Concerto for Piano and Woodwind Quintet, Op. 53: Score and Parts
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Wallingford Constantine Riegger was an American music composer, well known for orchestral and modern dance music, and film scores.
Background
Wallingford Riegger was born on April 29, 1885 in Albany, Georgia, the son of Constantin Riegger, owner of a lumber mill, and Ida Wallingford. Both parents were excellent amateur musicians, and music was a continuous presence in the household. When Wallingford was three, the family moved to Indianapolis, where, a few years later, he began studying violin and harmony.
In 1900 the family came to New York City, where Wallingford shifted from violin to cello so that the family might have a string quartet.
Education
After graduating from high school in 1904, Riegger entered Cornell University on a scholarship but remained there only a year. Having decided to devote himself solely to music, he enrolled in the Institute of Musical Art (now the Juilliard School of Music) in New York, specializing in cello with Alwin Schroeder and studying composition with Percy Goetschius.
In 1907 he became a member of the institute's first graduation class. For the next three years he studied in Berlin at the Hochschule für Musik with Robert Hausmann (cello) and privately with Anton Hekking (cello) and Edgar Stillman Kelley, an American composer (composition).
Career
In 1910 Riegger made his conducting debut with the Blüthner Orchestra in Berlin, directing the concert from memory, at that time an unusual practice. In 1910 Riegger returned to the United States.
He earned his living playing the cello in the St. Paul (Minnesota) Symphony and in theater orchestras. He returned to Germany in 1913 and became a year later assistant conductor at the State Theater in Würzburg.
He also conducted opera performances in Kunigsberg (1915 - 1916) and symphony concerts with the Blüthner Orchestra in Berlin (1916 - 1917). Three days before America's entry into World War I, Riegger returned to the United States with his wife and two daughters. From 1918 to 1922 he was a member of the department of theory and cello at Drake University in Des Moines and in 1924-1925 at the Institute of Musical Art. Riegger's first mature composition was a Trio in B minor (1920), which received the Paderewski Prize, as well as the Society for Publication of American Music Award.
It was first performed on March 21, 1930, in New York. La Belle Dame sans Merci, his setting of Keats's ballad for four solo voices and chamber orchestra (1923), was the first composition by a native American to receive the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Award; it was successfully introduced at the Coolidge Festival in Pittsfield, Massachussets, on September 19, 1924. In the works of this period, Riegger assumed a conservative posture.
His music was occasionally romantic, occasionally impressionistic, utilizing traditional harmonic and melodic procedures within formal structures. Riegger soon broke with conservatism to embrace atonality, first with the Rhapsody for Orchestra (1925), introduced by the New York Philharmonic under Erich Kleiber on October 29, 1931. Riegger gained notoriety with some segments of his audience and almost unqualified approbation from his colleagues for his Study in Sonority, for ten violins or multiples thereof (1927), given its first professional performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski on March 30, 1929. This is a totally atonal composition. From atonality, Riegger went on to the twelve-tone system - one of the earliest Americans to do so.
He used a partly twelve-tone idiom in Dichotomy (1932), for chamber orchestra, first performed in Berlin on March 10, 1932, and totally in the String Quartet No. 1 (1938 - 1939) and Duos for Three Woodwinds (1943). Although he was partial to such baroque and polyphonic techniques as the canon, fugue, and passacaglia, and to such classical structures as the symphony, the concerto, and the variation form, Riegger's music from then on was austerely atonal and sometimes twelve-tonal.
From 1926 to 1928 Riegger was on the faculty of Ithaca Conservatory in New York. In 1928 he returned to New York City, where he made his home for the remainder of his life. There he held various teaching posts, most significantly from 1936 at the Metropolitan Music School, of which he ultimately became president. In New York, Riegger channeled some of his creativity into scores for dance works choreographed by Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman.
He died in New York City.
Achievements
His most significant contribution, however, was to concert music, for which he was highly esteemed by composers, who regarded him as a master. The general public remained for the most part apathetic. Some recognition came with his Symphony No. 3 (1946 - 1947), commissioned by the Alice M. Ditson Fund, which received the New York Music Critics Circle Award following its premiere in New York on May 16, 1946. Tributes and performances of major works in many parts of the United States commemorated his seventy-fifth birthday in 1960.
Riegger received the Brandeis Creative Arts Award from Brandeis University.
