Hanson's 'Merry Mount' at the Met

Synopsis

On today’s date in 1934, the audience at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City demanded — and got — 50 curtain calls for the cast and conductor of the new opera that had just received its premiere staged performance.

The opera was Merry Mount, based on a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story set in a Puritan colony in 17th-century New England. The music was by American composer Howard Hanson. The performers for Met Opera’s premiere included great American baritone Lawrence Tibbett as the Puritan preacher Wrestling Bradford, sorely tempted by the Swedish soprano Gösta Ljungberg in the role of Lady Marigold Sandys, his unwilling leading lady.

Despite its setting in Puritan New England, the opera included plenty of the lurid sex and violence that fuels the all the best Romantic opera plots, and the score was in Hanson’s most winning Neo-Romantic style, with rich choral and orchestral writing, capped by a fiery conflagration as a grand finale. What more could an opera audience want?

Strangely enough, despite its tremendous first-night success, Merry Mount has seldom — if ever — been staged since 1934. To celebrate the centenary of Hanson’s birth in 1996, the Seattle Symphony presented Merry Mount in a concert performance conducted by Gerard Schwarz.

Music Played in Today's Program

Howard Hanson (1896-1981): Merry Mount Suite; Seattle Symphony; Gerard Schwarz, conductor; Delos 3105

On This Day

Births

• 1908 - Canadian composer and pianist Jean Coulthard, in Vancouver

• 1929 - American film score composer Jerry Goldsmith

• 1939 - American composer Barbara Kolb, in Hartford, Connecticut

Premieres

• 1744 - Handel: oratorio Semele, in London at the Covent Garden Theater (Gregorian date: Feb. 21)

• 1749 - Handel: oratorio Susanna in London at the Covent Garden Theater (Gregorian date: Feb. 21)

• 1794 - Haydn: Symphony No. 99, conducted by the composer, at the King's Theatre in London

• 1812 - Beethoven: public premieres of The Ruins of Athens and King Stephen Overture and Incidental Music, as part of a production at the opening of a new theater in Pest, Hungary (see also Feb. 9)

• 1860 - Brahms: Serenade No. 2, in Hamburg, with the composer conducting

• 1878 - Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4, in Moscow (Gregorian date: Feb. 22)

• 1881 - Offenbach: opera The Tales of Hoffmann, posthumously, in Paris at the Opéra Comique

• 1882 - Rimsky-Korsakov: opera The Snow Maiden (first version), in St. Petersburg, Napravnik conducting (Julian date: Jan. 29)

• 1896 - Walter Damrosch: opera The Scarlet Letter, in Boston

• 1903 - Rachmaninoff: Piano Preludes Nos. 1, 2 and 5 and Variations on a Theme of Chopin (Gregorian date: Feb. 23)

• 1927 - Krenek: jazz opera Jonny Spielt Auf (Johnny Strikes Up the Band), in Leipzig at the Stadttheater

• 1934 - Howard Hanson: opera Merry Mount, (staged premiere) at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Tulio Serafin conducting

• 1949 - Antheil: Symphony No. 6, by the San Francisco Symphony, Pierre Monteux conducting

• 1950 - William Schuman: Violin Concerto, by Isaac Stern with the Boston Symphony with Charles Munch conducting and Isaac Stern the soloist

• 1961 - Piston: Symphony No. 7, by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting; This work was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1961

• 1966 - Richard Rodney Bennett: Symphony No. 1, in London

• 1976 - Ulysses Kay: Southern Harmony, by the North Carolina Symphony

• 1995 - Daniel Asia: Piano Concerto, by the Grand Rapids (Michigan) Symphony, conducted by Carl St. Clair, with André-Michel Schub the soloist

• 2001 - Pierre Jalbert: L’amour Infini, (Infinite Love), by the Albany Symphony, David Alan Miller conducting

Others

• 1859 - First documented complete American performance of Handel’s oratorio Israel in Egypt, at Boston’s Melodeon, by the Handel and Haydn Society, Carl Zerrahn conducting. Selections from this work had been performed previously in New York and Boston. The Feb. 19 edition of Dwight’s Journal enthused: “Israel at last! The great work, occasionally nibbled at, attacked in fragments, in fits of resolution few and far between, was finally essayed in earnest; and after eight more rehearsals, the giant Handel’s greatest work, with the sole exception of the Messiah … was offered to the public, and the public wouldn’t have it … the hall was only two-thirds full.”

• 1921 - Charles Ives hears Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird Ballet Suite at an all-Russian program by the New York Symphony at Carnegie Hall. Also on the program were works of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninoff (with Rachmaninoff as piano soloist). Walter Damrosch conducted.