Composers Datebook

• Bernstein in Hollywood

  SynopsisElia Kazan’s film, On the Waterfront, a 1954 black and white classic starring Marlon Brando, won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It was also nominated for — but didn’t win — that year’s Oscar for best original score. It was Leonard Bernstein’s first film score, and his last. He didn’t enjoy the experience:“I had become so involved in each detail of the score, that it seemed to me the most important part of the picture. I had to keep reminding myself that it really is the least important part,” Bernstein recalled. “Sometimes the music would be turned off completely to allow a line to stand forth stark and bare, and then be turned on again. Sometimes the music, planned as a composition with a beginning, middle and end, would be silenced seven bars before the end … And so the composer sits by, protesting as he can, but ultimately accepting with a heavy heart the inevitable loss of a good part of the score. Everyone tries to comfort you. ‘You can always use it in a suite.’ Cold comfort. It’s good for the picture, you repeat numbly to yourself … it’s good for the picture.”But Bernstein did fashion a concert suite from On the Waterfront and, not one to waste time, conducted the first performance with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood on today’s date in 1954, exactly two weeks after the film opened.Music Played in Today's ProgramLeonard Bernstein (1918-1990): On the Waterfront Suite; Israel Philharmonic; Leonard Bernstein, conductor; DG 415 253

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• Two by Mozart

  SynopsisOn today’s date, Wolfgang Mozart completed two of his most famous works: on August 10, 1787, the Serenade known as Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, and, on the same day 10 years later, the Jupiter Symphony — Mozart’s Symphony No. 41.Despite the fame of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik — which translates as A Little Night Music — nothing is known for certain about the circumstances of its composition. Since a Serenade is a suite of orchestral movements normally written as background music for some rich patron’s patio party, we can assume Eine Kleine filled such a function some pleasant evening in Vienna. We can only hope the patrons appreciated what they got for their money.Hardly any more is known about the composition of Mozart’s final symphony, the Jupiter, as no relevant letters or documents survive from this period of his life. The Jupiter nickname appears to have originated years later in London. In Germany it was just called “the symphony with the fugal finale.”There’s a classic recording of Mozart’s symphony favorites featuring the Marlboro Festival Orchestra with Pablo Casals conducting. The Marlboro Festival is held each summer for seven weeks in a cluster of old farm buildings on a hilltop in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Talented young professional musicians from all over the country gather here, principally to study, secondly to perform, for audiences eager to hear both the emerging and established Marlboro musicians.Music Played in Today's ProgramWolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Eine Kleine Nachtmusik; Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields; Neville Marriner, conductor; EMI Classics 65690 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Symphony No. 41 (Jupiter); Marlboro Festival Orchestra; Pablo Casals, conductor; CBS/Sony 47294

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• Berlioz, Beatrice and Benedict

  SynopsisIn the 19th century, the German spa town of Baden-Baden was the place to be in the summer. Wealthy international tourists could bathe in artesian wells by day, and by night, gamble at the casino or attend performances at a splendid theater modeled on the Paris Opera.That theater opened on today’s date in 1862 with the premiere of a new comic opera by French composer Hector Berlioz, based closely on Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing, titled Beatrice and Benedict after the witty pair of lovers in the play. The composer conducted.“A great success … applauded from beginning to end. I was recalled to the stage I don’t know how many times,” Berlioz wrote the next day. Despite the success, he confessed, “My infernal neuralgia was so bad that I mounted the podium … without feeling the slightest emotion. This bizarre indifference meant I conducted better than usual!”Despite making light of his increasing illness, possibly Crohn’s Disease, this opera proved to be his last work, and Berlioz had only a few more years to live. His biographer David Cairns wrote: “Listening to the score’s exuberant gaiety, only momentarily touched by sadness, one would never guess that its composer was in pain when he wrote it and impatient for death.”Music Played in Today's ProgramHector Berlioz (1803-1869): Beatrice and Benedict Overture; Boston Symphony; Charles Munch, conductor; RCA Victor Gold Seal 61400

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• Chaminade in America

  SynopsisFrench composer and concert pianist Cecile Chaminade was born in Paris on this date in 1857. She wrote symphonic works and even operas, but it was her piano pieces and songs that became enormously popular with amateur musicians around the turn of the century, especially in America.In the decade before World War I, over a hundred Chaminade Clubs sprouted up in America, where her music was performed by and for her fans. So imagine the excitement when it was announced that Madame Chaminade would be giving a concert tour of Eastern and Midwest states in 1908. Her American tour opened and closed at New York’s Carnegie Hall, and over a two-month period she performed in Philadelphia, Louisville, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Boston and Washington, D.C.In 1908, the majority of amateur musicians in America were women, but the majority of music critics were men — the latter gave Chaminade’s concerts mixed reviews at best, and downright sexist put-downs at worst. For her part, she was used to that sort of reception in Europe — and the limited role society allowed women artists in her day.But in a Washington Post interview published during her American tour, she remained optimistic: “There is no sex in art,” she said. “Genius is an independent quality. The woman of the future, with her broader outlook, her greater opportunities, will go far, I believe, in creative work of every description.”Music Played in Today's ProgramCecile Chaminade (1857-1944): L’Ondine and Scherzo in C; (Peter Jacobs, piano; Hyperion 66584

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• Mendelssohn gets wet and wild

  SynopsisOn today’s date in 1829, the German composer Felix Mendelssohn and his friend, Karl Klingemann, were on the North Sea bound for Glasgow.Klingemann was not impressed with Scotland and wrote home that the rough North Sea passage had made most of the passengers sick — with one remarkable exception. “An 82-year old woman sat calmly by the smoke stack, warming herself in the cold wind. She was determined to see Staffa before she died. Staffa, with its silly basalt columns and caves, is in all the picture books. So, we were put into boats and clambered past the hissing sea on stumps of columns up to the odiously celebrated Fingal’s Cave. I must say, never did such green and roaring waves pound in a stranger cave. The many pillars make the inside resemble a monstrous organ. Black, resounding and utterly without any purpose at all…” he said. Well, perhaps not utterly without purpose, since Felix Mendelssohn sent a letter home to his family on August 7 which included a scrap of musical notation. “To give you an idea of how strange I felt, this music occurred to me,” wrote Mendelssohn. It was the opening theme of what would become his concert overture, The Hebrides, or Fingal’s Cave.Music Played in Today's ProgramFelix Mendelssohn (1809-1847): The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave); Overture BBC Symphony; Sir Colin Davis, conductor; Philips 426 978

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