Franz Schubert / Carol Channing

On this day in classical music: Austrian composer Franz Schubert was born near Vienna in 1797. Despite his extremely brief 32-year lifespan, Schubert composed an enormous body of music, including nine symphonies, 600 lieder, opera, chamber music and solo piano music. Liszt, Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn were staunch champions of Schubert’s music. Today, he’s considered one of the foremost composers of early Romantic period music. Listen to Alfred Brendel perform Schubert’s “Impromptu No. 3 in G-Flat Major.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkX4MyDeIqI

On this day in the musical theatre: Carol Channing was born in Seattle in 1921. Following studies at Vermont’s Bennington College, Channing headed to New York and subsequently landed a featured role in the musical revue “Lend an Ear.” Author Anita Loos caught a performance and picked Channing to create the role of Lorelei Lee in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” The Jule Styne score provided Channing with her signature tune, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Channing’s greatest role, and one she performed more than 3,000 times, was that as Dolly Gallagher Levi in Jerry Herman’s “Hello, Dolly!” Herman had envisioned the part with Ethel Merman in mind, but when she turned down the role, Channing was cast. In spite of strong competition from Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl,” Channing won the 1964 Tony Award for best actress in a musical. In 1973, she toured in a revised version of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” called “Lorelei.” Among her costars was Oklahoman Tamara Long. Listen to Carol Channing perform the showstopping “Before the Parade Passes By” from “Hello, Dolly!” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyUl0aYK8Ws

Musical musings: “Hello, Dolly!” is a musical comedy dream, with Carol Channing the girl of it. Almost literally it’s a dream, a drunken carnival, a happy nightmare, a wayward circus in which the mistress of ceremonies opens wide her big-as-millstone eyes, spreads her white-gloved arms in ecstatic abandon, trots out on a circular runway that surrounds the orchestra and proceeds to dance rings around the conductor. With hair like orange seafoam, a contralto like a horse’s neighing, and a confidential swagger that promises to baby-sit for the entire house, she fulfills for you a promise you made yourself as a boy: to see, someday, a musical comedy performer with all the blowzy glamour of the girls on the sheet music of 1916. – Walter Kerr in the New York Herald Tribune

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