Composers Datebook

Decades before the Cuban revolution, some decidedly revolutionary sounds had their birth in that country’s capital city on today’s date in 1930 during a concert of ultra-modern music presented by the Havana Philharmonic. The concert offered the premiere performance of a new Piano Concerto by the American composer Henry Cowell, who was also the soloist. Cowell’s concerto broke new ground—and perhaps a few piano strings—by employing what Cowell dubbed “tone clusters...

Back in the 18th century, Frederick the Great of Prussia was a prolific composer of sonatas, concertos, and even a few symphonies. In the 19th century, Prince Albert, the consort of Queen Victoria, composed songs and choral pieces. There have been other composers who were members of the European nobility, but more often they crop up as patrons of music rather than creators of it...

On today’s date in 1734, the second cantata from the “Christmas Oratorio” of Johann Sebastian Bach had its first performance in Leipzig, Germany. This cantata takes its inspiration from Luke’s Gospel describing shepherd keeping watch over their flocks and opens with a purely instrumental Sinfonia that sets the scene, evoking the sound of the shepherds’ rustic pipes. In Bach’s day, a famous builder of wind instruments lived in Leipzig. His name was J. H...

In the 1930s, many Americans had a hard time making ends meet. During the Great Depression, opera and concert tickets didn’t always figure into most family’s budgets, but thanks to live radio broadcasts, American families enjoyed a veritable “Golden Age” of operatic and symphonic music in the comfort of their own homes...

On today’s date in 1871, the Opera House of Cairo, Egypt, presented the world premiere of Giuseppe Verdi’s “Aida.” The Khedive of Egypt commissioned the opera for his new theater, which had opened in 1869 with a production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto.” Here’s how Verdi himself described it to his publisher, in Verdi's customary laconic fashion: “I was invited to write an opera for a very distant country. I replied ‘no’. I was approached again and offered a very large sum. I still said ‘no’...

Oh, to have been in Vienna on today’s date in 1785! Wolfgang Mozart had just finished a new piano concerto a week earlier, and quite likely performed it himself for the first time as an intermission feature at a performance of the oratorio “Ester” by Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf conducted by Antonio Salieri...

Whether you live in sunny California or snowy Minnesota, the arrival of the solstice means “It’s official: winter is here!” And if you were born someplace sunny, but moved to someplace snowy, the arrival of winter is pretty hard to ignore. Winter must have made an impression on the transplanted Italian composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, who was born in Florence but settled in Paris and ended up as the court composer for King Louis XIV...

On today’s date in 1934, on a radio broadcast from Moscow, the orchestral suite Prokofiev culled from his film score to “Lt. Kije” received its first performance. The original film recounted the efforts of 18th century Russian bureaucrats to invent a suitably impressive life and death for a nonexistent Russian solider, whose unusual name, actually a typographical error on a list of real soldiers’ names, caught the attention of the Czar. If the fictional Russian bureaucrats in “Lt...

On today’s date in 1738, a once-successful French composer died destitute in an asylum of Charenton. It was a lamentable end for the 56-year-old Jean-Joseph Mouret, who had once served the French King at the Palais Royal and whose operas had once graced the stage of the Paris Opéra...

The short career of Charles Tomlinson Griffes is one of the more tragic “might-have-beens” of American music history. Griffes died at 35 years old, in 1920, just as his music was being taken up by the major American orchestras of his day. As most American composers of his time, Griffes studied in Germany, and his early works were, not surprisingly, rather Germanic in tone. But beginning around 1911, Griffes began composing works inspired by French impressionism and the art of Asia...