Composers Datebook

SynopsisIn 1885, 20-year old violinist Franz Kneisel came to America to become concertmaster of the Boston Symphony. That same year he formed the Kneisel Quartet, the first professional string quartet in America. For the next 30 years, their concerts were major musical events.On today’s date in 1894, this review of a Kneisel Quartet performance appeared in the Boston Globe:“It was one of the most interesting concerts ever given in Chickering Hall. First on the program was the Dvořák Quartet in F Major, which has never before been played in public. It was given a private performance in New York recently, and the composer was so pleased with the playing of the Kneisels that he gave them the manuscript which they used last night. This composition was written last summer and … the melodious parts strongly recall the type of music that the composer says he had in mind when he wrote the quartet … [The performance] was exceptionally good, and the listeners were stirred to a high pitch of enthusiasm. It is safe to say that the Dvořák quartet is a success.”Not a bad “morning after” review for the premiere of Dvorák’s famous American String Quartet. Music Played in Today's ProgramAntonín Dvořák (1841-1904): String Quartet No. 12 (American); Keller Quartet; Warner 44355

SynopsisOkay, raise your hand if you have ever stayed up til midnight to attend the premiere showing of a new film — extra points if you attended in costume as a Hogwarts student! Well, opera fans are no slouches, either. On December 31, 1913, Wagner fanatics arrived at the opera house in Budapest in time to attend a performance of Wagner’s five-hour opera Parsifal that began at one minute after midnight!January 1, 1914 was the date on which the official copyright protection for Wagner’s last opera ran out. Before then, staged performances of Parsifal were forbidden to take place anywhere else than Wagner’s own festival theater in Bayreuth, Germany.Parsifal had premiered there in 1882, but since international copyright laws proved unenforceable in many countries, some opera companies just ignored them. The Met in New York, for example, extensively renovated its stage machinery for the sole purpose of staging Parsifal on Christmas Eve in 1903, and there were also pirated pre-1914 performances in Canada, the Netherlands, Monaco, and Switzerland.One interesting note about that midnight Parsifal in Budapest — the conductor was 25-year-old musical wizard Fritz Reiner, who would eventually be waving his wand — okay, his baton — to lead the Chicago Symphony.Music Played in Today's ProgramRichard Wagner (1813-1883): Parsifal excerpts; Welsh National Opera Chorus and Orchestra; Reginald Goodall, conductor; EMI 65665

SynopsisOn New Year’s Eve, 1948, Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the first performance of the Symphony No. 5 by the American composer George Antheil. Now, in his youth, Antheil was something of a wild man, composing a Ballet Mechanicque for a percussion ensemble that included electric bells, sirens and airplane propellers. It earned him a reputation, and Antheil titled his colorful 1945 autobiography what many called him: The Bad Boy of Music.But the great Depression and World War II changed Antheil’s attitude. Rather than write for small, avant-garde audiences, Antheil found work in Hollywood, with enough time left over for an occasional concert work, such as his Symphony No. 5. In program notes for the premiere, Antheil wrote: “The object of my creative work is to disassociate myself from the passé modern schools and create a music for myself and those around me which has no fear of developed melody, tonality, or understandable forms.“Contemporary critics were not impressed. One called Antheil’s new Symphony “nothing more than motion-picture music of a very common brand” and another lamented its “triviality and lack of originality,” suggesting it sounded like warmed-over Prokofiev. The year 2000 marked the centennial of Antheil’s birth, and only now, after years of neglect, both Antheil’s radical scores from the 1920s and his more conservative work from the 1940s is being performed, recorded and re-appraised.Music Played in Today's ProgramGeorge Antheil (1900-1959): Symphony No. 5 (Joyous); Frankfurt Radio Symphony; Hugh Wolff, conductor; CPO 999 706

SynopsisOn this date in 1905, Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár conducted the first performance of his new operetta, The Merry Widow. He was sure it would be a success, but others did not share his confidence. The show’s librettist, lawyer in tow, urged him to cancel the premiere, and the nervous theater manager banned Viennese reporters from dress rehearsals, fearing bad advance press.After a lukewarm debut at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien, The Merry Widow moved to a smaller, suburban theater, where it suddenly caught on. Within a year it had become a sensational hit throughout Europe.Lehár’s contemporary, Gustav Mahler, was a Merry Widow fan, although he sent his wife, Alma, to buy the music rather than risk the embarrassment of having the director of Vienna’s Imperial Opera House seen buying such a shamelessly “pop” score.Ironically, another great fan of Lehár’s music was Adolf Hitler. Despite the fact that his wife and many of his professional associates were Jewish, his music continued to be performed in Nazi Germany. He was 68 when Austria became part of the German Reich, and continued to conduct in Vienna and Berlin.Lehár’s family was spared, but many of his former associates were forced into exile. Others were not so lucky: In 1942, Louis Treumann, who first sang The Merry Widow Waltz at the 1905 premiere in Vienna, died in the concentration camp at Theresienstadt.Music Played in Today's ProgramFranz Lehár (1870-1948): The Merry Widow excerpts; Budapest Philharmonic; Janos Sandor, conductor; Laserlight 15046

SynopsisWhile hardly twins, the String Quartets of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel are often linked in the minds of music lovers and record companies. Admired today for their grace and sheer beauty, back when these quartets were first performed in Paris, reactions were quite different.Debussy’s work premiered on today’s date in 1893, played by the Ysaÿe Quartet. One critic wrote the music was “strange and bizarre, with too many echoes of the streets of Cairo and the gamelan.” The gamelan reference was a dig at Debussy’s enthusiasm for the Indonesian bronze gong ensemble that he — and many Europeans — heard for the first time at the Paris Exposition of 1889, which bought musical performers from around the globe to that city.Ravel completed his quartet ten years after Debussy’s. It’s dedicated to his teacher Gabriel Fauré, and was first played by the Heymann Quartet on March 5, 1904. Ravel submitted it to both the Prix de Rome and the Conservatoire de Paris. It was rejected by both institutions, and Fauré described the quartet’s last movement as “stunted, badly balanced, in fact a failure.”Now if Debussy were a modern-day American, he might have sent Ravel a note saying: “I feel your pain” or “Been there, done that” — but what he actually wrote to Ravel was: “In the name of the gods of music and in my own, do not touch a single note you have written in your quartet!”And you know what? Debussy was right.