Composers Datebook

No four notes in classical music are more familiar than those that open Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Their powerful psychological resonance has often extended beyond music into overtly political contexts.

For example, on today’s date in 1941, the British Broadcasting Company began using those notes as a theme for radio shows beamed across Europe to boost morale during World War II. In Morse Code, the “dit-dit-dit-DAH” that opens the symphony stood for the letter “V,” which in turn stood for “victory.”  At the end of the war, in celebratory radio concerts on V-E Day and V-J Day, Arturo Toscanini conducted performances of Beethoven’s Symphonies No. 5 and No. 3.

Some decades later, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 was performed at the end of the Cold War, when, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leonard Bernstein conducted moving performances in East and West Berlin utilizing an orchestra with members drawn from Eastern and Western Europe, Israel and the U.S. 

For those performances, which were recorded and broadcast around the world, Bernstein asked the chorus to substitute the word “freiheit” (freedom) for the word “freude” (joy) in the choral setting of Schiller’s poem, Ode to Joy, which closes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 5 & Symphony No. 9; Vienna Philharmonic; Simon Rattle, conductor; EMI 57445

On today’s date in 1995, the four members of the Arditti String Quartet entered four helicopters warming up their engines at an airfield in Holland. Followed by video cameras, each player’s image and audio was relayed to huge video displays and loudspeakers on the ground for the mid-air premiere of a work titled — what else — Helicopter Quartet by avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Guided by click tracks, the Arditti Quartet coordinated their performance, which was mixed on the ground by the composer for an audience gathered in a concert auditorium during the 1995 Holland Festival.

This music, like all the music Stockhausen wrote in the last years of his life, fit into his cycle of seven operas, collectively titled Light. Like Wagner’s Ring operas from the 19th century, Stockhausen’s operas attempted to synthesize world mythology into a visionary program for world salvation.

Speaking of Wagner and helicopters automatically calls to mind the scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now, in which helicopters blare Wagner’s Ride of Valkyries from loudspeakers as they attack.

By a bizarre coincidence, Wagner’s opera, Die Walküre, also had its premiere performance on June 26, 1870!

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007): Helicoptor Quartet; Arditti Quartet; Discques Montaigne Arditti Edition CD-35

On today’s date in 1910, one week after his 28th birthday, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky attended the premiere performance of his ballet, The Firebird, at the Paris Opera, staged by the famous Ballet Russe ensemble of Serge Diaghilev.

Recalling the premiere, Stravinsky wrote:

“The first-night audience glittered indeed, but the fact that it was heavily perfumed is more vivid in my memory … I sat in Diaghilev’s box, where, at intermission, a path of celebrities, artists, dowagers, writers and balletomanes appeared … I was called to the stage to bow at the conclusion … I was still on stage when the final curtain came down and saw coming toward me Diaghilev and a dark man with a double forehead whom he introduced as Claude Debussy. The great composer spoke kindly about the music and invited me to dine with him. [Later,] I asked him what he had really thought of The Firebird. He said: ‘Well, one has to start somewhere …’”

Stravinsky himself had feared his ballet score would be thought a poor imitation of the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, his great teacher. Nevertheless, The Firebird was Stravinsky’s first big success, and remains one of his best-loved scores.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): The Firebird Ballet; Russian National Orchestra; Mikhail Pletnev, conductor; DG 453 434

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the biggest, longest, most massively orchestrated symphony of all time is the Gothic Symphony by British composer Havergal Brian.

The symphony was composed between 1919 and 1922, but didn’t receive its first performance until 40 years later, on today’s date in 1961, when Bryan Fairfax conducted it for the first time in Westminster. Five years later, Adrian Boult conducted a performance with the BBC Symphony at Royal Albert Hall in London that created quite a sensation and has been preserved in a recording.

Brian was born in 1876 to working class parents. His talent was encouraged his fellow English composers Edward Elgar and Granville Bantock, as well as leading German composer Richard Strauss, to whom Brian dedicated his Gothic Symphony. Despite that, his musical career never caught hold and for most of his life Brian toiled on in obscurity.

By the time of his death in 1972, Brian had completed 32 symphonies. Although the BBC had committed to performing all of them, not a note of his music was commercially issued on record during his lifetime, and he died without ever having heard most of his symphonies performed.

Havergal Brian (1876-1972): Symphony No. 1 (Gothic); Czecho-Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra; Ondrej Lenard, conductor; Marco Polo 223280

A New Yorker scanning the music pages of the New York Times for June 23, 1940 might have caught a headline announcing a new work by American composer William Grant Still, scheduled for its premiere the following day at an open-air concert by the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium. As bad luck would have it, storm clouds postponed the premiere until June 25.

Storm clouds of war were also on the horizon in Europe in 1940, but Still’s new piece dealt with violence of a different sort. And They Lynched Him on a Tree was a choral setting of a poem describing the aftermath of a racially motivated killing.

A crowd of 13,000 attended the Lewisohn Stadium program, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Artur Rodzinski, and singers from the New York Schola Cantorum and Wen Talbert Negro Choir.

Still was not present; in the summer of 1940 he was writing movie music in Hollywood. In 1943, he would resign from a lucrative studio contract, in part to protest the depiction of African-Americans in the film Stormy Weather, starring Lena Horne, Cab Calloway and Fats Waller.

William Grant Still (1895-1978): And They Lynched Him on a Tree; Plymouth Music Series Singers; Leigh Morris Chorale; Philip Brunelle, conductor; Collins Classics 14542

On this date in 1787, an obituary in London’s Morning Post noted the passing two days earlier of Carl Friedrich Abel, 63, a composer, concert impresario and viola da gamba virtuoso.

The viola da gamba was the forerunner of the modern cello. Its heyday was in the 17th century, but soon after the softer-voiced gamba lost out to the more powerful cello. Abel’s obituary remarked: “his favorite instrument was not in general use and would probably die with him.”

Well, as usual, the press got it partly right — the gamba did pass out of general use for almost 150 years, but the early music revival in the 20th century has renewed interest in the viola da gamba, and today there’s even new music being composed for this old instrument:  for example, Roy Whelden’s Prelude and Divisions on “She’s So Heavy” — based on the Beatles tune by Lennon and McCartney.

Roy Whelden was born in 1950 in New Hampshire. Until 23, his instruments were the trumpet, and secondarily the cello, but he fell in love with the viola da gamba and ended up playing with and composing for period instrument groups like Ensemble Alcatraz and American Baroque.

Roy Whelden (b. 1950): Prelude and Divisions on ‘She’s So Heavy’; Roy Whelden, viola da gamba; New Albion 59

There are dozens of famous cello concertos that get performed in concert halls these days, ranging from 18th century works by Italian Baroque master Antonio Vivaldi to dramatic 20th century works of Russian modernist Dmitri Shostakovich.

American composer Sean Hickey was commissioned by Russian cellist Dmitry Kouzov to write a new one, which received its premiere performance on today’s date in 2009.

“I wanted to fuse my interest in neo-classical clarity and design with the songful, heroic nature of the greatest cello concerto literature. My Cello Concerto had its Russian premiere at the Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace, a neo-Baroque edifice on the banks of the Fontanka River in Saint Petersburg … [It] was then recorded in the legendary Melodiya Studios on Vasilevsky Island in St. Petersburg, known from Soviet times as producing recordings from the likes of Shostakovich, Rostropovich, Mravinsky, and many others,” Hickey said.

“The Russian orchestra, after rehearsing the piece for days, even picked up on a buried quotation from Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony in the final pages of my piece. It’s easy to forget in the glittering and watery metropolis, which rivals any European city for beauty and culture, that St. Petersburg is a city full of ghosts,” he concluded.

Sean Hickey (b. 1970): Cello Concerto; Dmitry Kouzov, cello; St. Petersburg State Symphony; Vladimir Lande, conductor; Delos 3448

On today’s date in 1901, English composer Edward Elgar conducted the first performance of his cheery, upbeat, and slightly rowdy Cockaigne Overture, a commission from the Royal Philharmonic Society dedicated to his many friends in British Orchestras.

Now Cockaigne does not refer to the schedule two narcotic, but rather an old nickname for the City of London, originating in a very old poem about a utopian land where rivers flow with wine and houses are made of cake and barley sugar.

Elgar said he wanted to come up with something “cheerful and London-y, stout and steak … honest, healthy, humorous and strong, but not vulgar."

The new overture proved an instant hit, and critics of the day compared it favorably to the festive prelude to  Act I of  Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger. Elgar made two recordings of the work, conducting the Royal Albert Hall Orchestra in 1926 and the BBC Symphony in 1933.

By chance during that 1933 recording session, as a backup, some takes were cut simultaneously to two separate wax master recording machines from two separate microphones. This enabled engineers many decades later to blend the two simultaneous “takes” into an “accidental stereo” version of the old mono recording.

Edward Elgar (1857-1934): Cockaigne Overture; BBC Symphony; Edward Elgar, conductor; 1933 ‘accidental stereo’; Naxos 8.111022

On today’s date in 1926, avant-garde musical piece Ballet Mechanique, scored for multiple pianos and percussion, had its public premiere at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris. Its composer was a 25-year old American named George Antheil.

Antheil’s piece had its private premiere earlier that year at the palatial Parisian home of a very beautiful — and very rich — young American who wanted to break into elite European society. He suggested the lure of cutting edge music and buckets of free champagne would win over her specially invited audience of Parisian blue bloods.

Antheil described the scene as follows: “Eight grand pianos filled up the giant living room completely and without an extra inch of room, while the xylophones and percussion were located in the side room and on the giant staircase. [The conductor] stood at the top of the piano in the center. To this already jammed-packed house, add 200 guests!”

Maybe it was the music, maybe it was the champagne, but it did the trick. “The last we saw of our beautiful young hostess that day,” Antheil recalled, “she was being thrown up and down in a blanket by two princesses, a duchess and three Italian marchesas.”

George Antheil (1900-1959): Ballet Mecanique; Ensemble Modern; H.K. Gruber, conductor; RCA 68066

On today’s date in 1985, a brand-new piece of music had its premiere in a brand-new concert hall in Minnesota. American composer Paul Fetler wrote his jaunty Capriccio to celebrate both the first concert of the seventh season of conductor Jay Fishman’s Minneapolis Chamber Symphony and the new Ordway Music Theater in St. Paul, which had opened its doors to the public that year.

“When Jay Fishman commissioned me to compose a dedicatory work for their opening concert, I immediately thought of a composition which would be light-hearted, buoyant, and playful,” Felter wrote, “I felt for once that the ‘serious’ contemporary music scene (which I often find to be super serious) could stand a bit of contrast. Perhaps the time is ripe to have a few pieces which are less ‘profound,’ something with the flair of Rossini to divert the listener from the daily burdens of life.”

He concluded: “There is no story behind the Capriccio, but the whimsy and playfulness are intended to suggest a musical caper of a kind. To bring this out, I made primary use of the woodwinds, in particular the flute and piccolo, with their skips, runs, and arpeggios.”

Paul Fetler (1920-2018): Capriccio; Ann Arbor Symphony; Arie Lipsky, conductor; Naxos 8.559606