Kern's 'Show Boat' is launched in D.C.

Synopsis

Today’s date marks the anniversary of the first performance of Jerome Kern’s Show Boat, produced in 1927 at the National Theater in Washington, D.C. by Florenz Ziegfeld.

Show Boat’s book and lyrics were by Oscar Hammerstein II, adapted from Edna Ferber’s novel, which had been published only the year before. It was a most unusual story for a musical, and dealt frankly with alcoholism and interracial marriage. Mixing tragic and comic elements was something simply unheard of in American musical theater of that time.

Ziegfeld’s secretary recalled that before the Washington premiere, he fretted that audiences would be disappointed that the girls on stage were wearing much too much clothing for a typical Ziegfeld show. There was little or no applause following the November 15 premiere, and he assumed that Show Boat was a flop. But the Washington audiences were simply too stunned to react.

When Ziegfeld’s secretary told his boss that there were long lines waiting to buy tickets for subsequent performances, at first he didn’t believe it. But by the time Show Boat opened on Broadway the following month, even the great Ziegfeld knew he had a hit on his hands — and one based on great music and a powerful book, with nary a scantily-glad show girl in sight!

Music Played in Today's Program

Jerome Kern (1885-1945): Selections from Show Boat; Royal Liverpool Philharmonic; Carl Davis, conductor; EMI 4573

On This Day

Births

• 1738 - German-English composer, oboist, and astronomer William Herschel, in Hannover

• 1934 - English composer, pianist and organist Peter Dickinson, in Lytham St. Annes, Lancashire

Deaths

• 1787 - German-Bohemian composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, 73, in Vienna

• 1986 - Polish-born French composer Alexandre Tansman, 89, in Paris

Premieres

• 1732 - Handel: opera Catone in London (see Julian date: Nov. 4)

• 1807 - first public performance of Beethoven: Symphony No. 4, at a benefit concert for charities (The very first performance had been in March of the same year at private concert underwritten by the aristocracy and performed at the palace of Prince Lobkowitz, one of Beethoven’s patrons)

• 1832 - Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 5 (Reformation) in Berlin

• 1903 - d’Albert: opera Tiefland (The Lowlands) (first version), in Prague at the New German Theater

• 1909 - Vaughan Williams: song-cycle, On Wenlock Edge, in London

• 1920 - Holst: orchestral suite, The Planets, Queen’s Hall, London, conductor Albert Coates (first public performance)

• 1927 - Jerome Kern: musical Show Boat, in Washington, D.C.

• 1930 - Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms, in Brussels (see also Dec 13, 1930)

• 1974 - Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 15, in Leningrad, by the Taneyev Quartet

• 1974 - William Grant Still: opera Bayou Legend, by Opera South in Jackson, Mississippi

• 1983 - John Harbison: Mirabai Songs (to poems of Mirabai, translated by Robert Bly), at Emmanuel Church in Boston, by soprano Susan Larson and pianist Craig Smith. A chamber orchestra version of this song cycle premiered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Feb. 1, 1984.

• 2001 - Michael Daugherty: Philadelphia Stories, at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, by the Philadelphia Orchestra, David Zinman, conducting

• 2002 - Jake Heggie: Holy the Firm, for cello and orchestra, at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, by the Oakland East Bay Symphony conducted by Michael Morgan, with Emil Miland the soloist

Others

• 1926 - First broadcast of a music program on the NBC radio network, featuring the New York Symphony conducted by Walter Damrosch, the New York Oratorio Society, and the Goldman Band, with vocal soloists Mary Garden and Tito Ruffo, and pianist Harold Bauer

• 1989 - Leonard Bernstein refused a National Medal of the Arts from President George Bush in protest against revoked NEA funding for a New York City exhibit on AIDS