Composers Datebook

Composers Datebook

Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.

Episodes

July 15, 2025 2 mins

Synopsis


In 1965, Leonard Bernstein took a sabbatical year from his duties as music director of the New York Philharmonic. In 1964, the busy Mr. Bernstein had just finished conducting Verdi’s opera Falstaff at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and in 1966, would make his debut at the Vienna State Opera, conducting the same work. But he reserved 1965 to concentrate on composing.


“In the c...

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Synopsis


Today is Bastille Day, and on today’s date in 1900, the Opera-Comique in Paris premiered a patriotic opera, La Marseillaise, which melodramatically depicted how, on a spring night during the French Revolution, Rouget de l’Isle supposedly wrote the words and music for the song which later became the French National Anthem.


The opera has been long forgotten, but its composer, the Fr...

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Decades after their deaths, Richard Strauss and Dmitri Shostakovich still remain politically controversial. Strauss worked in Nazi Germany under Hitler, and Shostakovich in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Was their art compromised by politics — and should that influence how we hear their music today?


In July of 1935, Strauss pleaded with Hitler for a personal meeting to explain his...

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Synopsis


On this day in 1900, the world first heard the Requiem of Gabriel Fauré in its full orchestral version at a concert at the Paris World Exhibition. Faure’s Requiem ranks today among his best-known and best-loved compositions, and omits all reference to the terrors of the Last Judgment which appear in the traditional liturgical text, concentrating instead on comforting the bereaved. The...

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July 11, 2025 2 mins

Synopsis


Today’s date marks two events in American musical history — one sad, one happy.


It was on today’s date in 1937 that George Gershwin died at 10:35 in the morning in a Hollywood hospital after an operation for a brain tumor. He was only 38. Gershwin was the idol of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, and also admired by the “serious” composers of his day, such as Maurice Ravel and Ralph Vau...

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July 10, 2025 2 mins

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On today’s date in 1733, Georg Friderich Handel paid a visit to Oxford to conduct the premiere performance of his new oratorio, Athalia, at the Sheldonian Theater.


Handel had been invited by the University to add some musical pizzazz to an elaborate ceremony know as “The Publick Act,” during which honorary degrees were bestowed on worthy individuals. It was apparently a terrific p...

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July 9, 2025 2 mins

Synopsis


Today marks the birthday in 1879 of Ottorino Respighi, a rare Italian composer more famous for orchestral works than operas. And no wonder — Respighi was a master orchestrator, learning his craft first-hand from brilliant Russian orchestrator Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov during the time the young Italian served as principal violist in the pit band of the Russian Imperial Theater in St. Pet...

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July 8, 2025 2 mins

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It’s a book! It’s a YouTube video! It’s a concert hall work! It’s by Stookey and Snicket!


Now, “Stookey and Snicket” is not the name of a law firm in some obscure novel by Charles Dickens, but is in fact the collaborative team of American composer Nathaniel Stookey and American novelist Daniel Handler, who writes popular children’s books under the pen name of Lemony Snicket.


S...

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July 7, 2025 2 mins

Synopsis


On today’s date in 1956, one of the most successful of all American operas had its first performance at the Center Opera House in Colorado. The Ballad of Baby Doe was created by composer Douglas Moore and librettist John Latouche, and was based on a real-life tale of love and loss that had played out in that state.


Elizabeth McCourt Tabor, better known as “Baby Doe,” became the se...

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July 6, 2025 2 mins

Synopsis


It was on this day in 1913 that the French Academy of Fine Arts — for the first time in its history — presented its highest award, the Prix de Rome, to a woman. The honor was awarded to Lili Boulanger, who was just 19 at the time. She was born in Paris in 1893, the younger sister of Nadia Boulanger, who would become the most famous teacher of composition in the 20th century, numbering...

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July 5, 2025 2 mins

Synopsis


On today’s date in 1989, NBC transmitted the pilot episode of a sitcom that 180 episodes later would be recognized as a TV classic.


In composing, as in comedy, timing is everything, so when comedian Jerry Seinfeld approached composer Jonathan Wolff about writing the intro music for Seinfeld, Wolff knew it was time for something a little different than a generic sitcom theme.


...

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On today’s date in 1876, America was celebrating its Centennial, and the place to be was in Philadelphia, where a Centennial Exhibition was in progress.  This was the first World’s Fair to be held in the United States. It drew 9 million visitors–this at a time when the entire population of the U.S. was 46 million.


The Exhibition had opened in May with a concert attended by Preside...

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The piano became the dominant keyboard instrument in Mozart’s lifetime in the late 18th century. Before that, the harpsichord had ruled. But for more than a hundred years after Mozart’s day, the harpsichord seemed as dead as the dodo, and even the great harpsichord works of Bach and other early 18th century masters were always played on the piano — that is, until Wanda Landowska came ...

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On this date in 1723, churchgoers in Leipzig were offered some festive music along with the gospel readings and sermon. The vocal and instrumental music was pulled together from various sources, some old, some newly-composed, and crafted into a fresh, unified work, the church cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben — which in English would be “heart and voice and thought and action.” ...

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July 1, 2025 2 mins

Synopsis


One way composers help make ends meet is to accept commissions for occasional pieces — works written for some special occasion, a private or public celebration or anniversary of some event, large or small. Sometimes these works go on to have a life of their own apart from the special occasion that prompted their creation, so that subsequent audiences might not even be aware of the ori...

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June 30, 2025 2 mins

Synopsis


Under the old Julian calendar in use in Czarist Russia, on today’s date in 1861, Romantic composer Anton Arensky was born in Novgorod. If you prefer, you can also celebrate Arensky’s birthday on July 12 — the same date under the modern Gregorian calendar, but Arensky was such a Romantic that the Old Style date seems, well, more appropriate somehow.


Arensky studied with Nicolai Rim...

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June 29, 2025 2 mins

Synopsis


The reign of the Roman emperor Nero, notorious for his horrific deeds, was chronicled by the historian Tacitus. His account of the rise of the courtesan Poppea from Nero’s mistress to his empress, provides the plot of one of the operas written by the 17th century Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi.


Monteverdi’s The Coronation of Poppea was first performed in Venice at the Teatro ...

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June 28, 2025 2 mins

Synopsis


A decidedly un-politically correct opera had its premiere at London’s Covent Garden on today’s date in 1905: L’Oracolo or The Oracle by the Italian composer Franco Leoni. Here’s a witty one-sentence précis of the opera prepared by Nicolas Slonimsky for his chronology Music Since 1900:


L’Oracolo, an opera in one long act, dealing with multiplex villainy in San Francisco’s Chinatow...

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June 27, 2025 2 mins

Synopsis


According to Emerson, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Well, we’re not sure if composer Arnold Schoenberg ever read Emerson, but we think the 20th-century Austrian composer must have shared this principle with the 19th-century American essayist. Just when many people had Schoenberg comfortably pigeon-holed as an atonal composer, he went and wrote a big tonal p...

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June 26, 2025 2 mins

Synopsis


In the summer of 1912, the Vienna Philharmonic presented a week-long Music Festival that offered three “Ninths” — Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 conducted by Felix Weingartner, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 conducted by Artur Nikisch, and, on today’s date, the world premiere of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, conducted by Bruno Walter.


Mahler had died the previous year, and the Viennese p...

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