Composers Datebook

Synopsis

Many operatic works have been described as “revolutionary,” but on today’s date in 1830, a performance of an opera helped to spark a real, take-to-the-streets kind of revolution.

The opera in question was by the French composer Daniel Auber, and entitled La Muette di Portici, or “The Mute Girl of Portici.” The opera’s story concerns a 17th century uprising by some patriots in Naples against their Spanish rulers ends with an erupting Italian volcano...

Synopsis

Looking back on a famous person’s life and career, one often notes quirky patterns of coincidences. Take the American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, for example.

On today’s date in 1943, Bernstein was one day short of his 25th birthday, and, at the Public Library in Lenox, Massachusetts, accompanied the singer Jennie Tourel in the premiere of a new song cycle for which Bernstein had composed both the words and the music...

Synopsis

The first railway line in Russia opened in 1837 and ran from St. Petersburg to Pavlovsk. In the summers, tourists from St. Petersburg would travel to Pavlovsk to visit the site of an 18th century royal palace, to dine at the elegant Vauxhall restaurant, or take in an orchestral concert.  Johann Strauss’s orchestra performed at Pavlovsk in the 1850s, and it remained a popular summertime concert venue for decades...

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On today’s date in 1980, at a Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, Colin Davis led the London Symphony in the premiere of a Triple Concerto for violin, viola and cello with orchestra, a new work by the British composer Michael Tippett...

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On today’s date in 1893 the French composer Lili Boulanger was born in Paris.

In 1913, when she was 20, Lili Boulanger became the first woman to win the prestigious Prix de Rome for her cantata “Faust and Helen,” an achievement which was headline news in those days. Lili’s father, Ernst, had he lived to see it, would have been especially proud, since he, too, was a composer and had won the Prix de Rome himself back in 1835...

Synopsis

On today’s date in 2020, the University of Maryland launched PriceFest–an annual festival devoted to the American composer Florence Price.

The plan was to stage performances of works in the context of lectures and panels devoted to this long-neglected African-American composer. The Covid outbreak forced the first PriceFest to be an online event only, but that worked so well the 2021 PriceFest arranged for more live-streamed and interactive Zoom events...

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Most of us—if we’re lucky—chug along more or less contentedly in an uneventful day-by-day routine... a little like the opening of this chamber work by the American composer John Howell Morrison...

Synopsis

The 1985 Salzburg Festival boasted a quite unusual premiere: a 17th century Venetian opera by the Italian Baroque composer Claudio Monteverdi entitled “Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria,” or “The Return of Ulysses to his Homeland,” as arranged and orchestrated by the contemporary German composer Hans Werner Henze.

The surviving music for Monteverdi’s opera does not exist in what we now call “full score...

Synopsis

When asked to name some important musical works associated with World War II, music lovers are apt to think of the sonatas and symphonies Prokofiev and Shostakovich wrote during those years. But three symphonies by the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger form another very compelling war triptych.

Honegger spent the war years in occupied France, and his Symphony No. 2, which premiered in 1942, might be considered a symphony of the grim wartime resistance...

Synopsis

It might seem odd that during his long career, Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodály wrote only nine works for orchestra. When someone asked him about this, he replied: “I was busy with more important work: I had to educate a public...