A 'Silly Symphony' Debut

Synopsis

We have a silly anniversary to note today — seriously!

On today's date in 1929, Walt Disney released his first Silly Symphonies cartoon: “The Skeleton Dance.” It depicted four skeletons dancing and making music in a graveyard, employing bizarre instruments, including an unfortunate cat played like a fiddle and the skeletons’ own bones, played like a xylophone.

While its release on Halloween might have been more appropriate, perhaps “The Skeleton Dance” provided some pleasurable spinal chills for moviegoers on a hot August evening back in 1929. In any case, this Silly Symphony was a huge success for Disney, became an instant classic, and was voted #18 in a 1994 poll of the 50 greatest cartoons of all time by professional animators.

And speaking of classics, a bit of Edvard Grieg’s spooky March of the Trolls was used to great effect in “The Skeleton Dance.” But credit for its success should go first to Carl W. Stalling, a legendary composer and arranger of cartoon music and absolute master of unexpected segues, witty allusions, and surreal orchestration, and second, to pioneering Disney animator Ub Iwerks, likewise a master in his field.

Chuck Jones, an animator famous for his much later Warner Brothers cartoons like Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner, had worked for Iwerks’ studio in his youth, and put it this way: “Iwerks is Screwy spelled backwards.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Edward Grieg (1843-1907): March of the Trolls

On This Day

Births

• 1827 - Austrian composer Josef Strauss, in Vienna. He was the son of Johann Strauss I and the younger brother of Johann Strauss, II.

• 1862 - French composer Claude Debussy, in St.Germain-en-Laye

• 1928 - German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, in Mödrath (near Cologne)

Premieres

• 1968 - Birtwistle: opera Punch and Judy, at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland

• 1980 - Tippett: Triple Concerto, for violin, viola, cello and orchestra, in London by the London Symphony, Colin Davis conducting

• 1982 - Peter Maxwell Davies: Image, Reflection, Shadow at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland

Others

• 1741 - Handel begins work on his famous oratorio, Messiah, which he finished scoring on September 14 (Gregorian dates: Sept. 2 to 25). The entire work was composed in a period of 24 days.

• 2002 - An opera by Iranian-Armenian composer Loris Cheknavariyan based on the Persian epic Rostam and Sohrab is staged in Teheran to mark the 1000th anniversary of the birth of poet Abol-Qasem Ferdowsi, on whose epic the opera was based. The performance, at Teheran’s Milad Hall, featured 125 Austrian musicians and singers. This marked the first occasion that a Western-style opera was staged in Iran since the 1979 Islamic revolution.