Composers Datebook

Synopsis

As kids, many of us received home-made presents: a sweater or pair of socks, perhaps, or — if you were unlucky — a crocheted bow tie you were forced to wear when Auntie came to visit.

On today’s date in 1720, Johann Sebastian Bach started a home-made present for his 9-year old son, Wilhelm Friedemann. It was a collection of little keyboard pieces designed to teach him to play the harpsichord, pieces now known as Bach’s Two- and Three-Part Inventions.

Here’s how J.S. Bach himself described these pieces: “Straightforward Instruction, in which amateurs of the keyboard, and especially the eager ones, are shown a clear way not only of learning to play cleanly in two voices, but also, after further progress, of dealing correctly and satisfactorily with three … all the while acquiring a strong foretaste of composition.”

In the case of little Wilhelm Friedemann, it did the trick. Not only did he master the keyboard, he became a composer himself.

Even just attentively listening to Papa Bach’s inventions can have its rewards, according to the late music critic Michael Steinberg, who wrote, “Bach has done such a good job at instilling 'a strong foretaste of composition’ that… they will make the hearer a better, … a more aware and thus a more enjoying, listener as well.”

Music Played in Today's Program

J.S. Bach (1685-1750): Two-Part Invention #6; Simone Dinnerstein; Sony 79597

Synopsis

The Piano Concerto No. 1 by Brahms received its premiere public performance on today’s date in 1859 with the Hanover Court Orchestra under the direction of Brahms’ close friend Joseph Joachim and its 25-year composer as soloist.

That first night audience had never heard anything quite like it. In his biography of Brahms, Jan Swafford describes what was expected of a piano concerto back then, namely “virtuosic brilliance, dazzling cadenzas, not too many minor keys, [and nothing] too tragic.”

“To the degree that these were the rules, [Brahms] violated every one of them,” wrote Swafford.

His concerto opens with heaven-storming drama, continues with deeply melancholic lyricism, and closes with something akin to hard-fought, even grim, triumph. Rather than a display of flashy virtuosity, Brahms’s concerto comes off as somber and deeply emotional. A second performance, five days later in Leipzig, was hissed.

“I am experimenting and feeling my way,” Brahms wrote to his friend Joachim, adding, “all the same, the hissing was rather too much."

Now regarded a dark Romantic masterpiece, it’s important to remember how long it took audiences to warm to Brahms’ music. American composer Elliott Carter recalled that even in the 1920s, Boston concert goers used to quip that the exit signs meant, “This way in case of Brahms.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Piano Concerto No. 1 - I. Maestoso - Poco più moderato; Maurizio Pollini, piano; Berlin Philharmonic; Claudio Abbado, conductor; DG 447041

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1961, French composer Francis Poulenc was in Boston for the premiere of his new choral work. It was a setting of a Latin text “Gloria in excelsis Deo“ or “Glory to God in the Highest.”

These days Poulenc’s Gloria is regarded as one of his finest works, but back in 1961, some critics shook their heads and tut-tutted about the perceived irreverence of sections of the new work which to them came off as too light-hearted and out of place in a presumably “serious” religious work. Poulenc’s setting of the Latin text “Laudamus te, Benedicimus te” (We praise you, we bless you), seemed downright giddy to those critics.

In his defense, Poulenc said: “I was thinking when I composed it of these frescoes by Gozzoli with angels sticking out their tongues, and of Benedictine [clergy] I once saw playing soccer.”

In retrospect, it seems odd that anyone should have been surprised by the coexistence of the serious and the silly in the music of Poulenc, since both moods had been evident in his music for decades. In 1950, critic Claude Rostand described the composer as “A lover of life, mischievous and good-hearted, tender and impertinent, melancholy and serenely mystical, half monk — and half delinquent.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963): Gloria; Tanglewood Festival Chorus; Boston Symphony Orchestra; Seiji Owaza, conductor; DG 427304

Synopsis

Each January, Martin Luther King Day is observed on the third Monday of the month, and in 2009, MLK day fell on January 19.

To celebrate, the director of the Boston Children’s Chorus commissioned and premiered a new work from the American composer Trevor Weston. Rather than set words spoken by King, Weston took a different course:

“[Dr. King’s] speeches speak to … the beauty of living in a society where the truth of equality is actually realized and often demonstrate a broad historical perspective, so I celebrated King by using texts from the African Saint Augustine and the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar,” he said.

From Saint Augustine’s Confessions, Weston includes the line, “O Truth, you give hearing to all who consult you … you answer clearly, but all men do not hear you,” and from a Dunbar work, The Poet, this line: “He sang of life, serenely sweet/With now and then a deeper note.”

Musically, Weston echoes works both medieval and modern, specifically the 12th century composer Hildegard von Bingen and the 20th century composer Morton Feldman, with a variation on the spiritual “Wade in the Water” tossed in for good measure.

The result is Truth Tones, a haunting, inward-looking choral work.

Music Played in Today's Program

Trevor Weston: Truth Tones; Trinity Youth Chorus; Julian Wachner, conductor; Acis 72290

Synopsis

On today's date in 1958, Leonard Bernstein asked, “What does music mean?” He posed the question to an audience of kids assembled at Carnegie Hall for the first of his Young People’s Concerts — but since the concert was televised, it was a question he posed as well to a nationwide audience of all ages.

That 1958 concert opened with Rossini’s William Tell Overture — music that meant The Lone Ranger to TV audiences back then, or as Bernstein put it: “Cowboys, bandits, horses, the Wild West.”

But, Bernstein argued: “Music is never about anything. Music just is. Music is notes and sounds put together in such a way that we get pleasure out of listening to them, and that's all it is.” Bernstein then demonstrated how the same music could plausibly be the soundtrack to any number of different stories.

Bernstein concluded his first Young People’s Concert with Ravel’s La Valse and these comments: “Every once in a while we have feelings so deep and so special that we have no words for them. Music names them for us, only in notes instead of in words. It’s all in the way music moves and that movement can tell us more about the way we feel than a million words can.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Giaocchino Rossini (1792-1868): William Tell Overture; New York Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; CBS/Sony 48226

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937): La Valse; New York Philharmonic; Pierre Boulez, conductor; CBS/Sony 45842