Composers Datebook

We tend to think our time has had a monopoly on bitter religious conflicts, but on today’s date in 1572, which happened to be St. Bartholomew’s Day, the Catholic queen dowager of France, Catherine de Medici, and her son, King Charles IX, decided that the best way to rid their kingdom of troublesome Protestants would be simply to kill them off.

A few days earlier, Catholic and Protestant nobles from across France had come to Paris to attend a noble wedding which, ironically, was intended to bring the rival religious factions closer together.

Things quickly turned ugly, and on the 24th of August the infamous “Massacre of St. Bartholomew” began and quickly spread across the entire country. Among those who perished was a French Protestant composer named Claude Goudimel, who was killed when the massacre reached Lyons.

Fortunately for posterity, not all Reformation era rulers were so bloodthirsty. English Catholic composer Thomas Tallis managed to keep his head through the reigns of alternating Catholic and Protestant monarchs, and the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I admired and supported the music of William Byrd, despite his openly Catholic sympathies.

Claude Goudimel (1510-1572): Comfort, Comfort Ye my People; Cathedral Singers; Richard Proulx, conductor; GIA 290

Tanglewood is one of America’s most famous summertime classical music festivals and can boast a long and impressive list of premieres and performances by famous American composers and conductors. It takes place each year around this time in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts.

Tanglewood has been the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home for more than 60 years, but it wasn’t the symphony’s first location in the Berkshires. In August of 1936, the first in a three-concert series was performed at Holmwood, a former Vanderbilt estate.

The great Russian-born conductor of the Boston Symphony, Serge Koussevitzky, moved the festival to Tanglewood and expanded the concert series into a kind of intensive summer camp for young musicians and composers. Among those who particularly benefited were two young composer-conductors, Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss.

In 1940, the Berkshire Music Center (now the Tanglewood Music Center) opened, and to mark the occasion, American composer Randall Thompson’s famous choral work, Alleluia, received its premiere performance.

Randall Thompson (1899-1984): Alleluia; Dale Warland Singers; Dale Warland, conductor; Minnesota Public Radio 201

Angel Fire is a village in the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico, home to ski slopes and hiking trails, plus a summer mountain-bike park and zip line. And, since 1983, it’s also the home of a late summer music festival called Music from Angel Fire.

Early on, violinist Ida Kavafian was invited to serve as the Festival’s Artistic Director, a position she maintained through 2019. Kavafian returned on today’s date in 2001 to perform in the premiere of a newly commissioned trio by Libby Larsen — along with cellist Peter Wiley and pianist Melvin Chen — this just one of over 45 premieres that have taken place at the Festival to date.

The trio is a classically-proportioned work in three movements: the first movement, Sultry, and the third, Burst, are rhythmic, fast, and hauntingly jazz-like. In between, the second movement, Still is serene, free flowing, and quiet.

Larsen said, “I compose music for the concert hall. I chose this type of music because I love physics. Flutes, cellos, trumpets, tubas, all of the orchestral instruments emit natural sound, and they operate on the laws of physics. I can hear those laws working in the air when those instruments play.”

Libby Larsen (b. 1950): Movement 3 (Bursts) from Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano; Curtis Macomber, violin; Norman Fischer, cello; Jeanne Kierman, piano; Navona Records NV-6014

At the BBC Proms on today’s date in 2004 Proms a new piece by the British composer Judith Bingham was premiered by the BBC Chorus. The Secret Garden was inspired by several events: a conversation about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden, a BBC TV series, The Private World of Plants, some rather racy descriptions of the sex life of plants by the 18th century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, and a disturbing news story about the bombing of the so-called “Adam Tree” in Iraq at a site that locals believe was where the Garden of Eden once stood.

Bingham wrote her own text, which includes many Latin names of plants, which led to The Secret Garden’s subtitle: Botanical Fantasy.

“This is meant to be a magical piece. It has a Christian framework with opening and closing quotations from Genesis and Matthew … but the piece also seems to wonder whether the world is better off without humans, and that, should humans cease to exist, Paradise would very soon re-establish itself …” she said.

Judith Bingham (b. 1952): The Secret Garden; BBC Symphony Chorus; Thomas Trotter, oboe; Stephen Jackson, conductor; Naxos 8.570346 (live Proms recording of the premiere performance)

Details on the lives and careers of composers born before 1700 tend to be a bit skimpy, at best. For example, we know Italian Baroque composer Jacopo Peri was born on today’s date in 1561, but we’re not sure if that was in Rome or Florence.

As a point of reference, remember William Shakespeare was born in 1564, just three years after Peri. And by the 1580s, around the same time Shakespeare was learning to be a playwright, Peri and some of his Italian contemporaries were experimenting with a new art form that we call now call “opera.”

There was much discussion at the time about what the music of the ancient Greek dramas must have been like, and how dramatic stories might be told in music. Peri was instrumental in the production of two of the earliest operas for which the complete music survives: Dafne, which premiered around 1597, and Euridice from 1600.

Peri outlived his English contemporary Shakespeare by 17 years. Shakespeare died in 1616 at 52, while Peri died sometime in August of 1633, at 72, a ripe old age for the 17th century.

Jacopo Peri (1561-1633): Euridice; Sylva Pozzer, soprano; Ensemble Albalonga; Anibal E. Cetrangolo, conductor; Pavane Records 7372/3

In the 19th century, anybody who had the means would flee the stifling heat of the cities and head for someplace green and shady and cool: a country house, a spa perhaps, or maybe just a modest cabin by a lake.

In the 19th century, it was Brahms who set the fashion for composers to spend their summer months in the countryside working on their music. His violin concerto and Symphony No. 2 were the products of leisurely weeks spent in the lake district of Austria’s Carinthian Alps.

For American composer Edward Collins, the city to be escaped was Chicago, and his country refuge was Cedar Lake, Wisconsin. In 1931, Collins composed a concert piece for piano and orchestra. Like much of Collins’ music, it was premiered by the Chicago Symphony under conductor Frederick Stock, who encouraged young American talent, especially from a local boy like Collins, a native of Joliet, Illinois.

These days the music of Edward Collins has all but disappeared from American concert halls, but conductor Marin Alsop and the Concordia Orchestra recorded a sampling of his major orchestral works for a compact disc series funded by the late composer’s family.

Edward J. Collins (1889-1951): Concert Piece in A minor; Leslie Stifelman, piano; Concordia Orchestra; Marin Alsop, conductor; Albany 267

August 1613 proved to be an especially eventful month in the life and career of Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi. The previous summer his old employer, Duke Vincenzo of Mantua, had died, and Monteverdi was looking for a job. Fortunately, the position of Master of Music for the Republic of Venice opened up, and, on today’s date Monteverdi was probably rehearsing musicians for a trial concert of his music at St. Mark’s Cathedral. The concert was a success. Monteverdi got the job, a generous salary, and even a cash advance to cover the move from his home.

So much for the good news — on his trip back home, Monteverdi was robbed by highwaymen armed with muskets. In a surviving letter, Monteverdi described the incident in some detail, noting that the muskets were very long and of the flint-wheel variety, and that he lost more than a hundred Venetian ducats.

Despite the trauma — and the humiliation of being strip-searched for valuables by one of the robbers — Monteverdi recovered his fortunes in Venice. In addition to his church duties at St. Mark’s, he became famous writing a newfangled sort of commercial entertainment called opera, and lived to the ripe old age of 77.

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643): “Che dar piu vi poss’io” from Fifth Book of Madrigals; Consort of Musicke; Anthony Rooley, conductor; L’oiseau Lyre 410 291

In 1980, Estonian composer Arvo Pärt emigrated from his Soviet-controlled homeland and settled in Austria. Since the 1960s, Pärt’s increasingly spiritual and overtly religious music, imbued with mystical and contemplative rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church, did not sit well with the communist authorities, and Pärt found it increasing hard to live and work in Estonia.

On today’s date in 1980, at the Salzburg Festival in Austria, another Baltic artist, the Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer, gave the premiere performance of a new violin-piano arrangement of Part’s Fratres, or Brothers — an instrumental work from 1977 that Pärt subsequently rescored for a variety of ensembles.

In the version commissioned by the Salzburg Festival, the original harmonic material resides in the serene piano part, while the violin plays virtuosic variations above it. That serenity is the result of Pärt’s effort to — as he put it — “learn to walk again as a composer.” He came up with a term, tintinnabulation, for the simplicity and directness of expression he sought.

“Tintinnabulation is like this,” writes Pärt. “I am alone with silence. I work with very few elements … The three notes of the triad are like bells. And that is why I called it tintinnabulation.”

Arvo Pärt (b. 1935): Fratres; Gidon Kremer, violin; Keith Jarrett, piano; ECM 1275

In the 1950s, if you said the words “Cuban music,” perhaps Desi Arnez, a.k.a. Ricky Ricardo, singing Babaloo might come to mind. These days, it’s more likely the Buena Vista Social Club.

On today’s date back in 1932, George Gershwin had Cuban music on his mind when the New York Philharmonic premiered his Cuban Overture under its original title Rumba. Cuban dance music has always proved appealing to North American composers and long before Gershwin, the 19th century piano virtuoso Louis Moreau Gottschalk toured Cuba and imitated some of the sounds and rhythms he heard there in his original works.

In the early 1940s, a young hay fever sufferer named Leonard Bernstein escaped the New England pollen of Tanglewood for a time in Key West. There he was inspired by the Latin dance bands he heard on radio Havana to write a jaunty little Cuban-style dance of his own that would resurface some 15 years later as the song “America” in Bernstein’s hit musical, West Side Story.

And in 1990, American composer Michael Daughterty composed his orchestral conga line, Desi, a symphonic tribute to Cuban bandleader Desi Arnez, in his pop icon role of Ricky Ricardo.

George Gershwin (1898-1937): Cuban Overture; New York Philharmonic; Zubin Mehta, conductor; Teldec 46318

Michael Daugherty (b. 1954): Desi!; Baltimore Symphony; David Zinman, conductor; Argo 444 454

When a flying saucer circled over Washington, D.C. in the classic 1951 sci-fi film, The Day the Earth Stood Still, it did so to music played on an electronic instrument known as the Theremin.

Its Russian inventor, Leon Theremin, was born in St. Petersburg on today’s date in 1896. In 1927 he traveled to America, where he obtained a patent for an electronic instrument he called the Thereminovox. In the 1930s, he arranged concerts for his creation at New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Then, in 1938, without explanation, he disappeared. Some said it was because he was in debt, others because he was married to two women at the same time. The truth was even stranger: Theremin was a spy.

He had been passing on American technical information to the Soviets. Ironically, when he returned home, he was immediately thrown into a Soviet prison for seven years. While incarcerated, he developed miniature electronic eavesdropping devices for the Soviet government.

Decades later, in 1989, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, 92-year old Theremin again showed up in New York to be honored at a festival of electronic music, amazed his name and instrument were even remembered.

Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975): The Day the Earth Stood Still; National Philharmonic; Bernard Herrmann, conductor; London 443 899

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): Berceuse from The Firebird; Clara Rockmore, theremin; Nadia Reisenberg, piano; Delos 1014