I wrote this on August 10th last year, but I hope you’ll indulge me, as I don’t think it can be improved upon!
P.T. Barnum is in the center ring today, with two works by American composers born on this date.
William Henry Fry was born in Philadelphia in 1813. Credited with being the first U.S.-born composer to write music on a large scale, he composed orchestral works and the first opera by an American to be performed publicly in his lifetime (“Leonora,” in 1845). He was an outspoken advocate of American music at a time when German imports ruled the roost. It would be decades before music by our native composers would gain a toehold in the concert halls, which makes Fry an even more remarkable figure.
Fry studied music with a former bandleader in Napoleon Bonaparte’s army, who went on to become the head of Philadelphia’s Musical Fund Society. Fry himself would become the society’s secretary.
He was also a journalist, a writer on music, and the first music critic to write for a major American newspaper. He was a foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and acted as music critic for the New York Herald Tribune.
He composed seven symphonies, all of them of a descriptive nature. One of his most audacious works was commissioned by Barnum. The “Niagara Symphony” (1854) was conceived for enormous forces, augmented by a mind-blowing eleven timpani. Someone should consider putting this on the same program with Berlioz’s Requiem. Though it is possible all that percussion really would turn out to be too much of a good thing!
Barnum once tried to buy Niagara Falls, but New York State wasn’t selling. So he constructed a replica, in miniature, “with real water,” for his American Museum (ironically, destroyed by fire in 1865), then located at the corner of Broadway, Park Row, and Ann Street, in Lower Manhattan. Among the other featured attractions was the notorious “Feejee Mermaid.”
80 years after Fry’s birth, Douglas Moore was born into an established Long Island family. (The family had lived there since the island’s settling in the 17th century.) He attended, among other institutions, Yale University, where he earned two degrees; then he was off to Paris to study with Vincent d’Indy, Ernest Bloch, and Nadia Boulanger.
Moore went on to serve as president of the National Institute and American Academy of Arts and Letters and director of music at the Cleveland Museum of Art. In 1926, he joined the faculty of Columbia University, where he remained until his retirement in 1962. With Otto Luening and Oliver Daniel, he cofounded the CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc.) label.
Moore was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1951 for his opera “Giants in the Earth.” But he is probably best-known for the opera “The Ballad of Baby Doe,” which became such a memorable vehicle for Beverly Sills.
Moore’s Barnum connection is by way of a concert suite, composed in 1924. “The Pageant of P.T. Barnum” was inspired by the Greatest Showman’s life and outlandish attractions. The work falls into five movements:
“Boyhood at Bethel”
“Joice Heth – 161 Year Old Negress” [sic]
“General and Mrs. Tom Thumb”
“Jenny Lind”
“Circus Parade”
Barnum’s circus may have folded in 2017 (after 146 years in existence), but there’s still a sucker born every minute.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Barnum & Tom Thumb, William Henry Fry, and Douglas Moore
