Virgil Thomson reviews Elliott Carter

Synopsis

On today's date in 1953, at New York’s 92nd Street YMCA, the Walden String Quartet tackled the difficult String Quartet No. 1 by American composer Elliott Carter.

Carter's Quartet was as densely-packed with ideas as a page from James Joyce — an author the composer cited as an influence. But, writing for the Herald Tribune, composer Virgil Thomson gave the work a glowing review: “The piece is complex of texture, delicious in sound, richly expressive and in every way grand — the audience loved it,” wrote Thomson.

That same year Carter’s quartet won first prize in the International String Quartet competition in Belgium — a contest Carter entered almost as an afterthought. “My Quartet No. 1 was written largely for my own satisfaction and grew out of an effort to understand myself,” he said. To escape from the distractions of New York, Carter retreated to the desert near Tucson to write it. No one had commissioned the quartet, and Carter initially feared its complexity would baffle performers and audiences. His next quartet, equally challenging, won a Pulitzer Prize.

Complexity would characterize Carter's music for the next 50 years — although the composer himself insisted that fantasy and invention, rather than difficulty for its own sake, had always been his goal.

Music Played in Today's Program

Elliott Carter (1908-2012): String Quartet No. 1; The Composers Quartet; Nonesuch 71249

On This Day

Births

• 1744 - Austrian composer of Spanish descent Marianne (Anna Katharina) von Martínez, in Vienna. She studied composition with Haydn, and Haydn and Mozart attended her musical soirées.

• 1860 - Austrian composer Emil Nikolaus Von Reznicek, in Vienna

• 1905 - Hungarian-born British composer and teacher Mátyás (György) Seiber, in Budapest

Deaths

• 1604 - Italian composer and publisher Claudio Merulo, 71, in Parma

• 1955 - Rumanian composer Georges Enesco, 73, late on May 3 or early on May 4, in Paris

Premieres

• 1795 - Haydn: Symphony No. 104, conducted by the composer, at the King’s Theater in London. This symphony is sometimes nicknamed the Salomon Symphony, although it (along with Haydn’s Symphonies 102 and 103) was in fact commissioned for and premiered at Viotti's Opera Concerts, not as part of the earlier series of Haydn concerts arranged by the impresario Salomon.

• 1895 - Dvořák: cantata The American Flag, in New York

• 1920 - Vaughan Williams: revised version of Symphony No. 2 (A London Symphony) at Queens Hall in London, conducted by Albert Coates. The first version of this symphony had premiered at Queen’s Hall in London on March 27, 1914, conducted by Geoffrey Toye. A final (twice revised) version of this symphony was published in 1936.

• 1924 - Miaskovsky: Symphony No. 6, in Moscow

• 1974 - Rautavaara: Flute Concerto, in Stockholm, with flutist Gunilla von Bahr and the Swedish Radio Symphony, Stig Westerberg conducting

• 1976 - Bernstein: musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at the Mark Hellinger Theater in New York City, conducted by Roland Gagnon. A trial run of this show had opened in Philadelphia at the Forrest Theater on February 24, 1976.

• 1976 - Sondheim: revue Side by Side by Sondheim (compiled from various Sondheim musicals by British singer-actor David Kernan and others). This revue opened on Broadway on April 18, 1977.

• 1989 - Joan Tower: Island Prelude for oboe and strings, by soloist Peter Bowman and the St. Louis Symphony, Leonard Slatkin conducting.