Composers Datebook

Synopsis

In 1996, American composer George T. Walker, Jr. became the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for music. That was for his Lilacs, a setting for solo soprano and orchestra of Walt Whitman’s poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” an elegy for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln.

Walker died in the summer of 2018 at 96, leaving behind a substantial body of music ranging from solo works for piano and organ to chamber works and orchestral scores, including five works he titled Sinfonias.

His fifth and last sinfonia, Visions, was inspired by the 2015 hate crime shootings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and exists in two versions: one version includes elusive, enigmatic spoken texts and a video that includes a photo of the port of Charleston at its conclusion; the other version is purely instrumental.

Sadly, although completed in 2016, despite Walker’s stature and fame, he found no American orchestra able to schedule it during his lifetime. A studio recording of Sinfonia No. 5 was made under the composer’s supervision in 2018, but its public premiere by the Seattle Symphony occurred posthumously on today’s date in 2019.

Music Played in Today's Program

George Walker (1922-2018): Sinfonia No. 5 (Visions); Sinfonia Varsovia; Ian Hobson, conductor; Albany TROY-1707

Synopsis

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” If George Antheil were asked that question in 1927, he would have answered that it was easy. After the scandalous Paris premiere of his aggressively avant-garde Ballet Mécanique, scored for eight pianos and lots of percussion, including airplane propellers, Antheil received a cable offering financial backing for a one-night only performance of the new work at Carnegie Hall.

Antheil was broke at the time, so the offer was hard to refuse. For his Carnegie Hall debut, he also programmed his new jazz sinfonietta — and hired the all-black W.C. Handy jazz band to accompany him at the piano — and remember, this was 11 years before Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall jazz concert famously presented a racially integrated ensemble on the same stage.

“The public paid scant attention,” Antheil later recalled. “They had come to see and hear the Ballet Mecanique. The new Jazz Sinfonietta which I composed specially for the occasion was played by a large Negro orchestra whose personnel contained a list of names later to become tremendously important in popular music … but the critics took almost no notice except to say that my Sinfonietta was reminiscent of Negro jazz and not as good.”

Music Played in Today's Program

George Antheil (1900-1959): A Jazz Symphony; Ivan Davis, piano; New Palaise Royale Ensemble; Maurice Peress, conductor; MusicMasters 67094

Synopsis

We’re cranking up the Datebook time machine today to take you back to a charity concert that took place in Hamburg on today’s date in 1786. The concert was organized and conducted by 72-year-old composer Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, who had been producing new sacred music in Hamburg for many years.

But instead of new works, for the charity concert C.P.E. Bach programmed some music that in 1786 was almost 40 years old: he opened with theCredo from his father J.S. Bach’s Mass in B minor, followed by two excerpts from Handel'sMessiah, namely theHallelujah Chorusand I Know that My Redeemer Liveth, both sung in German, and then his own setting of the LatinMagnificat, a work he had composed back in 1749 when his father was still alive.

C.P.E. Bach’s Magnificat is not heard as often as J.S. Bach’s more famous setting, which is a shame, since, like his father’s Magnificat, C.P.E.’s is a festive, exciting piece of sacred music with trumpets and drums and tuneful vocal solos, along with great choral writing — and we suspect papa J.S. Bach would have nodded with approval that his son’s version concluded with a well-constructed choral fugue.

Music Played in Today's Program

C.P.E. Bach (1714-1788): Sicut Erat In Principio, from Magnificat; RIAS Kammerchor & Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, Hans-Christoph Rademann; Harmonia Mundi 902167

Synopsis

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.”

Music Played in Today's Program

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

Synopsis

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.”

Music Played in Today's Program

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

Synopsis

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!”

Music Played in Today's Program

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

Synopsis

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.”

Music Played in Today's Program

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

Synopsis

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.”

Music Played in Today's Program

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

Synopsis

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.

Music Played in Today's Program

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

Synopsis

An invitation-only audience attended a historic Bruckner concert in Munich on today’s date in 1932. On the first half of the program, Siegmund von Hausegger conducted Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9, using the posthumous edition prepared by Bruckner’s pupil, Ferdinand Löwe, which contained many edits and alterations. For the second half, Bruckner’s Ninth was performed again — this time as the composer had written it, following the Bruckner’s unpublished manuscript score.

During his lifetime and after his death, Bruckner’s most devoted pupils, Löwe and the Schalk brothers, Josef and Franz, cut and altered his scores to better match the expectations of contemporary audiences, trying to make Bruckner sound more like Wagner — flashier and more dramatic.

The 1932 Munich concert began a five-year debate whether the original or altered Bruckner was preferable. Then in 1937, Germany’s Nazi government announced it would fund a new Bruckner edition based on the composer’s original manuscripts. Like everything else in Nazi Germany, symphonies were viewed through racially tinted lenses. Löwe had Jewish ancestry, and so what began as a musicological project to honor the Austrian composer’s original intentions was appropriated by the Nazis as a crusade to “liberate” Bruckner from what they called “non-Ayran” tampering.

Music Played in Today's Program

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896): Symphony No. 9; Minnesota Orchestra; Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, cond.; Reference 81