Del Tredici through the looking glass

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1976, the American composer David Del Tredici conducted the San Francisco Symphony in the first performance of Illustrated Alice, Two Scenes from Wonderland. These two scenes would eventually form bookend movements of a much longer Alice Symphony, which premiered 15 years later in August of 1991 at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts.

Back in the late 1960s, Del Tredici had become fascinated with the works of Lewis Carroll, whose Alice in Wonderland books have captivated both children and adults for generations.  Del Tredici then devoted the rest of his career to setting Carroll’s creation to music in a series of increasingly tonal works — something that must have come as a surprise to those familiar with his earlier atonal music.

“I couldn’t imagine setting a Carroll text to dissonant music,” explained Del Tredici. “Dissonant music can’t possibly project the mood that surrounds Carroll’s writings. In order to create that mood I had to rethink everything I had done up to that time. I had to think about tonality again, not because I was trying to bring back the music of an older period, but because my musical imagination had seized upon that language.”

Music Played in Today's Program

David Del Tredici (b. 1937): Acrostic Song; Carol Wincenc, flute; David Del Tredici, piano; Nonesuch 79114

On This Day

Births

• 1857 - French composer Cécile Chaminade, in Paris

• 1905 - French composer André Jolivet, in Paris

• 1938 - Canadian composer Jacques Hétu, in Trois Rivières, Quebec

Deaths

• 1950 - Russian composer Nikolai Miaskovsky, 69, in Moscow;

• 1967 - Czech-born composer Jaromir Weinberger, 71, commits suicide at his home in St. Peterburg, Florida (where he settled in 1939). Weinberger had composed one very popular work, his 1927 opera Schwanda, the Bagpiper, but was reportedly despondent that he was unable to produce any other equally successful works.

Premieres

• 1882 - Tchaikovsky: 1812 Overture, in Moscow (Gregorian date: Aug. 20)

• 1942 - Poulenc: ballet Les Animaux Modèles (The Model Animals), at the Paris Opéra

• 1943 - Piston: Prelude and Allegro for organ and strings, on a CBS radio broadcast by organist E. Power Biggs with Arthur Fiedler conducting

• 1976 - David Del Tredici: first version of An Alice Symphony (after Lewis Carroll) in San Francisco; See also Aug. 7, 1991

• 1984 - Berio: opera Un Re in Ascolto (A King Listens), at the Salzburg Festival in Austria