Composers Datebook

Commedia dell’arte was a kind of theater popular throughout Italy during the 18th century. In this improvised, rough and tumble genre, a group of stock figures with names like Harlequin, Pierrot, and Punchinello would appear in awkward and farcical situations which modern audiences might recognize from the TV sitcoms — only the earthy 18th century version often more R-Rated.

These characters were attractive to many of the 20th century’s greatest composers: Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire sets dreamy, surreal texts sung by a lovesick commedia dell’arte clown; Richard Strauss’ opera Ariadne auf Naxos offers an earthy commedia dell’arte troop as unlikely commentators on a serious Greek legend; and Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella recasts elegant 18th century musical forms into a robust modern score whose title character, according to Stravinsky was “a drunken lout whose every gesture was obscene.”

On today’s date in 1996, a more refined chamber work inspired by commedia dell’arte characters received its premiere at Boston College. It was commissioned and premiered by the Artaria Quartet, and was given the punning title, ART: Arias & Interludes. The music is by the Chinese-born American composer Thomas Oboe Lee, with each movement of Lee’s work related to a different commedia dell’arte figure.

Thomas Oboe Lee (b. 1945): ART: Arias and Interludes; Hawthorne String Quartet; Koch 7452

When your instrument is nicknamed “the burping bedpost,” it’s hard to get respect in refined circles. So it’s understandable that the bassoon section of, say, a major London orchestra might indulge in a bit of day-dreaming in which a gang of hot-rodding motorcycling bassoonists blow into town and take over a concert hall. And guess what? That is exactly the scenario of a piece written for Britain’s Philharmonia Orchestra by the American composer Michael Daughtery.

Hell’s Angels is a concerto for bassoon quartet that received its premiere in London on today’s date in 1999, with Daughtery commenting, “I find the bassoon to be an instrument with great expressive and timbral possibilities, ranging from low and raucous rumbling to plaintive high intensity.”

Daugherty often takes inspiration from icons of American pop culture, so it’s not surprising that he should choose Hell’s Angels for inspiration.

After all, he wrote, “the bassoon is similar in size and shape to the drag pipes found on Harley Davidson motorcycles … When the noise-curbing mufflers are illegally removed from the drag pipes, they create a deafening roar. I have removed the traditional mufflers on the bassoon repertoire in order to compose [my] concerto for bassoon quartet and orchestra.”

Michael Daugherty (b. 1954): Hell’s Angels; Oregon Symphony; James DePreist, conductor; Delos 3291

On this day in the year 1886, critic Gustav Dompke wrote these lines in the German Times of Vienna, after attending a performance of one of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies: “We recoil in horror before this rotting odor which rushes into our nostrils from the disharmonies of this putrefactive counterpoint…Bruckner composes like a drunkard!”

Today, with Bruckner’s symphonies performed and recorded so often, it’s doubtful many listeners “recoil in horror” from his rich Romantic harmonies, but he’s always been a little controversial. Bruckner’s European contemporaries and his early American audiences found his approach to symphonic composition puzzling, bizarre or — more often than not — simply boring.

The vogue for Bruckner symphonies in America had to wait until the latter part of the 20th century, a full century after many of them received their premiere performances in Europe.

In 1941, for example, when Bruno Walter conducted Bruckner’s giant Symphony No. 8 at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic, music critic Olin Downes lamented that Walter hadn’t chosen a “more interesting” program and noted that the Bruckner symphony “sent a number from the hall before it had finished.”

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896): Symphony No. 8; Concergebouw Orchestra; Riccardo Chailly, conductor; London 466 653

One of the most serious — and daunting — of musical forms is the passacaglia, in which an unchanging melodic pattern repeats itself while other lines of melody offer elaboration and counterpoint to the unwavering tread of the repeated motive. The result tends to be deliberate, somber and imposing. The most famous passacaglia in all of Western classical music is the Passacaglia and Fugue for organ by Johann Sebastian Bach, whose birthday we observe on today’s date.

After Bach’s high-water mark, it takes more than a little courage for modern composers to tackle this form. One of those brave souls who tried — and succeeded — was American composer Ron Nelson.

Nelson’s Passacaglia, subtitled Homage on B-A-C-H, utilizes the melodic motive represented in German musical nomenclature by B-flat, A, C, and B natural — in German B natural being represented by the letter H. Nelson’s wind band Passacaglia was was commissioned to celebrate the 125th anniversary of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in 1992. It didn’t prove an easy task, recalled Nelson: “It evolved very slowly … The trick was … to make it seamless and inexorable. Of all my compositions, this is the tightest. I cannot imagine changing one note.”

Ron Nelson (1929-2023): Passacaglia; Dallas Wind Symphony; Ron Nelson, conductor; Reference Recordings RR-76

In 2010, the American Composers Forum launched ChoralQuest, a specially-commissioned series of works written especially for middle and junior high school choirs. The idea was to expand the available repertoire for young choirs, introduce them to contemporary composers, and give composers the chance and challenge of writing for young voices.

One of these new works received its premiere on today’s date in 2011 with the Oak Grove Middle School Singers in Bloomington, Minnesota. Bryan Blessing conducted his young singers in lines from “Tintern Abbey” by 19th-century British poet William Wordsworth set to music by 21st-century composer Stephen Paulus, who titled his piece Through All Things. “I chose a poem that conveys some deep thoughts,” Paulus said. “People often underestimate the sophistication of young people … The Wordsworth poem speaks about ‘a motion and a spirit that rolls through all things.’”

“But a composer really needs to know the range of young singers and what they can do,” admitted Paulus, who spent time with the Oak Grove Singers and confessed it’s not just the kids who benefitted. “You’re never too old or too experienced not to learn something from writing a new piece, whether it’s for kids or professional musicians.”

Stephen Paulus (1949-2014): Through All Things; Minnesota Boychoir; Todd Price, piano; Mark S. Johnson, conductor; ACF score and recording (ISBN 0983388709)

The opening of Edith Wharton’s novel, The Age of Innocence, takes place at New York’s old Academy of Music in the early 1870s, during a performance of Gounod’s Faust, a French opera based on a German play by Goethe. At the time specified in Wharton’s novel, Gounod’s opera was still “new” music, having premiered about a dozen years earlier in Paris on today’s date in 1859.

Gounod’s Faust became a worldwide success, and was quickly translated into many languages. In Wharton’s fictional New York performance, for example, the real-life Swedish diva Christine Nilsson sang the role of Marguerite, the German maiden seduced and abandoned by Faust. As Wharton put it: “She sang, of course, ‘m’ama!” and not “he loves me,’ since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.”

Nilsson, again singing in Italian, sang Marguerite at the 1883 gala opening night performance of Faust at New York’s newly built Metropolitan Opera House. Faust was performed so often there that the building was soon dubbed the “Faust-spielhaus,” a pun on Wagner’s “Festpielhaus” or “Festival Theater” in Bayreuth.

Charles Gounod (1818-1893): Faust Ballet Music; St. Martin’s Academy; Neville Marriner, conductor; Philips 462 125

All artists, including composers, are frequently urged to “write what they know.”

Well, if that’s the case, then any new and sleep-deprived parent can relate to music which depicts a late-night session with a newborn baby. It’s the middle movement of a piano concerto that was given its premiere on today’s date in 1994 by the Kansas City Symphony, with Bill McGlaughlin conducting and pianist Richard Cass.

This new Concerto was by Kansas City composer James Mobberley, who wrote: “The piece is in three movements, each of which reflects a different emotional side of parenthood. The first movement represents the excitement and hysteria of forthcoming childbirth. The middle movement begins with amazingly soft moments following childbirth but leads into the period of sleeplessness and total chaos that inevitably follows. The final movement represents the wonderful fun and unpredictable interactions that start to happen, beginning with the child’s first smile.”

Mobberley was born in Iowa in 1954, raised in Pennsylvania, and balances teaching duties at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, with his composition work, which includes a wide range of concert and theatrical pieces, some combining electronic and live performing elements.

James Mobberley (b. 1954): Piano Concerto; Richard Cass, piano; Czech National Symphony; Paul Freeman, conductor; Albany 335

Today we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in Boston (where else?), noting two musical premieres that occurred in that Celtic city.

The first premiere was in March 1922, when Pierre Monteux conducted the Boston Symphony in the premiere of three of the Five Irish Fantasies by German-born American composer Charles Martin Loeffler. These were settings for solo voice and orchestra of poetry by William Butler Yeats, and, for their Boston premiere, the vocalist was none other than great Irish tenor John McCormack. 

The second premiere dates from 1947, when the Eire Society of Boston commissioned another American composer, Leroy Anderson, to write an Irish Suite for its annual Irish night at the Boston Pops. Anderson used six popular Irish tunes, ranging from the sentimental to the exuberant, for his suite, skillfully arranging them into an immediate hit and lasting success.  

Arthur Fiedler conducted the premiere and the work soon became a staple item for St. Patrick’s Day concerts in Boston and concert halls all across the United States.

Charles Martin Loeffler (1861-1935): Five Irish Fantasies; Neil Rosenshein, tenor; Indianapolis Symphony; John Nelson, conductor; New World 332

Leroy Anderson (1908-1975): Irish Suite; Decca studio orchestra; Leroy Anderson, conductor; MCA 9815

On today’s date in 1968, 72-year-old Italian-born American composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco died in Beverley Hills. As a young man, he was already known as a rising composer, concert pianist, music critic and essayist. In 1939 he left Mussolini’s Italy and came to America, and like a lot of European musicians of the time, he found work writing film scores for major Hollywood studios.

Castelnuovo-Tedesco became an American citizen, and eventually taught at the Los Angeles Conservatory, where his pupils included many famous names from the next generation of film composers, including Jerry Goldsmith, Henry Mancini, Andre Previn, Nelson Riddle and John Williams.

In addition to film scores, Castelnuovo-Tedesco composed a signifigant body of concert music, including concertos for the likes of Heifetz and Segovia.

A number of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s works are directly related to his Jewish faith, including Naomi and Ruth, a choral work from 1947. The composer’s mother was named Naomi, and he claimed the faithful Ruth in the Biblical story reminded him of his own wife, Clara. “In a certain sense,” he wrote, “it was really my symbolic autobiography, existing before I decided to write — to open my heart — in these pages.”

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968): Naomi and Ruth; St. Martin’s Academy and Chorus; Sir Neville Marriner, conductor; Naxos 8.559404

For their February 2013 cover story, the editors of BBC Music Magazine, came up with a list of the 50 most influential people in the history of music. Bach was on it, as you might expect — but so was Shakespeare.

Any music lover can see the logic in that, and cite pieces like Mendelssohn’s music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Tchaikovsky’s Overture-Fantasy Romeo and Juliet, or all the great operas based on Shakespeare’s plays, ranging from Verdi’s Falstaff to a recent setting of The Tempest by Thomas Adès.

And speaking of The Tempest, in New York on today’s date in 1981, Sharon Robinson premiered After Reading Shakespeare, a new solo cello suite she commissioned from American composer Ned Rorem.

“Yes,” Rorem said, “I was re-reading Shakespeare the month the piece was accomplished… Yet the experience did not so much inspire the music itself as provide a cohesive program upon which the music be might formalized, and thus intellectually grasped by the listener.” Rorem even confessed that some of the titles were added after the fact, “as when parents christen their children.“  

After all, as Shakespeare’s Juliet might put it, “What’s in a name?”

Ned Rorem (1923-2022): After Reading Shakespeare; Sharon Robinson, cello; Naxos 8.559316