Brahms bides his time

Synopsis

The German composer Johannes Brahms would probably have nodded in approval if he could have heard Orson Welles intone “We will sell no wine before its time” in those old TV ads for Paul Masson. Brahms was a notorious perfectionist, an obsessive polisher, and a cautious taste-tester of any of his own musical fermentations.

So, if one notes that Brahms appeared at the piano on today’s date in 1895, accompanying clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld at a high-profile Viennese performance of his Clarinet Sonata No. 1, one can safely assume there had been a number of trial performances beforehand.

In the summer of 1894, during his annual holiday in the Austrian countryside, Brahms composed this sonata. The very first performances of the new Clarinet Sonata followed in the fall of 1894 for the Duke of Meiningen and his sister, with an additional test run in Frankfurt for Clara Schumann. After Clara gave the new work a thumbs up, Brahms apparently felt it was fit for public consumption: first on January 7, 1895 for members of Vienna’s Tonkünstler Society, and four days later for an even more “toney” audience attending the Rosé String Quartet Quartet’s chamber music series.

After all, as Brahms and Mühlfeld might have put it: “We play no sonata before its time!”

Music Played in Today's Program

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Clarinet Sonata No. 1; Richard Stoltzman, clarinet; Richarde Goode, piano; RCA 60036

On This Day

Births

• 1856 - Norwegian composer Christian Sinding, in Kongsberg

• 1875 - Russian composer Reinhold Glière, in Kiev, Ukraine (Julian date: Dec. 30, 1874)

• 1902 - French composer and organist Maurice Duruflé, in Louviers

• 1944 - German composer York Höller, in Leverkusen

• 1975 - American composer Daniel Nass, in Buffalo, Minnesota

Deaths

• 1801 - Italian composer Domenico Cimarosa, 51, in Venice

• 1901 - Russian composer Vassili Sergeievitch Kalinnikov, 34, in Yalta (Julian date: Dec. 29, 1900)

• 1954 - Austrian composer Oscar Straus, 83, in Bad Ischl

Premieres

• 1754 - Rameau: opera Castor and Pollux (second version), in Paris at the Palais Royal Opéra

• 1895 - Brahms: Clarinet Sonata, No. 1 (first public performance), in Vienna, by clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, with the composer at the piano, as part of the Rosé Quartet’s chamber music series. The first performance ever of this work occurred on September 19, 1894, at a private performance in the home of the sister of the Duke of Meiningen at Berchtesgaden, with the same performers. Brahms and Mühlfeld also gave private performances of both sonatas in Frankfurt (for Clara Schumann and others) on Nov. 10-13, 1894 at Castle Altenstein (for the Duke of Meiningen), on Nov. 14, 1894 and on Jan. 7, 1895 (for members of the Vienna Tonkünstler Society).

• 1906 - Rachmaninoff: two one-act operas The Miserly Knight and Francesca da Rimini in Moscow (Gregorian date: Jan. 24)

• 1925 - Copland: Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, at Aeolian Hall in New York City by New York Symphony conducted by Walter Damrosch, with Nadia Boulanger the soloist

• 1940 - Prokofiev: ballet, Romeo and Juliet, in Leningrad

• 1968 - Shchedrin: Chimes by the New York Philharmonic

• 1976 - Broadway premiere of Sondheim: musical Pacific Overtures

• 1992 - John Harbison: song “The Flute of Interior Time” (text by Kabir, translated by Robert Bly), at the Shauspielhaus in Berlin, by baritone William Parker and pianist Allan Marks. This song became part of The AIDS-Quilt Songbook compiled by William Parker

• 1997 - Henze: opera Venus and Adonis, in Munich at the Bavarian State Opera

• 2001 - American premiere of John Adams: oratorio El Niño at Davies Hall, San Francisco with Kent Nagano conducting the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Symphony Chorus, the Piedmont Children’s Choir and the same soloists as the Paris world premiere performance at Théâtre du Chatelet in Paris on December 15, 2000.

Others

• 1946 - German composer Paul Hindemith becomes a U.S. citizen