Composers Datebook

On today’s date in 1827, Ludwig van Beethoven dictated and signed a letter in which he mentions “a new symphony, which lies already sketched in my desk.” This new work would have been Beethoven’s 10th Symphony.

But in March 1827, Beethoven was ill and his friends feared the worst. Even so, he seemed optimistic that he could finish a new symphony as a thank you for the Philharmonic Society of London. The society had recently sent him 100 pounds in the hopes it would ease his sickbed, and Beethoven was touched by their kindness.

“I will compose a grand symphony for them,” he told visitors.

But eight days later Beethoven died, and for the next 150 years most people disputed that he had in fact sketched out such a new symphony. It wasn’t until the 1960s that scholars started sorting through his sketchbooks and not until the 1980s that evidence surfaced to prove it.

British Beethoven scholar Barry Cooper went so far as to assemble a performing version of Beethoven’s sketches for the first movement of his 10th Symphony. Appropriately enough, as Beethoven intended his new symphony for a British premiere, the first recording of Cooper’s reconstruction was made by the London Symphony.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 10 (arr. Barry Cooper); London Symphony; Wyn Morris, cond. MCA 6269

One of Handel’s “greatest hits” had its premiere on today’s date in 1749 at London’s Covent Garden Theatre, as part of his new biblical oratorio, Solomon.

The text of Handel’s oratorio praises the legendary Hebrew king’s piety in Part 1, his wisdom in Part 2 and the splendor of his royal court in Part 3.

As the instrumental introduction to the third part of Solomon, Handel composed a jaunty sinfonia he titled “The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba.” In the Book of Kings, the Queen of Sheba travels from afar to visit the splendid court of King Solomon, arriving, as the Bible puts it, “with a very great retinue, with camels bearing spices, very much gold, and precious stones.”

Handel’s music admirably captures the excitement of a lavish state visit of an exotic foreign queen, and first-night London audiences would have had no problem reading into Handel’s depiction of an elaborate compliment of their reigning monarch, King George II.

Speaking of reigning monarchs, at the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics, Handel’s Sinfonia was used to accompany a video of James Bond (played by Daniel Craig) arriving at Buckingham Palace, where 007 was received by Queen Elizabeth II.

George Frederic Handel (1685-1757): excerpt from ‘Solomon’; English Baroque Soloists; John Eliot Gardiner, cond. Philips 412 612

In St. Petersburg on today’s date in 1897, the First Symphony of Sergei Rachmaninoff had its disastrous premiere.

Now, there are bad reviews and then there are really bad reviews. When Rachmaninoff opened up a newspaper the next day he read, “If there were conservatory in hell, and if one of its students were instructed to write a symphony based on the seven plagues of Egypt, and if he were to compose a symphony like Rachmaninoff's, he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and delighted the inmates of hell.”

Ouch!

What must have really hurt was that the review was written by a fellow composer, Cesare Cui, and the premiere was conducted — poorly, it seems — by another composer colleague, Alexander Glazunov.

The whole affair was so painful that Rachmaninoff needed therapy before he could compose again, and when he left Russia for good in 1917, he left the symphony’s manuscript behind, and in the turmoil of the Bolshevik revolution it was lost. However, the original orchestral parts for the 1897 premiere survived. They were rediscovered in 1945, two years after Rachmaninoff’s death, and a belated — and this time successful — second performance took place that same year.

Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943): Symphony No. 1; St. Petersburg Philharmonic; Mariss Jansons, cond. EMI 56754

The Palladium Ballroom once stood at the corner of 53rd Street and Broadway in New York City. It opened on today’s date in 1946, and in its heyday, was the mambo capital of the world, showcasing performances by Latin superstars like Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez and Machito.

The Palladium closed in 1966, but its dance floor and bandstand were re-created for the 1992 film The Mambo Kings, in which Puente plays himself.

The spirit of the Palladium was also evoked in a more recent chamber work by Puerto Rican composer Dan Román. Fascinated by both the music of contemporary minimalist composers and the popular dance forms of Puerto Rico, he combines the two in his four-movement work Musica de Palladium for violin, viola, cello and piano.

The work’s final movement, “Sensacional,” is, according to Román, “a collage of aural images taken from mambos and other dance music of Machito, Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez.”

Musica de Palladium was written for the New World Trio and recorded by them, joined by violist Steve Larson.

Dan Román (b. 1974): ‘Musica de Palladium’; New World Trio (Annie Trepanier, vn; Carlynn Savot, vcl; Pi-Hsun Shih, p); Steve Larson, vla. innova CD 904

Johann Strauss the Elder, patriarch of the famous waltz dynasty, was born in Vienna on this day in 1804. His music became immensely popular across Europe, and he dreamed of — but never realized — a tour of America.

At the height of his fame, Strauss visited Britain, providing music for the state ball on the occasion of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne. His waltz Homage to the Queen of England, quotes Rule, Britannia at its start and God Save the Queen — in waltz tempo, of course — for its finale. The Times reported that in this case, Victoria was amused, as were her subjects. In the spring and summer of 1838, the Strauss orchestra gave 79 performances in London alone.

Unfortunately, back home, Strauss was something of a cad. He abandoned his wife and his three talented musical children, Josef, Eduard and Johann Jr. for a mistress with whom he started a new family. He died at 45 of scarlet fever, contracted from one of his illegitimate children.

Strauss wrote about 300 works, the most famous being his Radetzky March, the obligatory clap-along selection on every Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Day Concert.

Johann Strauss Jr. (1827-1870): ‘Radetzky March’; Cincinnati Pops Orchestra; Erich Kunzel, cond. Vox 5132

Today’s date in 1962 marks the birthday in New Orleans of Terence Blanchard, American jazz trumpeter, composer and educator.

“I come from a family of musicians,” Blanchard says. “My father was an opera singer, my mother played piano and taught voice, my grandfather played the guitar. What I wanted was to be a jazz musician, have a band, travel and create music.”

Well, he got his wish! Blanchard started piano at 5 and trumpet at 8, playing music with childhood friends Wynton and Branford Marsalis at summer music camps and studied composition with their father, Ellis Marsalis. In 1980, while still in his teens, Blanchard began performing with the Lionel Hampton Orchestra and later Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.

In the 1990s, Blanchard started writing film and TV scores and has composed more than 40 of them to date. In 2019, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his music for Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman.

He holds major teaching positions and tours with his quintet, the E-Collective. In 2021, his opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones was premiered at the Metropolitan Opera.

Terence Blanchard (b. 1962): ‘Ron’s Theme,’ from BlacKkKlansman Suite; the E-Collective, with a 96-piece orchestra Back Lot Music CD 779

On today’s date in 1943, at the height of World War II, Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man had its premiere performance in Cincinnati. The Cincinnati Symphony’s conductor in those days, British-born Eugene Goosens, had commissioned 18 fanfares for brass and percussion.

“It is my idea,” he wrote, “to make these fanfares stirring and significant contributions to the war effort.”

Besides Copland, composers commissioned included Henry Cowell, Paul Creston, Morton Gould, Howard Hanson, William Grant Still and Virgil Thomson.

Most of the composers dedicated their fanfares to a unit of the U.S. military or one of its wartime allies. But Copland’s fanfare stood out, both musically and by virtue of its title.

Among the titles Copland considered — and rejected — were Fanfare for the Spirit of Democracy and Fanfare for Four Freedoms, the latter in reference to President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Address that called for the freedom of speech and religion, and from want and fear. He settled on Fanfare for the Common Man.

“It was the common man, after all, who was doing all the dirty work in the war and the army,” Copland recalled. “He deserved a fanfare.”

Aaron Copland (1900-1990): ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’; San Francisco Symphony; Michael Tilson Thomas, cond. RCA/BMG 63888

On today’s date in 1829, a 20-year-old German composer named Felix Mendelssohn conducted the first public performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in almost a hundred years. Earlier, Mendelssohn had written to a friend:

“You may know from the papers that I intend to perform the Passion, by Sebastian Bach, a very beautiful and worthy piece of church music from the last century, on March 11 at the Berlin Academy of Music. I ask if it would be possible for you to grant us the pleasure of your company that evening ... to honor an old master and dignify our celebration by your presence.”

Mendelssohn’s 1829 performance sparked a revival of interest in Bach’s music, generally considered too unmelodic, mathematical, dry and incomprehensible for the audiences in Mendelssohn’s day. It really took some doing for Mendelssohn to pry the score of Bach’s Passion from the Berlin musician who owned it, and who said it was a total waste of time to perform such an outmoded, unfashionable piece of music.

But, in fact, the performance was so well received that Bach’s Passion was performed again 10 days later, to even greater acclaim, on March 21, the anniversary of Bach’s birth.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750): St. Matthew Passion; Netherlands Bach Society; Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra; Ton Koopman, cond.

On this date in 1785, a new Piano Concerto in C major was given its premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna, with its composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, at the keyboard.

Years later, this piano concerto was labeled as Mozart’s 21st, and given the number 467 in the chronological list of his works compiled by Ludwig Ritter von Koechel, an Austrian botanist, mineralogist and Mozart enthusiast.

Today, this work is popularly referred to as the Elvira Madigan Concerto, for the simple reason that its romantic slow movement was used to great effect in a 1967 Swedish film of that name to underscore a passionate love story.

That Swedish movie helped to bring Mozart’s concerto to the attention of a far wider audience than ever before, as did the 1984 movie Amadeus, with Mozart’s music in general.

Musicologists might wince when they hear the title Amadeus. It’s a matter of historical record that Mozart signed his name “Amadeo” or “Amadé.” Others object that a Swedish film should provide a nickname for one of Mozart’s most sublime works — but, for better or worse, both Amadeus and Elvira Madigan are labels that seem to have stuck to Mozart’s name and his concerto.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Piano Concerto No. 21; Alfred Brendel, piano; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields; Neville Marriner, cond. Philips 412 856

On today’s date in 1902, composer Gustav Mahler, 41, married Alma Schindler, 22. Mahler was the famous director of the Vienna Court Opera, and by 1902 had written four symphonies. Schindler was considered one of the most beautiful women in Vienna, and also independent, unpredictable and remarkably free-spirited.

Perhaps that, as much as her beauty, appealed to Mahler, but many of the composer’s longtime friends did not approve and predicted disaster. One of them even suggested the composer convert to Protestantism, which would make getting a divorce easier in ultra-Catholic Vienna.

On today’s date in 1902, a large crowd of curious onlookers gathered in Vienna’s majestic Baroque Karlskirche at 5:30 p.m., the time the wedding was thought to take place, only to discover the couple had been married hours earlier in the privacy of its sacristy with just the immediate family present.

The next symphony that Mahler wrote, his Fifth, contains a lovely adagietto movement that Mahler’s friend Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg claims was inspired by Alma.

“It was his declaration of love. Instead of a letter, he confided it in this manuscript without a word of explanation,” Mengelberg said. “She understood. He tells her everything in music.”

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): Symphony No. 5; Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra; Riccardo Chailly, cond. London 458 860