Janssen, Werner

Janssen, Werner, American conductor and composer; b. N.Y., June 1, 1899; d. Stony Brook, N.Y, Sept. 19, 1990. He studied with Clapp at Dartmouth Coll. (B.Mus., 1921) and with Converse, Friedheim, and Chadwick at the New England Cons, of Music in Boston. He then studied conducting with Weingartner in Basel (1920-21) and Scherchen in Strasbourg (1921-25). He won the Prix de Rome of the American Academy (1930) and studied orchestration with Re-spighi at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome (1930-33). In 1930 he made his debut as a conductor in Rome; he gave a concert of music by Sibelius in Helsinki in 1934 and was praised by Sibelius himself; received the Finnish Order of the White Rose. He made his American debut with the N.Y. Phil, on Nov. 8, 1934, and served as conductor of the Baltimore Sym. Orch. (1937-39). He then went to Los Angeles, where he organized the Janssen Sym. Orch. (1940-52) and commissioned American composers to write special works. He was conductor of the Utah Sym. Orch. in Salt Lake City (1946-47), of the Portland (Ore.) Sym. Orch. (1947-49), and of the San Diego Phil. (1952-54). In 1937 he married the famous film actress Ann Harding; they were divorced in 1963. As a composer, Janssen cultivated the art of literal pictorialism. His most successful work of this nature was New Year’s Eve in New York (Rochester, N.Y., May 9, 1929), a symphonic poem for Large Orch. and Jazz Instruments; the orch. players were instructed to shout at the end “Happy New Year!” Other works were Obsequies of a Saxophone for 6 Wind Instruments and a Snare Drum (Washington, D.C., Oct. 17, 1929), Louisiana Suite for Orch. (1930), Dixie Fugue (extracted from the Louisiana Suite; Rome, Nov. 27, 1932), Foster Suite for Orch., on Stephen Foster’s tunes (1937), 2 string quartets (1934, 1935), Quintet for 10 Instruments (1968), piano music, many film scores, and popular songs.

—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire