Synopsis

A century before crowds of extras and gigantic sets first filled the silver screen of Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood extravaganzas, the Paris Opera brought similar resources to the stage for their historical operas—offering shipwrecks, explosions, massacres, and other crowd-pleasing spectacles.

For example, on today’s date in 1849, the premiere of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera “The Prophet,” included a ballet sequence that made audiences gasp in surprise when the dancers—supposed skating on a frozen lake—glided across the stage on roller skates!

Roller skates had been invented in Paris in 1790 but were considered a useless curiosity—after Meyerbeer’s opera, however, there was a booming demand for what was marketed as "Prophet Skates." Meyerbeer’s opera also included an on-stage sunrise, employing , for the first time at the Paris Opera, state-of-the art electric lights.

And just to prove that there is nothing new under the sun—electric or otherwise–in 1984, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Starlight express,” a rock musical about roller-ball competitors, had singers racing around the stage on roller-skates. The musical proved a big hit in London, New York and Las Vegas, and, reminiscent of Meyerbeer’s frozen pond ballet, there has even been a version of “Starlight Express—On Ice.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864) The Prophet: Ballet of the Skaters: Galop Barcelona Symphony Orchestra/Michal Nesterowicz Naxos 573076

Synopsis

At 2:20 a.m. on this date in 1912, the luxury liner S.S. Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic. Of the 2201 people of on board, only 711 reached their intended destination in New York. Eight British musicians, members of the ship’s band, stayed on board, reportedly playing a hymn tune as the ship went down.

In 1969, British composer Gavin Bryars prepared a multimedia musical work, The Sinking of the Titanic, which incorporated spoken interviews by Titanic survivors with a set of variations on the hymn tune played by the ship’s band. In 1985, the sunken wreck of the Titanic was rediscovered, and renewed interest led to a 1990 revival performance and recording of Gavin Bryars’s score.

A few years later, composer James Horner wrote an Oscar-winning film score for director James Cameron’s Titanic — an incredibly successful cinematic dramatization of the story.

Horner wrote other famous film scores like those for Aliens and Braveheart — but none quite as successful as Titanic. That film grossed more than $600 million at the domestic box office and more than $1.8 billion worldwide. Ironically, considering this “titanic” success, the first film for which Horner composed a score was The Drought.

Music Played in Today's Program

Gavin Bryars (b. 1943): The Sinking of the Titanic; Gavin Bryars and ensemble; Point Music 446 249

James Horner (1953-2015): Titanic sountrack; Studio Orchestra; James Horner, conductor;Sony Classcial 63213

Synopsis

Fiddler Jay Ungar wrote a melancholy tune in 1982 and titled it Ashokan Farewell. It reflected, he wrote, the wistful sadness he felt at the conclusion of a week-long, summer-time fiddle and dance program in the Catskill Mountains at Ashokan Field Campus of the State University of New York.

“I was embarrassed by the emotions that welled up whenever I played it,” Ungar recalled. It’s written in the style of a Scottish lament or Irish air, and Ungar says he sometimes introduced it as “a Scottish lament written by a Jewish guy from the Bronx.”

Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns heard a recording of Ungar’s tune and asked if he could use it as the theme for his PBS documentary series, The Civil War. In that context, the sadness in Ashokan Farewell takes on a whole different meaning.

The Civil War has inspired a number of other American composers, among them Roy Harris, whose Symphony No. 6 (Gettysburg) was premiered on this date in 1944 by the Boston Symphony. It was written on commission from the Blue Network, the radio predecessor of the American Broadcasting Company. Each of the symphony’s movements is prefaced by a quotation from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

Music Played in Today's Program

Jay Ungar (b. 1946): Ashokan Farewell; Jay Ungar, fiddle; Newman-Oltman Guitar Duo; MusicMasters 67145

Roy Harris (1898-1979): Symphony No. 6 (Gettysburg); Pacific Symphony; Keith Clark, conductor; Varese-Sarabande 47245

Synopsis

One of the best-loved works of classical music, Handel’s oratorio Messiah, had its first performance on today’s date in Dublin, Ireland, in 1742. Handel wrote Messiah in a period of only four weeks, then put it aside until he received an invitation to present a new work in the Irish capital. Dublin gave Messiah an enthusiastic reception, but it took a few years before London recognized that Messiah was a masterpiece.

Baroque composers like Handel freely borrowed materials from previous works — or even other composers — to use in new ones. Among Handel’s own instrumental works, the Concerti Due Cori, for example, contain melodies familiar from Messiah.

American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich harks back to this baroque custom in her own Concerto Grosso 1985, in which she quotes directly from Handel’s Violin Sonata in D — which in turns quotes from no fewer than four of Handel’s own earlier compositions.

Born in Miami in 1939, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich studied at Juilliard with two noted American composers, Roger Sessions and Elliott Carter, and in 1983 became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for her Symphony No. 1.

Music Played in Today's Program

George Frederic Handel (1685-1759): Sinfoni from Messiah; Boston Baroque Orchestra; Martin Pearlman, conductor; Telarc 80348

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (b. 1939): Concerto Grosso 1985; New York Philharmonic; Zubin Mehta, conductor; New World 372

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1933, the New York Philharmonic presented the premiere performance of Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Violin Concerto No. 2.

He was born in Florence in 1895 and enjoyed early success in Europe, but, because he was Jewish, the increasingly harsh racial policies of Mussolini forced Castelnuovo-Tedesco and his family to immigrate to the U.S. His passage was assisted by Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini and violin virtuoso Jasha Heifetz, who were also the conductor and soloist for the Carnegie Hall premiere of his new concerto.

Two weeks earlier, Toscanini and other prominent American musicians had signed a public cable to Hitler protesting the persecution of Jewish artists. For his part, Castelnuovo-Tedesco gave his new concerto a title: The Prophets.

“The title,” he wrote, “does not represent a precise and detailed program, but is intended only as an indication of the ethical environment … the choice of a solo violin might suggest the flaming and fanciful eloquence of the ancient prophets.”

Castelnuovo-Tedesco settled in California, where he taught and found work in Hollywood. He composed 100 film scores, became an American citizen in 1946, and died in Beverly Hills in 1968.

Music Played in Today's Program

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968): Violin Concerto No. 2 (The Prophets); Jascha Heifetz, violin; Los Angeles Philharmonic; Alfred Wallenstein, conductor; RCA BMG 7872

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 the Credo from his father J.S. Bach’s Mass in B minor, followed by two excerpts from Handel's Messiah, namely the Hallelujah Chorus and I Know that My Redeemer Liveth, both sung in German, and then his own setting of the Latin Magnificat, 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