Composers Datebook

It was the fashion in the late 19th century to decorate concert halls with the names of famous composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Of course, over time some composers once very popular fell out of favor, and many old concert hall walls included names like Cherubini and Meyerbeer, composers who nowadays are performed only on rare occasions. In Amsterdam, the main hall of the acoustically famous Concertgebouw boats a pantheon of over two dozen composers’ names as part of its interior decoration, and, not surprisingly, a few Dutch composers are included in the mix. Most of the native sons so honored are probably unfamiliar outside of the Netherlands, however. Take for example Alfons Diepenbrock, a self-taught composer and conductor born in Amsterdam who lived from 1862 to 1921. Diepenbrock composed a small body of big orchestral works in the late Romantic style of Gustav Mahler, who was a close friend. In Amsterdam on today’s date in 1906, the Concertgebouw Orchestra and conductor Willem Mengelberg premiered a work of Diepenbrock’s entitled “In Great Silence – a Mood Poem based on an Aphorism of Friedrich Nietszche.” This music sounds a little like a lost movement from some big Mahler symphony, and while these days the name Diepenbrock might not be as familiar as Mahler, maybe that’s something we should work on correcting!