Composers Datebook

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1841 an all-Beethoven concert was given at the Salle Erard to raise funds for the proposed Beethoven monument in Bonn, the late composer’s birthplace. Franz Liszt was the piano soloist in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, conducted by Hector Berlioz.

About a month earlier, Liszt had dazzled Paris with the premiere of his new piano fantasia on themes from the popular opera Robert the Devil, by Giacomo Meyerbeer. So, as Liszt walked on stage — with the entire orchestra in place, all ready for Beethoven’s concerto — the audience clamored loudly for a repeat performance. They made such a racket that Berlioz and the orchestra had no choice but to sit idly by until Liszt first encored his Fantasia.

In the audience was 27-year old Richard Wagner, reviewing the concert for a Dresden newspaper. Wagner was outraged that the Beethoven was put on hold for Liszt’s flashy solo.

We’re not sure if Wagner attended a concert the following day at the Salle Pleyel, but any modern-day time traveler would probably want to stick around to hear Frederic Chopin give one of his rare Parisian recitals, performing, among other works, his own F-Major Ballade.

Music Played in Today's Program

Franz Liszt (1811-1886): Reminiscences de Robert le Diable; Leslie Howard, piano; Hyperion 66861

Synopsis

During the last 20 years of his life, avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen concentrated on completing an ambitious cycle of seven operas, collectively titled Licht or, in English Light. Each opera was named for a day of the week and inspired by familiar and obscure world mythologies associated with each day.

The opera Montag (or Monday), for example, is devoted to the Moon and the feminine architype of Eve as the mother of all creation.

Each opera begins with a Greeting, or overture, often an electronic piece heard in the theater lobby while the audience gathers, and ends with a Farewell, sometimes intended for performance outside the theater, to be heard as the audience disperses.

Story lines in Stockhausen’s operas have more in common with symbolic Renaissance courtly masques and pageants than works by Verdi or Puccini, but might be considered a 21th century response to Wagner’s 19th-century cycle of four mythological Ring operas.

Portions of these operas were premiered piecemeal starting in 1977, and only on rare occasions staged in their entirety. The last to be completed, Sontag (or Sunday) was performed complete for the first time in Cologne, Germany, on today’s date in 2011, more than three years after Stockhausen’s death.

Music Played in Today's Program

Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007): “Lichter-Wasser (Sonntags-Gruss)” from Sonntag aus Licht; Barbara van den Boom, soprano; Hubert Mayer, tenor; Antonio Pérez Abellán, synthesizer; SW Radio Symphony Baden-Baden/Freiburg; Karlheinz Stockhausen, conductor; Stockhausen Verlag CD 58

Synopsis

During his stay in America, Czech composer Antonín Dvořák became convinced that distinctive American music could be based on two sources: the work songs and spirituals of African-Americans and the chants and dances of indigenous Native American tribes. By the early 20th century, a number of American composers had taken his suggestions to heart.

One of them, Arthur Farwell, was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on today’s date in 1872. He went to MIT intending to become an electrical engineer, and did, in fact, get his engineering degree in 1893, the same year Dvořák’s views began appearing in the press. Farwell decided that a musical career might be more interesting than engineering. Frustrated at his inability to find a publisher for his set of solo piano transcriptions, American Indian Melodies, he formed his own publishing house.

He also set Emily Dickinson poems to music, experimented with polytonality, and, in 1916, arranged for the first light show in New York’s Central Park, decades before the psychedelic 1960s. Farwell taught at Cornell, UC Berkley and Michigan State, but never felt at home in academia, preferring to organize community-based musical pageants with audience participation. He died at 79 in New York in 1953.

Music Played in Today's Program

Arthur Farwell (1872-1952): Navajo War Dance and Song of Peace; Dario Muller, piano; Marco Polo 223715

Synopsis

At London’s St. James’s Hall on today’s date in 1885, Czech composer Antonín Dvořák conducted the London Philharmonic Society’s orchestra in the premiere of his Symphony No. 7, a work they had commissioned.

The Society had also commissioned Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 decades earlier, a fact of which Dvořák was quite aware, and just before starting work he heard and was bowled over by the brand-new Symphony No. 3 by his friend and mentor Johannes Brahms. In other words, “No pressure!”

Dvořák felt he must do his very best, and, judging by the warm reception at its London premiere, the new work was a success, with one reviewer calling it “one of the greatest works of its class produced in the present generation.”

But not all reviews were glowing. Another wrote, “the entire work is painted grey on grey: it lacks sweetness of melody and lightness of style.” And his German publisher complained big symphonies were not profitable and advised he write only shorter piano pieces that had a ready market.

But subsequent performances helped establish the new symphony as the masterwork it is, and although not as often-played as his New World Symphony, today Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 ranks among his finest creations.

Music Played in Today's Program

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): Scherzo (Movement No. 3); from Symphony No. 7; Berlin Philharmonic; Rafael Kubelik, conductor; DG 463158-2

Synopsis

In 1863, the price of The New York Times was three cents, and many plunked down their pennies to read front-page news about “the rebellion” — what we now call the Civil War.

But if you were a music aficionado back in 1863, the Times “Amusements” page noted that one of Verdi’s newest operas, Un Ballo in Maschera, had just closed at the Academy of Music, and the contemporary composer-pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk had given a concert of his latest works the day before.

After all that “modern” music, maybe you were in the mood for some really old music. The enterprising duo of William Mason and Theodore Thomas was offering a Soiree of Chamber Music at Dodworth’s Hall on April 21, 1863, and their program included the first public performance in America of the Concerto for Two Keyboards and Strings by J.S. Bach. Now this was really old stuff — predating the birth of America in 1776 by a good 50 years!

The Times did not review this Bach premiere, but the next documented American performance in Boston in 1877 was described in Dwight’s Journal as a “cheerful, lightsome, everyday sort of composition … full of vigor and life, the best of tonics.”

Music Played in Today's Program

J.S. Bach (1650-1721): Concerto for Two Keyboards