Synopsis

Music — Beethoven’s music, in particular — played an important role in the life of Schroeder, a piano-playing character in Peanuts, the comic strip created by Charles Schulz, who was born in Minneapolis on today’s date in 1922.

But new music snuck in the strip on occasion, too. In a 1990 installment, Peppermint Patty is at a young person’s concert and when informed that American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich had won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, stands up and yells, ''Way to go, Ellen!''

Turns out Schulz had been impressed by a piece by Zwilich that he heard at a concert, and the cartoonist and composer struck up a friendship. So when Zwilich was asked to write a new work for a young people’s concert at Carnegie Hall, the result was a suite titled Peanuts Gallery.

Its 1997 premiere was acknowledged in a Sunday Peanuts strip that had Schroeder telling Lucy about the new work.

“We're all in it,” he says, and goes on to list the movements, including “Schroeder's Beethoven Fantasy,” “Lullaby for Linus” and “Lucy Freaks Out.”

Of course, Lucy's only comment is: “My part should be longer.''

Music Played in Today's Program

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1939) Peanuts Gallery; Jeffrey Biegel, p; Florida State University Symphony; Alexander Jiménez, cond. Naxos 8.559656