Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1885, at a public rehearsal at the Old Metropolitan Opera House, the New York Symphony, led by fresh-faced 23-year-old conductor Walter Damrosch, performed 61-year-old Austrian composer Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 3 for the first time in America.

The New York Times critic, in fairness to this unfamiliar composer, attended both the rehearsal and concert before venturing an opinion:

“As to form and workmanship, it is a highly commendable achievement,” he wrote. “The composer’s motives are distinct and fluent, the instrumentation is rich, though not cloying … Unfortunately, there is not in the whole composition a measure in which a spark of inspiration, or a grain of inventiveness is discernible.” 

Other New York papers were more blunt: “A dreary waste of sound … formless, weird, flimsy, uncongenial and empty” according to The Sun.

The Post observed, “The first movement is marked ‘misterioso’, but the only mystery about it is how it ever came to be written, printed and performed.”

In fairness to those critics of 1885, it would take many decades before American audiences started to acquire a taste for Bruckner’s particular blend of music and mystery.

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896): Symphony No. 3; BBC Scottish Symphony; Osmo Vänskä, conductor; Hyperion 67200

In many denominations, the Christian calendar or liturgical year begins with the season of Advent, the four Sundays preceding Christmas. The word “advent” comes from the Latin “adventus,” which means “arrival” or “coming,” because Advent celebrates both the joyful anticipation of the arrival of the baby Jesus and the need for believers to prepare for the second coming of their Savior at the Last Judgement.

In 1724, a devout German Lutheran church musician named Johann Sebastian Bach crafted a cantata, a work for a small instrumental ensemble with solo voices and chorus, to be performed on the First Sunday of Advent, which fell on today’s date that year.

At Bach’s church, the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, there would have been readings from Luther’s translation of the Bible appropriate for the day, so Bach asked a poet friend for a text meditating on them, and took for his musical inspiration Luther’s Advent hymn, Nun Komm, der Heiden Heiland, which in English means Now Come, Savior of the Heathens.

That hymn appeared as the first in the Thomaskirche’s hymnal, which meant the church year was off and running once again. Now, it was Bach’s responsibility to provide a cantata for performance each Sunday, and during his time in Leipzig he would write over 200 of them — which no doubt made him a favorite customer with anyone in Leipzig selling music manuscript paper!

J.S. Bach (1685-1750): Cantata No. 62 Nun Komm, der Heiden Heiland; Monteverdi Choir; English Baroque Soloists; John Eliot Gardiner, conductor; Archiv 463 588

On today’s date in 1949, Leonard Bernstein conducted the Boston Symphony in the first complete performance of Olivier Messiaen’s ten-movement, 75-minute long Turangalila Symphony.

“Turangalila” is the Sanskrit word for love, and Messiaen’s score is meant to be a voluptuous evocation of the emotion at its most exalted state.

Messiaen had spent the summer of 1949 as composer-in-residence at Tanglewood at the invitation of Russian conductor and new music impresario Serge Koussevitzky, who was also Bernstein’s mentor. Before arriving in Tanglewood, Messiaen had written to Bernstein as follows: “I have put into my symphony all of my strengths of love, of hope and of musical research. But I know you are a man of genius and that you will conduct it the way I feel it.” 

The exotic French score was a modest success in Massachusetts. At least it provoked no riot, but then, as The Christian Science Monitor noted, “If Bostonians suffer, they suffer in silence.”

When Bernstein and the Boston Symphony took the new score to New York’s Carnegie Hall, however, critical reaction ranged from “a really rousing experience” to the view that “the trashiest Hollywood composers have met their match.”

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992): Turangalila Symphony; Concertgebouw Orchestra; Riccardo Chailly, conductor; London 436 626

On today’s date in 1957, the New York City Ballet staged a new collaboration between great Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky and great Russian-born choreographer Georges Balanchine. 

The ballet company had been asking Stravinsky for nearly a decade to write a third ballet on a classical subject to make up a trilogy that would include his two earlier dance works on Greek mythology, Apollo from 1928 and Orpheus from 1948. Just as they were about to despair that Stravinsky would ever do it, he unexpectedly obliged — if not with a Greek myth, at least with a Greek word: his new ballet was titled Agon, the Greek word for contest or struggle.

On a more modern note, by the 1950s, as Stravinsky’s assistant Robert Craft recalled, “Something called twelve-tone music was in the air, and Agon is about 12 dancers and 12 tones.”

Agon is also set in 12 scenes, and some of its movements were consciously laid out in multiples of 12 bars. Balanchine himself said in working on the ballet, “Stravinsky and I constructed every possibility of dividing 12” — which in dance terms, meant abstract solos, duets, trios and quartets to match the abstract, if eminently danceable, nature of Stravinsky’s score.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): Agon Ballet; Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra; Michael Stern, conductor; Denon 78972

Ever wonder how composers choose the stories for their operas? Here’s one answer, courtesy of the American composer Tobias Picker: “My sister was dusting her bookshelf in 1998, and a copy of Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin fell off. She picked it up, read it and then recommended it to me for my next opera.”

And so three years later, on today’s date in 2001, the Dallas Opera premiered Thérèse Raquin, a new opera by Tobias Picker. Zola’s novel is a clinical examination of adultery, murder and a double suicide. “The novel exudes ‘opera’ from every page,” Picker said.

In his setting, traditional harmonies spiral off into atonality, just as the ordered world of the opera’s characters gradually falls apart. Picker has written successfully in both styles, so combining the two seemed only natural. “That tension has always been there in my music,” he said.

“I think the opera made some people uncomfortable,” Picker said. “It affected people strongly and in different ways. One woman came up to me at the third and final Dallas performance and said: ‘I just love this. It’s the third time I’ve seen it.’ Perhaps she had experienced the same catharsis that I had when I composed it!”

Tobias Picker (b. 1954): Thérèse Raquin; Dallas Opera Orchestra; Graeme Jenkins, conductor; Chandos 9659

On today’s date in 1719, the Papal ambassador in Lisbon noted the arrival of a fellow Italian, composer Domenico Scarlatti. Scarlatti was in his early 30s, and the son of Alessandro Scarlatti, a famous and influential composer of Baroque operas in Naples.

At the time, Scarlatti was nowhere near as famous as his father, and had come to Lisbon to serve as the music teacher for eight-year-old Portuguese princess Maria Magdalena Barbara. This teaching gig turned out to be the most important event in his life — and for two reasons.

First, the little princess was mad about music, and became a talented performer on the harpsichord. Second, in 1733, when the princess was 22, she married into the Spanish royal house, becoming the Queen of Spain. Scarlatti remained in her service for the next 25 years, composing for her amusement over 500 harpsichord sonatas, infused with the rhythms and colors of Spanish and Portuguese folk music and with the plucked sound of the harpsichord often mimicking a Spanish guitar.

Only a small number of Scarlatti’s sonatas were published during his lifetime, but long after his death all surviving manuscripts were tracked down and published.

Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757): Harpsichord Sonata; Gustav Leonhardt, harpsichord; Sony 61820

On today’s date in 1919, eminent French conductor Pierre Monteux led the Boston Symphony in the premiere performance of The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, a new orchestral score written by American composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes.

This music was inspired by the famous Romantic poem of that name by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but owes its exotic orchestral coloring to Griffes’ interest in the music of Asia and the Pacific Rim. Although Griffes himself never traveled there, he knew someone who had: influential Canadian soprano Eva Gauthier, famous for her avant-garde song recitals that included music by Stravinsky and Schoenberg, and her later association with Gershwin and Ravel. It was the well-traveled Gauthier who introduced Griffes to the musical traditions of Japan and Java.

The 1919 Boston premiere of Kubla Khan was the highpoint of Griffes’ career, and all the critics agreed a major new talent had arrived on the American music scene.

Unfortunately, one month later, Griffes took ill and in a few months died from a severe lung infection. He was just 35. How his music would have developed had Griffes lived remains one of the most intriguing “what might have beens” of American music.

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920): The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan; Boston Symphony; Seiji Ozawa, conductor; New World 273

On today’s date in 1972, almost two decades after its premiere, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony received its first successful concert performance by the Munich Philharmonic led by Rudolf Kempe. A recording was made with the same performers, supervised and produced by the composer’s son, George Korngold.

Korngold had died in 1957, so he was not able to enjoy the eventual success of this major work. He completed his Symphony in 1952, and its Austrian Radio premiere in 1954 had been a disaster. As the composer put it: “The performance, which was an execution in every sense of the term, took place under the most unfavorable conditions imaginable, with inadequate rehearsals and an exhausted and overworked orchestra.”

Korngold had become an American citizen during the 1940s, and dedicated his symphony to the memory of America’s wartime President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The postwar European premiere of his Symphony came at a time when shifting tastes in music made his late-Romantic style seem hopelessly old-fashioned to many of critics of that day. “More corn than gold” was one dismissive appraisal of his style.

These days, Korngold’s music — including his Symphony — make more frequent, better-played, and eagerly welcomed appearances on concert programs.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957): Symphony; Philadelphia Orchestra; Franz Welser-Most, conductor; EMI 56169

On today’s date in 1937, a gala concert in Berlin presented the premiere performance of Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto, a work composed in the fall of 1853, shortly before Schumann’s tragic mental collapse.

The concerto was never given a public performance during Schumann’s lifetime, although great 19th century violinist Joseph Joachim read through the score during an orchestral rehearsal early in 1854 and played the work privately in 1855 with piano accompaniment provided by Schumann’s wife, Clara. Clara, Joachim and their mutual friend Johannes Brahms all judged the concerto subpar and perhaps embarrassing evidence of Schumann’s declining mental state.

Oddly enough, the 1937 premiere in Berlin, attended by none other than Adolf Hitler, was presented as part of the Nazi’s Strength Through Joy cultural program. German commentators touted Schumann’s ties to the German “folk,” while American critics bemoaned that most of the great German violinists of the day were unavailable for this important premiere, having all left Germany for racial or political reasons.

On this side of the Atlantic, it was violinist Yehudi Menuhin who gave the American premiere of Schumann’s long-neglected concerto a month later, first with piano accompaniment at Carnegie Hall, then later with the St. Louis Symphony.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856): Violin Concerto; Gidon Kremer, violin; Philharmonia Orchestra; Riccardo Muti, conductor; EMI 69334

As a busy church musician, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote around 300 sacred cantatas. That seems a high number to us — but consider that his contemporaries Telemann and Graupner composed well over a thousand cantatas each!

In what surviving documents we have, Bach himself rarely uses the Italian term “cantata” to describe these pieces, preferring “concertos” or simply “the music” to describe these works intended for Lutheran church services. It was only in the 19th century, as Bach’s music was being collected and catalogued, that the term “cantata” would become the official label for this sizeable chunk of Bach’s output.

On today’s date in 1731, the 27th Sunday after Trinity that year, Bach presented what would become one of his most popular cantatas: Wachet auf, Ruft uns die Stimme, or Awake, the Voice Calls to Us. In that 19th century catalog of Bach’s works, this is his Cantata No. 140.

The text is based on a Gospel parable recounting the story of the wise and foolish virgins, who are called, ready or not, to participate in a wedding feast. The opening choral melody may have been already familiar to Bach’s performers and congregation, but his dramatic setting of it is downright ingenious.

J.S. Bach (1685-1750): Cantata No. 140 (Wachet auf, Ruft uns die Stimme); Bach Ensemble; Helmuth Rilling, conductor; Laudate 98.857