Composers Datebook

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...

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 some 20 curtain calls...

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...

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...

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...

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,” recalled Jay Ungar...

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 the year 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...

On today’s date in 1933, the New York Philharmonic presented the premiere performance of the Second Violin Concerto written by the Italian composer, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. He was born in Florence in 1895, and enjoyed early success in Europe, but, because he was Jewish, the increasingly harsh racial policies of Mussolini forced Castelnuovo-Tedesco and his family to immigrate to the U.S...

In 1996, the American composer George T. Walker, Jr. became the first African-American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. That was for his “Lilacs,” a setting for solo soprano and orchestra of Walt Whitman’s poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” an elegy for the assassinated Abraham Lincoln...

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” If George Antheil were asked that question in 1927, he would have answered that it was easy. After the scandalous Paris premiere of his aggressively avant-garde “Ballet Mécanique”—scored for 8 pianos and lots of percussion, including airplane propellers—Antheil received a cable offering financial backing for a one-night only performance of the new work at Carnegie Hall. Antheil was broke at the time, so the offer was hard to refuse...