Composers Datebook

Synopsis

On today’s date in the year 1900, the principal of Stanton Elementary in Jacksonville, Florida was asked to give a Lincoln’s Day speech to his students. Stanton was a segregated school for African-American children, and was the school that its principal, James Weldon Johnson, had attended. He decided he would rather have the students do something themselves, perhaps sing an inspirational song. He decided to write the words himself, and enlisted the aid of his brother, John Rosamond Johnson, who was a composer.

“We planned to have it sung by schoolchildren, a chorus of 500 voices. I got my first line, ‘Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing’ — not a startling first line, but I worked along, grinding out the rest,” Johnson recalled. He gave the words to his brother as they came to him, not even writing them down as his brother worked at the piano. By the time they finished, he confessed he was moved by what they had created: “I could not keep back the tears and made no effort to do so.”

The song was a great success on February 12th, 1900, and then was pretty much forgotten by Johnson — but not by the children who sang it. They memorized it. Some of them became teachers, and taught it to their students. The song spread across the country, and soon became the unofficial National Anthem of Black America.

“We wrote better than we knew,” he said.

Music Played in Today's Program

J.W. (1871-1938) and J.R. (1873-1954) Johnson: “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing”; Choirs and Boston Pops Orchestra; Keith Lockhart, conductor; BMG/RCA 63888

Synopsis

If the bassoon is rather unkindly known as the “clown” of the orchestra, what does that make the poor tuba?

Just say “tuba” to someone, and they turn into a mime — at least that was the experience of American composer Alex Shapiro when she mentioned that she was writing a new work for tuba and piano.

“The response was usually one of surprised and barely muffled laughter. The exclamation ‘Tuba, eh? What a funny instrument!’ was often accompanied by exaggerated hand and mouth gestures that somewhat resembled a trout attempting to inflate a balloon,” she said.

Shapiro wanted to show how nimble and lyrical a tuba could be. She gave her finished piece — for tuba and piano — a punning title: Music for Two Big Instruments.

The new work was commissioned by Norman Pearson, principal tubist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who premiered the work with wife, pianist Cynthia Bauhof-Williams, on today’s date in 2001 at Alfred Newman Hall on the campus of University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Grateful tubists have taken up Shapiro’s piece since then, and this West Coast commission’s first recording was made by New York Philharmonic principal tubist Alan Baer, so one could say — with a bit of a stretch — Music for Two Big Instruments has been a coast to coast success!

Music Played in Today's Program

Alex Shapiro (b. 1962): Music for Two Big Instruments; Alan Baer, tuba; Bradley Haag, piano; innova 683

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1934, the audience at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City demanded — and got — 50 curtain calls for the cast and conductor of the new opera that had just received its premiere staged performance.

The opera was Merry Mount, based on a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story set in a Puritan colony in 17th-century New England. The music was by American composer Howard Hanson. The performers for Met Opera’s premiere included great American baritone Lawrence Tibbett as the Puritan preacher Wrestling Bradford, sorely tempted by the Swedish soprano Gösta Ljungberg in the role of Lady Marigold Sandys, his unwilling leading lady.

Despite its setting in Puritan New England, the opera included plenty of the lurid sex and violence that fuels the all the best Romantic opera plots, and the score was in Hanson’s most winning Neo-Romantic style, with rich choral and orchestral writing, capped by a fiery conflagration as a grand finale. What more could an opera audience want?

Strangely enough, despite its tremendous first-night success, Merry Mount has seldom — if ever — been staged since 1934. To celebrate the centenary of Hanson’s birth in 1996, the Seattle Symphony presented Merry Mount in a concert performance conducted by Gerard Schwarz.

Music Played in Today's Program

Howard Hanson (1896-1981): Merry Mount Suite; Seattle Symphony; Gerard Schwarz, conductor; Delos 3105

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1784, in the city of Vienna, Wolfgang Mozart finished one bit of work and started another — which he would continue until the end of his life.

After Mozart put the finishing touches to his Piano Concerto No. 14, he entered this work as the first item in a ledger, which he titled, “A List of all my works from the month of February, 1784 to the month of...” Mozart then left a blank space on his title page for the concluding month and wrote just the number “1” in the space left for the concluding year of his catalog — with the reasonable expectation that he would live long enough to see the turn of the new century. He then signed his title page: “Wolfgang Amadé Mozart by my own hand.”

On the catalog’s unruled left-hand pages Mozart wrote the date and description of his subsequent works, and occasionally, in the case of his operas and vocal pieces, the names of the singers who premiered them. The right-hand side of the page was lined with music staves, and here Mozart would write the opening measure of each piece.

The very last entry in Mozart’s ledger book is dated November 15, 1791, just one month before his death. This final entry notes the completion of a cantata written for Vienna’s New-Crowned Hope Masonic Lodge.

Music Played in Today's Program

Wolfgang Mozart (1756-1791): Piano Concerto No. 14; Murray Perahia, piano and conductor; English Chamber Orchestra CBS/Sony 415

Freemason Cantata; Boston Early Music Festival; Andrew Parrott, conductor; Denon 9152

Synopsis

On this day in 1934, an excited crowd of locals and visitors had gathered in Hartford, Connecticut, for the premiere performance of a new opera, Four Saints in Three Acts.

The fact that the opera featured 16 saints, not four, and was divided into four acts, not three, was taken by the audience in stride, as the libretto was by expatriate American writer Gertrude Stein, notorious for her surreal poetry and prose. The music, performed by players from the Philadelphia Orchestra and sung by an all-black cast, was by 37-year old American composer, Virgil Thomson, who matched Stein’s surreal sentences with witty musical allusions to hymn tunes and parodies of solemn, resolutely tonal music.

Among the locals in attendance was the full-time insurance executive and part-time poet, Wallace Stevens, who called the new opera “An elaborate bit of perversity in every respect: text, settings, choreography, [but] Most agreeable musically … If one excludes aesthetic self-consciousness, the opera immediately becomes a delicate and joyous work all around.”

The opera was a smashing success, and soon opened on Broadway, where everyone from Toscanini and Gershwin to Dorothy Parker and the Rockefellers paid a whopping $3.30 for the best seats — a lot of money during one of the worst winters of the Great Depression.

Music Played in Today's Program

Virgil Thomson (1896-1989): Four Saints in Three Acts; Orchestra of Our Time; Joel Thome, conductor; Nonesuch 79035