William Billings

Synopsis

On today’s date in 2000, King’s Chapel in Boston presented a festival of music by the early American composer William Billings, honoring the 200th anniversary of his death in 1800.  As the Chapel’s records of 1786 stated, Billings taught singing “to such persons of both sexes as incline to sing psalm-tunes.” They must have liked him, because in 1790, when Billings was in financial trouble, the Chapel held a benefit concert for him.

When Billings was born in 1746, America was still a British colony. The last record we have of him as a composer dates from 1799, when he wrote music for a memorial concert for George Washington, the first president of the United States, who had died in December of that year.

Today, Billings is regarded as America’s first truly original composer. His contemporaries agreed. The Reverend William Bentley of Salem was moved to write in his diary: “Many who have imitated him have excelled him, but none had better original powers … he was a singular man, short of one leg, with one eye, and with an uncommon negligence of person. Still, he spake and sung and thought as a man above common abilities.”

Music Played in Today's Program

William Billings (1746-1800): Emmaus and Shiloh; His Majestie's Clerkes; Paul Hillier, conductor; Harmonia Mundi 90.7048

On This Day

Births

• 1898 - American pianist and composer George Gershwin in Brooklyn

Deaths

• 1800 - Early American composer William Billings, 53, in Boston. He died in poverty and was buried in an unmarked grave in Boston Common.

• 1945 - Hungarian pianist and composer Béla Bartók, 64, in New York City

Premieres

• 1835 - Donizetti: opera Lucia di Lammermoor, at the Teatro San Carlos in Naples

• 1898 - Victor Herbert: operetta, The Fortune Teller, in Toronto

• 1907 - Sibelius: Symphony No. 3, by the Helsinki Philharmonic, with the composer conducting

• 1915 - Schillings: opera Mona Lisa, in Stuttgart at the Hoftheater

• 1938 - Kurt Weill: musical, Knickerbocker Holiday, during trial run in Hartford, Connecticut. The musical opened in New York on October 19, 1938.

• 1957 - Bernstein: musical West Side Story, at the Winter Garden in New York City; A trial run of the musical had premiered during a trial run in Washington, D.C. at the National Theater on August 19, 1957.

• 1967 - Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 2 by the Moscow Philharmonic, Kirill Kondrashin conducting, with soloist David Oistrakh

• 1991 - Wuorinen: cantata Genesis, in San Francisco, Herbert Blomstedt conducting

• 1997 - Kirchner: Of Things Exactly As They Are, with vocalists Roberta Alexander and William Stone, with the Boston Symphony and Tanglewood Chorus conducted by Seiji Ozawa

• 1998 - Philip Glass: opera The White Raven, by the San Carlos National Theater at the World Expo in Lisbon, Portugal, with Dennis Russell Davies conducting

Others

• 1962 - Igor Stravinsky concert by the Moscow State Symphony during the composer’s first visit to Russia in 48 years. Stravinsky conducts his Ode and Orpheus Ballet, Stravinsky’s assistant Robert Craft conducts The Rite of Spring, with the composer returning to conduct his 1917 arrangement of the Volga Boatmen’s Song as an encore.