Composers Datebook American Public Media

Synopsis
No four notes in classical music are more familiar than those that open Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. Their powerful psychological resonance has often extended beyond music into overtly political contexts.

For example, on today’s date in 1941, the British Broadcasting Company began using those notes as a theme for radio shows beamed across Europe to boost morale during World War II. In Morse Code, the “dit-dit-dit-DAH” that opens the symphony stood for the letter “V,” which in turn stood for “victory.”  At the end of the war, in celebratory radio concerts on V-E Day and V-J Day, Arturo Toscanini conducted performances of Beethoven’s Symphonies No. 5 and No. 3.

Some decades later, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 was performed at the end of the Cold War, when, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leonard Bernstein conducted moving performances in East and West Berlin utilizing an orchestra with members drawn from Eastern and Western Europe, Israel and the U.S. 

For those performances, which were recorded and broadcast around the world, Bernstein asked the chorus to substitute the word “freiheit” (freedom) for the word “freude” (joy) in the choral setting of Schiller’s poem, Ode to Joy, which closes Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9.

Music Played in Today's Program
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 5 & Symphony No. 9; Vienna Philharmonic; Simon Rattle, conductor; EMI 57445

Synopsis
On today’s date in 1995, the four members of the Arditti String Quartet entered four helicopters warming up their engines at an airfield in Holland. Followed by video cameras, each player’s image and audio was relayed to huge video displays and loudspeakers on the ground for the mid-air premiere of a work titled — what else — Helicopter Quartet by avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Guided by click tracks, the Arditti Quartet coordinated their performance, which was mixed on the ground by the composer for an audience gathered in a concert auditorium during the 1995 Holland Festival.

This music, like all the music Stockhausen wrote in the last years of his life, fit into his cycle of seven operas, collectively titled Light. Like Wagner’s Ring operas from the 19th century, Stockhausen’s operas attempted to synthesize world mythology into a visionary program for world salvation.

Speaking of Wagner and helicopters automatically calls to mind the scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War film, Apocalypse Now, in which helicopters blare Wagner’s Ride of Valkyries from loudspeakers as they attack.

By a bizarre coincidence, Wagner’s opera, Die Walküre, also had its premiere performance on June 26, 1870!

Music Played in Today's Program
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007): Helicoptor Quartet; Arditti Quartet; Discques Montaigne Arditti Edition CD-35

Synopsis
On today’s date in 1910, one week after his 28th birthday, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky attended the premiere performance of his ballet, The Firebird, at the Paris Opera, staged by the famous Ballet Russe ensemble of Serge Diaghilev.

Recalling the premiere, Stravinsky wrote:

“The first-night audience glittered indeed, but the fact that it was heavily perfumed is more vivid in my memory … I sat in Diaghilev’s box, where, at intermission, a path of celebrities, artists, dowagers, writers and balletomanes appeared … I was called to the stage to bow at the conclusion … I was still on stage when the final curtain came down and saw coming toward me Diaghilev and a dark man with a double forehead whom he introduced as Claude Debussy. The great composer spoke kindly about the music and invited me to dine with him. [Later,] I asked him what he had really thought of The Firebird. He said: ‘Well, one has to start somewhere …’”

Stravinsky himself had feared his ballet score would be thought a poor imitation of the music of Rimsky-Korsakov, his great teacher. Nevertheless, The Firebird was Stravinsky’s first big success, and remains one of his best-loved scores.

Music Played in Today's Program
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971): The Firebird Ballet; Russian National Orchestra; Mikhail Pletnev, conductor; DG 453 434

Synopsis
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the biggest, longest, most massively orchestrated symphony of all time is the Gothic Symphony by British composer Havergal Brian.

The symphony was composed between 1919 and 1922, but didn’t receive its first performance until 40 years later, on today’s date in 1961, when Bryan Fairfax conducted it for the first time in Westminster. Five years later, Adrian Boult conducted a performance with the BBC Symphony at Royal Albert Hall in London that created quite a sensation and has been preserved in a recording.

Brian was born in 1876 to working class parents. His talent was encouraged his fellow English composers Edward Elgar and Granville Bantock, as well as leading German composer Richard Strauss, to whom Brian dedicated his Gothic Symphony. Despite that, his musical career never caught hold and for most of his life Brian toiled on in obscurity.

By the time of his death in 1972, Brian had completed 32 symphonies. Although the BBC had committed to performing all of them, not a note of his music was commercially issued on record during his lifetime, and he died without ever having heard most of his symphonies performed.

Music Played in Today's Program
Havergal Brian (1876-1972): Symphony No. 1 (Gothic); Czecho-Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra; Ondrej Lenard, conductor; Marco Polo 223280

Synopsis
A New Yorker scanning the music pages of the New York Times for June 23, 1940 might have caught a headline announcing a new work by American composer William Grant Still, scheduled for its premiere the following day at an open-air concert by the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium. As bad luck would have it, storm clouds postponed the premiere until June 25.

Storm clouds of war were also on the horizon in Europe in 1940, but Still’s new piece dealt with violence of a different sort. And They Lynched Him on a Tree was a choral setting of a poem describing the aftermath of a racially motivated killing.

A crowd of 13,000 attended the Lewisohn Stadium program, with the New York Philharmonic conducted by Artur Rodzinski, and singers from the New York Schola Cantorum and Wen Talbert Negro Choir.

Still was not present; in the summer of 1940 he was writing movie music in Hollywood. In 1943, he would resign from a lucrative studio contract, in part to protest the depiction of African-Americans in the film Stormy Weather, starring Lena Horne, Cab Calloway and Fats Waller.

Music Played in Today's Program
William Grant Still (1895-1978): And They Lynched Him on a Tree; Plymouth Music Series Singers; Leigh Morris Chorale; Philip Brunelle, conductor; Collins Classics 14542

Synopsis
On this date in 1787, an obituary in London’s Morning Post noted the passing two days earlier of Carl Friedrich Abel, 63, a composer, concert impresario and viola da gamba virtuoso.

The viola da gamba was the forerunner of the modern cello. Its heyday was in the 17th century, but soon after the softer-voiced gamba lost out to the more powerful cello. Abel’s obituary remarked: “his favorite instrument was not in general use and would probably die with him.”

Well, as usual, the press got it partly right — the gamba did pass out of general use for almost 150 years, but the early music revival in the 20th century has renewed interest in the viola da gamba, and today there’s even new music being composed for this old instrument:  for example, Roy Whelden’s Prelude and Divisions on “She’s So Heavy” — based on the Beatles tune by Lennon and McCartney.

Roy Whelden was born in 1950 in New Hampshire. Until 23, his instruments were the trumpet, and secondarily the cello, but he fell in love with the viola da gamba and ended up playing with and composing for period instrument groups like Ensemble Alcatraz and American Baroque.

Music Played in Today's Program
Roy Whelden (b. 1950): Prelude and Divisions on ‘She’s So Heavy’; Roy Whelden, viola da gamba; New Albion 59