Synopsis Today’s date in 1913 marks the birthday of the American composer and musicologist George Perle, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1986. In a 1985 interview, Perle vividly recalled his first musical experience, an encounter with Chopin’s etude in F minor, played by an aunt. “It literally paralyzed me,” said Perle. “I was extraordinarily moved and acutely embarrassed at the same time, because there were other people in the room, and I could tell that nobody else was having the...

Synopsis “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Well, the usual reply is, “by practicing!” But back in 1891, Peter Tchaikovsky would have probably answered, “by ship” — since he had, in fact, sailed from Europe to conduct several of his pieces at the hall’s gala opening concerts. The first concert in Carnegie Hall, or as they called it back then, “The Music Hall,” occurred on today’s date in 1891, and included a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Coronation March, conducted by the composer. The...

Synopsis At Queen’s Hall in London, on today’s date in 1920, conductor Albert Coates led the premiere of the revised version of A London Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams. A longer version of this symphony had premiered six years earlier, and Vaughan Williams would continue to tinker with this work, on and off, for decades. “The London Symphony is past mending,” wrote Vaughan Williams in 1951, “though with all its faults I love it still; indeed, it is my favorite.” For most music lovers,...

Synopsis Pleyel and Company was a French piano firm founded in 1807 by composer Ignace Pleyel. The firm provided pianos for Chopin, and ran an intimate Parisian 300-seat concert hall called the Salle Pleyel — the “Pleyel room” in English, where Chopin once performed. In the 20th century, a roomier Salle Pleyel comprising some 3,000 seats was built, and it was there on today’s date in 1929 that a new concerto for an old instrument had its premiere performance. This was the Concert Champêtre...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1692, London audiences were treated to lavish theatrical entertainment with The Fairy Queen. This show was loosely based on Shakespeare’s comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play already 100 years old in 1692. To make it more in line with contemporary taste, characters were added or cut, and scenes shifted around to such an extent that Shakespeare, were he alive to see it, would be hard put to recognize much of his original concept. Musical sequences were also...

Synopsis Today’s date marks two anniversaries in the life of American composer, teacher and organist Leo Sowerby, who lived from 1895 to 1968. Sowerby was born May 1 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and on his 32nd birthday in 1927, was hired as the permanent organist and choirmaster at St. James’ Church in Chicago, where he remained for the next 35 years. Sowerby wrote hundreds of pieces of church music for organ and chorus, plus chamber and symphonic works, which are only recently receiving...

Synopsis Today we have a tale of jealousy to tell — the tale of Claude and Mary and Maurice and Georgette — related to the premiere, on today’s date in 1902, of Pelléas et Mélisande. This new opera by Claude Debussy was based on a play about jealousy by the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. Debussy had worked on his opera for years with no objection from Maeterlinck until late in 1901, when Debussy announced that the Scottish soprano Mary Garden would sing the role of...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1899, Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in Washington, D.C. The son of a former White House butler, Elllington was born into a comfortable middle-class African American household. After piano lessons from the aptly named Miss Klinkscales, Ellington composed his first original piece, The Soda Fountain Rag. Two important mentors were a local dance band leader, Oliver “Doc” Perry and a high school music teacher named Henry Grant, who introduced Ellington to classical...

Synopsis For the 1965-1966 season of the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein planned a series of concerts titled “Symphonic Forms in the 20th Century,” programming works by Mahler, Sibelius and other great European masters. Bernstein also included American symphonies, including, on today’s date in 1966, the belated premiere performance of David Diamond’s Symphony No. 5. Diamond began work on his Symphony No. 5 in 1947, and its original inspiration was two-fold: Diamond wanted to compose...

Synopsis Few of us today really know — or care — very much about the War of Austrian Succession, a conflict that troubled Europe in the 18th century. For music lovers, it’s enough to know that to celebrate the end of that war, George Frederic Handel was commissioned to compose music for a fireworks concert in London’s Green Park, an event that took place on today’s date in the year 1749. Back then there were no such things as microphones and loudspeakers, so Handel’s score called for a huge...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1965, the first complete performance of American composer Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 4 took place in New York. 38 years earlier, in 1927, also in New York, British conductor Eugene Goossens had performed the first two movements of Ives’ Fourth Symphony, after many a sleepless night trying to figure out how to perform certain sections of Ives’ score where the bar-lines didn’t jibe — parts where more than one rhythm pattern happened simultaneously. “I remember,”...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1926, Giacomo Puccini’s last opera, Turandot, had its belated premiere at the La Scala Opera House in Milan, with Arturo Toscanini conducting. The originally scheduled 1925 premiere had to be postponed, as Puccini had died in November 1924, leaving Turandot unfinished. Another Italian composer, Franco Alfano, was brought in to complete the opera based on Puccini’s sketches. It’s said that after showing Toscanini his completion, Alfano asked, “What do you have to...

Synopsis Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons had its premiere performance on this date in Vienna in 1801. Like its predecessor, The Creation, Haydn’s new oratorio was a great success, and, as before, Haydn received help with the text and a lot of advice from the versatile Gottfried Bernhard Baron van Swieten, an enthusiastic admirer of Handel oratorios and the music of J.S. Bach. Swieten’s text for The Seasons included many opportunities for baroque-style “tone painting” — musical representations...

Synopsis Deadlines are a fact of life for many of us — and composers are no exception. In 1875, Peter Tchaikovsky agreed to write 12 short solo pieces, one a month, for a St. Petersburg music magazine, beginning with their January 1876 issue. Tchaikovsky dashed the first piece off, but, fearing that he might forget his monthly deadline, took the wise precaution of instructing his servant to remind him. “Peter Ilyich, isn’t it about time to send something off to St. Petersburg?”...

Synopsis On this date in 1948, the ballet Fall River Legend was premiered at the Metropolitan Opera House by the Ballet Theatre of New York. The choreography was by Agnes de Mille, and the music by Morton Gould. The previous year, de Mille and Gould had met at the Russian Tea Room to discuss their ballet, a retelling of the true story of Lizzie Borden, acquitted for the gruesome ax murders of her father and stepmother. Both de Mille and Gould thought Borden must have been guilty as charged....

Synopsis In the biographical film Maestro, Leonard Bernstein’s dramatic 1943 Carnegie Hall debut conducting the New York Philharmonic, filling in at the last moment for Bruno Walter, receives a masterful cinematic treatment.But the first time Bernstein wielded a baton in public took place on today’s date in 1939, when Lenny was still a student at Harvard and conducted his own incidental music for a student performance of the ancient Greek comedy, The Birds, by Aristophanes.The play was...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1862, an 18-year-old Russian named Nicolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov graduated as midshipman from the Russian Naval Academy and prepared for a two-year’s training cruise around the world. His uncle was an admiral and a close friend of the Czar, and in his autobiography Rimsky-Korsakov admits he, too, at first thought it might be a good idea — he loved reading travel books, after all. But then Rimsky-Korsakov was seduced by music. He’d made the acquaintance of...

Synopsis A concerto, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is “a piece for one or more soloists and orchestra with three contrasting movements.” And for most classical music fans, “concerto” means one of big romantic ones by Beethoven or Tchaikovsky, works in which there is a kind of dramatic struggle between soloist and orchestra. But on today’s date in 2003, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and its concertmaster Stephen Copes premiered a Violin Concerto that didn’t quite fit that mold. For...

Synopsis It was on today’s date in 1944 that the ballet Fancy Free — with music Leonard Bernstein and choreography by Jerome Robbins — was first staged by the Ballet Theater at the old Metropolitan Opera House in New York City. It was a big hit. Bernstein himself conducted, and alongside Robbins took 20 curtain calls. “The ballet is strictly wartime America, 1944,” Bernstein wrote. “The curtain rises on a street corner with a lamppost, a side-street bar, and New York skyscrapers making a...

Synopsis On today’s date in 1887, readers of the Wiener Salonblatt, a fashionable Viennese weekly artspaper, could enjoy the latest critical skirmish in the Brahms-Wagner wars. At the close of the 19th century, traditionalist partisans of the Symphonies, Sonatas, and String Quartets of Johannes Brahms rallied around the conservative Viennese music critic, Eduard Hanslick. In the opposing camp were equally passionate admirers of the music dramas of Richard Wagner and the symphonic tone poems...

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...

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...

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...

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...