Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1935, the Kolisch Quartet gave the premiere performance of Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 5 in the auditorium of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. That performance was part of a chamber music festival sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, one of the 20th century’s great musical patrons.

In 1925, she created a foundation to enable the Library of Congress to present concerts and commission new works in the nation’s capital. Among the major American works commissioned by the Coolidge Foundation were Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring and George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children. Coolidge herself was an accomplished musician and amateur composer. One of her chief advisors was Dutch cellist and conductor Hans Kindler, who once contacted Sibelius with a Coolidge commission for a new cello concerto, which, sadly, never materialized. It was Kindler who suggested commissioning a string quartet from Bartók, this time with success.

After its premiere, the critic for The Musical Courier wrote: “Mr. Bartók’s [new quartet] is impressionistic and well-wrought.”

The critic for Musical America was less impressed: “It honestly treats folk melody with a healthy vigor … [but] there is … no subtle play of light and shade.”

Béla Bartók (1881-1945): String Quartet No. 5; Emerson String Quartet; DG 423 657

On today’s date in 1805, Ludwig van Beethoven conducted the first public performance of his Symphony No. 3, subtitled Eroica at Theater an der Wien in Vienna. It was a symphony bolder, louder, and twice as long as any Mozart or Haydn ever wrote and must have been a real challenge for the musicians and audiences of Beethoven’s day.

Prior to the first public performance, several private rehearsals and performances had taken place at the palace of Beethoven’s patron, Prince Lobkowitz. Apparently, the prince had to add 22 extra musicians to his court orchestra, including a third French horn player Beethoven requested.

Speaking of French horns, at one point in the symphony’s first movement, one of them seems to come in early, intoning the main theme. It’s what Beethoven intended, but even Beethoven’s secretary, Ferdinard Ries, attending the first rehearsal of the new work, assumed it was a mistake, and said so to Beethoven — who was NOT amused — as Ries recalled in his memoir:

"’That damned hornist!,’ [I said.] ‘Can't he count? It sounds frightfully wrong.’ I nearly got my ears boxed, and Beethoven did not forgive me for a long time.”

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1828): Symphony No. 3 (Eroica); Berlin Philharmonic; Herbert von Karajan, conductor; DG 429 036

In 1920, a French publisher commissioned several works in memory of Claude Debussy, who had died two years earlier. Maurice Ravel’s contribution was a single-movement piece for violin and cello.

Ravel then expanded this music into a four-movement sonata he titled Duo — perhaps thinking of the Duo for the same instruments by Zoltán Kodály. And if Ravel’s music at times sounds Hungarian, perhaps another reason was his meeting with Béla Bartók while working on this piece.

In any case, Ravel was trying something new and different, and said so: “I believe this sonata marks a turning point in the evolution of my career. In it, thinness of texture is pushed to the extreme. Harmonic charm is renounced, coupled with an increasingly conspicuous reaction in favor of melody.”

Violinist Hélène Jourdan-Morhange and cellist Maurice Maréchal gave the premiere performance of Ravel’s Duo at the Salle Pleyel in Paris on today’s date in 1922.

“It's complicated,” Jourdan-Morhange told Ravel. “The cello has to sound like a flute and the violin like a drum. It must be fun writing such difficult stuff, but no one's going to play it except virtuosos!”

“Good,” replied Ravel a smile, “then I won’t be murdered by amateurs!”

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937): Sonata (Duo) for Violin and Cello; Nigel Kennedy, violin; Lynn Harrell, cello; EMI 56963

On today’s date in 1946, composer Lou Harrison conducted the premiere performance of an orchestral work written 45 years earlier. It was Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 3, composed between 1901 and 1904.

Early in 1911, Ives had sent the score for his symphony for consideration to the major New York orchestras of his day, Walter Damrosch’s New York Symphony and Gustav Mahler’s New York Philharmonic. Damrosch never responded, but it seems Mahler took notice. In 1911, the gravely ill Mahler took Ives’ score with him when he returned to Vienna for treatment, apparently with the intention of performing it. Sadly, Mahler died before that could happen, and Ives’ Third would have to wait another 35 years for its premiere.

Lou Harrison’s 1946 performance was given by the Little Symphony of New York at Carnegie Hall’s smaller chamber music room. The critic for Musical America wrote: “Ives’ Third is an American masterpiece … as unmistakably a part of our land as Huckleberry Finn or Moby Dick.”

Ives’s Symphony won the 1946 Pulitzer Prize for Music. When notified of the award, the crusty Mr. Ives, then elderly, ill and living in retirement, responded: “Prizes are for boys — I’m grown up.”

Charles Ives (1874-1954): Symphony No. 3; Concertgebouw Orchestra; Michael Tilson Thomas, cond. CBS/Sony 37823

On today’s date in 1977, Polish composer Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 was performed for the first time in Royan, France, by the Southwest German Radio Orchestra.

Gorecki’s symphony has a subtitle — Symphony of Sorrowful Songs — and sets three texts set for solo soprano voice: a 15th century lamentation from a Polish monastery, a prayer inscribed on the wall of a WWII prison cell at the headquarters of the Polish Gestapo and a sad Polish folk song.

Fifteen years after its premiere, a recording of Gorecki’s symphony featuring American soprano Dawn Upshaw and conductor David Zinman received some airplay on a British radio station and quickly soared to the top of the pop charts in the U.K. Radio stations in the U.S. started playing it as well, with the same effect.

Was it a sign of an international religious revival? A delayed reaction to the collapse of Communism in Europe? Even Gorecki himself was perplexed: “Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music,” he wrote. “Somehow I hit the right note—something, somewhere that had been lost to them. I feel they instinctively knew what they needed.”

Henryk Gorecki (1933-2010): Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs); Dawn Upshaw, soprano; London Sinfonietta; David Zinman, cond. Nonesuch 79282

The composer of “Dance of the Cuckoos” was born on this date in 1905.

Thomas Marvin Hatley worked for the Hal Roach film studio that produced the famous Laurel and Hardy comedies, for which he wrote memorable music. His “Cuckoo” theme was originally used as a time cue for a radio station located on the Hal Roach studio lot, but when Stan Laurel heard it, he knew it would be perfect as the Laurel and Hardy signature theme.

Between 1929 and 1940, Hatley wrote over 800 compositions for the studio. His scores for two Laurel and Hardy films were nominated for Academy Awards. But Hal Roach didn’t seem to appreciate Hatley’s music. In 1939, Hatley was fired by Roach, but at the insistence of Stan Laurel, Hatley returned to score one final Laurel and Hardy film.

Hatley went on to become a Los Angeles-area cocktail lounge pianist, and quipped that he earned more in that career than he did working for Hal Roach.

In his senior years, Hatley would attend meetings of Laurel and Hardy fan clubs in California, happily playing the piano to accompany old silent film era Hal Roach comedies.

Marvin Hatley (1905 - 1986) — "Dance of the Cuckoos" (Van Phillips and His Orchestra) British 78-rpm recording ('Dance of the Cuckoos')

Prolific British composer Havergal Brian wrote 32 symphonies. His last was completed in 1968 when he was 92. Just before completing his Symphony No. 32, perhaps as insurance in case he died before finishing it, Brian wrote a shorter work as kind of coda or capstone to his output. He gave it a Latin title, Ave atque Vale (Hail and Farewell in English).

In a letter to Robert Simpson, a fellow composer and friend, Brian said he didn’t intend this work as any kind of confession or comment on his life or music, but a purely abstract “last word” from him as a composer.

Ave atque Vale received its premiere performance on today’s date in 1973, six months after Brian’s death, in a studio recording by the London Philharmonic intended for a BBC broadcast that never materialized.

Brian’s music was seldom performed during his lifetime. He enjoyed some initial success in the early years of the 20th century, and a revival of interest in the 1950s and 60s, but since then his late Romantic, restless and often melancholic music — a quirky blend of Elgar and Mahler — is heard most often via recordings sponsored by the Havergal Brian Society.

Havergal Brian (1876-1972): Ave atque Vale; BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra; Garry Walker, cond.; Toccata Classics 110

Troubled Island, an opera about Haiti by William Grant Still, was written in 1938 but had to wait 11 years for its first performance, which took place on today’s date in 1949.

That production was by the New York City Opera, and the original cast included baritone Robert McFerrin Sr., whose son, Bobby McFerrin Jr., also became a famous singer. Speaking of familiar names, the libretto for Troubled Island was written by Langston Hughes, and its dance sequences were choreographed by George Balanchine.

Still was born in Mississippi in 1895, studied music at Oberlin Conservatory and took private lessons from arch conservative composer George Whitefield Chadwick, as well as avant-garde firebrand Edgard Varèse. Like many composers active in the 1930s and ‘40s, he moved to Los Angeles to write for Hollywood, but also achieved fame as a preeminent African-American composer of concert works.

The critical reception to Troubled Island in 1949 was negative. One review wrote, “Troubled Island sounds rather as if the libretto of Tosca had been set to the music of The Desert Song.”

But with the hindsight of history, any project involving Still, Hughes and Balanchine sounds downright intriguing.

William Grant Still (1895-1978): Symphony No. 1 (‘Afro-American’); Detroit Symphony; Neeme Järvi, cond. Chandos 9154

“Call me Ishmael” Birge. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, then, I account it high time to get to the nearest Starbucks as soon as I can.

With apologies to Hermann Melville, today marks the anniversary of the opening of the first Starbucks coffee shop in Seattle. Now, since Starbucks gets its name from the first mate of the Pequod, the whaling ship made famous in Melville’s classic American novel Moby Dick, in addition to a steaming hot cup of Starbucks coffee, we celebrate composer Jake Heggie’s ambitious Moby Dick opera, which premiered in Dallas in 2010.

“When I write an opera, at a certain point the characters start singing to me,” Heggie said about wrestling with his great white whale. “But this was the first piece where I felt there was a physical cost, an exhaustion. ... Moby Dick deserved that.”

And no doubt Dallas Opera stage director Leonard Foglia needed more than a few cups of Starbucks coffee to bring Melville’s epic drama to life on stage.

He said, “I had to sink the ship in eight bars of music.”

Jake Heggie (b. 1961): ‘Moby Dick’; San Francisco Opera; Patrick Summers, cond. EuroArts DVD 2059658

One sunny afternoon in 1925, Czech composer Leos Janácek was sitting in a park listening to a military band concert. He was so taken with the fanfares he heard that he decided to write something along these lines himself. He was asked to write music for the Sokol gymnastic festival the next year, and soon he was enthusiastically working on what would become his Sinfonietta, which had its first performance on today’s date in 1926.

Janácek dedicated the work to the Czechoslovak Armed Forces and said the music was meant to express “the contemporary free man, his spiritual beauty and joy, his strength, courage and determination to fight for victory.”

Another concert showpiece inspired by an athletic event is Javelin, commissioned from American composer Michael Torke for the 1996 Olympic Games in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.

“I liked the word ‘javelin,’” Torke said. “The sweeping motion of a lot of the music is like an object thrown; a slender spear such as a javelin seemed apt, I knew the title would be appropriate.”

Leos Janácek (1854-1928): ‘Sinfonietta’; Boston Symphony; Seiji Ozawa, cond. EMI 47837

Michael Torke (b. 1961): ‘Javelin’; Atlanta Symphony; Yoel Levi, cond. Argo 452 101