Composers Datebook

Synopsis American composer Marga Richter was born on today’s date in 1926, in Reedsburg, Wisconsin. She began piano lessons by 4, started composing at 12 and had her first work performed when she was in high school in Robbinsdale, Minnesota, where her family had moved so she could study at the MacPhail School of Music in Minneapolis. The family moved again in 1943, this time to New York, so she co...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1950, Karel Ančerl was named the artistic director of the Czech Philharmonic, a position he would hold for the next 18 years. He had first conducted the orchestra in 1930, when, upon graduation from the Prague Conservatory, he led that ensemble in one of his compositions. For a time, he debated whether to be a composer or a conductor. He opted for the latter, demonstrat...

Synopsis Rugby is a style of football that originated in England at Rugby School and was played at British public boy’s schools during the 19th century. It’s also the name of a tone poem written by Swiss composer Arthur Honegger that premiered in Paris at the Théâtre des Champes-Elysées on today’s date in 1928 at the first concert of the Orchestre Symphonique de Paris. In describing his tone poem,...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1871, Hermann Levi conducted the premiere of a new choral work by Johannes Brahms: Schicksalslied , or Song of Destiny . It’s a setting of a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, contrasting in its first part the blissful Greek gods on Mount Olympus and in its second the miserable suffering of we mortals below. Brahms discovered the poem in summer 1868 while visiting his friend...

Synopsis Today’s date in 1946 marks an important moment in Parisian theatrical history with the debut performance of a legendary acting company created by husband-and-wife actors Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud. Their opening production was Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a French translation by André Gide, with incidental music by Swiss composer Arthur Honegger. To play Honegger’s score, Barraul...

Synopsis Of all the works of Richard Strauss, the one that premiered in Dresden on today’s date in 1925 ranks amount the least-known. For starters, it has an odd title, Parergon to the Symphonia Domestica . “Parergon” means “an ornamental accessory or embellishment,” and he meant his new work, written for piano left-hand and orchestra, as a follow-up to his Symphonia Domestica tone-poem of 1903, w...

Synopsis The hills surrounding the Austrian town of Salzburg, according to Rogers and Hammerstein, are “alive with the sound of music.” Well, the same could have been said for the vast interior and multiple choir lofts of Salzburg Cathedral on today’s date in 1682. A lavish celebration of the 1100th anniversary of the Archbishopric of Salzburg culminated in a specially-composed mass setting, with...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1883, the premiere of Antonín Dvořák’s Violin Concerto was given in Prague by Czech violinist František Ondrícek with the National Theatre Orchestra, led by Czech conductor Moric Anger, an old friend of Dvořák’s and his onetime roommate. The concerto was commissioned by distinguished violinist Joseph Joachim, an old friend and collaborator of German composer Johannes Br...

Synopsis As far as housewarming gifts go, a nice bottle of champagne is common, or maybe a bouquet of flowers. But if you’re a composer, and the occasion is the ceremonial opening performance at a new concert hall, you write a celebratory piece of music. On today’s date in 1984, for the inaugural concert of the Indianapolis Symphony’s new home, the Circle Theater, American composer Ellen Taaffe Zw...

Synopsis By a coincidence, the last two symphonies of Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev premiered on today’s date: his Symphony No. 6 premiered in Leningrad in 1947, and his final, Symphony No. 7, in Moscow, in 1952. The Symphony No. 6 is tragic in tone, and Prokofiev confided that it was about the physical and emotional wounds suffered by his countrymen during World War II. It was premiered at the...

Synopsis American jazz composer and pianist Thelonious Sphere Monk was born on today’s date in 1917. Largely self-taught, he began playing piano at 6. At 17, he dropped out of New York’s esteemed Stuyvesant High School for gifted students to serve as organist for a touring evangelist. In his 20s, he became the house pianist at Minton’s, a Manhattan jazz nightclub. His original compositions, marked...

Synopsis On today’s date in 2001, the release of a CD of Vivaldi’s oratorio Juditha Triumphans launched an ambitious project to record nearly 450 works of the famous Italian Baroque composer that exist as manuscript scores in the Biblioteca Nazionale in Turin, Italy. It’s the largest collection of manuscript scores by any 18th-century composer in existence and includes many Vivaldi works unperform...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1992, one of the strangest — and some would say most strikingly original — violin concertos of the late 20th century had its premiere performance in Cologne, Germany. It was written by Transylvanian-born Hungarian composer György Ligeti. He became famous in the west when some of his music appeared in the 1968 Stanley Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey . Kubrick used his...

Synopsis As the 20th century drew to its close, some who followed the development of opera were struck by the number of new American operas on American themes. On today’s date in 2000, one of these new operas debuted in San Francisco. Dead Man Walking , an opera in two acts, was based on a 1993 book by Sister Helen Prejean, a book also made into a successful movie. The libretto for the operatic ve...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1927, the landmark film The Jazz Singer received its premiere showing at the Warner Theater in New York. The Jazz Singer starred Al Jolson and is usually credited with being the first “talkie” — the first motion picture to successfully incorporate prerecorded music and spoken dialogue. Both the music and dialogue were recorded using the Vitaphone process, essentially a...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1867, two eminent British Victorians arrived in Vienna in search of Franz Schubert. Now, Schubert had been dead for 39 years, as the two Brits were quite aware. George Grove, 47, was England’s finest musicologist, and Arthur Sullivan, 25, one of the country’s most promising young composers. Grove believed there might be forgotten manuscripts in the possession of the lat...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1945, Artur Rodzinski conducted the New York Philharmonic in the premiere performance of an orchestral suite arranged from Aaron Copland’s ballet score Appalachian Spring . For the ballet’s 1944 premiere at the Library of Congress, Copland called for a chamber orchestra of 13 players, but for most music lovers, it’s as a work for a larger symphony orchestra that Appalac...

Synopsis Despite a disastrous premiere in Birmingham on today’s date in 1900, Edward Elgar’s oratorio The Dream of Gerontius has become one of his best-loved and most-frequently performed works in the U.K., where, in 2015, Classic FM offered a guide to what it called the work’s “most epic choral stupendousness.” Here’s Classic FM’s summary of its story: “The piece follows an ‘everyman’ character (...

Synopsis In 2001, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Nobel Prize, Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, commissioned American composer Steve Heitzeg to write a Nobel Symphony . In 1866, the Swedish engineer and scientist Alfred Nobel had invented dynamite. His patent helped him amass a great fortune, but, troubled by the destructive power and potential misuse of his invention...

Synopsis On today’s date in 2010, at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music in Nashville, the ALIAS ensemble gave the premiere performance of a new chamber work by American composer Gabriela Lena Frank. It was titled Hilos — the Spanish word for “threads” — and scored for piano, violin, cello and clarinet. Now, it’s not unusual for composers to tap their particular cultural background for i...

Synopsis Even during the bombing of London by the German Air Force, the London Blitz of World War Two, the BBC Proms Concerts continued. True, in 1941 a German incendiary bomb did destroy the long-time home of the Proms, Queen’s Hall on Langham Place, but, not to be deterred, the Proms simply moved to the Royal Albert Hall in South Kensington. Wartime Proms programs included this printed notice: “...

Synopsis On today’s date in 2000, a new cello concerto received its premiere performance at the Barbican Center in London. Billed as the Crouching Tiger Concerto , this score was by Chinese composer Tan Dun, and was derived from his film score for Ang Lee’s martial arts film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon . That score featured a prominent cello part, tailor-made for cellist Yo-Yo Ma, as well as a...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1951, the classic sci-fi film The Day the Earth Stood Still was playing in theaters across America. The film’s opening sequence depicted a UFO hovering over Washington, D.C. Back then, flying saucer sightings were increasingly common, perhaps a result of mass hysteria spawned by cold war tensions and the existential threat posed by the atomic bomb. Or maybe we were bein...

Synopsis In September 2001, American composer Elliott Carter was just a few months shy of his 93rd birthday, but still busy composing new works both large and small. On today’s date that year, his Cello Concerto received its premiere in Chicago with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and Daniel Barenboim conducting the Chicago Symphony. Carter’s music is technically challenging for performers, and its complexity ca...

Synopsis Today’s date in 1899 marks the birthday of famous African-American composer, choir director and teacher, William L. Dawson, in Anniston, Alabama. After musical studies in Kansas City and Chicago, from 1931 to 1956 Dawson taught at the Tuskegee Institute, where he developed the Institute’s Choir into an internationally-renowned ensemble. His arrangements of African-American spirituals, whi...