Composers Datebook

You might say that Eubie Blake flunked retirement.

In 1946, with a five-decade career as a successful performer and composer behind him, Blake retired at 63. He was the son of former slaves, and his religious mother objected to ragtime music on principle. But in 1899, while still a teenager, Blake penned a classic: The Charleston Rag. In 1915, he formed a songwriting partnership with a talented young singer named Noble Sissle, and, in the 1920s, the two men fused ragtime and operetta into a series of smash Broadway shows.

During World War II, Blake toured with USO shows, and, after retiring in 1946, studied composition formally at New York University, collecting and editing his works for posterity.

In the 1950s, a revival of interest in early jazz coaxed Blake out of retirement, and the use of ragtime music in the film The Sting transformed that interest into a pop culture sensation.

On today’s date in 1973, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Blake was honored by ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), and in 1981, at 98, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Sousa, arr. Eubie Blake (1887-1983) Semper Fidelis; Eubie Blake, piano Columbia (LP) C2S-847

In St. Petersburg, Russia, on today’s date in 1909, Alexandre Siloti conducted the first performance of a new orchestral work by a 26-year-old composer named Igor Stravinsky. The work was billed as Scherzo Fantastique, but Stravinsky’s original title was Bees.

Stravinsky had just completed his studies with the great Russian composer Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, whose Flight of the Bumblebee was already a famous musical depiction, so perhaps he wanted to impress his teacher — or try to outdo him.

In 1907, Stravinsky wrote to Rimsky-Korsakov, “Just now [my wife] Katya and I have read Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bees, a partly artistic, partly philosophical book that pleased me, as they say, down to my toes.”

Maeterlinck’s book offered an anthropomorphized description of the life cycle of bees describing “the innumerable agitations of the honeycomb, the perpetual, enigmatic and crazy jiggling of the nurses on the brood chamber … the invading spirals of the queen, the various and incessant activities of the crowd … the comings and goings overwhelmed with ardor.”

Stravinsky’s scoring includes three harps and multiple woodwinds, but omits timpani, trombones and tuba, resulting in a light, nimble and air-born orchestral sound for his busy bees.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) Scherzo Fantastique; Montreal Symphony; Charles Dutoit, cond. Decca 414 409

In Berlin on today’s date in 1915, prolific German composer Max Reger conducted the premiere performance of what would become his most popular orchestral work.

Like Bach, Reger was a master of counterpoint and the fugue, and, like Beethoven, loved writing variations. Reger’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart starts off simple enough, quoting a familiar theme from one of Mozart’s piano sonatas. About 30 minutes later, the simple theme develops into a massive fugue. It’s all grand and clever if you like it, or bombastic and tiresome if you don’t.

The witty Nicolas Slonimsky, in his book Music Since 1900, described it as follows: “Mozart’s ingenuous theme … is subjected to torturous melodic anamorphoses, contrapuntal contortion, canonic dislocation, rhythmic incrustation and harmonic inspissation.”

To save you the trouble of Googling the definition of “inspissation,” let’s just say it’s not a condition you would wish on anybody!

Whether you’re a fan or not, Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Mozart is quintessential Reger, and one is tempted to say, “What did you expect? It’s Reger to the Max!”

Max Reger (1873-1916): Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart; New York Philharmonic; Kurt Masur, cond. Teldec 74007

By 1837, the symphonies of Beethoven had become quite popular in Paris. Beethoven had been dead for 10 years, but surprisingly, much of his chamber music had yet to be performed publicly in Paris.

So Franz Liszt organized a series of chamber concerts at the Salle Erard to introduce Beethoven’s piano trios. Liszt would play the piano part, of course, joined by the finest Parisian violinist and cellist available.

One of the programs fell on today’s date in 1837 and was to feature, on the first half, one of Beethoven’s Trios, then, on the second half, a new trio by contemporary German composer Johann Peter Pixis, whose works Liszt admired.

At the last minute, the performers decided to reverse the printed order of the program, performing the new Pixis trio first. The audience (and critics), following the printed program, warmly applauded the Pixis, mistakenly thinking it was the Beethoven, and reacted coolly to the Beethoven, assuming it was by Pixis.

Among the many newspaper critics who attended the concert, only one noticed the switch and wrote his review accordingly — and that music critic’s name happened to be a famous composer, Hector Berlioz.

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) Piano Trio, Op. 1, No. 2; Kempff-Szeryng-Fournier Trio DG 453 751

If he hadn’t turned composer, Johannes Brahms might have made an excellent travel agent. He was in the habit of spending his summer vacations working on his music and consequently was always on the lookout for scenic spots and comfortable rooms at a decent price. In the summer of 1865, Brahms rented rooms from a certain widow Becker in Lichtental near Baden-Baden. The rooms offered a wonderful view of a mountain hillside covered with fir trees — and the rent was irresistibly low.

“I came. I saw. I rented,” Brahms wrote to a friend.

Brahms composed his String Sextet No. 2 there, between jolts of bracing coffee in the morning and afternoon hikes up the aforementioned hillside. Not surprisingly, this sextet turned out to be one of his happiest and most genial chamber works.

But on today’s date in 1867 at the sextet’s first performance in Vienna, the critic of the Wiener Zeitung heard desert sands rather than shady forests, and wrote: “We are seized with a kind of foreboding whenever Herr Johannes Brahms, this new John the Baptist, emerges from the wilderness. This prophet makes us quite disconsolate with his impalpable, vertiginous tone-vexations, pleasing to neither body nor soul.”

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): String Sextet No. 2; L'Archibudelli Sony Classical 68252

On today’s date in 1890, Czech composer Antonin Dvorak conducted the first performance of his Symphony No. 8 in Prague, on the occasion of his election to the Bohemian Academy of Science, Literature and Arts.

By 1890, Dvorak was a world-famous composer, honored in his own country and abroad. Within a year of its premiere, Dvorak conduced his Symphony No. 8 again in London, Frankfurt and at Cambridge University, where he received an honorary doctorate in music in 1891.

Despite some mysterious and melancholy passages, Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony is usually described as “sunny,” “idyllic” and “pastoral.” Its final movement opens with a brass fanfare, perhaps a reference to a century-old tradition of signal trumpeters playing from the towers and parapets in Prague, a sight and sound that visitors to the famous Astronomical Clock tower in that city’s Old Town Square can still experience today.

It’s amusing — and perhaps revealing of something deep in the national spirit — that at a rehearsal of this finale, legendary Czech conductor Rafael Kubelik quipped to his players, "Gentlemen, in Bohemia the trumpets never call to battle — they always call to the dance!"

Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904): Symphony No. 8; Berlin Philharmonic; Rafael Kubelik, cond. DG 447 412

In 1881, the posthumous premiere of Jacques Offenbach’s final work, The Tales of Hoffmann, had been announced for Feb. 1 at the Opera Comique in Paris — and in fact was performed on that date, but as a closed dress rehearsal attended only by theater staff and Offenbach’s family.

Offenbach knew he was dying as he wrote this opera and had completed a full piano score and extensive sketches for its orchestration. For its premiere, Ernest Guiraud faithfully orchestrated Hoffmann, but, at the request of the Opera Comique’s director, he replaced the original, quick-paced spoken dialogue between its musical numbers with slower, sung recitatives in the style of a grand opera.

At a private premiere, the opera ran much too long. In something of a panic, drastic cuts and a wholesale rearrangement of Offenbach’s score were made before the public premiere nine days later. In its drastically altered form, Hoffmann proved to be a great success and remained so for decades. For the opera’s centenary in 1981, however, musicologists painstakingly prepared new performing versions of Hoffmann, restoring Offenbach’s original plan for the work.

Consequently, opera companies today are faced with a dilemma: Do they stage the familiar or the faithful version of Offenbach’s masterpiece?

Jacques Offenbach (1819-1880): Tales of Hoffmann Suite; Detroit Symphony; Paul Paray, cond. Mercury 434 332

Since the 18th century, Paris and Prague have been famous for producing some of the greatest wind players of Europe. And in the 19th century, Anton Reicha, who was born in Prague but died in Paris, wrote for those wind players a sizable body of quintets to showcase the agreeable blend of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and French horn.

In our own time, the number of professional wind quintets has increased dramatically, and, not surprisingly, contemporary composers are eager to create new works for them.

On today’s date in 1987, at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall in New York, the Manhattan Wind Quintet premiered a piece by American composer David Maslanka — his Wind Quintet No. 2.

A clarinetist, Maslanka is particularly known for his works for wind ensembles, large and small. He describes his three-movement Wind Quintet No. 2 as follows:

“The first movement is fierce and somewhat daunting in its technical demands; the second is moody and elusive; the third is sweet and resigned.”

This recording features the Bergen Woodwind Quintet of Norway, an ensemble that has taken Maslanka’s music to heart, recording three of his Wind Quintets for the BIS label from Sweden.

David Maslanka (1943-2017) Wind Quintet No. 2; Manhattan Wind Quintet Albany 246

In 1985, the musical world was celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of Georg Frideric Handel. On today’s date that year, Minnesota-based composer Libby Larsen, then in her mid-30s, was celebrating the premiere performance of her Symphony No. 1.

Larsen titled her symphony Water Music and says its first movement was a deliberate homage to Handel’s famous Water Music. As a resident composer of a state with over 10,000 lakes, Larsen admits her love of sailing also had something to do with the symphony’s descriptive title.

Since 1985, Larsen has gone on to write a few more symphonies, each with its own particular title. And she frequently gives individual movements of each symphony a descriptive tag. For example, one movement from her Solo Symphony (No. 5), from 1999, is titled “The Cocktail Party Effect.”

Rather than the wallop of a stiff drink, Larsen says she means the ability of human hearing to pick out a single voice among the extraneous noise one encounters at a crowded cocktail party.

“It’s a kind of musical ‘Where’s Waldo?’” she says. “In this case, Waldo is a melody, introduced at the beginning … then hidden amid the other music.”

Libby Larsen (b. 1950) Symphony: Water Music; Minnesota Orchestra; Neville Marriner, cond. Nonesuch 79147; and Solo Symphony; Colorado Symphony; Marin Alsop, cond. Koch 7520

In the early 1990s, flutist Susan Morris de Jong and guitarist Jeffrey Van commissioned Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra to write three sets of chamber works that have become classics for their combination of instruments. Sierra titled these Crónicas del Descubrimiento, or Chronicles of Discovery, and said they were his vision of the bewilderment the native Indians of Puerto Rico must have felt during first interactions with the Spanish conquistadores, and vice-versa.

Each of the three sets contains two contrasting pieces in which flute and guitar seem to observe, excite and provoke each other, with the first slow atmospheric piece followed by a more rhythmic second one. On today’s date in 1994 in Minneapolis, De Jong and Van presented the third and final set of Sierra’s Chronicles of Discovery, containing two pieces: the first titled Song, and the second, more ominously, Battle.

Sierra left his native Puerto Rico to study composition with György Ligeti in Hamburg in the late 1970s, served as the composer-in-residence of the Milwaukee Symphony in the 1980s and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.

Roberto Sierra (b. 1953) – Battalia, from Tercera Crónica del Descubrimiento (Marcelo Barbozab, flute; Fabio Zanona, guitar) Somm CD-0669