried into the hall on an armchair lifted high so that all could see him. The orchestra played a fanfare and shouts of “Long live Haydn!” rang from the audience — which included Ludwig van Beethoven.

Franz Josef Haydn (1732-1808): The Creation; English Baroque Soloists; John Eliot Gardiner, conductor; Archiv 449 217

For the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, a major international arts festival was planned, and, as its centerpiece, a gigantic day-long music-theater work designed and coordinated by avant-garde American director Robert Wilson.  

Wilson titled the work the CIVIL warS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, with a story line loosely inspired by Matthew Brady’s famous photographs from America’s Civil War, but also incorporating myths, images, and historical icons from around the world.

The idea was that the various sections of the work would be contributed by a team of composers, each section connected by what Wilson called “knee plays” – short “joints” if you will, linking the parts to the whole. The “knee play” music was contributed by the American pop musician David Byrne, a member of the Talking Heads.

The fifth and final act of Civil Wars was written by minimalist composer Philip Glass. It was dubbed The Rome Section, since it was commissioned and premiered as a separate work by the Rome Opera on today’s date in 1984.

In the end, Wilson’s ambitious day-long epic wasn’t staged in Los Angeles as planned. The reason given at the time was funding problems.

Philip Glass (b. 1937): Rome Section, from The Civil Wars; Giuseppe Sabbatini, tenor; American Composers Orchestra; Dennis Russell Davies, conductor; Nonesuch 79487

On today’s date in 1965, Lizzie Borden premiered at the New York City Opera. The new opera by American composer Jack Beeson depicted a fictionalized version of a real-life event: a gruesome double axe-murder of Andrew and Abby Borden that occurred in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892. Andrew Borden’s daughter, Lizzie, was accused of the murder of her father and stepmother. Many at the time thought her guilty. As a famous children’s rhyme of the period put it:

“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
And when she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”

Borden was acquitted for the murders, which remained unsolved.

Beeson thought Lizzie’s story resembled the ancient Greek legend of Elektra, already the subject of a famous opera by Richard Strauss. And like Strauss’s Elekra, Beeson’s Lizzie is the central character in an angst-ridden, Freudian tale of a dangerously dysfunctional family.

Beeson said, “A lot of Lizzie Borden is very dissonant. It was even thought to be a twelve-tone piece back in 1965. There’s not a 12-tone row in it, but the agonized situation in much of Lizzie seemed to me to require that kind of music.”

Jack Beeson (1921-2010): Lizzie Borden; New York City Opera; Anton Coppola, conductor; CRI 694