Henry Kimball Hadley

Synopsis

Works by Henry Kimball Hadley rarely shows up on concert programs anymore, but in the early years of the 20th century, he ranked as a major and very popular American composer. In 1910, Gustav Mahler conducted Hadley’s tone poem The Culprit Fay during his tenure at the New York Philharmonic, and in 1920, Hadley’s opera Cleopatra’s Night was staged at the Metropolitan Opera.

But by the time of his death on today’s date in 1937, Hadley’s full-blown, late-Romantic style was falling out of fashion in the modernist age of Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

In other aspects of his musical career, however Hadley was quite avant-garde and forward-looking: In 1921 he became associate conductor of the New York Philharmonic — the first American-born conductor to hold a full-time post with any major American orchestra. In 1926, he was invited by Warner Brothers to conduct the Philharmonic at the New York premiere of their silent film Don Juan, starting legendary actor John Barrymore, and the following year wrote an original score for a second Barrymore silent feature, When A Man Loves.

Hadley is also credited with making the first symphonic video, a 10-minute Vitaphone film of Hadley conducting Wagner’s Tannhauser Overture that was shown in movie theaters back then and you can still see today via YouTube!

Music Played in Today's Program

Henry Kimball Hadley (1871-1937): The Culprit Fay; Ukraine National Symphony; John McLaughlin Williams, conductor; Naxos 8.559064

On This Day

Births

• 1644 - Baptismal date of Spanish organist and composer Juan Bautista José Cabanilles, in Algemesi, province of Valencia

• 1781 - Austrian composer and music publisher Anton Diabelli, sometime on Sept. 5/6, in Mattsee (near Salzburg)

• 1912 - American composer Wayne Barlow, in Elyria, Ohio. One of his best-known works, The Winter’s Past, was recorded by the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra under Howard Hanson, Barlow’s former teacher.

• 1923 - American percussionist, composer and conductor William Kraft, in Chicago

• 1938 - American composer Joan Tower in New Rochelle, New York

Deaths

• 1937 - American composer and conductor Henry Hadley, 65, in New York

• 1962 - German composer Hans Eisler, 64, in East Berlin

Premieres

• 1791 - Mozart: opera, La Clemenza di Tito, in Prague at the National Theater. Written for and performed on the eve of the coronation of Leopold II of Prague.

• 1910 - Vaughan William: Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, at the Glouchester Festival, with the composer conducting

• 1961 - Elliott Carter: Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras, in New York during the Eight Congress of the International Musicological Society, with Gustav Meier conducting and harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick and pianist Charles Rosen as the soloists

• 1977 - Thea Musgrave: opera Mary, Queen of Scots at the Edinburgh Festival in Scotland, conducted by the composer

• 1979 - Knussen: Symphony No. 3, by the BBC Symphony in London

• 1995 - Lou Harrison: A Parade for M.T.T., by the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting.