Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1935, at the Church of Saint François-Xavier in Paris, organist Geneviève de la Salle gave the first complete performance of the three-movement Suite by French composer, teacher and virtuoso organist Maurice Duruflé.

If you sing in a choir or are a fan of choral music, you’re probably familiar with Duruflé’s serene and tranquil Requiem, which premiered 12 years later.

Duruflé’s Op. 5 premiered in 1935, his Op. 9 in 1947, so you might reasonably conclude the composer was a slow worker — which he was. He was also a very self-critical perfectionist whose catalog of works is rather small, but exquisitely crafted. In all, Duruflé’s output comprises less than 15 published works, of which seven are for organ.

Duruflé’s music is firmly embedded in the French tradition of organ composers like César Franck and Louis Vierne, and orchestral composers like Debussy, Ravel and Duruflé’s own composition teacher, Paul Dukas. Great French organist Marie-Claire Alain, when asked to describe Duruflé’s music, replied “it is a perfectly honest art … he was not an innovator but a traditionalist … Duruflé evolved and amplified the old traditions, making them his own.”

Maurice Durufle (1902-1986): Organ Suite; Todd Wilson, organ; Schudi organ at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Dallas, Texas; Delos 3047

One of the 20th century’s most important — and most lurid — operas had its American premiere at the Metropolitan Opera on today’s date in 1907.

Richard Strauss’s Salome is a faithful setting of Oscar Wilde’s play about the decadent Biblical princess who, after her famous “dance of the seven veils,” demands the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter as a reward. She then confesses her love to the severed head and kisses it. This scene, accompanied by Strauss’s graphic music, proved too much for early audiences to take.

“A reviewer should be an embodied conscience stung into righteous fury by the moral stench with which Salome fills the nostrils of humanity,” wrote The New York Tribune. The Met cancelled the rest of the scheduled performances, and Salome was not staged there again until 1934.

Closer to our time, American composer Terry Riley put a more positive spin on the legend of Salome. In the 1980s, Riley wrote some string quartets collectively titled Salome Dances for Peace. “I conceived my quartets as a kind of ballet scenario, in which contemporary world leaders like Reagan and Gorbachev are seduced by a reincarnated Salome into realizing world peace,” said Riley.

Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Dance of the Seven Veils, from Salome; New York Philharmonic, Lorin Maazel, conductor; DG 7890

Terry Riley (b. 1935): Good Medicine, from Salome Dances for Peace; Kronos Quartet; Nonesuch 79217

English lutenist and songwriter John Dowland is one of the best-known composers from the age of Shakespeare, but there’s much about him that we don’t know. Dowland wrote that he was born in 1563 but didn’t say where. Early biographies said he died in London on today’s date in 1626, but a mid-February date seems more likely. Dowland was 63 when he died — a ripe old age in a time of Plague.

One early biographer described Dowland as “a cheerful person, passing his days in lawful merriment,” but his most famous works are deeply introspective in tone, in keeping with the then-fashionable cult of melancholy and its preoccupation with tears, darkness, and death.

Dowland lived in a dangerous period of bitter religious conflict. He once wrote a frantic letter from Germany warning of a Catholic plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. But in that same letter Dowland confessed his own Catholic sympathies, yet at home and abroad worked for eminent Protestant families and royalty. The last record we have of him as a performer dates from May of 1625 when he played at the funeral of King James I — a fitting finale to a remarkable composer of that remarkable age.

John Dowland (1563-1626): Melancholy Galliard/Allemande; Ronn McFarlane, lute; Dorian 90148

In 1940, choreographer Léonide Massine, approached composer Paul Hindemith, with the idea of having him arrange pieces by 19th century Romantic composer Carl Maria von Weber into a ballet score. At first Hindemith was intrigued, but Massine wanted straight arrangements and Hindemith wanted to write something original in the spirit of Weber, so the ballet idea was scrapped.

Oh well, what Hindemith finally did come up with turned out to be one of his most successful and popular orchestral works, Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, which received its premiere performance on today’s date in 1944 at a New York Philharmonic concert conducted by Artur Rodzinski.

Now, Hindemith had a reputation for being serious and rather “Germanic,” so The New York Times critic had a little fun with that image of the composer, writing:

“Sometimes [Hindemith’s] counterpoint has been as busy and energetic as the works of an automobile — and as meaningless. Sometimes it has been thick and overstuffed in its style. This metamorphosis employs counterpoint as a matter only incidental to the gay development of ideas, and there is sunshine in every nook and cranny of the transparent, debonair score.”

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963): Symphonic Metamorphosis; San Francisco Symphony, Herbert Blomstedt, conductor; London/Decca 421523

When boomers wax nostalgic about the Kennedy Administration, it’s Lerner & Loewe’s musical Camelot they start to hum. After all, Camelot opened in 1960 just a month after John F. Kennedy was elected, and, a week after his assassination in 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy told historian Theodore H. White that they owned the original cast album and liked to play it before retiring at night. She quoted a phrase — “one brief shining moment” —from Camelot’s title song as how she wished his presidency to be remembered.

But early in 1961, everyone was looking forward, not backwards. The President-elect had asked Frank Sinatra to help arrange a musical gala to be held on January 19, 1961, the eve of his inauguration, and Leonard Bernstein was tapped to represent classical music. Bernstein had known Kennedy since the mid-1950s, and, after all, they both were Harvard men.

As luck would have it, a rare blizzard hit Washington D.C. that night, snarling traffic, and a police escort had to rush Bernstein to the Gala. There was no time for him to change into formal attire, so Bernstein appeared onstage in a hastily-borrowed and much-too-large dress shirt to conduct the world premiere of his Fanfare for JFK.

After the premiere of his Fanfare, Bernstein conducted a more familiar wind band standard —Sousa’s The Stars and Stripes Forever.

Frederick Loewe (1901-1988): Camelot: Overture; London Promenade Orchestra; Eric Hammerstein, conductor; Reader's Digest 16931

Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990): Fanfare for the Inauguration of John F. Kennedy Jr.; National Symphony Orchestra; Cristoph Eschenbach, conductor; Ondine 1190

Composers can be quite superstitious about numbers. Gustav Mahler, for example, was reluctant to assign the number 9 to his song cycle symphony, Das Lied von der Erde, fearing it would turn out to be his last: after all, Beethoven and Bruckner had only completed nine symphonies. Ironically, Mahler did go on to complete a ninth, but died before he could finish work on his tenth.

Most American composers have avoided this problem by rarely if ever producing more than one or two symphonies of their own. Naturally there are exceptions.

On today’s date in 1963, the Symphony No. 9 of American composer Roy Harris was given its premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy, who had commissioned it. Like many other symphonies by Harris, his Symphony No. 9 has a patriotic program, with each movement having a subtitle from either the American Constitution or Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Harris went on to write thirteen symphonies in all — although, perhaps submitting to a bit of numerological superstition himself — when his symphony No. 13, a bicentennial commission, was first performed in Washington, D.C. in 1976, it was billed as his Symphony No. 14!

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Symphony No. 9; New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein, conductor; Sony 60597

Roy Harris (1898-1979): Symphony No. 9; Albany Symphony; David Alan Miller, conductor; Albany 350

When TIME magazine chose Albert Einstein as their Millennium Person of the Century in 1999, their profile catalogued his achievements in physics and philosophy but made no mention of Einstein’s interest in music — or music’s interest in him. That’s where we come in.

In addition to being a brilliant thinker, Einstein was a talented amateur violinist. On this day in 1934, he even performed the second violin part of Bach’s Double Concerto at a private recital in New York to raise money for scientists who had suffered at the hands of Hitler.

So, was Einstein any good? After that concert, the Musical America critic wrote, “The press had been asked not to criticize Professor Einstein’s playing. Unofficially, however, they confessed to being impressed. He played, according to their report, as all great artists play, with ‘technique,’ ‘expression’ and a complete absorption in his music.”

And Einstein himself has inspired more than a few musical works. The 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass, for example, features a solo violinist dressed as Einstein who wanders in and out of scenes. Music from Glass’s opera was quoted as an in-joke during a TV commercial showing Einstein trying to choose between Coke and Pepsi.

Philip Glass (b. 1937): Cadenza, from Einstein on the Beach; Philip Glass Ensemble; Michael Riesman, conductor; Nonesuch 79323

Today marks the anniversary of the creation of a famous classical music nickname, “Les Six” — French for “The Six.” That’s what Parisian music critic Henri Collet dubbed six composers in a magazine article on this day in 1920.

Three of the composers Collet named are performed more often these days — Darius Milhaud, Arthur Honegger and Francis Poulenc — while the other three composers — George Auric, Louis Durey and the only woman in the group, Germaine Tailleferre — are heard less frequently.

Though Tailleferre is counted among the neglected half of Les Six, her music has been having something of a revival lately, perhaps it’s a belated recognition that much of her work remains fresh and appealing. This music is from her Violin Sonata No. 1, composed in 1921 and dedicated to great French violinist Jacques Thibaud.

Born near Paris in 1892, Tailleferre was a prodigy with an astounding memory. Erik Satie proclaimed her his “musical daughter,” and she was also close friends with Maurice Ravel. Two unhappy marriages and resulting financial insecurity inhibited Tailleferre’s talent in later years, and dimmed her fame, but she continued to compose and teach until her death at 91, in 1983.

Germaine Tailleferre (1892-1983): Violin Sonata No. 1; Renate Eggebrecht, violin; Angela Gassenhuber, piano; Troubadisc 1406

French composer Olivier Messiaen played the piano part in one of the strangest premiere performances of the 20th century on today’s date in 1941. As the composer put it, “My Quartet for the End of Time was conceived and written during my captivity as a prisoner of war and received its premiere at Stalag 8a in Görlitz, Silesia.”

One of the four performers was cellist Etienne Pasquier, who offered this recollection:

“We were captured at Verdun. Our entire company was initially held in a large field near Nancy. Among our comrades was a clarinetist who had been allowed to keep his clarinet. Messiaen started to write a piece for him … as he was the only person there with an instrument. [That] solo was later to become the third movement of the quartet. The clarinetist practiced in the open field and I acted as his music stand. The piece seemed too difficult … and he complained about it to Messiaen. ’You’ll manage,’ was Messiaen’s only reply.”

Pasquier said the quartet’s premiere was a great success and led to the release of Messiaen and his three colleagues, because the Germans assumed — wrongly, it turns out — that the four musicians must have all been non-combatants.

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992): Quartet for the End of Time; Tashi; RCA/BMG 7835

Some instruments seem to have all the luck — or at least all the concertos!

If you play piano or violin, you have hundreds of concertos to choose from. But if your instrument is the harp — and you will forgive the pun — the pluckings are slim.

This hardly seems fair to one of mankind’s oldest instruments, depicted on murals from ancient Egypt and traditionally associated with King David in the Bible. In the 18th and early 19th century, there are a handful of great classical harp concertos by Handel, Mozart, and others. In the 20th century, things start to improve a little, with modern concertos by Gliere, Pierne, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Rodrigo.

On today’s date in 1955, we’re happy to report, one of the finest modern works for harp and orchestra had its premiere performance when harpist Nicanor Zabeleta premiered a new harp concerto by prolific Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos — with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by the composer.

One more recent addition came in 2000 from the pen of Finnish composer Einojuhanni Rautavaara. His harp concerto was commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra, who premiered the new work with Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä and Kathy Kienzle as soloist.

Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959): Harp Concerto; Catherine Michel, harp; Monte Carlo Opera Orchestra; Antonio de Almeida, conductor; Philips 462 179

Einojuhani Rautavaraa (1928-2016): Harp Concerto; Marielle Nordmann, harp; Helsinki Philharmonic; Leif Segerstam, conductor; Ondine 978