Composers Datebook

This lush, late-Romantic score, composed in 1904, had to wait until 1962 for its premiere performance, when, on today's date that year, the Philadelphia Orchestra led by Eugene Ormandy performed it in Seattle during an international festival devoted to its composer, Anton Webern. For most music lovers, the Austrian composer Anton Webern is a shadowy, vaguely mysterious figure. If they know anything at all about him, it is that he was a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, that he wrote a small body of very short and very condensed atonal scores, and that in 1945 he was shot by accident by an American soldier in the tense days following the end of World War II. The early orchestral score that received its belated premiere on today's date in 1962 was titled "In the Summer Wind," completed when Webern was just 19 years old. It's very much in the style of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, and even Arnold Schoenberg in the early years of the 20th century. To earn a living, Webern worked as a conductor of everything from Viennese operettas to worker's choral unions. He was one of the earliest European conductors to present music by the American composer Charles Ives, and even appeared as a guest conductor in London with the BBC Symphony. His conducting career came to a halt when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, and until his untimely death in 1945, Webern lived by doing routine work for a Viennese music publisher.