Tailor-made music by Walter Piston

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1955, the Boston Symphony was celebrating its 75th anniversary season with the premiere performance of a brand-new symphony — the sixth — by American composer Walter Piston. At the time, he was teaching at Harvard, and his association with the Boston Symphony went back decades. Even so, he paid the orchestra an extraordinary compliment, crediting its musicians as virtual partners in its composition:

“While writing my Symphony No. 6, I came to realize that this was a rather special situation. I was writing for one designated orchestra, one that I had grown up with, and that I knew intimately. Each note set down sounded in the mind with extraordinary clarity, as though played immediately by those who were to perform the work. On several occasions it seemed as though the melodies were being written by the instruments themselves as I followed along. I refrained from playing even a single note of this symphony on the piano,” he wrote.

This symphony may have been tailor-made for the Boston players, but Piston was practical enough to know other orchestras would be interested, and so added this important footnote: “The composer’s mental image of the sound of his written notes has to admit a certain flexibility.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Walter Piston (1894-1976): Symphony No. 6; Seattle Symphony; Gerard Schwarz, conductor; Delos 3074

On This Day

Births

• 1785 - Austrian composer Franz Gruber, in Unterwweizberg. In 1818 he wrote the famous Christmas carol “Silent Night.”

• 1856 - Russian composer Sergei Taneyev, in Dyud’kovo, near Moscow (see Julian date: Nov. 13)

• 1896 - American composer and music critic Virgil Thomson, in Kansas City, Missouri

• 1924 - American jazz saxophonist Paul Desmond, in San Francisco. Desmond and composer Dave Brubeck co-wrote the popular piece Take Five for Brubeck’s famous 1959 Columbia LP, Time Out.

Deaths

• 1640 - Burial date of English Renaissance composer Giles Farnaby, 77, in London

• 1755 - German violinist and composer Johann Georg Pisendel, 67, in Dresden

• 1901 - German composer and organist Josef Rheinberger, 62, in Munich

Premieres

• 1731 - Bach: Sacred Cantata No. 140 (Wachet auf, Ruft uns Die Stimme) performed in Leipzig on the 27th Sunday after Trinity

• 1847 - Flowtow: opera Martha, in Vienna

• 1865 - Brahms: Variations on a Theme of Paganini, for piano, in Zürich, Switzerland

• 1882 - Gilbert and Sullivan: operetta Iolanthe at the Savoy Theater in London

• 1898 - Rimsky-Korsakov: opera Mozart and Salieri, in Moscow (Gregorian date: Dec. 7)

• 1901 - Mahler: Symphony No. 4, by the Kaim Orchestra of Munich, with soprano soloist Margarete Michalek and the composer conducting

• 1951 - Lou Harrison: Seven Pastorales, in New York City, by the Collegium Musicum, Fritz Rikko conducting

• 1954 - Prokofiev: opera The Fiery Angel (sung in French), in a concert performance in Paris

• 1955 - Piston: Symphony No. 6, by the Boston Symphony, Charles Munch conducting

• 1958 - John La Montaine: Piano Concerto No. 1, in Washington, D.C. This work won the Pulizter Prize in 1959.

• 1960 - Mussorgsky: opera Khovanscchina (in the arrangement by Shostakovich), in Leningrad at the Kirov Theater

• 1978 - H.K. Gruber: Frankenstein! a “pan-demonium” for baritone and orchestra, by the Liverpool Philharmonic, with Simon Rattle conducting and the composer as the vocal soloist. A revised chamber version of this work premiered on Sept. 30, 1979, in Berlin, with the composer conducting.

• 1992 - Peter Maxwell Davies: Strathclyde Concerto No. 7 for double bass and orchestra, at Glasgow’s City Hall, by the Scottish Chamber Orcherstra conducted by the composer, with soloist Duncan McTier

Others

• 1720 - Handel’s Keyboard Suites, First Collection), is published in London (see Julian date: Nov. 14)

• 1835 - Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, is born in a small weaver’s cottage in Dumfemline, Fife (Scotland). He funded the creation of a concert hall in New York that opened on May 5, 1891, and now bears his name. The building was originally called the “Music Hall,” but the earlier title was deemed to have too many associations tied to the “lower class” vaudeville acts typical of the British “music hall,” and was eventually changed to “Carnegie Hall,” in honor of its funder.

• 1934 - Conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler’s article The Hindemith Case defending Hindemith's music appears in several German newspapers. A response attacking both Hindemith and Furtwängler appears in the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff on November 28. Furtwängler resigns all his official German posts on December 4 and leaves Berlin for several months. On December 6 Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels denounces Hindemith as an “atonal noisemaker” during a speech at the Berlin Sport Palace.