Composers Datebook

The comic opera Don Pasquale by Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti had its first performance in Paris on this date in the year 1843. To this day it remains one of his best-loved and most frequently performed works. In all, Donizetti wrote about 70 operas, sometimes turning out four per year.

Amazing as this seems today, it wasn’t at all uncommon in the 19th century, especially in Italy, where audience demand for new works was insatiable. Back then, when composers vied with one another for speed, Donizetti was asked if he believed that Rossini had written The Barber of Seville in only 13 days. “Why not?” quipped Donizetti. “He’s so lazy!”

In our time, the corollary of a busy opera composer like Donizetti might be a hard-pressed Hollywood composer like John Williams, who could quip that Donizetti was the lazy one. After all, he has surpassed Donizetti’s count of 70 operas with well over 100 film scores.

Williams started out in the 1960s writing scores for TV shows like Wagon Train and Gilligan’s Island before shifting primarily to movies and crafting the iconic soundtracks like Jaws, E.T., Star Wars and Schindler’s List.

Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848): Don Pasquale Overture; Philharmonia Orchestra; Riccardo Muti, condcutor; EMI 54490

John Williams (b. 1932): Devil’s Dance, from Witches of Eastwick; Boston Pops; John Williams, conductor; Philips 422 385

On today’s date in 1843, Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman had its premiere performance in Dresden. The opera’s sea-swept overture was supposedly inspired by a stormy voyage Wagner and his wife Minna took from Riga to Paris, their journey interrupted by an emergency stop in a Norwegian fjord due to rough weather, as well as a longer layover in London.

As usual, Wagner was fleeing creditors, and made the cramped voyage — as usual — in extravagant style, namely in the company of a huge Newfoundland dog he named Robber. Imagine, if you will, being cheek-by-jowl with a wet, seasick Newfie. That North Sea crossing must have seemed as interminable as the Flying Dutchman’s eternal wanderings!

Negotiating London also proved a challenge, as Wagner recounted in his memoirs:

“The dog whisked round every corner and dragged us every which way. So the three of us sought refuge in a cab, which took us to the Horseshoe Tavern, a sailor’s pub recommended to us by our captain ... the narrow London cabs were meant to carry two people facing each other, so we had to lay Robber across our laps, his head through one window and his tail through the other...”

Richard Wagner (1813-1883): The Flying Dutchman Overture; Berlin State Orchestra; Daniel Barenboim, conductor; Teldec 88063

We’d like to start the new year with some upbeat music to honor American composer and bandleader Edwin Franko Goldman, who was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on today’s date in 1878.

At the tender age of 14, Goldman attended the National Conservatory of Music in New York City, where he studied composition with Antonin Dvořák. At 15, Goldman became a professional trumpet player with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra.

In 1911, he founded the New York Military Band, later known simply as the Goldman Band. They performed hundreds of public concerts around the city, including on the Mall in Central Park. In the 1930s, radio broadcasts made the Goldman Band famous nationwide. Their catchy signature tune, On the Mall, was composed by Goldman and invited the audiences to sing — or even whistle — along.

Goldman composed about 150 band works of his own, and commissioned many more, including classics by composers such as Virgil Thomson, Walter Piston and Howard Hanson. The Goldman Band, led by Goldman or his son Richard, also premiered new works by leading European composers.

Goldman founded the American Bandmasters Association in 1929 and served as its Second Honorary Life President after John Philip Sousa.

Edwin Franko Goldman (1878-1956): On the Mall; Eastman Wind Ensemble; Frederick Fennell, conductor; Mercury 434 334

In the 1940s, the Boston Symphony gave the premiere of more than 60 new orchestral works — most of them conducted by the charismatic and wealthy Serge Koussevitzky, the music director of the Boston Symphony.

And why not? It was the Koussevitzky Foundation that commissioned most of those pieces in the first place, and certainly Maestro Koussevitzky had the knack for picking winners and advancing the careers of composers he admired. In the 1940s, for example, Koussevitzky premiered no less than four major works by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu. On today’s date in 1943, one of these pieces, Martinu’s Violin Concerto No. 2, received its first performance under Koussevitzky with Mischa Elman as the soloist.

But not all the Boston premieres were conducted by Koussevitzky. Earlier that same December of 1943, the American composer and conductor Howard Hanson led the orchestra in the first performance of his Symphony No. 4, and on today’s date in 1948, the premiere of his Piano Concerto, with the Boston Symphony and Czech pianist Rudolf Firkusny as soloist. Like the Martinu concerto, this, too, was a Koussevitzky Foundation commission.

Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959): Violin Concerto No. 2; Josef Suk, violin; Czech Philharmonic; Vaclav Neumann, conductor; Supraphon 11 0702

Howard Hanson (1896-1981): Piano Concerto; Alfred Mouledous, piano; Eastman-Rochester Orchestra; Howard Hanson, conductor; Mercury 434 370

For fans of old-time radio shows, it’s known as the theme for The FBI in Peace and War. But among classical music buffs its title is “March” from Prokofiev’s opera The Love of Three Oranges.

This satirical, fairytale opera had its premiere performance in Chicago on today’s date in 1921, with Prokofiev himself was on hand to supervise the rehearsals. His opera received a lavish production which cost Chicago $250,000 — a staggering amount in 1921. The premiere was a modest success, even though the Chicago Tribune pronounced Prokofiev’s music “too much for this generation.” The production then traveled to New York for one performance which was savaged by the press as “Russian jazz with Bolshevist flourishes.”

Summing up his American experience, Prokofiev wrote, “In my pocket was a thousand dollars; in my head, noise from all the running around and a desire to go away somewhere quiet to work.”

In the 1930s, Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union, where his music had to toe the Stalinist Party Line. It’s one of life’s little ironies that a theme by a then Soviet composer would be chosen for a radio show about the FBI that aired during the height of America’s postwar “Red Scare.”

Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953): March from The Love of Three Oranges; Montreal Symphony; Charles Dutoit, conductor; London 440 331

On today’s date in 1903, violinist and conductor Harry West led the first performance by the Seattle Symphony. At that time, the orchestra was comprised of just 24 players. For their first program, the aptly named Maestro West conducted Schubert and Rossini, two long-dead classical masters, and also programmed works by three living composers: Max Bruch, Jules Massenet and Pablo Sarasate.

More recently, under music director Gerard Schwarz, the Seattle Symphony earned worldwide attention with its recordings of both classical and contemporary works, including critically acclaimed recordings of symphonic works by modern American masters like Howard Hanson, David Diamond and Alan Hovhaness, as well as newer pieces by a younger generation of American composers including Richard Danielpour and Stephen Albert.

That tradition continued under Gerard Schwarz’ successor Ludovic Morlot, who took particular interest in fostering music from Seattle composers, including composers within the orchestra. The Seattle Symphony commissioned and premiered Become Ocean, a work by American composer John Luther Adams, which went on to win the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Music and the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

Max Bruch (1838-1920): Violin Concerto No. 2; Nai-Yuan Hu, violin; Seattle Symphony; Gerard Schwarz, conductor; Delos 3156

John Luther Adams (b. 1953): ‘Become Ocean’; Seattle Symphony; Ludovic Morlot, conductor; Cantaloupe 21161

Émile Lemoine was a French mathematician and passionate amateur musician who, in 1861, founded a members-only chamber music society he called “La Trompette,” or “The Trumpet,” a society that soon included some of the most famous musicians in Paris, including composer Camille Saint-Saëns. For years Lemoine begged Saint-Saëns to compose a chamber work for his society, asking only, not surprisingly, that it feature the trumpet.

Saint-Saëns eventually fulfilled Lemoine’s wish, composing a Septet for the unusual combination of trumpet, two violins, viola, cello, double bass, and piano, a work influenced somewhat by his love of 17th century French music and dances.

The Septet was successfully premiered at a La Trompette series concert on today’s date in 1880 and published the next year. Some consider it a minor masterpiece for its skillful writing, musical humor, and effective balancing of the unusual instrumental forces.

Of all his works, it was the septet that Saint-Saëns reportedly liked the most, even though he once confessed to Lemoine, “When I think how much you pestered me to make me produce, against my better judgment, this piece that I did not want to write and which has become one of my great successes, I am at loss to explain it.”

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921): Préambule from Septet; Trio a Cordes Francais; EMI 47543

Austrian composer Anton Bruckner’s symphonies were introduced to American audiences in the 1880s, when Bruckner was still alive and composing. Walter Damrosch introduced Bruckner’s Third to New York audiences in 1885, Theodore Thomas conducted the Seventh in Chicago in 1886, and Anton Seidl led the first New York performance of the Fourth in 1888.

Bruckner, then in his 60s, was thrilled to learn that Americans were performing his music. He would have been less thrilled had he seen the reviews. “Formless, weird, fragmentary, flimsy, uncongenial, and empty,” were just a few of the adjectives that greeted his music.

After his death in 1896, it was the Boston Symphony’s turn to take up his cause. On today’s date in 1901, Wilhelm Gericke led the American premiere of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5, to mixed reaction: “Interesting, scholarly and very skillfully orchestrated, ”said some, “not very coherent or systematic,” said others.

When Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 debuted at a Boston Symphony matinee conducted by Max Fiedler in 1909, one reviewer wrote, “The work is, of course, massive, but it is massive like a business building, not like a mountain; it impresses one, but it does not move the emotions ... Altogether it made a trying afternoon.”

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896): Symphony No. 5; Saarbrucken Radio Symphony; Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, conductor; Arte Nova 43305

There are several examples in the catalog of German Romantic composer Johannes Brahms of works that emerged from his pen in contrasting pairs. The most famous being his two concert overtures: the comic and upbeat Academic Festival Overture, and the dark, stoic pessimism of his Tragic Overture.

While composing the jaunty Academic Festival Overture in 1880, to acknowledge an Honorary Doctorate he had received the previous year from the University of Breslau, Brahms felt compelled to write a more serious companion piece. To his friend the publisher Simrock, he wrote, “I could not refuse my melancholy nature the satisfaction of composing an overture for a tragedy.” To another friend, Carl Reinecke, he wrote, “One weeps, the other laughs.”

Hans Richter conducted the premiere of the Tragic Overture in Vienna on today’s date in 1880, and the following month Brahms himself led the premiere of his Academic Festival Overture in Breslau. And the new works soon came to the New World: On November 12, 1881, the enterprising Theodore Thomas conducted the New York Philharmonic in the American premiere of the Tragic Overture, and one week later, the Academic Festival Overture as well with the Brooklyn Philharmonic.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): ‘Academic Festival Overture’; New York Philharmonic; Kurt Masur, conductor; Teldec 77291

Johannes Brahms: ‘Tragic Overture’; Vienna Symphony; Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor; Philips 438 760

Today, some unfamiliar Christmas carols — or perhaps very familiar ones, if you’re Polish.

In 1946, the Director of Polish Music Publishing asked composer Witold Lutosławski to make some new arrangements of old Polish carols. During World War II, Poland had been under the control of Nazi Germany, and after the war dominated by the Soviet Union. In addition to material hardships, in the cultural sphere 1946 was a difficult time for Polish artists. Overnight Communist ideology was imposed on all endeavors, including music. The Polish Music Publishing director probably thought collecting and publishing Christmas carol arrangements was a relatively safe activity.

And so, Lutosławski collected and arranged 20 old Polish Christmas carols for voice and piano, and these were premiered in Kraków soon after. In the political and cultural turmoil of the decades that followed, these arrangements were pretty much forgotten until almost 40 years later, when Lutosławski re-arranged them for solo soprano, chorus, and orchestra. 

And, even if you don’t speak Polish, if you sing in a choir looking for some new Christmas music, you should know these Lutosławski carol arrangements are available in English-language versions, too.

Witold Lutosławski (1913-1994): The Angels Came to the Shepherds and Hey, We Look Forward Now (excerpts), from 20 Polish Christmas Carols; Polish Radio Chorus, Kraców; Polish National Radio Chorus and Symphony; Antoni Wit, conductor; Naxos 8.555994