Composers Datebook

Two famous pieces of chamber music had their premieres on today’s date, both at private readings prior to their first public performances.

On today’s date in 1842, the German Romantic composer Robert Schumann arranged for a trial reading of his new Piano Quintet in E-flat at the Leipzig home of some of his friends. Schumann’s wife, Clara, was supposed to be the pianist on that occasion, but she took ill, and Schumann’s friend and fellow-composer Felix Mendelssohn stepped in at the last moment for the informal performance, reading the work at sight.

After this preliminary reading, Mendelssohn praised the work, but offered some friendly suggestions concerning part of the trio section in the new work’s Scherzo movement, which prompted Schumann to write a livelier replacement movement for the work’s first public performance.

About 100 years later, on today’s date in 1949, a cello sonata by the Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev received a similar private performance in Moscow, for an invited audience at the House of the Union of Composers. Two of the leading Soviet performers of the day, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and pianist Sviatoslav Richter, gave the work its first performance. The following spring, it was again Rostropovich and Richter who gave the Sonata its public debut at the Moscow Conservatory.

Robert Schumann (1810–1856) — Piano Quintet in Eb, Op. 44 (Menahem Pressler, piano; Emerson String Quartet) DG 445 848

Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) — Cello Sonata, Op. 119 (David Finckel, cello; Wu Han, piano) Artist Led 19901

“Snuff” is a finely pulverized tobacco that can be, well, “snuffed” through the nose. In the 19th century, taking snuff was a common practice, and on today’s date in 1837, the most notorious example of snuff-taking in music history occurred –or didn’t, depending on who you believe – during the premiere in Paris of the massive “Requiem Mass” of the French composer Hector Berlioz.

As Berlioz tells it in his Memoirs, the conductor of the performance, Francois-Antoine Habeneck, decided to take a pinch of snuff during an especially tricky passage, at the very moment he should have been giving an important cue to the orchestra. To avert disaster, Berlioz jumped up, gave the cue, and afterwards accused Habeneck of sabotage.  Some eye-witnesses are on record saying, “Yes, that’s just how it happened,” while others, equally emphatic, state, “Preposterous! Nothing of the sort occurred.”

Whom to believe? 

Well, it IS known that once the basic tempo was set, M. Habeneck was in the habit of putting down his baton to let the orchestra play on by themselves. He would then calmly take a pinch of snuff. Sometimes, it’s said, he even offered snuff to his neighbors, so perhaps those performances were indeed sabotaged – by an especially loud sneeze!

Hector Berlioz (1803–1869) — Requiem, Op. 5 (French Radio Chorus and Orchestra; Leonard Bernstein, cond.) Sony 47526

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

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,” he wrote, “it is a highly commendable achievement. 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, while 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 in d (BBC Scottish Symphony; Osmo Vänskä, cond.) 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 very 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, cond.) 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 the great 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 (quote) “the trashiest Hollywood composers have met their match.”

Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) — Turangalila Symphony (Concertgebouw Orchestra; Riccardo Chailly, cond.) London 436 626

On today’s date in 1957, the New York City Ballet staged a new collaboration between the great Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky and the 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, cond.) 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,” said Picker, “exudes ‘opera’ from every page.”

In Picker’s 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,” says Picker.

“I think the opera made some people uncomfortable,” said Picker. “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) — Therese Raquin (Dallas Opera Orchestra; Graeme Jenkins, cond.) Chandos 9659

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

At the time, Domenico was nowhere near as famous as his father, and had come to Lisbon to serve as the music teacher for an 8-year old Portuguese princess named Maria Magdalena Barbara. This teaching gig turned out to be the most important event in the life of Domenico Scarlatti – and for two reasons.

First, the little princess was mad about music, and became a very 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.

On today’s date in 1919, the 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 the 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: the 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 years old. 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, cond.) New World 273

On today’s date in 1972, almost two decades after its premiere, Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp 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 1959, so was not able to enjoy the eventual success of this major work. He completed his Symphony in 1950, and its Austrian Radio premiere in 1954 had been a disaster. As the composer himself 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, Op. 40 (Philadelphia Orchestra; Franz Welser-Most, cond.) EMI 56169