Ruggles on the mountaintop

Synopsis

It’s perhaps not surprising that a solitary, iconoclastic 20th century composer should identify with a solitary, iconoclastic 18th century poet. The ultra-modernist American composer Carl Ruggles took as the title for one of his most famous orchestral pieces a phrase from a motto by the early Romantic British poet William Blake which ran, “Great things are done when men and mountains meet.”

On today’s date in 1924, Ruggles’ “Men and Mountains” received its premiere performance at a New York concert of the International Composers’ Guild.

The music critic of the New York Times was in attendance and wrote: “Mr. Ruggles, in his ‘Men and Mountains,’ leaps upon the listener with a yell. There is a wild shriek of the brass choir, and thereafter no rest for the wicked. It is as if the irate composer had seized a plump, disparaging critic by some soft and flabby part of his anatomy, and pinched him blue, crying the while, ‘You will hear me and you’ll not go to sleep, either!’ No one slept, either during or after the concert, for there is a Ruggles contingent, and a determined one. They applauded in phalanxes, while others kept silent or groaned. This was,” concluded the Times, “one of the most entertaining moments of the evening.”

By the time of his death in 1971, at age of 95, Ruggles would come to be revered—if not always performed—as the craggy, last-standing survivor of the craggy ultra-modernist movement of the early 20th century.

Music Played in Today's Program

Carl Ruggles (1876–1971) Men and Mountains Buffalo Philharmonic; Lukas Foss, cond. Vox 8155

On This Day

Births

• 1637 - Italian composer Bernardo Pasquini, in Massa da Valdinievole, Lucca;

• 1840 - German composer Hermann Goetz, in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad);

• 1863 - Italian composer Pietro Mascagni, in Livorno;

• 1887 - Austrian-born American composer Ernst Toch, in Vienna;

• 1910 - American composer and bandmaster Richard Franko Goldman, in New York City;

• 1912 - Welsh composer Daniel Jones, in Pembroke;

Premieres

• 1861 - Brahms: "Handel Variations," Op. 24, in Hamburg, by pianist Clara Schumann;

• 1873 - Tchaikovsky: symphonic fantasia "The Tempest", in Moscow (Gregorian date: Dec. 19);

• 1879 - Berlioz: opera "La Prise de Troie" (The Capture of Troy), Acts 1 & 2 of "Les Troyens" (The Trojans), posthumously, in a concert performance in Paris at the Théatre du Châtelet;

• 1889 - Gilbert & Sullivan: operetta, "The Gondoliers." at the Savoy Theatre in London;

• 1890 - Tchaikovsky: opera, "Pique Dame," in St. Petersburg (Gregorian date: Dec. 19);

• 1898 - Rimsky-Korsakov: opera "Mozart and Salieri," in Moscow, Truffi conducting (Julian date: Nov. 25);

• 1924 - Carl Ruggles: "Men and Mountains," in New York City;

• 1939 - Walton: Violin Concerto, by the Cleveland Orchestra, Artur Rodzinski conducting, with Jascha Heifetz (who commissioned the work) as the soloist;

• 1975 - Lou Harrison Symphony No. 2 ("Elegiac"), by the Oakland Youth Symphony, Denis de Coteau conducting;

• 1999 - Gunther Schuller: Saxophone Sonata, in New York, by members of the Washington Square Contemporary Music Society;

Others

• 1732 - John Rich opens his "Theatre Royal, Covent Garden" in London (Gregorian date: Dec. 18); Five years earlier, in 1728, Rich had launched English-language “ballad opera” as a genre when he staged John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London (as contemporary wags put it, the wildly successful Beggar’s Opera ”made Gay Rich and Rich Gay”); Even though The Beggar’s Opera parodied the prentions of Italian opera seria, it was Rich who gave Handel’s beleaguered opera company a home at Covent Garden in 1734-1737; Handel’s Ariodante, Alcina, Atalanta, Arminio, Giustino and Berenice were first staged at Rich’s theater;

• 1842 - First concert by The Philharmonic Society of New York (now the New York Philharmonic Orchestra), in the Apollo Rooms at 410 Broadway, program including Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Weber's "Oberon" Overture.