Carlos Salzedo, the most influential harpist of the 20th century, was born in Arcachon, France, on today’s date in 1885. Salzedo transformed the harp into a virtuoso instrument, developing new techniques showcased in his own compositions and that others like Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Britten adopted in theirs.

In 1921, Salzedo and Edgard Varese co-founded the International Composers Guild, promoting works by progressive composers like Bartok and Honegger. Salzedo’s compositions for harp include both transcriptions as well as original works like Scintillation, probably his most famous piece, and Four Preludes to the Afternoon of a Telephone, based on the phone numbers of four of his students.

He taught at the Curtis Institute and the Juilliard School, and offered summer courses in Camden, Maine. Hundreds of Salzedo pupils filled harp positions with major orchestras around the world. Salzedo himself entered the Paris Conservatory at 9 and won the premiere prize in harp and piano when he was 16. He came to America in 1909 at the invitation of Arturo Toscanini, who wanted him as harpist at the Metropolitan Opera, and — curious to note — Salzedo died in the summer of 1961, at 76, while adjudicating Metropolitan Opera regional auditions in Maine.

Carlos Salzedo (1885-1961): Scintillation; Carlos Sazledo, harp; Mercury LP MG-80003

In a 1964 essay, American composer Samuel Barber wrote, “I want my music to be of use to people, to please them, to enhance their lives … I do not write for posterity.” And in a 1979 interview, he said, “I write for the present, and I write for myself … I think that most music that is really good will be appreciated by the audience — ultimately.”

Barber was 35 when he composed his Cello Concerto in 1945, finishing the work around the same time he was discharged from the U.S. Army Air Corps. The concerto was written for cellist Raya Garbousova, who gave the premiere performance of the work with the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky on today’s date in 1946.

The new concerto was warmly received in Boston, and even won an award from New York music critics. Oddly enough, soon after its premiere, Barber’s Cello Concerto was pretty much ignored for several decades, and to date has yet to catch on with performers or audiences to the same degree as his earlier Violin Concerto — another work that took quite a while to become popular.

Still, in recent years both performers and audiences seem more than willing to revisit all of Barber’s scores, including his Cello Concerto, and a major reappraisal of Barber seems well underway, and, to paraphrase the composer himself, we think most of Barber’s music that is really good will be appreciated by audiences — ultimately.

Samuel Barber (1910-1981): Cello Concerto; Yo Yo Ma, cello; Baltimore Symphony; David Zinman, conductor; CBS/Sony 44900

On today’s date in 1964, the musical Anyone Can Whistle opened at Broadway’s Majestic Theater. The book was by Arthur Laurents, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

The show told the story of a town that's gone bankrupt because its only industry manufactured something that never wears out. To spark tourism, the town’s mayor fakes a miracle — water flowing from a rock — and when patients from a local mental hospital called the Cookie Jar escape and mix in with townspeople and tourists, chaos ensues. The only conventional thing about the new Sondheim-Laurent musical was the inclusion of a love story.

The New York Daily News called the first act “joyously daffy,” and the Journal-American reported that the opening night audience cheered several numbers. The New York Times, unfortunately, panned the new show, opening its review with this statement: “There is no law against saying something in a musical, but it’s unconstitutional to omit imagination and wit.”

Ouch!

It didn’t help that the new Laurent-Sondheim musical’s competition on Broadway that year included crowd pleasers like Hello, Dolly!, Funny Girl and Fiddler on the Roof. The show ran for just one week.

But one person who liked the show happened to be a Columbia Record executive named Goddard Lieberson, who assembled the original cast the day after it closed to make an original cast recording that became something of a cult classic.

Steven Sondheim (1930-2022): Me and My Town, from Anyone can Whistle; Angela Lansbury; orchestra; Paul Gemignani, conductor; RCA Victor 60515

On today’s date in 2003, a new orchestral work by American composer Elliott Carter had its premiere in Boston. Carter was then 94 — he would live to be a month shy of 104, and, even more remarkable, he was composing new works almost to the end of his days.

When you live that long, you experience a lot of changes. Carter had studied English and Greek at Harvard, and recalled a time when at Boston Symphony concerts conservative members of the audience would joke that the emergency exits signs should read “Exit — in case of Brahms.” Apparently, even in the 1920s, for some Boston Brahmins, Brahms was still “difficult music.”

For his part, Carter felt the complexity of his own music reflected the complex world into which he was born — the world of Proust, Picasso and Stravinsky. His music was technically very, very difficult, but Carter always insisted it was all in service of the greater freedom and fantasy of his imagination, not difficult for difficulty’s sake.

Carter’s Boston Concerto was dedicated to the memory of his wife, Helen, who died shortly before its premiere. He prefaced his score with the opening lines from the poem “Rain” by William Carlos Williams:

“As the rain falls

So does

your love

bathe every

open

Object of the world—“

Elliott Carter (1908-2012): Boston Concerto; BBC Symphony; Oliver Knussen, conductor; Bridge 9184

On today’s date in 1800, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 had its first performance in Vienna, at a benefit concert for the 29-year-old composer.

It would be several years before any of Beethoven’s orchestral music reached American shores, but it did occur during Beethoven’s lifetime. In 1819, for example, a “Grand Piano Concerto” as it was billed, was performed in New Orleans — only we have no idea which concerto. On today’s date in 1825, when Beethoven was 54, his Egmont Overture was performed at the City Hotel in New York, and was performed again in Philadelphia on March 28, 1827 — just two days after its composer had died in Vienna.

By the 1840s, Beethoven’s overtures and symphonies appeared with some regularity on the East Coast, and slowly worked their way Westward.

In 1853, Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 was performed in San Francisco by musicians gathered from that city’s gambling houses. A letter describing the event recalled, “there were many Chinese present,” and that it “lasted four hours owing to an overwhelming demand for encores, which the performers dared not refuse in the face of rugged California individualism.”

In 1856, when San Francisco’s German Society gave the West Coast premiere of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, The San Francisco Chronicle review the following day noted: “The pieces were very beautiful, but it must be said that some of them appeared to be considered very tedious by the greater number of the audience. The Adagio, Scherzo and Finale of Beethoven’s Symphony, for instance, caused many to yawn.”

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): Symphony No. 1; Concertgebouw Orchestra; Bernard Haitink, conductor; Philips 442 073

For many years, the BBC celebrated April Fools’ Day by trying to pull radio listeners’ legs with outrageously fabricated news stories. One year, for example, BBC TV aired footage of an Italian spaghetti farm where happy peasants harvested that year’s crop from bushes that the BBC production crew had draped with limp noodles for the filming.

On another April 1, the BBC’s classical service featured a profile of an eccentrically reclusive 19th century French composer who concocted unplayable works in his apartment on a bizarre instrument that combined an organ pedal board with a grand piano. He was, the story claimed, as fantastic a performer as Liszt or Chopin, and supposedly was crushed to death by his own bookcase when he attempted to remove a heavy volume from its top shelf. Only in this case, the story was more or less true, and the composer, Charles-Valetin Alkan, was a very real person.

Alkan was born in Paris in 1813 and was buried there on today’s date in 1888. Only the bit about Alkan’s “death by bookcase” in the BBC profile is disputed by some historians. That story originated with Isidore Philipp, one of only four mourners who attended Alkan’s April 1 interment, and who claimed to have been present when the composer’s body was found in his apartment. Philipp was a highly respected and long-lived French composer and piano teacher who came to America in 1940 and died here in 1958. He seems a credible witness — so who to believe?

Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888): Bombardo-Carillon; Caroline Clemmow and Anthony Goldstone, pedal-piano; Symposium 1062

We tend to think of the Czech composer Antonín Dvořák as a 19th century composer — but he lived a few years into the 20th and one of his major works, his opera Rusalka, had its premiere in Prague on today’s date in 1901. We also think of Dvořák as primarily a composer of symphonies and chamber works, but forget that in his final years, he devoted himself chiefly to opera — and for reasons that might surprise us today.

In a 1904 interview, given just two months before his death, Dvořák said: “Over the past five years I have written nothing but operas. I wanted to devote all my powers, as long as the dear Lord gives me health, to the creation of opera … because I consider opera to be the most suitable medium for the Czech nation and the widest audience, whereas if I compose a symphony I might have to wait years before it is performed.”

Dvořák was gratified that Rusalka was a big success at its 1901 premiere and would subsequently become one of his most popular works with Czech audiences, but ironically, outside Czech-speaking lands, most of his other operas, unlike his symphonies, are rarely performed.

Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904): O Silver Moon, from Rusalka; Renée Fleming, soprano; London Symphony; Sir Georg Solti, conductor; London 455 760

By the time of his death in 1949, German composer Richard Strauss was famous worldwide as the composer of operas like Der Rosenkavalier and tone-poems like Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. These operas and tone-poems are so famous, we tend to forget that Strauss also composed symphonies — two of them, both written when the young composer was just starting out.

Strauss’ Symphony No. 1 was premiered in his hometown of Munich on today’s date in 1881, when the composer was just 16. That performance was given by an amateur orchestra but was conducted by one of the leading German conductors of that day, Hermann Levi, who would lead the premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal the following year. Another eminent Wagnerian conductor, Hans von Bulow, subsequently took up the teenager’s symphony, and also commissioned him to write a Suite for Winds.

American conductor Theodore Thomas was an old friend of Richard Strauss’ father, Franz Strauss, and while in Europe during the summer of 1884, Thomas looked over the score for the younger Strauss’ Symphony No. 2, and immediately arranged for its premiere in New York City the following winter.

Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Symphony No. 1; Bavarian Radio Symphony; Karl Anton Rickenbacker, conductor; Koch/Schwann 365 322