A belated Webern premiere

Synopsis

This lush, late-Romantic score, composed in 1904, had to wait until 1962 for its premiere performance, when, on today’s date that year, the Philadelphia Orchestra led by Eugene Ormandy performed it in Seattle during an international festival devoted to its composer, Anton Webern.

For most music lovers, the Austrian composer is a shadowy, vaguely mysterious figure. If they know anything at all about him, it is that he was a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg, that he wrote a small body of short, condensed atonal scores, and that in 1945 he was shot by accident by an American soldier in the tense days following the end of World War II.

The early orchestral score that received its belated premiere on today’s date in 1962, In the Summer Wind, was completed when Webern was just 19. It’s very much in the style of Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and early Schoenberg.

To earn a living, Webern worked as a conductor of everything from Viennese operettas to worker’s choral unions. His conducting career came to a halt when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, and until his untimely death in 1945, Webern lived by doing routine work for a Viennese music publisher.

Music Played in Today's Program

Anton von Webern (1883-1945): Im Sommerwind; Cleveland Orchestra; Christoph von Dohnanyi, conductor; London 436 240

On This Day

Births

• 1926 - American composer and jazz trumpet Miles Davis, in Alton, Illinois

Deaths

• 1934 - English composer Gustav Holst, 59, in London

Premieres

• 1715 - Handel: opera Amadigi di Gauli at the King’s Theater in London (Gregorian date: June 5)

• 1723 - Handel: opera Flavio, re de’Langobardi (Julian date: May 14)

• 1870 - Delibes: ballet Coppelia at the Paris Opéra

• 1878 - Gilbert and Sullivan: H.M.S. Pinafore, at the Opera Comique Theatre in London; This production ran for 700 consecutive performances

• 1953 - Marc Blitzstein: musical The Harpies, at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City

• 1961 - Castelnuovo-Tedesco: opera Il Mercante di Venzia (The Merchant of Venice), at the Maggio Musicale Festival in Florence, Italy

• 1962 - Webern: Im Sommerwind (composed in 1904), at the First International Anton von Webern Festival at the University of Washington in Seattle

• 1984 - Stockhausen: opera Samstag von Licht (Saturday from Light), in Milan at the Teatro alla Scala

• 2001 - Philip Glass: Voices for pipe organ, two didgeridoos, clap sticks and narrator performed by didgeridoo virtuoso Mark Atkins, Calvin Bowman (organ), Ron Murray (second didgeridoo and clapsticks) and Wurundjeri elder Joy Murphy Wandin (narrator) at City of Melbourne Town Hall to celebrate the refurbishment of the Melbourne (Australia) Town Hall Grand Organ

• 2001 - Salonen: Fanfare for Betty, dedicated to the 80-year old music patron, Betty Freeman, by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, with the composer conducting. See May 26-27 as well.

• 2001 - David Ward-Steinman: Millennium Dances, for percussion and orchestra, by soloist John Flood and the San Diego Symphony, Jung-Ho Pak conducting

Others

• 1869 - The newly completed Vienna Opera on the Ringstrasse opens with a production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (sung in German)

• 1944 - Arturo Toscanini conducts the combined NBC Symphony and New York Philharmonic in a benefit concert of music by Wagner, Verdi, and Sousa at the old Madison Square Garden. The concert raised $100,000 for the Red Cross. During an intermission auction, New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia auctioned off Toscanini’s baton for $10,000.