The truth about Alkan

Synopsis

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?

Music Played in Today's Program

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

On This Day

Births

• 1866 - Italian composer and pianist Ferruccio Busoni, in Empoli

• 1873 - Russian composer and pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff, in Semyonovo, near Staraya Russa, Novgorod district (Julian date: Mar. 20). Rachmaninoff came to the U.S. in 1918, and became an American citizen shortly before his death in 1943.

• 1917 - Romanian composer and pianist Dinu Lipatti, in Bucharest

• 1921 - American composer Williams Bergsma, in Oakland, California

Deaths

• 1917 - American ragtime composer Scott Joplin, 48, in a New York City hospital

Premieres

• 1735 - Handel: Organ Concerto No. 4. as an intermission feature during the London premiere of Handel’s oratorio Athalia at the Covent Garden Theater. Athalia had premiered at the Sheldonian Theater in Oxford on July 10, 1733 (Gregorian dates: April 12 and July 21, respectively).

• 1747 - Handel: oratorio Judas Maccabaeus, in London at the Covent Garden Theater. The event possibly included the premiere of Handel’s Concerto a due Cori No. 3 as well (Gregorian date: April 12).

• 1873 - Verdi: String Quartet, at an informal performance in Verdi’s hotel in Naples, by performers identified only as “the Pinto brothers (violins), Salvadore (viola), and Giarritiello (cello)”

• 1894 - Rachmaninoff: symphonic fantasy The Rock, in Moscow, conducted by Vasily Safonov (Julian date: March 20)

• 1913 - de Falla: opera La Vida Breve (The Short Life), in Nice, at the Théatre du Casino Municipal

• 1937 - Menotti: opera Amelia Goes to the Ball, at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Menotti was a Curtis alumnus and wrote Amelia Goes to the Ball while still a student there. The work is dedicated to Curtis founder Mary Bok. A year later, the opera is presented by the Metropolitan Opera.

• 1954 - Copland: opera The Tender Land, by the New York City Opera

• 1976 - Diamond: Violin Concerto No. 3, in New York City

• 1995 - Michael Torke: December for string orchestra, by the Des Moines (Iowa) Symphony, Joseph Giunta conducting

• 1999 - Magnus Lindberg: Cantiags for orchestra, by the Cleveland Orchestra, Christoph von Dohnányi, conducting

Others

• 1888 - Eccentric Parisian composer and piano virtuoso Alkan is buried in the Montmatre Cemetary. Isidore Philipp, one of only four mourners who attend Alkan’s internment, claimed to have been present when the composer's body was found in his apartment and said the elderly Alkan was pulled from under a heavy bookcase, which apparently fell on him while Alkan was trying to reach for a copy of the Talmud on its top shelf. This story has been discounted by some Alkan scholars.

• 1902 - American premiere of Debussy’s Prelude to The Afternoon of a Faun by the Orchestral Club of Boston.