Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
The Philharmonic does Beethoven
On today's date in 1842, an orchestra of 63 players performed Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 at the first concert of the Philharmonic Society of New York. This 1842 performance of Beethoven's Fifth occurred 34 years after the work's premiere in Vienna in 1808. One early and avid Philharmonic Society fan was George Templeton Strong, a young New York lawyer who recorded this appraisal of the symphony after another Philharmonic Society performance of Beethoven's Fifth in 1844: "The first movement, with its abrupt opening, the complicated entanglement of harmonies that makes up the rest of it, is not very satisfactory or intelligible to me as a whole, though it abounds in exquisite little scraps of melody that come sparkling out like stars through a cloudy sky... but the second and fourth movements—the third ain't much—are enough to put Beethoven at the head of all instrumental composers if he'd never written another note." In 1865, Strong became the President of the Philharmonic Society, and founded the Church Music Association, which presented sacred choral compositions by leading European composers. George Tempelton Strong's diaries are a fascinating record of life in New York City during the 19th century. Entries from Strong's diaries were quoted frequently as part of the Ken and Ric Burns' PBS television documentaries on the American Civil War and the history of New York City.