Harold Samuel Shapero (April 29, 1920 – May 17, 2013) was an American composer.
Early years
Shapero was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, on April 29, 1920. He and his family later moved to nearby Newton. He learned to play the piano as a child, and for some years was a pianist in dance orchestras. With a friend, he founded the Hal Kenny Orchestra, a swing-era jazz band.
He was more interested in classical music. In his teens some of his teachers included Nicolas Slonimsky (editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians) in 1936 and Ernst Krenek in 1937. At 18 he entered Harvard, where he became friends with Leonard Bernstein and studied composition with Walter Piston in 1938. He also studied with Paul Hindemith at the Berkshire Music Center in 1940–41.
Shapero was one of the first students at Tanglewood following its founding in the 1940s. When Igor Stravinsky was Norton Professor at Harvard in 1940, Shapero showed Stravinsky his Nine-Minute Overture. Shapero hoped to get the Overture played at Tanglewood that summer, but Hindemith ordered that no student compositions would be played that season. Aaron Copland hastily put together an orchestra to play student compositions, including Shapero's Overture. Shapero was awarded the Rome Prize in 1941 for his Nine-Minute Overture, which included a $1000 award. World War II prevented him from taking advantage of the residency in Italy the prize provided.
At Harvard he held the Naumberg and Paine Fellowships. After graduating in 1941, Shapero undertook further studies with Nadia Boulanger at the Longy School of Music in 1942–43. While studying with her, Shapero was also in contact with Stravinsky, who was helpful in his critiques of Shapero's music.
Postwar years
Shapero's output was prolific in the 1940s and included three piano sonatas, the Sonata for Violin and Piano, and a variety of songs and works for chamber ensembles. His major work was the Symphony for Classical Orchestra, a 45-minute work in four movements. Decades later, he told a New York Times interviewer that he was unaware while composing it of how lengthy it had become, that he "had wildly miscalculated my materials. When I measured out the slow movement, I was shocked. It was 15 minutes. I stopped working for a month. Then I tried to cut the thing. But it fought me and won. Slowly I became aware, with horror, of what I was writing: a long and difficult symphony. I thought I'd never get it performed". In 1946 Shapero won the Joseph H. Bearns Prize of US$1200 for a Symphony for String Orchestra. Leonard Bernstein "fell in love" with the Symphony for Classical Orchestra and led its premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in January 1948. George Szell, though far less enthusiastic about the work, gave its second performance with the Cleveland Orchestra in March. Reviews were mixed. It received an award from the Koussevitsky Foundation. Bernstein recorded the work in 1953, but it was largely forgotten until revived in 1986 by André Previn to positive reviews. Previn recorded the work and played it several times with other orchestras.
In 1945, Shapero married the painter Esther Geller. Throughout the rest of the decade they were often residents at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. In 1946 he won the second annual George Gershwin Memorial Contest for his Serenade in D, which included a performance of one movement from the work at Carnegie Hall on February 13, 1946. The prize also included publication of the score with royalties and US$1000. It was the first time Shapero had a score published.
Aaron Copland thought highly of Shapero's technical skill and the spontaneity of musical inspiration. Once, after being impressed with Shapero's Woodwind Quintet, he teased Leonard Bernstein, who was two years ahead of Shapero at Harvard with a note: "Look to your laurels! There may be another composer in your neighborhood!" But in a 1948 New York Times article, he wrote: "Stylistically, Shapero seems to feel a compulsion to fashion his music after some great model. Thus, his ... Serenade ... is founded upon neoclassical Stravinskian principles, his three Amateur Piano Sonatas on Haydnesque principles, and his recent long Symphony [for Classical Orchestra] is modeled after Beethoven.... [H]e seems to be suffering from a hero-worship complex—or perhaps it is a freakish attack of false modesty".
In the 1940s Shapero was closely associated with fellow Piston students Arthur Berger and Irving Fine in a "Stravinsky school" of American composers—a phrase first coined by Copland. He was also grouped in the "Boston school" along with Arthur Berger, Lukas Foss, Irving Fine, Alexeï Haieff, and Claudio Spies.